By MATTHEW C. NISBET - BIG THINK
Added: Thu, 05 Jan 2012 00:36:03 UTC

--Guest post by Declan Fahy, AoE Science & Culture correspondent

Richard Dawkins guest-edited the Christmas edition of British left-wing politics and culture magazine The New Statesman -- and it contains an interview he conducted with his fellow anti-theist Christopher Hitchens, the writer’s last interview before he died of pneumonia, a complication of his oesophageal cancer. At 5,264 words, it’s a long, but riveting read. (There’s an excerpt at the magazine’s website.)

A criticism of Dawkins’s public work is that he has been a strident, sharp-tongued advocate for evolution, but Hitchens said the scientist should never be afraid of that label.

He told Dawkins in the interview: “You have a discipline in which you are very distinguished. You've educated a lot of people; nobody denies that, not even your worst enemies. You see your discipline being attacked and defamed and attempts made to drive it out.

“Stridency is the least you should muster . . . It's the shame of your colleagues that they don't form ranks and say, ‘Listen, we're going to defend our colleagues from these appalling and obfuscating elements.’”

Taking evolutionary science as the discipline Hitchens refers to, this approach of closing ranks to publicly defend evolution is problematic in terms of communication, as such public debates are often concerned, not only with facts, but values. Furthermore, Dawkins -- as a long-time public defender and explainer of evolution -- understood some of the difficulties involved in the public defense of evolution.

In an unfinished correspondence with the late Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, Dawkins described how the two scientists were planning to publish a co-authored letter to the New York Review of Books advising other evolutionary scientists not to debate in public intelligent design advocates.

Dawkins wrote to Gould, in the correspondence printed in his book A Devil’s Chaplain: “These people have no hope of convincing reputable scientists by their ridiculous arguments. Instead, what they seek is the oxygen of respectability. We give them this oxygen by the mere act of ENGAGING with them at all.”
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TAGGED: CREATIONISM, RICHARD DAWKINS