I agree. I wasn't ever a math nerd, I don't flap my hands or take things literally, and I never recited train schedules. But those are the people affected who get all the attention!

Comment 12 by aikidokkagirl :

I find the stereotypes applied to people with aspergers very irritating.

So wait, have these bacteria reproduced in 86 million years? Or are they the same lives? I wasn't clear on that.

Who here remembers the 1996 PSAs shown in the US that had the "You're Worth Waiting For" tagline? They always portrayed the girls as victims and the guys as manipulative. One ends with a girl with a baby, saying, "I should have told him 'no.'" Another has images of a girl dying in a hospital. There's a voiceover of a guy saying, "If you don't sleep with me, it means you don't love me," and "I'm not going to get you pregnant, honey," and a very phony sounding, "I love you!"

Julie

He'd better be back in NYC so I can give him another drawing! ;)

From The Undead, a book I am reading, on pages 329-330:

"I know, I probably pick on poor Richard Dawkins too much, but it is hard not to. He's such a nasty little pill. I agree with much of what he writes, but he exploits real scientists' work without giving adequate credit until years later. He wraps himself in the mantle of Darwin but appears to ignore his ideas. And it is hard to accept as a Darwinist a man who needed three wives to produce a single offspring. Reproduction is where natural selection really counts. Consider Michael Behe, the intelligent-design proponent and polar opposite of Dawkins. He has nine children. One wonders who is more Darwinian and who will ultimately win the evolutionary struggle. Darwin himself had ten children."

Seriously?????

Comment 161 by Richard Dawkins :

Comment 160 by guwest :

Great programme and who was the left wing commentator who thought Dawkins' work led to Thatcher's election, as mentioned in it?

The following is from A Devil's Chaplain

I should be allowed a personal word here because I am tired of being identified with a vicious politics of ruthless competitiveness: accused of advancing selfishness as a way of life. Soon after Mrs Thatcher’s election victory of 1979, Professor Steven Rose wrote, in New Scientist, as follows:

I am not implying that Saatchi and Saatchi engaged a team of sociobiologists to write the Thatcher scripts, nor even that certain Oxford and Sussex dons are beginning to rejoice at this practical expression of the simple truths of selfish genery they have been struggling to convey to us. The coincidence of fashionable theory with political events is messier than that. I do believe though, that when the history of the move to the right of the late 1970s comes to be written, from law and order to monetarism and to the (more contradictory) attack on statism, then the switch in scientific fashion, if only from group to kin selection models in evolutionary theory, will come to be seen as part of the tide which has rolled the Thatcherites and their concept of a fixed, 19th century competitive and xenophobic human nature into power.

The ‘Sussex don’ was John Maynard Smith, and he gave the apt reply in a letter to the next issue of New Scientist: What should we have done, fiddled the equations?