#10: “If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored.” Unfortunately I’ll never have a chance to sit down with him in a pub somewhere, to talk all night.
I felt good about Dawkins but surprisingly these quote make him seem quite trivial.
1) The first quote is a simple truism or tautology. The number of possible people is always greater than the number of actual people - infinity is greater than any number. Yay. In an infinite number of people there are an infinite number of poets greater than Keats. So? We won a lottery to be born? So?
2) We aren’t survival machines, we are entropy exporting machines along with a large number of other homeostatic systems. If individual annihilation would reduce the entropy of a system, the individual won’t survive.
3) Sneezing - were a parasite not programming its host to spread it, it would disappear quite quickly. Is that a strong surprise?
4) Lolcats is a Fad. A way of cooking that persists for 1000 is a culture. I find the ‘meme’ word unconvincing in his description. “Trope” is not an invented word and accurately describes everything claimed to be a “meme”. Relabeling old words isn’t that amazing.
I’m actually surprised - I need to rethink what I’ve read by and about him. It seems… superficiality draped in complexity.
#10: “If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored.” Unfortunately I’ll never have a chance to sit down with him in a pub somewhere, to talk all night.
Wouldn't that be great!
I felt good about Dawkins but surprisingly these quote make him seem quite trivial.
1) The first quote is a simple truism or tautology. The number of possible people is always greater than the number of actual people - infinity is greater than any number. Yay. In an infinite number of people there are an infinite number of poets greater than Keats. So? We won a lottery to be born? So?
2) We aren’t survival machines, we are entropy exporting machines along with a large number of other homeostatic systems. If individual annihilation would reduce the entropy of a system, the individual won’t survive.
3) Sneezing - were a parasite not programming its host to spread it, it would disappear quite quickly. Is that a strong surprise?
4) Lolcats is a Fad. A way of cooking that persists for 1000 is a culture. I find the ‘meme’ word unconvincing in his description. “Trope” is not an invented word and accurately describes everything claimed to be a “meme”. Relabeling old words isn’t that amazing.
I’m actually surprised - I need to rethink what I’ve read by and about him. It seems… superficiality draped in complexity.