roseweird posted:swirlsofhistory please tell me some awesome things about richard dawkins
his mortality
roseweird posted:swirlsofhistory please tell me some awesome things about richard dawkins
When Richard Dawkins charges up his intellectual hadoken and unleashes on faith, he doesn't just wreck Christianity and Islam like everyone else (though he does do it better), but superstitions with protected victimhood status too, like Judaism and Feminism. I think that's badass, and proves he's not just an ideological hack trying to make a buck off a backlash against the big faiths. I'd like to see him take on the queer theorists next. Maybe team up with Penn & Teller– even though I disagree with their politics, they have a lot of important things to say.
roseweird posted:richard dawkins never addressed feminism, he just made fun of luce irigaray, whom as far as i know no one has ever actually read
lgp's swedish cuckold has
seriously, how this man functions in society without youtube uploads of tantrums at restaurants is remarkable
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sewall_Wright was one among a good few biologists and scientists who developed theories of fitness topographies, wherein certain genes (as manifested by traits) would find peaks in multidimensional topographies determined by physical/environmental characteristics. dawkins's ideas in selfish-gene are pretty much exactly this, from wiki:
"An organism is expected to evolve to maximize its inclusive fitness—the number of copies of its genes passed on globally (rather than by a particular individual). As a result, populations will tend towards an evolutionarily stable strategy."
applications of information theory (physics/statistical mechanics) can be applied to genetics problems (genes encode certain information, which transverse these topographies) to see what genes will continue to survive as the environment changes - whether generally or time-dependently. there's a guy from princeton who's applying this directly for work in bacterial/cancer resistance to drugs: http://www.technologyreview.com/news/425525/how-pathogens-fight-drugs/
oh no our precious continental philosophy, we must protect things that we hold dear
HenryKrinkle posted:
in it; voted 5.
animedad posted:I think that the half-educated bandwagon backlash against Dawkins is also mind numbingly boring
oh no our precious continental philosophy, we must protect things that we hold dear
well just acknowledging sassure and semoitics, which isn't really strictly continental or maybe even structuralist, at least shows that there's more dimension to an idea in society than what is immediately perceived to be the idea.
i have no idea what you mean about the backlash? is that a 'thing'?
roseweird posted:this is cool. it's a bit over my head, but i think i get the basic idea. peaks represent ideal kinds of organisms and molecules selected by the landscape, and lateral ranges represent variations tolerated by the landscape? something like that?
anyway thanks for the background. do you study genetics?
the guy at princeton is operating in its most simplest case. to describe the experiment: he has a huge set of cells/petri dishes that are loosely connected - all populated by ecoli. he runs a solution of cipro (antibiotic) around the sides of the cells. the cipro diffuses and creates a gradient of solution (highest concentration by the ends).
thus we have a literal topography. there is a plane (XY) with a gradient in (z) as a function of (xy) wherein that last dimension is not physics altitude but concentration of liquid death for bacterial that do not develop resistance as represented by selection of a single gene which produces that resistance.
representation of the topology can be abstract over whatever parameters that may impact the genome. this is more mathematical?
this all gets to the fact i'm not a biologist. nah, i'm back in school for physics. the princeton guy came and gave a talk which really turned me on a to a few of these concepts as it pertains to some other work, though.
roseweird posted:i don't think people are actually defending continental philosophy so much as making fun of him for comparing philosophy to algebra
yeah algebra is actually useful sometimes
roseweird posted:philosophies can develop regional variations because philosophy is primarily social and
lol philosophy isn't social, it's one of the least social disciplines there is. Continental philosophy is just a name for a loose group of philosophers reading some earlier philosophers, and sometimes each other.
Meursault posted:in it; voted 5.
roseweird posted:swirlsofhistory posted:just an ideological hack trying to make a buck off a backlash against the big faiths
lol, this wasn't my argument but since you put it so succinctly for me i might as well: richard dawkins is just an ideological hack trying to make a buck off a backlash against the big faiths.
If that's the best argument anyone can muster against Dawkins – other than the crimes of 'arrogance' and 'popularizing atheism', of course – then maybe they should keep their fingers away from their keyboards, their mouths shut, and so on. It shows how nearly all criticism of Dawkins and atheism itself stems from a place of resentment, of not engaging with his arguments (because creationists obviously realize they can't actually win on any ground, be it their scripture or logic or cosmology) and, well, irrationality.
And "backlash against the big faiths"? I wish.
ZinniaJones posted:If that's the best argument anyone can muster against Dawkins – other than the crimes of 'arrogance' and 'popularizing atheism', of course – then maybe they should keep their fingers away from their keyboards, their mouths shut, and so on. It shows how nearly all criticism of Dawkins and atheism itself stems from a place of resentment, of not engaging with his arguments (because creationists obviously realize they can't actually win on any ground, be it their scripture or logic or cosmology) and, well, irrationality.
And "backlash against the big faiths"? I wish.
welcome to the rhizzone, a place where fail aids is funny and acceptable
The coding is a bit bad.