A Devil's Chaplain

Richard Dawkins, BvtnLib 500 DAW 2003

Essay collection. "love letters to science and rationality".

Dawkins fiercely opposes pseudoreligious zealots who fiercely oppose him. In the crossfire, we lose sight of the goal - teaching scientific (careful, measured, self-skeptical) thinking to as many as possible.

Looking beyond oppositional zealotry, Dawkin's has much to share about the natural world, and fruitful ways to comprehend it.

What did I learn from this book?

• p28 genes as software subroutines
• p33 DNA database - who's the father
• p36 Eating human placentas

• p37 Extending libel to lies about science, David Rorvik

• p41 juries and herd behavior. Louise Woodward

• p54 Sanderson of Oundle (boys school)
• p59 What eats the Hydra (some fish)
• p65 Natural selection (functional) vs sexual selection (competition for mating)

• p67 Darwin did not subscribe to Brunn Natural History Society ( Gregor Mendel's Versuche uber Pflanzen-Hybriden)

  • particulate inheritance
• p73 Motoo Kimura neutral theory - mutations with no functional/selective consequences used as clocks

• p76 More genetic variation among chimpanzees than humans, suggesting a <100KYA bottleneck

• p85 Library shelves and order

• p89 inheritance of acquired characteristics in principle incompatible with embryology

  • recipe embryology, not blueprint / most acquired characteristics are damage / fine tuning by size doesn't explain eye lens lucidity
• p95 Bee dance, 3 bits for direction and 3 bits for distance
• p99 Genome size vs complexity, redundancies, genes for different stages of development
• p105 Genetic determinism; some genes code for rates. Gene in Xq28 region correlates to homosexuality, but not denterministic
• p107 "Son of Moore's Law" 2002 essay, graph on page 109 exponential-linear

  • and obsolete, full human genome for ₤1000 in 2035? No, 2015

  • Apples and oranges; Moore's law is still photolithography, new sequencing technologies very different
  • p111 "the same money will buy the genome of any other mammal" ... no, depends on the shortcuts used.
  • which suggests that new chip-patterning techniques (derived from molecular biology) can bypass photolithography limits
• p113 "Genetic Book of the Dead" by 2050, genes to description of ancestral environments
• p114 Missing Link Genome Project, Lucy Genome Project ... no projects with those names

• p121 Origami Chinese Junk

• ... numerous agnostic essays; yes, some religionoids are ignorant jerks. Don't let that interfere with finding shared ground, and expanding that.

• p179 Snake Oil Because Cowards Get Cancer Too by John Diamond (quack medicine)

• p187 Dawkins vs Gould PSU Sterelny ... The Darwin Wars Brown

• p218 Unfinished Correspondence with a Darwinian Heavyweight ... unfinished Dawkins/Gould joint letter about refusing fake debates with creationists

• p228 Red Strangers Elspeth Huxley

• p231 The Lion Children: I purchased and enjoyed this fascinating book. A few puzzling words and descriptions.