Usually, I am not a Dawkins fan. I always thought that his ultradarwinism was actually hurting the public perception of the theory of evolution.
But Dawkins is a brilliant mind and with his brilliant mind he brings a different and unique perspective on Saddam's execution and hanging. A highly recommended reading...
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Since March 29th 2006
2 comments:
I’m not very familiar with Dawkins’ works even though I quite like Darwin, Tylor and Spencer the great Victorian/“Positivist” trio.
Strikes as narrow-mindedly reductionist with his pseudo-scientific (I mean “sample size” man! WTF?) anthropological musings:
“It is in the nature of research on ruthless national dictators that the sample size is small. Wasn't the judicial destruction of one of the very few research subjects we had - and a prime specimen at that - an act of vandalism?”
Victor,
One can fairly say that dawkins is a hardcore positivist. And the passage you cite is somehow awkward. It shows that dawkins, by mentioning the sample sixe issue discards some fine qualitative psychological research while at the same time reducing the tyran psyche to an extraordianry phenomenon, in fact it is not. One needs historical and social research, in addition to biological and psychological ones, to understand such a phenomenon.
However, what I found interesting in dawkins perspective is the scientific one: lets get the truth out of this. Really, in all this spin that was the Iraq war, nobody is preoccupied anymore about the truth. We have even forget what Truth means. This is what the Iraq war has done to western consciousmess, hiding the truth as if it did not exist.
Saddam,s swift execution was also meant to hide the truth and that's a point Dawkins makes brilliantly without tresorting to conspiracy theories...
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