It sounds a bit like a soap opera (maybe it is), but I’m speculating whether Dr Clarke is liable to join Dr Gee in condemnation of He Who Must Be… oh, Dawkins, for goodness sake, I can say it because I’m brave.
This is thanks to the latest pronouncement from the throne of the rotweiller ‘professor of public irritation with science’.
He’ll be turning on Father Christmas next. (Or has he already?)
Oooh, turning on Father Christmas would be pretty bad, it would destroy the industry of Lapland (I feel a re-post of some YouTube videos coming on, but I’ll do it in December).
I notice he made no mention of mermaids.
Heh, I think it’s time to lock Dawkins up for the good of imagination everywhere.
What a dickhead.
I think looking back to my own childhood, the fact that so many of the stories I read allowed the possibility of frogs turning into princes, whether that has a sort of insidious affect on rationality, I’m not sure
Oh dear, Brites rationality runs around the left side of the circle, and crashes head-on into “Burn the witch!” fundamental Christianity.
I often wish quidditch were real, though … it has a lot of similarities with polo.
Funny how quite a few Christians don’t approve of Harry Potter, either – for much the same reasons as HWMNBN.
Can I say ‘wanker’ on the NN? Oh, heck, I just have.
I don’t approve of HP— for adults.
It’s for kids, innit? I’d sooner read The Famous Five books. Or Noddy.
Another prominent scientist gives up on rationality, turning instead to introspective, unfounded hogwash. Dawkins states “I don’t know what to think about magic and fairy tales.”, but he’s going to write a book for children based on dismissing them?
Perhaps it’d be more profitable to find out whether children who read science books only turn out to be equally valuable to society as those who read fairy tails.
I have to say, I saw Dickie D give a lecture in Glasgow to the non-specialist audience at the Glasgow Royal Philosophical Society, and he was excellent. Even when asked a highly technical question (about molecular function in evolutionary processes or summat), DD instantly reworded the question to make it understandable to the whole audience, then dressed down his questioner for being a nincompoop. Highly amusing.
Fairy tales. Forgive me spelling/grammar police.
That’s ok Mike, you get extra points for using ‘nincompoop’.
@ Mike: Perhaps it’d be more profitable to find out whether children who read science books only turn out to be equally valuable to society as those who read fairy tales.
In The Science of Middle-earth_":http://www.chiswick.demon.co.uk/books_science_of_middleearth.html I argued that a capacity to appreciate the fantastic is not only desitrable for a good scientific mind, it’s absolutely essential. What is an hypothesis if not a statement about how the world might look, in a make-belioeve universe, however constrained?
I have to say, I saw Dickie D give a lecture in Glasgow to the non-specialist audience at the Glasgow Royal Philosophical Society, and he was excellent
Excellent presentation is all that separates a prize idiot from a dangerous demagogue.
@ Henry: yes, imagination is absolutely essential.. and not just for scientists! It helps children (and some adults) process the world around them.
From the Telegraph article:
[…] The prominent atheist is stepping down from his post at Oxford University to write a book aimed at youngsters in which he will warn them against believing in “anti-scientific” fairytales.
Most children I know are aware that fairytales are fairytales..
Here’s a transcript of the lecture – you can decide which camp he falls into for yourself (if you ain’t already…).
Although, having scanned through it quickly, my memory seems to be based on a completely different lecture. That could be because I’d just finished my PhD and was totally
fupping blottofatigued and dreamt the whole thing, or because the old fart who was recording the lecture was asleep and just made something up.And if anyone has a copy of Dougal Dixon’s After Man – A Zoology of the Future I’d willingly exchange some shiny pebbles for it.
owww… jolly gee, what the. Ok, I will stop cursing and for a good sentence. How about needing to look at things from different views? (in science too) and that “fantasy and fairy tales” helps that. No to mention that it helps to keep life happy rather than just look at the world of today.
Then of course, one must acknowledge the fact that people can distinguish from “reality” and “stories” – and that life would be everlasting boring without stories, real or not.
That is my, Swedish “land of Father Christmas almost”, point of view ;)
I just googled ‘child development imagination’ – check it out. Next headline: Prominent atheist Dawkins sabotages childrens’ healthy development
(heehee)
I just googled ‘child development imagination’ – check it out. Next headline: Prominent atheist Dawkins sabotages childrens’ healthy development
(heehee)
Henry: Funny how quite a few Christians don’t approve of Harry Potter, either
There’s rather a sweet little book called What’s a Christian to do about Harry Potter? that analyzes why some Christians object to it, and explains very gently why they are wrong.
It tends to be the very literal wing, who are probably going on Exodus 22:17 You shall not suffer a witch to live, and worry that HP encourages everyone to rush out and become witches. (I presume they love the likes of Buffy even more.)
Leaving aside the fact that adjacent chapters in Exodus tell you what to do when one man’s ox butts [sic] another’s and when a man seduces a virgin who is not yet betrothed, always useful guidance I find, there’s something very strange about extrapolating a prehistoric society’s social rules to lit crit.
BTW in future, please swear on your own blog. I’ve come over all Andrew Sachs.
From the article that Brian linked, it sounds as if HWMNBN might be one of those people who, upon entering a room, immediately sucks all the joy out of it.
BTW in future, please swear on your own blog. I’ve come over all Andrew Sachs.
What’s wrong with ‘wanker’?
For someone who coined one of the most popular words on the internet these days (“meme”) Dawkins has a sad lack of imagination.
I never liked “meme” anyway.
Henry: I just feel so Sachsed+.
Kristi: From the article that Brian linked, it sounds as if HWMNBN might be one of those people who, upon entering a room, immediately sucks all the joy out of it. Does that make him a dementor rather than HWMNBN?
+ Sachsed – having had abusive terms left on your answering machine/blog – originates from unfortunate behviour by Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross during radio show.
Incidentally, while discussing Harry Potter, authors are often asked where they get their ideas from. Now all is revealed:
I’d love to be able to add that last line to all my
richardgrant proposalsApologies, I should have acknowledged this link http://geek.com.mx/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/harrypotterstarwars.jpg for the source of the Harry Potter outline.
Dawkins just lost me…
as did Richard!
“I don’t approve of HP— for adults.”
Well, excuse ME for loving HP! Care to disapprove of any of my other books / music / favourite films?
;)
Hee hee.
I’m a snob. Sorry.
@ Brian – seems to be a favourite fantasy plot. I had the great misfortune of going to see the film Eragon with Gee Minor. The plot is exactly like that of ‘A New Hope’. I mean, exactly.
Mrs Gee (who is sitting next to me as I type) says that she and Gee Minima enjoyed High School Musical III: The Wrath of Khan very much. (“There – that’ll lower the tone”, she says.)
Mrs Gee can only raise the tone.
Unlike her husband, the first person to say ‘wanker’ on NN.
Where’s Maxine when you need her? I’m surprised she hasn’t already knee-capped you, Richard, for casting aspersions on HP for adults…
…or is that why you’ve got that funny walk? (No comments linking this to Henry’s remark, please. This is a 12 rated blog.)
Mrs Gee can only raise the tone. Unlike her husband, the first person to say ‘wanker’ on NN.
But didn’t you say ‘dickhead’ earlier on, you ‘arsehole’ quipped Steel.
Okay, 15 rated.
I’ve said worse stuff than ‘dickhead’. But this isn’t about me.
I emailed Maxine yesterday, and got an auto-reply saying she’s out of the office. She’s probably flying over to give me a good seeing-to.
She’s probably flying over to give me a good seeing-to
Oh, you wish.
But didn’t I read somewhere that you’d proposed marriage?
Cath, I also like Harry Potter, and a great deal of other children’s lit. I even took a course in children’s literature once. I have 3 or 4 copies of Alice in Wonderland, and I own Winnie-the-Pooh in twelve different languages, including Latin, Jiddish, and Swiss German (the latter on cassette, because it’s not a written languages). Apparently I’m a snob and children’s book lover.
Are you sure we can’t force this up to being an 18 certificate, Brian?
@ Eva: I own Winnie-the-Pooh in twelve different languages, including Jiddish
Kanga: Don’t forget to dress up warm when you go outside, dear. And don’t talk to any goyische kangaroos.
Pooh: He often felt the need for a little smackerel of something at about eleven o’clock.
Rabbit: What do you mean he bounced? We don’t allow bouncing around here. Specially not on Shabbat, and with all my friends-and-relations watching.
Tigger: I said I eat anything. Anything, that is, except if it didn’t come from an animal that didn’t chew the cud, or didn’t have fins of scales or ate carrion or was seethed in its mother’s milk. Bagels, now. Bagels are what Tiggers like best. Except during Passover.
Eeyore: Nobody cares about me. They never phone. They don’t write.
Piglet: Oy! But he had never seen so much rain!
I’m on day 2 of a 3-day half-term holiday. One of the things I did on day 1 was to read the Times, in which Libby Purves wrote a rather good piece about the same story.
I presume, if he intends to discuss them, Prof Dawkins will actually read the Harry Potter books before he writes his; assuming so, I am quite happy with whatever he writes.
I quite like some of Prof D’s writings and I am very keen on J K Rowling’s. I don’t think it follows that the two of them necessarily have to be keen on each other’s work, or that a particular reader should only enjoy one author out of two that are adversarial, or have incompatible views, etc. (I also enjoy reading Henry Gee, for example!).
Richard, I think you have a bit to live down now, after your perhaps rash proposal!
@ What one thinks about a person is distinct from what one thinks about their writings. I like Belloc’s verses for children even though the man was a rampant antisemite. I have even known people to admire Wagner’s music despite the same disability on the composer’s part.
I happen to think that HWMNBN’s book Climbing Mount Improbable one of the finest books on evolution ever written, and will continue to recommend it as such, even though I think somewhat less of the author. There are passages in the otherwise humdrum Unweaving The Rainbow that make me green with envy, as a writer.
But the fact remains that The God Delusion fails because of the fundamental category error at its heart, an error which HWMNBN’s myriad supporters simply refuse to see. This sideswipe at Harry Potter is an example of the same flaw, in which HWMNBN sets up science as a kind of belief system in opposition to what he and his acolytes see as pseudoscience, when the two are quite different. To attack imagination and fantasy is a step further – not only is it self-defeating, as we’ve explained above, it also launches into self-parody.
From now on I shall regard anyone who takes seriously HWMNBN’s pronouncements on religion and even the nature of science as at best someone with an axe to grind, or at worst a fool.
What about his pronouncements on fairy tales, Henry? ;-)
Maxine: I presume, if he intends to discuss them, Prof Dawkins will actually read the Harry Potter books – very risky assumption, that.
Well he won’t be alone, then. As mentioned above, JKR is banned in some US school libraries, and many parents don’t let their children read the books because they’ve heard they are “about witchcraft”. I think there is also a significant minority elsewhere in the world that shares these views.
What about his pronouncements on fairy tales, Henry? ;-)
It depends what they are, but if his past record is anything to go by, they aren’t likely to make any sense.
Maxine – absolutely. That’s one of the points made in the What’s a Christian… book I mentioned above. Almost everyone the author spoke to who were anti-Potter (is that like anti-matter, I wonder. Would an anti-Potter person colliding with a Potter person turn into pure energy?) had not read the book and the weirdest ideas about J. K., up to and including the urban myth about her having a website dedicated to satanism.
However, I don’t hold out huge hopes for HWMNBN reading all those interesting books Libby Purvis mentions, as I seem to remember he has said there is no point reading theological books as they’re all rubbish (paraphrase) so may well take the same attitude to books on literary theory etc.
And I’d be willing to bet he’d never read Tolkien’s essay On Fairy Stories, either, given that Tolkien was devoutly Christian and therefore biased …
Marcus du Sautoy will have the chair starting December.
Tell him ’mine’s a pint.’
Seriously, I think he’ll do a better job than HWMNBN, though (in an unbiassed way) I think they really ought to give the job to a full time science writer. (Ahem. Over here, guys.)
Seriously, I think he’ll do a better job than HWMNBN
From Wikipedia, font of
the male answer syndromeinformation for people who pretend to know everythingall knowledge, du Sautoy has written several books and articles on mathematics for the Public (which means different things to different people, I guess).Has anyone here read any of du Sautoy’s books? They look to be potential gift items for my mathematics-obsessed nephew.
Not read any of his books but heard him talk clearly and enthusiastically on the radio (and podcasts). He has just fronted a BBC TV series on the Story of Maths (still available on iPlayer — UK only I’m afraid) but I’ve managed to miss all of it!
Kristi – yes, read most of his books and they are very enjoyable. Might I also (ahem, more modesty) point your nephew to my A Brief History of Infinity available (as they say) in all good bookshops.
I must stop taking those ‘buy my book’ pills Henry keeps sending me…
Well, Brian, you can take the red one, or the blue one. You choose.
Amazon still haven’t sent me a copy of your book though, the
wankersbounders.In what looks like the 50th comment on Brian’s blog post, I note that Pharyngula, usually quick to trumpet the
doingsexploits of HWMNBN, doesn’t seem to have mentioned it.Henry: Amazon still haven’t sent me a copy of your book though, the bounders.
I think it’s because it’s in a strange state – it’s being sold as if it were a UK publication, but is actually the US edition.
Confused? I am. Possibly as a result of taking those pills. I must have taken the purple
prosepill by mistake.According to Libby Purves, Dawkins has read Pullman, but not (yet?) Rowling.
@ Brian: Excellent suggestion, regarding your book. My nephew and my dad enjoy reading the same types of books about physics and mathematics, so I’ll buy the du Sautoy for one, and the Clegg for the other, and they’ll both get to read both. I’ve already got a New Scientist subscription doing double duty in that manner. :-)
In the comments section for the Purves article, someone quite rightly brings up Mr. Gradgrind from Dickens’ Hard Times. There’s also a choice quote from Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather. Heh heh heh!
One of the bookshops in Manchester Airport had it in the Mysticism section.
The stories of US Christian nutters fulminating about Harry Potter due to the “magic element” always crack me up. Presumably they would object to Tolkien (a legendarily devout Catholic, of course) for similar reasons. You have to laugh when these people are too dim, and too tunnel-vision obsessed, to see that the imaginary universes of the writers in question are fairly clearly underpinned by a broadly Christian moral framework. I suppose the only conclusion one can reach is that segments of the US Christian right are so thoroughly imagination-deficient that they can only spot a moral universe if it is vested in an allegory of the crashing unsubtlety of C.S. Lewis’ Narnia books.
The similarity between Star Wars and HP , which Brian commented on, can be read as just another example of the samey-ness of all the “hero’s quest / progress” type stories, as discussed notably by the mythologist Joseph Campbell. The Star Wars setup was done fairly deliberately to the Campbell blueprint, which of course was derived from an analysis of a lot of old mythologies. I always understood Campbell’s ideas were widely taught in screenwriting (and perhaps even creative writing) courses in the US.
Getting back to Henry’s bete noire HWMNBNamed, he does seem to be lacking a bit of perspective in this case. Pretty much all childrens’ books deal in fantasy at some level. Even Phillip Pullman’s books are awash with fantasy elements, the only difference being that they specifically don’t include fantasy elements derived from religion. But witches fly, and bears talk, and shamans can down airships by the power of thought… and all the better for it, really.
Anyway, children start with fantasy, and gradually learn that fantasy isn’t reality. Not exactly rocket science. I don’t suppose many kids who were raised on The Jungle Book and The Wind in the Willows really ended up believing in talking animals. So I think Prof Ricky D is doing a bit of unnecessary windmill-charging on this one.
One significant value of fairy tales is that they allow the young, powerless child to “be strong” – the recurrent theme is that the good prevails, the fierce “parent figure” (eg wicked stepmother, evil ogre) is defeated by the inherent goodness of the “child”. This is explored in The Uses of Enchantment by Bruno Bettleheim, which I can highly recommend, particularly to those with fairy-tale-reading aged children.
This teaching that the “weak, inherently good and innocent” can prevail is deeply important on a psychological level for the young child to absorb, as part of the necessary separation process from the parents. Otherwise, people get stuck at the toddler stage and we all know what that leads to (check out some “recreationally outraged” blogs for a taster).
Of course, we do not know that Richard Dawkins intends to discount this important aspect of psychological theory in his book.
Presumably they would object to Tolkien (a legendarily devout Catholic, of course) for similar reasons
If some of the Tolkien-themed messageboards are any indication, US fundamentalist Christians tend to support very rigid Christian moral and allegorical interpretations of the Lord of the Rings, at least. It’s more difficult to plaster such interpretations onto The Hobbit and The Silmarillion, I think (but that doesn’t stop them from trying). The kinds of magic alluded to in The Lord of the Rings don’t seem to be a problem; it’s the references to witchcraft and spells and demons, particularly in the Harry Potter books, which bother them, apparently.
Of course, the online discussions from those quarters are rarely about Tolkien now, and instead focus on “OH NOES! Teh evul Obama is going to take our
preciousssssilmarilsmoneys with TAXESSSS!” To be avoided. {rolls eyes}@Maxine—
that reminds me of what Terry Pratchett said on the matter: fairy tales are important because they teach that monsters can be defeated.
@ Austin – Anyway, children start with fantasy, and gradually learn that fantasy isn’t reality. Not exactly rocket science.
However, some would argue rocket science is fantasy.
I don’t mean the
nutterspeople who think we never went to the moon, I mean those who think that spending money on manned spaceflight is a terrible waste when it could be used on real science.I know that’s not what is usually meant by ‘rocket science’ – but I was just inspired by the juxtaposition of fantasy and rocket science.
Sorry, back to Harry Potter and the Evil Professor…
This seems to be an interesting discussion about Dawkins.
I must say, I don’t get most of it. That could be due to living in Switzerland. Here we just get bits and pieces.
If so that he argues in a similar way than christians against those books, that would not be a miracle, psychologically speaking.
Did someone say “choose your enemies carefully!” ? If not, that should be considered. Choice of enemies may tell something about you and moreover hostile interaction may – can I say? – dye you in a similar colour than their’s.
Dawkins seems to be advancing a similar line of reasoning as found in the arguments that fiction can be harmful to our moral sensibilities (as found in those arguing to ban certain books during the turn of the century). Needless to say, this is a line of argumentation I disagree with strongly.
When I was an undergraduate, I enjoyed reading Mimesis as Make Believe. Walton thinks that we have much to learn from children’s make believe, which informs our understanding of fiction. He suggests that make believe is unique because it is a case where one simultaneously believes in both the real and the unreal (Walton’s explanation also includes a significant discussion of what “belief” is). By engaging in make believe, we can “see” things in ways that they are not while not denying their true nature; we engage in hypothetical reasoning and evaluate alternate scenarios while not necessarily denying the way that things are. Surely these are valuable abilities for young scientists to cultivate. I suppose it is an open research question if fiction and rationality are antagonistic (or that fiction has an “insidious affect on rationality”), but many philosophers and social scientists have suggested that the two are actually complementary.