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The Issues

Darwin’s Rottweiler & the Public Understanding of Science

Peter Williams claims that Richard Dawkins is a good writer but a poor logician, and attempts to prove it with examples of some formal fallacies.

The famous zoologist Dr Richard Dawkins is a man who courts controversy; many would agree with Dorothy Nelkin’s description of him as “materialistic, reductionist and overtly antireligious.” (Alas, Poor Darwin, Vintage, 2001, p.15.) One of his admirers is Charles Simonyi, head of Microsoft’s Intentional Programming team, who gave Oxford University funds to establish a Professorship for the Public Understanding of Science with Dawkins specifically in mind. “Evolution’s first great advocate, 1860s biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, earned the nickname ‘Darwin’s bulldog’ from his fellow Victorians.

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