Event: Richard Dawkins speak­ing at Portland State University (PSU), October 10, 2009

So…I made it down to the PSU Stott Center tonight, amazed to see hun­dreds of peo­ple wait­ing in line to hear Richard Dawkins read from his new book, THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH.

Note: I’ve never seen a crowd this size at a book read­ing. Where did these peo­ple come from? My wife, an agnos­tic who doesn’t know or care who Dawkins is, remarked that the crowd was young-looking (early 20s, by and large).

This young demo­graphic bodes well for the next gen­er­a­tion of crit­i­cal thinkers, I guess, but my inner critic won­ders if some were just pur­su­ing the car­rot of extra-credit points.  I say this because a few younglings looked bored stiff as Dawkins riffed on DNA and phe­no­types. Also, it’s pos­si­ble that many of these hatch­lings were drawn in by Dawkins’ frus­trat­ing asso­ci­a­tion with the bray­ing jack­ass Bill Maher. Who knows. Whatever the case, this was a very large crowd. I cede that the incen­tive get­ting peo­ple there is irrel­e­vant.  It’s nice to see a giant swarm of curi­ous minds at such a gathering.

My curi­ous mind is still fresh from the pro­ceed­ings, so here’s a few thoughts on the read­ings and Dawkins’ Q&A ses­sion (adroitly set up via text messaging):

• The sound sys­tem sucked. Would it have killed the orga­niz­ers to do a qual­ity sound­check prior to Dawkins’ arrival on-stage? Even Dawkins got annoyed. At one point, he slammed his papers on the floor to go turn off an addi­tional stage mic. (I don’t want to be too hard on the peo­ple in charge of the fes­tiv­i­ties, but this was pretty distracting).
• In read­ing pas­sages from his book, Dawkins noted that fos­sil records are not essen­tial in prov­ing evo­lu­tion. Dawkins made the anal­ogy of a spy cam­era at the scene of a crime. Sure, it’s great that its film ani­mates the crime scene, but the pho­tos are extra­ne­ous in the hands of a skilled foren­sic analyst.
• The audio screw-ups took some enjoy­ment out of Dawkins’ read­ings. The event orga­niz­ers, to their credit, even­tu­ally got the stuff sorted out and the Q&A ses­sion was more engaging.
• When asked about the flood of “rebut­tal” books that fol­lowed THE GOD DELUSION, Dawkins quoted Yeats and said “Was there ever a dog that praised his fleas?” He then directed us to the fleas on his Web site.
• Dawkins said age 7 or 8 would be a good time to intro­duce evo­lu­tion to young minds. Evolution is rather easy to under­stand, unlike say, quan­tum physics.
• Dawkins noted that astronomers err in using evo­lu­tion­ary terms to describe stars. I think he said “embry­ol­ogy” bet­ter suited celes­tial objects. He did con­cede that uni­verses may spawn “daugh­ter” uni­verses, though, and per­form a kind of nat­ural selec­tion in that regard.
• Dawkins dis­cussed homo­sex­u­al­ity and added some inter­est­ing points to the dia­logue of its orig­i­na­tion. He said we may be ask­ing the wrong ques­tion when con­tem­plat­ing the where­abouts of a homo­sex­u­al­ity gene. Perhaps there is no homo­sex­u­al­ity gene but rather a gene that may be con­di­tioned through nur­tur­ing to alter its genetic propen­sity. To illus­trate, Dawkins described a baby with one such mal­leable gene; the gene’s sus­cep­ti­bil­ity to change is trig­gered by bottle-fed milk in lieu of breast-fed milk. Dawkins stressed that he does not endorse this the­ory, nec­es­sar­ily, but it’s another tool to help fur­ther the discussion.
• Another inter­est­ing talk­ing point on homo­sex­u­al­ity: Dawkins went back to our ances­tral apes for this one. Who bet­ter to watch the clan when the alpha male goes hunt­ing than — not nec­es­sar­ily the strongest male — but the strongest male least likely to shagg the alpha male’s harem. In short, homo­sex­u­al­ity may have got­ten through nat­ural selection’s dis­crim­i­nat­ing fil­ters because it pro­vided a valu­able ser­vice.
• I don’t fol­low evo­lu­tion issues very closely but Dawkins broached the “aquatic ape the­ory,” which is brand-new ter­ri­tory for me. Per Wikipedia, this alter­na­tive evo­lu­tion­ary hypoth­e­sis entails a pool­side lifestyle for our ances­tral brethren.
• No shocker here, but Dawkins’ words for Bibical lit­er­al­ists and cre­ation­ists were unkind. As Dawkins said him­self, he is happy to take an intel­lec­tual sledge­ham­mer to their small nuts.
• Dawkins quoted A.J. Ayer in ratio­nal­iz­ing why it’s OK for an athe­ist to say grace at a meal: “I won’t utter false­hoods, but I’ve no objec­tion to utter­ing mean­ing­less state­ments.”
• Dawkins said he thinks the uni­verse has plenty of alien life. He did dis­cuss the pos­si­bil­ity that Earth life is unique, though, and that this pos­si­bil­ity is rife with con­se­quence.  I’m not sure I under­stood his point, but allow me to pon­tif­i­cate: a “rare Earth” means the God of Intelligent Design is a poseur. If all He can assem­ble is one measly planet of sen­tient beings — in an infi­nite or near-infinite uni­verse of his own mak­ing — then pre­cisely what pur­pose does his floun­der­ing omnipo­tence serve?
• As Dawkins ham­mered away at holy book lit­er­al­ists, he brought up Noah’s Ark. He asked, if the Mountains of Ararat were the final des­ti­na­tion point for Noah’s magic yacht, then where is the evi­dence left behind by mar­su­pi­als who ditched Armenia and road-tripped to Australia? Where is the resid­ual cha cha cha of chin­chillas who car­pooled to South America? Or the fos­silized camp sites of pen­guins en route to the South Pole?
• Dawkins was in fine form for this item: If the chee­tah is a machine built for killing gazelles — and it is — then what does this say about the gazelle? The unique build of the gazelle, after all, makes it nature’s most skilled chee­tah dodger. So…what kind of para­dox­i­cal mind-fuck is tak­ing place here? Whose side is God on? Or is God a sadist? WHISKEY TANGO FUCK?
• Dawkins said it’s trou­bling that young sci­en­tific minds do not veer toward physics. He described a recent encounter with state-of-the-art physics tech­nol­ogy (the Large Hadron Collider, I believe) whose beauty reduced him to tears.  Now is the time for bright young minds to embrace this discipline.
• An audi­ence mem­ber asked Dawkins if he had seen IDIOCRACY. The answer was no.
• Dawkins politely shut down a meme question.

In sum, a fine evening. Thanks to the Center for Inquiry for its hard work and for mak­ing sure the sound gaffes did not spi­ral out of con­trol. I hope this blog post does not pro­vide cheat­ing fod­der for PSU stu­dents on their extra-credit projects. (Cheap shot! Sorry, kids. Some of you did look really bored, though.)

— —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  — –
— —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  — –
— —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  — –

• «Previous Post
• Next Post »

---