Richard Dawkins goes a bridge too far
Some people got off the Richard Dawkins train straightaway, when -- with "The Selfish Gene" -- he became the best-known popularizer of scientific research underscoring the power of genes in shaping human outcomes. (I think it's a fine book, though one should also read the attacks on it.) Others have found his role as one of the world's most outspoken atheists off-putting -- either because he offends their beliefs or because they find his pit-bull tone unproductive even if they share his views. (I stuck with him through that phase, too.)
But now Dawkins has announced that his next project will be "a book aimed at youngsters in which he will warn them against believing in 'anti-scientific' fairytales." Evidently the popularity of Harry Potter has thrown the acclaimed science writer into a swivet.
He plans to study the effects of "bringing children up to believe in spells and wizards."
"I think it is anti-scientific -- whether that has a pernicious effect, I don't know," he told a TV interviewer, according to London's Telegraph, which synthesized a number of Dawkins's recent remarks.
"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. Perhaps it's something for research." He will also, natch, be taking aim at the "Judeo-Christian myth" in this book.
His advice? "[A]ppeal to children to think for themselves; to look at the evidence. Always look at the evidence."
Fine advice … for a budding scientist of 13. But really -- as a substitute for what has been traditionally called "story time" for a child from, say, four to seven? Thanks, but in my house we'll be sticking with C.S. Lewis -- Christian allegories and all -- and, no doubt, eventually even that dread Potter fellow: "Scientific methodology hour" can wait.
