Dawkins is a brilliant writer and speaker on science. His grasp of the subject and his use of vivid analogies can explain scientific concepts and make them clear even for the non-scientist...
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Richard Harries, the 41st Bishop of Oxford, "A Fellow Humanist", as quoted in Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think, p. 236.Richard Dawkins
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Concepts like these can seem remote, until you explain with analogies taken from everyday life. But unfortunately some ideas do not lend themselves to familiar analogies.
Leonard Mandel
Simply translating the act of the scientist is the first job of any science writer. Then, in my more grandiose moments, the other big job of a science writer is to see connections, to see the forest composed by all these trees. The act of being a scientist, by definition, the act of being a modern scientist requires you to really focus. You have to drill down. You have to spend years studying one brick, one synaptic protein, one kind of thing that turns on the amygdala, one very particular question.
Jonah Lehrer
Richard Dawkins is quite simply incomparable. No one can make science so exciting, so interesting, or so clear... If only Stephen Hawking had a tenth of his clarity.
Richard Dawkins
It is Nietzsche’s merit that he was aware that to philosophize is radically problematic in the cultural, historicist dispensation. He recognized the terrible intellectual and moral risks involved. At the center of his every thought was the question “How is it possible to do what I am doing?” He tried to apply to his own thought the teachings of cultural relativism. This practically nobody else does. For example, Freud says that men are motivated by desire for sex and power, but be did not apply those motives to explain his own science or his own scientific activity. But if he can be a true scientist, i.e., motivated by love of the truth, so can other men, and his description of their motives is thus mortally flawed. Or if he is motivated by sex or power, he is not a scientist, and his science is only one means among many possible to attain those ends. This contradiction runs throughout the natural and social sciences. They give an account of things that cannot possibly explain the conduct of their practitioners.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The really deep divergence between the humanistic and scientific sensibilities is one of temporality. Very nearly by definition, the scientist knows that tomorrow will be in advance of today. A twentieth-century schoolboy can manipulate mathematical and experimental concepts inaccessible to a Galileo or a Gauss. For a scientist the curve of the future is positive. Inevitably, the humanist looks back.
George Steiner
Dawkins, Richard
Day-Lewis, Daniel
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