John Gray has a review of Richard Dawkins's An Appetite For
Wonder at New Republic here. I review Gray's awful review here.
Gray begins with a quotation from Dawkins that, suggests Gray, exhibits several of Dawkins's 'traits' in his
'campaign against religion'. Here's what Gray quotes from Dawkins:
Intelligent
life on a planet comes of an age when it first works out the reason for its own
existence. If superior creatures from space ever visit earth, the first
question they will ask, in order to assess the level of our civilisation, is:
“Have they discovered evolution yet?” Living organisms had existed on earth,
without ever knowing why, for over three thousand million years before the
truth finally dawned on one of them. His name was Charles Darwin.
Gray claims this passage reveals three
things:
1. Gray says: 'There
is his equation of superiority with cleverness: the visiting aliens are more
advanced creatures than humans because they are smarter and know more than
humans do.'
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