Richard Dawkins' Compound Ignorant Mistakes

Angel said:

Ad Hominem Tribute

Richard Dawkins is an asshole of the first water. Make that "arsehole," out of respect.

I affectionately refer to him as "Dopey Dick Dawkins," or simply "Dopey Dick," in recognition of his level of religious understanding.

Anyone who defends this Dick's religious bigotry deserves mention in this tribute.​

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Sweden said:

A post that tells us a lot about you and nothing about Dawkins. Not really required though, as there is already ample evidence of your childishness.

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Angel said:

All these posts tell us is that I deplore the empowerment of this religious bigot and that you are among those who have empowered him.

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MrWonderful said:

...I offer a $500 reward to any atheist or Darwinist who can accurately quote a book written by an atheist, which condemns another prominent atheist for "quote mining." ... Find one published example, in a book found in libraries, of one atheist/Darwinist, by another, and $500 is yours.

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Sweden said:

If I thought for one moment that I had 'empowered' the brllliant Richard Dawkins I would be almost as pleased with myself as you are.

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MrWonderful said:

...

NOT ONLY did Dawkins commit the atheist *irrationality* of quote mining, but he also COMPOUNDED IT in two amusingly ignorant ways, this pretender of Exceptional Brightness.
1. He badly misquoted the arguably original author of the false quote.
2. He abused the very idea of statistics embedded in the real quote, or his own made up version, take your pick.
And while I'm at it, his third ignorant mistake occurs to me, he was too lazy to look up the author of the quote he abused so terribly in two other distinctly different, ignorant ways.

[...]

Which points out yet another atheist hypocrisy/irrationality/anti-scientific strut: The Fallacy of the Argument from Authority. Atheists/Darwinists cite this fallacy often when condemning those of us they "despise," as Dawkins writes in one of his books, but irrationally never notice their own practice of that very fallacy. They pretend/claim/assert that they are always and ever of superior intellect to those they "despise" but when trapped in their own web of mendacious mediocrity, the best that they can do is fall back on that very Fallacy of the Argument From Authority. You're stupid. I'm brilliant. Shut up.

...

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• 
  [*=1]Compositional structure:
  Is there some reason you opened with the term "quote mining," which is ambiguous (its meaning isn't constrained to "digging through texts for excerpts;" its imagery is puzzling), instead of the precise (and, frankly succinct) term, "contextomy" (or the wordier "quoting out of context")?
  
  I wouldn't typically ask, but insofar as your OP tacitly and pedantically declaims your erudition on the matter, I feel obliged to inquire because although dictionally, "quote mining" is okay, opening your critical essay with it instead of a more specific word or phrase is compositionally awkward. Better to first establish unambiguously what one means and later adopt more casual verbiage.
  [*=1]Invoking fallacious lines is not, as your passage suggests, an "atheist irrationality" or "atheist hypocrisy/irrationality/anti-scientific strut." Doing so is a behavior theists and atheists commit.
  
  Improvement suggestions:
  • 
    [*=1]Eschew redundancy: "NOT ONLY did Dawkins "quote mine," ...." is succinct, clear, and it avoids the redundancy of "irrational quote mining." (Contextomy, or "quote mining" if one prefers that term, is inherently irrational; thus there's no need to say so.)
    [*=1]Attribution of cause, nature, timing or extent: Be more careful about adjective selection and placement. Shun positive degree adjectives if the existential nature they imply is, in fact, not universal.
    
    Everyone's contextomy derives from their cognition about the topic they discuss, not their a-/theology. Quote mining is not unique to atheists.

MrWonderful said:

...

I will correct all three of Dawkins' irrational oversights.

1. The correct quote is: "If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters they might write all the books in the British Museum."
2. The probability of "an army of monkeys" strumming on typewriters to produce just one sentence, 50 characters in length, using only 50 different possible keystrokes available on a typewriter (26 letters + 10 numbers + characters and upper case exceeds 50 but let's just use that number) is 1 chance in 50 to the 50th. This equals 1 chance in 10 to the 84th power. In other words, the "army of monkeys" would have to "strum" 10 to the 84th power of lines BEFORE they were likely to produce one single line of any book you might choose.
There are *only* 10 to the 80th fundamental particles in the universe. Dawkins himself defines "impossible" as 1 chance in 10 to the 40th power, so.....

3. – Physicist Arthur Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World, 1928

In one of his typically hateful responses, Dawkins emailed me, calling me "stupid," after I pointed out error after error after error in several of his books. He could not address his glaring oversights and ignorance honestly, rationally, so instead, he did what atheists everywhere do so routinely. He attacked me and my "stupidity."

Which points out yet another atheist hypocrisy/irrationality/anti-scientific strut: The Fallacy of the Argument from Authority. Atheists/Darwinists cite this fallacy often when condemning those of us they "despise," as Dawkins writes in one of his books, but irrationally never notice their own practice of that very fallacy.

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• Misquote: Dawkins notes no "army" of monkeys, nor does he cite as a benchmark of sorts "all the books in the British Museum."
• Lie of omission: What part of...
  "The operative phrase is, of course, given enough time. Let us limit the task facing our monkey somewhat. Suppose that he has to produce, not the complete works of Shakespeare but just the short sentence 'Methinks it is like a weasel', and we shall make it relatively easy by giving him a typewriter with a restricted keyboard, one with just the 26 (capital) letters, and a space bar.​
  
  ...did you not read or understand?
• Context: Dawkins penned the passage to refute the plausibility and probability of single-step selection of random variation and to provide a lay-comprehensible illustrative referential contrast with cumulative selection's comparatively greater likelihood and plausibility. (Upon completing his single-step selection discussion, Dawkins presents a cumulative selection one.) You've yet elided that contextual element of his explication.

MrWonderful said:

...

3. – Physicist Arthur Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World, 1928

In one of his typically hateful responses, Dawkins emailed me, calling me "stupid," after I pointed out error after error after error in several of his books. He could not address his glaring oversights and ignorance honestly, rationally, so instead, he did what atheists everywhere do so routinely. He attacked me and my "stupidity."

Which points out yet another atheist hypocrisy/irrationality/anti-scientific strut: The Fallacy of the Argument from Authority. Atheists/Darwinists cite this fallacy often when condemning those of us they "despise," as Dawkins writes in one of his books, but irrationally never notice their own practice of that very fallacy.

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• Arthur Eddington died in 1944.
• Richard Dawkins was born in 1941.

• Why do you assert that Dawkins wrote that atheists/Darwinists condemned people like him?
• You should review the exception to argumentum ad verecundiam. There's a fully legitimate reason why one should refrain from citing and relying upon non natural scientists regarding natural science matters. Scientists refrain from pontificating about theology and its dogma, methods, conclusions, etc. and theologians should refrain from pontificating about science and its methods, conclusions, etc.

1. Let us, for the sake of discussion, entertain the alternative assumption that life has arisen only once, ever, and that was here on Earth. It is tempting to object to this assumption on the following emotional grounds. Isn't there something terribly medieval about it? Doesn't it recall the time when the church taught that our Earth was the centre of the universe, and the stars just little pinpricks of light set in the sky for our delight (or, even more absurdly presumptuous, that the stars go out of their way to exert astrological influences on our little lives)? How very conceited to assume that, out of all the billions of billions of planets in the universe, our own little backwater of a world, in our own local backwater of a solar system, in our own local backwater of a galaxy, should have been singled out for life? Why, for goodness sake, should it have been our planet?
   
   I am genuinely sorry, for I am heartily thankful that we have escaped from the small-mindedness of the medieval church and I despise modern astrologers, but I am afraid that the rhetoric about backwaters in the previous paragraph is just empty rhetoric.
2. For example the Cambrian strata of rocks, vintage about 600 million years, are the oldest ones in which we find most of the major invertebrate groups. And we find many of them already in an advanced state of evolution, the very first time they appear. It is as though they were just planted there, without any evolutionary history. Needless to say, this appearance of sudden planting has delighted creationists. Evolutionists of all stripes believe, however, that this really does represent a very large gap in the fossil record, a gap that is simply due to the fact that, for some reason, very few fossils have lasted from periods before about 600 million years ago. One good reason might be that many of these animals had only soft parts to their bodies: no shells or bones to fossilize. If you are a creationist you may think that this is special pleading. My point here is that, when we are talking about gaps of this magnitude, there is no difference whatever in the interpretations of 'punctuationists' and 'gradualists'. Both schools of thought despise so-called scientific creationists equally, and both agree that the major gaps are real, that they are true imperfections in the fossil record. Both schools of thought agree that the only alternative explanation of the sudden appearance of so many complex animal types in the Cambrian era is divine creation, and both would reject this alternative.

MrWonderful said:

Richard Dawkins, the quote miner - Evolutionary biologist at Oxford and prominent atheist who consistently has expressed his *rationality* in an unnecessarily hateful manner.

“I don’t know who it was first pointed out that, given enough time, a monkey bashing away at random on a typewriter could produce all the works of Shakespeare.” - The Blind Watchmaker, by Richard Dawkins, page 46


I offer a $500 reward to any atheist or Darwinist who can accurately quote a book written by an atheist, which condemns another prominent atheist for "quote mining." You will read many smug put-downs of Christians and doubters of Darwin by atheists for the formers' "quote mining." Find one published example, in a book found in libraries, of one atheist/Darwinist, by another, and $500 is yours.

I will correct all three of Dawkins' irrational oversights.

1. The correct quote is: "If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters they might write all the books in the British Museum."
2. The probability of "an army of monkeys" strumming on typewriters to produce just one sentence, 50 characters in length, using only 50 different possible keystrokes available on a typewriter (26 letters + 10 numbers + characters and upper case exceeds 50 but let's just use that number) is 1 chance in 50 to the 50th. This equals 1 chance in 10 to the 84th power. In other words, the "army of monkeys" would have to "strum" 10 to the 84th power of lines BEFORE they were likely to produce one single line of any book you might choose.
There are *only* 10 to the 80th fundamental particles in the universe. Dawkins himself defines "impossible" as 1 chance in 10 to the 40th power, so.....

3. – Physicist Arthur Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World, 1928


$500. Who's game? [Don't be lazy. Google ain't gonna cut it. And don't cheat. Cheating has been rampant among atheists/Darwinists for centuries. It's anti-science and irrational.]

“Many people don’t realize that science basically involves assumptions and faith. Wonderful things in both science and religion come from our efforts based on observations, thoughtful assumptions, faith and logic. (With the findings of modern physics, it) seems extremely unlikely (that the existence of life and humanity are ) just accidental.” – Charles Townes, Nobel Laureate and Professor of Physics at UC Berkeley
Footnote: There is ALSO a fourth error implicit in Dawkins misguided misquote.

ANY TIME a "Fundie/Creo/YEC" (That is a derisive group of terms for non-Darwinists, near and dear to Darwinists themselves) misquotes someone else, the whole of the Fundie/Creo/YEC message is instantly dismissed as being worthless. Do atheists/Darwinists ever discredit their own for misquoting others? I have yet to see it, and am tempted to offer a second $500 reward for any atheist/Darwinist to cite such an example in a published book. But I cannot due to the fact that cheating has been so widespread among them for so many centuries/decades that it is all too likely to be attempted here. [See Icons of Evolution for specifics of long-term, ongoing cheating by their side.]
A fifth: IF, in fact, I were as "stupid" as Dawkins/atheists/Darwinists claim all the time, how is it possible that I can critique Dawkins so comprehensively?

A speculative sixth: (I'm *stupid* and everything I said was wrong. And stupid.)

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Xelor said:

///

Though Dawkins' atheism maybe moved him to expound on the Theory of Evolution's (TOE's] aptness, his theology affects not the methodological and quantitative legitimacy of the (im-)probabilities his monkey example illustrates, nor does it affect TOE's rigor or accuracy. But that's not your OP's thesis.

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What you've done is literally and figuratively quote mine Dawkins to make your case. Is your surname "Pot" or "Kettle?" I daren't guess. That notwithstanding, your OP is a fine illustration of the hypocrisy inherent in quote mining, namely yours.

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Xelor said:

///



Blue:
You've gallfully (1) misquoted Dawkins' statement, despite your having written "the correct quote is," (2) limiting remarks, and the context in which he presented the passage you misquoted.

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MrWonderful said:

You have gallfully misunderstood, and quite obviously willfully so.

Dawkins attempted to quote the author of the original statistical folly. He failed to quote it correctly. How unscholarly of Dawkins.
Moreover the original statement is as ignorant as Dawkins' misquotation and misinterpretation of it.
I explained how impossible it would be for any number of monkeys to randomly type a single sentence and yet you persist with your pretentious pedantry.
You waste everyone's time. ciao

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Manc Skipper said:

The most charitable interpretation of your misplaced assertion is that you are grievously mistaken.

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MrWonderful said:

PROOF THAT YOU ARE WRONG:

1. There are 50+ possible keystrokes on a typewriter.
2. The random selection of keys by one or more monkeys would be 1/50 to the nth power, with n being the number of characters in a sentence, paragraph, chapter, or book.
3. Richard Dawkins DEFINED "impossible" as 1 chance in 10 to the 40th power or less.
4. A very reasonable definition of "impossible" is 1 chance in 10 to the 50th power or less, since 10 to the 50th grains of sand occupy a volume equivalent to 15 spheres the size of our solar system out to Pluto.
5. That is ONE chance, not an infinite number of tries. I know, 1 chance is a difficult concept for many Dawkins followers.
6. For a single sentence just 50 characters in length, 1/50 x 1/50 x 1/50... fifty times equals 1 / 10 to the 84th power. That's one simple sentence.

Q.E.D.

Nor are you "slightly liberal" by any means. Liberals are so embarrassed by their Leftist dogma that they try to paint themselves as less guilty than they really are.

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MrWonderful said:

Richard Dawkins, the quote miner - Evolutionary biologist at Oxford and prominent atheist who consistently has expressed his *rationality* in an unnecessarily hateful manner.

“I don’t know who it was first pointed out that, given enough time, a monkey bashing away at random on a typewriter could produce all the works of Shakespeare.” - The Blind Watchmaker, by Richard Dawkins, page 46


I offer a $500 reward to any atheist or Darwinist who can accurately quote a book written by an atheist, which condemns another prominent atheist for "quote mining." You will read many smug put-downs of Christians and doubters of Darwin by atheists for the formers' "quote mining." Find one published example, in a book found in libraries, of one atheist/Darwinist, by another, and $500 is yours.

NOT ONLY did Dawkins commit the atheist *irrationality* of quote mining, but he also COMPOUNDED IT in two amusingly ignorant ways, this pretender of Exceptional Brightness.
1. He badly misquoted the arguably original author of the false quote.
2. He abused the very idea of statistics embedded in the real quote, or his own made up version, take your pick.
And while I'm at it, his third ignorant mistake occurs to me, he was too lazy to look up the author of the quote he abused so terribly in two other distinctly different, ignorant ways.

I will correct all three of Dawkins' irrational oversights.

1. The correct quote is: "If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters they might write all the books in the British Museum."
2. The probability of "an army of monkeys" strumming on typewriters to produce just one sentence, 50 characters in length, using only 50 different possible keystrokes available on a typewriter (26 letters + 10 numbers + characters and upper case exceeds 50 but let's just use that number) is 1 chance in 50 to the 50th. This equals 1 chance in 10 to the 84th power. In other words, the "army of monkeys" would have to "strum" 10 to the 84th power of lines BEFORE they were likely to produce one single line of any book you might choose.
There are *only* 10 to the 80th fundamental particles in the universe. Dawkins himself defines "impossible" as 1 chance in 10 to the 40th power, so.....

3. – Physicist Arthur Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World, 1928

In one of his typically hateful responses, Dawkins emailed me, calling me "stupid," after I pointed out error after error after error in several of his books. He could not address his glaring oversights and ignorance honestly, rationally, so instead, he did what atheists everywhere do so routinely. He attacked me and my "stupidity." Which points out yet another atheist hypocrisy/irrationality/anti-scientific strut:
The Fallacy of the Argument from Authority. Atheists/Darwinists cite this fallacy often when condemning those of us they "despise," as Dawkins writes in one of his books, but irrationally never notice their own practice of that very fallacy. They pretend/claim/assert that they are always and ever of superior intellect to those they "despise" but when trapped in their own web of mendacious mediocrity, the best that they can do is fall back on that very Fallacy of the Argument From Authority. You're stupid. I'm brilliant. Shut up.

$500. Who's game? [Don't be lazy. Google ain't gonna cut it. And don't cheat. Cheating has been rampant among atheists/Darwinists for centuries. It's anti-science and irrational.]

“Many people don’t realize that science basically involves assumptions and faith. Wonderful things in both science and religion come from our efforts based on observations, thoughtful assumptions, faith and logic. (With the findings of modern physics, it) seems extremely unlikely (that the existence of life and humanity are ) just accidental.” – Charles Townes, Nobel Laureate and Professor of Physics at UC Berkeley
Footnote: There is ALSO a fourth error implicit in Dawkins misguided misquote.

ANY TIME a "Fundie/Creo/YEC" (That is a derisive group of terms for non-Darwinists, near and dear to Darwinists themselves) misquotes someone else, the whole of the Fundie/Creo/YEC message is instantly dismissed as being worthless. Do atheists/Darwinists ever discredit their own for misquoting others? I have yet to see it, and am tempted to offer a second $500 reward for any atheist/Darwinist to cite such an example in a published book. But I cannot due to the fact that cheating has been so widespread among them for so many centuries/decades that it is all too likely to be attempted here. [See Icons of Evolution for specifics of long-term, ongoing cheating by their side.]
A fifth: IF, in fact, I were as "stupid" as Dawkins/atheists/Darwinists claim all the time, how is it possible that I can critique Dawkins so comprehensively?

A speculative sixth: (I'm *stupid* and everything I said was wrong. And stupid.)

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FreedomFromAll said:

So you hate Richard Dawkins, ok go for it.

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MrWonderful said:

"Hate" is your word, not mine. I have never stated that I hate Richard Dawkins, or for that matter any other pathological liar and con man.
I have the utmost contempt for him and others like him - a contempt that is utterly justified.

"Anyone who doesn't believe in evolution is either ignorant, stupid, insane or wicked." - Richard Dawkins




Manc Skipper
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FreedomFromAll said:

SO you claim to not hate Dawkins then give me hateful memes and for some strange insane reason you quoted the DP message that you ignored Manc Skipper. You certainly do seem to be doing a lot of hatting and trolling.

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I get it atheism threatens your faith in your god. And you must do whatever you can to attack everyone that you believe to be atheist. All of your posts so far in this thread are nothing more than childish crybaby crap.

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MrWonderful said:

Let me explain some things to you. Memes of Dawkins' reprehensible conduct have sound basis in fact. Calling someone "hateful" who really is hateful does not make the person describing the conduct what he describes. Were I to call murderers "murderers," that would not make me a "murderer," nor would it evidence my being hateful. Facts are facts. Try to remember that.
Secondly, I don't want people I ignore to claim that because I did not respond to their rants, I had no sufficient answer, and THEREFORE they "won" the argument. That is a common claim among the Left and atheists. It is of course blatantly false, but that never stops them from making that failed point.

I don't know what "hatting" is but I present my ideas. You call them "trolling." When you atheists troll or "hat," you call it "free speech." Obviously you do not accord me the same right.



You get NOTHING. Your claims are meritless. I am not "threatened" in the least by the small, insignificant minority of atheists who so maliciously and profanely rant and rave. I do however object to their condescension, their dishonesty, and their mendacity. (Look up the word.) Why would you bother responding to "childish crybaby crap." When I see childish crybaby crap from one of your fellow atheists, I add them to my Ignore List, as I will now do to you. Your comments are not worth the time to read.

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Visbek said:

and misunderstandings about the Cambrian diversification.

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MrWonderful said:

Leftists destroy everything they touch. - Dennis Prager

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