Dawkins: If Science Worked Like Religion

[video at site]

OK, so he’s a snarky ass.  We all know that, even those of us who love him.  And the clip is very entertaining and, in my opinion, worth watching.

Relating to geographic distribution of scientific thought — and his argument as to the absurdity of such a contention — I’d like to point out, however, a passage in one of his books (which, I can’t remember) in which he wrote (roughly, as I haven’t bothered to research where I read it) the following:

Remarking on a smug challenge he received in at an American evolutionary conference, criticizing his depiction of evolution as ‘gradual’, he reflected that this was not at all uncommon.  “Like most lay Americans interested in biology, this man was educated almost entirely by Stephen Jay Gould, and taught to conclude that we ‘gradualists’, in contrast to those believing in ‘punctuated’ evolution, were benighted idiots.”  That likely very far from the exact text, but I tried to make it as Dawkins-sounding as possible.