Richard Holloway tells us about Richard Dawkins new book in the Guardian. A Devil's Chaplain & Other Selected Essays. “The goal of life is life itself. There is no final purpose, no end other than entropy and the end of all endings.” Yes, O. K. “But there is deep refreshment to be had ‘from standing up full-face into the keen wind of understanding’.” Mh, maybe, sometimes. Dawkin's earlier book River out of Eden was of the boring kind though. (via Arts & Letters Daily)

p. s.: There's a read-worthy portrait of “the devil's chaplain” in the Guardian by Simon Hattenstone. Two quotes: “In one of the letters that he [Dawkins] regularly fires off to newspapers, he suggested that child sex abuse in the Church ‘unpleasant as it is, may do less permanent damage to the children than bringing them up Catholic in the first place’.” This is not so far away from the truth, I think. — “I see religion, however, as a kind of organised misconception.” Here he is wrong because religion is not about conception, or is it? (via SciTech Daily)

p. s. Gould and God, a review of A Devil's Chaplain in Nature.

p. s. Through a Glass, Darkly. A thoughtfully written review by Michael Ruse in the American Scientist.

p. s. The concept of cultural items such as tunes or games, beliefs or fashions, as themselves “memes” with a kind of life of their own, making use of human beings as vehicles in their pitiless Darwinian struggle with competitors, has similar problems. First it sounds perverse, but then it seems dazzling and exciting. Yes! A gunman is a bullet's way of making another bullet, and a librarian is a library's way of making another library! Like Samuel Butler, who instructed that “even a potato in a dark cellar has a low cunning that stands it in excellent stead,” we suddenly think of tunes and games and accents and treatments as pursuing their own projects, plotting to invade us, making use of us to pursue their own competitive existences. Again, though, there is the sobering up. Get rid of any image of a tune or a treatment cunningly squirreling away, invading people and bringing about changes. A tune does not literally make use of people, since it is not the kind of thing that has purposes and designs. What is true is that when one lodges in people's heads, they are prone to spread it. And then we feel let down, since this is all that is apparently left when the rhetorical flourishes are cleaned off.
From a review by Simon Blackburn in The New Republic online. I feel alike.