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A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love |  | Author: Richard Dawkins
Publisher: Mariner Books
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
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Rating:  59 reviews
Sales Rank: 29242
Media: Paperback
Pages: 272
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.8
ISBN: 0618485392
Dewey Decimal Number: 500
UPC: 046442485395
EAN: 9780618485390
ASIN: 0618485392
Publication Date: October 27, 2004
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com Review
Richard Dawkins has an opinion on everything biological, it seems, and in A Devil's Chaplain, everything is biological. Dawkins weighs in on topics as diverse as ape rights, jury trials, religion, and education, all examined through the lens of natural selection and evolution. Although many of these essays have been published elsewhere, this book is something of a greatest-hits compilation, reprinting many of Dawkins' most famous recent compositions. They are well worth re-reading. His 1998 review of Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont's Fashionable Nonsense is as bracing an indictment of academic obscurantism as the book it covered, although the review reveals some of Dawkins' personal biases as well. Several essays are devoted to skillfully debunking religion and mysticism, and these are likely to raise the hackles of even casual believers. Science, and more specifically evolutionary science, underlies each essay, giving readers a glimpse into the last several years' debates about the minutiae of natural selection. In one moving piece, Dawkins reflects on his late rival Stephen Jay Gould's magnum opus, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, and clarifies what it was the two Darwinist heavyweights actually disagreed about. While the collection showcases Dawkins' brilliance and intellectual sparkle, it brings up as many questions as it answers. As an ever-ardent champion of science, honest discourse, and rational debate, Dawkins will obviously relish the challenge of answering them. --Therese Littleton
Product Description
The first collection of essays from renowned scientist and best-selling author Richard Dawkins is an enthusiastic declaration, a testament to the power of rigorous scientific examination to reveal the wonders of the world. In these essays Dawkins revisits the meme, the unit of cultural information that he named and wrote about in his groundbreaking work The Selfish Gene. Here also are moving tributes to friends and colleagues, including a eulogy for novelist Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; correspondence with the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould; and visits with the famed paleoanthropologists Richard and Maeve Leakey at their African wildlife preserve. The collection ends with a vivid note to Dawkins's ten-year-old daughter, reminding her to remain curious, to ask questions, and to live the examined life.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 59
 An orator at the top of his form December 15, 2009
PeteA (GA USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
An erudite professor. If the subject matter doesn't interest then the sheer brilliance of his prose should. Fortunately the subject is unwaveringly interesting and exciting. Evolution, natural selection and Atheism, but there's so much more. Richard is a Philosopher and a moralist, there can be morals without scripture, and the world would be a far better place too. Global warming is not at issue here, a return to the Dark Ages of religious oppression and persecution is far more frightening, and indeed where we are heading here in the US. Read it, it's important that you pass the messages on.
More than interesting reading December 10, 2009
R. Forsey (Berkeley CA USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The book is a series of essays collected from various previous publicatons. Some are fairly lengthy, which is good, if you have a lot say. As usual I find Dawkins to be a very good writer and that his material is not filled with superflous words and ideas. One reason I love to read his books is that he more often than not has ideas that I would never have come up with on my own. I find that I almost always agree with him, probably because I view him as a smart and extremely well educated professor.
Brilliant writing, occasionally infuriating February 11, 2009
David Spero (San Francisco, CA United States)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Diabetes: Sugar-Coated Crisis: Who Gets it, Who Profits and How to Stop it
I had long resisted reading Richard Dawkins, because of his reputation as a militant opponent of religion, New Age culture, and fuzzy thinking in general. I thought I would find him too polemical, too much on the attack all the time.
Now I regret waiting. I picked up a copy of A Devil's Chaplain and discovered that Mr. Dawkins is an excellent writer. He's also an evenhanded and effective advocate for science in general and evolutionary biology in particular. A Devil's Chaplain provides a range of Dawkins' essays: book reviews, eulogies, treatises on evolution, attacks on religion, and views on scientific/political issues of the day.
Most are interesting and entertaining reads, but some are nonetheless infuriating. I notice large gaps in his understanding of the relationship between science and society, and a reverence for evolution and its theorists that I don't yet share.
There are six sections in this book. The first features a variety of brilliant essays on topics such as cloning, deconstructionism, science vs. mysticism, trial by jury, and educational excellence. This was my favorite part of the book.
The second section is devoted to a celebration of evolutionary theory, with essays such as "Darwin Triumphant," and "Genes Aren't Us." I believe in evolution, although I don't find random mutation a sufficient explanation for it. But Dawkins clearly believe it is the most wonderful theory and process in the world. He even quotes a colleague saying that there is no use arguing with anyone who doesn't believe evolution is the most important idea in the world. If you're not quite as excited about evolution as he is, you might find this part a bit boring.
The third section is devoted mostly to attacks on religion. I'm no fan of religion, or especially of monotheism. But Dawkins doesn't acknowledge religion's excellent reasons for being. Yes, for rulers and religious leaders, it serves as a form of social control. But the billions of adherents must be getting something out of it! You can rail against religion all you want from the safe and pleasant hillside of upper middle-class academia, but people with hard lives in the trenches will have trouble hearing you, unless you can offer something better. By not acknowledging the perceived benefits of religion, he weakens his arguments. They wind up sounding shrill.
The fifth section consists of book reviews, many of works by Steven Jay Gould, the American writer on evolution. Dawkins and Gould had some well-known debates on issues in evolution, but they might mainly be of interest to those in the field.
The fourth section includes eulogies for Hitchhiker's Guide author Douglas Adams and scientist W.D. Hamilton. Here we see Dawkins' personal side, with wonderful details and anecdotes lighting the lives of the deceased. The sixth section has book reviews relating to Africa, an interesting mix of novels, personal memoirs and science.
I like this book very much. My complaint is the pride of place Dawkins uncritically gives to science over less fact-based ways of thinking. Without doubt, science is the most powerful way to find truth. But for that reason, it has been among greatest causes of harm. Human society has in no way been ready to handle the truths that science, and its kid brother technology, have brought us.
Religion brought us the crusades and the inquisition. But science brought us the internal combustion engine, mechanized agriculture, and the atomic bomb. The first has fouled the air with the potential - if global warming theorists are correct - of ending human civilization for all time. The second has stripped the land of soil, and the bomb, well, we know about that. Science placed in the hands of people motivated by greed has led, among other things, to the near-extermination of Native Americans and Australians at the hands of European immigrants. While humanitarians have used science to cure many diseases, medical technology, placed in the hands of a death-denying culture, has led to extraordinarily expensive suffering for millions of people who live a medically-supported life in a form that barely deserves the name.
Still, I plan to read more of Dawkins' books in future. As a science writer myself - see my books Diabetes: Sugar-coated Crisis and The Art of Getting Well, available on Amazon - I appreciate his style, clarity, and humor.
The Imaginery Iceberg September 30, 2008
Clifford J. Stevens (Boys Town, NE 68010 USA)
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
In this book, in vivid and virile prose, and many passages of stunning beauty, Richard Dawkins has created an illusion of certainty on one of the most critical issues of contemporary society: What does it mean to be a human being. The book is a collection of articles written over several years, with a literary grace and gift for imagery that is almost poetry.
The book is not a scientific treatise, but it waves the flag of science on every page. The science is sound, the science is breathtaking, for Richard Dawkins is a superb evolutionary biologist. But he speaks from the pulpit of Ethology, yet ventures into the domain of Anthropology.
Ethology studies animal behavior and yet he applies the principles and findings of Ethology to human beings, for one salient reason: he is convinced that human beings are nothing more than refined animals, and this collection of essays tries to illlustrate this from the findings of the fathers of Ethology: Niko Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz.
"To speak of animal is one thing, to speak of the human animal is quite another" - This was not a principle accepted by Tinbergen, and in Tinbergen's latter years, Richard Dawkins was his pupil. Instead of comparing human behavior and animal behavior, they applied their findings in animal behavior to human beings and came up with scientific monstrosities in human psychology and behavior, creating a pseudo-science, not recognizing that human beings have free-will which determines most human behavior. Of course,Richard Dawkins denies free-will in human beings. All human behavior is determined by genes, DNA and the mechanisms of Natural Selection, Descent with Modification and the Survival of the Fittest. His evolutionary science is sound, his use of it is off the charts. His claim that everything is biology has become almost an obsession and it determines almost everything he writes. Beware the man of one idea.
He breaks the primary rule of reasoned thinking: Never Deny: Seldom Affirm: Always distinguish. His inability to distinguish puts him in the circus tent of P. T. Barnum, with his exotic hoaxes. "A Devil's Chaplain" is full of literary and scientific hoaxes, but to call it science, and to give it credence, is to be hoodwinked into believing things like the Cardiff Monster and Piltdown Man.
It is a tragedy that such a brilliant scientist like Richard Dawkins would use his science and his scientific gifts to build a platform for atheism. The brilliantly written essays of "A Devil's Chaplain" is a clever use of evolutionary science to support a personal agenda that has nothing to do with science. Sooner or later someone will recognize that the emperor has no clothes.
Father Clifford Stevens
Always something more to learn February 24, 2008
W. T. HATTORI (Brazil)
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
This is a book to sit and read. You are going to reflect why the evolutionary understanding is great!!!
Showing reviews 1-5 of 59
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