Richard Dawkins is best known for his sociobiology works, such as The Selfish Gene (1976), in which argued that organisms are just epiphenomena for the genes, a central controlling agent. But, that was the past, and today he is now known on the internet as someone who has said that sex is binary, that there are males and females, from a biological perspective. Such comments have led to Dawkins being stripped of awards he had received in the past, as payback for daring to not bow to the new woke orthodoxy, of the social construction of sex and gender.
This is interesting, since on most other things Dawkins falls in line with the establishment, such as on the Covid vax issue where he said that “They [anti-vaxxers] just think it’s a matter of individual liberty. They don’t realise that refraining from vaccination for no very good reason is rather like driving on the wrong side of the road … we do owe a certain curtailment of individual liberty in the interests of society.” Even if that dismissal of liberty was justified, which it is not, it still begs the question that there is no sound scientific critique of the Covid vaxxes, which from just the last day of this blog we see there are. Dawkins does not seem to be up to date on this issue, and like much of his work, such as the critique of religion, is superficial. Still, good on him for having a shot at one of the great dogmas of our time. It is better than saying nothing.