Richard Dawkins knows about as much about language and its interactions with consciousness as Noam Chomsky knows about genetics. The difference is that Chomsky knows better than to invent some quack speculations about the workings of DNA, peptides, and genomes based on his insights into linguistics, and try to pass them off as some revolutionary insight.

So your claim is that Dawkins is a linguist who shouldn't stray into biology or genetics?

Only in the comments of Salon could someone be so vapidly wrong and so arrogant about it.

Well, actually, anywhere on the Internet, but yours was a particularly good example.

Dawkins didn't invent something about DNA based on linguistics, it was entirely the other way around. His insights into biology (he's a zoologist, not a linguist or philosopher) led him to speculate at the end of The Selfish Gene about ideas acting in evolutionary ways, and if you actually read it you would know that he would be the first to admit that he was no expert on language. The meme chapter was very much an afterthought, the book was about biology and evolution.

Here's a sentence from his encyclopedia entry:

In 1982, he made a widely cited contribution to evolutionary biology with the theory, presented in his book The Extended Phenotype, that the phenotypic effects of a gene are not necessarily limited to an organism's body, but can stretch far into the environment, including the bodies of other organisms.

So there's part of the very real contribution to biology, which of course you're unware of or at least it seems so with your comment that Dawkins put forth ideas on DNA "based on his insights into linguistics".

On the other hand, memetics (seems to be the preferred term, my bad) is a real and growing field of study, I've just finished a fascinating book by one of the main theorists in the UK. The forward is by Dawkins.

If you ask me, that accidental discovery by Dawkins is far more influential than his biology, as impressive as that was, and certainly infinitely more important than another book proclaiming that god is not dead after all.

The part about Eagleton I can't understand here is that I've always known him to be a rather devoted Marxist. Curiouser and curioser.

You've misunderstood me. Perhaps my original wording was unclear.

Er, yes perhaps it was.

I understood that you started out that way, in how you were comparing Chomsky and Dawkins, but by the end of the paragraph why then did you write that Dawkins did his biology "based on his insights into linguistics"?

Nothing could be more backwards, as I laid out above.

Dawkins was extremely well-known before he or Christopher Hitchens started writing about religion and became known as "Dithckens" to Eagleton, a deeply silly term by the way that doesn't help Eagleton's case at all here. In the fervor to defend religion, I wish people would at least stop using people as cartoon character versions of who they actually are.

Never mind. I get what you meant now, took a rereading or two. Too convoluted by half for me but I got it in the end. Chomksy doesn't use linguistics to talk about DNA thus Dawkins shouldn't etc etc. Got it.

Well, I think you'll just have to wait and see, depending on our life spans anyway, how influential memetics ends up being. I bet you're going to be surprised.

My prediction: When theology is a quaint branch of anthropology, the contribution of that leap from evolutionary biology to evolutionary psychology is going to be widely recognized and heavily studied. To some degree, all of this is already true.

Your notion that Chomsky knows better than to stray outside of his field of training would seem kind of absurd given his work in politics, which is why most people have even heard of him, far more than know his linguistics in any real way.

Has Eagleton ever met some of the Christians in America?

That's a considerable part of what's going on here, harking back to my first post (you don't mind if I hark back to myself do you? Speaking of metaphysical problems).

How the more airy and philisophical aspects of theology are discussed at Oxford and Trinity Colleges bears very little resemblance to what goes on in our country in some places, something with which both Hitchens and Dawkins are very familiar having both lived here.

To quote the social philosopher, Kilgore Trout: "If Jesus came back and saw what had been done in his name, he'd never stop throwing up".

Of course, Vonnegut was referring as much to the crusades, inquisition, and all the other fun adventures of organized Christianity starting long before we even existed as a nation, as to the more modern obscenities carried out using religion as a justification. So Eagleton and the other dons should be all too aware of the dangers from the past even without spending lots of time in the US.

However, the UK and France and many other countries long since came to terms with religion to a degree that many in the US don't realize or understand. "Religion is for weddings and funerals" is a common line in France, despite their being seen as such a heavily religious country. People there are routinely astonished that we swear the President in on a Bible for example. They'll say "That's fascinating, see, here in France we have this thing called 'separation of church and state'", and you can only respond "Er, yes well we do too...in theory anyway..."

My point here is that Eagleton is suffering perhaps from an overfamiliarity with the equilibrium about religion achieved by Europeans, and an insufficient understanding of the lack of it Dawkins and Hitchens know all too well from living in the USA.

I still can't figure out how Eagleton is going this route when he's always been such a devout Marxist, but that's another question.