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RICHARD
DAWKINS TOPS PROSPECT'S LIST OF BRITAIN'S TOP 100 PUBLIC
INTELLECTUALS
Richard
Dawkins has comfortably topped Prospect's poll
of the top 100 public intellectuals in Britain. Over a thousand
people voted for their top five public intellectuals from the list
of 100 published in the July issue of Prospect.
It's
interesting to note that the very first edition of Edge in
December, 1996 featured a talk by Dawkins entitled "Science,
Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder". The site began in
part as an extension of my 1991 essay on "The
Emerging Third Culture" which stated that "The third
culture consists of those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical
world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking
the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the
deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are."
In Edge #1,
as an introduction to the Dawkins piece, I wrote: "Richard Dawkins
enjoys the high regard of his peers both for his writing and his
thinking. Sir John Maddox, editor emeritus of Nature, notes
that "Climbing Mount Improbable has the grandeur of
Darwin's The Origin of Species, but that's not surprising—it
covers the same ground. Nobody can look at this book and then put
it down unread—and nobody who reads it can fail to understand
what Darwin is all about." According to Danny Hillis, "notions
like selfish genes, memes, and extended phenotype are powerful and
exciting. They make me think differently. Unfortunately, I spend
a lot of time arguing against people who have overinterpreted these
ideas. They're too easily misunderstood as explaining more than they
do. So you see, this Dawkins is a dangerous guy. Like Marx. Or Darwin."
Congratulations
to Richard Dawkins!
— JB
[See Richard Dawkins' Edge
Bio page]
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