The "Economic Naturalist" series are actually the least annoying pop-econ books by a long way
... an economist writes:
This, from Dawkins, would be fair enough if he and his daughter had been hiking in Snowdonia, or across some tundra somewhere. But the "English Countryside" (Oxfordshire, I suppose?) is pretty much as man made as a landscape can get. If there is a wild flower growing there, it is growing because somebody has made a more or less conscious decision not to put weedkiller on it or plough it into a field. Particularly if it is "by the wayside", ie next to a road, or in a hedgerow (a hedgerow also being an entirely man made environment).
See also; the "intelligent design" of dogs. There was once an ur-dog, wolflike ancestor, and the process by which that ur-dog has Paris Hilton's handbag poodle as a descendant did, in a strict sense, operate by environmental selection on random genetic variation. But if some burst of radiation were to obliterate humanity and leave dogs, then the alien invasion which followed it would have a very odd theory of the development of dogs if it didn't posit an intelligent designer.
Actually, most of the stuff that people dislike about "Richard Dawkins in the 1990s" is attributable to Dennett.
a hedgerow also being an entirely man made environment
ReplyDeleteAnd made for specific socio-political reasons by the Enclosure Acts from 1773 onwards, which makes them significantly more modern than, say, Dawkins' college.
That quote does remind me that one of my main gripes with Dawkins is that he's a fundamentally joyless fucker. It's quite possible to be comfortable that the idea that nature is fundamentally indifferent to what we think of it, while recognising that the telling of stories about humans' relationship to the world is as much a part of the real world as the science bit.