Dawkins' Intellectual Dishonesty, or Why Dawkins Should Be Sent Down

This quote is from Dawkins 'rebuttal' to Not in Our Genes, a book by Lewontin and others that criticizes Dawkins obsessiveness with the genome as the only means of inheritance.

"So, life is complex and its causal factors interact. If that is "dialectical", big deal.
But no, it seems that "interactionism", though good in its way, is not quite
"dialectical". And what is the difference?

" . . . First (interactionism) supposes the alienation of organism and
the environment.... second, it accepts the ontological priority of the
individual over the collectivity and therefore of the epistemological
sufficiency of..." (emphasis mine).

There is no need to go on. This sort of writing appears to be intended to
communicate nothing. Is it intended to impress, while putting down smoke to
conceal the fact that nothing is actually being said?"

After reading Popper's quilt quoting of Hegel to make points he couldn't have made if he had any comprehension of Hegel whatsoever, it no longer surprises me to see this kind of intellectual dishonesty from a supposed scientist. But let me continue.

Quoting half a sentence, then claiming that "nothing is actually being said" is the height of "putting down smoke". The sentence chosen is interesting, if only psychologically, because it is at the crux of the most cogent criticism of Dawkins' views. If he does quote the sentence fully and the reader does understand the terms involved it will at least put Dawkins' enterprise into severe question in the reader's mind. Dawkins' ideas on the genome as replicator, as with all simplistic natural selection, view the environment as a fixed, external reality that is not affected by the organism as much as vice versa. Dawkins' emphasis on the genome as the focus of evolution with the organism playing the role of mere vehicle is precisely a flagrant dismissal of the notion of ontological priority.

Now that the human genome project has demonstrated that genes in fact are evental, and behave more like elements of a language, meaning something specific only in an actual cellular and organism/environmental context, Dawkins' actual views on the genome are no longer materially cogent in any case.

But that his views' lack of cogency originated in unquestioned assumptions that proved dead wrong combined with a lack of comprehension of basic philosophy (thinking), together with his intellectual dishonesty in this feeble attempt to defend himself from accurate criticism, leaves his views on other matters suspect, if not to be completely ignored. If an undergraduate at Oxford handed in a paper with the above he would not simply be failed, but 'sent down' (i.e. kicked out of the university permanently) for intellectual dishonesty, yet a man capable of publishing this in a scholarly journal was given the Simonyi Professorship at the same school?

It's time to take note of Dawkins' intellectual dishonesty along with his scientific ignorance and ideological rigidity as the major characterizations of his work. Together they add up to the Dawkins we know - the loudmouthed charlatan who is determined to turn science into a religion.

Quote taken from Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology and Human Nature
by Steven Rose, Leon J. Kamin and R.C. Lewontin (Pantheon Books, 1985)
Reviewed by Richard Dawkins in "Sociobiology: the debate continues", New
Scientist 24 January 1985
http://dba.fc.ul.pt/evo/textos/Dawkins.pdf