For philosophers, reading Richard Dawkins is often a frustrating experience. Many of Dawkins’s writings treat important philosophical topics, such as the existence God, meaning life, and relationship randomness to order. has original ideas, but he lacks training vocabulary articulate these ideas properly develop them coherently. In Believing in Dawkins, Eric Steinhart sets himself an ambitious ...

The present study seeks to revisit the concept of intertextuality as integrated into a sociocognitive discourse-analytical perspective, whereby intertextual meanings can be explicated via semantic macropropositions, mental representations, event models, and pragmatic context models. study’s significance derives from its scholarly endeavour demonstrate how rhetorical are cognitively explicable i...

The view that the initiation of branching into two sympatric species may not require natural selection emerged in Victorian times (Fleeming Jenkin, George Romanes, William Bateson). In the 1980s paleontologist Steven Jay Gould gave a theoretical underpinning of this non-genic “chromosomal” view, thus reinstating Richard Goldschmidt’s “heresy” of the 1930s. From modelling studies with computer-g...

The temptation with a rallying cry such as Dawkins’s latest effort is to join the chorus of praise or boos, or note dismissively that it is a popular book not really worthy of academic attention. While we might imagine a theological journal taking a passing interest (along with passing pot-shots), surely a social scientific journal need not pay attention to The God Delusion. But Dawkins quite s...

In the second edition of The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins included a short bibliometric analysis of key papers instrumental to the sociobiological revolution, the intention of which was to support his proposal that ideas spread within a population in an epidemiological manner. In his analysis, Dawkins primarily discussed the influence of an article by British evolutionary biologist William Don...

Caravan, and Hippodrome, " a year later adding the moniker " The Greatest Show on Earth. " Ever the showman, Barnum was renowned for promoting hoaxes, the most celebrated of which was the Feejee Mermaid, a mummified specimen boasting the head and torso of a monkey and the rear end of a fish. Such a ridiculous creature, what Richard Dawkins would refer to as a " fishkey, " half fish and half mon...

The celebration of Allan Kaufman’s 80th birthday was an occasion to reflect on a career that has stimulated the mutual exchange of ideas (or memes in the terminology of Richard Dawkins) between many researchers. This paper will revisit a meme Allan encountered in his early career in magnetohydrodynamics, the continuation of a magnetohydrodynamic mode through a singularity, and will also mention...

The idea of the extended phenotype (EP), which was first proposed by the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins to explain how and why organisms—or, more fundamentally, their genes—are able to manipulate their environment (Dawkins, 1982), has been the focus of intense debate and much research for more than 20 years. In his book, The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene, Dawkin...