I can see why Dawkins might be a little brassed off about the video's presentation -- it's a balls-out parody of Eminem, and while Eminem does the call-to-arms thing quite well (cf. "Mosh"), his calls to arms invariably involve an element of "shut up and listen to what I say" which I find a bit disturbing. This could well be taken as a slam on Dawkins et al as well; I've heard rumours that the video is actually a viral marketing effort for Ben Stein's upcoming movie "Expelled", which promotes "intelligent design". (
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
spider88 remarked, earlier this evening, "If so, it's backfired.") I won't be surprised if the rumours turn out to be true; equating Dawkins and Eminem as "rebel authoritarians" (i.e., "Here are my revolutionary new ideas intended to destroy the establishment, now take them as gospel and do not question, what do you mean that creates a new establishment?") is probably really funny to folks who think that modern biologists are just mindlessly parroting Darwin.I do not think that most scientists expect people to listen to them because they are scientists. I think most scientists do expect (perhaps naively) that people will listen to their arguments, recognise that the scientist has undertaken rigorous analytical steps in order to produce those arguments, and evaluate said arguments critically and independently. I also think that most people who aren't scientists are used to people arguing from authority, and interpret scientists' matter-of-factness and lack of weasel-words as authoritarianism. They couldn't be further from the truth, but few take the time to familiarise themselves with the register in question; it's like taking offense to a phrasing which means something derogatory in your dialect but which is totally unmarked in the speaker's.
(Side-note: you will notice that I use the phrase "I think" or equivalent a lot in the remarks above. If you haven't noticed that I try rather hard to make a clear distinction in my writing between points on which I am certain and points on which I am speculating, you either haven't been reading me very long or haven't been reading me very critically, perhaps both. :P )
But anyway, where I was going with this is that I (and my LJ biologist friends thus far, apparently) cannot stop laughing when we watch this thing. Eugenie Scott in a bikini! Blunt-smoking Christopher Hitchens! Daniel Dennett in a pimp hat, waving a cane! Popping and locking Charles Darwin! And on top of all that it's just a dis track that puts Monzy to shame, capturing Eminem's lyrical stylings better than any other nerdcore rap I've seen. We computer scientists have enjoyed the fruits of nerdcore for most of its existence; the biologists have gotten the short end of the stick, even if you count MC Hawking's nods to bio.
(Side-note #2: I wonder if we have so much CS nerdcore because hackers are cocky little fuckers who like to show off and argue -- cf. all the religious wars about programming languages, for instance. [Have we seen a rap battle between proponents of static vs. dynamic or duck typing yet? There should be one. It would be funnier than mailing list arguments.] I've never seen chemists getting into throwdowns about how best to work up a reaction, but then maybe I don't hang out with enough chemists. Anyway, maybe this will kick off a new avenue of creativity in the evolution wars. The voyeur in me can only hope!)
Also, I think PZ Myers and my former boss, Andy Peek, may be long-lost twins. (I dunno. Is PZ Myers 6'3" and built like a linebacker? Some day I want a photo of them together. Evo-devo biologist and population geneticist, separated at birth?)
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Comments
Did you see this?
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2
It is rich in irony and other essential nutrients.
Truth is even more hilarious than fiction.
Beware the Believers
Hello, is this on?
Can I get some more hydrogen in my test tube, please?
My name is D to the I to C to the K,
yeah I’m the Dickie D, I gots my PhD
and comin’ your way on the Youtube, to bust your world view,
so just listen to me and don’t you argue.
You see, this battle’s been ragin’ since Zeus was on the bottle,
‘tween Science like Democritus and Faith like Aristotle,
who said the mover was unmovin’ like some magic trick,
but that’s no good logic, my posse is far too quick for this religious sthick.
‘Cuz science is the only way to know y’all,
you stand with me y’all, or you can fall y’all,
so go ahead and take your pick…
ES: Yeah you tell him Rick …
Darwin : ‘Cuz if you don’t know me …
RD: YOU DON’T KNOW DICK!
Chorus: Yo he’s the Dick to the Dawk to the PhD,
he’s smarter than you, he’s got a science degree!
Dick to the Dawk to the PhD,
he’s smarter than you, he’s got a science degree!
SH: On the shoulders of midgets we built up this machine,
DD: YEAH!
RD: Science silenced that watchdog wingnut Paley
growing stronger and harder almost daily,
storming Wilber‹by›force as we framed the discourse
that faith and science are split in schismatic divorce.
Then Darwin took to the seas to see what no one had seen,
and ever since then we’ve been increasingly keen,
they may never adore us, but they’ll no longer ignore us,
give it to ‘em PZ hit these ‹BLEEP› with the chorus!!!
Chorus: Yo he’s the Dick to the Dawk to the PhD,
he’s smarter than you, he’s got a science degree!
Dick to the Dawk to the PhD,
he’s still smarter than you, he studied biology!
Then there was Darrow,
dukin’ it out with the straight and the narrow,
a ragin’ bull in the ring, he did his thing,
and took it on the chin like he was Bobby De Niro.
We might have lost at Scopes, beaten down by the dopes,
and the stooges of popes, but in losin’ we coped,
becomin’ more than we hoped,
creationists slipped on the soap of their own slippery slope.
What was impossible, improbable, is now wholly unstoppable untoppleable,
the Dick Dawk’ll roll up as you creationists foldup,
you haters talkin’ bull, don’t you know that this Dick is un-‹BLEEP›-frickin’ blockable?
Chorus: Yo he’s the Dick to the Dawk to the phd,
he’s smarter than you, he’s got a science degree!
Dick to the Dawk to the PhD,
he’s still smarter than you, he studied biology!
Now the machine of our making, sees culture ripe for the taking,
‘cuz I’m the rappinest, rabidest atheist who,
unlike the Catholic, the Muslim or even the Jew,
believes that no God but science could ever be true,
hell, if I was dyslexic I’d even hate “dog” too.
Time to open your eyes, get yourself wise,
the age of sciences will rise to be religion’s demise,
and while you churchies all cry, shouting ‘why God oh why,’
I’ll still be poppin’ my collar earning more dollars than Allah.
Allah!
Darwin: Yes well I’ve told you.
Chorus: Yo he’s the Dick to the Dawk to the phd,
he’s smarter than you, he’s got a science degree!
Dick to the Dawk to the phd,
he’s still smarter than you, he studied biology!
Chorus: Dick to the Dawk to the phd,
he’s smarter than you, he’s got a science degree!
Dick to the Dawk to the phd,
he’s still smarter than you, he studied biology!
Yesterday we went to the Harvard Museum of Natural History to see their glass sea creatures, and spent the afternoon there. The rest of the museum is of the "old school" natural history museum motif: dead stuffed things and bones. They have a number of nice fossils and dinosaur bones, and Brian kept saying "how can so many people believe that these didn't exist and were just placed in the ground 'to test their faith'?" (That's what he was told in CCD, apparently.)
That's hilarious. It comes across to me as "Mr. Dawkins, yes, you're right, but you're rather a dick about the presentation of your points."
Which is true. Dawkins loads the crossbow with nasty barbed ammo and shoots creationists and ID proponents in the softest part of their underbellies. It's jolly fun to watch, but sometimes I get annoyed because it (a) seems counterproductive to inspiring people to listen and learn, and (b) we're supposed to be better than the hellfire-and-brimstone asshole crowd.
Science is a monumentally better tool for understanding the world than anything religion can dish up. But you can't convince people to use their brains by making fun of them. People are reactionary morons.
Or just a riff on the more general xkcd comic: "EVOLUTION. It works, bitches."
Which shows how grotesquely out of touch with certain points of view he is.
The South Park boys, and even the dumb fuckers who behind Expelled are not stupid people. (Well the latter could be -- they are quite proud of their ignorance.) It's really infuriating to me that Dawkins is such a classist pig (which often de facto amounts to being a racist as well -- "oh yes I'm sure we can teach brown people to think/act/speak/dress just like white people!" is still a strain of racism to me), and no one calls him on it.
Dawkins is absolutely right to be classist.
And yeah, there's plenty to reject coming from that environment. But I still don't think of such folks as *stupid*.
I know a remarkable number of brilliant people, many of them scientists, who are theists of one stripe or another. (Some Christians, some pagans, a few Hindus -- including a math PhD who now does really cool phylogenomics research.) The difference between them and creationists/fundies is that they look at the world and want to know how it works, specifically the details of how. Their faith doesn't obstruct their inquisitiveness or their rigor in investigating their areas of research.
Science is really just about asking questions and finding out what the answers are. Fundamentalism is about authority and control, so of course fundies don't like it when people ask questions.
I've felt for a while that one of the more useful changes that could be made to public education is to give children a basic grounding in sociolinguistics. In the past, I've thought it would be mostly useful as a way to help people be more aware of when they're being taken advantage of, and a way to help people understand why learning American Standard English is so important (and to defuse many of the awful reasons teachers give for learning it). But it sounds as though it would be useful in combatting this prejudice, too.
I wonder if anyone ever did a follow-up on the kids William Labov worked with when he did his studies of AAVE. Did they pick up on what he was investigating? What did they think of it? How much did he let on about what he was studying?
One of the fundamental principles of sociolinguistic research is avoiding subject bias by not letting the subjects know what's happening (e.g., the famous example of going into a multi-story department store and asking "Where can I find men's shoes?" [or some other appropriate question] in order to elicit the response "Fourth floor," rather than just asking people to say "fourth floor," because when you ask somebody to say something they typically kick into a more formal register, but if you covertly elicit the utterance you want to study, you can get the casual register). That's a pretty complicated notion to get across to kids, but if that (and, before that, the general use of the scientific method) could be brought across at that young of an age, that would be totally awesome.
(That said, we had a hard enough time conveying it to undergrads back when I was a sociolinguistics TA. On the other hand, maybe it's easier when you get 'em younger.)
All that said, yes, I think you've nailed it with regards to it not being a question of authoritarianism from the science side, but being perceived that way from the other side regardless.