[AndrewC]

Because Gould and Clive Bradley said that politics was why Dawkins allegedly considered non-gradual evolution heresy

I don't read it that way. They just made the heresy comment.

With this statement, Ah well, why bother to read a book, if the title alone tells you it must be the sort of book you disapprove of on political grounds?(said about his book The Selfish Gene), he accuses them of politics. I have that book right here at the moment, and although their names are not on the first page with comments, I can not say they did not read the book. (I do like this comment by The Oxford Times, "The speculative nature of the treatise will appeal strongly to those who find a special kind of excitement in the original ideas that good science fiction offers.")

And forgive my oversight, thanks for the well wishes.

[CarolinaGuitarman]

"I don't read it that way. They just made the heresy comment."

But he is specifically rebutting Gould and Clive Bradley's (who as far as I can tell is not a scientist, but just a socialist *thinker*) claim that he thought that non-gradual evolution was heresy because of Dawkin's political beliefs.

"Ah well, why bother to read a book, if the title alone tells you it must be the sort of book you disapprove of on political grounds? "Dawkins considers this [non gradual evolution] heresy…" No I don't (least of all "because it has a political dimension." If anything, politics might make me approve it, but the point is irrelevant because nature irritatingly neglects her Aesopian social responsibility to provide political allegories for the benefit of Homo sapiens)." (Dawkins)

How the above can be interpreted as anything BUT a refutation of Gould and Bradley's specific allegation that Dawkins based The Selfish Gene on politics rather than science is beyond me.

" With this statement, Ah well, why bother to read a book, if the title alone tells you it must be the sort of book you disapprove of on political grounds?(said about his book The Selfish Gene), he accuses them of politics."

He is as much accusing them of misreading HIS politics as he was saying they had a political agenda (though Bradley obviously has one). He wants to be critiqued on the science.

I am getting a little baffled about why this even matters in this discussion. Does politics affect the views of some scientists? Sure. But in order to convince others though, you have to argue from evidence.

Is this supposed to be evidence that evolution is a foundation of Marxism, which was the point made earlier? This capitalist doesn't see it.