[betty boop]

LOL Heartlander! That's from the "great (non)debate," "Is Science Killing the Soul?"!!! At The Edge. (Very interesting website.) I remember it well!!! Would you believe I have a bound copy of it, which I treasure?

And certainly I remember the piece of it from which you quoted, "The Soul of the White Ant."

To say that Dawkins and Pinker are reductionists of the first order would be the grossest understatement. They "quantize" man down to the level of an ant, and then start blathering about man as if he were an ant.

Am I the only person here who sees there's something intrinsically dishonest about their entire approach to science — and to reality?

[MHGinTN]

“Am I the only person here who sees there's something intrinsically dishonest about their entire approach to science — and to reality?” Having now read that little session with Dawkins and Pinker, I would say they were practicing a particularly deceitful form of presentation, assuming as axiomatic that which they sought to discredit. Both start with the assumption that science has finally ended the ghost in the machine, then they set about to use that axiom as the basis for proving there is no ‘ghost in the machine’! Neither of the ‘intellectual giants’ can answer how it is that random mutation (noise as it were) adds any positive aspect to the species genetic coding! And they avoid all together the elephant in their music rooms by avoiding the truth that what holds and passes the identity of the species is information/coded data, probably because the acknowledgment of this reality—that a code requires a coder, one to generate the code as a means to hold and pass information--is the reality they choose to deny regardless of the evidences.