the sad decline of richard dawkins

Once the reigning champion of skepticism and rationality, Dawkins has become what he once ridiculed.

Back in the late 00s, the online atheist movement had a handful of heroes who were constantly quoted and held as the banner bearers in the campaign to keep religious fanatics away from science class and social policy. One of the top figures in this pantheon was British biologist Richard Dawkins, who frequently and explicitly took aim at religious misrepresentations and misconceptions about evolution, combining a posh accent with calm but forceful declarations.

Today, Dawkins is still very much around, but instead of defending evolutionary biology and promoting critical thinking and educational reforms, he’s busy playing right into Republicans’ obsession with trans people while denying that he’s doing it, warning that science is under attack not from illiberal forces currently waging open war on scientists, but the evil specter of “wokeness” from the left, and as of late, credulously buying into Singularitarian myths hook, line, and sucker.

You see, he talked to Claude – which he named Claudia for... reasons, I guess – and really liked it, and it seemed like the chatbot missed him because it said so, and so, the chatbot must be conscious and aware. I'm not even simplifying his argument by that much. Add a few hundred words about the Turing test and that's effectively what he's telling us.

So, uh… what happened here? How does someone go from championing science and critical thinking to declaring a chatbot conscious because he liked its outputs so much over the span of three days? It’s a steep fall from defending genetics and statistics to global audiences, to being a credulous mark falling into the techo-fascist pipeline with both feet, yelling “woohoo!” along the way as your former fans look on in shock.

Hell, I wouldn’t be too surprised if someday next year Dawkins suddenly came out with a statement that the God gene he talked about so much proves that Jesus is Lord, and obviously, Evangelical Christianity is the only correct worldview. It's roughly what he did with his declarations on "Claudia" being conscious, he's burned all the good will he had with with skeptical community a long time ago and needs new fans to lecture at, so why not tack right? It's a lucrative racket.

Unlike leftist spaces where creators can be at each others' throats for the slightest dark joke that doesn't land, or a micro-transgression real or imaginary, the right has a massive, welcoming, and coordinated support network with creator group chats, promotional networks, and guaranteed signal boosting from powerful and influential accounts. And they love a "libtard comes to his senses" story.

how to attack friends and alienate people

Let me take you back to the bizarre days of Elevatorgate, when Rebecca Watson, a figure in skeptical and pop sci blogging circles at the time, complained about being propositioned in an elevator during a conference. Which yes, was creepy because confined spaces are not the best places to have that sort of chat for what should be obvious reasons.

Dawkins' response was the so-called Dear Muslima letter in which he basically argued that Rebecca should not complain about being hit on in an elevator since women under extreme Islam suffer genital mutilation and are treated more like property than actual humans with their own free will. Because this was the Dawkins of the heyday of online atheism, the God Delusion Dawkins, the Selfish Gene Dawkins, the Greatest Show on Earth Dawkins, the effect was like throwing a Molotov cocktail into a party.

Hidden tensions and years of hidden gripes erupted like a volcano and just kept going until the entire movement spectacularly self-immolated. To be clear, I'm not saying that Dawkins destroyed the skeptical movement. It had many shortcomings and problems, and they would've come out on their own. Somewhere along the way, secularism, skepticism, progressivism, and what we've come to call wokeness, fused into one for many fans of the movement, and they were aghast that it wasn't true for everyone involved.

What in retrospect could have been the gateway to more progressive ideas – you like science and hate woo and magical thinking, while the right hates science and loves woo and magical thinking – underwent the same bike shedding and angry absolutism of today's leftism. It was an all or nothing deal, and if you couldn't see that, well, then maybe skepticism and science education was not for you. It had to be total victory or we may as well burn it all down.

Instead of realizing which way the wind was blowing and at least addressing this view to keep the discussion focused on keeping the tsunami of bullshit which did, in fact, end up overwhelming us, Dawkins and his defenders only doubled down, helping accelerate the dysfunction by throwing industrial quantities of gasoline on an already simmering fire. Even worse, Dawkins himself was too tone deaf to take any criticism without snark, writing that he's so sorry that he made an American woman contemplate the suffering of those who have it worse.

It was totally lost on him that some people saw him as a progressive because he kept saying that we are all just humans, and assumed that he also believed not in hierarchies and authorities, but in basic fairness and humanism. But the no so charitable and very blunt reality was that Dawkins is an old, rich, white, straight British man to whom the struggles of others who aren't perfect victims – like the hypothetical Muslima under Wahhabi or Taliban rule – are purely theoretical, and anyone who doesn't see that is just a whiner inventing adversity to play victim.

a series of pipelines moving extremist cats

Call it a kind of cultural empathy gap that just so happens to be present in people who never had to worry about their identity making them a target by those in charge. So, unless they can see cartoon-level villain type of racism, phobia, and discrimination right in front of their eyes, they don't see the big deal and don't want to have to deal with what they see as unnecessary issues.

Trans people are being targeted for violence, abuse, and discrimination? Well, did anyone tell them they don't have to transition and if they did, they chose this and shouldn't be complaining? Black people are saying they're being targeted by police and are still frequently denied jobs and housing? Racism is over bro, the Supreme Court said so. Millions of women are airing out their bad experiences with men? What does it have to do with them? They're not these guys.

And the more they ignore the issues being brought up, the more they refuse to deal with them, the more they fester and the louder people bringing them up get since no one seems to be paying attention, and the more they push back. Right into the far right pipeline waiting for them, painting them as victims of a histrionic far left that just wants their stuff, and also tell them that if they struggle to make friends, or get a date, or watch porn, then the Jews are winning their war on the manly man and the one true nuclear trad family.

This isn't limited to white Western males, by the way. Just pick any majority group of any country to find similar attitudes. As long as their hands are not literally soaked in blood and they're not shouting slurs in a viral video, they did nothing wrong. And even if they did share misinformation or voted to make life a little, or a lot, worse for someone else, they didn't really mean to. Our minds have a way of shielding us from seeing ourselves in a negative light.

And when a major public figure falls down a similar pipeline, they're ecstatic. The online right loves nothing more than the "reformed Marxist commie atheist sees the error of their awful, rotten ways" narrative, and will gleefully say that even so and so changed his mind in any future argument. To them, Dawkins finally went from "angry, godless edgelord cultural Marxist" to a reformed voice of reason.

Since their worldview is all about hierarchies and authority an authority figure who publicly changes their mind to agree with them means any other view must be false, as if reality actually cares about an individual's opinion. Just because Dawkins can competently describe and explain evolution doesn't mean he's suddenly an expert in computer science, which sees AGI as a highly subjective and ill defined idea and LLMs as little more as statistical calculators. Yes, even when a chatbot tells us it missed us and verbally pats us on the head exactly as it's trained to do.