Richard Dawkins interview

There's an awesome interview of Richard Dawkins over at Cosmic Afterthoughts. It was pretty good, so I recommend checking it out.

For those of you who don't already know, Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist from Oxford University who popularized the view that natural selection acts through the survival of competing genes, and that our physical and behavioral traits are adaptations due to the genes that promote their propagation best. So you can see how he's been an influence to evolutionary psychology I'm sure. I mean, he's basically laid the foundation for it! This argument of his was laid out in the 1976 release of The Selfish Gene.

Lately though, he has been gaining more attention for his active popular science writing, unabashed atheism and promotion of skepticism. This is what the interview concerns itself with mostly. They discuss his newest book, The God Delusion, and his views of why it's important to promote reason over faith. I think it was a generally good interview, definitely not as hostile as some I have seen in the past. Whether you agree with him or not, I still recommend checking it out, as well you should check out his books! My favorites are The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker. (Thanks to pharyngula for posting the Cosmic Afterthoughts link!)

On another note, google has recently added a feature to blogger, in which readers can watch youtube and google videos without leaving the blog page. Pretty cool! And if you haven't noticed, I have added such a videobar to my blog. At the moment videos from Steven Pinker and Philip Zimbardo are on rotation, just because I have mentioned them a lot on this blog. I also threw in some banjo videos for good measure! To check them out, you just click on one of the videos and it'll load at the top of the page . . . well under my title that is. So anyways, check them out, let me know what you think . . . does it look messy? Should I keep them? Comments are welcome!