Obviously I’m not a fan of Dawkins. I haven’t read any of his work, but from the various clips and quotes of his I’ve seen over the years he strikes me as an incurious bigot with a blinkered worldview. But I have no reason to doubt that he is a smart man.
So it’s very funny to see him realize that he’s debating a genuinely delusional person, as Peterson makes some bizarre epistemological argument that dragons are literally real because we use the concept of predator as a shorthand for animals that kill other animals. Except Peterson seems to expand the definition of predator to “anything that can kill a person” when he argues that fire is a predator.
Yeah, that about sums it up. He has to go for the low-hanging fruit to shine intelectually. This is why he built his entire career on dunking on young earth creationists, it’s something where he can wield his entire academic expertise against people who’ve built their view of evolution by walking backwards from the assumption that the biblical measurements for Noah’s Ark must be taken literally.
So let’s see what’s going on here
what the actual fuck
Actual image from
’s 1999 book “Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief”:
Check out the dergy :3
How did anyone take this man seriously lmao
Idk, I haven’t read the book, maybe it makes sense somehow and we’re gonna need to create a new category of super-genius in our ontologies and put Jordan B. Peterson in there, but it seems quite unlikely
That’s fairly run-of-the-mill esoteric quackery and i’m unfortunately not surprised that this shows up in a self help book. What’s worrying is that at this time, he was still lecturing at a Canadian university and practiced as a licensed psychotherapist, and that both of that only stopped after he got cancelled, oh wait, he wasn’t, he decided on his own to make a career as a professional transphobe instead because he liked getting fanmail from groypers so much.
There’s a very, very fine line between discussing, like, how ancient mesopotamian creatures we gloss as dragons often combine features of many creatures, including lions. Or how lions and other predators are used to allegorically represent many different things in medieval art, ranging from supernatural evil, to actual lions, to the authority of kings, to the gentle mercy of Christ. On one side of that line is an analyssi of a common symbol or motif based on textual and artistic sources. On the other side is whatever the fuck Peterson is.
When people occasionally argue that peasants didn’t understand literal vs metaphorical, I’ve always found that hard to believe, but maybe Peterson is actually like that.
“Matriarchal World of Darkness” is the title of my new ambient melodic death metal concept album
It’s really silly, too, if you’ve seen him actually teaching biology and whatnot at Oxford. He obviously knows a lot about evolutionary biology, but rather than continue to teach, he wastes time arguing with YECs because of the fan mail.
It’s nice to see him quit pretending and go full mask-off with his Islamophobia and transphobia. He’s all in on the grift of internet debate bro personalities.
Dawkins books The selfish gene and the extended phenotype are both significant contributions to evolutionary biology. There have certainly been meaningful critiques of both since, but for books that are 40-50 years old in a rapidly changing field, they are good.