A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science and Love

Richard Dawkins

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004 - Science - 263 pages

The first collection of essays from renowned scientist and best-selling author Richard Dawkins.

 

Richard Dawkins's essays are an enthusiastic testament to the power of rigorous, scientific examination, and they span many different corners of his personal and professional life. He revisits the meme, the unit of cultural information that he named and wrote about in his groundbreaking work The Selfish Gene. He makes moving tributes to friends and colleagues, including a eulogy for novelist Douglas Adams; he shares correspondence with the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould; and he visits with the famed paleoanthropologists Richard and Maeve Leakey at their African wildlife preserve. He concludes the essays with a vivid note to his ten-year-old daughter, reminding her to remain curious, to ask questions, and to live the examined life.

What people are saying

Review: A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love

User Review  - Doc Kinne - Goodreads

This is a good introduction to Richard's general writings. It is a collection of essays over the years. Most are quite good. I thought it bogged down a bit toward the end when he presented forwards to ...

Review: A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love

User Review  - James - Goodreads

Superb essays.

Contents

• Introduction to the American Edition: 1
• Science and Sensibility: 5
• A Devils Chaplain: 8
• What is True?: 14
• Gaps in the Mind: 20
• Science Genetics and Ethics Memo for Tony Blair: 27
• Trial By Jury: 38
• Crystalline Truth and Crystal Balls: 42
• Postmodernism Disrobed: 47
• The Joy of Living Dangerously Sanderson of Oundle: 54
• Light Will Be Thrown: 61
• Light Will Be Thrown: 63
• Darwin Triumphant: 78
• The Information Challenge: 91
• Genes Arent Us: 104
• Son of Moores Law: 107
• The Infected Mind: 117
• Chinese Junk and Chinese Whispers: 119
• Viruses of the Mind: 128
• The Great Convergence: 146
• Dolly and the Cloth Heads: 152
• Time to Stand Up: 156
• They Told Me Heraclitus: 163
• Lament for Douglas: 165
• Eulogy for Douglas Adams: 168
• Eulogy for W D Hamilton: 171
• Snake Oil: 179
• Even the Ranks of Tuscany: 187
• Rejoicing in Multifarious Nature: 190
• The Art of the Developable: 194
• Hallucigenia Wiwaxia and Friends: 203
• Human Chauvinism and Evolutionary Progress: 206
• Unfinished Correspondence with a Darwinian Heavyweight: 218
• There is All Africa and her Prodigies in Us: 223
• Ecology of Genes: 225
• Out of the Soul of Africa: 228
• I Speak of Africa and Golden Joys: 231
• Heroes and Ancestors: 234
• A Prayer for My Daughter: 241
• Good and Bad Reasons for Believing: 242
• Endnotes: 249
• Index: 256

About the author

Richard Dawkins taught zoology at the University of California at Berkeley and at Oxford University and is now the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, a position he has held since 1995. Among his previous books are The Ancestor's Tale, The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, Climbing Mount Improbable, Unweaving the Rainbow, and A Devil's Chaplain. Dawkins lives in Oxford with his wife, the actress and artist Lalla Ward.

Bibliographic information

• Title: A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science and Love; A Mariner Book
• Author: Richard Dawkins
• Edition: illustrated, reprint
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004
• ISBN: 0618485392, 9780618485390
• Length: 263 pages
• Subjects: Science / Essays; Science / Philosophy & Social Aspects