Why Dawkins is wrong | Denis Noble interview

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This was a really cool discussion. Noble got into how genes are the tools the body uses to make proteins but that they're not where most of the functions of the body are at. He gave an interesting example, I'm assuming with lab mice, where they'd identified a particular gene that codes for the protein that makes up 80% contribution to the electrical discharge for the heartbeat, they genetically modified one with that gene knocked out and it appeared to have miniscule effect because there were several other proteins which could do the same job if needed.

His biggest disagreement with Dawkins seems to be that genes are not 'code' in the sense of us being wind-up dolls that are spooled on 46 chromosomes and he has a sense that Dawkins hasn't caught up to that.

Dawkins has a history of shutting down discussion and trampling on nuance. As a young, angry atheist I was quite into him, but then I read a debate in New Scientist magazine pitting Dawkins against two biologists working on theories of kin- and group-level selection. They made some interesting points. He basically just called them idiots and refused to engage with them.

Dawkin's arrogance seems boundless, but one man saying he's wrong does not count for a consensus in the scientific community.

Dawkins & his excessive pompousness negates any kind of interesting intellectual material he offers. His delivery is not the best.

Dawkins is kinda the archetypal debate bro.

He's also the mouthpiece for a kind of Neodarwinism that's based on state of the art knowledge from the 1970's (The Selfish Gene - 1976) and both David Sloan Wilson and Bret Weinstein already had bones to pick with his worldview, Sloan Wilson I believe more specifically on group / lineage selection and Weinstein - which he already had a debate with him - on the idea that memes and their evolution have separation from human evolution (it was a debate over phenotypes and he lead Dawkins along to his point by talking about beaver dams using unwitting beavers for their own evolution - Dawkins disagreed with that which is exactly what he wanted).

I don't think this is so much showing Dawkins up in an absolute sense so much as showing progress and changes in conceptualization for how we're internally governed, how much of it is directly genetic vs. indirectly (such as limited supply of proteins that can be made or epigenetic information methylating / demethylating). What Noble was talking about is how reusable and multifunction so many proteins are and how many redundancies we have for various types of protein activity.