Guess Who I Met Today?
In a beautiful lecture titled The Purpose of Purpose, given at the Harvey Preisler Memorial Symposium and aimed at a free-thinking audience, Richard Dawkins delivered a thoughtful and highly congenial talk about how words like purpose, design, selection, and others, can be understood both in teleological and non-teleological ways, and that we ought to be careful not to confuse these diametrically opposed meanings.
More interestingly, however, Dawkins explained many discreet ways in which adaptations evolved during what evolutionary psychologists refer to as the EEA (environment of evolutionary adaptedness) can be hijacked and subverted by modern institutions (such as the fast-food industry, sport franchises, the porn industry, and nationalistic governments), and how religion is perhaps the mother of all subversions, since it exploits every other form of subversion for its own end, regardless of any benefit conferred to its members.
I haven't met many celebrities in my time, but meeting Dawkins was even more stimulating than that time I slept with Megan Fox... :)
If the video is made available online, I'll be sure to post it.
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