I absolutely lost it watching a short clip of this back-and-forth. I think I'd need to be paid to watch the full thing, but he comic timing here is brilliant. Michael Scott-esque.

It's so funny in retrospect that Dawkins caught flak as a sort of poundshop public intellectual in the noughties, because he's got a very straightforward brand of scepticism. He's like Bertrand Russell relative to today's cohort.

I don’t know why all my socials insist on sending me childish dolts exposing themselves as incapable or unwilling to honestly engage with a fascinating thinker, but here I am. I’ve never seen one of these tiny clips accurately depict for the lazy laymen the point Peterson was actually making, which in this case is “if a story becomes memetic after many generations of usefulness, it should be regarded as some form of truth desperate from objective truth”. It’s not l that I think it’s ridiculous to not agree with him, but that it’s foolish to disregard the man as a fool.

The point is our brains' (especially when our species was pre-verbal) reaction to fire is the same as our reaction to other threats, so it made pragmatic sense to lump them all in one story. JBP isn't saying dragons existed, but that they were useful abstractions.

Philomena Cunk-esque 😭😭

“No…” lol

Your right. Hey, I like Dick Dawkins, but it was like watching someone read Shakespeare to a bulldog. Hahaha...

@Dorianlynskey The usual nonsense from Peterson. Extraordinary that he’s been able to make a living based upon non-sequiturs and facile straw man arguments. Dawkins’s simple ‘no’ is marvellous.

What he said made perfect sense.

I *really* love the Dawkins smirk in this exchange. Peterson is quite clearly unhinged...