I am disappointed by the absolute paucity of reasoned discourse in this comment thread so far. All I have witnessed are lazy dismissals and thought-terminating

I am disappointed by the absolute paucity of reasoned discourse in this comment thread so far. All I have witnessed are lazy dismissals and thought-terminating cliches [0] without anyone actually engaging with the substance of the article. Recalling the HN guidelines: > Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. I expect Dawkins has run into quite a bit of the same mode of equivocation and redefinitions of terms he writes of, when he went around striking down anti-scientific Creationist arguments such as "evolution is just a theory." A Creationist would parrot this line, thinking that "evolution is just a guess." A scientist understands this to mean, "a falsifiable hypothesis verified through empirical evidence and experiment." It's worth taking a look at what Frege had to say with respect to words, their meanings, and what they can refer to [1]: > It might perhaps be said: Just as one man connects this idea, and another that idea, with the same word, so also one man can associate this sense and another that sense. Hence the necessity for interlocutors to "come to terms" on what exactly they mean by stating their definitions clearly before there is any hope of rational discussion. This is rapidly becoming more and more difficult, as old words with a long history of usage such as "gender" are being appropriated to mean, and refer to, things quite different from the original senses and references of those terms. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A... [1] http://www.scu.edu.tw/philos/98class/Peng/05.pdf http://www.scu.edu.tw/philos/98class/Peng/05.pdf