I caught the end of Horizon tonight. It was all about the Dover school board case where concerned parents fought to keep intelligent design off the syllabus.

I had only been watching for a few minutes when Richard Dawkins popped up doing his irate atheist bit, and it occurred to me that he could be doing his cause more harm than good now as a result of his ubiquity.

Its the Shami Chakrabarti effect.

If whenever a particular topic is featured on TV it is alway the same person appearing to support (or more often refute) it, isn’t there a danger that the more casual viewer will assume they are the only person with that opinion? This ends with the response not being the desired “Wow. What a good point. I’m persuaded.” but “Oh its just them. They would say that wouldn’t they? They always do.”

Horizon redeemed itself by featuring David Attenborough as well towards the end.

Not that I’m knocking Dawkins’ position on the ID debate: just the way he presents it.

Still on the subject of Dawkins, I was in Crockatt & Powell yesterday, looking for a new non-fiction book to keep me going and I noticed that they had six Dawkins books but only three Stephen Jay Gould books. That was depressing, but what was surprising was that the six Dawkins books did not include The Blind Watchmaker – surely his best-known book.

Maybe someone had already bought it?