Obviously I’m not a fan of Dawkins. I haven’t read any of his work, but from the various clips and quotes of his I’ve seen over the years he strikes me as an incurious bigot with a blinkered worldview. But I have no reason to doubt that he is a smart man.
So it’s very funny to see him realize that he’s debating a genuinely delusional person, as Peterson makes some bizarre epistemological argument that dragons are literally real because we use the concept of predator as a shorthand for animals that kill other animals. Except Peterson seems to expand the definition of predator to “anything that can kill a person” when he argues that fire is a predator.
It’s really silly, too, if you’ve seen him actually teaching biology and whatnot at Oxford. He obviously knows a lot about evolutionary biology, but rather than continue to teach, he wastes time arguing with YECs because of the fan mail.
It’s nice to see him quit pretending and go full mask-off with his Islamophobia and transphobia. He’s all in on the grift of internet debate bro personalities.
Dawkins books The selfish gene and the extended phenotype are both significant contributions to evolutionary biology. There have certainly been meaningful critiques of both since, but for books that are 40-50 years old in a rapidly changing field, they are good.