Richard, Richard, Richard!

And how will the New Republic treat the inferior races? How will it deal with the black? . . . the yellow man? . . . the Jew? . . . those swarms of black, and brown, and dirty-white, and yellow people, who do not come into the new needs of efficiency? . . .

Well, the world is a world, not a charitable institution, and I take it they will have to go . . .And the ethical system of these men of the New Republic, the ethical system which will dominate the world state, will be shaped primarily to favour the procreation of what is fine and efficient and beautiful in humanity—beautiful and strong bodies, clear and powerful minds . . . And the method that nature has followed hitherto in the shaping of the world, whereby weakness was prevented from propagating weakness . . . is death . . . The men of the New Republic . . . will have an ideal that will make killing worth the while.
..............................H G Wells in Anticipations, as quoted by Richard Dawkins

Pretty bleak stuff from an English Intellectual considered a progressive at the turn of the century. Looks like it could have come right from the SS manual. It's also a very dishonest piece of selective quotation. Of all those ellipses, the only fair one is the first. In many other cases, many pages were skipped between fragments, or major thoughts which drastically change the meaning were left out. The order of the fragments has been changed, with Dawkins version skipping forward and back by pages or paragraphs. In some cases, the material left out completely reverses the meaning. The initial sentences, for example, are distastefully phrased, but Well's actual argument is that people should be judged as individuals not as members of a race.

Wells reproduces the rampant racism of his day, and echoes it, but at least partly, it seems, to mock it. If you would like to check out the original, Project Gutenberg has the book. The relevant passages are all from Chapter IX here.

This, it seems to me, is a mortal sin of scholarship. There is a venial sin or two as well. Dawkins presents a highly dubious claim that Chuck Yeager was not the first to fly faster than the speed of sound on page 598 of The Ancestor's Tale. A balanced account of the facts can be found on Wikipedia here.

Richard Dawkins is stylish author and a gifted expositor, but dishonest scholarship is no minor fault. I am very disappointed in him.

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