Science & Tech Quote by Richard Dawkins

Dawkins is doing what he does best: turning a social tic into a moral indictment, then daring the reader to feel embarrassed. The line works because it frames scientific illiteracy not as a private weakness but as a public performance. “Boasts” is the tell. He’s not talking about people who struggle with math; he’s talking about the little ritual where adults laugh about being “bad at numbers” as if it’s a personality trait, a harmless quirk, even a marker of taste.

The subtext is status. In many educated circles, ignorance of literature reads as philistinism, a lack of cultural refinement. Ignorance of science, by contrast, can be coded as sophistication: proof you’re not trapped in the nerdy, utilitarian world of formulas and lab coats. Dawkins flips that hierarchy. By calling the observation a “cliche,” he anticipates the eye-roll - yes, you’ve heard this complaint before - then insists it remains true precisely because nothing has changed.

Context matters: Dawkins is writing from within a culture war about expertise, where “two cultures” (humanities vs. sciences) is not an abstract debate but a pipeline to policy failure, bad journalism, and a public that can quote Shakespeare while misunderstanding risk, statistics, or evolution. The sting is rhetorical: he’s not asking the arts to surrender; he’s asking why numeracy gets treated as optional. The quote is less a defense of science than a critique of the social permission structure that lets people opt out of it without losing face.