Dawkins has never struck me as being particularly intellectual. The stance he takes on his definition of science often comes across as extreme as many religious fundamentalist perspectives.
From an article linked elsewhere in the comments, a comment by Dawkins:
"I greatly admire EO Wilson & his huge contributions to entomology, ecology, biogeography, conservation, etc. He’s just wrong on kin selection."
I get that you can slam someone like that about very, very well established stuff like physics; if someone says F = M * a * v then rip into them all you want (there is no v in the eq.). That stuff is well established, I think in physics you have to get 5 sigma to claim "significance" ( p = 0.0000003 ) which is pretty hard to do on accident.
But when you're dealing with biology thus far significance is still a p value of around 0.05 which means there's a 5% chance it could have happened by accident. That's a pretty substantial risk, at least relative to the world of physics.
So for someone to proclaim certainty on a subject which is inherently much, much less certain you have to wonder what's going on. How did a person get so confident of something without the data telling them to be that confident? Is it possible that they're choosing to believe something further than what the data show? If they're willing to exaggerate their confidence on one subject, who's to say they aren't doing it elsewhere?
Unfortunately in a lot of realms of science people end up with beliefs about how things work that aren't rigorously backed up. That doesn't make said beliefs inherently wrong, but pretending that they're provably correct when they're not smacks of charlatanism.
You seem to think that because it's more likely for someone to be wrong in Biology versus Physics that they can't have a strong, confident opinion backed by science. Dawkins holds a PhD and is a really smart guy who has contributed to science in general and, more specifically, the theory of evolution. I don't see the problem here.
As far as I can tell they were both being asshats to each other in the media (Wilson calling him a Journalist then Dawkins saying to throw Wilson's book hard). Reading Dawkin's response[1] I think it has merit and it refers to plenty of science (which doesn't come across at charlatanism to me) though I'm not going to say he's right because I don't know.
