I forgot to post about yesterday’s live-streamed debate between Richard Dawkins and Deepak “Quantum” Chopra at the Ciudad de las Ideas conference in Puebla, Mexico. Fortunately, it’s now been put on YouTube, and I’ve embedded it below.

The first five minutes are plenty weird (and superfluous), with a bunch of harlequins and pirates prancing about onstage. WHY? Then Dawkins, Chopra, and moderator (and organizer) Andrés Roemer enter through a picture frame. Andrés introduces them in Spanish at length. If you don’t speak Spanish and want to skip the pyrotechnics and introduction, the English part starts at 13:10.

There’s roughly an hour of discussion, and I must confess that I haven’t had time to watch it. I’ve listened to bits, and it’s the usual Chopra blathering. At about 26 minutes in, The Deepak goes on about the purpose of evolution being the “production of maximum diversity” for “that is what we see.” I suppose the purpose of tsunamis is death, then, for “that is what we see”. Deepak needs to learn the difference between “purpose” and “effect”! Richard calls him out for using a “word salad” of scientific terms that Chopra doesn’t understand.

Okay, I have to stop watching this and get to work.

For those of you who do watch it (or saw it live-streamed yesterday), weigh in below.

Chopra is an intensely irritating man, and willfully stupid—indeed, duplicitous—because his errors have been pointed out to him many times. Of course he has a right to blather as much as he wants, but thank Ceiling Cat that people like Dawkins, Shermer, and Harris call him out for his obscurantism. Of course some of you may feel that such debates are pointless, and I’m on the fence about that.