I guess I shouldn’t have said this thread, because you are right, many are debating it openly. I should have said the OP was a great example of tribalism, posted in the BBQ Pit as a knee-jerk condemnation of KV.
Just a side note, Kurt has written that he thinks the entire Human evolution was orchestrated by Marooned aliens who needed a part built.
Sirens of Titan of course 
Jim
And I, for one, welcome our new Trafalmadorian overlords
Huh? I was complaining that Vonnegut didn’t seem to understand the basics of evolution. I even said “I can respect saying ‘I don’t understand’.” But he went beyond that.
Scientists aren’t pretending; the facts have lead them to the conclusion: evolution via natural selection.
I’m all for debating “Emotion. Free-will. Consciousness etc.” But the debate needs to start from what we actually know (or our best approximation to that).
As I said, I seriously doubt his comment comes from ignorance; indeed, i think that your comment about his ignorance comes from your own ignorance about his body of work :). Either he misspoke, or he’s changed his mind recently (and in a direction that I don’t like, I admit). The misspeaking thing seems much likelier: it’s not as though the interviewer asked him difficult followup questions to clarify.
Daniel
I heard the NPR interview, enroute to work, and started listening about midway, so didn’t know who was talking. He sounded very tired , old , and weak in voice. I thought the comments on tribalism were interesting; the interviewer sounded taken aback about the comments on evolution. At the end of the interview, I was really shocked that it was Kurt Vonnegut.
Not because of the content, but because he sounded so bad. Very precarious. I add this, not to generate pity, but to say that with his bad health, perhaps Vonnegut is not at the top of his game live interview wise.
I’ll have a bit of compassion for a writer who helped my teenaged mind open up a great deal. Sad to hear him so weak, but there were nice glimmers of his thinking outside of boxes.
“There’s no such place as Traflamaduke!”
As a sort of postscript, I just finished reading “A Man Without A Country”. My conclusion is that KV has definitely entered his twilight era. He is sounding like the nutty-professor-uncle who keeps repeating the same witticisms (now hoary chestnuts) from earlier lectures, updated to adjust for current events, as if pitching it to a freshman class who wouldn’t know he’d already used it in last year’s class. He even threw some of this material into the NPR interview as if it were casual conversation. So it’s pretty clear to me that although he hasn’t fundamentally changed what he believes, he’s losing his ability to articulate it in original ways. Fair enough. He’s written around 20 books which is around 20 times more than most people will ever think of writing. If he writes any more I’m sure I’ll buy them and read them, but I don’t expect great things at this point anymore.
That was very much my impression of the Daily Show interview. He had a few chestnuts he was determined to broadcast, context be damned, and Jon Stewart had a hard time keeping him on topic. It was kind of like reading a thread where one of those one trick pony drops in just to go, “Speaking of Condoleezza Rice’s fashion choices, male circumcision is destroying our culture.” Stewart was finally able to get Vonnegut to quit tryin to read from an actual piece of paper on which he had jotted his witticisms by promising to publish it on the Daily Show website.
There is a Listen button on the page linked to by the OP. You can hear the whole interview for yourself. It seems to me Vonnegut 1) agrees that evolution is a fact 2) argues that scientists too behave tribally 3) neither evolution nor religion has offered complete explanations of the “something wonderful going on”
Seems sensible to me, and I agree with others that whether the above is right or wrong does not affect to one iota my enjoyment of his books. I sympathise with the OP’s reaction though. In high school, my very inspired English teacher successfully instilled in me an appreciation of Shakespeare. He almost dashed it, though, by airing speculations that Willy was gay (I suffered from a mild case of homophobia at the time). He engaged the class in a discussion of “why would it matter?” that took me a year or so to fully digest.
Uh…has anything else? As far as I know, religion has made assertions about these things, made claims, but not actually explained them; when it gets down to brass tacks, most religions ask you to take it on faith, or present you with a Zen koan, or claim God is inscrutable. They don’t explain those intangibles any better than science has, to date.
huh?
Sailboat
Yeah, a point I’d wanted to make as well. This is classic anti-evolution slippery-slope talk.
Science is a process. It’s not done yet. Creationists use the fact that Science has not achieved all answers as a basis for dismissing it in favor of religion.