Tim Hunt the victim of self-righteous feeding frenzy, says Richard Dawkins

[Goblinmonger]

So I'm sure that other room is going to be aghast with cries of DAWKINS and calls for him to shut up and all that other stuff, but I'd like to discuss this more rationally here. From the article:

Professor Richard Dawkins has claimed Sir Tim Hunt was the victim of “a feeding frenzy of mob-rule self-righteousness” when he quit his job in the wake of controversial comments he made about women working in laboratories.

Dawkins said the reaction to the 72-year-old Nobel laureate’s comments had been “disproportionate” and gone through schadenfreude into “cruelty”, in a letter to the Times.

Hunt provoked a backlash on social media after he reportedly said the “trouble with girls” in laboratories was that “you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticise them they cry”.

In his letter to the Times, Dawkins said: “Along with many others, I didn’t like Sir Tim Hunt’s joke, but ‘disproportionate’ would be a huge underestimate of the baying witch-hunt that it unleashed among our academic thought police: nothing less than a feeding frenzy of mob-rule self-righteousness.”

(emphasis mine)

More at full article

I think Hunt is just some old nerdy guy who is likely on on the autism scale that had NO clue how what he said would be taken. He was trying to make a funny. Is it kind of sexist? Of course. Was the reaction kind of over the top? I think so.

What I'm guessing few of the religionistas and apologists and faitheists will actually quote is what I bolded above. Dawkins doesn't like what Hunt said.

Anyway, discuss...