Universal Celebrity Crush

On episode #51 of Within Reason podcast, Richard Dawkins explains that people have a celebrity crush as a natural extension of their normal, human sexual desires. But this tells us nothing about the plausibility of millions who desire Celebrity X to have an actual relationship with him/her.

He also argues that our own natural self-preservation instinct can explain people’s desire to live forever, but this has no bearing on whether this is a real phenomenon.

Another example is that many physicists have a strong desire to see a Grand Unified theory where quantum mechanics and gravity will work in a single framework, but this tells us nothing about whether someone will solve this in the next 100 years, or whether it will forever be an unrequited desire.