10.10.09
Dawkins new book a slight retreat?
This Times review of Dawkins is misleading: Dawkins retreats slightly to the simple demonstration of the fact of evolution, with less emphasis on the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection. The book is ambiguous, hence misleading, in that regard, but as this blog has pointed out for years you can only claim that evolution occurs. So far, its mechanism is not fully understood.
The idea that evolution really does explain everything in biology is so far unproven. There are a host of things that still don’t make sense, especially in human evolution.
The theory of evolution really does explain everything in biology. The phenomena that Darwin understood in broad brush strokes can now be accounted for in the precise language of DNA. And though biological systems have attained extraordinary levels of complexity over the passage of time, no serious biologist doubts that evolutionary explanations exist or will be found for every jot and tittle in the grand script.
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THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTHThe Evidence for Evolution
By Richard Dawkins
470 pp. Free Press. $30
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Times Topics: Evolution
Richard Dawkins’s Web SiteTo biologists and others, it is a source of amazement and embarrassment that many Americans repudiate Darwin’s theory and that some even espouse countertheories like creationism or intelligent design. How can such willful ignorance thrive in today’s seas of knowledge? In the hope of diminishing such obscurantism, the prolific English biology writer Richard Dawkins has devoted his latest book to demonstrating the explanatory power of evolutionary ideas while hammering the creationists at every turn.