11.08.09
Horgan review of Dawkins’ The Greatest Show’
Heaps of evolution evidence
Biologist Richard Dawkins presents the basics to assist those “prepared to argue the case.”
I think Horgan has missed the point here: Dawkins presents ‘heaps of evidence’ for evolution as a fact, but soft pedals the natural selection theory.
There is therefore a big difference in the presentation from previous, or most other, books on Darwinism.
The emphasis on NS has discredited evolution for many, if only because its proponents blur the distinction, and this infuriates the opposition to the point where they reject the fact of evolution because of the wrong promotion of the theory.
I think Horgan might consider the ‘Anthropic Principle’ a little more closely. It is NOT, save in the minds of paranoids physicists, an argument for a theistic designer, but a statement, probably semi-teleological, about the natural state of the universe able to produce life. If NS is wrong, then evidence that the universe shows a natural tendency towards life should be welcomed and considered.
As to predictions, etc, the fact is that evolutionary theory is NOT physics, and it does NOT clearly make predictions about the future in the same way as physics.
In fact the confusion over this is one aspect of Social Darwinism;.
Dawkins also refutes the tired claim that evolutionary theory, because it concerns the past, makes no predictions and hence is not a “real” scientific theory. In 1862 Darwin himself predicted – based on his recognition of the evolved codependence of many species – that a Madagascar orchid that secretes nectar at the bottom of a foot-long tube must be pollinated by a moth with an equally long proboscis. The moth was discovered in 1903 and dubbed Xanthopan morgani praedicta, with the praedicta a nod to Darwin’s prescience.
Dawkins falters only in his wrap-up. Echoing the closing of On the Origin of Species, he asks, “How is it that we find ourselves not merely existing but surrounded by such complexity, such elegance, such endless forms most beautiful and wonderful?” He answers, “It could not have been otherwise, given that we are capable of noticing our existence at all, and of asking questions about it.”
Instead of being stirred by this coda, I scribbled, “Oh no!” in the margin. Although he does not use the term anthropic principle, Dawkins comes perilously close to invoking that notorious concept, which some benighted physicists have proposed as a solution to the mystery of the universe. The principle states that that universe must be as we observe it to be, because, if it weren’t, we wouldn’t be here to observe it.