… about genetics, here, in honour of Darwin Day.
Meet A False Fact: What Would Darwin Do (WWDD)?Now, in the spirit of challenging false facts and views, as Darwin encourages us to do, we have a particular “false fact” in mind, used to support a false view. Both are widely promoted by Richard Dawkins, who should know better. (More about that, below.) We’ll call this false fact Dawkins’ Whopper.
You can listen to the Whopper here, as Dawkins answers this question:
Out of all the evidence used to support the theory of evolution, what would you say is the stongest [sic], most irrefutable single piece of evidence in support of the theory?
Or you can read a transcript of what Dawkins says in the video:
“There’s an enormous amount of evidence, from all sorts of places, and it’s hard to pick one strand which is more important than any other. There’s fossils, there’s the evidence from geographical distribution, there’s the evidence from vestigial organs. I think to me perhaps the most compelling evidence is comparative evidence, from modern animals — particularly biochemical comparative evidence, genetic, molecular evidence.”
Mmmm. We then learn,
Churakov and colleagues found that five genes supported the first pattern, where human and armadillo are most closely related; nine genes supported a contradictory history, where human and elephant are most closely related; whereas eight genes supported a third, mutually contradictory history, where elephant and armadillo were closest relatives.If you want to explore this further, here are four papers dealing with various aspects of the problem, although we could cite hundreds of others:
Oh, you know what? Because Uncommon Descent is not to be outdone in sheer ambition, O’Leary has decided on a moral reform project as well: She will ask “Wuthering Heights”, the Bronte township dump bear, to adopt cleanliness and tidiness as key goals. She expects more success than any of her rivals in quixotic projects.