The Wars Over Evolution
By Richard C. Lewontin
New York Review of Books
Volume 52, Number 16 · October 20, 2005
The Evolution-Creation Struggle
by Michael Ruse
Harvard University Press, 327 pp., $25.95
Not By Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution
by Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd
University of Chicago Press, 332 pp. $30.00
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18363
“… Maybe God is lurking out there somewhere but He doesn’t leave any residue in our test tube, so we will be tempted to assume He doesn’t exist. This is a philosopher’s worry that does not, as far as I can tell, correspond to the way people really acquire their views of reality. Some may have had mountaintop conversions at some point in their lives, while others experience a crisis of faith as they mature. Theodosius Dobzhansky, the leading empirical evolutionary geneticist of the twentieth century, who spent most of his life staring down a microscope at chromosomes, vacillated between deism, gnosticism, and membership in the Russian Orthodox Church. He could not understand how anyone on his or her deathbed could remain an unrepentant materialist. I, his student and scientific epigone, ingested my unwavering atheism and a priori materialism along with the spinach at the parental dinner table….”