Dawkins’ new book is reviewed in the Economist.
From the review there are no new arguments, just more of the same polemical rhetoric and the same tired old evidences. If this is the best RD can do then Darwinian evolution is clearly on its last legs.
Does Dawkins really appeal to the homology of skeletal plan which could be equally evidence of common design, or to the fossil record with all its out of place fossils including a Jurassic Beaver, Carboniferous dragonflies and Cambrian vertebrates.
Does Dawkins really retreat to the rhetoric and polemics of a schoolyard bully again by misrepresenting arguments and people’s positions?
The reviewer writes “Perhaps some evolution-deniers will read this book and be convinced. But even to pick it up they would have to ignore a determined campaign of misinformation: polemicists demanding that schools “teach the controversy” (there is none); books about “intelligent design” written by “creationist scientists” (a ragbag of nonentities, mostly engineers or chemists rather than biologists); untruths and ad hominem attacks (few [scientists] “accept that an amoeba can evolve into a human being, even one as flawed as Richard Dawkins,” wrote one Christian essayist recently, neatly combining both genres).”
If this is the level of debate then it is clearly not about science, but about a struggle for supremacy over control of the educational institutions and direction of society. Perhaps if Dawkins understood some of the new philosophy taking place in biology involving cooperation, epigenetics and lateral gene transfer, and not simple struggle for survival, he might be more willing to engage in a respectful and reasoned debate and dialogue.
One may wonder whether Dawkins’ position is looking more and more like one of those extinct Cretaceous dinosaurs that fill the British Natural History Museum.