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Does John van Wyhe typify the last, best burst of unfettered Darwinism in 2013?

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John van Wyhe is a historian of science at the National University of Singapore. He is the Director of Darwin Online and Wallace Online, the author of eight books and lectures and broadcasts around the world.

A friend kindly writes to say:


He spends a fair bit of his 17 minutes retelling the story of the history of fossil research, which is interesting and fun. I’d never heard it before.

But then he goes on to say, we now have “billions of times more evidence for evolution than in Darwin’s time,

So I kept waiting, and waiting, for an account of the evidence. Well, he spends maybe 2-3 minutes at the very end, trotting out “vestigial organs” and “embryonic recapitulation” [What? That dead horse again? Call Jonathan Wells!] and “homology” and the sort of simplistic “proof” you might see in a high school biology text from 1955. So this is scholarship? And this is “how we know evolution [never defined] is true?”


It surely shows what people could get away with in 2013 by way of poorly sourced evolution claims.

Could they do so as easily today?

Comments
I was astounded to hear the fraudulent ‘embryonic recapitulation’ used again. In my biology lectures at Sydney 1957 the speaker mentioned it and a student called out, “A sign! A sign!” So at least 60 years ago this nonsense was an embarrassment.Belfast
August 20, 2021
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Well, TED talks are basically dull old establishment doctrine disguised as fresh material. TED types are still doing the old Savannah Sabertooth routine.polistra
August 20, 2021
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