Many Darwinists are fond of quoting Theodosius Dobzhansky who wrote “nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution.”
It is good to know there are folks like wd400 — himself an evolutionary biologist — who believe in modern evolutionary theory but acknowledge that biologists can get along perfectly well without even understanding evolution, much less depending on it as Dobzhansky would have had us believe.
In a comment to a prior post wd400 writes:
Unfortunately a lot of molecular biologists (Collins included) don’t understand much about evolution.
Here is a partial list of the awards won by Dr. Collins (per his Wiki entry):
While leading the National Human Genome Research Institute, Collins was elected to the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences. He was a Kilby International Awards recipient in 1993, and he received the Biotechnology Heritage Award with J. Craig Venter in 2001.[45][46] He received the William Allan Award from the American Society of Human Genetics in 2005. In 2007, he was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.[47] In 2008, he was awarded the Inamori Ethics Prize[48] and National Medal of Science.[49] In the same year, Collins won the Trotter Prize where he delivered a lecture called “The Language of God”. Collins and Venter shared the “Biography of the Year” title from A&E Network in 2000.[50] In 2005, Collins and Venter were honored as two of “America’s Best Leaders” by U.S. News & World Report and the Harvard University Center for Public Leadership.[51] Collins received the Albany Medical Center Prize in 2010 and the Pro Bono Humanum Award of the Galien Foundation in 2012.[
So, evolutionary biologist wd400 acknowledges that “a lot of molecular biologists,” including one of the world’s leading biologists, former Director of the National Institutes of Health and leader of the human genome project Francis Collins, can do their jobs perfectly well without even understanding evolution, far less depending on it.
Good for you wd. Good for you.
I also admire this little bon mot from wd:
[Richard] Dawkins was a great popularizer (before he bacame a full time internet troll)
UPDATE:
To be perfectly fair I should point out that in the comment thread below, wd400 demurs to the assertions raised in this post. In fact, “demur” does not quite capture his reaction, for it was far from demure.* When confronted with the logical conclusions that ineluctably proceed from his own statement, he did the verbal equivalent of this:
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*There is nothing like a fine play on words; of course that was nothing like a fine play on words. 🙂