The Ottawa Citizen’s David Warren‘s birthday greeting to Darwin is
“I oppose Darwinism because it is an intellectual & scientific fraud. I have opposed it all my adult life on that account alone; as I’ve told you before, I opposed it as crap science when I was an atheist. But I oppose it today with greater & greater passion, because I see that it provides the cosmological groundwork for real evil.”
He offers a link to a discussion of what it means to say that humans are unique.
Here are some further reflections from his column of today:
Darwin was an honest, capable, plodding man. Alas, of his great hypothesis of “the origin of species, by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life,” it must be said that what was true in it was not original, and what was original was not true.
The basic notion of evolution — that all living creatures are related, and that man himself descends from the primordial slime as the product of purely material forces — is an ancient one, going back at least to Anaximander in the 6th century B.C. Likewise, the notion that creatures may be altered by selective breeding goes back as long as humans have bred animals.
Darwin’s contribution was the mechanism of natural (and later, sexual) selection. This mechanism was simultaneously proposed by Alfred Russel Wallace, a true genius who made many other signal observations and discoveries; but Darwin alone became obsessed with this one, and insisted that it could carry us beyond adaptation within a species, across natural barriers to the creation of entirely new forms, over eons of time. Wallace was not so sure, and to this day, Darwin’s notion exists merely as a surmise. It has never been proven.
Which is its great strength. For what cannot be proven can never be disproven, either. The Darwinian account is merely belied by the fossil record, which has provided none of the inter-species “missing links” that Darwin anticipated, and which instead yields only sudden radical changes.
I would add that when Darwinists claim that their theory is overwhelmingly confirmed, what they mean is that it must be true because otherwise atheist materialism (or liberal Christianity?) would not be true. Can’t help that, I am afraid.
I also suspect that they would dump it in a minute if they could think of an alternative satisfactory to atheist materialism or liberal Christianity.
Also just up at The Post-Darwinist:
Twitter account for the Post-Darwinist
Polls: Slight majority of Britons are okay with intelligent design
Teaching evolution: A note from The Cranky Professor
Mark Steyn’s testimony on the Ontario Human Rights Commission’s misdoings is here.)