By JERRY COYNE - WHY EVOLUTION IS TRUE
Added: Tue, 07 Sep 2010 14:38:03 UTC

In his blog On Art in today’s Guardian, Johnathan Jones, whoever he is, makes an invidious and ill-informed comparison between Dawkins and Darwin: “Natural selection: Give me Darwin over Dawkins any day.“

To Jones, Darwin was the moderate Victorian gentleman, presenting evidence without bashing creationism, while Dawkins (of course) is strident and arrogant, putting off his biology audience off by touting atheism. This is Mooneyism at its best:

Darwin is the finest fruit of English empiricism. His modest presentation of evidence contrasts, I am sorry to say, with the rhetorical stridency of Richard Dawkins. Visit the famous atheist’s website and you will see two causes being pushed. Dawkins is campaigning with other secular stars against the pope’s visit to Britain. Meanwhile he is touring the paperback of his book The Greatest Show On Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. The trouble with this book is that it lacks Darwin’s empirical style. Where the Victorian writer presented masses of evidence, and let his astonishing, earth-shattering theory emerge from common-sense observations of nature, Dawkins lacks the patience, at this point in his career, to let natural history speak for itself. He has become the mirror image of the theological dogmatists he despises.

He just can’t separate science from the debate he has got into with religious people.

I don’t know what book Jones read, but it’s not the same one I reviewed in The Nation. The Greatest Show on Earth has chapter after chapter of solid biology, natural history, genetics, evo-devo, and the like. Yes, Dawkins takes some slaps at creationists, but Darwin wasn’t dealing with a 150-year history of entrenched religious opposition to his ideas.

Read on

TAGGED: ACCOMMODATIONISM, DARWIN, RICHARD DAWKINS