Quote from Teleologist:
James Bond wrote:
TraderNik wrote:
Time for James Bond and TraderNik to eat a little crow.
âIâm a Darwinist becase I believe the only alternatives are Lamarckism or God, neither of which does the job as an explanatory principle. Life in the universe is either Darwinian or something else not yet thought of.â
- Richard Dawkins in â Survival Machineâ, from âthe Third Cultureâ ed. J Brockman, 1996
See:
http://mombacho.wordpress.com/2006/08/31/darwin-dawkins-and-god/
I had not read this interview. The passage I quoted earlier was from one of his books, in which he properly defined "Darwinist" as a slander. Your quote bothers me. I also found this sentence in the same interview:
" I'm becoming increasingly interested in computer models and artificial life, because I'm interested in Darwinism as a general phenomenon: what will Darwinism have to be like, in principle, anywhere in the universe."
This is more troublesome. I think Dawkins maybe overstepping here. Unless he is substituting "Darwinism" for "evolution," which I think is dangerous. It's analogous to subsituting "Newtonian" for "gravity." In my view, Darwinism is a fixed doctrine (a dogma if you like) whereas evolution is a scientific theory that is constantly revised and refined.
I'm not going to rationalize why Dawkins had two entirely different views on "Darwinism." His personal views aside, it doesn't change the fact that you religious zealots are attacking a strawman that is outdated and unscientific. Modern theory of evolution is well supported by experimental evidence in the same way as modern theory of gravity is supported. We're not talking about apples dropping to the ground any more. We're talking about well-designed experiments that complements the observations that had been made in the past. The anti-evolution crowd seem to only know a little about the observations, but know nothing modern experiments that verifies the evolution theory.
If someone uncovers experimental evidence that evolution theory is incorrect, then Nobel Prize in biology would almost be a certainty for that discovery. The incentive for a scientist is tremendous. OTOH, if someone discovers evidence that evolution works just as the way people (scientists) expect, then yawn, so what? No big deal.
So you see, the way science works is that unconventional discoveries are hugely rewarded. There are many examples of this. The 1956 discovery of the violation of parity, for example, was awarded Nobel Prize the next year. Parity is one of those things that scientists held dear - it was one of the fundamental symmetries that scientists believed in. So when two young physicists from Columbia University proposed that parity could be violated, it was a very daring act. People rushed to do the experiment because everyone knew that this was Nobel Prize work. The experimental proof came a few months later, and the Nobel Prize was awarded next year.
Any discovery that can lead to the disproof of evolution, would also cause a mad rush by the scientists. To think that these scientists would conform to some dogma (so that they deprive themselves a chance at glory) is sheer nonsense.
So far we have not heard of any evidence that can disprove the theory of evolution.
