Posted: Oct 06, 2017 11:38 pm
Wortfish wrote:Thommo wrote:
What do you want me to say? The audio link is just a book plug for a polemic that is widely reported as being biased and factually inaccurate. I haven't read the book and having heard the author and read various reviews and review extracts I'm not going to.
Negative reviews were inevitable given the provocative title of the book. But, as you have shown, the reviews are themselves emotional polemics by Darwinists
Bollocks. Interesting to see you whinge and bleat about others here purportedly not bothering to read the requisite material, when you yourself manifestly didn't do this with respect to those reviews. One of which was from an actual evolutionary biologist, Dr Adam Rutherford, who also has the distinction of having been an editor of Nature for ten years. One whose curriculum vitae includes the publication of a raft of peer reviewed papers on the genetics and evolutionary development of various eye related genes, research into which he conducted over a long period of time, both with respect to human eye disorders and the evolution of stalk eyed flies. The idea that this individual wrote "emotional polemics" is a non-starter amongst those of us who actually did read his review in full, in which he clearly listed numerous errors in A. N. Wilson's tome, errors that he was well placed to list, not only because of his scientific background, but because he too has been, in the past, been involved in biographical works covering Darwin. Indeed, one of those biographical works was turned into a film. More on this here.
The second review posted by Rumraket, was from no less a person than the curator of the Darwin Online internet repository, an accredited historian of science with several Darwin biographies to his name, in the form of John van Whye, who also lists numerous elementary and egregious errors in A. N. Wilson's work. Perhaps the funniest such error documented by van Whye being this one:
Another egregious blunder is made regarding a 1 June 1858 meeting of the Linnean Society which was supposedly cancelled because of the former president’s death on the 10th!? (p. 235) How could a meeting be cancelled in honour of someone who died 9 days later??
More serious is this one:
Equally breathtaking ignorance is shown of the large scholarly literature on Darwin. Wilson repeats the 1960s claim of anti-Darwin conspiracy theorist Loren Eiseley that the first 50 pages of Darwin’s first evolution notebook were suspiciously missing. They aren’t. They were located and published by 1967. How could anyone even vaguely competent to write a book on Darwin know so little of the literature on him?
Wortfish wrote:who consider the man to be their guru and consider Wilson's arguments blasphemous.
This is exactly the sort of bullshit creationist polemics, replete with predictable religious metaphors not applicable to the views of any modern evolutionary biologist, that we've come to expect from the lower depths of the sludge pits of creationist apologists. I'll give you a clue here, so that next time you post on the topic, you'll actually have some genuine knowledge to work with, unlike A. N. Wilson ...
Darwin is regarded as historically important because he founded the scientific discipline of evolutionary biology, and in the process, converted biology from a cataloguing exercise into a proper empirical science. The reason Darwin is considered important is NOT because he is regarded uncritically as an "authority figure" - the critical thinkers leave this sort of starry-eyed gazing to followers of the likes of William Lane Craig. Darwin is regarded as important because he was the first person to pay serious attention to reality with respect to the biosphere, with respect to the business of determining mechanisms for its development, and the first to engage in diligent intellectual labour for the purpose of establishing that reality supported his postulates with respect to the biosphere. In other words, instead of sitting around accepting uncritically mythological blind assertion, he got off his arse, rolled up his sleeves, did the hard work, put in the long hours performing the research and gathering the real world data, and then spending long hours determining what would falsify his ideas and determining in a rigorous manner that no such falsification existed. For those who are unaware of this, the requisite labour swallowed up twenty years of his life, which is par for the course for a scientist introducing a new paradigm to the world. THAT is why he is regarded as important, because he expended colossal amounts of labour ensuring that REALITY supported his ideas. That's the ONLY reason ANY scientist acquires a reputation for being a towering contributor to the field, because said scientist toils unceasingly for many years, in some cases whole decades, ensuring that his ideas are supported by reality in a methodologically rigorous fashion.
Additionally, just in case this idea hasn't crossed the mind of any creationist posting here, evolutionary biology has moved on in the 150 years since Darwin, and whilst his historical role is rightly recognised, the critical thinkers have also recognised that more recent developments have taken place that would leave Darwin's eyes out on stalks if he were around to see them. The contributors to the field after Darwin are numerous, and include individuals who contributed to the development of other branches of science making advances in evolutionary theory possible. Individuals such as Ronald Fisher, who developed the mathematical tools required to make sense of vast swathes of biological data (heard of analysis of variance? Fisher invented it), or Theodosius Dobzhansky, who combined theoretical imagination with empirical rigour, and who, amongst other developments, provided science with a documented instance of speciation in the laboratory. Other seminal contributors included Müller (who trashed Behe's nonsense six decades before Behe was born), E. O. Wilson, Ernst Mayr, Motoo Kimura, Stephen Jay Gould, Niles Eldredge, J. B. S. Haldane, Richard Lewontin, Sewall Wright, Jerry Coyne, Carl Woese, Kenneth Miller, and they're just the ones I can list off the top of my head. Pick up any half-decent collection of scientific papers from the past 100 years, and dozens more names can be added to that list.
So, anyone who wants to be regarded as an extremely low-grade chew toy here only has to erect the "evolutionist" or "Darwinist" canard, and they will guarantee this end result.
Moving on ...
Wortfish wrote:If you want to try and provoke a fight by wittering on about "arguments from authority" where none are present, I guess that's your prerogative, but I've got better things to do.
It helps to form an opinion of your own rather than delegating this responsibility to someone else.
You rang?
Hmm, let's see, how many scientific papers have I brought here on the subject of evolutionary biology over the past 7 years? I suspect the number now runs well into the hundreds. Perhaps someone with some time on their hands can provide a full audit. I've also dealt with more than my fair share of Darwin quote mines. Again, those with the time, feel free to perform an audit.
Wortfish wrote:Thomas Eshuis wrote:Thommo wrote:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._N._WilsonWilson's biography Charles Darwin, Victorian Mythmaker, (2017), has been criticised by John van Wyhe in the New Scientist for confusing Darwin's theory of natural selection with Lamarckism at one point, as well as other scientific, historical and editorial errors.[10] Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian wrote it is "cheap attempt to ruffle feathers", with a dubious grasp of science and attempted character assassination.[11] In The Evening Standard, Adrian Woolfson says that "..while for the greater part a lucid, elegantly written and thought-provoking social and intellectual history" Wilson's "speculations on evolutionary theory," produce a book that is "fatally flawed, mischievous, and ultimately misleading".[12] Steve Jones, an emeritus of University College London, commented in The Sunday Times: "In the classic mould of the contrarian, he despises anything said by mainstream biology in favour of marginal and sometimes preposterous theories."[13] The geneticist and former editor of Nature, Adam Rutherford, called the book "deranged" and said Wilson "would fail GCSE biology catastrophically."[14][15]
Not to mention that the ToE has moved beyond the original findings and theory of Darwin.
The book is not a critique of evolutionary theory. It is a critque of Darwin's own ideas about how evolution works.
Oh wait, what did I say above about the developments that occurred after Darwin launched the discipline of evolutionary biology? Which, by definition, Darwin knew nothing about? It's entirely typical of creationist dishonesty, to try and suggest that his ideas were wrong, on the basis of developments occurring after his death, whilst hoping no one will notice the large number of ideas that were, and remain, essentially correct, and continue to form part of the bedrock of evolutionary theory even after those later developments.