Thursday 24 August 2017

New Scientist: Thou Shalt Not Bash Darwin

New Scientist tries to defend this Victorian gentleman by bashing his recent biography.




Joel Kontinen

Evolutionists are not pleased with A. N. Wilson’s soon-to-be released book Charles Darwin: Victorian mythmaker, in which this prolific writer and biographer accuses Darwin of plagiarism, bad science and says his thinking led to bad consequences, such as giving inspiration to eugenics and Nazi race laws.

Writing in New Scientist, John van Wyhe takes issue with all of this, claiming that Wilson’s portrayal of Charles Darwin is “error-strewn and tendentious.”

Now, Wilson might have made a few small mistakes in his biography, such as attributing the emergence of the giraffe’s long neck to Darwin’s ideas (it was Lamarck’s), but Darwin made some huge ones, and these cannot be overlooked.

What is more, some of the alleged mistakes van Wyhe mentions, for instance, overlooking “hundreds, thousands of examples of transitional fossils,” are not mistakes at all.

Many alleged transitional fossils, such as Archaeopteryx and Tiktaalik, are highly suspicious.

Image courtesy of the Institute for Creation Research.

And when Wilson describes evolution as an “ersatz religion”, he is exactly right. This is attested by statues, such as the one in London’s Natural History Museum. and the importance given to Darwin Day.

Sources:

van Wyhe, John. 2017. ‘Radical’ new biography of Darwin is unreliable and inaccurate. New Scientist (21 August).

Wilson, A.N. 2017. It’s time Charles Darwin was exposed for the fraud he was. Evening Standard (4 August).