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).

Survival of the Friendliest Wasps: New Evolution Story

Wasps overturned Darwinian dogma. Image courtesy of Alvesgaspar, Wikipedia.



Joel Kontinen

Evolution was supposed to be about the survival of the fittest. But when it comes to wasps, it seems that it is more about the survival of the friendliest.

According to Science Daily, “Polistes fuscatus, a paper wasp found throughout North America, evolved better vision to recognize the variable facial patterns of other members of its species.

So, now instead of a Darwinian struggle for existence, we seem to have co-operation.

“Some wasps have developed bigger eyes, and thus better vision, to read the social cues written on the faces of their sister wasps, according to a new University of California, Berkeley, study.”

Lead author Michael Sheehan, a UC Berkeley postdoctoral fellow, uses details in a well-known fairy tale to illustrate what he believes happened:

"The Big Bad Wolf had it right. When Little Red Riding Hood said, 'Goodness, what big eyes you have,' he replied, 'The better to see you with.' "

Sheehan suggests that some paper wasps “evolved better vision for the purpose of telling one another apart. This is consistent with the idea that hearing, smelling, seeing or other sensory capabilities in animals, including humans [sic] may have evolved in response to communication signals like we see in the wasp."

Sheehan and his colleagues published their paper recently in Biology Letters. He points out that the findings don’t “overturn evolutionary dogma”. His clarification does show, however, that evolutionists tend to be very dogmatic and that the Darwinian community seldom if ever approves of dissenting views.

Anyway, it might be time to bury the Darwinian concepts of survival of the fittest and the struggle for existence.


Source:

The big bad wolf was right: Among wasps, bigger eyes evolved to better see social cues. Science Daily. April 29, 2014.