Evolution Icon Evolution

Berlinski’s Dismantlement of Darwinism “A Virtuoso Recital”

David Berlinski’s collection of essays, The Deniable Darwin, garnered a favorable review over at Hot Air, where CK Macleod had this to say:

The Deniable Darwin collects essays written from 1996 to 2009 mostly on the same general theme: That the insufferable pretensions and aggressive self-certainty of science ideologues prevent us from justly appreciating how much we actually have learned about the natural world, and how wonderfully little that is. He applies his dauntingly well-informed, remorselessly cogent skepticism to several fields of study — theoretical physics, mathematics, linguistics, molecular biology — but it’s his dismantlement of Darwinism that he takes to center stage for a virtuoso recital.

Macleod understands that critics of Berlinski are wrong to accuse him “of the thought-crime of religious faith”:

The most you can say about Berlinski’s argument on this score — the argument he actually makes as opposed to the one he’s frequently assumed to be making — is that it points, insistently, to obviously “design-like” aspects of the natural world that no biologist has been able to explain except by childlike inferences, circular reasoning, and “just-so” stories — how this, that, or the other biological peculiarity might/must have served a survival purpose — and by scandalously oversold pseudo-experiments.

Read the review here, and pick up your copy of The Deniable Darwin if you haven’t already.