Guilty of intellectual dishonesty? David Berlinki’s latest in this month’s issue of Commentary (sadly, you have to pay for it online—but it’s well worth it) is a damning indictment of the increasingly shrill and tiresome Richard Dawkins.
Dawkins has made a great show of claiming that a 1994 paper by biologists Suzanne Pelger and Dan-Erik Nilsson used a computer simulation to reveal how purely natural selection could account for the evolution of the eye.
According to Berlinski, a mathematician and author of several excellent science books, no such simulation was ever conducted. The authors’ paper cites none, Nilsson actually said so to Berlinksi, and yet their paper has been mentioned repeatedly over the years as a “defining” proof of Darwin’s theory.
I don’t mind saying I accept Darwin’s theory as far as it goes, but this kind of dishonesty by the extreme Darwinists is, to put it mildly, a scandal, as Berlinski writes.
BTW, Berlinski does a good job taking apart the mathematical assumptions behind Nilsson and Pelger’s paper while he’s at it.
Hmm. Don’t mind saying I look forward to seeing how Dawkins, Pinker et al respond.