David Berlinski Says Evolution Is Wrong: Wayne Eyre of the National Post Falls for It

 

Yesterday Wayne Eyre wrote a column for the National Post entitled 'Darwin? That's just the party line'. Here's how it starts ..

For example, Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, says that anyone who doesn't believe in evolution "is ignorant, stupid or insane." Oxford professor Peter Atkins, another ardent atheist, recently denounced theology, poetry and philosophy and concluded that "scientists are at the summit of knowledge, beacons of rationality and intellectually honest." Geneticist Emile Zuckerkandl -- writing on whether biological facts suggest an intelligent designer -- terms the notion of intelligent design an "intellectual virus" and its advocates "an offensive little swarm of insects ... [who] feed like leeches on irrational beliefs."

That these gentlemen go on like this in the wake of, for example, biochemist Michael Behe's masterful Darwin's Black Box, in which he sets out a devastating case for the "irreducible complexity" of human systems, truly makes one wonder about the confidence they have in their own convictions.

Anyone who would describe Behe's argument as "devestating" has obviously not been paying attention.

But this isn't a column about Behe. Instead, it's a homage to another IDiot named David Berlinski,¹ especially his recent book The Devil's Delusion: Atheism And Its Scientific Pretensions.

Now you'd expect to see a nice summary of the most powerful arguments for Intelligent Design Creationism, wouldn't you? That's not what this column is about. What impresses Wayne Eyre is all the hype about evolution being wrong and that's what he picks out from Berlinksi's book. (In fairness, that's all there is in the book.)

He's the best example that impresses Eyre.

"Suspicions about Darwin's theory arise for two reasons," he writes. "The first: The theory makes little sense. The second: It is supported by little evidence ... The theories that we do have do what they can do, and then they stop. They do not stop because a detail is missing; they stop because we cannot go on. Difficulties are accommodated by the magician's age-old tactic of misdirection."

Berlinski -- who argues that computer simulations of Darwinian evolution fail when they are honest and succeed only when they are not -- says the unpersuasiveness of the literature on the subject is well known. He tells how a Nobel laureate once said to him in a faculty lounge: "Darwin? That's just the party line."

In his dissection of Darwinists and Darwinism, Berlinski notes that "if biologists are wrong about Darwin, they are wrong about life, and if they are wrong about life, they are wrong about everything."

Little wonder, then, that so many of them do indeed protest so much.

That's it folks. David Berlinski, who is not a biologist, says that evolutionary biologists are wrong about evolution and that's all it takes to impress Wayne Eyre.

And you wonder why we call them IDiots?

---

1. Described by Eyre as "a highly respected member of the scientific elite." You can't just make this stuff up ... or can you?

[Hat Tip: Canadian Cynic]