Evolution Isn't a Theory. No! Really?

Richard Dawkins’ new book is out, presumably in celebration of which he gave an interview with David Frost on ‘Frost Over the World’  today(Jazeera TV, 12/9/2009). The Frosticle, whose intellect is less well honed than it once was, asked a few banal and unimaginative questions to which the guru of humanism made polite, but uninspiring replies, interspersed with his characteristically self-deprecating grin which he uses in the presence of morons. There are a few little nuggets of flammable material in ‘The Greatest Show On Earth’, however. This from the first chapter.

‘’Imagine you are a teacher of more recent history, and your lessons on 20th-century Europe are boycotted, heckled or otherwise disrupted by well-organised, well-financed and politically muscular groups of Holocaust-deniers [who] really exist. They are vocal, superficially plausible and adept at seeming learned. They are supported by the president of at least one currently powerful state, and they include at least one bishop of the Roman Catholic Church. Imagine that, as a teacher of European history, you are continually faced with belligerent demands to “teach the controversy”, and to give “equal time” to the “alternative theory” that the Holocaust never happened but was invented by a bunch of Zionist fabricators.’’

While most scientists (90% of the Royal Society) are not religious and thus have no ethical problem with evolution as best-match hypotheses for the way things are, Dawkins’ sinister comparisons between Holocaust-deniers and Evolution-deniers is sickeningly pernicious, underhandedly anti-intellectual and will bite back in the future. Hopefully quite hard.

The image carries no significance. It's just weird, a paradigm of my own thoughts. Live with it