"He who rejects with scorn the belief that the shape of his canines, and their occasional great development in other men, are due to our early forefathers having been provided with these formidable weapons, will probably reveal, by sneering, the line of his own descent."
That's a quite hilarious jibe from someone I thought was a serious dude. Guess who. The quote is via a New Scientist article (subscription-only) on evolution running backwards (i.e, supposing it had a direction, which it doesn't). The propensity for organisms to go backwards on their evolutionary path is also known as Atavism.
- Log in to post comments
More like this
Not infrequently, I’m asked why it is that I do what I do. Why do I spend so many hours of my free time, both here and at my not-so-super-secret other blog (NSSSOB), to write my detailed analyses of various forms of quackery, analyses of scientific studies, and expressions of my dismay at the…
It's like talking to a brick wall: MacLatchie is appallingly obtuse. When last I argued with him, I pointed out that the major failing of his entire developmental argument against evolution was that it was built on a false premise. As I said then,
I can summarize it with one standard template: "…
The seventh chapter of Wells' book could be summed up in a single sentence: "biology doesn't need no steeekin' evolution!" Wells argues that, because medicine and agriculture were already doing just fine prior to Darwin's publication of Origin, clearly then, these fields (and others) haven't…
If I told you that evolution was in crisis, what would you think I meant? You would probably think I meant that the theory was on its way out. You would think that new discoveries had shown the untenability of evolution, and that biologists were in despair over their lack of a central organizing…