Book review sparks war of words between grand old man of biology and Oxford’s most high-profile Darwinist
A disagreement between the twin giants of genetic theory, Richard Dawkins and EO Wilson, is now being fought out by rival academic camps in an effort to understand how species evolve.
The learned spat was prompted by the publication of a searingly critical review of Wilson’s new book, The Social Conquest of Earth, in Prospect magazine this month. The review, written by Dawkins, author of the popular and influential books The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker and The God Delusion, has prompted more letters and on-line comment than any other article in the recent history of the magazine and attacks Wilson’s theory “as implausible and as unsupported by evidence”.
“I am not being funny when I say of Edward Wilson’s latest book that there are interesting and informative chapters on human evolution, and on the ways of social insects (which he knows better than any man alive), and it was a good idea to write a book comparing these two pinnacles of social evolution, but unfortunately one is obliged to wade through many pages of erroneous and downright perverse misunderstandings of evolutionary theory,” Dawkins writes.
The Oxford evolutionary biologist, 71, has also infuriated many readers by listing other established academics who, he says, are on his side when it comes to accurately representing the mechanism by which species evolve. Wilson, in a short piece penned promptly in response to Dawkins’s negative review, was also clearly annoyed by this attempt to outflank him.
“In any case,” Wilson writes, “making such lists is futile. If science depended on rhetoric and polls, we would still be burning objects with phlogiston [a mythical fire-like element] and navigating with geocentric maps.”
Wilson, 83, is a Harvard professor of evolutionary biology who became famous in the early 1970s with his study of social species in his books The Insect Societies and Sociobiology. He is internationally acknowledged as “the father of sociobiology” and is the world’s leading authority on ants.
For lay spectators, the row is a symptom of the long and controversial evolution of the very idea of evolution. At root it is a dispute about whether natural selection, the theory of “the survival of the fittest” first put forward by Charles Darwin in 1859, occurs only to preserve the single gene. Wilson is an advocate of “multi-level selection theory”, a development of the idea of “kin selection”, which holds that other biological, social and even environmental priorities may be behind the process.
For “lay spectators”, this spat between Dawkins and Wilson does a service in exposing fallacies of Darwinian evolution, which is itself downright perverse. As retired Washington University (St. Louis) medical professor David Menton once stated, “evolution contributes nothing to our understanding of empirical science.”
Biblical creation is the basis for scientific research, despite the efforts of Dawkins and Wilson to suggest otherwise.
Evolution is the action, Darwin’s theory of Evolution by Natural Selection explains how it happens. Have you actually read The Origin of Species? I see nothing ‘exposing’ in this article. Do you not know that evolution is literaly a cornerstone of Biology, without it we would have no medicin, vaccines, domestic dogs, industrial food production the list goes on and on.
Yeah, because the world is 6000 years old, light was created before the sun, the whole human population has was created and grew with incest then killed off then grown again with incest, dinosaurs walked with humans and the earth is flat. There is literally nothing scientific in the bible that wasn’t known at the time and I challenge you to produce something to counter that claim.