Dawkins on evolution
In his inimitable way, Richard Dawkins reviews (h/t: Arts & Letters Daily)
Jerry Coyne's Why Evolution Is True, calling the book "outstandingly good:"
Coyne's knowledge of evolutionary biology is prodigious, his deployment of it as masterful as his touch is light. His coverage is enviably comprehensive, yet he simultaneously manages to keep the book compact and readable.
As enjoyable as Dawkins is when praising his fellow scientist, I enjoyed his smackdown of Creationist anti-science complaints of "arrogance" even more:
A scientist arrogantly asserts that thunder is not the triumphal sound of God's balls banging together, nor is it Thor's hammer. It is, instead, the reverberating echoes from the electrical discharges that we see as lightning. Poetic (or at least stirring) as those tribal myths may be, they are not actually true.But now a certain kind of anthropologist can be relied on to jump up and say something like the following: Who are you to elevate scientific "truth" so? [...] Listen, anthropologist. Just as you entrust your travel to a Boeing 747 rather than a magic carpet or a broomstick; just as you take your tumour to the best surgeon available, rather than a shaman or a mundu mugu, so you will find that the scientific version of truth works. You can use it to navigate through the real world.
Mentions of "the real world" always come back to the fossil record, and--at the request of Bay of Fundie-- I'm posting this image:
