myth
oracknows | October 12, 2014A few weeks ago, I wrote a post in which I explained why wearing a bra does not cause breast cancer. After I had finished the post, it occurred to me that I should have saved that post for now, given that October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. The reason is that, like clockwork, pretty much every year around this time articles touting various myths about breast cancer will go viral, circulating on social media like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr like so many giant spider-microbes on the moon a week ago. Sometimes, they’re new articles. Sometimes they’re old articles that, like…
evolvingthoughts | April 9, 2009Older histories of biology are often full of useful and interesting facts. One of my all-time favourites is Eric Nordenskiöld's history, but I came across an earlier one by Louis Compton Miall in which I found this text:
Bonnet in 1745 traced the scale of nature in fuller detail than had been attempted before. He made Hydra a link between plants and animals, the snails and slugs a link between mollusca and serpents, flying fishes a link between ordinary fishes and land vertebrates, the ostrich, bat, and flying fox links between birds and mammals. Man, endowed with reason, occupies the highest…
evolvingthoughts | March 4, 2009Darwin's Dangerous Idea, according to Daniel Dennett in the book by that name, is natural selection. This is often referred to as "Darwin's theory". But Darwin did not always think evolutionary events or processes were due to natural selection.
First off, let's say this again: Darwin did not think that evolution was due to chance. His mechanism of evolution was not "random chance", as Behe and others have asserted. He believed that variation was not correlated with fitness, yes, and occurred in ways that are statistically distributed (a conception not available until Galton came up with the…
evolvingthoughts | March 1, 2009Actually, this one is better called "Darwin was a racist", but as the text concerned is from the same source as those claims, I thought it might be easier to evaluate a single claim and generalise from that.
Our gospel for today is chapters V and VI of The Descent of Man, published in 1871.
If you read Darwin sloppily, or to find evidence that he really was a Very Bad Man for rhetorical - usually religious - purposes, you soon come across this statement. In fact, you can find paraphrases of it in literally hundreds of creationist documents and sites. Here is the offending passage, from…
evolvingthoughts | February 20, 2009This myth says a lot about the default views of western thinking, rather like the issue of teleology.
One of the constant and incessant complaints made against Darwin by theists in particular, is that he introduced chance and purposelessness into our worldview. I don't believe in such entities as worldviews, but leave that for now: did he introduce chance, and if so, does it imply a general lack of purpose in the world?
Here are some classic examples of that complaint. From Is Darwin Right? Or, The Origin of Man in 1877, William Denton wrote:
... it has been said that those who advocate…