I Maked A Mistake

Last updated on: November 30, 2010 at 11:07 pm by Jeffrey L. Falick

I Maked A Mistake 2010-11-30T23:07:00-05:00 Jeffrey L. Falick

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Something’s been bugging me about my post on Norbert Samuelson’s review of The God Delusion. While reading Edward J. Larson’s book Evolution, it finally struck me. Samuelson accuses Dawkins of ignoring Thomas Hunt Morgan’s mutationism and I sort of went along with that after a brief check online. Actually I mostly looked into the whole controversy over punctuated equilibrium and not too much on Morgan, so I’m guilty of bad research there.

As I was reading Larson, I was reminded that Morgan was the fruit fly guy! He was the one with the students called Morgan’s Raiders whom I’d read about in Jonathan Weiner’s Time, Love, Memory. Morgan’s beef with Darwin was over the mechanism of change in evolution. Darwin and his generation were just guessing all over the place because the science of genetics hadn’t been invented yet. Darwin made a few awful guesses and Morgan corrected them while becoming practically the first geneticist.

Morgan didn’t reject Darwin’s principle of natural selection and Richard Dawkins doesn’t reject Morgan’s findings.

Samuelson could not have been more wrong. It just goes to show that when a theologian writes about science, you’re not going to learn very much. Even in my rush to defend Dawkins I underestimated Samuelson’s ignorance of the history of evolutionary biology.

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