Something\u2019s been bugging me about my post on Norbert Samuelson\u2019s review of The God Delusion<\/i>.\u00a0 While reading Edward J. Larson\u2019s book Evolution<\/i>, it finally struck me.\u00a0 Samuelson accuses Dawkins of ignoring Thomas Hunt Morgan\u2019s mutationism and I sort of went along with that after a brief check online.\u00a0 Actually I mostly looked into the whole controversy over punctuated equilibrium and not too much on Morgan, so I\u2019m guilty of bad research there.<\/p>\n
As I was reading Larson, I was reminded that Morgan was the fruit fly guy!\u00a0 He was the one with the students called Morgan\u2019s Raiders whom I\u2019d read about in Jonathan Weiner\u2019s Time, Love, Memory<\/i>.\u00a0 Morgan\u2019s beef with Darwin was over the mechanism of change in evolution.\u00a0 Darwin and his generation were just guessing all over the place because the science of genetics hadn\u2019t been invented yet.\u00a0 Darwin made a few awful guesses and Morgan corrected them while becoming practically the first geneticist.<\/p>\n
Morgan didn\u2019t reject Darwin\u2019s principle of natural selection and Richard Dawkins doesn\u2019t reject Morgan\u2019s findings.<\/p>\n
Samuelson could not have been more wrong.\u00a0 It just goes to show that when a theologian writes about science, you\u2019re not going to learn very much.\u00a0 Even in my rush to defend Dawkins I underestimated Samuelson\u2019s ignorance of the history of evolutionary biology.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Something\u2019s been bugging me about my post on Norbert Samuelson\u2019s review of The God Delusion.\u00a0 While reading Edward J. Larson\u2019s book Evolution, it finally struck me.\u00a0 Samuelson accuses Dawkins of ignoring Thomas Hunt Morgan\u2019s mutationism and I sort of went along with that after a brief check online.\u00a0 Actually I mostly looked into the whole […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2281,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[38],"class_list":["post-625","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogentries","tag-science-and-reason"],"yoast_head":"\n