The Ottawa Citizen Should Be Ashamed of David Warren

 
David Warren writes for the Ottawa Citizen—an otherwise respectable newspaper. Denyse O'Leary is one of Warren's biggest fans. Today's column in the Citizen is about The doctrine of Darwin.

Here are some things that David Warren has to say. Trust me, I'm not making them up; you can check for yourself by following the link to the newspaper.

Darwin's contribution was the mechanism of natural (and later, sexual) selection. This mechanism was simultaneously proposed by Alfred Russel Wallace, a true genius who made many other signal observations and discoveries; but Darwin alone became obsessed with this one, and insisted that it could carry us beyond adaptation within a species, across natural barriers to the creation of entirely new forms, over eons of time. Wallace was not so sure, and to this day, Darwin's notion exists merely as a surmise. It has never been proven.

Which is its great strength. For what cannot be proven can never be disproven, either. The Darwinian account is merely belied by the fossil record, which has provided none of the inter-species "missing links" that Darwin anticipated, and which instead yields only sudden radical changes.

You have to wonder about the intelligence of someone who can write as an authority on Darwin while remaining completely ignorant of the entire field of paleontology. Does Warren go out of his way to avoid reading anything by any science writers, who have been documenting all kinds of transitional fossils, even in the past year?

The man himself was very much a product of his age: a bourgeois Victorian adapted to an intellectual environment in which such fatuities as Utilitarianism and Malthusianism were in the air. In retrospect, he is a redundant character, for Wallace already had the theory, and many others could have drudged out Darwin’s specific points.

You don't have to read a biography of Darwin to recognize the stupidity of this assertion—although reading a book or two is probably a good idea before shooting off your mouth. No, you don't have to read a whole book to learn that Darwin developed the essence of his theory of natural selection more than 15 years before Wallace ever thought of such a thing. Furthermore, Darwin was far, far, ahead of Wallace in his thinking about evolution. Darwin's genius lay in presenting the case for evolution in a way that Wallace—and no one else that we know of—ever could.

All you have to do to find this out is read some rather short articles, or Wikipedia. Is that too much to ask?

As if that's not bad enough, Denyse O'Leary quotes a birthday greeting from David Warren on her blog [Darwinism: Well then, no birthday cake for you, David!].

I oppose Darwinism because it is an intellectual & scientific fraud. I have opposed it all my adult life on that account alone; as I've told you before, I opposed it as crap science when I was an atheist. But I oppose it today with greater & greater passion, because I see that it provides the cosmological groundwork for real evil.

Is that the sort of person who should be writing 200th birthday greetings for the Ottawa Citizen?

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