Why Darwin Matters_ The Case Against Intelligent Design - Michael Shermer [78]
14. Charles Darwin, Origin of Species, p. 84.
15. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976).
16. Percival W. Davis and Dean H. Kenyon, Of Pandas and People (Dallas, Tex.: Haughton, 1993).
17. Charles Darwin, Origin of Species, p. 280.
18. For a brief analysis of whether punctuated equilibrium constitutes a paradigm shift in evolutionary theory, see my book The Borderlands of Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). For a lengthy summary of all critiques of punctuated equilibrium, and detailed responses to them, see the 300-page chapter on the subject in Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002).
19. Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould, “Punctuated Equilibria: An Alternative to Phyletic Gradualism,” in T. J. M. Schopf (ed.), Models in Paleobiology (San Francisco: Freeman, 1972), p. 205.
20. D. S. McKay et al., “Search for Past Life on Mars: Possible Relic Biogenic Activity in Martian Meteorite ALH84001,” Science 273 (1996), pp. 924–30.
21. William Schopf, Cradle of Life: The Discovery of Earth’s Earliest Fossils (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999).
22. Whewell, Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, p. 230. The irony is that the theory of evolution is arguably the most consilient theory ever generated, and Whewell rejected it, going so far as to block the Origin of Species from being shelved at the library at Trinity College, Cambridge.
23. Personal correspondence, December 13, 2004.
24. All three articles appear in the November 22, 2002, issue of Science: Jennifer A. Leonard et al., “Ancient DNA Evidence for Old World Origin of New World Dogs,” pp. 1613–16; Peter Savolainen et al., “Genetic Evidence for an East Asian Origin of Domestic Dogs,” pp. 1610–13; Brian Hare et al., “The Domestication of Social Cognition in Dogs,” pp. 1634–36.
25. Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004).
26. Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, P. Menozzi, and A. Piazza, The History and Geography of Human Genes (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994).
27. Jack Horner, Digging Dinosaurs (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), p. 168.
28. Ibid., p. 129.
29. Ibid., pp. 129–43.
2. Why People Do Not Accept Evolution
1. All quotes are from Bryan’s Last Speech: The Most Powerful Argument against Evolution Ever Made, a small booklet (price 25¢) published shortly after his death and reprinted in full in Skeptic Vol. 4, No. 2 (1998), pp. 88–100. The booklet was sent to me by my friend and colleague Clayton Drees, who found it in a used book store in Virginia. In the film about the trial, Inherit the Wind, in the middle of Bryan’s final moving speech he dramatically keels over dead in the courtroom to the gasps of his faithful followers and the chagrin of his evolutionary opponents. The reality was perhaps a bit less histrionic, but the real speech is much more revealing (in the film he is reduced to reciting the books of the Bible).
2. I discuss the Scopes trial briefly in both Why People Believe Weird Things and How We Believe. For a complete history of the trial see Edward J. Larson, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate over Science and Religion (New York: Basic Books, 1997).
3. Quotes in this section are from Stephen Jay Gould, “William Jennings Bryan’s Last Campaign,” Natural History (November 1987), pp. 32–38.
4. J. V. Grabiner and P. D. Miller, “Effects of the Scopes Trial,” Science 185 (1974), pp. 832–36.
5. V. L. Kellog, Headquarters Nights (Boston: The Atlantic Monthly Press. 1917). Kellog had joined the Belgian relief program before America entered the war and, through his contacts with professional scientists, gained access to the German General Staff in Berlin, from whom he gathered the material for his book. Gould’s 1987 reconstruction of Bryan’s intellectual reversal on the theory of evolution is unsurpassed (see