On opening it I was amazed to find that Chapter One begins by spouting one complete fallacy after another about Darwin.
I have not yet progressed beyond page 1, but decided to I would write a blog post for each fallacy I find in the book and publish them here as I read my way through it
Darwin Fallacy No.1. (page 1, of Howard 1982)
'Darwin then married his first cousin, and the family seems to have thrown practically nothing away ever since... The notes and records of a whole lifetime's scientific work have been maintained virtually intact.'
In reality, we know that several of Darwin's notebooks and essays are missing. His remaining notebooks are missing many torn out pages, he destroyed copies of letters he sent, others are lost or missing and he habitually burned many of the letters he received.
From (Sutton, M. 2014. Nullius in Verba:Darwin's Greatest Secret).
'As Beddall (1968, p. 310) so precisely puts it in her excellent and classic article on the Linnean Debacle: "It seems surprising that all the material relating to the most dramatic (not to say traumatic) moment in his life should disappear." While absence of those letters is not proof of what was in them, we are nonetheless rationally permitted to weigh that absence in the balance when such absence is both markedly peculiar to suspicious events and is explained away by contradictory evidence from Darwin's son. To be specific, Francis Darwin wrote contradictory accounts, claiming that his father saved all his important letters,[175] and then claiming the opposite—that his father habitually burned them (Darwin 1887, p. 119 and page v, respectively).'
Reference
Howard, J. (1982) Darwin. Oxford University Paperbacks.
The collection of posts seems promising. Darwin Myths are infinite. Do you have an idea of the meaning of all this? why so much emphasis in keeping as a scientific model someone that was not even a scientist? Why to keep as a theory a set of word games?
ReplyDeleteI think that perhaps the number of myths that have been published by Darwin scholars provides confirmatory evidence for the "Dysology Hypothesis"
DeleteDYSOLOGY HYPOTHESIS
"Letting scholars get away with publishing fallacies and myths signals to others the existence of topics where guardians of good scholarship might be less capable than elsewhere. Such dysology then serves as an allurement to poor scholars to disseminate existing myths and fallacies and to create and publish their own in these topic areas, which leads to a downward spiral of diminishing veracity on particular topics."
http://dysology.com/Dysology%20Hypothesis.html
Honestly. I dont think that book is worth its price.
ReplyDelete