Saturday 14 February 2009

Christopher Booker, creationist

"One would never have guessed from the adulation heaped on the great man by the likes of Sir David Attenborough that there is something very odd about Darwin’s theory."
Okay, I'm with you so far, Mr Booker, but this I didn't expect:
"One great stumbling block to his argument is that evolution has repeatedly taken place in leaps forward so sudden and so complex that they could not possibly have been accounted for by the gradual process he suggested - “the Cambrian explosion" of new life forms, the complexities of the eye, the post-Cretaceous explosion of mammals. Again and again some new development emerged which required a whole mass of interdependent changes to take place simultaneously, such as the transformation of reptiles into feathered, hollow-boned and warm-blooded birds."
It's from last week's Sunday Telegraph, also available online:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/4550448/Charles-Darwin-zealots-have-made-science-a-substitute-religion.html

I can't help wondering whether Mr Booker actually understood (or even paid any attention to) what David Attenborough so lucidly explained in his recent exemplary BBC TV programme, "Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life". To take just one obvious example from the quote above, Attenborough's explanation of the evolution of the eye, accompanied by clear and excellent graphics, shows precisely why it cannot be held to be "irreducibly complex".

Just because you don't understand something, doesn't mean it's incapable of being understood. Do your research - pontificating on the basis of ignorance is not what I call reasoned argument.