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In this section you quote the famous closing passage from "Origin of Species" and claim: - "Dawkins also quotes this magnificent conclusion (p. 12), but he omits the words "by the Creator". There are no dots to indicate an omission. Dawkins simply pretends that Darwin never wrote them." - In fact Prof. Dawkins is quoting correctly from the first edition (as cited in his bibliography). You are quoting from a later edition. You should say which one. There were, I think six editions published in Darwin's life-time, and it is well known that he changed the wording from time to time.

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Thank you for this and for the gentle manner in which you have pointed it out. All the "Origin" quotes are from a much read, much loved old "Collins Clear Type Press" edition (London & Glasgow, no date), but I did check the quote in three more modern editions, all of which contained "by the Creator". I do not, alas, have access to a first edition, but I will try to get my text amended as soon as possible. With regard to your other query, I am a retired, male academic, and have nothing to do with any other D. Wilson you will have heard of. The sole reason for setting up this website is to stimulate discussion, and I would like the focus to be on ideas, not on writers' cvs. Once again, my thanks for the correction and for your much appreciated courtesy.

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The complete text of the first edition is available online here: - http://www.literature.org/authors/darwin-charles/the-origin-of-species/ - There are probably other sites as well.

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In this section you quote the famous closing passage from "Origin of Species" and claim:
> 
> "Dawkins also quotes this magnificent conclusion (p. 12), but he omits the words "by the Creator". There are no dots to indicate an omission. Dawkins simply pretends that Darwin never wrote them."
> 
> In fact Prof. Dawkins is quoting correctly from the first edition (as cited in his bibliography). You are quoting from a later edition. You should say which one. There were, I think six editions published in Darwin's life-time, and it is well known that he changed the wording from time to time. - This is true. However, when quoting a work from any other source, I don't usually go to the first edition, first press. Corrections are made for a purpose. Grammar, annotations, and continuity. When quoting the passage from Darwin, Modern scientists are obligated to quote Darwin factually, and that would be to quote his most recent work. We don't know why Darwin changed this passage, but it would seem to me that he was discovering more information that was leading him to believe in an intelligent first cause. - When people are getting ready to leave the planet, they don't usually save the most useless information to spout off on their death bed. They say what's important. I think scientists should evaluate the reasons why they feel the need to quote the first edition. It's sort of like a preacher that uses a certain translation of the bible that fits his doctrine the best. That Dawkins would even attempt this kind of subversive trick, to me, is a clear insight into his motives. Those being, to make a name for himself, and to accrue a following. - It's not as though some religious nut came along and added it later, like some other books we know.

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Matt regards Dawkins' omission of the words "by the Creator", when quoting Darwin's conclusion, as a "subversive trick". I couldn't agree more. There seems to be a general hero-worship of Darwin when it suits the atheist cause to quote him, but a dismissive wave of the hand when you point out that he was an agnostic who categorically stated that one "can be an ardent Theist and an evolutionist." Of course science has moved on since his time, and amazing discoveries have been made, but none that can even begin to invalidate his statement. - All the same, I am grateful to George Jelliss for pointing out the discrepancy. I didn't know that Darwin had inserted those words later, and as Dawkins did quote from the first edition, he had covered himself factually, though certainly not ethically. I altered the wording accordingly in the "guide" with an acknowledgement. That is, of course, no defence of Dawkins, and as Matt points out, the strategy is not untypical of people who have made up their minds that theirs is the only truth.

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There are good reasons for citing the 1859 first edition of "Origin of Species". In later editions Darwin tried to take account of criticisms, such as those of his inadequate speculations on genetics, but only made his position on this issue worse. It was not until 1900 that the work of Mendel was rediscovered and provided clues to the correct explanation. In fact some of the geneticists thought their discoveries disproved Darwin's thesis. It took twenty years or more to achieve a "neo-Darwinian" synthesis of genetics and natural selection, thanks to the work of Fisher, Haldane and others. - Steve Jones for example based his 1999 book "Almost Like a Whale", which is an updating of "Origin of Species", on the 1859 edition, and concluded with exactly the same passage as cited by Richard Dawkins. - As regards the inclusion or not of the phrase "by the Creator" after the word "breathed". This is surely a trivial point. The word "breathed" already implies that there was a someone who did the breathing, if only metaphorically. - By the way which edition of the Bible is the most authentic?

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George Jelliss commented: "It was not until 1900 that the work of Mendel was rediscovered and provided clues to the correct explanation. In fact some of the geneticists thought their discoveries disproved Darwin's thesis. It took twenty years or more to achieve a "neo-Darwinian" synthesis of genetics and natural selection, thanks to the work of Fisher, Haldane and others." - I don't understand the phrase :provided clues to the correct explanation. What explanation did Mendel provide? - And I also want to know if any Darwin scientist has ever satisfactorily answered the issue of "Haldane's Dilemma"? I refer to his article, "The Cost of Natural Selection", J. Genetics 55, pp 511-524, 1957, in which he calculated that harmful mutations would outnumber beneficial mutations before an older species could evolve into a new one.

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David asked: "I don't understand the phrase :provided clues to the correct explanation. What explanation did Mendel provide?" - As I understand it, Darwin's inadequate genetic theory didn't work because new traits once inherited would just dilute and revert to the average in subsequent generations, whereas Mendel's experiments with peas indicated that traits were passed on in some permanent discrete form, later identified in terms of chromosomes and genes. But there are lots of good sites on Mendel and genetics that explain these things better than I can. This one seems exceptionally clearly laid out: - http://anthro.palomar.edu/mendel/mendel_1.htm - David also asks: "And I also want to know if any Darwin scientist has ever satisfactorily answered the issue of "Haldane's Dilemma"? I refer to his article, "The Cost of Natural Selection", J. Genetics 55, pp 511-524, 1957, in which he calculated that harmful mutations would outnumber beneficial mutations before an older species could evolve into a new one." - You are getting a bit technical here. I googled and found this on wikipedia which reproduces Haldane's mathematics and provides links to more recent work as well as to creationist exploitation of it: - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haldane's_dilemma - It seems to show that it is best to change one genetic trait at a time, which is what usually happens, rather than several at once.

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George Jellis answered re' Haldane's Dilemma: "It seems to show that it is best to change one genetic trait at a time, which is what usually happens, rather than several at once." I agree with that conclusion, but it doesn't really answer Haldane's original mathematical conjecture: since mutations are at random, the chance is more than one trait can pop up at the same time, and bad and neutral mutations far outnumber beneficial mutations. It does seem that 'good' traits survive against all odds, or else evolution would not have created more and more complex organisms. Haldane was essentially asking, how can that happen? To my knowledge, that question has never been answered. My guess is that the current research into microRNA and interference RNA will eventually show that complex codes in RNA manage the problem.

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This is not a subject on which I am any sort of expert, so I have not attempted to respond. However the subject of "Haldane's Dilemma" has come up on the Dawkins forum. The following is a copy of a response by one calling himself "Calilasseia" which gives up to date details: - === - Well first of all, Haldane's Dilemma has been roundly dealt with in the 49 years since Haldane first published his paper, not to mention the fact that Haldane himself stated that his conclusions would probably require drastic revision in the light of new data. He was, after all, operating with what was the state of the art of knowledge in 1957, and nowadays, we have acquired a lot more knowledge. - First of all, the assumptions upon which Haldane based his calculations include: - [1] That a gene, or collection of genes, is rare at the start of an evolutionary sequence, because they are initially detrimental; - [2] That a sudden environmental change now favours those genes; - [3] As a result, the large number of organisms possessing the previously favourable genes will all die. - First of all, the scenario was erected as an entirely hypothetical one. Second, assumption [3] is extremely suspect, given what we know from real world observation of actual living organisms. - However, more to the point, the idea that science has ignored the question or brushed it aside is errant nonsense. Take, for example, this interesting paper: - The Cost of Natural Selection Revisited by Leonard Nunney, Ann. Zool. Fennici, Vol 40, 185-194, 30 April 2003 - Let's take a look at the abstract: - Nunney, 2003 wrote:
In a constantly changing environment, organisms must continuously adapt or face extinction. J.B.S. Haldane argued that the "cost of natural selection" (also called the cost of a substitution) puts an upper limit on the rate of adaptation, and showed that the cost (C) was a decreasing function of of the initial frequency of the beneficial alleles. Based upon a mutation-selection balance and 10% selective mortality, he suggested that the limits to adaptive evolution was about one allelic substitution per 300 generations. I have tested Haldane's results using simulations of of a population limited by density-dependent regulation and subject to a constantly changing environment that affects n (=1-7) independent survival traits, each controlled by a single locus. I investigated the influence of carrying capacity (K), mutation rate (u), number of beneficial mutations per generation (approximated by M=2Ku) and net reproductive rate (R). Of these, M has the predominant influence. The effect of large changes in R was relatively small. The cost of selection (C) was measured as the shortest number of generations between an allelic substitution at all loci under selection that ws consistent with population persistence. The results differed from Haldane's solution.. Across a range of conditions, the cost of simultaneous selection at n loci was determined by the linear relationship C = C0(M) + nC1(M), where C0(M) is the intercept and C1(M) is the slope of the linear regression of C on n, for a given M. The intercept defined a positive fixed cost of substitution, that appears to reflect genetic deaths occurring during the stochastic phase when the beneficial alleles are rare. For M>Â½, the cost of natural selection is substantially less than Haldane's estimate; however, for M<Â½, the cost (and particularly the fixed cost) increases in an accelerating fashion as M is lowered. This result has important implications for conserved populations, since for u approximately equal to 5 Ã 10-6 the carrying capacity of the population must be 50,000 for M=Â½. To avoid low M, smaller populations should be linked together into a larger metapopulation whenever possible. This large unit would be capable of adapting when the isolated parts could not. It also suggests that if M is much less than 1, small gains in K through increases in habitat can have a very large positive influence on the future survival of the population in a changing environment. - Interested readers can read the full paper by downloading it from here. - http://www.sekj.org/PDF/anz40-free/anz40-185.pdf - So in other words, once again, the peer reviewed scientific literature comes up trumps. Haldane was right to be suspicious about his own work and right to suggest that it was in need of revision. What a pity he didn't have access to powerful computers to test his ideas upon.

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I'll have to research this further, but it is my impression that Gould and his school of thinkers thought that small isolated groups had a better chance of advancing evolution with needed change, not large groups. The study George cites uses assumptions in a computer program. Results are as accurate as the assumptions. Applies to Haldane also.

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George brought this up a long time ago, but a news review has been presented covering all the new theories to try to solve the problem, which roughly is: the time is too short, as accepted intervals in evolutionary history, for beneficial mutations to create speciation especially when looking at the human split from monkeys:-http://inference-review.com/article/haldanes-dilemma-This is a long mathematically intense article.-Haldane, one of the founders (along with Ronald Fisher and Sewall Wright) of mathematical population genetics, was the first to quantify such a limit on the speed of adaptive evolution.7 He concluded that the cost of selection defines one of the factors, perhaps the main one, determining the speed of evolution. Cost was the main reason Motoo Kimura proposed the neutral theory of molecular evolution. Many others cite its importance. -The implications for mammalian evolution were considered so severe that the issue became known as Haldane's dilemma.-Despite Haldane's work, a massive body of literature has accumulated asserting the primary role of natural selection in evolutionary change, often implying rates of adaptive evolution that exceed plausible limits. I maintain that cost, though often neglected in contemporary studies, remains as important as Haldane's mathematical theory of selection. By setting a limit on the number of selective evolutionary changes, Haldane provided a simple way to test the plausibility of many evolutionary scenarios.-***-It is easy to see why Haldane's conclusions posed a dilemma for biologists interested in mammalian evolution. Human and chimpanzee species diverged from a common ancestor approximately 4.5 to 13 million years ago. Humans currently have an average generation time of 30 years, chimpanzees 20 years. At most, 500,000 generations have elapsed. Given Haldane's limit, this makes for 3333.3 adaptive differences.-Can roughly 3000 changes explain all of the complex adaptive differences between humans and chimpanzees? -This is Haldane's dilemma.-It is a dilemma that has been exacerbated by genome sequencing. Humans and chimpanzees both have genome sizes of roughly 30 billion nucleotides. Yet these species differ by some 30 million fixed nucleotide differences.37 If these differences were fixed individually by positive selection, then the substitution rate would have been 1.5 substitutions per year in each line of descent, or 30 per generationa biological impossibility.-ReMine's work: "Can this formulation of cost be used to calculate an achievable number of substitutions over the course of human evolution? If we assume a total fertility rate of five per female, R = 2.5 per individual.54 If the historic population size N = 10,000, there are then roughly t ? 10 generations per substitution, implying a maximum of 50,000 substitutions.55-The dilemma remains.-***-With respect to neutral substitutions, it follows that there is no real dilemma. They can easily account for the approximately 30 million nucleotide differences observed between humans and chimpanzees. But neutral mutations have no effect on fitness, and so by definition do not contribute to complex adaptations. If we consider the case of beneficial mutations, then positive natural selection appears limited to driving the substitution of fewer than 10,000 nucleotides.-We are faced with a different formulation of the same dilemma. Can so few differences account for the complex adaptive changes and innovations that shaped humans over the 10 million years since their divergence from the chimpanzees? -Either Haldane's limit on adaptive changes can be modified while still assuming positive natural selection, or natural selection must be supplemented by a different adaptive mechanism.-***-Genetic drift: "In The Origins of Genome Architecture, Michael Lynch has argued that random genetic drift is, by itself, quite sufficient to explain many of the features of complex genomes. Neutral mutations that fix over the course of evolution might provide novel genetic contexts that can be converted into beneficial alleles by subsequent mutations. As few as one in 1077 protein domain-sized polypeptides may be able to form functional folds. This suggests that the number of neutral mutations needed to result in a functional gene product is vast. Lynch and Adam Abegg have observed that a mutation involving three nucleotide sites and two neutral steps would take ~760 million years to be fixed.-But processes of this sort do not explain functional innovations in structural genes, let alone genes that might be unique to the human species.

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George brought this up a long time ago, but a new review has been presented covering all the new theories to try to solve the problem, which roughly is: the time is too short, as accepted intervals in evolutionary history, for beneficial mutations to create speciation especially when looking at the human split from monkeys:
 
 http://inference-review.com/article/haldanes-dilemma
 
 This is a long mathematically intense article. 
 
 "Haldane, one of the founders (along with Ronald Fisher and Sewall Wright) of mathematical population genetics, was the first to quantify such a limit on the speed of adaptive evolution.7 He concluded that the cost of selection defines one of the factors, perhaps the main one, determining the speed of evolution. Cost was the main reason Motoo Kimura proposed the neutral theory of molecular evolution. Many others cite its importance. 
 
"The implications for mammalian evolution were considered so severe that the issue became known as Haldane's dilemma.
 
" Despite Haldane's work, a massive body of literature has accumulated asserting the primary role of natural selection in evolutionary change, often implying rates of adaptive evolution that exceed plausible limits. I maintain that cost, though often neglected in contemporary studies, remains as important as Haldane's mathematical theory of selection. By setting a limit on the number of selective evolutionary changes, Haldane provided a simple way to test the plausibility of many evolutionary scenarios.
 
 *** 
" It is easy to see why Haldane's conclusions posed a dilemma for biologists interested in mammalian evolution. Human and chimpanzee species diverged from a common ancestor approximately 4.5 to 13 million years ago. Humans currently have an average generation time of 30 years, chimpanzees 20 years. At most, 500,000 generations have elapsed. Given Haldane's limit, this makes for 3333.3 adaptive differences.
 
" Can roughly 3000 changes explain all of the complex adaptive differences between humans and chimpanzees? -This is Haldane's dilemma.
 
" It is a dilemma that has been exacerbated by genome sequencing. Humans and chimpanzees both have genome sizes of roughly 30 billion nucleotides. Yet these species differ by some 30 million fixed nucleotide differences.37 If these differences were fixed individually by positive selection, then the substitution rate would have been 1.5 substitutions per year in each line of descent, or 30 per generationa biological impossibility.
 
" ReMine's work: "Can this formulation of cost be used to calculate an achievable number of substitutions over the course of human evolution? If we assume a total fertility rate of five per female, R = 2.5 per individual.54 If the historic population size N = 10,000, there are then roughly t ? 10 generations per substitution, implying a maximum of 50,000 substitutions.55
 
 The dilemma remains.
 
 ***
 
" With respect to neutral substitutions, it follows that there is no real dilemma. They can easily account for the approximately 30 million nucleotide differences observed between humans and chimpanzees. But neutral mutations have no effect on fitness, and so by definition do not contribute to complex adaptations. If we consider the case of beneficial mutations, then positive natural selection appears limited to driving the substitution of fewer than 10,000 nucleotides.
 
 We are faced with a different formulation of the same dilemma. Can so few differences account for the complex adaptive changes and innovations that shaped humans over the 10 million years since their divergence from the chimpanzees? -" Either Haldane's limit on adaptive changes can be modified while still assuming positive natural selection, or natural selection must be supplemented by a different adaptive mechanism.
 
 ***
 
" Genetic drift: "In The Origins of Genome Architecture, Michael Lynch has argued that random genetic drift is, by itself, quite sufficient to explain many of the features of complex genomes. Neutral mutations that fix over the course of evolution might provide novel genetic contexts that can be converted into beneficial alleles by subsequent mutations. As few as one in 1077 protein domain-sized polypeptides may be able to form functional folds. This suggests that the number of neutral mutations needed to result in a functional gene product is vast. Lynch and Adam Abegg have observed that a mutation involving three nucleotide sites and two neutral steps would take ~760 million years to be fixed.
 
" But processes of this sort do not explain functional innovations in structural genes, let alone genes that might be unique to the human species."

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His issue is the time limits involved so chance beneficial mutations can do their completed changes for a Newly fully working species. Review the last article if needed. In this case the author forgets the need for chance mutations over time and says death is needed to kills off those without the new chance beneficial mutation:

https://nautil.us/issue/104/harmony/why-do-we-have-to-die

"For this new mutation to climb in frequency from 1 in 100,000 to 2 in 100,000, the individual who carries it must produce not one but two offspring. But the population, we’ve said, is held steady, by some limited resource, at 100,000 individuals. So for one extra individual bearing the new mutation to enter the population, one extra individual who does not bear the new mutation must die, making room for improvement, so to speak. More generally, one extra death is required for each incremental increase in the beneficial mutation’s prevalence. For the new mutation to increase by 1 percent in our population of 100,000, 1,000 extra deaths must occur. For the new mutation to be shared by the whole population—for it to go to fixation, as evolutionary biologists would put it—100,000 extra deaths must occur. Thus, the dues of evolution are paid in the currency of death.

"We ought to add some nuance. For each incremental increase in the frequency of the beneficial mutation, it’s not technically a death that’s called for, but only the failure of one individual to survive and reproduce. Maybe someone just doesn’t get to have her allotted offspring. The point is only that the parent’s genetic lineage must come to an end. But in nature, that usually means mortality for either the prospective parent or the offspring. A reasonable shorthand is, well, just death.

***

"Using our toy model just a moment ago, we reasoned that the number of extra deaths, spread over the entire history of the evolutionary change, would be about equal to the population size in any single generation (our 100,000). In his model of diploids with semi-dominant mutations, Haldane found that the number was more like 30 times the population size in any single generation.

***

"Recall that, in Haldane’s improvement to our toy model, pushing a new mutation from a single copy to predominance and finally to fixation required 30 times as many “extra” or “useful” deaths as there were individuals in the population during a single generation. So that means the minimal number of useful deaths required to transform the chimp-human ancestor into a bona fide Homo sapiens would be 100,000 (that’s the number of selected mutations) times 50,000 (that’s the population size) times 30 (Haldane’s factor). That gives us an answer of 150 billion useful deaths.

"Hmmm. That’s a really big number. How many deaths altogether, useful or not, were there along the lineage from the chimp-human ancestor to modern humans? Based on our estimate of the population size (which we just used), the average generation time (which we can make a pretty good guess at), and the total time since chimps and humans split (a number that comes from both archaeology and genetics), we can do another simple calculation to estimate the total number of deaths. I just worked it out, and it comes to ... 17.5 billion.

"Oops. How can the number of useful or extra deaths that natural selection needs to evolve a human from its ancestor be larger than the total number of deaths that have taken place? Well, it can’t. So what’s the explanation?

"In large part, it’s sex. Say a certain man has a beneficial mutation. And say a certain woman has one of her own, only it’s different: It confers a different advantage, and it’s located somewhere else in the genome. And say, finally, this man and this woman get together and have kids. One of those kids might get both beneficial mutations, while another kid might get neither. When the doubly lucky kid survives and reproduces, while the doubly unlucky kid doesn’t, a single death becomes doubly useful: It pays for the simultaneous rise in frequency of two beneficial mutations.

"You can repeat the argument for parents who have two mutations, three, and so on. Thanks to sex, a single death can push many beneficial mutations toward their ultimate fixation. We can conclude, therefore, that although the price of life is death, sex improves the exchange rate.

***

"And yet, though Darwin may have found no ultimate vindication for death in the creation of beautiful living things, he would continue to find profound joy in such beauty. In sexual selection, he discovered the origin of life’s most extravagant displays. He attributed a great deal of importance to that process in the descent of Homo sapiens from hominid ancestors. To my knowledge, though, he never realized what Haldane and genomics have helped us to see here, that sex can greatly reduce the toll required for a certain measure of evolution."

Comment: This cement-headed Darwinist is insanely confused. He doesn't recognize Haldane's timing dilemma. He thinks a random beneficial mutation can simply appear and every design will be just fine in the time allotted. What he does recognize is death, and I might add extinctions, as a high important part of the process of evolution from simple to complex. dhw doesn't seem to understand all those necessary extinctions led to humans

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George Jelliss writes: "As regards the inclusion or not of the phrase 'by the Creator' after the word 'breathed'. This is surely a trivial point..." - Taken in isolation, yes it is, but it's symptomatic of the way Dawkins and his ilk distort arguments and mislead people (or perhaps even themselves) into thinking that their beliefs are backed by science. It's become clear on this forum alone that there is a great deal of confusion over what constitutes Darwinism, evolution and natural selection, and to what extent atheism is based on faith in chance. - First, Darwinism. In an interview, Dawkins said specifically: "I'm a Darwinist. I believe the only alternatives are Lamarckism or God...Life in the universe is either Darwinian or something else not yet thought of." (The latter clearly rules out God or any other sort of designer.) Darwin said one "can be an ardent Theist and an evolutionist." So if Dawkins is a Darwinist, what was Darwin? - Secondly, according to Dawkins, natural selection "explains the whole of life" (p. 116, The God Delusion). And: "Design is not the only alternative to chance. Natural selection is a better alternative" (p. 121). Does it? And is it? Does natural selection explain the origin of life or of the mechanisms that gave rise to heredity, new organs, adaptation etc., and doesn't natural selection depend on random (i.e. chance) mutations? Contrast Darwin: "How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself originated." - Darwin, evolution, natural selection and atheism have been rolled up into a single ball, inscribed with its maker's logo: DAWKINSIAN SCIENCE. Alternative views of science, including Darwin's own, are excluded. The different strands need to be separated: Darwin ... sorry if this is getting repetitive ... was an agnostic, natural selection is only one element of evolution, evolution itself does not provide scientific evidence either for or against God, and the choice remains: either you believe in chance, you believe in design, or you admit you don't know.

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I responded to the last part of the first paragraph of dhw's post by opening a "Definitions" section, but it seems he really wanted a reply to his criticisms of Richard Dawkins, so I will attempt a defence here. - dhw considered that Dawkins's preference for quoting from the first edition of "Origins" (which did not include the phrase 'by the Creator' after the word 'breathed') was "symptomatic of the way Dawkins and his ilk distort arguments and mislead people (or perhaps even themselves) into thinking that their beliefs are backed by science." - dhw: First, Darwinism. In an interview, Dawkins said specifically: "I'm a Darwinist. I believe the only alternatives are Lamarckism or God...Life in the universe is either Darwinian or something else not yet thought of." (The latter clearly rules out God or any other sort of designer.) Darwin said one "can be an ardent Theist and an evolutionist." So if Dawkins is a Darwinist, what was Darwin? - I don't know the full context in which Dawkins was speaking, and there is an ellipsis in the quote. However it seems to me that Dawkins is here just using the word Darwinism in its standard dictionary definition "the theory of the origin of animal and plant species by evolution through a process of natural selection" (Collins Dictionary) which does not include any mention of God. If dhw thinks "Darwinism" should be redefined to bring in God I think he has an uphill task. - dhw: Secondly, according to Dawkins, natural selection "explains the whole of life" (p. 116, The God Delusion). And: "Design is not the only alternative to chance. Natural selection is a better alternative" (p. 121). Does it? And is it? Does natural selection explain the origin of life or of the mechanisms that gave rise to heredity, new organs, adaptation etc., and doesn't natural selection depend on random (i.e. chance) mutations? Contrast Darwin: "How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself originated." - These quotes from Dawkins come in a section headed "Natural selection as a consciousness-raiser", so he is talking about evolution of species, not about the origin of life, abiogensis. Also he is arguing against those creationists who keep saying that evolution is solely a matter of chance and ignore or fail to understand the power of natural selection. - dhw: Darwin, evolution, natural selection and atheism have been rolled up into a single ball, inscribed with its maker's logo: DAWKINSIAN SCIENCE. Alternative views of science, including Darwin's own, are excluded. - Dawkins's book "The God Delusion" is specifically devoted to the question of whether evolution by natural selection is compatible with God-belief. Part of his argument is that complexity can only appear by evolution, and so if a God existed prior to the origin of life, it must have been the product of prior evolution, thus we get an endless regression. - dhw: The different strands need to be separated: Darwin ... sorry if this is getting repetitive ... was an agnostic, natural selection is only one element of evolution, evolution itself does not provide scientific evidence either for or against God. - The compatibility of evolution with religious beliefs is indeed argued by other people, Ken Miller, Francis Collins, Polkinghorne, etc. But the contrary thesis is the whole point of Dawkins's book. - dhw: and the choice remains: either you believe in chance, you believe in design, or you admit you don't know. - Here you are sounding like a creationist again. Chance is a factor in the theory, it produces the variation upon which natural selection acts.

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My thanks to George Jelliss for his detailed, helpful and gallant defence of Richard Dawkins. - I agree with much of what you have said. The problem, however, is not Dawkins' advocacy of evolution (and certainly not any desire on my part to redefine Darwinism), but his insistence that one must choose between Darwinism and God. You have summed this up yourself : - "The compatibility of evolution with religious beliefs is indeed argued by other people, Ken Miller, Francis Collins, Polkinghorne, etc. [You might have mentioned Darwin himself.] But the contrary thesis is the whole point of Dawkins's book." - And that is the basis of the distortions. By making it appear that Darwinism and natural selection turn God into an unnecessary hypothesis, Dawkins also makes it appear that science supports the case for the origin of life through chance and for the ability of chance mutations to create complex new organs and systems. It is these two areas ... not the process of natural selection ... that have no scientific basis and therefore demand a quasi-religious faith.
 
 When faced with this problem, as once again you have quite rightly pointed out, he falls back repeatedly on the question of where God came from (i.e. the "endless regression"). This is part of the dilemma that faces the don't-know category of agnostic (my position). Even though I can happily go along with natural selection as the logical method by which some species survive and others don't, I do not have faith in chance to invent life or complex new systems. Not knowing the origin of a designer does not (a) make the chance theory any more believable, or (b) even invalidate the design theory, since eventually all theories come up against the same impossibility of knowing the first cause. But of course it is no basis for faith either, which brings us back full circle to the last statement of mine which you quote and which ... mysteriously ... sounds to you like Creationism: - "Either you believe in chance [i.e. abiogenesis and innovative mutations], you believe in design, or you admit you don't know." - I don't know. That's what makes me an agnostic. And although it is none of my business what other people believe ... and good luck to them if they can derive comfort from their religion or quasi-religion ... I find it objectionable when atheists (or theists) try to impose their beliefs on me, denigrate other people's beliefs, or juggle with scientific terminology in order to give their arguments an unsubstantiated ring of authenticity.

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