Tag: evolution

As various studies have reported, biologists are the least intelligent of the science majors. And as a perusal of any biology major’s curriculum will show, most of them are completely uneducated in history, in logic, and in philosophy. There isn’t even much use of the actual scientific method in their “science”; there is a reason that hard scientists have long denigrated them as “butterfly collectors. While Richard Dawkins is the most notorious example of a biologist who foolishly attempts to opine outside his area of expertise, at least he usually appears to have some idea of what he is talking about when biological evolution is the subject. PZ Myers, on the other hand, is so intellectually undisciplined that he cannot keep even simple things straight when the subject he teaches at his community college is the topic at hand:

1. Of course biologists have considered alternate mechanisms! Coyne argues for selection as a mechanism of speciation (by pleiotropic side effects of genes that are selected for other functions), and Futuyma argues for speciation by drift.

2. Similarly, mechanisms of abiogenesis have been proposed that suggest selection, but also chance or as a necessary outcome of the physico-chemical properties.

3. The structure of DNA was analyzed by its chemistry, not it’s evolutionary history, obviously, but as this paragraph even concedes, the consequences of DNA biochemistry were profoundly important in their effects on evolution.

4. Nope. Structure of DNA was determined in 1953; the neo-Darwinian synthesis occurred in the 1930s-1940s with the integration of genetics into evolutionary biology. It was genetics (especially population genetics) that established evolution as the only reasonable explanation for the history of life on earth.

5. The precise taxonomic status of Archaeopteryx was not a specific prediction of evolutionary theory. Finding more data in the form of more fossils of feathered dinosaurs strengthens the idea of avian descent from dinosaurs.

6. If you examine the family tree of Archaeopteryx and Xiaotingia, what you should see is that the taxonomic re-evaluation of Archeopteryx merely moves it from the Paraves branch to the nearby Deinonychosaurian branch…hardly a “wildly wrong” model.

7. Vox Day has not described anything yet which shows evolution being wrong. Adjusting the precise timing of evolutionary events by millions of years is a reasonable response to new data which does not falsify the underlying hypotheses of relatedness.

8. Again, this discovery does not demonstrate the opposite of what evolutionary biologists have been claiming, and actually makes for a better fit with other data about ancient bird ancestors; moving Archaeopteryx from a first cousin to a second cousin of the ancestor of modern birds isn’t a radical idea that invalidates evolutionary biology.

The big picture is even more damning for Vox Day. Of course we have huge volumes of information supporting the theory of evolution, that suite of mechanisms and principles that describe the broad course of evolutionary history, including common descent and descent with modification. And also there are a multitude of details that aren’t completely known — we have millions of species on this planet, and only a fraction have been studied in depth. The theory of evolution does not hang on the exact lineage of any two species out of those millions…it hangs on the fact that there is a lineage.

Vox Day is quite the poseur — he pretends to know better than real scientists, when he can’t even tell the difference between hypothesis and data.

First, let me begin by addressing PZ’s remarkably foolish comment at the end. He knows perfectly well that I know the difference between hypothesis and data, this is just his characteristic posturing in a groundless attempt to argue from the lectern. His pretense that anyone, let alone a superintelligence of my confirmed cognitive capacity, might have any difficulty distinguishing the two concepts accomplishes little more than to imply he teaches a remarkably low caliber of student. Second, I will note that I don’t pretend to know better than real scientists, I often prove that I know better than they do.

Consider, for example, the public statements of the illustrious Paul Krugman, professor of Economics and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, Centenary Professor at the London School of Economics, and 2008 recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics versus Vox Day, level 72 Dwarf Hunter and one-time Pooyan world champion, concerning the price of gold in 2002, the housing market in 2005, the success of the Obama stimulus plan in 2009, the economic theory of the Austrian School, or even the historical expenditures of the Hoover administration in 1929-1933. Back when gold cost $325 per ounce, Krugman was declaring gold to be “just a metal” and pushing the Fed to create a housing bubble while I was writing columns urging readers to stay out of real estate and invest in “the barbarous relic” instead. Gold is now at $1,750. Case-Shiller is now at 125.41 and falling; it’s already below the 126.13 of Q3-2002. So you see, Dawkins and Myers are neither the first nor the last scientists to have been my bitches.

I have no need to rely upon any pretense of superior knowledge when I can cite numerous empirically confirmed demonstrations of it. PZ would have done much better to question if my proven ability “to know better than real scientists” translates from economics, economic history, and finance to evolutionary biology, global warming, and other quasi-scientific subjects. No doubt PZ considers himself a real scientist, so let’s see how he did with his seven specific points.

1. PZ failed to comprehend the point of what I wrote when I asked when any evolutionist has reconsidered the basic hypothesis that species evolve into different species through natural selection as a result of the falsity of one, ten, or even a hundred predictions based upon it. Obviously, I am well aware of the existence of proposed “alternate mechanisms”, otherwise I would not openly mock the “Theorum of Evolution by (probably) Natural Selection, Biased Mutation, Genetic Drift, and Gene Flow” aka TE(p)NSBMGDaGF in the Voxicon.

The point was not that no one has ever proposed an alternative method, but rather, that alternative methods, (or as I prefer to call them, evolutionary epicycles), are invariably proposed in lieu of contemplating the possibility that the basic hypothesis is simply wrong. When an astrophysicist or an economist gets a prediction based on a hypothesis wrong, his consequent assumption is usually that the hypothesis is incorrect. When an evolutionary biologist gets a prediction based on a hypothesis wrong, his consequent assumption is always that the hypothesis cannot possibly be to blame, there must be some missing factor that has not been properly taken into account. If evolution by natural selection has not taken place, then evolution by some other mechanism must have taken place; the logical conclusion that the core hypothesis is simply incorrect and evolution did not take place is seldom, if ever, considered an option.

2. PZ’s answer is completely irrelevant. There is zero evidence that abiogenesis ever took place, robustly imagined mechanisms for it notwithstanding. To claim that because there was no life before, but there is now, ergo abiogenesis occurred, is the very sort of philosophy that science has largely come to supplant. Evolutionists tend to wisely punt on the logically-dictated abiogenetic foundation upon which their materialist assumptions rest, but there is no reason anyone should permit them to do so. It’s rather like economists who attempt to leave debt out of their equations. The numbers may all add up nicely without it, but leaving out the most important element tends to call the entire model into question.

3. PZ could actually have claimed some very limited credit for evolutionary theory on the basis of Linus Pauling’s contribution to the discovery of DNA, but instead he demonstrates that he completely failed to comprehend the point. It is irrelevant that he believes “the consequences of DNA biochemistry were profoundly important in their effects on evolution”. That is surely true, but it doesn’t change the truth of my statement that evolutionary theory was not required for the development of DNA. In fact, it’s rather like saying the consequences of the beheading were profoundly important in their effects on the criminal’s future activities.

4. The timeline of Mendelian genetics, the Neo-Darwinian synthesis, and the discovery of DNA are not relevant here. The salient point is that DNA, which required no assistance from evolutionary theory to develop although it did receive some as per Pauling’s aforementioned contribution, has exploded numerous decades-old assumptions by the evolutionists, including the Tree of Life and the very concept of speciation itself. As DNA is better understood, (which understanding requires absolutely nothing from evolutionary theory), there is a reasonable probability that it will eventually undermine the entire idea of evolution and not merely the natural selection mechanism. Still, the only reason evolution is still considered even remotely relevant to actual science that does not revolve around the increasingly futile efforts to provide a solid scientific foundation for a proof of evolution is due to the perceived connection between DNA and TE(p)NSBMGDaGF. No scientist attempting to improve DNA identification or unravel the mysteries of junk DNA finds it terribly useful to incorporate natural selection into their research. Indeed, to the extent that researchers concern themselves with the evolutionary utility of “junk DNA”, they are arguably hindering their research by chasing a rotting red herring. It’s rather like the way Keynesians avidly investigate global savings rates while paying no attention to the various debt/GDP ratios.

5. What a load of historically revisionist nonsense. Anyone who grew up in the 1970s can remember the pride of place that Archaeopteryx held in evolutionary theory. It was a “missing link”, it was cited as proof of evolution in our elementary school textbooks. It still has its own Wikipedia entry: “The first remains of Archaeopteryx were discovered just two years after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. Archaeopteryx seemed to confirm Darwin’s theories and has since become a key piece of evidence for the origin of birds, the transitional fossils debate, and confirmation of evolution.” Finding more data in the form of more fossils of feathered dinosaurs suggests that more dinosaurs had feathers, it doesn’t strengthen “the idea of avian descent from dinosaurs”, primarily for what should be the obvious reason that the significant avian is no longer avian.

6. PZ skates over the fact that the erstwhile bird is no longer a bird, but merely a another type of dinosaur, means that it is not the transitional species it was once believed to be. This not only serves to demolish the scientific importance of Archaeopteryx, but also undermines the confirmation of Darwin’s theories that its “first bird” claim once supported.

7. This is an absurd statement. PZ here illustrates why real scientists, whose predictive models are actually expected to perform to high degrees of accuracy, hold the butterfly collectors in scientific contempt. The reason Daniel Dennett was forced to appeal to astrophysics rather than evolutionary biology when he praises science is because the latter lacks the “amazingly accurate results” that has generated so much respect for the former. Evolutionary biology has simply never delivered any reasonable predictive results in over 150 years and has been responsible for an incredible number of frauds as well as false predictions. When Samuelsonian economists attempt to get away with margins of error measured in the billions of dollars – the most recent Q1-2011 revision of GDP amounted to a $225 billion error – people rightly conclude their models are fundamentally flawed. Given the similar scales involved, there is no reason evolutionary biologists should not be held to the same standard.

8. As I wrote in my previous post, this is just another demonstration of the intrinsic unfalsifiability of the butterfly collector’s art. When he’s wrong, when a bird is not a bird or a transitional species, but merely another dinosaur, it really means he’s more right than ever! This is ridiculous. When I said that Hillary Clinton would win the 2008 Democratic nomination, it did not make me more right than ever when Obama actually won it. It made me wrong.

As for the supposedly damning big picture, I am perfectly content to await further developments. I further note that as those “huge volumes of information” continue to expand, the evolutionary theorists have been forced to concoct ever more complicated and grandiose evolutionary epicycles to attempt to keep Darwin in the picture. Both the core concepts of “species” and “natural selection” have been increasingly called into question by advances in genetics, and it will not surprise me if further advances force the eventual junking of TENS in any of its reasonably recognizable forms.

Still, just to be clear, I am not, nor have I ever been, an evolution denier. I am merely a strong evolution skeptic, and it is worth noting that my perceptive and public doubts about natural selection are increasingly being supported by firm believers in TE(p)NSBMGDaGF. One of the many reasons that I remain confirmed in my skepticism to date is the constant historical revisionism of PZ Myers and many other True Believers in the cult of Darwin as well as their staunch refusal to abide by the same standards of evidence that even the practitioners of an arcane quasi-science like economics do.

As an added bonus, these three comments from the astute economic observers at Pharyngula will likely provide considerably entertainment to those who have read The Return of the Great Depression.

“Well, you gotta give him credit for consistency. He is all wrong about Keynesian economics, too. It is the neo-Keynsians, not the freshwater types, whose models have correctly predicted the economic mess we are in today. The evidence (completely ignored by what Krugman calls the “Very Serious People) is pretty clear about this.”
– SES

I’d trust Vox Day on economics as much as I do on science. Zero.
– Raven

One notes the comparison with pleasure. Keynesian economics, like evolutionary biology, has an outstanding record of success, and has become the foundation for a vast amount of productive work in its field.
– JRE

Those who make ridiculous assertions that amount to this line of logic should not find it terribly hard to understand why those of us who actually possess working memories tend to be just a little bit skeptical about the reliability of whatever their current positions happen to be. I know you are probably as shocked as I am that the Fowl Atheist is claiming that the “reevaluation” of Archaeopteryx, the fossil that has been hailed as literally rock-solid proof of evolution since I was being subjected to evolutionary propaganda back in elementary school, doesn’t mean that the legitimacy of either archeological science or TE(p)NSBMGDaGF should be called into question:

We all knew this was coming. Xiaotingia, the newly described feathered dinosaur, suggests a reevaluation of the taxonomic status of Archaeopteryx, so the creationists are stumbling all over each other to crow about the failure of science…which doesn’t make any sense, since reconsidering hypotheses in the light of new evidence is exactly what science is supposed to do.

That’s an interesting claim. Precisely when has any evolutionist reconsidered either a) the basic hypothesis that species evolve into different species through natural selection or b) the corollary and requisite hypothesis that life evolved from non-life, as a result of the falsity of one, ten, or even a hundred predictions that relied upon one or both of them? If it weren’t for DNA, which was not discovered or developed with any assistance from evolutionary theory, evolutionary biology would already be openly recognized by every intelligent, rational, science-literate individual as being about as useful as phrenology and astrology.

Darwinian biologists are very much like Keynesian economists. It doesn’t matter how many times their predictions fail. It doesn’t matter how often their models are proven to be wildly wrong. It doesn’t matter how many times they have been wrong in the past even with the benefit of margins of error consisting of millions of years. They continue to insist that their position is based on evidence even when the evidence demonstrates precisely the opposite of what they have been claiming.

An evolutionist is one who is continually convinced, despite past experience, that adding just one more series of magic evolutionary epicycles will somehow make the whole system finally begin to function in a coherent and reliably predictive manner.

In other, somewhat tangential news, we have discovered that the New Atheist Circle Jerk continues unabated. Seriously, you can’t even parody these charlatans without them one-upping you.

The 2011 Richard Dawkins Award goes to…
Category: Godlessness

Who else but Christopher Hitchens?

What a beautiful, beautiful thing. If I had dared to invent the idea, no one would have believed me. Out of nearly seven billion people on the planet, Richard Dawkins chose to give out his eponymous award to the third-most amusing recipient. Second, you understand, would have been awarding it to himself. But to maximize our collective utility on the happiness-suffering metric, though, he would have had to present the award to Rebecca Watson.

After only 150 years, Man finally witnesses evolution from one distinct species into another:

A dragon-sized, fruit-eating lizard that lives in the trees on the northern Philippines island of Luzon has been confirmed as a new species, scientists reported on Tuesday. Hunted for its tasty flesh, the brightly colored forest monitor lizard can grow to more than six feet in length but weighs only about 22 pounds (10 kg), said Rafe Brown of the University of Kansas, whose team confirmed the find.

“It lives up in trees, so it can’t get as massive as the Komodo dragon, a huge thing that eats large amounts of fresh meat,” Brown said by telephone. “This thing is a fruit-eater and it’s only the third fruit-eating lizard in the world.”

I think it’s remarkable proof of the power of natural selection. And to think that it only takes three generations for homo sapiens to evolve into draco arboris! No doubt the families of those missing Japanese soldiers will not only be relieved to know the ultimate fate of their loved ones, but proud to know that both the Sakurakai and Shintaro Ishihara were right and the Japanese are, in fact, the most highly evolved form of Man on the planet.

Of course, we had better wipe these dragons out at once before the pressure placed upon them by quasi-cannibalistic Philippinos causes them to evolve the ability to breathe fire. And in other evolution news, the Missing Link was found again. What are the odds that it lasts longer than last year’s extraordinary fossil find, Ida?

I found this exchange in the comments to be more than a little amusing, as Darth clearly picked up on the same scientific ignorance of the design process in reading about the Pagel paper that I did in reading Richard Dawkins’s latest book.

Darth Toolpodicus: “‘Rather than designing each species from scratch, as an engineer might, evolution is conservative, using the same designs over and over.’

Are you freaking kidding me?!? SERIOUSLY?!? Pagel plainly doesn’t know the first thing about design engineering… Wow is that gaspingly ignorant. Of course, what would I know…having only spent my entire career in R&D design engineering.”

Schadenfreude: “You’re right. Let me rephrase it for him: “…as an engineer who, unlike human engineers, was not limited in time, resources, or ingenuity, and who did not for some hidden reason want to make every organism appear related just as one would expect if evolution had occurred.”

The reason that this is so funny to a game and technology designer like me is that whenever evolutionists attack the idea of creation from a design angle, they almost invariably do two things. First, they make what is best described as the Scheisskopfian Plea, after the character from the Joseph Heller novel.

“‘I don’t believe,’ she sobbed, bursting violently into tears. ‘But the God I don’t believe in is a good God, a just God, a merciful God. He’s not the mean and stupid God you make him out to be.’”

The Creator God in which the evolutionist doesn’t believe is a good designer, a careful designer, an efficient designer. He’s not the lazy and careless designer that the apparent design imperfections make him out to be.

The second thing that they do is reveal a near-complete ignorance of the design process. Every designer, hardware and software, reuses as much material as he can. I’m finishing up a design document right now, and it is literally nothing more than the exact same document I used for a previous design, but with most of the graphics and some of the text changed. I’ve also been reviewing a number of development projects over the last two weeks and the best of them was described to me like this: “It’s “famous game designer’s” latest, it’s just “very successful game” set in a [different] setting.” And, after reviewing the material, that’s precisely what it is. As far as I can tell, not even the hotkeys have changed.

The design process is messy, haphazard, and often involves a certain amount of retrofitting. If you pop the top on the average high-end mouse, you’ll not infrequently find the circuit board inside crossed with a wire or three. That retro-fitted inefficiency is not an indication that the mouse evolved through natural selection, it just means that the design engineer decided to fix a problem without starting from scratch. And most designs are, to be blunt, a little crazy and a lot stupid. Before embarking upon my most recent technology design project, I looked through patent after patent and was astounded by how many people and corporations had designed multi-button mice over the last thirty years… and how every single one of them had placed those additional buttons right under the palm of the user’s hand, which is the second most-inaccessible location they could possibly have chosen.

Once you take into account that the Biblical God is said to have regretted that He made Man (Genesis 6:6) and that He made Saul king over Israel (1 Samuel 15:11), it seems more than a bit… clueless… to base an argument upon the idea that a god who informs us in his own scriptures that he makes mistakes cannot design anything in a manner that we might consider to be mistaken. And this does not even take into account the obvious possibility that planned imperfection was part of the design. For example, I find myself wondering what evolutionists who favor the Scheisskopfian argument conclude from the obvious design failure involved in the susceptibility of digital Call of Duty characters to the flying projectiles that infest their environment.

After all, imperfection and death couldn’t possibly be part of a truly efficient design….

Blackblade explains his take on Richard Dawkins’s invalid substitution of inference for fact in his latest book, The Greatest Show on Earth:

My reading may be oversimplifying but, summarising, his fundamental assertion is this: There is sufficient evidence, direct and inferred, to prove that evolution has occurred (although not the mechanism by which it did so), to the normal standards of such proof and it should therefore be viewed as fact.

He then attempts to justify his nomenclature of evolution as a “fact” by somewhat confusing hypotheses, theorems and facts and the definition thereof. He even goes so far as to create a new one called theorums so as to be more precise in his meaning. However, since you made a few words up yourself in TIA for a similar purpose I think you can’t complain on that one too much 🙂 But, yes, I do agree that your original point was valid.

However, and this is why I made my original point, the whole thing is a distraction from the fundamental issue … is there sufficient evidence to conclude that evolution has occurred and with what degree of confidence … the nomenclature of what confidence level deserves the imprimatur “Fact” is, to me at least, largely inconsequential and Dawkins would have done well to have avoided the pseudo-philosophical and just focused on the evidence.

I certainly can’t disagree with the latter part of that statement. Dawkins would always do well to avoid anything that is even remotely philosophical, pseudo or otherwise, since philosophy is demonstrably outside both his competence and his interest. However, what Blackblade is missing here is that The Greatest Show on Earth is not a rational case for the theory of evolution by natural selection or possibly something else. It is instead a polemical work of propaganda; as in The God Delusion, Dawkins is not presenting his case and methodically supporting that case with evidence, he is instead merely attempting to browbeat and bedazzle the careless or moderately intelligent reader into accepting something that is provably and demonstrably untrue. The reason that Dawkins could not simply focus on the evidence because the evidence, scientific and otherwise, is insufficient to make a convincing case, let alone a conclusive one.

Consider the insidious and characteristic bait-and-switch in which Dawkins engages in the first chapter alone:

“Evolution is a fact. Beyond reasonable doubt. Beyond serious doubt, beyond sane, informed, intelligent doubt, beyond doubt evolution is a fact.”

“Evolution is a fact, and this book will demonstrate it.”

“I shall demonstrate that evolution is an inescapable fact.”

“I shall show the irrefragable power of the inference that evolution is a fact.”

Notice the rapid devolution in Dawkins’s case from “evolution is an inescapable fact” to “I infer that evolution is a fact”. These are two very different statements because an inference is not a fact, by definition. It cannot reasonably be considered a fact no matter how much Dawkins elects to argue that it can be. And Dawkins knows this perfectly well, for he even writes: “The dictionary definition of a fact mentions ‘actual obervation or authentic testimony, as opposed to what is merely inferred‘ (emphasis added). The implied pejorative of that ‘merely’ is a bit of a cheek. Careful inference can be more reliable than ‘actual observation’, however strongly our intuition protests at it.”

But what Dawkins has done here is to cherry-pick aspects of the definition of “fact” and silently substitute “apparent fact” for “fact” in order to dishonestly justify his substitution of inference for fact. It is true that careful inference can be more reliable than actual observation, but it is also true that astrology, blind luck, and women’s intuition can be more reliable than actual observation. None of these comparisons of reliability have anything to do with the definition of a fact. In addition to leaving out the greater portion of the definition, Dawkins skates over the obvious distinction between fact and apparent fact, which is to say that if an observation or testimony is incorrect, then the claim based on that observation or testimony is clearly not a fact. Now let’s consider the definition.

FACT
–noun

1. something that actually exists; reality; truth
2. something known to exist or to have happened
3. a truth known by actual experience or observation; something known to be true
4. something said to be true or supposed to have happened

Dawkins blatantly leaves out the first two definitions and the second part of the third one in a devious attempt to leverage the small opening provided by the first part of the third one into misleading the reader into accepting the idea that an inference is equivalent to a fact. But it is not. It cannot be, according to its own definition.

INFERENCE
–noun

1. the act or process of inferring.
2. something that is inferred
3. Logic.
a. the process of deriving the strict logical consequences of assumed premises.
b. the process of arriving at some conclusion that, though it is not logically derivable from the assumed premises, possesses some degree of probability relative to the premises.
c. a proposition reached by a process of inference.

Of course, the reason that Dawkins wants to claim that his proposition, his conclusion with some degree of probability that is not logically derivable from the premises, is something that known to exist or have happened, is that if he sticks to what he can actually prove to be true, he has absolutely no basis for claiming that people who reject that proposition are “History-deniers”. Because, by the very definition of inference, there is some degree of probability that the skeptics are correct to doubt the validity of his conclusion.

I note with no little amusement that no man who was so foolish to write, as Dawkins did on page 249 of The God Delusion: “I do not believe there is an atheist in the world who would bulldoze Mecca— or Chartres, York Minster or Notre Dame, the Shwe Dagon, the temples of Kyoto or, of course, the Buddhas of Bamiyan.”, should ever dare to use the term “History-denier” in public. Remember, we are dealing with such a historical ignoramus here that he not only doesn’t know it was atheists who destroyed 41,000 of Russia’s 48,000 churches, 240 of 700 Buddhist temples in Vietnam, and 7,000 Buddhist temples in Tibet in the previous century, but genuinely believes religion is a primary cause of war.

Blackblade points out that Dawkins coins a somewhat useful term, “theorum”, in order to distinguish non-mathematically provable scientific concepts in which he has a high level of confidence from mathematical theorems. The ironic thing, however, is that Dawkins destroys his own case in his very definition of “theorum”.

“[It] has been confirmed or established by observation or experiment, and is propounded or accepted as accounting for the known facts; [it is] a statement of what are held to be the general laws, principles or causes of something known or observed.”

What follows are 434 pages of explaining why the reader should accept Dawkins’s proposition as a fact despite the absence of observation and experiment in support of it. I think my favorite argument was Dawkins’s technologically naive citation of the recurrent laryngeal nerve in mammals as good evidence against a designer. Speaking as an veteran technology designer, I would invite anyone who finds that argument convincing to open up the shell of an electronic device; in many cases you will find no shortages of wires indicating similar reroutings of the printed circuit boards.

And ironically, even if evolution by possible natural selection is both propounded and accepted as accounting for the known facts by every sane, informed, intelligent individual, that pesky and means that in addition to not being a fact, Dawkins’s inference does not even qualify as a theorum by his own chosen definition.

The historical fact of the matter is that evolution by natural selection is a failed science. It has a long and inglorious record of failed predictions that puts even Keynesian economics to shame. Evolutionists know this, which is why they prefer polemic to predictions and why the foremost evolutionary propagandist has adopted rhetorical tactics that are utilized by the devotees of another pseudoscience, anthropogenic climate change/global warming.

The Greatest Show on Earth is an apt name for Dawkins’s book. For, as the man who made that phrase famous is popularly and erroneously supposed to have said, there’s a sucker born every minute.