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Tallis in Wonderland

An Encounter with Radical Darwinitis

Dr Raymond Tallis lances a metaphysical boil.

Regular readers of this column will know that I have repeatedly criticized ‘Darwinitis’. I have, of course, no problem with Darwinism, and its central idea of natural selection operating on spontaneous variation as a mechanism explaining the journey from single-celled creatures to the organism H. sapiens. It is one of the most tested and robust of scientific theories, and technologies and discoveries since the publication of The Origin of Species (1859) – carbon dating, filling in of the fossil record, and genomics, to name but a few – have all strengthened its case. However, Darwinitis – the claim that evolution completely explains the human person, and that the distinctive features of human beings are, or will be, best understood through the science of the evolved brain – is quite another thing.

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