There Is No Gene "for" Such Unambiguous

All Science Is Intelligent Inference; Excessive Literalism Is Delusion, Not A Humble Bowing To Evidence.

In His Anti-darwinian Book... (and Eponymously Named The Neck Of The Giraffe ), Francis Hitching Tells The Story... "the Need To Survive By Reaching Ever Higher For Food Is, Like So Many Darwinian Explanations Of Its Kind, Little More Than A Post Hoc Speculation." Hitching Is Quite Correct, But He Rebuts A Fairy Story That Darwin Was Far Too Smart To Tell - Even Though The Tale Later Entered Our High School Texts As A "classic Case" Nonetheless.

The Myriad Valleys Could Have Arisen Anywhere On The Landscape. The Current Positions Are Quite Accidental. If We Could Repeat The Experiment, We Might Obtain No Valleys At All, Or A Completely Different System. Yet We Now Stand At The Shore Line Contemplating The Fine Spacing Of Valleys And Their Even Contact With The Sea. How Easy It Is To Be Misled And To Assume That No Other Landscape Could Possibly Have Arisen.

How Did Scientists Get Money In The Past? They Were Either Lucky And Independently Wealthy, Like Darwin, Or They Had Patrons, Like Galileo. Universities Or Governments Have Become Patrons Only In The Last Few Generations. Many Of The Great Scientists Of The Past Were In Debt To Their Patrons In The Same Sense That Modern Scientists Are Influenced By What Their Granting Agencies Want.

Each Of The Major Sciences Has Contributed An Essential Ingredient In Our Long Retreat From An Initial Belief In Our Own Cosmic Importance. Astronomy Defined Our Home As A Small Planet Tucked Away In One Corner Of An Average Galaxy Among Millions; Biology Took Away Our Status As Paragons Created In The Image Of God; Geology Gave Us The Immensity Of Time And Taught Us How Little Of It Our Own Species Has Occupied.