In search of a blind watchmaker

The standard model of evolutionary theory is an illusion. The truth is that there is no clean-cut theory, as there is for the theory of relativity. Instead there is a hodge-podge of competing ideas even more variegated than found in the climate change controversy.

Yet many in the journalistic and educational spheres seem to think that a "scientific consensus" needs to be enforced that stifles voices of dissent in order to avoid aiding and comforting "religious crazies." Yet some critics are scientists themselves, though their detractors would like to run them out of the scientific community.

I do not attempt to favor the intelligent design creationists, but I don't think their opponents have a right to enforce draconian censorship of their ideas as being allegedly beyond the pale.

Radical Darwinists like Richard Dawkins are at the forefront of attempts to impose a mechanist orthodoxy on scientific thinking. But I believe scientists should beware the human tendency of contempt prior to examination.  True, one should have contempt, say, for a purported proof that the circle can be squared with geometers' instruments, and not bother to examine it. But evolutionary theory is not all that straightforward.

The general reader, for example, might fall under the spell of computer programs discussed in Dawkins' book The Blind Watchmaker and believe he had made a mathematical case for evolutionary theory. The fact that the eminent biologist has not done so in that book is the point of an essay I have written:

In search of a blind watchmaker
http://www.angelfire.com/az3/nfold/watch.html