If you discovered tomorrow a new and most un-Darwinian-looking species of animals, in which every adult pair produced on average a hundred offspring, but the father always killed all of them very young, except one which was chosen by some random process, it would take an armor-plated neo-Darwinian no more than two minutes to “prove” that this reproductive strategy, despite its superficially inadvisability, is actually the optimum one for that species. And what is more impressive still, he will be able to do the same thing again later, if it turns out that the species had been misdescribed at first, and that in fact the father always lets three of his hundred offspring live. In neo-Darwinianism’s house there are many mansions: so many, indeed, that if a certain awkward fact will not fit into one mansion, there is sure to be another one into which it will fit to admiration. — David Stove, Against the Idols of the Age, p. 244
Laszlo Bencze, who sent UD News this one, provides the handy formula, noting,
In short there is no conceivable fact which could not be shoe horned into an evolutionary scheme of one sort or another. After all, all evolutionary ‘proofs’ are speculations and you don’t have to pay retail for them. All you have to do is to use Darwin’s rhetorical trick of couching them as:
I see no reason why it would not be possible for…
It seems eminently reasonable that … should obtain.
Can anyone prove that it is not possible that … should be the case?
Certainly it seems quite possible that under conditions x, y, and z ___________ could have occurred and if this is the case then there is no reason to suppose that __________ would not have been the further result.
Science liberated from fact is so much easier.
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