21 April 2014

Knowing nothing

I'm re-reading Stove's book Darwinian Fairytales at the moment; full of 'emporeror's new clothes' class of bon mots contra darwinian evolution, as it is.

Here's one:

All Darwinians have a remarkable asymmetry of mind where their own species is concerned. On the one hand there is the human life which, both by experience and by reading history and literature, they know a great deal about; but all of this they put to one side, as having nothing to do with theory. They have to put it aside, because of course this human life contains not a single instance of the famous Darwinian struggle, and in fact consists entirely of disconfirmations of that theory. But on the other hand, Darwinians draw endless confirmations of their theory form the lives of extinct or hypothetical or imaginary or impossible human beings, concerning whom they know exactly as much as the reset of us do: namely nothing. for Darwinians, where their own species is concerned, it's not what you know that counts; its what you don't know.
And that just about sums it up.