Dawkins is wrong on this point. Evolution has never been proven beyond a reasonable doubt.
It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that).
Based on the fact that evolution has never been proven beyond a reasonable doubt this whole statement is "ignorant, stupid or insane" and shows how biased he is on the issue.
The common definition of Evolution - the variation of allele frequency within a population due to differential replication - is beyond reasonable doubt.
Dawkins is wrong on this point. Evolution has never been proven beyond a reasonable doubt.
False. The theory is used to make predictions about what will be found in lab and field observations. So far, these predictions have been correct. A recent one was where to dig to find a fish-amphibian intermediate. Other things that were predicted using the ToE, and later found, include fossil monotremes in Antarctica, fossil ape-human intermediates in Africa, and the distribution of genetic markers amongst various species. The theory has passed thousands of tests involving many different animals, plants, fungi and microorganisms. This is confirmation to a very high order, and can be considered as "beyond a reasonable doubt"
If you have particular doubts about the ToE, please explain them and I will attempt to show that they're not reasonable.
Based on the fact that evolution has never been proven beyond a reasonable doubt this whole statement is "ignorant, stupid or insane" [you forgot wicked] and shows how biased he is on the issue.
I disagree. I'd say his statement is more of an observation about anti-evolution activists. We see ignorance here on the FR crevo threads all the time: for example, ask an anti-evo to state the ToE; the chances are he can't. We see over and over things like "there are no Precambrian fossils", "the ToE predicts a dog giving birth to a cat", and so on. this leads naturally into the stupid category, which you don't see here so much, although there is a tendency for andi-evolutoin activists to repeat things without acknowledging and replying to criticism. Insane? Well, the craziest FReeper anti-evos were banned (some were crazy or stupid enough to call Jim Robinson a liberal), but look at a banned FReeper's posts. (There are others!). And finally wicked: this applies mainly to the con artists at DI, AiG, DrDino, etc., who are making a fortune by ripping off Christians.
The other thing is, I have yet to encounter a sane, smart, honest, educated, anti-evo. See my tagline. The number of fallacies on the anti-evo side is staggering: strawman, false dichotomy, inapprpriate appeal to authority, and on and on. The dishonest practice of quote-mining should tell you that these people know they're wrong and have no evidence to support their claims.
All in all, I'd say that Dawkins' observations were stated with typical British understatement.
Something to think about is the data on Some More of God's Greatest Mistakes. This is a collection of facts from natural history that cannot easily be explained in an ID or creationist setting: EG, the recurrent laryngeal nerve, teeth that are never used, whale hindlimbs, chicken tooth genes, and many others. Interesting and entertaining.