A hilarious, razor-sharp refutation of the hallowed dogmas of Darwinism
Darwinian Fairytales
by David Stove
In Darwinian Fairytales: Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity and Other Fables of Evolution, philosopher David Stove is relentless and surgically precise in his ability to take apart the shallow and flimsy arguments that pass for Darwinian "scholarship" these days. But Stove is not your average creationist or proponent of intelligent design: he is a not a Christian (or a believer in any religion), and declares forthrightly that Darwin was a genius. That's why it's all the more compelling when Stove, working purely from sound reasoning and a sober evaluation of the evidence, explains clearly why Darwinism is unsound, overstated, and ultimately unbelievable -- no one accuse can him of mere party spirit or partisan cheerleading.
Stove skewers modern defenders of Darwinism such as E.O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins, refuting their false assertions and faulty assumptions with blistering logic and devastating wit. He shows the hollowness of generally accepted Darwinian notions such as "Every organism has as many descendants as it can"; "Anything that hurts chances for survival will be rooted out by the process of natural selection"; "People who are prosperous and fortunate will have more children than the poor and disadvantaged"; and more.
Darwinian Fairytales breaks through the doctrinaire cant that still surrounds Darwinian myths -- making it the one book to read in order to understand how to refute the tired but still influential Darwinian arguments that continue to dominate the popular discourse.
"Darwinian Fairytales" debunked:
-- Why the human race wouldn't even exist today if one of Darwin's core assumptions was actually true
-- The Darwinian conception of life: how it rests on assumptions that are denied by Darwinism itself
-- How Darwin misread evidence of the differences between civilized and savage men that he found among the Yahgan Indians of Tierra del Fuego -- leading him to disastrously mistaken conclusions
-- How Darwinism depends on discredited Malthusian theories about how population growth would ultimately outstrip food production
-- Four ways in which the Malthus/Darwin theory that reproduction is the primary focus of human endeavor is false
-- Why even the best available explanation of certain matters may still be false and incomplete
-- How Darwinism overestimates human selfishness and disregards overwhelming evidence that humans are more altruistic than the theory allows for
-- Why the Darwinian struggle for life simply does not exist in human populations
-- How Darwin's theory regarding population growth is exactly the opposite of what the evidence actually shows
-- How the Darwinians actually overestimate the differences between human beings and animals in formulating their theories
-- Richard Dawkins' popular theory of the "selfish gene": why it ranks among the most absurd of the many absurd contemporary defenses of Darwinism
-- How Darwinians contradict themselves by describing adaptations as designed for certain purposes, while simultaneously denying that they mean that those adaptations were ever intended
-- The glaring factual error Darwin -- and later Darwinians -- make regarding the incidence and importance of child mortality in various species
-- Enlightenment views of man: how they always exaggerate quite ridiculously the amount that education can achieve
-- The inclusive fitness theory, which affirms a Darwinian "dog eat dog" view of human interaction: its many absurdities
-- Proof that -- contrary to a core principle of Darwinism -- cooperation has always been more common than competition among human beings
-- How the Darwinian idea that human life, and indeed all life, is devoted primarily to reproducing as much as possible is absurd, reductionist, and ultimately opposed to all human creativity and achievement
"Whatever your opinion of 'Intelligent Design,' you'll find Stove's criticism of what he calls 'Darwinism' difficult to stop reading. Stove's blistering attack on Richard Dawkins' 'selfish genes' and 'memes' is unparalleled and unrelenting. A discussion of spiders who mimic bird droppings is alone worth the price of the book. Darwinian Fairytales should be read and pondered by anyone interested in sociobiology, the origin of altruism, and the awesome process of evolution." -- Martin Gardner, author of Did Adam and Eve Have Navels?: Debunking Pseudoscience