After referring to Darwin and Wallace last week, in the current debate on evolution by natural selection, the current great maintainer of that theory is Richard Dawkins. Maximum representation of militant neo-Darwinism, biologist, ethologist, zoologist, and scientific popularizer, he is a prominent professor at the University of Oxford since 2008.
Dawkins maintains that there is nothing that is not automatic and by chance or necessity in his area of science, coinciding with Robert M. Pirsig, a strange American philosopher, who said that of such exaltation: “when many people suffer from a delirium collective, that is called religion. Wouldn't it be that he was the first to be delirious at what he saw?
Reaffirming his position, in his book The Selfish Gene (1976), Dawkins asserted that “all life evolves through the differential survival of replicating entities,” without any acceptance of special evolutionary pathways; not even for the devices of the most extreme perfection: the human eye, DNA as God's special alphabet – which Collins said –, etc. A large number of scholars express that such complex organs could not be made alone, with mere chance and necessity.
Even on the recommendation of his late colleague Stephen Jay Gould, Dawkins refuses to participate in debates with supporters of Intelligent Design (ID), so as not to give rise to those who see that evolution has not yet become a complete theory.
Furthermore, in his book The Blind Watchmaker (1986), Dawkins already harshly criticized ID itself, very different from creationism. That is supported by Prof. Michael Behe, from Lehigh University, and many other scientists. To which we will refer in the third article of this series on evolution, which began last week, and will end next Friday.