Today, a six day trial begins in Kansas. The accused: Evolution.
“I feel like I’m in a time warp here,” said Topeka attorney Pedro Irigonegaray who has agreed to defend evolution as valid science. “To debate evolution is like debating whether the Earth is round. It is an absurd proposition.”
Meanwhile, Dawkins offers a dose of his signature “take no prisoners” logic in this interview with Salon:
For a long time it seemed clear to just about everybody that the beauty and elegance of the world seemed to be prima facie evidence for a divine creator. But the philosopher David Hume already realized three centuries ago that this was a bad argument. It leads to an infinite regression. You can’t statistically explain improbable things like living creatures by saying that they must have been designed because you’re still left to explain the designer, who must be, if anything, an even more statistically improbable and elegant thing. Design can never be an ultimate explanation for anything. It can only be a proximate explanation. A plane or a car is explained by a designer but that’s because the designer himself, the engineer, is explained by natural selection.
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