The Dysology Hypothesis

Letting scholars get away with publishing fallacies and myths signals to others the existence of topics where guardians of good scholarship might be less capable than elsewhere. Such dysology then serves as an allurement to poor scholars to disseminate existing myths and fallacies and to create and publish their own in these topic areas, which leads to a downward spiral of diminishing veracity on particular topics.

Thursday 6 March 2014

Darwin's Finches are Another Supermyth

The long-busted, yet pervasive, myth that Charles Darwin's Eureka! Moment realisation of the ability of natural selection to explain the problem of species, came by way of his observation of variation in the beaks of Galapagos Islands finches is a supermyth. Darwin did no such thing. He failed to understand the significance of the variation in those finch beaks, he never collected the finches, he misclassified 7 of the 13 finches collected. He never even collected them, they were collected by another crew member. The real natural selection significance of adaptation of Galapagos Islands finches was a 20th century discovery. The myth is a supermyth because it is deployed to this day by Darwinists arguing against the myth of divine creation of new species. It is used by the uninformed, including some Darwinists, in an attempt to disprove the overwhelming evidence that Darwin’s real Eureka! Moment came around 1837 within the pages of Patrick Matthew’s (1831) full and prominently published and reviewed articulation of the theory of the ‘natural process of selection.’ Darwin claimed never to have read the book despite the newly discovered fact that other famous naturalists read and cited it - including three of Darwin's scientific associates.