Over at Uncommon Descent, Michael Flannery has an excellent post examining Adrian Desmond’s and James Moore’s Darwin’s Sacred Cause, in which the authors try to humanize Darwin by showing that he was driven by his passionate hatred of slavery. But is this accurate? Flannery points out that the main question really is, does the anti-slavery Darwin necessarily make for a “kinder, gentler” Darwin? Read it all at Uncommon Descent. Then check out Flannery’s own new book Alfred Russel Wallace’s Theory of Intelligent Evolution: How Wallace’s World of Life Challenged Darwinism.

In a recent post, Dr. Steven Novella took issue with an essay I wrote for Forbes.com. Dr. Novella objects to my observation that there the fossil record does not accord with Darwinian predictions of gradual transitions between species. The fossil record shows sharp discontinuity between species, not the gradual transitions that Darwinism inherently predicts. Dr. Novella writes: Darwin himself thought that the fossil record would show gradual continual change among species. What we found, rather, was relative stability punctuated by speciation events – species would remain mostly stable for about 2 million years on average, then disappear from the fossil record. Meanwhile, new species would appear. Gould and Eldridge termed this pattern punctuated equilirium [sic], and creationists have dutifly [sic] Read More ›