Seymour Flops
Diamond Member
The primary theme of this book is that Darwin published his The Origin of Species via Natural Selection while admitting that it contained very little evidence. In particular, it was missing actual cases of one species evolving from another.
Darwin admitted this several times throughout the book, stating that Origin of Species was only an abstract as he called it. He promised a much larger work, which would present the evidence he found through research which led him to abandon the idea of species being immutable and embrace evolution through a purely naturalistic mechanism.
Darwin never published that book, instead taking up a long study and writing about specific flowering plants.
However, there is an unfinished manage script of this book. This unfinished manuscript has a similar structure to the published book, chapters correspond with the chapters of the manuscript.
The author of the book presented by the OP claims that there is a dearth of evidence in that manuscript also. In other words, Darwin never published the grand book of evidence, because he had found so little of it. Not to mention that origin of species was subjected to much criticism, to which Darwin had little response.
A couple of things I find very interesting about those claims: making a claim about science, and insisting that there is a mountain of evidence for it while refusing to show the evidence is a rhetorical device easily recognizable to people on this forum. Only instead of telling people to “look it up,” Darwin would say that the evidence is on its way in the form of his larger book.
Darwin commonly insisted that people who disagreed with his theory simply did not understand it. That is another method of debate avoidance that we commonly see on this forum..
Darwin admitted this several times throughout the book, stating that Origin of Species was only an abstract as he called it. He promised a much larger work, which would present the evidence he found through research which led him to abandon the idea of species being immutable and embrace evolution through a purely naturalistic mechanism.
Darwin never published that book, instead taking up a long study and writing about specific flowering plants.
However, there is an unfinished manage script of this book. This unfinished manuscript has a similar structure to the published book, chapters correspond with the chapters of the manuscript.
The author of the book presented by the OP claims that there is a dearth of evidence in that manuscript also. In other words, Darwin never published the grand book of evidence, because he had found so little of it. Not to mention that origin of species was subjected to much criticism, to which Darwin had little response.
A couple of things I find very interesting about those claims: making a claim about science, and insisting that there is a mountain of evidence for it while refusing to show the evidence is a rhetorical device easily recognizable to people on this forum. Only instead of telling people to “look it up,” Darwin would say that the evidence is on its way in the form of his larger book.
Darwin commonly insisted that people who disagreed with his theory simply did not understand it. That is another method of debate avoidance that we commonly see on this forum..
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