Page 9 - RD (English) - Sample

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Introduction

“No biologist has been responsible for more – and for more
drastic – modifications of the average person’s worldview than
Charles Darwin.” 1

hese words were spoken by Harvard professor Ernst Mayr
(1904–2005), veteran evolutionary biologist, when on September
T23, 1999, he received the Crafoord Prize from the Royal Swedish
Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. Dr. Mayr made the point that
although most groundbreaking scientists, such as Albert Einstein, had
a marked influence within their own fields of science, they made little
impact on the way the average person apprehends the world, whereas
Darwin changed the very fabric of our worldview.
And so this book. As long as the ideas of Darwin are so deeply woven
into the lives of almost everyone, they will continue to be explored,
explained, and critiqued from different perspectives. This book pre-
sents an overall scientific critique of Darwin’s theory of evolution in
a way that is accessible to laypersons, contains novel ma terial and
new perspectives that may interest even insiders within the scientific