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les both an ideological and an or- did happen on only one
ganizational direction. Erasmus de- planet, anywhere in the
veloped arguments that would later universe, that planet has
form the basis of Darwinism from to be our planet-because
here we are talking about
his research in his eight-hectare
it. 121
botanical garden and collected the-
se in his books, The Temple of Na- This attitude, on the
ture and Zoonomia. In 1784, he part of one of the best-
also set up a society that would known authorities on

a
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R Richard Dawkins s
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play a leading role in the dissemi- evolution, clearly ref-
nation of these ideas. In fact, the lects the imperfect logic
Philosophical Society would be one of on which the theory is constructed. The
the greatest and most passionate adhe- above statements, taken from Dawkins’
rents of the concept put forward decades book Climbing Mount Improbable, boil
later by Charles Darwin. 120 down to the argument that “If we are he-
In short, despite the theology that re, that means evolution must have hap-
Charles Darwin learned, the most impor- pened”—a striking example of a logical
tant factor in his turning to materialist- paradox that actually explains nothing at
naturalist philosophy—and rapidly re- all.
jecting religious beliefs, and subsequ-
ently publishing his book The Origin of
Dawson, Charles
Species—was his grandfather, Erasmus
Darwin. Charles Dawson was a well-known
doctor and amateur paleontologist who
claimed to have discovered a jawbone
Dawkins, Richard
and skull fragment in a pit near Piltdown
The British biologist Richard Daw- in England in 1912. Although the jawbo-
kins is one of the world’s most promi- ne resembled that of an ape, the teeth and
nent proponents of Darwinism. Howe- skull resembled those of a human being.
ver, Professor Dawkins also admits the This fossil, known as Piltdown Man and
impossibility of the very theory of evo- estimated to be roughly 500,000 years
lution that he espouses so passionately: old, was depicted as incontrovertible evi-
dence of the evolution of man.
So the sort of lucky event we are looking
However, carbon- dating tests carried
at could be so wildly improbable that the
out from 1949 to 1953 revealed that the
chances of its happening, somewhere in
the universe, could be as low as one in a skull was indeed human, but only 500
billion billion billion in any one year. If it years old, and that the jaw belonged to a

THE EVOLUTION IMPASSE I