Darwinism and popular culture: Real biology vs. Darwinism

David Warren (my favourite anti-Darwinian legacy media columnist), writes,

It is summer, and I have been reading the works of Skutch, in a desultory way, while myself pining for the fields. I want to recommend everything the man ever wrote: several dozen books and innumerable papers, including well more than a hundred remarkably thorough life histories of tropical birds. (He made his principal home for many decades in a remote valley of Costa Rica.) The most suggestive and “philosophical” of his books, are the essays collected in Origins of Nature's Beauty (University of Texas Press, 1992) and, Harmony and Conflict in the Living World (ditto Oklahoma, 2000).

I recommend such works especially to those who have had their minds cluttered and abused by the sort of ideological indoctrination offered today, in place of real science, by the Darwinist biology faculties in most of our universities. Skutch persistently shows that there is more happening in nature than evolutionary obsessives can begin to imagine. For Skutch's view of nature is founded in the traditional way, on direct observation, rather than in the post-modern way, on grand, arbitrary, utterly unprovable evolutionary hypotheses. That is to say, observation preceding theory, as opposed to theory preceding observation.

Perhaps the best shock treatment, for the confused young Darwinized zoologist, would be a close reading of Birds Asleep, Skutch's pioneering investigation of what birds do with about half their time (Texas, 1989). It will be noticed that the author cites no statistics at all, conducts no banding studies, but nevertheless supplements his own acute observations with apt references to an uncommonly broad range of published literature.

Doubtless, the need to defend Darwinism has resulted in massive loss of data on the real lives of creatures of our planet. There is much to repair, and some of us might well begin by reading non-Darwin-defending biologists.

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