Rating: 
Summary: In response to the nonscientist
Review: Thanks for using this BOOK REVIEW section to enlighten us all on your personal opinion of evolutionary biology. Yet another example of nonscientists trying to sneak their opinions on the masses when it's completely irrelevant. You speak of Dawkins and Gould as resorting to circular reasoning in their arguments, however, this book is not an argument over the reality of evolution, it is a debate about how natural selection works and at what level. Had they been asked to state the evidence for natural selection, both Dawkins and Gould would be able to present compelling data to support it, as would any biologist.
Rating: 
Summary: A meaningless, pointless and purposeless debate
Review: The debate between Dawkins (gradualism) and Gould (stasis and punctuated equilibrium),has put science in a similar situation in which the catholic thomistic university ideal of "limited dissent" drove theology in the Middle Age. Here, dissent was possible in the boundaries of catholic dogma alone. Protestant and evangelical dissenters were heretics thast should be silenced and burned. Now, dissent is possible in the boundaries of darwinian dogma alone. Darwin is the secular equivalent of the catholic pope. Creationists and proponents of intelligent designers are "stupid, wicked and pervert" (Dawkins), and should be excluded from the academia. The fact is that, as marxism passed away, after Marx, as freudianism passed away, after Freud, so darwinism will pass away after Darwin. When science is built only upon thinking men's thoughts after men themselves, it will lead to a meaningless, pointless and purposeless universe. Science will keep being a progressive and meaningful field only if it is willing to "think God's thoughts after God Himself". (Kepler, Newton). Dawkins and Gould, refute each other, cancel each other's arguments. Both of them are "non sequitur". It is the classical fossils v. molecules debate. Gould says (used to say) that gradualism is incompatible with the fossil record. At the same time, Dawkins says that saltationism is impossible, from the perspective of molecular biology.
Neither of them can prove evolution without assuming it existed in the first place. Both of them are captive of their own circular reasoning. Actually, both of them are right: gradualism and saltationism are impossible. Neither of them can have a convincing response to the gaps of the fossil record, the lack of evidence of transpecific macroevolution, the cambrian explosion, the hundreds of highly fine tuned biological, ecological, astrophysical antropic coincidences, irreducible complexity in molecular life, the orignis of life and the formation of DNA, the compatibility of evolution with the second law of thermodinamics(valid also in biological and open systems), the morality and religiosity of Mankind, etc., etc. Dawkins and Gould believe the evidence to prove evolution because they interprete the evidence in the light of evolutionary assumptions. An example: 1. Evolutionary assumptions explain the fossil record. 2. The fossil record, interpreted in the light of evolutionary assumptions, demonstrates the existence of the geological ages. 3. The existence of the geological ages, interpreted in the light of the fossil record as interpreted in the ligh of evolutionary assumptions, proves the validity of evolutionary assumptions. This kind of reasoning, that convinces only the previously convinced or the unintelligent, is everpresent in "scientific" evolutionism. Actually, it is its raw material. The truth is that in all the above mentioned subjects, evolutionary theory has proved incapable of any scientific discourse that sustains itself apart from previously hidden naturalistic and evolutionary assumptions that need to be proved in the first place. I know not of one argument that is really cogent. If you remove evolutionary assumptions from evolutionary theory and stick to the evidence itself, you will find yourself with nothing in your hands. You will get only the meaningless, pointless and purposeless debate between men like Gould and Dawkins. They are clever, but they are only men. How can they pretend to prove the universal negative that God doesn't exist without rendering themselves as ridiculous and even stupid? It is time that intelligent design and biblical creationism step in to this "dead end debate" and give it some intelligence, purpose and meaning.
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