Steve Jones On The Study Of Evolution

Steve Jones, Almost Like A Whale: The Origin of Species Updated (London: Anchor, 2000), xxxiv.

‘I have never met a biology undergraduate who has read The Origin of the Species.

Even scientists, familiar as they are with its contents (or what they believe them to be), tend to honour it in the breach rather than the observance.

It is, though, much studied by students of the humanities as an element of a philosophy or an English literature course. . . .

Evolution is to the social sciences as statues are to birds: a convenient platform upon which to deposit badly digested ideas.

It has been debased since it began by those who use the idea to support their own creed. Darwinism was not the first (and will probably not be the last) science to be abused for political ends.’

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