Scott Adams Bullshit

Read this book!

For those unfamiliar with Scott Adams and his comic strip, Dilbert, this rant won’t be interesting. The only thing you should take away from this is that evolution is not bullshit and that you should read The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins.

Scott Adams, it turns out, is pretty darn smart. He reads stuff. He thinks about stuff. However, it doesn’t mean he isn’t wrong. He wrote a rant ”Fossils are bullshit” on his Dilbert Blog where he reads a Newsweek article on msnbc and then declares that his bullshit detector thinks evolution and the fossil record is bullshit.

Let’s first off give Mr. Adams credit for even thinking about this. A bunch of people in the word just read Newsweek and don’t really think about what it says or talk about it anything. Kudos. It’s good to think.

“The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ (I found it!) but ‘That’s funny…‘” — Isaac Asimov

It should also be mentioned that the Newsweek article is full of “evolution revolution” claptrap. How that didn’t set his bullshit detector off, I don’t know. If there was a revolution, it’d be a big deal and in more than just one article in Newsweek and it’d not be obvious it was a revolution until after it had hit at least a few other sources.

Back to Mr. Adams: It is possible that one person might know more than many scientists who study a specific thing. It happens every so often, but it isn’t likely and it is the responsibility of the person making the claims to provide some proof. If Mr. Adams has some proof to back up his claims that evolution is bullshit, then he should definitely provide some proof. But I suspect the real problem is that he doesn’t understand what evolution claims.

More can be said on this, but PZ Meyers, an evolutionary developmental biologist and rather famous skeptic, does a better job than I could in his blog post ”Scott Adams reads Newsweek. Uh-oh.“.

The most important thing though is this: read The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. It is an exciting read. It is written clearly. And you’ll like it, I promise! It explains what evolution really is. The stuff you learned in high school (if you remember it) probably didn’t explain it well enough. This will. You will come away looking at the world going, “Gosh! This is amazing!” … and it is!

Seriously. Read it.

Ciao!