Can't forget ...

... the birthday boy. I don't know if it does Darwin any favors, but for the occasion let's give Dickie (God bless him) his hyper-ventilating say: Dawkins on Darwin. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

I do find it interesting that the good professor should end by saying that "Coyne is right to identify the most widespread misunderstanding about Darwinism as the idea that, in evolution, 'everything happens by chance'. This common claim is flat wrong – obviously wrong, transparently wrong ..."

After all it is Dawkins who has told us that

“In a universe of blind forces and physical replication, some people are going to get hurt, others are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. As that unhappy poet A.E. Housman put it,

‘For Nature, heartless, witless nature
Will neither care nor know.’

DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its tune.”

"Blind forces ... no purpose ... no design." No rhyme, no reason. Sounds pretty damned haphazard to me.