A most peculiar bird …

…Cuckoo about Cuckoos > Theodore Dalrymple. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

It is curious that even the most convinced evolutionists find it difficult to eviscerate their language of intention, design and moral assessment. They claim that this language is a kind of shorthand, and that it would be tedious to translate such language into a purely naturalistic one: but I suspect that this is not really quite honest, and that in fact they not only speak, but think in this shorthand. At any rate, they conceive of Evolution as if it had designs as an entity rather than an abstraction—Evolution does this, Evolution does that—when, of course, the whole point of the concept is to explain how we became what we are without resort to design, Evolution’s or anything or anybody else’s. And I say this as one who does not believe in any overall purpose immanent in the universe, though I concede that I cannot prove it one way or the other.