Richard Dawkins and the Problem of Progress

Abstract Directionalist common sense surely wins on the very long time scale: once there was only blue-green slime and now there are sharp-eyed metazoa. One of the many attractive things about the writings of Richard Dawkins is his willingness to state his positions clearly and forcefully. No hiding of ideas in ambiguity or of saying one thing in the text and then qualifying it to death with a thousand footnotes. In the language of the Bible, Dawkins lets his yea be yea and his nay be nay. Nowhere has Dawkins been more forthright than in his endorsement of the idea of evolutionary progress. He believes in it, he has said so many times, and he has argued for it. Yet, perhaps surprisingly, this is a controversial position, with today’s evolutionists split down the middle on the issue.