Stephen’s Reviews > How the Leopard Changed Its Spots : The Evolution of Complexity > Status Update

> The idea of a genetic program in an egg that specifies all the details of the organism by the information it contains is another version of this story.
"This story" is the idea of the homunculus. Seriously?!

He further compares it to the idea of "a creator whose word is written down in some form." Seriously?!

> So we see that the Darwinism described by Dawkins […] has its metaphorical roots in one of our deepest cultural myths, the [Biblical] story of the fall and redemption of humanity.
#sodeep

But actually it's not that similar if you think about it (or think about, e.g. Buddhism)

>In Darwin's time, physicists had made a calculation about the age of the earth on the basis of its temperature and the rate of cooling of solid bodies. The result was the "fact" that the earth could not be older than a few million years[…]
We didn't get a definition of "organism" in the previous chapter, and I fear we're in problematic territory with "fact" in this chapter…

"The proposals I am going to make about biology are somewhat similar to the shift of perspective from a geocentric to a heliocentric view of the planetary system." Wouldn't the shift to general relativity be a more apt analogy? But I guess he will be arguing for a privileged reference frame (the "organism") anyway...

"Western science has, for historical and ideological reasons, chosen to focus on quantities, while the sciences of other cultures have tended to focus much more on qualities." Uh oh...