Errata: I’m a computational biologist, not a geneticist.
Instead of trying to get everyone to agree in debates over human origins, the Christian geneticist aims to have an open, informed dialogue in his new book.
Joshua Swamidass: Well, if you go back 160 years ago, Darwin published “Origin of Species.” What’s interesting about that book is it doesn’t actually talk about human evolution. And the reason is Darwin knew right from the beginning that that was going to be extremely potent.
But a friend of his named [Thomas Henry] Huxley went straight there. The next year, he began a whole bunch of public debates about human evolution, or whether humans actually shared common ancestors with the great apes.
So that’s the grand debate. It’s been there for a while. And that’s really been the center of the creation/evolution controversy.