All three of them have read vastly more than Collins in both contemporary and historical evolutionary theory. That is evident from Collins’s childish public statements about how evolution works. They don’t rise much beyond the crudest neo-Darwinism. He’s a great geneticist, but nowheresville as an evolutionary theorist.
Technical isn’t bad in itself. It’s good in its place. It’s bad when it cramps imagination, innovation, etc. It’s bad when it turns into pedantry, or into reflexive defense of the status quo in any field. The immediate hostile reaction to Scott Turner on this site was couched in terms of alleged technical errors made by Turner, and his broader conceptions were dismissed out of hand. It’s that kind of technician that I find insufferable, the one who savagely attacks scientists with more imagination and breadth than himself. Or the kind of technician who dismisses a 500-page book by Meyer on the basis of one terminological error which didn’t affect the overall argument of the book.
We have our unimaginative technicians in Religious Studies as well. (Many of them are called “New Testament scholars.”) I assure you, I chide them with every bit as much force as I do their analogues in science. It is a certain cast of mind of object to, whether in the science or the arts subjects, not scientists as such.
Not at all. Denton has read massively in the history of evolutionary thought. The others have some knowledge of it, as well.