Abstract
All living creatures share a common ancestor. This statement is true in the same sense that it is true that the sun is hotter than the earth or that you have a head. Thus Richard Dawkins, ever the feisty polemicist, begins his latest book, a collection of essays entitled A Devil's Chaplain. However, he readily concedes that common ancestry does not verify Darwinism. What he calls "core Darwinism ... the minimal theory that evolution is guided in adaptively nonrandom directions by the nonrandom survival of small random hereditary changes," has yet to prove universally true. But, Dawkins says, it is currently "the only viable explanation we have" to account for the truth of evolution. Then in a reversal that strikes this reader as remarkable, Dawkins says that Darwinism has yet to achieve the same status of certainty that the heliocentric model of the solar system has achieved, and that its current dominance of biology may only be momentary. Dawkins is quite willing to admit that future scientists may uncover facts that force them either "to abandon Darwinism or modify it beyond recognition."