Old post from Christian CADRE complaining that Dawkins says the gaps in the fossil record are explicable. There are good reasons for thinking this–most organisms will never become fossils, and there’s reason to think that speciation happens relatively quickly–emphasis on relatively, that is relative to geological time–because it tends to be spurred by ecological changes and geographic isolation of populations.

It’s an extraordinarily dumb post, because it reasons that to respect the evidence, we shouldn’t think about whether the evidence really supports a claim, rather than merely appearing to support it. This seems to me to be an instance of a wider phenomenon: taking originally smart slogans like “follow the evidence” and not going through any of the thinking behind them, and turning it into something really dumb. As a general name for this sort of thinking, I suggest “aphorism decay”–see it all the time with advice about rationality, testability, etc.