Hemant asks, Dawkins and Dennett say “yes.”

I personally think this is kind of unfortunate. Evolution isn’t as fundamental to the scientific picture of the world as the idea of fundamental physics: that a small combination of principles, like Newton’s Laws + Maxwell’s Field Theory + Quantum Mechanics, could explain everything that happens on Earth. Evolution is the study of historical patters, unlike physics, which tells you what, fundamentally, is really there. One of the most unfortunate features of popular discussions of science is that we lack good popularizations of things like quantum chemistry, molecular biology, and neuroscience, the disciplines that turn the bits of scientific trivia you learned in high school into a coherent whole.

In reading recent anti-atheist literature, I see little hints here and there that part of why people recoil against evolution is that they don’t understand what evolution is supposed to be producing, according to the modern scientific worldview: things made of basic physical particles. If you don’t understand that life can be explained chemically and that (at least a great deal of) the mind can be explained biologically, the idea that either of these things could have evolved is going to be pretty mysterious.