He may (or may not) be wrong but he is hardly alone. I had a teacher who said that without evolution, biology was just stamp collecting. The sentiment was rather common among the teachers. One said that it was evolution (and with it predictive science) that made biology a science.
I see what you are saying and mostly agree with you but the sentiment DT is expressing is rather common among biologists and not without some basis.
Like them being incompetent by definition? That’s like calling it institutional bias when an airline company won’t hire engineers who don’t believe in air.
No, it’s like hiring engineers that don’t believe in metallurgy, but still manage to still believe in all the plane parts that already exist and understand how they and the air work together.
This gross exageration of the percentage of biology that depends on understanding of evolution is what you’re wrong about.
You know, this may be a defensive reaction to the fact evolutiuon is under attack - they inflate its importance to position the creationists as denying all of biology (which is obviously silly - or rather, even more silly than the silliness of denying evolution alone).
If everyone got their heads right and stopped denying evolution the hyperbole level would probably go down accordingly.
No; what actually happens is that we pretend that evolution is less important than it is so we can placate the creationists. “Evolution not taught in schools? No big deal.”
This may vary by region and/or the composition of the school board. Regardless, it’s tangential to the tangent we’ve been scuffling over.
But plants are full of living creatures. Are we to suppose that T-rex carefully picked out the worms from the apples before eating them? What about microscopic creatures?