"I am not being funny when I say of Edward Wilson's latest book that there are interesting and informative chapters on human evolution, and on the ways of social insects (which he knows better than any man alive), and it was a good idea to write a book comparing these two pinnacles of social evolution, but unfortunately one is obliged to wade through many pages of erroneous and downright perverse misunderstandings of evolutionary theory," Dawkins writes.

The Oxford evolutionary biologist, 71, has also infuriated many readers by listing other established academics who, he says, are on his side when it comes to accurately representing the mechanism by which species evolve. Wilson, in a short piece penned promptly in response to Dawkins's negative review, was also clearly annoyed by this attempt to outflank him.

"In any case," Wilson writes, "making such lists is futile. If science depended on rhetoric and polls, we would still be burning objects with phlogiston [a mythical fire-like element] and navigating with geocentric maps."

Wilson, 83, is a Harvard professor of evolutionary biology who became famous in the early 1970s with his study of social species in his booksThe Insect Societies and Sociobiology. He is internationally acknowledged as "the father of sociobiology" and is the world's leading authority on ants.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/jun/24/battle-of-the-professors

Perhaps that’s why the E.U. gave a thumbs up to its now-yanked  video, “Science: It’s a Girl Thing!” which has been rightly blow-torched in every corner of the planet with so much as a dial-up iMac, and vanished from the E.U. website almost as soon as it was posted. (Still available on YouTube, but viewer discretion advised: You shall despair of a species capable of such numbskullery.)

In fairness, the E.U. brain trust was responding to a real need. As education officials noted in a June 21 post, females now account for 45% of all PhDs earned in Europe, but barely one-third of science researchers. (In the U.S., women now slightly outpace men—10.6 million to 10.5 million—in the number of advanced degrees  in the 25 and above age group. But here too, they trail badly in science and engineering fields.)