History, Evolution, and the Darwin Debate
Another good comment from Luke.
I often think in terms of ‘G-design’ and ‘N-design’, the design a la the ID folks, and the natural design that we see all the time in nature. Looking at the wonders of biochemical systems we are struck quite directly by their ‘N-design’, in the presence of processes of nature that can elude our understanding, hence the attempts to ascribe them to ‘G-design’.
From Rad-Green
Max Horkheimer 1963
Theism and Atheism
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The Limits of Organic Life in Planetary Systems
Committee on the Limits of Organic Life in Planetary Systems, Committee on the Origins and Evolution of Life, National Research Council
David Sloan Wilson
The Unselfish Gene
Now why would WIE want to interview Wilson (author of Darwin’s Cathedral, not E.O. Wilson)? Wilson’s views are totally at variance with the New Age paradigm at the Cohen outfit. They must not care a hoot about his Darwinian idiocies, but are too cagey to criticize Darwin in public, you know, market share and all that. Read the rest of this entry »
John West’s Forthcoming Book: Darwin Day in America: How Our Politics and Culture Have Been Dehumanized in the Name of Science
Robert Crowther
Next Fall ISI Books will release CSC associate director Dr. John West’s important book, Darwin Day in America: How Our Politics and Culture Have Been Dehumanized in the Name of Science.
Darwin Day in America tells the disturbing story of scientific expertise run amuck, exposing how an ideological interpretation of Darwinian biology and reductionist science have been used to degrade American culture over the past century through their impact on criminal justice, welfare, business, education, and bioethics.
Seven of 10 Republicans skeptical on evolution
Republicans are far more likely to doubt the theory of evolution than Democrats, according to a new Gallup Poll.
Sixty-eight percent of Republicans say they doubt that humans evolved from lower life forms over millions of years, while only 40 percent of Democrats hold that view. The poll was conducted by telephone June 1-3 and has a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points.
Research sheds light on evolution of the brain
[Date: 2007-07-02]
”Much of the Bible is not systematically evil, but just plain weird,” notes English scientist Richard Dawkins in his highly entertaining atheists’ handbook du jour, The God Delusion.
For all its “obnoxious” morality, he concedes that this “cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents” is a brilliant resource for writers. “We can give up belief in God,” he says, “while not losing touch with a treasured heritage”.
Getting free of religion would seem an insuperable task for the New Atheists, whose comprehension of the basic history is limited to indignation.
One is remimded of the old fashioned missionaries sitting in their bungalows sipping beefeater, muttering over and tut tuting the ‘fetishes’ of the savages.
Obviously, for people like me, this little atheist revolution is thrilling stuff. If nothing else, Dawkins and company have bumped the rest of us further down on the list of people to be stoned to death in a public square. So it’s with reluctance that I confess that the movement has left me a little empty. Sure, Dawkins and Hitchens have shown that religion is wrong, and Jillette has shown that religion can be more entertaining than playing “pick a card, any card.” But so far, they’re just preaching to the choir. (Insert your own ironic retort here.)
All of these people have failed to contemplate a cohesive movement with a vision, a history, and a clear, humanistic goal. They haven’t even offered a single kind word about Madalyn Murray O’Hair, an American hero who single-handedly defeated school prayer, but who died with the infamous label “America’s Most Hated Woman.” (My condolences to the runner-up, Martha Stewart.)
If you take the religion out of religion (think Unitarian), it becomes clear that church does provide some good stuff: community-building, charity work, a reason to shower on Sunday morning. You know, geeky activities that even atheists might like to be part of if they didn’t come with a side dish of silliness.
So, until a leader steps up to the plate to ask, “What can an atheist tomorrow look like?”, I’ll just keep dreaming of my own atheist utopia.
James said,
July 4, 2007 at 1:20 am ·
“I think that if students of Quantum Mechanics would get their act together they would see the resemblance of its architecture to the Kant-Schopenhauer perspective.â€Bohm’s interpretation would have been perfect. It’s a tragedy that it was ignored. It would’ve reopened the issues discussed by Kant and Schopenhauer.
The physicist Peter Russell has actually gone into the relationship of physics to Kantian thinking, and I have a webpage quoting him on this:
Kant and Quantum Mechanics
Here’s a short bit. It’s worth reading the whole page, since the connection he suggests is surprising. Physicists, of course, are silent about all this.
Because all we ever know is the product of the mind operating on the raw sensory data, Kant reasoned that our experience is as much a reflection of the nature of the mind as it is of the physical world. This led him to one of his boldest and, at the time, most astonishing, conclusions of all. Time and space, he argued, are not inherent qualities of the physical world; they are a reflection of the way the mind operates. They are part of the perceptual framework within which our experience of the world is constructed.
It seems absolutely obvious to us that time and space are real and fundamental qualities of the physical world, entirely independent of my or your consciousness—as obvious as it seemed to people five hundred years ago that the sun moves round the earth. This, said Kant, is only because we cannot see the world any other way. The human mind is so constituted that it is forced to impose the framework of space and time on the raw sensory data in order to make any sense of it all.
Strange as Kant’s proposal may have seemed then, and strange as it may still seem to many of us today, contemporary science is proving him right.
Someone beat me to it: my version of the Enlightenment hijacked appears frequently on this blog.
NEW TITLE FROM VERSO
THE THREAT TO REASON
How the Enlightenment was hijacked and how we can reclaim it
Dan Hind
PUBLISHED 2nd JULY
Hardback
$26.95 / £14.99 / $33.50CAN
ISBN: 978 1 84467 152 6
A Fertile Domestication of Cats
By Constance Holden
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Coyne responds to Behe’s objections to Coyne’s review
Professor Coyne published a review (see http://www.talkreason.org/articles/Mutator.cfm) of Michael Behe’s new book titled The Edge of Evolution. Behe responded on an Amazon blog (see http://www.amazon.com/gp/blog/post/PLNKMTTP938HTSPI). Here is Professor Coyne’s rebuttal of Behe’s response.
Evo-News on Dawkins review in Times
Perhaps the most striking feature of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion is its lack of science. I had thought that this was an anomaly, but Dawkins’ New York Times review (out Sunday) of Michael Behe’s The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism is the same patchwork of fallacies devoid of science as The God Delusion.
July 1, 2007
Inferior Design
By RICHARD DAWKINS
THE EDGE OF EVOLUTION
The Search for the Limits of Darwinism.
By Michael J. Behe.
Now why should the Times assign Richard Dawkins to review Behe’s new book? Did Dawkins get that kind of treament?
It is clear the Times wishes to avoid serious discussion of evolution, and with deadly serious intent wishes to make sure Behe gets smeared. This review shows the typical Dawkins style: when your argument is empty, use the appearance of intelligent haughtiness to ridicule your opponent. Pile up the ad hominem, and sneer in every paragraph. The result will work fine on the Darwin consumer, and noone will quite realize propaganda when they see it. Dawkins talks a good game on science, but he has made a bundle over the years with his own brand of pseudo-science, and gets away with it because it serves the interests of the establishment. Read the rest of this entry »
Richard Dawkins you know, but John Lennox, his Oxford colleague in mathematics and the philosophy of science, may require a brief introduction. Professor Lennox is the author of the forthcoming book God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? and has lectured around the world on mathematics, science, and theology.