I attended and spoke at a meeting in Erzurum in eastern Turkey on May 7. Suppose I told you the topic of the meeting was “Partial Differential Equations in Geophysical Modeling,” and then I added, since the meeting was in Turkey, the majority of the speakers and attendees were Muslim. You would say, the religious views of the participants are completely irrelevant, why would you even mention this? Well, suppose I told you the topic was “The Proper Role of Theology in Politics.” Then the religion of the participants would not be irrelevant at all. Actually, the primary topic was Darwinism and Intelligent Design, here is the report I posted earlier at Uncommon Descent about this meeting, organized by a Read More ›

Evolution: Education and Outreach is usually a disappointment. The journal could do with more philosophically savvy writers and more critical reviewers. The various contributions provide very little evidence that they understand Kuhn’s thesis about the way science develops. Most of the authors are working in a silo and fail to understand anyone who operates outside their tightly defined paradigm. A notable exception was Daniel R. Brooks (2011) who wrote on “The Extended Synthesis: Something Old, Something New” (blogged here). Another is the theme of this blog: a review of Alan Feduccia’s “Riddle of the Feathered Dragons” by Egbert Giles Leigh Jr. What caught my eye was the acknowledgement that Feduccia provides a “powerful criticism of prevailing views of bird evolution”. Read More ›

In Charles Darwin’s one long argument against final causes, teleology, separate creation, independent creation or as he sometimes simply put it, the “ordinary view,” he complained, among other things, that notions of independent creation were tantamount to rejecting “a real for an unreal, or at least for an unknown, cause.” Furthermore, separate and innumerable acts of creation amounted to a tautology, “only re-stating the fact in dignified language.” And echoing Descartes’ criticism of Aristotelianism (the qualities themselves are in need of explanation), Darwin complained that viewing nature as revealing the plan of the Creator is vacuous and “nothing is thus added to our knowledge.” In summary, Darwin argued that independent creation was a vacuous tautology that appeals to unknown or Read More ›