A friend of Uncommon Descent was asked recently, is there any proposition in Darwinism so obviously stupid and false that a Darwinist would not defend it? The far-sighted mares, for example? He responded,

… Assuming a Darwinist tries to be self-consistent: why should we believe anything a Darwinist tells us? Read More ›

In “‘Man is more than an overdeveloped monkey’: Raymond Tallis explains why he has declared a war of words on the trendy ideas that underpin ‘neuromania’ and ‘Darwinitis’” ( Spiked, Tim Black writes,

There is a chill to Tallis’s lament. Whether in the form of neuromania or its close relative Darwinitis, we stand reduced, degraded. We are no longer being seen as the source of our actions; we are no longer understood as creatures of reason; we are no longer being deemed capable of making decisions rationally, let alone striving idealistically. Instead we are deemed subject to forces beyond our control, mere organic matter caught on the wind of physical laws. Of course, we may think we’re acting rationally, we may believe that we freely choose to follow a particular course of action. But that is an illusion. In the words of Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s masterpiece of pseudoscience Nudge, we are not the rational Homo Economicus of Scottish Enlightenment myth, we are the non-rational Homo Sapiens of contemporary reality. Or worse still, we are what the glib misanthrope John Gray called Homo Rapiens, a ‘serv[ant] to evolutionary success, not truth’.   Read More ›

The US Darwin lobby announces:

There’s only a month left for you to submit your idea for a new NCSE bumper sticker, so sharpen your pencils, cudgel your brains, and consult your muse! This is your chance to speak loud, speak proud for evolution, by crafting a killer slogan that could end up on the tail end of thousands of cars.

UD News staff remember first seeing the fish-with-feet bumpo, labelled “Darwin,” about 30 years ago – and assuming it was an attack on Darwinism. Read More ›

Max “Multiverse” Tegmark:

To me, the key point is that if theories are scientific, then it’s legitimate science to work out and discuss all their consequences even if they involve unobservable entities. For a theory to be falsifiable, we need not be able to observe and test all its predictions, merely at least one of them.

– in “The Case for Parallel Universes: Why the multiverse, crazy as it sounds, is a solid scientific idea” (Scientific American, July 19, 2011)

Good news! The Toronto Crystal Ball Association predicts a number of things, including the end of the world, the landing of the space aliens, the discovery of the origin of life, and that Read More ›