On August 6th, Steven Pinker, the well-known Psychology Professor from Harvard, had an article in New Republic entitled Science is Not Your Enemy, in which he lambasts those who decry scientists for propounding scientism.  You’d expect rebuttals of Pinker to come from the likes of Wesley J. Smith who indeed took Pinker to task in an article in National Review Online, which we discussed here at UD as well.  You wouldn’t expect attack from your own side, however, but that is precisely what P.Z. Myers has done on his popular anti-ID blogsite Pharyngula in a post entitled Repudiating scientism, rather than surrendering to it.  Never one to mince words, PZ launches right in: When I heard that Steven Pinker had Read More ›

About a year and a half ago I wrote a critique of Steve Pinker’s best-seller, The Better Angels of Our Nature, but I didn’t bother tidying it up. And then I forgot about it. I would like to thank Lar Tanner for jogging my memory, with a comment he made on Uncommon Descent yesterday. Professor Steven Pinker’s book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (Viking Adult, 2011) has attracted much attention in the press. But after having perused Professor Pinker’s book, as well as his online lecture, A History of Violence (27 September 2011), as well as his responses to Frequently Asked Questions about The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, I feel Read More ›

At the International Conference on Creationism 2013 (ICC 2013), professional geneticist Jeffrey Tomkins (along with Jerry Bergman) delivered a devastating critique of the claim that humans are 98% genetically similar to chimps. What he demonstrated was the fact that Darwinists are essentially saying “what is similar is 98% similar”, which is cherry picking. Tomkins acknowledges we are closer to chimps than daffodils, but humans are still substantially different from chimps. I posted a less technical complaint here: With no dictionary tricks, humans only 70% similar to chimps. Recall the “dictionary trick” whereby Tom Wolfe’s famous novel The Right Stuff can be shown to be almost 100% identical to a dictionary merely by aligning the words in Wolfe’s novel against identical Read More ›