Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Clarence Darrow on rape and chloroforming the unfit: Jerry Coyne’s strange choice of heroes

“Clarence Darrow … is one of my heroes,” Professor Jerry Coyne declares in a recent post over at Why Evolution Is True. I wonder how well Professor Coyne really knows the man whom he idolizes. I’d like to quote from a book titled, Crime: Its Cause and Treatment by Clarence Darrow, published in 1922. Darrow apparently believed that rapists weren’t responsible for their deeds because they were governed by their sex instincts: the poor things simply couldn’t help doing what they did. Here’s what he had to say about rape, in a chapter titled, “Sex Crimes”: Most of the inmates of prisons convicted of sex crimes are the poor and wretched and the plainly defective. Nature, in her determination to Read More ›

George Orwell on “What is Science?”

Recently, while browsing through the essays of George Orwell – a writer I’ve always admired, even when I disagree with him – I came across one entitled, What is Science? which struck me as both timely and prescient. I’d like to quote a few excerpts, and invite readers to weigh in with their opinions. (Emphases below are mine.) …[T]he word Science is at present used in at least two meanings, and the whole question of scientific education is obscured by the current tendency to dodge from one meaning to the other. Science is generally taken as meaning either (a) the exact sciences, such as chemistry, physics, etc., or (b) a method of thought which obtains verifiable results by reasoning logically Read More ›