In my previous post on John Jeremiah Sullivan’s essay, One of us, I exposed the numerous factual errors in its depiction of how people’s attitudes to animals have changed over the course of time. My expose stopped at the end of the Middle Ages; today, I’ll be talking about Montaigne, Descartes, Spinoza and the physiologist Haller (who influenced Voltaire’s thinking on animals). A short summary of Sullivan’s errors Sullivan is a great admirer of the humanistic scholar Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), who argued eloquently for the existence of rationality in animals, in his “Apology for Raymond Sebond”. Sullivan’s essay contains villains too: one of these is the French philosopher Rene Descartes (1596-1650), who described animals as “natural automata”, which Sullivan Read More ›

Theory protectionism comes in many forms. One of the most common protections for the theory of evolution is the so-called God of the gaps warning which casts evolution criticism as an argument for the existence of God that is from ignorance and therefore a danger to one’s faith. This warning appeared again this week when Mark Shea used it against Intelligent Design in the National Catholic Register.  Read more

Recall the series of threads that was sparked by this comment by a Darwinist: if you have 500 flips of a fair coin that all come up heads, given your qualification (“fair coin”), that is outcome is perfectly consistent with fair coins, a 22 sigma event is consistent with fair coins which was another example of SSDD where I asked a Darwinist if a space shuttle is an example of intelligent design, and he said, “No!”. Barry highlighted some other comments in the wake of their fiascos: Jerad’s DDS causes him to succumb to miller’s mendacity and Jerad and Neil Ricker Double Down. In their determination to disagree with IDists on every point, even basic questions, they end up saying Read More ›

The following quote is taken from Thomas Henry Huxley’s essay, Evolution and Ethics (The Romanes Lecture, 1893): The propounders of what are called the “ethics of evolution,” when the ‘evolution of ethics’ would usually better express the object of their speculations, adduce a number of more or less interesting facts and more or less sound arguments in favour of the origin of the moral sentiments, in the same way as other natural phenomena, by a process of evolution. I have little doubt, for my own part, that they are on the right track; but as the immoral sentiments have no less been evolved, there is, so far, as much natural sanction for the [80] one as the other. The thief Read More ›