Steno

The Festival of Science in Liverpool, organised by the prestigious British Association, has certainly produced some fireworks this past week. Following Professor Reiss’s comments, Professor Robert Winston has now criticised ‘science delusions’ and a ‘deterministic’ approach to genetics. Winston is well known through the mainstream media in the UK as a leading geneticist. He accuses militant atheists such as Richard Dawkins of damaging science with their rhetoric, commenting that the new atheism is ‘dangerous,’ ‘irresponsible’ and ‘very divisive.’ Winston comments that; “Far too many scientists including my good friend Richard Dawkins present science as…factually correct. And actually of course that clearly isn’t true.” “I think that…it is actually…irresponsible. I think it poo-poos other people’s views of a universe about which Read More ›

Professor Michael Reiss, director of education at the Royal Society, has argued that science teachers in the UK should allow alternatives to evolution to be discussed in the science classroom such as creationism and intelligent design. Banning such discussions he argues is counterproductive and only serves to alienate school children from science, especially with so many children from Muslim, Christian and Jewish backgrounds in the state education system. He commented that; “My experience after having tried to teach biology for 20 years is if one simply gives the impression that such children are wrong, then they are not likely to learn much about the science…” Reiss, who is an ordained Church of England Minister, was speaking at the British Association Read More ›

A very interesting programme on the problem of inbreeding with pedigree dogs has recently been shown on BBC 1 in the UK; “Pedigree dogs exposed,” Tuesday 19th August 2008 21.00 BST. Although this programme didn’t set out to be anti Darwinian, there are some very interesting observations that come out of it that are really quite damaging to neo-Darwinian explanations. In fact the programme stated that the whole concept of purebred dogs came out of the eugenics movement of the 19th century.

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