Culture

So claims writer Mark Strauss at Slate: Ridiculing astrobiologists is a favorite sport at the Discovery Institute, which complains on its news site that “hardly a month goes by lately when the science media fail to breathlessly report the discovery of a new planet, in some star’s ‘habitable zone,’ that might hypothetically be capable of supporting life.” The institute attributes the coverage in part to hype purposefully generated by “organized science” to shake down the government for grant money. But the creationists also see a more sinister agenda than naked greed. They place astrobiologists among the ranks of the “Darwin Brigades” who have always been “eager to undermine human exceptionalism,” since “the alleged ordinariness of the human race was vital Read More ›

Sir James Gray stated in a 1954 issue of *Nature *(v. 173; 227) that No amount of argument, or clever epigram, can disguise the inherent improbability of orthodox [Darwinian] theory; but most biologists feel it is better to think in terms of improbable events than not to think at all; there will always be a few who feel in their bones a sneaking sympathy with Samuel Butler’s skepticism. And why are those the only options? Essentially, Darwinian evolution is a cultural mood. Evidence isn’t really needed because it functions as a kind of religion for everyone from the biologists to the airheads on TV. From Dawkins: “My argument will be that Darwinism is the only known theory that is in principle capable of explaining Read More ›

As an adaptation, if it is even that, here: But, some theorists argue, religion is actually a bad adaptation. Evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne attributes Americans’ doubt about Darwinian evolution theories to religious faith, which, he claims, correlates highly with social dysfunction. He goes on to claim that the United States is “one of the most socially dysfunctional First World countries.” That’s a tough contest to judge, considering the cutbacks riots and secularist-Islamist clashes that are increasingly common in secular post-modern Europe. And it is, in any event, difficult to discuss social dysfunction if societies do not even share basic values. These theories about religion (useful, useless, harmful) have two things in common: First, they typically spill forth with no real Read More ›

In the context, “evolution” typically means Darwinism, survival of the fittest. Anyway here: President David Alexander of Northwest Nazarene University (NNU) sent a letter to the campus over the weekend, defending the decision to lay off tenured theology professor Thomas Jay Oord. Alexander said budget cuts necessitated the move. A professor in the school’s counseling department was also affected by the layoffs. Oord was notified of his firing by email while on break, which Alexander said lacked compassion. “I want to publicly apologize to Dr. Tom Oord for the way in which he learned of the change,” said Alexander in his email. “Discussions occurred via mail and email due to spring break and the March 31st notification deadline. That was Read More ›

And Mae-Wan Ho: Ho’s lucubrations on evolutionary biology, as revealed in an interview she gave to Suzan Mazur at PuffHo, are just as bad. The piece, “Mae-Wan Ho: No boundary really between epigenetic and genetic”, is replete with misstatements, errors, and distortions on the part of both interviewer and subject. Mazur, as you may recall, is a gonzo journalist driven by one Big Obsession: modern evolutionary biology is wrong and she’s going to show how rotten it really is. Mazur tried to win renown by reporting on the infamous “Altenburg 16,” a group of biologists who convened a meeting in Austria, originally intending to debunk the Modern Synthesis, but later retracted their claws and claimed only to “extend” the synthesis. Read More ›

A sendup of science journals How’s That Again? From the Los Angeles Times: In the muddy sediments beneath the deep sea, scientists have found ancient communities of bacteria that have remained virtually unchanged for 2.3 billion years. Researchers say these microscopic organisms are an example of “extreme evolutionary stasis” and represent the greatest lack of evolution ever seen. They may also, paradoxically, prove that Darwin’s theory of evolution is true. ? JPD At least some authors are suspected of ID links No problem. The Dumbdown police will be there shortly. Wherever is “there” these days… Follow UD News at Twitter!

History prof Richard Weikart reviews Nancy Pearcey’s Finding Truth: “While I was reading Nancy Pearcey’s new book, Finding Truth, a professor at the state university where I teach circulated a news item about a politician seeking to alter the university’s goals. Instead of facilitating “the search for truth,” the university under this plan would commit itself to meeting “the state’s work-force needs.” I remarked to this professor and other colleagues that many academics had already eliminated “the search for truth.” In the ensuing e-mail conversation, several professors rejected the idea that there is any universal truth, and one professor even described the whole concept of a “search for truth” as incoherent. … The fourth principle involves examining the worldview for Read More ›

From the excellent Nautilus, like we said: But trawling the Internet, I found a strange paradox: While memes were everywhere, serious meme theory was almost nowhere. Richard Dawkins, the famous evolutionary biologist who coined the word “meme” in his classic 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, seemed bent on disowning the Internet variety, calling it a “hijacking” of the original term. The peer-reviewed Journal of Memetics folded in 2005. “The term has moved away from its theoretical beginnings, and a lot of people don’t know or care about its theoretical use,” philosopher and meme theorist Daniel Dennett told me. What has happened to the idea of the meme, and what does that evolution reveal about its usefulness as a concept? It Read More ›

… have a really hard time figuring out why anyone tries to be good? The current barf is The carriers of the evolutionary process are populations. Populations consist of reproducing individuals, such as cells, viruses, plants, animals, and people. Offspring inherit fundamental information from their parents. This information is encoded in genomes, if we focus on genetic evolution. Occasionally modifications arise. These new genetic variants are called “mutants.” Mutation generates new types, new molecular ideas. This constitutes the first half of the evolutionary process. The second half is “natural selection.” The mutations might affect reproductive rates. Some mutant genes spread faster in the population than others. Nature becomes a gigantic breeder selecting for advantageous traits. Survival of the fittest is Read More ›

Here: I’m often asked what I do for a living. My answer, that I am a professor at the University of Kentucky, inevitably prompts a second question: “What do you teach?” Responding to such a question should be easy and invite polite conversation, but I usually brace for a negative reaction. At least half the time the person flinches with disapproval when I answer “evolution,” and often the conversation simply terminates once the “e-word” has been spoken. Occasionally, someone will retort: “But there is no evidence for evolution.” Or insist: “It’s just a theory, so why teach it?” At this point I should walk away, but the educator in me can’t. I generally take the bait, explaining that evolution is Read More ›

Here’s another item of note: Readers of his columns and works of philosophy may wonder why he chose to tackle this through the medium of the novel. ‘I’ve always taken the view that works of art are not just things that we enjoy. They can convey truths about the world more vividly and to greater effect than ordinary philosophical prose can because they don’t just deal in ideas but show the emotional reality of them. And I think that our society has gone terribly wrong because people have not been confronting the great issues — the loss of the Christian faith, the inability to confront Islam, the loss of the sense of the sacredness of the sexual relation, and the Read More ›

For the same reasons as he once “believed in” Freudian psychiatry, according to Laszlo Bencze: Freudianism triumphed (for a while) not because of its scientific value but because of its language. Freud was a high grade intellectual fully immersed in the ancient classics and literarily sophisticated. He used the language of writers, artists, and critics in crafting psychoanalysis. When people read Freud they were exposed to unusual ideas in language that felt like an old shoe. An ex British schoolboy who had struggled with Latin and Greek felt masterful in encountering discussions of the Oedipus Complex. It flattered him to know that his literary wrestling matches had finally paid off in deep understanding. There never was anything truly demanding in Read More ›

He likes Ayaan Hirsi Ali Yeah, yeah, that guy, still selling Darwin’s used cars [!]. But never mind, get this—he likes Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Below is Hirsi Ali’s interview with Megyn Kelly on Fox News. Kelly did a far better job than Jon Stewart, who tried to argue that Islam is no worse than any other faith, and that even without Islam and other religions, people would still be doing exactly the same amount of bad stuff. It’s a shame that it’s mainly the right-wing interviewers who give Hirsi Ali (and criticism of Islam) a fair shake, for I intensely dislike being in bed with conservatives. (Unlike Stewart, Kelly at least lets Hirsi Ali put forth her ideas.) The contrast Read More ›

Possibly in advance of a political victory in 2016 that will provide unlimited public purse power, a Darwin follower muses thus: I can name one large museum (but I won’t) that totally avoids human evolution (but not necessarily evolution in general) because there are private donors who don’t think humans evolved. The aforementioned human evolution exhibit funded by Koch is probably a mild example of bias. I’ve seen a lot of human evolution exhibits, and so far the few that are quite willing to challenge visitors’ religious or other anti-science beliefs were entirely state funded, as far as I know. I think it is appropriate to ask the Smithsonian to dump the Kochs and their ilk as donors and board Read More ›

In a review of Wallace, Darwin, and the Origin of Species, from the Weekly Standard, we read: In this deeply absorbing book, James T. Costa seeks to establish Alfred Russel Wallace as the fully vested co-creator of what he feels we should once again call the “Darwin-Wallace Theory” of evolution by natural selection. That Wallace had a part in the history of evolutionary theory is, of course, well known. While he was collecting in Malaysia, the basic facts of natural selection occurred to him with the kind of beautiful clarity most of us experience only in dreams (and Wallace was indeed suffering from malaria at the time). He sent his account to Charles Darwin, catapulting the more senior naturalist into a Read More ›