Culture

(Series)

Alfred Russel Wallace is the all but forgotten co-founder of modern evolutionary thought. His major book reveals a bit of why, right from the title and sub-title: The World of Life: a manifestation of Creative Power, Directive Mind and Ultimate Purpose.

In short, Wallace was a design thinker, and in fact he was also a supernaturalist. (A Spiritualist, actually.)

It should be no surprise to see, therefore, that he took on the methodological naturalism that was even then beginning to be informally institutionalised in science.  (In our time, it has now been formally written into redefinitions of science promoted by bodies like the US’s National Academy of Science and their National Science Teachers Association, in the teeth of serious historical, logical and epistemological issues and concerns.)

It is worth pausing for a few moments in this series of posts, to reflect on how Wallace responded to Hume et al, in his An Answer to the Arguments of Hume, Lecky, and Others, Against Miracles.

Clipping from p. 112 on, we may see: Read More ›

Here’s New Scientiston the Princeton exhibit: This year contest organisers chose the theme “intelligent design” – a rubric they confess was intentionally picked to be provocative. The term, they decided, suggests a theme that can be interpreted broadly enough to encourage submissions from any number of fields. But given its wide use in attacks on the theory of evolution, contest organisers hope to push scientists to reclaim the term, and remind one another of all its other possible connotations: the intelligently designed product of a thoughtful engineer, or the clever new simulation from a creative computer scientist. They can reclaim the term any time they want, except for one thing: Darwinism explicitly teaches that there is no design, intelligent or Read More ›