Darwinism

I was originally going to post this as a response to David Coppedge’s post, but it got too long. The relationship between Freud and Darwin – both intellectually and institutionally – is more complicated than has been suggested here. Although Freud had top-notch academic credentials, his career was always that of an outsider, whose main constituency was in the larger public intellectual culture and well-educated middle class people who were his client base. (Freud’s books won literary prizes, not scientific ones.) One way you can see Freud’s outsider status is that he was never granted a professorship even though he tried several times. While his theories were somewhat embraced by medical schools (peaking in the US in the 1950s), experimental Read More ›

Sigmund Freud had immeasurable impact on modern culture.  Along with Marx and Darwin, he was one of the great modern thinkers, whose “science” of psychology and treatment, psychoanalysis, defined modern concepts of human nature for generations.  His theories (based largely on Darwinism) brought new words into popular vocabulary–id, ego, super-ego, the unconscious.  His ideas influenced education, law, religion and medicine.  People began to think about their actions being determined by dreams, sexual repression and mysterious forces deep in their unconscious minds.  They worried about Oedipus complexes, anal retention, penis envy and all kinds of causal concepts Freud introduced.  They spent fortunes lying on couches undergoing psychoanalysis by their shrinks, under the impression they were getting “scientific” treatment because, after all, Read More ›

My second post on Darwinian censorship today pertains to Illustra Media’s film Darwin’s Dilemma: The Mystery of the Cambrian Fossil Record. It was slated to be shown at the California Science Center, as Anika Smith of the Discovery Institute has noted:

[T]he Los Angeles Daily News reports that the California Science Center, a “ department of the State of California,” cancelled the screening of Darwin’s Dilemma after the screening became public knowledge and the Center came under intense pressure to cancel, possibly from the Smithsonian Institution, with which they are affiliated.  The Center’s IMAX Theater had been rented by a private group, the American Freedom Alliance, to hold the Los Angeles premiere of the film as part of a series of activities commemorating the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.

The Smithsonian Institution was clearly upset by publicity promoting the screening that mentioned the true fact that the Science Center is an official “ Smithsonian Affiliate.” The President of the Science Center’s Foundation is now claiming that it canceled the event “because of issues related to the contract,” issues he conveniently refuses to identify.

Read More ›

Some evolutionists are thoughtful and measured, willing to admit the anomalies that evolutionary theory must still explain. Richard Dawkins is not one of them. Instead, he seems to inhabit a la-la land where all the conceptual difficulties connected with the evolutionary theory are resolved or swept under the rug. As one colleague who wishes to remain out of the limelight wrote to a list I moderate:

———————————————————

In the MSNBC interview with Richard Dawkins, titled “The Not-So-Angry Evolutionist,” Dawkins says the following:

“You can actually plot a picture of the pattern of resemblances and differences between every animal and plant and every other animal and plant, and you find out that it fits on a beautiful, hierarchical, branching tree, which can only sensibly be interpreted as a family tree. When you do the same thing with a different gene, you get the same tree. Do the same thing with a third gene, and you get the same tree. It’s overwhelmingly powerful evidence.”

It’s also overwhelmingly false. No molecular systematist would make this claim.

Now, either Dawkins knows this, and therefore is lying to his audience, or he doesn’t know, and has been cribbing from erroneous Talk.origins FAQs. Either option is bad news. One should not accuse someone of lying without solid evidence, so let’s just say that Dawkins is wildly irresponsible.

The incongruence of gene and species trees is a standing obstacle, or research problem, in molecular phylogenetics. Read More ›

Christianity Today has weighed in on the bloggingheads’ controversy involving the disappearing and reappearing discussion between John McWhorter and Michael Behe. An online clearinghouse for intellectual debate has discovered the apparent boundary for its controversial conversations: Intelligent Design. Bloggingheads.tv posted a video interview between journalist John McWhorter and Intelligent Design proponent Michael Behe in late August focused on the Lehigh University biochemistry professor’s 2007 book The Edge of Evolution. It was taken down the same day after the website received a barrage of online criticism for not asking tougher questions of Behe and for hosting him at all. The video was re-posted later, but as Dr. Behe  explains, the initial removal is indicative of a larger issue: “Reposting the interview Read More ›

In “God vs. Science Isn’t the Issue”, William McGurn (Wall Street Journal, October 12, 2009) notes,

In contrast to the majority of scientists whose wondrous discoveries seem to inspire humility, today’s advocates of scientism can be every bit as dogmatic as the William Jennings Bryans of yesteryear. We saw an example a week ago, when the New York Times reported that many scientists view “outspoken religious commitment as a sign of mild dementia.”

The reporter was Gardiner Harris, and the object of his snark was Francis Collins—the new director of the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Collins is perhaps best noted for his leadership on the Human Genome Project, an effort to map the genetic makeup of man. But he is also well known for his unapologetic talk about his Christian faith and how he came to it.

Mr. Harris’s aside about dementia, of course, is less a proposition open to debate than the kind of putdown you tell at a private cocktail party where you know everyone in the room shares your orthodoxies. In this room, there are those who hold that God cannot be reconciled with what science has discovered about the human body, the origin of the species, and the beginnings of the universe. The more honest ones do not flinch before the implications of their materialist principles on our understanding of human dignity and human rights and human freedom—as well as on religion.

A couple of thoughts:

– Whoever said God vs. science was an issue? The whole idea was invented and is kept alive by materialist atheists, whose comments about “dementia” tell you something worth knowing.

– I have noticed that working scientists tend to be humble in the face of the facts, which is a good place to begin any type of true knowledge. The practitioners of scientism, by contrast, behave like cult members.* Recently, I was listening to one of them hold forth as an after-dinner speaker, proclaiming that on many science stories there is only one side. Well, that’s all right then; we can all just mindlessly shout in unison. Oh wait. Cue the pop science press on any subject to do with neuroscience. It is genuinely hard to imagine a neuroscience story so stupid they wouldn’t run with it. Read More ›

According to Michael Brooks (New Scientist, 06 October 2009), in Don’t be such a scientist, Randy “Flock of Dodos” Olson advises DID you spot James Cameron’s mistake in Titanic? Leo DiCaprio is about to drown in the north Atlantic ocean, yet the constellations of the southern hemisphere are aglow in the sky above. Who cares? Scientists, apparently. The mistake “ruined” the movie for Neil de Grasse Tyson, director of New York’s Hayden Planetarium, Randy Olson says. It’s the kind of reaction that gets scientists a bad rap, and Olson – himself a scientist and film-maker – suggests it pays to skip the pedantry and concentrate on the bigger picture. While small factual errors can be irksome, they are not life-threatening, Read More ›

O’Reilly told Dawkins”

you insist you can’t even mention it, that is fascism, sir.

Was he right? Is it constitutional/scientific to insist that only materialistic evolution can be taught?
See: O’Reilly vs. Atheist Author Richard Dawkins

O’REILLY: . . . It’s not fair to leave it out of the science class if the science class is incomplete. And you, by your own admission, say we don’t know how it all began. So if the science class is going to say evolution only, but I really don’t know how it started, that gap has got to be explored. Read More ›

Our friend and colleague Atom tha Immortal has finished up the WEASEL GUI at the Evolutionary Informatics Lab (go here for the GUI). It implements every conceivable interpretation of Dawkins’s WEASEL program as outlined in THE BLIND WATCHMAKER. Thanks Atom for all your hard work!

This book retails for $79.95 and Amazon sells it for $57.78. But the best price online to purchase it is at the Human Events Book Service (go here), where you can get it for $34.95. I highly recommend Weikart’s latest. Darwinists continually try to deny or change the subject that Darwin’s theory deeply influenced the Nazis. Accordingly, what the Nazis did is supposed to constitute a profanation of tried-and-true pure Darwinism. But the flow of ideas from one to the other is clear. To be sure, Darwinism is not a sufficient condition for Nazism, but it certainly was a necessary one.

Anika Smith has noted at Evolution News and Views that Richard Dawkins, author of the recently published book The Greatest Show On Earth, refuses to debate Stephen C. Meyer, author of the recent book The Signature in the Cell.

Dr. Meyer challenged Dawkins to a debate when he saw that their speaking tours would cross paths this fall in Seattle and New York. Dawkins declined through his publicists, saying he does not debate “creationists.”

“Dawkins’ response is disingenuous,” said Meyer. “Creationists believe the earth is 10,000 years old and use the Bible as the basis for their views on the origins of life. I don’t think the earth is 10,000 years old and my case for intelligent design is based on scientific evidence.”

According to Discovery Institute, where Dr. Meyer directs the Center for Science & Culture, the debate challenge is a standing invitation for any time and place that is mutually agreeable to both participants.

Read More ›

I was just listening to Rush Limbaugh (I trust this radio preference of mine will make it quickly into my Wikipedia entry but that my work with the Evolutionary Informatics Lab will continue to be ignored there; by the way, I also enjoy reading Camille Paglia). In any case, Rush read portions of an article at The American Thinker by fellow mathematician Ron Lipsman, who has given up his senior deanship at the big University of Maryland campus so that he can speak his mind more fully. He remains on as a professor there. The article speaks at many levels to the opposition that ID faces from the cultural elite. Here’s a sample: …The liberal hegemony exists in many quarters Read More ›

Wesley J. Smith has written a blog on human exceptionalism at Secondhand Smoke, his blog at First Things, in light of the recent publications about  “Ardi”, the hominid that is supposedly “pretty close” to the common ancestor of humans and chimps way back 4.4 million years ago.

Human exceptionalism received a boost today with the news that human beings apparently did not evolve from apes…I bring this up because some Darwinsists and other assorted materialists have attacked human exceptionalism on the basis that our supposed emergence from the great apes and/or our genetic closeness means that we should not think of ourselves as distinctive. I never thought that was in the least persuasive.  What matters is what we are now, not what might have been millions of years ago or how we got here…

And that brings me to Ewen Callaway’s review in New Scientist of the book Not a Chimp: The hunt to find the genes that make us human authored by Jeremy Taylor. As Mr. Callaway explains, Jeremy Taylor’s book sheds light on the issue of genetic similarity:

In this book, his first, the former BBC producer synthesises recent genetic, behavioural and neuroscientific research to argue that far more than a handful of genes divides humans from our evolutionary cousins, 6 million years removed.

Take that 98.4 per cent, an oft-repeated figure that has been used to argue that chimps deserve human rights. True, Homo sapiens and Pan troglodytes share an extraordinary amount of genetic similarity – yet humans and mice share almost as much.

Read More ›

Is this politically correct? Hmmm… [youtube d4KcRMTKImQ]

Clearing out the Inbox, I find this item, “Charles Darwin film ‘too controversial for religious America’” A British film about Darwin has failed to find a US distributor because his theory of evolution is too controversial for American audiences, according to its producer (Anita Singh,The Daily Telegraph, 11 Sep 2009). Utter rubbish. Most likely, the film – which led off the Toronto International Film Festival – was rejected because it is a bore. No one here cares about Charles and Emma Darwin. A tell-all about Bill and Hillary Clinton or Barack and Michelle Obama, now …. This whole fake uproar* reminds me of a recent occasion when some pundit from the States claimed that Canadians have a growing fear of Read More ›