In “Is Evolution a Lousy Story?” (Chronicle of Higher Education May 2, 2012), Tom Bartlett makes a statement about the new academic freedom law in Tennessee that is quite simply false:
In Tennessee a new law took effect last month that allows teachers to discuss creationism as an alternative to evolution.
The law explicitly forbids that, and was intended to protect teachers who want to discuss the history of life as a body of facts, apart from Darwin’s nauseating pieties .
It probably feels good to Bartlett to be able to use terms like “Monkey Trial” and “Monkey Bill” and to introduce the idea that, according to “literary Darwinism,” evolution might be a “lousy story”:
Gottschall is among the best-known proponents of Literary Darwinism, and in his latest book, The Storytelling Animal, he sets out to prove that the human brain is wired for story and to figure out why that might be useful. “If evolution is a story, it is a story without agency,” he writes in an e-mail. “It lacks the universal grammar of storytelling.” Stories are about a character finding a solution to a problem. Evolution has problems and solutions but no character. As a result, according to Gottschall, “it doesn’t connect as well—especially at the emotional level.”
Does it feel good to be so out of it, Tom Bartlett?
Darwin’s version is fact-challenged, not emotion-challenged. There has never been a shortage of passionate devotion to ideas like the superior race and survival of the fittest. The problem is, it’s not true of human life or any other type.
Academics need this intellectual junk food to avoid confronting the general falsity of Darwinist claims.
See also: Self-organization theorist James Shapiro on Tennessee academic freedom bill
and How the bill exposes the fascist tactics of Darwinists
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