According to the Daily Beast:
Over the years, Epstein billed himself as a renowned philanthropist and pledged $30 million for Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics. He’s palled around with a host of famous faces including Donald Trump and Bill Clinton; the latter traveled with Epstein to Africa to address issues like economic development and AIDS.
Pervaiz Shallwani, Kate Briquelet, Harry Siegel, “Jeffrey Epstein Arrested for Sex Trafficking of Minors” at The Daily Beast
Program for Evolutionary Dynamics
Our current research topics include: evolution of cooperation, cancer, viruses, evolutionary game/graph/set theory, prelife, protocells, eusociality, evolution of construction, population structure, evolution of language, experimental games, and evolutionary economics.
Our ambitious goals include curing the world of cancer, infectious disease, selfishness, and inclusive fitness theory. More.
Some of these areas would seem to be science issues and others only questionably so. It is much easier to get general, evidence-based agreement on what constitutes cancer and its remedies, for example, than on what constitutes selfishness and its remedies.
One niggle: There seems to be something wrong with the second paragraph of the description. Much as the Program’s participants might hate inclusive fitness theory, they can’t really intend “curing the world” of it. More likely, some grammatical signposts are missing. They may, in reality, be well disposed toward inclusive fitness theory.
The director of the program is Martin Novak, of whom we learn:
A corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Nowak is the recipient of the Weldon Memorial Prize of Oxford University, the David Starr Jordan Prize of Stanford University, and the Akira Okubo Prize of the Society for Mathematical Biology. Nowak is the author of over 450 papers and four books. Evolutionary Dynamics (2006) provides an overview of the powerful yet simple laws that govern the evolution of living systems. SuperCooperators (2011) argues that cooperation is the third fundamental principle of evolution beside mutation and selection.
Keeping the file open.
See also: “The evolutionary psychologist knows why you vote — and shop, and tip at restaurants”
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Hey just keep in mind that as bad as this looks this guy might just be trying to look good with the academics of Harvard
You’ve actually covered this issue on UD (search for “Nowak”). Nowak thinks that inclusive fitness theory is wrong, and group selection theory right. He managed to convince E.O. Wilson, but virtually nobody else, probably because we already knew they two are equivalent (oh yes, and his arguments didn’t hold water).
Aaron – apparently Nowak & Epstein were friends: Nowak has said in interviews that he has visited Epstein’s island lair (that’s not the phrase he used!), where they talked physics. I haven’t seen any allegations that are more salacious about them, so I think it’s worth keeping an open mind about this (I can see Nowak being slightly naïve, especially if he wasn’t invited to those sorts of parties, but I would also agree that a lot of scepticism is warrented). I hope more information will come out soon.
As to:
,,, “evolution of cooperation” HA! Yes that would be a bit of an enigma for a theory based on survival of the fittest and selfish genes. In fact altruistic and/or cooperative behavior of any sort is an outright falsification of Darwin’s theory:
as to, “cancer”. Shoot, besides Darwinian just so stories being completely useless for medical research,,
In fact, besides being useless to medicine, Darwinian evolution, to the extent it has influenced medical diagnostics and research, has been harmful to medicine (i.e. malpractice) – December 2016
http://www.uncommondescent.com.....ent-622443
,,, besides Darwinian just so stories being completely useless , even harmful, to medical research,, a Darwinist once claimed that cancer was actually proof that evolution could, of all things, innovate and create
as to “prelife, protocells”,, see Dr. Tour’s recent devastating critique of current ‘evolutionary’ Origin of life research:
As to “evolution of language”. That is the most laughable area of research of all for a Darwinist to donate money to. Much like the origin of information in life, Darwinists have ZERO hope of ever explaining the origin of language in humans. In fact, the unique ability of man to be able to utilize language, and more specifically, the unique ability of man to be able to infuse information into material substrates, is a VERY powerful proof that man was indeed ‘made in the image’ of God:
Each and every other area of research listed by News, that Epstein donated to, is also a completely hopeless area of research for a Darwinist to take up. Which is not surprising. Darwinian evolution simply is not a science by any reasonable measure one may wish to invoke but is much more realistically, at least how Darwinists treat their theory, classified as a unfalsifiable pseudoscientific religion for atheists.
OT: