With characteristic boldness, Suzan Mazur showed astronomy icon Martin Rees a copy of her book Darwin Overthrown: Hello Mechanobiology, a move that—with participants other than Mazur and Rees—might have resulted in a trip past the recycle bins on the way out. And not for Rees. So what happened?
“Heresy!” Lord Martin Rees, UK’s Astronomer Royal, exclaimed—though seemingly tongue-in-cheek—when I handed him a copy of Darwin Overthrown: Hello Mechanobiology prior to his May Day Simons Foundation lecture in New York: “Physics in Real and Counterfactual Universes.” Suzan Mazur, “Martin Rees on Darwin Overthrown, Our Flat Universe, and Post-Humans” at Oscillations
Hey, “tongue-in-cheek” it had better be if Rees’s own lecture is about physics in real—and counterfactual—universes… 😉
You can read the rest here. The story addresses the way Rees has been in the background of creative thinkers in biology who are grappling with what we now know. Things we didn’t know back in the Sixties. And what we know just isn’t Darwinism (or neo-Darwinism or whatever we are supposed to call what’s taught in school).
In addition to Darwin Overthrown, Suzan Mazur is the author of a number of other books exploring evolution from a non-Darwinian perspective, which, despite denials, is becoming more common. As philosopher James Barham puts it, we are “seeing past Darwin.”
Mazur’s pioneering book was The Altenberg 16: An exposé of the evolution industry (2010), which discussed a private meeting of key figures who were fed up with stale textbook orthodoxies that, let us say, represented their originators much better than they represented nature.
Since then, she has also written The Paradigm Shifters: Overthrowing ‘the Hegemony of the Culture of Darwin’ and Royal Society: Public Evolution Summit, about the Royal Society’s 2016 attempt to address reality, with mixed but still interesting results.
Martin Rees is a lively figure, to be sure. His 2011 Templeton Prize wasn’t for orthodoxy. About technology, he contemplates things like cyborgs on Mars. It’s a good thing he isn’t a zealous defender of orthodoxy as he does not use the product much himself.
And, as we say here, keep an eye on the file.
Follow UD News at Twitter!
See also: Suzan Mazur’s New Book Details How Mechanobiology Dooms Darwin