Casey Luskin reports the passing of our colleague and member of the National Academy of Sciences, Phil Skell.
Philip S. Skell, sometimes called “the father of carbene chemistry,” is widely known for the “Skell Rule,” which was first applied to carbenes, the “fleeting species” of carbon. The rule, which predicts the most probable pathway through which certain chemical compounds will be formed, found use throughout the pharmaceutical and chemical industries.
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Later in his career, Phil became a skeptic of neo-Darwinian evolution. His main position was that Darwinism does not serve as the cornerstone of biological thought that many claim it does.