Month: November 2007
Meet the Materialists, part 4: Cesare Lombroso and the New School of Criminal Anthropology
Note: This is one of a series of posts adapted from my new book, Darwin Day in America. You can find other posts in the series here. By the end of the nineteenth century, American scholars were already talking with excitement about the “new school of criminal anthropology” that sought to use modern science to identify the causes of crime. Leading the way was Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909), whose book Criminal Man (1876) remains a landmark work in the field of criminology. Lombroso and his disciples contended that criminal behavior could be explained largely as a throwback to earlier stages of Darwinian evolution. According to Lombroso, infanticide, parricide, theft, cannibalism, kidnapping, theft and anti-social actions can all be found Read More ›
Looks Like Darwin Day Has Come A Little Early
Darwin Day in America that is. The new book by CSC associate director John West is now available in bookstores and online. If you missed West at the Heritage Foundation yesterday you can now watch or listen online. Abolition of Man? How Politics and Culture Have Been Dehumanized in the Name of ScienceWatch | Streaming MP3 | Save MP3 | Details
Rebuttal to Paul Gross’ Review of The Edge of Evolution – Error #3: Ignoring Behe’s Rebuttal of Exaptation Speculation
[This four part series responding to Paul Gross can be seen in: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.] An urban legend has cropped up among Darwinists that Michael Behe ignores indirect routes of evolution, commonly called “exaptation,” when he argues for irreducible complexity. In his review of The Edge of Evolution in The New Criterion, anti-ID biologist Paul Gross wrongly accuses that “Behe had failed to understand ‘exaptation’ (the use of an available part in function ‘B’ despite its original function ‘A’).” But in Darwin’s Black Box, Behe clearly accounts for exaptation and explains why it does not refute irreducible complexity: “Even if a system is irreducibly complex (and thus cannot have been produced directly), however, one can Read More ›
Bruce Chapman Is Pleased (Sorta)
The intelligent new on-line Seattle regional magazine “Crosscut“, edited by David Brewster, carries a column (as Anika Smith pointed out yesterday) called “Bruce Chapman is Right,” written by “Mossback” liberal Knute Berger. It generally agrees with recent comments of mine on Dr. James Watson and the battle over eugenics. I hate to cavil after such welcome praise, but I have to demur from Berger’s one demurral. That is, when he says that we should remember that many Christian and Jewish clergy backed the original eugenics program in America, some heavy qualification is needed.
Behe’s Critics in Cahoots?
Michael Behe has a new blog series up responding to Nick Matzke’s review of his book in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, in three parts: Part 1Part 2Part 3 As Behe notes, this review of Edge of Evolution is a real doozy, “a tediously disdainful review of The Edge of Evolution which revisits the blunders of previous reviews while adding new ones.” It’s only when we get to Part 3 of his response that Behe reveals the identity of the reviewer to be none other than Nick Matzke, formerly of the NCSE. Behe thinks this is worth mentioning: