Darwinism’s “Virtual Reality”: A Lepidopterist Explains

In explaining how the Darwinian “trick is done,” internationally famous lepidopterist Bernard d’Abrera recruits a name I haven’t heard much about since college: the philosopher and historian Michel Foucault. In the latest volume of d’Abrera’s epic Butterflies of the World series, titled Butterflies of the Afrotropical Region, Part III: Lycaenidae, Riodinidae, he gives us Foucault in a supporting role you wouldn’t have expected. The two make an odd pair. D’Abrera is the Australian butterfly expert and defender of traditional Linnaean taxonomy, Foucault the French Nietzschean and amoralist. But Foucault’s concept of the episteme, an a priori framework in which scientific and other thought is carried out, nicely describes the hermetically enclosed scientific world of the Darwinist as d’Abrera sees it. Read More ›

What Is It About Butterflies that Drives Men to Doubt Darwin?

I’ve written here before about novelist and lepidopterist Vladimir Nabokov, a self-described “furious” critic of Darwinian theory. An erstwhile butterfly researcher and curator at Harvard and the American Museum of Natural History, Nabokov thought that butterflies possess powers of mimicry inexplicable on Darwinian assumptions: “Natural Selection,” in the Darwinian sense, could not explain the miraculous coincidence of imitative aspect and imitative behavior, nor could one appeal to the theory of “the struggle for life” when a protective device was carried to a point of mimetic subtlety, exuberance, and luxury far in excess of a predator’s power of appreciation. In the same tradition of butterfly-induced Darwin heresy, meet Bernard d’Abera. A kind of latter-day Audubon of lepidoptera, D’Abrera is a philosopher Read More ›

Discovery Institute, the All-Purpose Boogey Man

It always amazes me how if you want to bash intelligent design, Discovery Institute, or Darwin doubters generally, you can pretty much say anything you want, however ridiculous, and everyone in the Darwin choir will sing hallelujah and never bother to fact check what you say. At the Huffington Post, science writer John Farrell debuts with an awkwardly written blog trying to pick a fight with John West on Darwinism’s sinister race-war theme (“Bad Faith (in Science): Darwin as All-Purpose Boogey Man?“). The post struck a nerve, garnering 1,266 comments as of this writing. Says Farrell, West wants his readers to realize that Darwin’s racism had murderous overtones and that therefore the science of evolution must be suspect. Farrell means Read More ›

Berlinski Takes on St. Christopher, Now Viewable Online at C-SPAN

Good news! The Berlinski/Hitchens debate of a couple weeks ago, “Does Atheism Poison Everything?,” is now viewable online in full at C-SPAN. Berlinski is inimitably rapier-like yet courteous as always, though I don’t envy him having to fend off the sympathy vote for the ailing and recently sainted Christopher Hitchens (who looks eerily like Sebastian Shaw as Anakin Skywalker in Return of the Jedi). At Why Evolution Is True, Jerry Coyne notes the C-SPAN production, first smugly saying — apparently before he watched it — how enjoyable it is to see Hitchens “take apart” the “haughty” Berlinski. Then he offers an update to the same post, apparently now having watched the event, where he pronounces it a “reasonably good debate” Read More ›

On Yom Kippur, Considering the Moral Meaning of Theistic Evolution

Tonight is Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement, a wrenching time when we look back on our moral failures of the past year and ask God to accept our repentance as Avinu Malkeinu, our Father and our King. In this space we’ve sometimes considered the theological implications of accepting a Darwinian picture of how human beings came to be. By the lights of so-called theistic evolution, God may have hoped for something like human beings to emerge from the otherwise blind, purposeless process of Darwinian evolution, but to see him as our creator or designer goes too far. What is the moral meaning of such an idea? One of the phrases in the Yom Kippur liturgy asks of God, Read More ›