Alfred Russel Wallace, who along with Charles Darwin discovered and advanced the theory of evolution, was, unlike Darwin, a deeply spiritual man who was convinced that materialistic natural selection did not fully explain the origin of man. Unlike so many of his philosophically materialistic scientific colleagues, Wallace was a fierce critic of eugenics and the arrogant scientism of his day. Wallace wrote: Segregation of the unfit is a mere excuse for establishing a medical tyranny. And we have had enough of this kind of tyranny already…the world does not want the eugenist to set it straight…Eugenics is simply the meddlesome interference of an arrogant scientific priestcraft. (1) Commenting on our modern scientific priestcraft, Steven Lenzer has a superb essay and Read More ›

David Chalmers has a thoughtful blog post about the growing importance of the problem of consciousness in the debate over intelligent design. Chalmers, a leading philosopher of the mind, is a particularly clear and honest thinker, and his elaboration of “the hard problem of consciousness” alone warrants much gratitude from those of us who are trying to formulate a vocabulary for the thoughtful discussion of the problem of consciousness. Chalmers is not a theist, but he believes that consciousness is a fundamental property in the universe, in the same way that matter and natural laws are properties in the universe. In that sense, he is a dualist. He does not, however, believe that the necessity for an immaterial explanation for Read More ›

All natural functional biological complexity arose through the mechanism of non-teleological heritable variation and natural selection. That’s the Neo-Darwinian synthesis, in a nut-shell, and it’s the cornerstone of biology. The Neo-Darwinian synthesis may be divided into two professions, so to speak, the union of which constitutes the orthodoxy. Jacques Monod called them “chance” and “necessity,” and it’s a useful shorthand. Monod’s “chance” means absence of design. Chance means random in the sense of lacking teleology. There is no purpose in the raw material of Darwinian evolution. Of course, that doesn’t mean that the “random heritable variation” generator doesn’t obey natural laws. It does, like everything else, but it has no foresight. It’s random like flipping a coin is random. The Read More ›

P.Z. Myers and I finally agree on something! In a recent post, I described several actual Darwinian medicine “theories”: ‘Children Hate Vegetables Because of Ancestral Reproductive Advantage of Avoiding Toxins’ or ‘We Will Evolve Oiler Skin Because of Frequent Bathing’ or ‘X-Linked Color Blindness Evolved to Help Paleolithic Male Hunters See Camouflage.’ As I pointed out in my original post, these theories are real, and in fact represent the cutting edge of Darwinian medicine. Myers refers to these Darwinian medicine research projects as “silly”: No, none of those very silly talks were given. And he’s right. What he fails to note, however, is that these theories differ little in substance from the ephemeral corpus of Darwinian just-so stories. These silly Read More ›

Several Darwinist bloggers have taken exception to my observation that Darwinian stories about the origin of diseases contribute little of significance to medical education, research, or practice. Orac responds: …that creationist neurosurgeon with a penchant for laying down hunks o’ hunks o’ burnin’ stupid on a regular basis, that Energizer Bunny of antievolution nonsense, Dr. Michael Egnor has spouted off on evolution again in a way that got my attention. It came in response to a post by PZ about a conference he attended entitled Understanding evolution: the legacy of Darwin, which served as a launching pad for Dr. Egnor to go right down the rabbit hole…The stupid, it burns. It sears. My neurons are crying out in pain. Once Read More ›