Category: Culture & Ethics
When Evolutionary Psychology Collides With Morality
In 2006, the New York Times published an exceedingly long book review titled “An Evolutionary Theory of Right and Wrong,” covering Harvard evolutionary psychologist Marc D. Hauser’s theories of the evolution of human morality. “Religions are not the source of moral codes,” stated the review when describing Hauser’s ideas, further noting that this claim, “if true, would have far-reaching consequences.” The review observed that “[m]atters of right and wrong have long been the province of moral philosophers and ethicists,” but after Hauser’s work, “[m]oral philosophers may not welcome a biologist’s bid to annex their turf.” So who has authority over morality: evolutionary psychologists, or theologians? In his book, Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong, Read More ›
We Hold Some Truths To Be Self Evident
When we celebrate our country’s independence on July 4th, the day may resonate with many Americans more powerfully than in other recent years. The nation’s political mood is increasingly, well, independent. Voters are fed up with incumbent politicians and reigning political parties. This accounts for the unlikely bestselling books that keep shooting up out of what might seem like nowhere — previously obscure biographies of the Founders that pose fundamental questions about the role of our government and what direction the nation is headed. In a welcome development, Americans want to refresh their acquaintance with the sources of our rights as citizens. Yet there is one source, more basic than any other, that so far has not received the attention Read More ›
Manliness, Human Dignity, and All That Darwin Can’t Explain
The failure of Darwinism to account for our human experience is something many people know intuitively — but few can articulate it so well as Harvard philosopher Harvey Mansfield and novelist Tom Wolfe. Peter Lawler, who blogs over at First Thing’s Postmodern Conservative, wrote a wonderful essay detailing the ways “America’s two most astute social commentators… have weighed in on the debate over the neo-Darwinian view of evolution.” In “Real Men Prove Darwin Wrong (Again),” Lawler synthesizes how these two masters illustrate that there are more things in heaven and earth than can be explained by Darwin: They agree that the real controversy in our country is not between rationalists who preach evolutionism and fundamentalists who live in Darwin-denial, but Read More ›
Gould’s Fatal Flaw: The Thirtieth Anniversary of Wallace’s Encounter with Darwinian Newspeak
Precisely thirty years ago this month the late Stephen Jay Gould published an article in volume 89 of Natural History purporting to demonstrate Alfred Russel Wallace’s “fatal flaw.” Wallace, who co-discovered natural selection in his now-famous Ternate Letter of 1858, first startled Charles Darwin and then prompted him after years of ponderous delay to finally complete his Origin of Species and rush it to press. By November of the following year his magnum opus was in the hands of the English public. But Wallace would break with Darwin over the source of the human intellect. While Darwin thought man and animal different in degree not kind, Wallace felt that the special attributes of the human mind, its facility for abstract Read More ›
What Climategate Tells Us About “Consensus Science”
The parallels between the CRU email scandal (aka “Climategate”) and the abuse of science perpetrated by those who want to keep Darwin-skeptics out of their universities, journals, and way, are clear to those closely involved in the debate over evolution. Today Stephen Meyer explains in an article at Human Events how familiar it is to have “scientists from various academic institutions hard at work suppressing dissent from other scientists who have doubts on global warming, massaging research data to fit preconceived ideas, and seeking to manipulate the gold standard ‘peer review’ process to keep skeptical views from being heard.” Does this sound familiar at all? To me, as a prominent skeptic of modern Darwinian theory, it sure does. For years, Read More ›