Category: Culture & Ethics
Canadian Science Journalist Reviews Darwin Day in America
Canadian science journalist Denyse O’Leary (co-author of the terrific book The Spiritual Brain) offers a multi-part review of my book Darwin Day in America here. O’Leary is a wry as well as perceptive writer, and I loved her description of my chapter on modern architecture, which she describes as a discussion of “featureless apartment buildings that resemble broiler houses.”
Meet the Materialists, part 9: Clotaire Rapaille, Marketing Guru
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. When Kellogg needed advice about Tony the Tiger, Seagrams wanted to know more about whisky, and Samonsite wanted to understand the deeper meaning of luggage, they all called one man: Clotaire Rapaille, Boca Raton marketing guru extraordinaire. A native of France, Rapaille has parlayed a master’s degree in psychology and a doctorate in medical anthropology from the Sorbonne into a lucrative career in high-stakes world of corporate advertising. Featured by such news outlets as CNN, The New York Times, and Newsweek, Rapaille has assembled an elite client list straight from the Fortune 100. Read More ›
The Questions Larry Arnhart Won’t — Or Can’t — Answer
Fresh from our debate at Seattle Pacific University last month, Larry Arnhart resumed his on-again-off-again attack on Darwin Day in America—a book he alternately praises and condemns. Arnhart originally misrepresented (here and here) Darwin Day by alleging that I tried to tie every example of scientific reductionism in my book back to Darwin. As I pointed out in a previous blog, Arnhart’s claim is untrue, and I showed how he had misread or misrepresented the particular examples he had cited. Rather than correct his erroneous claim, however, Arnhart now asserts that I engaged in “bait and switch” when I pointed out in my book that Darwinism is “only one part of [the] larger story” of “materialistic reductionism” even while also Read More ›
Meet the Materialists, part 8: John Watson, the Father of Modern Advertising
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. John B. Watson, founder of the behavioral school of psychology, believed that human beings were on par with animals, and so he insisted that they should be studied just like animals. Indeed, he defined behaviorism as “an attempt to do one thing—to apply to the experimental study of man the same kind of procedure and the same language of description that many research men had found useful for so many years in the study of animals lower than man.” He compared opposition to behaviorism to the “resistance that appeared when Darwin’s ‘Origin of Read More ›
Meet the Materialists, part 7: Katherine Blackford, M.D., and the “Scientific” Selection of Employees
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. During the early decades of the twentieth century, Katherine Blackford , M.D., urged America’s businesses to reinvent their employment policies by drawing on the discoveries of modern science, especially Darwinian biology. Employment selection procedures, in short, needed to be based on the facts of natural selection.