Category: Culture
Prehistoric “Man” as a Case of Epistemological Regress: Some Historical Lessons From Lukacs and Koestler
Consider this from John Lukacs At the End of An Age (2002): In Chapter 1 of this book I suggested another fundamental limitation of Darwinism, which is the application of Evolution ever further and further backward, claiming that humans may have existed as early as one million years ago. That is a prime example of how unreason lies buried at the bottom of any and every materialist interpretation of mankind, because of its thesis of matter preceding human mind, with mind gradually appearing: when? perhaps in dribs and drabs, much later. (I happen to believe that there is no such thing as ‘pre-historic’ man, historicity being the fourth dimension of human existence from the beginning.) But perhaps the essential fault Read More ›
Icons of Evolution 10th Anniversary: Paul Nelson
At 4:38 of this interview, Paul Nelson says that the Miller-Urey experiment is incorrectly interpreted by textbooks as having “synthesized life.” What he meant to say was “the building blocks of life.” Dr. Nelson regrets the error.
Astronomer Denied Job at University of Kentucky Due to Perceived Sympathy for “Creationism”
Martin Gaskell is an astronomer who is originally from the United Kingdom. He came to the U.S. in 1975 and later received his M.S. and Ph.D. at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He’s not a creationist. As we’ll see below, he’s generally a theistic evolutionist, who has at times expressed minor criticisms of some aspects of evolution (he accepts common ancestry) and an openness to the possibility of intelligent design. In 2007, Gaskell was on the faculty at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, where he taught in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. At that time, he applied for a job at the University of Kentucky (UK), hoping to serve as the founding director of a newly planned Read More ›
NCSE’s Program Director Josh Rosenau: Human Dependency Obviates the Right to Life
National Center for Selling Evolution Science Education’ s Program and Policy Director Josh Rosenau has made disturbing arguments in favor of abortion. On his personal blog Thoughts from Kansas, Rosenau, who has been a doctoral candidate in evolutionary biology at the University of Kansas, asserted that children in the womb were nearly indistinguishable from… cancer. Later in his post, Rosenau defends abortion by asserting: Is an embryo a discrete human being? I think not. An embryo is dependent on its living host… An old-fashioned term for the “living host” of an embryo is… mother. Rosneau frames the mother-child relationship charmingly: he compares the relationship between a mother and her unborn child to the relationship between a host and a parasite. Read More ›
Science and Worldviews: Slate Sees the Light
Slate — yes, stet that, Slate — carries an excellent essay opening up the interesting question of whether political and philosophical presuppositions distort what we think of as mainstream science (“Lab Politics: Most scientists in this country are Democrats. That’s a problem“). Author Daniel Sarewitz notes that among scientists, self-identified Republicans make up a dismal 6 percent, while Democrats are 55 percent (the rest are independents and I-don’t-knows). Though Sarewitz doesn’t mention evolution, he ought to have done so. But never mind. While folks on the political right have been strangely slow to pick up on the political resonances of Darwinism, his illustration from the climate debate makes the same point: Could it be that disagreements over climate change are Read More ›