Irving Kristol, Darwin Doubter, RIP

If you’re ever given a choice between seeing one of two doctors about a health concern, with all else about them being apparently equal, you’d be well advised to choose the older one. Oh but won’t the young guy have all the latest techniques and therapies at his disposal, fresh from med school? Maybe or maybe not. What’s more likely, and more important, is that the seasoned practitioner will have wisdom and experience of the human condition. So too in the political world, where on the conservative side of the spectrum you have “neocons,” “paleocons,” and “theocons.” Those distinctions have always seemed a bit spurious, having to do more with preferences in personal style and social networking than anything else. Read More ›

How David Berlinski Came to Doubt Darwin

ENV: When did you start thinking, as a critic, about Darwinian evolution? Did anything in your biography incline you to freethinking in that area?It was the fall of 1965. My graduate school roommate Daniel Messenger and I were ambling along Nassau Street in Princeton. We were munching the kind of wonderful Winesap apples that seem to have disappeared as a variety. I wonder why that is? Daniel’s girlfriend, Sandra Petersen, was there too. Daniel was a fine philosopher and Sandra was doing a degree in classical philosophy. We walked over to Darwin’s theory of evolution, living at the time in one of Princeton’s back alleys.A back alley was the right place to look for Darwin. No one in the philosophy Read More ›

Richard Weikart Responds to Larry Arnhart’s Review of Hitler’s Ethic

The first review of my book, Hitler’s Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress, has appeared. Larry Arnhart, professor of Political Science, Northern Illinois University, author of Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature, posted a perceptive review to his blogsite.He provides a good summary of the book, and then offers the following remarks: The elements of Nazi ideology seem diverse — racism, German nationalism, anti-Semitism, socialism, militarism, imperialistic expansionism, the ‘leadership principle,’ eugenics, and genocide. But Weikart is remarkably persuasive in showing how all of these strands of Nazi ideology are woven together by the final end of Hitler’s ethic — the evolutionary improvement of the human species through the triumph of the Aryan race in the Read More ›

The Making of a Skeptic: David Berlinski’s Childhood

ENV: Were you always subversive? Tell us about the childhood David Berlinski.I am not sure that I would care to think of myself as subversive. It is a mole-and-badger kind of word, isn’t it? So long as we are searching for similes, I would prefer lion-like. Regal is another fine word.I was from an early age indisposed to accept what I had been told. Having been urged not to insert a fork into an electrical outlet, I stuck one in anyway; I was shocked to discover that it was a poor idea, just as my mother had maintained. An impatient child, I became a school yard terror, and a high-school bully. At the Bronx High School of Science I was Read More ›

Oklahoma’s Darwinists Are Freaked Out by Intelligent Design

For an idea that Darwinists say has no value, intelligent design still seems to captivate them a great deal. Darwinists in Oklahoma have their own list-serv which they use to make announcements, and currently are using to stir up more anti-ID animosity amongst evolutionary foot soldiers in the heartland. They’re all aflutter about the screening of Darwin’s Dilemma, and about Stephen Meyer’s lecture on ID at University of Oklahoma next week. Note this bit of bogus puffery: 2. AND ANOTHER DI INTELLIGENT DESIGN TALK AT OU!As part of the DI appearance on the OU campus Dr. Stephen C. Meyer will deliver a free lecture about his new book, Signature in the Cell: DNA and Evidence for Intelligent Design, at 7 Read More ›