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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 ›
Feser on Heisenberg on Act and Potency
In my view, the most important question in the ID-Darwinism debate is this: what do we mean by design? All participants in the debate agree that living things manifest design of some sort; Darwinists assert that the design is unintelligent, the product of ateleological genetic variation and natural selection. ID proponents assert that design implies an intelligent source. Philosophers of an Aristotelian and Thomist stripe assert that teleology pervades nature, but insist that a proper understanding of teleology entails a metaphysical understanding of nature (hylomorphism) that differs from the metaphysical presuppositions of most ID advocates, who generally accept (implicitly if not explicitly) the mechanical view of nature shared by materialists. In my view, we need to integrate our understanding of 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 Greatest Show on Earth — Another Circus Comes to Town
The New Scientist may sound like a scholarly science publication, but in covering news it often revels in uninformed and unprofessional attacks on critics of Darwinian evolution. So it is somewhat of a surprise to see the publication produce a not-so-veiled pan of The Greatest Show on Earth, Richard Dawkins’ new book. If the evident disappointment expressed by science filmmaker Randy Olson is at all valid, Dawkins’ resemblance to the creator of the original “Greatest Show on Earth,” 19th Century circus entrepreneur P.T. Barnum, is confirmed.
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 ›