Tag: Bruce
University of Missouri Doctor Lectures on Design
It looks like CSC contributor Michael Egnor is not the only professor of medicine to stick his neck out for intelligent design and face severe personal attack. Dr. John Marshall of The University of Missouri–Columbia lectured this week on his own campus with the title “Intelligent Design: Is It Science or Religion?”
I stand corrected on David Brooks
Recently I shared my reading of David Brooks’ recent colum “The Age of Darwin.” The whole thing read like parody to me. I thought for sure that Brooks could not seriously write that, while we are generally post-modern people who are skeptical of metanarratives, we have and should abandon this view because Darwinism is the true metanarrative of life. I thought he was just pointing out the contradiction in academia between postmodern and Darwinian thought. With thanks to one ENV reader named Oleg, I stand corrected. I had forgotten that Mr. Brooks shared his views on Darwinism in The New Republic in 2005:
Argumentum Ad Baseless Demonization: Assessing Dr. John Wise’s Response to Anika Smith and Sarah Levy
It’s disheartening (and revealing) when people have to demonize their opponents in order to argue against them. Unfortunately, SMU biology professor John Wise has chosen this approach, opening his rebuttal to Anika Smith and Sarah Levy by stating, “Deceptive tactics seem to be a recurring theme at the Discovery Institute,” and continuing for the entirety of his response to supply nothing more than a string of misdirected or misinformed ad hominem attacks. Baseless ad hominem attack 1–Of Pandas and People: Wise attacks the Of Pandas and People textbook as if it is dishonest, and as if that affects the Discovery Institute. But Wise fails to mention that the textbook was first published a year before Discovery Institute was even founded, Read More ›
What does David Brooks really think about Darwinism?
It is a rare day that I would dispute Bruce Chapman’s reading of anything. But today is one such day. Disagreeing with Ambassador Chapman’s and Richard Kirk’s interpretations of David Brooks’ recent column “The Age of Darwin,” I (perhaps mistakenly) thought that Brooks was pointing out the irony of our supposedly post-modern intellectual culture which waxes eloquently about having no grand, unifying metanarrative and at the same time bows down to the Darwinian fairytale, to borrow David Stove’s phrase. Writes Brooks: