Tag: psychology
Making Hash of Evolutionary Psychology
Stuart Derbyshire, senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Birmingham, has an absolutely scathing review (at Spiked) of the latest nonsense emanating from evolutionary psychologists. As Derbyshire has it in the first line: Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World is an unbearably stupid book. The authors, Malcolm Potts and Thomas Hayden, ‘explain’ war and violence by treating human beings as machines programmed by evolution to grab resources, form in-groups and pass on their genes. Women, according to the authors, are naturally more passive because they must invest more effort into rearing offspring, and men are naturally more aggressive because they can produce lots of offspring by being dominant. Read More ›
None Dare Call it Journalism
Whether the Times will discover the full scope of the threat is uncertain. No one at the Times has yet noticed, for example, that if you play the movie’s interview with Richard Dawkins backward, you can hear Ben Stein saying, “Bill Dembski is dead”
O’Leary Reviews Cardinal Schonborn’s Chance or Purpose?
I am often asked what to make of Christoph Cardinal Schonborn’s new book Chance or Purpose?Luckily, I can now point people to Denyse O’Leary’s spot-on review. Among the many highlights, O’Leary notes that
Second Verse Same as the First: Practice Science, Follow the Evidence Where it Leads
I might have titled this post, “Eastern Mystics Join Western Fundamentalist Conspiracy,” except that there are those out there that would howl to the highest that I had finally admitted we are fundamentalists with a secret conspiracy. (First, I’m fundamentally not a fundamentalist, and the so-called “secret conspiracy” is neither secret nor a conspiracy.) Instead, I have a title that neatly sums up the point made in the Asian Tribune today, titled Is our evolving universe an intelligent design?, by essayist Vasantha Raja. It is an excellent article in which Raja shows that following the evidence where it leads isn’t a fundamentalist conspiracy to convert the world in whichever direction at all, it is rather what the scientific method should Read More ›
Who wrote Richard Dawkins’s new book?
This past Tuesday, Richard Dawkins spoke at DC’s famous Politics & Prose bookstore, reading from his new book “The God Delusion.” One philosophically astute questioner, American Enterprise Institute’s Joe Manzari, had the following exchange with Dr. Dawkins: