essay
General Augusto Pinochet is now back in his native Chile amid a welter of recriminations. He stands accused of the kidnap, torture and murder of thousands of his fellow citizens. On the grisly Richter scale of genocidal horror, the world has seen far worse than Pinochet – Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot killed millions. The…
Suppose you are a potato grower and you have a big contract to supply McDonald’s with prepared french fries. It would be really great if they could come packaged with their own fat for frying, and that all one had to do was pop them into the microwave. So, you go to the Pork Producers…
Science, we are told, is tentative. And given the history of science, there is every reason for science to be tentative. No scientific theory withstands revision for long, and many are eventually superseded by theories that flat contradict their predecessors. Scientific revolutions are common, painful, and real. New theories regularly overturn old ones, and no…
If you were shrewd enough to invest $15,000 in Microsoft ten years ago you’d be a millionaire by now. The engine of growth that has driven the computer industry, and looks set to make Bill Gates the world’s first trillionaire, is no lucky fluke. Underpinning it have been sweeping advances in fundamental electronics. The first…
Arguing for a “balanced theory of contingent-necessity in evolution.”
He constructs a cosmology nucleated on big-bang cosmology.
Does the history of our species show any evidence of higher purpose?
You can separate out the context of discovery from the context of justification, but anyone who studies real science will see that it is deeply cultural impregnated.
I was recently on an NPR program with skeptic Michael Shermer and paleontologist Donald Prothero to discuss intelligent design. As the discussion unfolded, it became clear that they were using the phrase “intelligent design” in a way quite different from how the emerging intelligent design community is using it. The confusion centered on what the…
From: Ursula Goodenough I lack the training to respond to Geoge Ellis’s anti-reductionism arguments with respect to physics, but I don’t believe his arguments with respect to biology should stand unchallenged. He makes two: “(c) The central theme of evolutionary biology is the development of particular DNA codings through an evolutionary process, in order to…