essay
On August 11, 1999, the Kansas State Board of Education voted six-to-four to remove references to cosmology and evolution from the State’s education standards and assessments. The Board’s decision does grave disservice to the students and teachers of the State of Kansas, as well as to science and religion everywhere. Students need to study…
From: Edward Remler I read this with a heavy heart. An eminent physicist confusing an already hopelessly confused subject. Consider the statement: “Superfluidity, like the fractional Hall effect, is an emergent phenomenon – a low-energy collective effect of huge numbers of particles that cannot be deduced from the microscopic equations of motion in a rigorous…
Stephen Jay Gould is the best-known evolutionist in Americaand his fame goes well beyond his country’s borders. My father, who died a year or two back, prided himself on his knowledge of things intellectual, religion, literature, science, and so forth, and took much pleasure in catching me out on matters pertaining to my own subject. …
There seems to be quite a misunderstanding about reductionism, based on a strong misapprehension of what it allows in physics [which is where the idea comes from, after all!]. I think it would be salutary for those wish to seriously get involved in the area to get to know a bit about what the modern-day…
When a problem persists against our usual repertoire of responses we really have only two choices. One is to accept the problem as beyond our control. The other is to press on in the conviction that we can solve it. Either of these two choices works best when embraced to the exclusion of the other. …
In The Design Inference (Cambridge, 1998) I argue that specified complexity is a reliable empirical marker of intelligent design. A long sequence of random letters is complex without being specified. A short sequence of letters like “the,” “so,” or “a” is specified without being complex. A Shakespearean sonnet is both complex and specified. Thus in…
Meta 166. 1999/12/20. Approximately 2567 words. Below is a review of Robert Pollack’s new book “The Missing Moment:How the Unconscious Shapes Modern Science.” The review is written byNat Lehrman in New York. The largely positive review below isbalanced by another review by Stephen Hall in the New York Times BookReviews on December 19, 1999 entitled…
Introduction Participation in the Parliament of the World’s Religions (1999) was a most enriching experience, and I am sharing the following excerpts from my journal because the Parliament was essentially a shared experience for all of us. No one could have taken full advantage of everything that was there, and notes are based for the…
Evolutionary biologists have long been interested in war and aggression. It was something Darwin talked of in his Descent of Man – hardly a surprise since his mechanism of natural selection is fueled by a “struggle for existence” – and his followers and critics have struggled with the issue since. Some, the extreme “Social Darwinians,”…
INTRODUCTION Alchemy has gone the way of the dodo, or has it? On any word analogies test, pairing alchemy with chemistry is like pairing astrology with astronomy. To be sure, alchemy and astrology each had their uses. In the history of ideas they helped focus interest in areas that eventually would submit to rigorous analysis–the…