Holmes Rolston, III is a well-known philosopher who has written extensively on both the philosophy of religion and on philosophical issues to do with the environment. The book under review, Genes, Genesis and God: Values and Their Origins in Natural and Human History, started life as the Gifford Lectures given at the University of Edinburgh…
The noted American evolutionist and popular science writer Stephen Jay Gould argues strenuously that science and religion occupy different domains and speak to different issues. Properly understood therefore they cannot be in conflict: the ongoing American controversy about the literal truth of Genesis versus the claims of the evolutionists must be predicated on mistaken understandings…
Dr. Raymond Damadian failed to be included in this year’s Nobel honors for work in Medicine, and feels sore about it. Although he was the inventor of the first machine that discovers cancers through magnetic resonance imaging, the award went to two other and somewhat subsequent scientists, Paul Lauterbur and Peter Mansfield. Notoriously, the Nobel…
Stephen Jay Gould is dead. He died Monday morning of cancer. In his life, he was many things: a Harvard professor, a baseball fanatic, an enthusiastic singer of oratorio, an outstanding evolutionist, and above all the greatest science writer of his generation. Young people of all ages, in America and elsewhere, have grown up on…
It’s not much fun being a cow or a sheep in Englandat the moment. In fact, it is not much fun being anyone in England at the moment. My wife Lizzie just returned from a week’s trip there, and she found the place a bit like a fortress – or a prison, more like. She…
In May of this year Billy Grassie published a three-part series on the subject of “Human Creativity: Expanding Complexity and Evolutionary Discontinuities.” He gave a version of this paper at the beginning of June of this year at a Templeton-sponsored workshop at Haverford College in Philadelphia, and by his invitation I was the respondent. Again,…
I am always torn when it comes to criticism of my thinking. On the one hand, my inclination is to let it pass in silence. I have had my say, and now it is the turn of others. I am never quite sure that anyone gains if one spends time with charge and counter charge. …
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…
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.
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. …