Responding to Michael Ruse’s thoughtful response to my essays on “Human Creativity: Accelerating Complexity and Evolutionary Discontinuity” and his more colorful criticism at the recent Haverford Conference on “Genetics, Bioethics, and Religion.”
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,…
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…
Although it is a well-written book and Robert Wright is a clever journalist with a bent for spinning evolutionary just-so stories, he forgot to test his hypothesis. As a consequence he has paid the price by being wrong.
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. …
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. …
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,”…
Altruistic love (or “love of neighbor”) can be directed to kin, friends, strangers, the neediest, and even for enemies. To better understand the profound human phenomenon of such love, a highly integrative approach is needed, one that links the biological and social sciences with philosophical, ethical, and comparative religious themes. The word altruism derives from…
When Alfred Nobel instituted his prizes at the beginning of this century, he set up awards in physics and chemistry, medicine, and literature and peace. Since then, in his memory, economics has been added. There are some notable omissions. The story is that Nobel’s wife ran off with a mathematician, so that put paid to…