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Wednesday, February 22, 2006

For the Really Highbrow Darwin Doubters

Get to know David Berlinski. His collection of essays for Commentary magazine is available here.

4 comments:

Kathy Hutchins said...

The Commentary archive is pay for play. I think you can get the full text of all these articles from the Discovery Institute.

And someone should give Commentary a clue about basic economics: I would have been willing to pay for access to the archives as part of a subscription deal, but their prices for access to the full archive are insane, and the access options with a print subscription only go back six years. I don't know what kind of perceived market segmentation they're trying to exploit, but it's nuts.

Evanston2 said...

Kathy, thanks for the link. I think the Summers purge at Harvard illustrates how heterodox beliefs (e.g., ID) will never be received in academe or most "peer reviewed journals." While Summers' problems were in the arena of social sciences, such purges reinforce the impression that Darwinists would rather shout down ID than disprove its arguments. Of course, we see this shouting down practiced in Kansas, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Ohio. Merely stating that Darwinism is a theory, or encouraging critical thinking, or "teaching the controversy" prompts a response by our Betters that we need not explore the facts -- that to do so is somehow "religious." I have particularly been disappointed by social science conservatives like James Q. Wilson, who don't deign to counter ID's arguments but instead tell me to just agree with his peers. Agree or be purged.

Hunter Baker said...

Evanston, you have to understand that Wilson is a Darwinian theorist in his approach to political philosophy. It is the paradigm he has assumed in most of his scholarship. Don't expect him to be an inquirer in this area.

Evanston2 said...

Hunter, thanks for the elucidation. After Wilson published some paragraphs on ID a few months ago, I looked at online bio's (including titles of his work, and its influence) but didn't read his stuff. Perhaps I was forced to read a little in college, but that's going into "wayback machine" to the early '80s before I switched from the bombast of international relations to good ol' economics! Well, I expected something more factual from Wilson, particularly assuming he has a few grad assistants or the like to do the research.