Survival of the Fakest

If you had asked me during my years studying science at Berkeley whether or not I believed what I read in my science textbooks, I would have responded much as any of my fellow students: puzzled that such a question would be asked in the first place. One might find tiny errors, of course, typos and misprints. And science is always discovering new things. But I believed – took it as a given – that my science textbooks represented the best sci- entific knowledge available at that time. It was only when I was finishing my Ph.D. in cell and development biology, however, that I noticed what at first I took to be a strange anomaly.

Article originally appeared in The American Spectator – December 2000 / January 2001