Teaching the Controversy
Metaphysics Matters
In his influential book The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins asserts that “Like successful Chicago gangsters our genes have survived . . . in a highly competitive world, . . . [and so] a predominant quality to be expected in a successful gene is ruthless selfishness.” Therefore, “We are survival machines-robot vehicles programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.” Read More ›
Molecular Machines
Michael Behe’s Response to Boston Review Critics
The following is Michael Behe’s response to the essays published by Boston Review following Allen Orr’s review of Darwin’s Black Box. All of those articles may still be found at Allen Orr Professor Orr has a mistaken notion of irreducible complexity. I thought I made that clear in my reply, but from his response I suppose I did not, so Read More ›
Owen Gingerich
Into the fibersphere
The New Rule of Wireless
Life After Television, Revisited
In 1994, four years after I wrote the first edition of Life After Television, the cornucopian afterlife is indeed at hand. With microchips and fiber optics eroding the logic of centralized institutions, networks of personal computers are indeed overthrowing IBM and CBS, NTT and EEC. But as the great pyramids of the broadcast and industrial eras–the familiar masters of the Read More ›
Digital Dark Horse Newspapers
The perennial question of all suitors of fate and fortune now whispers and resounds through conference resorts, executive retreats and consulting sessions across the land as business leaders from Hollywood to Wall Street pose with pundits and ponder the new world of converging technologies. Symbolized in a famous mandala by MIT’s Media Lab, this grand fondue of information tools–to be Read More ›