Last week the Kansas Board of Education voted to remove from state standards references to evolution as the underlying principle of biology. While the vote allows schools the freedom to teach about evolution, the battle is being reported as a simple conflict between scientific ‘evolutionists’ on one side and fundamentalist ‘creationists’ on the other, following the standard trope of the Read More ›
A Chinese paleontologist lectures around the world saying that recent fossil finds in his country are inconsistent with the Darwinian theory of evolution. His reason: The major animal groups appear abruptly in the rocks over a relatively short time, rather than evolving gradually from a common ancestor as Darwin’s theory predicts. When this conclusion upsets American scientists, he wryly comments: Read More ›
BETHLEHEM, Pa. — The debate leading the Kansas Board of Education to abolish the requirement for teaching evolution has about the same connection to reality as the play ‘Inherit the Wind’ had to the actual Scopes trial. In both cases complex historical, scientific and philosophical issues gave way to the simplifying demands of the morality play. If the schoolchildren of Read More ›
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has taken a bold stand on the state’s new Academic Achievement and Accountability Commission (editorial 8/5/99). The Post-Intelligencer is alarmed because (horrors!) the Republicans “want to use the commission to debate how education reform will unfold in this state.” According to the Post-Intelligencer the “debate is over.” Why, then, I wonder, should there be a commission at Read More ›
Evolution has enormous purchase on the public imagination, and it’s easy to understand why. Just peek into the average living room where toddlers everywhere are sitting wide-eyed before videos like The Land Before Time series. This series offers nothing less than an excursion into evolution. Colorful one-celled organisms arise in a blue-green primeval ocean, where they “change again and again,” Read More ›
In this scientific age, it is impossible to quarantine the claims of science. They invariably leak into other cultural domains. So we should attend to what scientists tell us. Sometimes it is quite important. For instance, in The Meaning of Evolution, George Gaylord Simpson repeats what is surely the “official” dogma of the contemporary scientific guild: “Man is the result Read More ›
It is the unfortunate nature of man that financial imperatives often supersede important moral and ethical principles. We often tolerate or even celebrate inherently unethical and immoral actions as long as they make a buck. Simply put, mammon has the power to distort moral intuitions. Take the issue of assisted suicide. Opponents of legalization warn that if killing is ever Read More ›
If mathematics is about finding solutions to well-defined problems, then philosophy is about finding problems in what previously we thought were well-settled solutions. Mark Steiner’s The Applicability of Mathematics As a Philosophical Problem mirrors both sides of this statement, admitting that mathematics is the key to solving problems in the physical sciences, but also asserting that this very applicability of Read More ›
Sacramento, California It was every liberal’s dream of diverse, grass-roots political activism: more than a hundred people demonstrating angrily in front of the California state capitol against pending legislation that threatened people who are poor, who are disabled, and who are vulnerable. Disability-rights activists in wheel-chairs marched in solidarity with white medical professionals, alongside African-American clergy and advocates for the Read More ›