Darwinism: Science or Naturalistic Philosophy?
Auctioning the Airways
Imagine it is 1971 and you are chair of the new Federal Computer Commission. This commission has been established to regulate the natural monopoly of computer technology as summed up in the famous Grosch’s Law. In 1956 IBM engineer Herbert Grosch proved that computer power rises by the square of its cost and thus necessarily gravitates to the most costly Read More ›
Open Debate on Life’s Origins
Can scientists change their minds about controversial ideas? Can they reject theories if evidence requires? That may depend upon what theories are at stake. Consider a disturbing case in California involving a distinguished biology professor, Dean Kenyon. A year ago, Kenyon was removed from his biology classroom at San Francisco State University after a few students complained to administrators about Read More ›
Recapturing the Spirit of Enterprise
There is a world of poverty, decline, and decay, and every place has problems that are promoted by government into crises that then have to be “solved” by new government programs. Now, my great theme for the last decade or so, which I have adopted from Peter Drucker, who is one of the great men of our era, is “Don’t Read More ›
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 Read More ›
The Harmony of Natural Law
In her Dec. 15 letter responding to my December 6th editorial-page piece “A Scopes Trial for the ’90s” Eugenie Scott claims that Prof. Kenyon and I misunderstand the nature of science. What she means, of course, is that we understand it — and its current arbitrary prohibitions — all too well. The Kenyon case underscores a fact that Dr. Scott Read More ›
Danger: Indoctrination
When most of us think of the controversy over evolution in the public schools, we are likely to think of fundamentalists pulling teachers from their classrooms and placing them in the dock. Images from the infamous Scopes “monkey” trial of 1925 come to mind. Unfortunately, intolerance of this sort has shown itself in California in the 1990s as a result of students complaining about a biology instructor. Unlike the original Scopes case, however, this case involves a distinguished biology professor at a major university — indeed, an acknowledged expert on evolutionary theory. Also unlike Scopes, the teacher was forbidden to teach his course not because he taught evolutionary theory (which he did) but because he offered a critical assessment of Read More ›
Danger: Indoctrination
