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There’s an old joke about the philosopher Rudolf Carnap and his method of doing philosophy. According to the joke, Carnap’s method was to begin any philosophical investigation with the statement “Consider a formal language L.” As the good logical positivist he was, Carnap desired the precision inherent in formal languages. Unfortunately, precision has its price. Formal languages are not natural languages and the problems expressible in formal languages need not connect to actual problems in the real world. With formal languages the question ever remains whether they adequately capture the subject under investigation.

Appropriately modified, the joke about Rudolf Carnap can be retold about Stuart Kauffman and the scientific method he employs in At Home in the Universe. According to the modified joke, Kauffman’s method is to begin any scientific investigation with the statement “Consider an NK Boolean network.” Indeed, throughout At Home in the Universe just about every real-world problem gets translated into a toy-world problem involving NK Boolean networks. As with Carnap’s formal languages, NK Boolean networks have the advantage of complete logical precision. But they also suffer the disadvantage of losing touch with reality. And it is this disadvantage which ultimately proves the undoing of Kauffman’s project.

The United States Army doesn’t like the Army National Guard very much. They never have. Some of the tension is cultural: the professional’s instinctive disdain for the “weekend warrior.” Another part is political, the problem of dual chains of command. Except when federalized, the Guard works for state governors. The Army supervises, but lacks the total control it exercises over Read More ›

When The Chronicle of Higher Education reported last week that the faculty senate of Baylor University voted 26-2 to recommend that the administration dissolve the recently established Michael Polanyi Center for Complexity, Information, and Design, many readers must have assumed that the new hotspot in the Darwin Wars was Waco, Texas. Move over, Kansas. After all, despite much huffing and Read More ›

Review of What is Darwinism? And Other Writings on Science and ReligionCharles Hodge, Edited and with an introduction by Mark A. Knoll & David N. LivingstoneGrand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1994. 182 pp. The central administration building at Princeton Theological Seminary is Hodge Hall, named after the most prominent and respected Presbyterian theologian in mid-nineteenth-century America. Charles Hodge taught theology Read More ›

Charles Darwin on Social Darwinism Richard Weikart, “A Recently Discovered Darwin Letter on Social Darwinism,” Isis 86 (1995): 609-611. For many decades, historians have debated whether Darwin was himself a social Darwinist, i.e., someone who believed that human beings were and should be subject to the same competitive forces acting on all other living things. The debate is sharpened by Read More ›

Not far from La Jolla, California, lies some of the vast undeveloped land left along the coast of fast-growing San Diego County. Pardee Construction, the Weyerhaeuser subsidiary that owns the central portion of the land, plans to turn it into a suburban neighborhood. But local environmental activists believe it should serve a more valuable purpose: The area forms a corridor Read More ›