Category: Flashback

Irreducible complexity is a term invented by Behe. It is a myth: there is no irreducible complexity in living organisms.

Derogation of the out-group was expressed in word and deed.

A commitment to women’s equality has eroded and strong opposition to this commitment has emerged.

‘How, given the recent and sorry history of ideologically motivated conceptions of knowledge — Lysenkoism in Stalin’s Soviet Union, for example, or Nazi critiques of `Jewish science’ — could it again have become acceptable to behave in this way?’

What is a government department doing endorsing the idea that traditions and myths count as evidence?

Book reviews in glossy magazines, worshipful interviewers on public radio and tv, ‘annoying’ as the ultimate condemnation…

Terrorists, freedom fighters, fundamentalists, postcolonialism, the Enlightenment – all contested, as usual.

‘Sexual selection really is a good candidate for explaining a great deal about the unique evolution of our species.’

‘the findings were nicely congruent with the hypothesis’ – yes, they always are, that’s the problem.

‘I don’t need a Hell to fear to be ethical, or a paradise to reward me for my good.’

‘He was very easily irritated by anything bogus, anything facile or hypocritical.’

Why did it take the US Senate forty years to ratify the UN Genocide Convention?

Sally Satel looks at the way we construct narratives about our symptoms.

‘A Russian, an Italian, could not justify beating his wife to death by referring to the customs of dear old Moscow or Calabria’

The Bush administration wants scientists it can trust.

Why do people believe or disbelieve?

Bernard Ortiz De Montellano on gibberish dressed up as education.

Dawkins on fun and games.

The shift from logic to history, and the perennial appeal of irrationalist programs.

The way to ‘reject the insipid relativism of the tabula rasa without denying or ignoring the freedom and variability of individual human beings and their cultures.’