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Before Gelernter, Wolfe, Shapiro, Prager, Nagel, Et Al., There Was Iconoclast Tom Bethell

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Biology
Evolution
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We’re seeing a science uprising among iconoclastic intellectuals who have come to reject key features of the materialist, Darwinian understanding of biology. Most recently, Yale polymath David Gelernter announced he had been persuaded by books from Stephen Meyer and David Berlinski. He joined Tom Wolfe, Ben Shapiro, Dennis Prager, Thomas Nagel, and others, who became Darwin skeptics, not from religious motivations but from objectively considering the evidence and refusing simply to take evolutionists’ word for it.

Bethell

Before these freethinkers, there was someone who was in a sense the granddaddy of contemporary evolution iconoclasts: Tom Bethell, a wonderful essayist and thinker, who was already “out” as a Darwin skeptic in 1985 when he wrote an essay on the subject for Harper’s Magazine, “Agnostic Evolutionists: The Taxonomic Case Against Darwin.” If you haven’t read his fantastic book, Darwin’s House of Cards (2016), do yourself a favor and get it here. It’s a treat. And watch this short feature on Bethell, “Iconoclast: One Journalist’s Odyssey Through the Darwin Debates”:

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David Klinghoffer

Senior Fellow and Editor, Science and Culture Today
David Klinghoffer is a Senior Fellow with Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. He is the author of seven books including Plato’s Revenge: The New Science of the Immaterial Genome and The Lord Will Gather Me In: My Journey to Jewish Orthodoxy. A former senior editor at National Review, he has contributed to the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and other publications. He received an A.B. magna cum laude from Brown University in 1987. Born in Santa Monica, CA, he lives on Mercer Island, WA.
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