According to a live-blogger at the Southwestern premiere of “Darwin’s Dilemma” earlier tonight, a Darwinist during Q and A challenged Stephen Meyer and Jonathan Wells by charging that the interviews in the film of noted paleontologists Simon Conway Morris and James Valentine (both evolutionists) were done a decade ago. “Are you aware that the interviews of Morris and Valentine were done 9 and 10 years ago?” the questioner asked. Apparently the implication was that the interviews were so old they no longer accurately reflected the views of Morris and Valentine. Except that the questioner was flat wrong. According to Illustra Media, with whom I checked tonight, the interviews were done specifically for this project in October and November of 2006 Read More ›
Well, the news out of Oklahoma about Stephen Meyer’s intelligent design presentation at the University last night is quite encouraging. Over three hundred people reportedly turned out for the lecture and discussion following. For all the potty-mouthed bluster that local Darwin activists offered up ahead of time, almost everyone in attendance, whether for or against ID, was civil and respectful during the presentation and discussion last night.
The local daily paper, The Norman Transcript, has two stories today, one about the event last night and one about the screening of Darwin’s Dilemma this evening.
Intelligent design is the most likely explanation of the origin of life, an author and speaker at the University of Oklahoma said Monday night.
If you aren’t at the University of Oklahoma tonight or tomorrow for the ID events you can still follow the events online through live blog updates here.
ENV: You describe yourself as a “secular Jew” and “remarkably indifferent to the religious life.” Yet so much of your writing bears directly on whether religion has been intellectually defeated by secular, science-flavored ideologies. You can’t have given no thought to religious questions. Would you share with us your hunches and suspicions about spiritual reality, the trend in your thinking, if not your firm beliefs?
DB: No. Either I cannot or I will not. I do not know whether I am unable or unwilling. The question elicits in me a stubborn refusal. Please understand. It is not an issue of privacy. I have, after all, blabbed my life away: Why should I call a halt here? I suppose that I am by nature a counter-puncher. What I am able to discern of the religious experience often comes about reactively. V.S. Naipaul remarked recently that he found the religious life unthinkable. He does, I was prompted to wonder? Why does he?
ENV: Darwinism is fiercely guarded by a scientific guild. What does the guild have at stake in this? Prestige? Money? To some observers, the defense seems impermeable. Do you see cracks in the fortress wall opening up?
DB: Fiercely guarded, but not, mind you, effectively guarded. If the Darwinian Guild, to adapt your phrase (since science has nothing to do with it), was interested in rational self promotion, the Guild would have never allowed its members to display in public their characteristic attitude of invincible arrogance and sheep-like stupidity. Just listen to them as they limber up in the insult room: Dumbski, Little Mikey Behe, Stevie Meyer (a regression to school yard taunts irresistible at both the Panda’s Thumb and Talk Reason), the creationist playbook, creationist pablum, creationism in a cheap tuxedo, tired creationist canards, creationist cranks, ID’iots, creotards, creos, sky fairies, liars for Jesus. I’ve even seen Disco’Tute, this the invention of an elderly fellow at the Panda’s Thumb who, like Polonius, imagines that he is the soul of wit. One lunatic named Quick or Quack — or is that simply the sound of his posts? — has become fond of the phrase mendacious intellectual pornography and has so overused it that his fellow bloggers have taken to attacking him. When they do, Quick as a Quack responds that they are guilty of mendacious intellectual pornography. The gabble is as unedifying as it is unending.
What is wonderful, I think, is the way in which membership in the Guild so runs to type, P.Z. Myers, to take the loudest case, reveling in his role as the hearty American rustic, a man prepared as circumstances demand either to desecrate the Catholic wafer or at dinner to immerse his feet in a platter of boeuf bourguignon. If in public he now refrains from withdrawing long spools of lint from his navel and examining them studiously that is because Richard Dawkins has advised him that at Oxford, it is no longer done.
Today’s commentary at Breakpoint is about Stephen Meyer’s Signature in the Cell, which they hail as a “landmark book about intelligent design“, adding that it is a “profound, hugely important book.”You can read it and listen to it here.
ENV: When did you start thinking, as a critic, about Darwinian evolution? Did anything in your biography incline you to freethinking in that area?
It was the fall of 1965. My graduate school roommate Daniel Messenger and I were ambling along Nassau Street in Princeton. We were munching the kind of wonderful Winesap apples that seem to have disappeared as a variety. I wonder why that is? Daniel’s girlfriend, Sandra Petersen, was there too. Daniel was a fine philosopher and Sandra was doing a degree in classical philosophy. We walked over to Darwin’s theory of evolution, living at the time in one of Princeton’s back alleys.
A back alley was the right place to look for Darwin. No one in the philosophy department at Princeton had ever introduced his name into a seminar, or thought to argue that his theory was relevant to our concerns.
The first review of my book, Hitler’s Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress, has appeared. Larry Arnhart, professor of Political Science, Northern Illinois University, author of Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature, posted a perceptive review to his blogsite. He provides a good summary of the book, and then offers the following remarks:
The elements of Nazi ideology seem diverse — racism, German nationalism, anti-Semitism, socialism, militarism, imperialistic expansionism, the ‘leadership principle,’ eugenics, and genocide. But Weikart is remarkably persuasive in showing how all of these strands of Nazi ideology are woven together by the final end of Hitler’s ethic — the evolutionary improvement of the human species through the triumph of the Aryan race in the struggle for existence. Proponents of Darwinian ethics — like myself — should be honest in recognizing the impressive evidence that Weikart marshalls from Hitler’s writings and speeches to show how Hitler’s thought and actions were driven by a coherent view of Darwinian ethics.
ENV: Were you always subversive? Tell us about the childhood David Berlinski.
I am not sure that I would care to think of myself as subversive. It is a mole-and-badger kind of word, isn’t it? So long as we are searching for similes, I would prefer lion-like. Regal is another fine word.
I was from an early age indisposed to accept what I had been told. Having been urged not to insert a fork into an electrical outlet, I stuck one in anyway; I was shocked to discover that it was a poor idea, just as my mother had maintained. An impatient child, I became a school yard terror, and a high-school bully. At the Bronx High School of Science I was a part of the clique — Moose Moscowitz, Steven Parker, Arthur Klein, June Tauber, Alan Abramson — that inflicted a life-long feeling of inadequacy on everyone else. I am often astonished that we got out of high school alive.
For an idea that Darwinists say has no value, intelligent design still seems to captivate them a great deal. Darwinists in Oklahoma have their own list-serv which they use to make announcements, and currently are using to stir up more anti-ID animosity amongst evolutionary foot soldiers in the heartland. They’re all aflutter about the screening of Darwin’s Dilemma, and about Stephen Meyer’s lecture on ID at University of Oklahoma next week. Note this bit of bogus puffery: 2. AND ANOTHER DI INTELLIGENT DESIGN TALK AT OU!As part of the DI appearance on the OU campus Dr. Stephen C. Meyer will deliver a free lecture about his new book, Signature in the Cell: DNA and Evidence for Intelligent Design, at 7 Read More ›
