Science and Culture Today Discovering Design in Nature
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cognition

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Photo credit: Mark Harpur via Unsplash.

Little Book, Big Waves — Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, Nine Years Later

As a colleague points out, Nagel's departure from the “right-thinking consensus” is on a par with David Gelernter’s 2019 farewell to Darwinism. Read More ›
Statue of Philosophy
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Photo: Statue of Philosophy, Reading Room, Library of Congress, by Carol M. Highsmith, via Flickr.

Scott Turner Explains Philosophical Traditions Shaping Biology

Turner classifies the intelligent design movement as a resurgence of Platonic idealism. Read More ›
Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin
Photo: Charles Darwin in 1855, by Maull and Polyblank, Literary and Scientific Portrait Club, via Wikimedia Commons.

Scott Turner: New Video Series on His Model for Evolution

Darwin’s ideas have become a flashpoint in the culture, so any discussion of the science can easily become highly polarized and politicized. Read More ›
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Why Social Science Does Not Need Evolutionary Theory

The example that Professor Cristine Legare proffers is schoolyard bullying. Read More ›
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Kissinger: A.I. Machines Won’t “Think”

Transhumanists and other anti-human exceptionalists have been arguing of late that artificial-intelligence machines are destined to become so sophisticated that they will become “self-aware.” Read More ›
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Biologist Scott Turner: What Is Life? And Other Simple Questions

The picture of life that biologist Scott Turner sketches in his recent book is remarkable, and not easy to fully take aboard in your mind. Read More ›
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In Purpose and Desire, Scott Turner Argues that Cognition Is Foundational to Life

The evidence of purpose and design permeate life at every level, and this evidence presents ever increasing challenges to all theories of undirected evolution. Read More ›
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Biologist Scott Turner’s Purpose and Desire, In His Own Words

If Turner is right, the clockwork, mechanistic, DNA-centric model may have met its match. Read More ›
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Image credit: GoodIdeas - Adobe Stock

Another Reason to Doubt the Relevance of Jeffrey Shallit

Materialist mathematician Jeffrey Shallit has a post on an article in the Globe and Mail about philosophy and the immateriality of the mind. Shallit’s post is titled “Another Reason to Doubt the Relevance of Philosophy”. Shallit doesn’t think much of philosophy: If philosophers think the view that “The brain is not an organ of consciousness. … The brain has no cognitive powers at all” deserves anything more than a good horselaugh, this simply shows how irrelevant philosophy has become … Our future understanding of cognition will come from neuroscience, not from Wittgenstein. Philosophy is plainly irrelevant to Shallit, which is the problem. Wittgenstein may not inform Dr. Shallit’s understanding of cognition, but Descartes, Kant, Hume, James, Skinner, Block, the Churchlands, Read More ›

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