Paul Braterman is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at Glasgow University, and former Regents Professor at the University of North Texas. His research has involved chemistry related to conditions on the early Earth and to the origins of life, and collaborations with Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Sandia National Laboratories, and NASA’s Astrobiology Institute. His earlier book, From Stars to Stalagmites, discusses aspects of chemistry in their historical and everyday contexts, and he is now working on a book exploring the links between creationism, climate change denial, conspiracy theories, and right-wing politics. Email: [email protected]; contactable at @[email protected]
by Paul Braterman I am browsing school science textbooks published and marketed by an influential and nationally accredited US university. Here is what I find.[1] Satan wants people to believe in evolution. This is probably the main reason that evolution is so popular. Evolution relies on processes that cannot be observed, therefore it isn’t a…
by Paul Braterman Rotation of back paw allows red panda to descend head first down tree. Taken at the Cincinnati Zoo. Photo by Greg Hume through Wikipedia Keywords: sex, violence, baby swapping, mistaken identity, DNA testing, international relations, Richard Nixon, Viagra, Sixth Mass Extinction Same thumb, different family Names can be deceptive. The red panda…
by Paul Braterman Professor Plantinga lecturing, 2009 Prof Alvin Plantinga, of Notre Dame University, is perhaps the most distinguished critic of current views on evolution. He claims that if our conceptual apparatus is simply the product of naturalistic Darwinian evolution, it will generally give rise to unreliable results. From this premise he argues that it…
by Paul Braterman Watercolour, Darwin after return from The Beagle, by George Richmond Charles Darwin regarded our minds, like our bodies, as the products of undirected evolution. He therefore considered them unreliable on topics vastly more abstruse than the experiences that had shaped them. Alvin Plantinga claims that minds produced by undirected evolution could not…
Addendum: On the day this item was posted, a school board member in Nebraska used slides of Well’s Icons of Evolution to argue that the school should teach “the evidence for and against neo-Darwinian evolution;” details here and here. by Paul Braterman Comparison of carbonaria and typica mounted against post-industrial treetrunk, 2006. Licenced under GFDL…