This article was originally published in Antithesis (July/August 1990). I still agree with all of this, but I must say that reading stuff of mine that is over twenty years old gives me the feeling that I used to compose my prose with flattened cardboard boxes and tin snips. Just so you know. In preparing …
Natural Law and Self-Deception
So it looks to me as though we are going to have a full bore discussion of natural law. This is fine, and about time. I do think that there are some genuine differences here, obviously, but perhaps not as many as advertised. Some of this seems to me to be a debate between advocates …
Spring Loaded
One of the things we should have realized by now is that the world around us is far crazier than we could ever have dreamed. Just when we have finally accommodated ourselves to taking yesterday’s staggering discoveries for granted, along comes another one. Our sinful hearts have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for …
Down the Trunk of the Jub Jub Tree
This morning, I read this little snippet at the Bayly Blog, and thought I needed to add my two cents. Here is my first penny. Note that a “first couple” is not required by the text of Scripture, but that it is required by the theologians. Well, then . . . all rise! If the …
Book of the Month/September
So this is a book that I really did not expect to be reviewing as my book of the month selection, but life is funny. Mind & Cosmos is subtitled “Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False.” When a book with this kind of subtitle comes out, written by a philosopher …
Kicking Evolutionary Euro-Butt
Coyne’s last two chapters might best be treated together. This is because the closer we get to the end, the faster the evolution of this review wants to accelerate. In these chapters, Coyne addresses the evolution of man. Chapter 8, “What About Us?” tackles the evolution of man, and his last chapter, “Evolution Redux,” also …
If Creationists Were Beetles . . .
So then, Jerry Coyne now comes to explain, in the famous phrase, the origin of species. How is it that wherever we look we see distinct species, and not a long blur of intermediate types and missing links between each of the species? In addressing this question, he sets out laboriously to prove something that …
The Turtle On the Fencepost
As providence would have it, last night I read the next chapter of Coyne’s book in order to mull over it a bit before writing my next post. And then this morning, as is my practice, I spend some time reading through any magazines that have accumulated during the course of the week. And, as …
Evolution’s Alligatornado
Coyne’s next chapter is on the “engine of evolution,” which is to say, natural selection. One of his examples was one I was already familiar with, and since it is quite a fun one — let’s just go with it. There is a kind of roundworm that is a parasite to a species of ant …
His Brother Was Joktan, If That Helps
In his next chapter, Coyne addresses the subject of biogeography, “the study of the distribution of species on earth” (p. 88). In responding to this chapter, I want to begin by pointing out how much of it was beside the point. Coyne spent a great deal of time and energy showing the various ways that …