In Defense of Wishful Thinking
July 5th, 2011 |
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In my most recent post and others—and in chats with George Johnson and Robert Wright on Bloggingheads.tv—I rail against biological determinism and defend free will. Some critics accuse me of letting wishful thinking cloud my judgment when it comes to these issues. They say that objective reality is objective reality, regardless of our subjective attitudes [...]
Keep reading »Defending Stephen Jay Gould’s Crusade against Biological Determinism
June 24th, 2011 |
50
I used to be tough on Stephen Jay Gould, the great evolutionary biologist, who died in 2002. I found him self-righteous and pompous, in person and on the page. In an August 1995 profile of him for Scientific American I summed up his worldview, which emphasizes the role of randomness, or "contingency," in shaping life, [...]
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