The Guardian has a piece titled Steve Fuller: Designer trouble, in reference to testimony that the aforementioned professor gave to the Dover court. After reading the article I have to say that I'm not surprised that he testified, he seems to not be of any camp aside from that of Steve Fuller, and oh how he loves himself. Fuller notes that "It is not like people love you for doing this" in reference to his pro-ID testimony at Dover. Sure, but it gets you 1400 word write ups in The Guardian, along with putting "social epistemology"1 on the map that has to make you somebody.
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Yesterday was a very good day for science education in the midwest. I wrote last week about ongoing controversies in Michigan and Ohio as advocates of intelligent design (ID) were trying to find a way, any way, to weaken science education and open the door at least a crack for the introduction of…
The new PBS documentary on the Dover trial, Judgment Day (optimistically reviewed by NCSE! The Discovery Institute in frantic denial!) starts here in the midwest in about a half hour. I've got my diet coke, I think I'll pop some popcorn, and maybe I'll take a stab at liveblogging the show. Let's…
I'm sure some of you remember the brouhaha a few weeks ago over the accusation made by Seth Cooper, Joe Manzari and Michael Francisco that the new Dover school board, voted into office in November, intentionally delayed rescinding the policy because they were in collusion with the ACLU. Well now…
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What have you experienced at the hands of scientific materialists? Are you aware of the Sternberg case? The pressures directed against frontline ID…
If the Chinese universe was unknowable then how come they were coming up with cool maths (the Chinese Remainder Theorem and Pythagoras' Theorem, for example) millennia before Westerners came across them?
read starks' books, and he'll tell you that that's "nonsense!" (he really likes to use this as a surefire way to rebut any disagreemants with his hypothesis)
though seriously, stark has some interesting data and provocative arguments, but
1) he overplays his hand
2) he makes scholarly errors because he is out of field, and that really undermines his credibility as an erudite interpreter (please see the charles martel discussion in for the glory of god, anyone with a history class in this area will see what i'm talking abut).
3) he is blind to other disciplines who cast doubt on the relevance of the parameters that he works back as the causative factors in intercultural differences.
Is monotheism necessary for the initiation of science? The ancient Greek and Hellenistic world was polytheistic, but its scientific achievements were not negligible. Most historians would put Archimedes, Aristotle*, Hipparchus, Ptolemy and Galen among the greatest of all scientists. (Not to mention Euclid, Apollonius of Perga, and Diophantus in pure mathematics.) The modern scientific revolution began (with Copernicus, Vesalius, etc) by correcting some of the errors of the Greeks, but it wouldn't have got off the ground without the Greek achievement as a starting point. The real innovation of modern science is its emphasis on systematic empirical testing through experiment and quantitative observation, of which there was comparatively little among the Greeks. But I don't see that monotheism is a necessary condition for this.
*Aristotle would count as a great scientist on the strength of his biological work alone. His ideas on physics and cosmology were largely wrong, but you have to start somewhere!