It's Not Just Science

Dr. Cornelius Hunter's recent article offers yet another reason why it's important to be an accurate historian...

"The influence of evolutionary thought reaches far beyond science. Consider, for example, the histories we are given of how the theory of evolution arose. Charles Darwin and co-founder Alfred Wallace were deeply influenced by non scientific considerations and these influences have, to a certain extent, been explored. Janet Browne, Peter Bowler, Michael Ruse, Keith Thomson, Neal Gillespie, Adrian Desmond and James Moore are but a few of those who have elucidated the cultural, political and other non scientific forces that influenced Darwin and Wallace. As Bowler explains, historians are now far more concerned about the social environment within which scientific knowledge was generated, and far more willing to admit that the development of science is not the inevitable triumph of a series of factually true assertions about the natural world. That sounds like good, solid historiography. But there’s a catch.

Today’s history tellers cannot avoid the undeniable non scientific influences in evolutionary thought. But they do avoid the obvious implication; namely, that evolution entails non scientific premises. It is, as it were, a social construct. Evolution is a theory created by humans, out of human concerns that have very little to do with science..."

Click here to continue.

The Evolution of Evolutionary Thought: Why Historians Analyze Evolutionists But Not Evolution

An interesting article from Dr. Cornelius Hunter's blog, Darwin's God: How Religion Drives Science and Why It Matters:

"One of the reasons evolutionists are convinced their theory is true is because of the way the species compare to each other. The patterns we find amongst the species, say the evolutionists, prove Darwin’s idea beyond a shadow of a doubt. Such arguments pervade the evolution genre—from textbooks to popular literature—but what exactly do they mean? To understand this we must understand the evolutionary mind. These arguments have circuitous histories and baked-in assumptions that are now long forgotten. But they are worth remembering. Here is one example.

In the early years of modern science it was argued that motion was caused by contact between masses. In this mechanical philosophy, influences in the natural world were assumed to be transmitted only by direct mechanical contact. And while this may seem intuitive, the related assumption that there can be no vacuum was less obvious. But it was taken to be a fact. As Rene Descartes wrote in 1644, “some make the mistake of imagining [the heavens] to be a totally empty space … there can be no such vacuum in nature.”

For Descartes the planets moved around the sun because they floated in a cosmic whirlpool. And although Isaac Newton later disproved any such Cartesian whirlpool effect, the Lutheran philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz later promoted Descartes’ ideas. As Leibniz explained in 1715, the principle of plenitude disproves the existence of vacuums in nature:

Now let us fancy a space wholly empty. God could have placed some matter in it without derogating in any respect from all other things. Therefore he has actually placed some matter in that space; therefore there is no space wholly empty; therefore all is full.

It was a good example of how rationalism can produce certainty in even the most obscure notions. Empirical evidence gives one a healthy respect for nature’s complexities, but thought experiments lead to tidy conclusions..."

Click here to continue reading.

Origin of the Unoriginal: Episode I by Amanda Read, (8/18/09)

Are you prepared for the drama…the romance…the comedy…of the original science fiction story? Ironically, it happens to be a true story. Sit right back and you’ll hear how the unbelievable hypothesis became the darling tale of a once scientific Western Civilization.

The origin of the universe is the ultimate nucleus of all debate. “Where did we come from?” – that very question, in all its cliché simplicity, is the prequel to the ultimate factors that determine an individual’s worldview. It challenges a person to decide how to regard life, death, the universe and morality. There is no detouring around it, though there are so many intellectual “scientific” thinkers that insist upon imagining fine print complexities and tut-tutting away all supposedly childish speculations because they would much rather have the public quietly accept their theoretical spoon feeding. Perhaps this sort of situation has always existed in civilization to some extent. In the past two centuries, so much has happened so quickly that probably few have given much thought to the fact that the debate of origins was given a very peculiar treatment not too long ago. Ah, it doesn’t appear too out of the ordinary anymore, because we have grown up immersed in it, regardless of which side of the debate we actually stand on. But there are plenty of extraordinary things in history that no one likes to talk about any more. Perhaps this has become one of them...

Click here to continue reading.

Image by The Cross-Eyed Blog and Webzine