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NP:Leading atheist branded a ‘heretic’ for daring to question Darwinism


Zguy28

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National Post

‘What has gotten into Thomas Nagel?’: Leading atheist branded a ‘heretic’ for daring to question Darwinism

http://life.nationalpost.com/2013/03/23/what-has-gotten-into-thomas-nagel-leading-atheist-branded-a-heretic-for-daring-to-question-darwinism/

 

The philosopher Thomas Nagel is not taking phone calls.

His secretary at New York University says there have been hundreds, all wanting to reach the modern “heretic,” as a current magazine cover labels him, but he is not taking the bait.

 

All he did was argue in a new book the evolutionary view of nature is “false,” and now grand forces have descended upon him. He does not want to talk about it.

The vicious reception handed Mind & Cosmos, which urges deep skepticism about evolution’s explanatory power, illustrates the perils of raising arguments against intellectual orthodoxy.

 

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You are the fastest reader I've ever seen.

First line "The philosopher Thomas Nagel is not taking phone calls."

 

Exactly what are his credentials for evaluating a scientific process and refuting that which the majority of science has upheld the last century or so?

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First line "The philosopher Thomas Nagel is not taking phone calls."

 

Exactly what are his credentials for evaluating a scientific process and refuting that which the majority of science has upheld the last century or so?

I'm not sure what they are or why your asking me for the answer, I'm not defending him, just posting an interesting article (to me at least).

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If you're going to dismiss centuries worth of data, at least take the time to do your due diligence on the topic you are writing about. His notion that evolutionary biology does not attempt to answer questions of consciousness is not true at all.

 

The guy confesses to be a scientific layman and it shows... does he really not know how to do a simple search using pubmed?

 

Consciousness itself is a relatively new field within Neuroscience (I mean relative to most modern Biology, most of Neuroscience is new itself). Evolutionary biology needs a biological framework to work with before attempting to explain a characteristics origins. It has a somewhat narrow framework at the moment. The biological study of consciousness really wasn't possible until long ago... you can't study something if the technology required for it hasn't been developed (we now have some devices that help us).

 

For an academic, it's really kind of disingenuous to take a new field and critique it for its lack of collected data. It's no surprise he's getting slammed and him being an "atheist" or a "creationist" (which he doesn't seem to be) has nothing to do with it. Bad work is bad work.

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The only way to solve this is with a time machine. I think we can all agree with that, so let's demand this vital research be added to the federal budget. Nothing too huge just 10 billion or so a year.

We'll send a team back in time to when the aliens were building pyramids and inspiring Inca wall carvings and solve all this evolution nonsense once and for all.

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I'm psyched to read this book for several reasons.

The mechanism for evolution has long been admitted to be more involved than "mere" Darwinistic "survival of the fittest".

Rather immediate (1-2 generation) evolution in bacteria populations is witnessed in reproducible experiments. Punctuated equilibrium appears to be driven by more than just dramatically reduced populations.

I am sensing a conflation of how dire Nagel's heresy actually is. The facts are that the scientific community is still trying to understand the mechanisms that drive evolution and there's some weird stuff that keeps our understanding from being tied in a neat bow. Nagel's desire to not ignore this weirdness is to be applauded.

The books mentioned in the article are worth a read, as is McFadden's "Quantum Evolution". Understanding how much we do not yet understand about the mechanisms that drive evolution is essential to developing that understanding.

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First line "The philosopher Thomas Nagel is not taking phone calls."

 

Exactly what are his credentials for evaluating a scientific process and refuting that which the majority of science has upheld the last century or so?

 

from what I read he is not ,he is refuting a extremist wing of Darwinism.

 

I say we we revoke his Atheist card....this cannot be allowed

 

burn all the heretics before it spreads

 

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/features/neo-darwinism-has-failed-as-an-evolutionary-theory/98152.article

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from what I read he is not ,he is refuting a extremist wing of Darwinism.

 

I say we we revoke his Atheist card....this cannot be allowed

 

burn all the heretics before it spreads

 

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/features/neo-darwinism-has-failed-as-an-evolutionary-theory/98152.article

 

Sometimes I really wish people were more actively involved in looking at where the field itself stands on these issues, instead of reading polarizing articles.

 

Yes molecular biology has helped us a great deal in understanding evolution. Yes there were holes in its explanations that are now being filled with epigenetics and other fields. This guy isn't disagreeing with some extremist wing of evolutionary biology. He's making assumptions about work that is already under research.

 

I can't state enough what a crap article that is.

 

 

This cannot succeed because it leaves out too much. Organisms are large-scale physical systems that grow and develop, run, fly, produce leaves and flowers, and generate patterns of relationships with each other. Some of them even love and write poetry. Genes do none of these things, and neither do molecules.

 

 

 
Yes genes independently don't do those things. Genes working in cohort do produce those features. Sometimes individual genes play big roles in determining these features. What does this guy think would happen if say, his Dystrophin gene was mutated and non functional? 

 

What does it take to be an expert on Darwinism?

 

A good understanding of Biology? A careful examination of literature before making claims?

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Seems like a well-balanced and fair article:  :lol:

 

"The impassioned shunning of Prof. Nagel parallels the experience of some climate-change skeptics. By the time it became a political mega-issue a decade ago, environmentalism had come to resemble religion, complete with myths of the Fall and the Apocalypse, pilgrimages, iconography, scripture, prophecies, tithes and Al Gore as a secular saint.

 

Now evolutionary science, in its opposition to creationism, is staking out a similar position in the culture wars. In the absence of Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins is emerging as the anti-pope of a New Atheism, whose orthodoxy inspires the brutal treatment of heretics, even as it lures adherents into a simplistic, unreflective, fanciful faith in its own methods."

:lol:

How hard is this to understand for certain religious folks. Evolutionary science is not in opposition to creationism. It makes no statements on creationism. 

 

And New Atheism has an Anti-Pope in Richard Dawkins? Is this the same as Al Sharpton being the official spokesperson all African Americans, and Sarah Palin for the Republican Party?

 

And the likes of Richard Dawkins derive much of their attention and support primarily because of Creationists trying to push their religion into science class. It is Creationism proponents fighting a culture war. Not scientists.

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It's simply really. Make claims that are testable and refutable. Go out and test them. Publish your findings.

 

There are controversial papers that challenge conventional understanding published frequently in scientific journals. Some of the more intriguing ones get published in the best journals. There was a paper published a couple of years ago which challenged a fundamental aspect of Neuroscience (all or none law of action potentials). It generated debate within the community and was published in Science. No one is trying to silence skeptics.

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