The War Between Fact and Theory

Another message board had the following exchange:

A: So much of what is taught in school is still technically "Theory" even as it is being taught as fact - like The Big Bang, for instance.

B: The statement quoted above mostly just signals a rather low level of scientific literacy--a lack of awareness of how the ( Read more... )

( Read more... )

Who Sez There's No Telos in Nature?


( Read more... )

The End of Darwinism Evolution
or
Evolutionism vs. Creationism

The surest way to gin up some traffic here is to put those terms into the post.  Heheh.

Now, I cheated in the title, as will become apparent in a moment.  Aristo-Thomists might already suspect the pun.  If so, keep quiet until I'm done here. 

( Read more... )

Two Waves or One?There are black races in Asia that is rather distinct from the black races in Africa. These are the Negritos of the islands and coastal areas: the Andaman Islands, parts of coastal India, New Guinea, Australia, Melanesia, and so on. The theory has always been that these were the results of coastal canoers leaving East Africa and ( Read more... )

This is Good News For Some of Us

Forget about all those big-brained descendants of ours in all those olf skiffy stories.

( Read more... )

Facts and Theories

While noodlng around on Ardi, the latest Ape Man that will cause us to Rethink All of Human Evolution, I came across the following on a web site called "Darwin Catholic."  As Chesterton observed back when he was writing about the Scopes Trial, there is no contradiction between the two, at least insofar as "Darwin" stands in for a ( Read more... )

Capclave

Spending the weekend at Capclave in Rockville MD, with is within three standard deviations of Washington.  There is a meeting the following week in DC regarding asteroid deflection, which readers of FIRESTAR will recall as an interest of mine.  But the first day is classified and Capclave is pushing my finances to the edge.  Still...  Sigh ( Read more... )

J.R. Lucas on Huxley and the Birth of Creationism

Huxley's intemperate enthusiasm was an embarrassment to Darwin, who wrote urging him to moderate his polemics. Huxley succeeded in attracting wide publicity for Darwin's thought, but at the cost of arousing needless antagonisms, and distorting the whole tenor of subsequent discussion. His set-to ( Read more... )

The Four Horsemen of the Causocalypse

To clarify finality:  Here is an example I ran across some time ago that may clarify the distinction of the four causes.  It may be helpful to replace the tainted term "cause" (which to modern ears always has an echo: "[efficient] cause") with the original Greek "aition," or with the term "because."

The Four ( Read more... )