Darwinism and popular culture: If this is love, please hate me instead

This guy, David Loye, an American progressive, wants a kinder, gentler evolution, and tells us about the real Darwin:

"In the Descent of Man Charles Darwin wrote only twice of "survival of the fittest" — but 95 times about love! 92 times about moral sensitivity. And 200 times about brain and mind."

Yes, but did Loye happen to notice all the racism in the book?

This transcript of a talk gives you some sense of Loye's program for all of us for the century.

Magic at Bloggingheads TV: Design theorist goes poof!, then ...

Forget rabbits and hats: Design theorist Mike Behe disappears and then reappears on Bloggingheads.

I’ve just been through the weirdest book-related experience I’ve had since a Canadian university professor with a loaded rat trap chased me around after a talk I gave a dozen years ago, threatening to spring it on me.

Apparently, vitriol over this interview caused Behe's discussion partner John McWhorter to ask that it be removed.

He wrote primly,

"John McWhorter feels, with regret, that this interview represents neither himself, Professor Behe, nor Bloggingheads usefully, takes full responsibility for same, and has asked that it be taken down from the site. He apologizes to all who found its airing objectionable."

This is not only objectionable, it is astounding. McWhorter was there, he said what he did, so how can he claim that it doesn't represent him?

(Note: In complete fairness to him, anyone who has not dealt with Darwinist vitriol may be tempted to just back down - but after a while one learns to cope with it. Basically, they were enraged because he had a civilized exchange of ideas with Behe , and that sort of thing is not to their taste, as much experience shows.)

A day later, the show was back up. So looks like the Darwin thugs lost that round.

Behe writes,

Well, mobs, including internet mobs, are scary things, and it’s understandable to panic when they unexpectedly show up at your door. But if you’re going to set up a website to air discussions about contentious issues of the day, you should have a whole lot more guts than displayed by Bloggingheads TV.

Better see it while you can though.

From the mailbox: Competition in nature is overrated

Steve Sparrow writes,

The more & more I think on Darwinism the more I become certain that left to itself Darwin's schema would have resulted in one single organism which would have eliminated all others and be constantly struggling with itself over survival - like one tree - a Sequoia - lording it over all everywhere no matter what the climate - just be smaller or larger. Following on from David Warren's essay a few weeks back talking of Alexander Skutch, I read two books of his and am struck by his allusion to co-operation in natural organisms - no "nature red in tooth and claw" there. So as I said here , it's all about desire - desire of the organism.

From his blog:

This principle of innate desire pervades the whole spectrum of life in all of its forms, but must (I think) be preceded by consciousness/awareness - a faculty shared to some degree by even the most primitive of organisms. Desire is expressed in appetites - food, sex, and additionally in the case of humanity, the desire to be comforted. Human beings crave comfort, presupposing the existence of some place or thing where that desire is satisfied, and this desire for comfort is intuitively embodied in the ascending realms of the physical, the psychological, and the spiritual.

Well, one thing I know for sure is that co-operation is the basis of the ecology, not competition.

Here's Warren on Skutch:

I recommend such works especially to those who have had their minds cluttered and abused by the sort of ideological indoctrination offered today, in place of real science, by the Darwinist biology faculties in most of our universities. Skutch persistently shows that there is more happening in nature than evolutionary obsessives can begin to imagine. For Skutch's view of nature is founded in the traditional way, on direct observation, rather than in the post-modern way, on grand, arbitrary, utterly unprovable evolutionary hypotheses. That is to say, observation preceding theory, as opposed to theory preceding observation.

Perhaps the best shock treatment, for the confused young Darwinized zoologist, would be a close reading of Birds Asleep, Skutch's pioneering investigation of what birds do with about half their time.

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

All this just happens when you add water and stir

Fifteen amazing body shots, captured using a scanning electron microscope