The ID Report

Archives for: February 2011, 23

02/23/11

by Denyse O'Leary 06:27:54 am, Categories: Commentary - Announcements, 429 words

Coffee!! Robert "Non-Zero"Â Wright explains his conversion to evolutionary psychology

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Here. He was briefly a born-again Christian as a youth, but

... my sister's husband (an aspiring psychologist whose preference for graduate school over employment my father wasn't wild about) suggested I read Beyond Freedom and Dignity by B.F. Skinner. As intellectuals go, Skinner was pretty dismissive of intellectuals -- at least the ones who blathered unproductively about "freedom" and "dignity," the ones he considered insufficiently hard-nosed and scientific.Look, he said, people are animals. Kind of like laboratory rats, except taller. Their behavioral proclivities are a product of the positive and negative reinforcements they've gotten in the past. Want to build a better society? Discern the links between past reinforcement and future proclivity, and then adjust society's disbursement of reinforcements accordingly. No need to speculate about unobservable states of mind or ponder the role of "free will" or any other imponderables. Epistemology, phenomenology, metaphysics, and 25 cents will get you a ride on the New York subway.

This was my kind of intellectual -- an anti-intellectual intellectual! I became an ardent Skinnerian.

However, that wore off, so then this:

In high school, I bought into this view, but in college, a reference to the "socio-biology" controversy on the cover of Time magazine caught my eye, and I started looking into the Darwinian underpinnings of human behavior. This train of thought culminated -- about two decades after I encountered Skinner -- in my book The Moral Animal, a full-throated defense of evolutionary psychology.

Full-throated defense of what,did you say? From the malign to the ridiculous, in one swift descent ... He ended up saying that we evolved for adultery, in Time Magazine (but could somehow help it anyway).

That's interesting. As I understand the meaning of the word "evolved", the whole point is that you can't help it. If I tell you that I evolved to have ten fingers, walk upright and see in binocular vision, the point is that I didn't and don't just choose this stuff.

The least the committed Darwinist could do (but of course he won't) is not to make nonsense of the meaning of words in common use.

He insists that Dawkins buddy Jerry Coyne misunderstands his most recent Evolution of God. Coyne thinks Non-Zero isn't a â€œmaterialistâ€ and, amazingly enough, Non-Zero affirms that he is one. Gosh, I wonder who can be right?

Non-Zero?: He also wrote a book explaining how the universe could have arisen from the interplay between positive and negative forces, equaling zero. Bill Clinton praises it here.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

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Access Research Network
Discovery Institute
Evolution News Blog
Evolution has become a favorite topic of the news media recently, but for some reason, they never seem to get the story straight. The staff at Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture started this Blog to set the record straight and make sure you knew "the rest of the story".
Intelligent Design Network (IDNet)
Intelligent Design Undergraduate Research Center
Intelligent Reasoning
A blogger from New England offers his intelligent reasoning.
International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design (ISCID)
Telic Thoughts
We are a group of individuals, coming from diverse backgrounds and not speaking for any organization, who have found common ground around teleological concepts, including intelligent design. We think these concepts have real potential to generate insights about our reality that are being drowned out by political advocacy from both sides. We hope this blog will provide a small voice that helps rectify this situation.
The Design Inference - The Writings of William A. Dembski
The Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness Center (IDEA)
www.themonkeytrial.com
Website dedicated to comparing scenes from the "Inherit the Wind" movie with factual information from actual Scopes Trial. View 37 clips from the movie and decide for yourself if this movie is more fact or fiction.

Links - Of General Interest

A Brief View of Time and Those That Live There
Don Cicchetti blogs on: Culture, Music, Faith, Intelligent Design, Guitar, Audio
A Quick Guide to Sequenced Genomes
ARN Related Web Links
Creation/Evolution Quotes
Australian biologist Stephen E. Jones maintains one of the best origins "quote" databases around. He is meticulous about accuracy and working from original sources.
CreationEvolutionDesign
Most guys going through midlife crisis buy a convertible. Austrialian Stephen E. Jones went back to college to get a biology degree and is now a proponent of ID and common ancestry.
Darwinian Fairytales by David Stove
Complete zipped downloadable pdf copy of David Stove's devastating, and yet hard-to-find, critique of neo-Darwinism entitled "Darwinian Fairytales"
ID The Future
Intelligent Design The Future is a multiple contributor weblog whose participants include the nation's leading design scientists and theorists: biochemist Michael Behe, mathematician William Dembski, astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, philosophers of science Stephen Meyer, and Jay Richards, philosopher of biology Paul Nelson, molecular biologist Jonathan Wells, and science writer Jonathan Witt. Posts will focus primarily on the intellectual issues at stake in the debate over intelligent design, rather than its implications for education or public policy.
John Mark Reynolds Blog
A Philosopher's Journey: Political and cultural reflections of John Mark N. Reynolds. Dr. Reynolds is Director of the Torrey Honors Institute at
Biola University.
NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day