11Mar 2020 by Post

With a Hopeful Message About Life’s “X Factor,” Episode 5 of Secrets of the Cell Is Well Timed

accidents, Charles Darwin, Culture, Discovery Institute, Intelligent Design, Irreducible Complexity, Michael Behe, philosophers, philosophy, scientists, Secrets of the Cell, theology, X Factor
Michael Behe is a biochemist, leading proponent of intelligent design, and a wise guide to understanding the wonders of life with its mysterious “purposeful arrangement of parts.” The new series from Discovery Institute, Secrets of the Cell with Michael Behe, concludes today with a last consideration of the “X Factor” that appears to lie behind the wonderful, irreducible complexity of biology. That “X Factor,” he explains, is an intelligence inconceivably beyond our own: Secrets distills the argument for intelligent design in five-to-eight minute episodes, five in all. I’m sure ID has never been presented more accessibly, in a way anyone can easily understand. Share Secrets of the Cell with your family, friends, and social media network! What a remarkable thing that the design of the universe was almost universally appreciated,…
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07Mar 2020 by Post

Rats Are People, Too!

ambassador, Animal Welfare Act, animals, anthropocentrism, bioethicists, Culture & Ethics, human exceptionalism, humans, Jane Goodall, Kristen Andrews, lab rats, medical experiments, Medicine, mice, misanthropy, monkeys, Nuremberg Code, philosophy, rats, reduction, refinement, replacement, Susana Monsó
If animal-rights activists ever had their way, all uses of animals by humans would cease — no matter how beneficial to our welfare and thriving. That emphatically includes animal research in medical and scientific experiments.  Animal rights activists falsely claim that no value to humans comes from such experiments — a claim I have rebutted often. Not only does animal research save human lives and offer invaluable information about biology, but it has also been deemed a crucial human-rights protection. The Nuremberg Code specifically stated that animal studies must be conducted before human subject research. International laws and protocols have encoded this wisdom. Rats Are “Empathetic”? But animal rights activists keep fighting. The latest effort — by Kristen Andrews, a professor of philosophy, and Susana Monsó, a bioethicist — argues that…
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16Feb 2020 by Post

Michael Aeschliman in National Review — Berlinski Detonates “Fatuous, Flattering” Optimism

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Ben Shapiro, biology, climate change, coronavirus, Culture & Ethics, ethics, First World War, future, Herbert Butterfield, Homo Deus, Human Nature (book), Incarnation, intellectuals, Ivy League, Jonathan Swift, Law of the Jungle, linguistics, Malcolm Muggeridge, Martin Luther King, mathematics, Michael Aeschliman, Middle East, National Review, philosophy, Reinhold Niebuhr, Steven Pinker, Sunday Special, T.S. Eliot, The Better Angels of Our Nature
From climate change to the coronavirus, one tendency among writers and commentators is to an urgent, insatiable, almost sexual desire to cast unwarranted terror over other people. This tendency is matched by an equal appetite, among a large part of the public, for being terrified. The market is well matched with its suppliers. But this dynamic is mirrored by its opposite: a wish, proceeding from different personal imperatives but no less urgent, to assure us that the future looks better and better, all progress with little pain. There’s a market for this, too, and the relationship with the suppliers is just as tight. It’s to this second pairing that David Berlinski turns his attention in his recent essay collection, Human Nature. Two Celebrity Intellectuals Dr. Berlinski gets a fabulous review…
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24Nov 2019 by Post

Fast Track: Speeding Ben Shapiro and David Berlinski to You NOW

Ben Shapiro, Ben Shapiro Show, David Berlinski, Discovery Institute, drug trials, essentialism, Evolution, evolutionary science, Fast Track, Germans, human beings, Human Nature (book), interview, Jews, Nazis, philosophy, prescription medicines, science, social consequences, Sunday Special, USFDA
Wow, this is an amazing, hour-long conversation between Ben Shapiro and our Discovery Institute colleague David Berlinski. It’s today’s Sunday Special on the Ben Shapiro Show and you can watch it here on YouTube: Berlinski is wise and hilarious, and Shapiro a very fitting interlocutor. David’s new book, which forms the spine of the interview, is Human Nature, out now. I’ll have more to say on their interaction later. But in the spirit of the Fast Track program of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, hastening needed prescription medicine ahead of otherwise routine burdensome drug trial requirements, here are David and Ben right NOW, covering the philosophical and political attack on essentialism, why evolution is fundamentally at odds with a fixed nature to human beings (or dogs, or anything else…
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16Nov 2019 by Post

Bioethics Coming to Elementary and High Schools?

abortion, animals, assisted suicide, bioethics, Culture & Ethics, dead donor rule, elementary school, end of life, euthanasia, futile care, high school, ideology, Jacob M. Appel, Leon Kass, Medicine, morality, organ harvesting, philosophy, prenatal screening, President’s Council on Bioethics, puberty, religion, Scientific American, sex education, students, textbooks
Bioethicist Jacob M. Appel wants the bioethics movement to educate your children about the policy and personal conundrums that involve medical care and health public policy. He claims that “most of us give little thought” to issues that may arise, such as end-of-life care and prenatal screening. Then, when an issue does come up, people are unprepared to make wise and informed decisions. From, “The Silent Crisis of Bioethics Illiteracy,” published in Scientific American: Change will only occur when bioethics is broadly incorporated into school curricula [at an early age] and when our nation’s thought leaders begin to place emphasis on the importance of reflecting meaningfully in advance upon these issues… Often merely recognizing such issues in advance is winning the greater part of the battle. Just as we teach…
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12Nov 2019 by Post

Original, Incisive, Brilliant: Victor Davis Hanson on Berlinski’s Human Nature

celebrities, Culture & Ethics, David Berlinski, endorsements, Evolution, groupthink, Hoover Institution, human nature, intellectuals, linguistics, mathematics, military history, philosophy, physics, Stanford University, Uncommon Knowledge, Victor Davis Hanson
I’ve already had my say on David Berlinski’s new book, Human Nature. Now come the celebrity endorsements! I mean the endorsements from celebrity intellectuals. For the courage and clarity of his own writing, Victor Davis Hanson is a hero to me. Here’s what he has to say about Berlinski: Polymath David Berlinski’s appraisal of a transcendent human nature is really a military history, a discourse on physics and mathematics, a review of philosophy and linguistics, and a brilliant indictment of scientific groupthink by an unapologetic intellectual dissident. Read it and learn something original and incisive on every page. Yes, true. Hanson is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of The Second World Wars and other books. More to come. Photo: David Berlinski on Uncommon…
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