“Relentless and Devastating”: Mathematician Stephen McKeown on Berlinski’s Human Nature
Dallas, David Berlinski, Evolution, history, Human Nature (book), mathematics, quiddities, science, scientific knowledge, Stephen McKeown, University of Texas, wit, writers
More terrific endorsements for Human Nature! Here is mathematician Stephen McKeown on the latest from David Berlinski: Another tour de force by David Berlinski. Few writers indeed, about science or society, can boast such a thoroughgoing command of the significant ideas of the past century, the confident mastery of every centrally significant scientific theory. Yet if Berlinski derives obvious joy from the great theories that unify the world, he is never more memorable than when he vividly displays its irreducible particulars, holding the quiddities of place and person more clearly before our imagination than we might even see them ourselves. If Berlinski glories in science’s achievements, he is no less dismissive of those attempts to see pattern and abstraction born not of vision but of ignorance; and he repeatedly marshals…