The divine comedy Creationism |
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Evolutionism debunkers |
David Berlinski is an American philosopher and intelligent design advocate. He is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture.[1] He has also written on mathematics, including a rather well-received introduction to calculus, though his books “Newton's Gift” and “The Advent of the Algorithm”, his only two books to be reviewed on MathSciNet, were criticized for containing historical and mathematical inaccuracies. It is worth noting that his books on mathematics are popular books. Although often referred to as a “mathematician”, Berlinski has done no research in mathematics.[2] He has also written several books of fiction.
He claims to be a secular Jew and agnostic, and denies that he is an advocate of intelligent design but rather claims to be a skeptic on the matter of evolution. However, his articles and books are filled with religiously-based creationist arguments.[3] Although he officially refuses to speculate about the origins of life, critics argue that he is pretty obviously a shill for intelligent design.[4] Berlinski is a signatory to A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism.
In his 1996 article “The Deniable Darwin”, Berlinski lays out several reasons for his skepticism of evolution,[5] These include
The article elicited a number of responses from real scientists,[6] and was described by Daniel Dennett as “another hilarious demonstration that you can publish bullshit at will – just so long as you say what an editorial board wants to hear in a style it favors.” Eugenie Scott described Berlinski's arguments thus:
“”The content of David Berlinski's article does not differ from more traditional creation-science material, though his tone is more genteel and his writing a lot more literate […] But true to the creation-science genre, his approach consists of constructing strawmen, then knocking them down with misinterpreted, faulty, or nonexistent data as well as carefully selected quotations from evolutionary scientists.
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In his appearance in Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed he told Ben Stein that “Darwinism is not a sufficient condition for a phenomenon like Nazism but I think it's certainly a necessary one,” apparently because race-based genocide had never happened before The Origin of Species, which was, by the way, banned in Nazi Germany.
Berlinski, along with fellow Discovery Institute associates Michael Behe and William Dembski, tutored Ann Coulter on “science and evolution” for her book Godless: The Church of Liberalism. According to the credit section: “I couldn't have written about evolution without the generous tutoring of Michael Behe, David Berlinski, and William Dembski, all of whom are fabulous at translating complex ideas, unlike liberal arts types, who constantly force me to the dictionary to relearn the meaning of quotidian.” Of course, Coulter was in absolutely no position to write about science after their tutelage either.[note 1]
One of Berlinski’s main argument strategies is to name-drop people, in particular mathematicians, who were allegedly skeptical of evolution.[7] He is rarely able to document any skepticism of evolution from the people he mentions, but claims to have heard about their skepticism from his friends, who may have met some of them.
PZ Myers has summed up Berlinski as a bad case of delusional narcissism.[8]
One of Berlinski’s most celebrated anti-evolution arguments is his calculation that at least 50,000 changes were required to change a cow into a whale (he stopped counting). Of course, since even if he was capable of listing out these differences at an implausibly fast average rate of one every ten seconds, it would still take more than 5 days of non-stop 24h-hour activity to accomplish this, few believe that he actually did what he claimed to have done.[9] Berlinski does not, of course, know anything about the evolution of whales, missing such rather central details as the fact that cows did not evolve into whales.[10]