Peter F. said:
"dkomo" <[email hidden]> wrote in message "]news:[email hidden]...
Quoted message said:I ran across a new book at Barnes and Noble this afternoon. It's called _Biocosm: The New
Scientific Theory of Evolution: Intelligent Life Is the Architect of the Universe_ by James N.
Gardner:
2-4679039?v=glance&s=books or
tinyurl.comrtfzOpen ↗
The Amazon web page shows that this book could have interest for some on sci.bio.evolution. The
book does not appear to be a work of pedestrian crackpottery, nor to spring from a hidden
religious agenda. The book jacket features favorable blurbs from quite few well known people in
the arena of public science, including one glowing endorsement from the arch skeptic Michael
Shermer (much to my surprise), and others from Paul Davies, Sir Martin Rees, and John Casti.
Just a short skEPTic (so not just skeptic) comment:
I don't feel like aligning myself with your *perhaps ignorant* assertion that these people do not
have a religious agenda.
Of "these" people (Michael Shermer, Paul Davies, Sir Martin Rees, John Casti), which of them do you
think has a religious agenda and why?
Shermer is a columnist for Scientific American, writing the monthly column "Skeptic", and is also a
well known creationist deflator. He is also the publisher of _Skeptic_ magazine. Casti has written a
number of books, some of which I've read, and I don't recall him even indirectly expressing
religious sentiment. Martin Rees is a cosmologist and Britain's royal astronomer (whatever the hell
that is). He's quite agnostic. The only one who might even remotely have a religious agenda is the
physicist Paul Davies, who wrote the acclaimed book _The Mind of God_. He has expressed some
sympathy with the thesis of intelligent design.
Besides, the main idea in the _Biocosm_ book, that the universe continually reproduces itself and
evolves by creating intelligent life, is not something a religious believer of the Western variety
would normally accept. Standard religious dogma holds that there is One Creator who designed One
Universe -- this one -- which was carefully tuned and designed to support Man. It says so in the
Book of Genesis.
Quoted message said:But sight unseen I AM prepared to under-rignt the possibility of the book not being a work of
_pedestrian_ crackpot(s). ;-) I hope you are prepared to be warned and to consider that
(metaphorically speaking):- Even in some very fine crockery there are almost invisible, and so not
always spotted, hair-line fractures.
If crockery ships with hairline fractures, it's often because the Chief Inspector is absent. The
Chief Inspector is, of course, a metaphor for verifiability in science. Any theory, no matter how
fine on the surface, may be seriously defective unless it can be empirically verified.
There are those that think that the fine crockery known as evolutionary psychology is an example of
such a plausible sounding, but largely unverifiable theory. I trust that you are prepared to take
your own warning seriously.
Quoted message said:Yours not always deceptively joking,
P
---
The author of this post is the conceptualizer behind EPT [an Evolutionary Psychology (-type)
Thesis] and 'FOOT'.
These two labels refer to the same philanthropically oriented overview of mainly the
anthropobiological aspect of 'What Is going on'. However, the last label is best used for
emphasizing: the effectively philosophy terminating philosophical perspective (Foremost Overview
Of Truth) that gets into focus (Tolerably or accEPTably so) if one applies a degree of fuzzsilly
logic from a slightly off-center position on an explanatory platform of terms that (amongst else)
allows 'elevated philosophical thinking' about any prospective (obtained or not) peripheral
(compared to FOOT) TOE.
%-]
