Wednesday, 16 February 2011

A Better, Purer Science

As someone who wrote a dissertation entitled “Maximal Diversity: Non-Darwinian Evolutionary Theory in American Fiction, 1895-1910,” I can’t help but lend my full support to this bill:

Oklahoma state Rep. Sally Kern wants to make it clear that her new legislation protecting the rights of science teachers to “teach all science instead of just the Darwin model” is in no way an attempt to introduce creationism or Intelligent Design into the classroom. It is, in fact, just an attempt to let teachers teach “pure science” about “all of evolution”

No student in Oklahoma can possibly understand the modern world without a firm grasp of heterogenesis, Lamarkian inheritance, kinetogenesis, orthogenesis, metakinesis, geographic isolation, biologic isolation, the Baldwin effect, organic selection, and orthoplasty, to name but a few. To stick to those strains of evolutionary theory that Morse Peckham called “Darwinisticistic” is a travesty against science and democracy that can only be rectified by the State of Oklahoma commissioning to write a textbook for many moneys.

Feb 16, 2011 4:31:20 PM | Academia, Dissertation, Evolution, Politics

3 Comments

John Protevi

Did you mean to say "commissioning many monkeys to write a textbook"?

Posted by: John Protevi | Wednesday, 16 February 2011 at 05:25 PM

Jake

So, have you ever ran across a book called Darwinian Conservatism in your research? If so, what did you think of it?

Posted by: Jake | Wednesday, 16 February 2011 at 05:32 PM

SEK

@John: I always really mean monkeys.

@Jake: I have, actually, via regular commenter KWK. It's not the most convincing line of reasoning, though I say that as a general impression, not as a result of a serious scholarly engagement with it. (By the time KWK showed me that book, I'd long been sick of my dissertation and treated it with a respect undeserved.)

Posted by: SEK | Monday, 21 February 2011 at 11:32 AM

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