Category Archives: Politics and sociology

I caught a trailer for this year’s BBC Reith lectures on the way to a rehearsal yesterday. Apparently they are being given by Niall Ferguson on “the evolutionary approach to economics.” As far as I can see from Google, they’ll be based on his book The Ascent of Money, which clearly alludes to Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man, which in turns refers to Charles’ Darwin’s The Descent of Man. None of them, it seems, depends on my first boss’s political slogan, “Sideways with the People.”

I don’t know if this popular programme on archaeology, a 20 year British institution, has made it across the Atlantic, though I’ve seen it on satellite TV across the world. It’s hit the headlines because one of its original team, Brummy archaeologist Prof Mick Aston , has left in anger because of decisions made by Channel 4, the commissioners of the programme: They included a new presenter to join Tony Robinson and decisions to ‘drop some archaeologists’ and ‘cut down the informative stuff about the archaeology’.

Gregory, who often posts here, is a sociologist interested in showing how the concept of evolution is misleading when applied to human sciences. Watch out for his forthcoming book on “Human Extension”. Nevertheless, the fact that evolution ought to be restricted to the field of biology doesn’t mean that it hasn’t, in reality, been applied to everything under the sun, and over it, as a global philosophy of existence. I want to look today at the interesting way in which that generalising principle has shifted since Darwin.

I found this post  on a blog by someone who’s apparently an academic somewhere up in Canada. In case you’ve missed the background, William Dembski recently published a challenge to James Shapiro, saying that since they seemed to share many of the same criticisms of Neodarwinism, maybe they should work together. Shapiro issued a counter-challenge on Evolution News and Views to the effect that maybe if ID dropped its commitment to the supernatural and stuck to science, it might be possible. Both Ann Gauger and Doug Axe have posted replies – Dembski not so far. I think the atmosphere could be described as “cordial, but still far apart.”