Stephen Jay Gould‘s famous ‘Two Separate Domains‘ argues, roughly, that religion and science operate in different domains of inquiry, and as such do not conflict with each other: We get the age of rocks, and religion retains the rock of ages; we study how the heavens go, and they determine how to go to heaven.Continue reading “Stephen Jay Gould’s Weak Argument For Science And Religion’s ‘Separate Domains’”
Tag Archives: Stephen Jay Gould
The Visually Sophisticated Society and “Seeing is Believing”
In 1980, Stephen Jay Gould and Steven Selden sent their copy of H.H Goddard‘s The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness to James H. Wallace, director of Photographic Services at the Smithsonian Institution. The photographs in Goddard’s book of the supposedly “feeble-minded” family had appeared to confirm their mental infirmity: All have aContinue reading “The Visually Sophisticated Society and “Seeing is Believing””
The Practice of Science According to Article Abstracts and Headers
Sometimes close reading of article headers can pay rich dividends. On Monday morning, my Philosophy of Biology class and I were slated to discuss a debate crucial to understanding adaptationist paradigms: the role of bodyplan (Bauplan) constraints in restricting an organism’s occupancy of possible points in developmental space, which complicates our understanding of the supposed ubiquityContinue reading “The Practice of Science According to Article Abstracts and Headers”
Samir Chopra 