When my friend Andrew Berry, who teaches at Harvard, told me this story two days ago, I realized that it would be a great post for Wallace Year. (This is the centenary of the death of the great naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, aka The Man Who Also Thought of Natural Selection.) I begged Andrew, an […]
Just a quick but heartening note from the airport: a new article in Religion Dispatches, “Are atheists the new campus crusaders?”, discusses the growing influence of the secular movement on American college campuses. It highlights the Secular Student Alliance, but also mentions the Richard Dawkins Foundation, the Center for Inquiry, and the Secular Coalition for […]
A while back Marc Hauser, a psychology professsor at Harvard, was accused of research misconduct, which included selective use of or even fabrication of data. I suspended judgment until an official University investigation found Hauser guilty of eight instances of scientific misconduct. Harvard suspended Hauser for a year, not allowing him to teach, and he subsequently […]
by Greg Mayer Robert R. Sokal, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Ecology and Evolution at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, died at the age of 86 on April 9. During his long career he made distinguished contributions to evolutionary biology, systematics, human population genetics, and statistics, and generations of biologists have learned […]
If you’re a fan of E. O. Wilson, you’ll want to read his profile (written by Howard W. French) in the latest Atantic: “E. O. Wilson’s theory of everything.“ It’s long, combining a vignette of Ed’s trip to Mozambique with a retrospective of his career, and makes absorbing reading. The man is indefatigable, even at […]
