David Klinghoffer

The fictional Dr. Frankenstein in Mary Shelley's 19th-century horror novel came closer to creating life, based on misunderstandings of her own about “experiments of Dr. [Erasmus] Darwin” who “by some extraordinary means” induced “voluntary motion” in a piece of pasta.

The wearable AI necklace, Friend, opens up a whole new chapter of horror. It’s not a parody: young people wear their “Friend” on their person.

The pivotal ID element comes in because a beautiful African-American neurosurgeon is testing the limits of academic freedom, exposing her medical students to evidence of intelligent design, and trying the patience of her Jewish atheist supervisor. If the supervisor gets his way, it will affect her hospital privileges. Because there is currently a very unusual and consequential patient, that could bring disastrous results for a major Midwestern city.

Why were researchers sure that plants could not have cognition? They may have been thinking in terms of a “hierarchy of evolution.” It's a familiar concept: the long, slow march from mud to mind meant that only toward the upper tier would we find such developments as cognition. But suppose we adopt a different approach. Suppose we assume that any type of life form that has been around for a while has probably done so in part by solving certain decision-making problems, including some complex ones. But life forms use very different structures for doing so.

The lack of scrutiny and skepticism by professional academics reflects a crisis of its own.

As Casey Luskin wrote here earlier today , C. W. Howell's book Designer Science tries to tie intelligent design to larger trends of “extreme” science

Retraction Watch covers failed scholarship and worse in a range of areas. It has published a reasonably accurate account of the Designer Science quote fabrication scandal at New York University Press.

The tragic death of Cambridge professor Jason Arday, an accused fabulist, has been widely cited as a parable about race.

A commenter, J.L.S., at Retraction Watch scolds me about C. W. Howell, author of the New York University Press book Designer Science . Says

There are tales readily believed by scholars, “in order to live” — because the ideological campus discourse is beyond question. In the Age of Arday and of C. W. Howell, the discourse is due for a genuine scholarly review.