The Post-Partisan Emporium

  How Darwinism Became a Pseudoscience Evolution ,  Faith and Science ,  Intelligent Design ,  Science ,  Creation Magpies by Archibald Thorburn 1905 Evolutionary biologist, Bret Weinstein, has a reputation for some pretty wild ideas outside his area of expertise that I might not want to defend. But when it comes to some comments he made a few months ago, within his own field of expertise, he was spot on when he provided a disturbing reality check on the current state of Darwinism and, as a scientist, I have my own reasons why. He stated, “In my opinion, the mainstream Darwinists are telling a kind of lie about how much we know and what remains to be understood … I think modern Darwinism is broken. Yes, I do think I know more or less how to fix it. I’m annoyed at my colleagues for, I think, lying to themselves about the state of Modern Darwinism. I think I know why that happened. I think they were concerned that a Creationist worldview was always a threat … and...

  Recent evolution of the ability to read and write The Visual Word Form Area provides an interesting case of gene-culture coevolution. Written by Peter Frost. The Visual Word Form Area is a brain region that helps us recognize written words and letters. (We can read without it, albeit less easily.) When a man suffered an accidental lesion to his VWFA during brain surgery, he lost much of his reading ability but experienced no loss of object recognition and naming, face processing or general language abilities. Six months later he had partially recovered, but reading still took twice as long as it had before the surgery ( Gaillard et al, 2006 ). The VWFA is composed of neurons that were once used for face recognition: Thus, learning to read must involve a ‘neuronal recycling’ process whereby pre-existing cortical systems are harnessed for the novel task of recognizing written words. … [Such areas of the cortex] possess the appropriate receptive fields to recognize the small co...