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Full Title:A Lapse in Watchfulness: New York Times Admits Neo-Darwinism Faces a "Paradigm Shift" Over "Failure" to Explain Body Plans Despite keeping a watchful eye out for inklings of heresy on Darwinian evolution, the New York Times occasionally lets its guard down. Such a lapse was the only way to explain the recent review of Harvard computer scientist Leslie Valiant's book Probably Approximately Correct in which Berkeley mathematician Edward Frenkel was allowed to acknowledge a "gaping gap" in "Darwin's theory." Now a colleague has pointed out to me a 2007 article in the Times that I hadn't previously seen. The...

New species might arise as a result of single rare events, rather than through the gradual accumulation of many small changes over time, according to a study of thousands of species and their evolutionary family trees. This contradicts a widely accepted theory of how speciation occurs: that species are continually changing to keep pace with their environment, and that new species emerge as these changes accrue. Known as the 'Red Queen' hypothesis, it is named after the character in Lewis Carroll's book Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There who tells a surprised Alice: "Here, you see, it takes...

Immanuel Velikovsky was too eminent a scholar to be dismissed outright as a kook, and he counted some respected people among his friends... Nevertheless, his Catastrophism was rejected outright by a scientific establishment that couldn't stomach an interdisciplinary challenge to its dogmatic Uniformitarianism, even after Velikovsky's predictions about the temperature of Venus and radio activity from Jupiter were proven true. Stephen Jay Gould summed up mainstream scientific opinion, saying, "Velikovsky is neither crank nor charlatan -- although to state my opinion and to quote one of my colleagues, he is at least gloriously wrong ... Velikovsky would rebuild the science...

Penn Museum, Philadelphia Janet Monge of the Penn Museum examines some of the Morton collection skulls with her colleague, Alan Mann. Scientists have often been accused of letting their ideology influence their results, and one of the most famous cases is that of Morton’s skulls — the global collection amassed by the 19th-century physical anthropologist Samuel George Morton. In a 1981 book, “The Mismeasure of Man,” the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould asserted that Morton, believing that brain size was a measure of intelligence, had subconsciously manipulated the brain volumes of European, Asian and African skulls to favor his bias that...