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Famed Yale computer science professor quits believing Darwin’s theories JENNIFER KABBANY - FIX EDITOR •JULY 30, 2019 ‘The origin of species is exactly what Darwin cannot explain’ David Gelernter, a famed Yale University professor, has publicly renounced his belief in Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, calling it a “beautiful idea” that has been effectively disproven. Gelernter, who is known for predicting the World Wide Web and has developed many complex computing tools over the years, is today a professor of computer science at Yale, chief scientist at Mirror Worlds Technologies, member of the National Council of the Arts, and a...

Recorded on June 6, 2019 in Italy. Based on new evidence and knowledge that functioning proteins are extremely rare, should Darwin’s theory of evolution be dismissed, dissected, developed or replaced with a theory of intelligent design? Has Darwinism really failed? Peter Robinson discusses it with David Berlinski, David Gelernter, and Stephen Meyer, who have raised doubts about Darwin’s theory in their two books and essay, respectively The Deniable Darwin, Darwin’s Doubt, and “Giving Up Darwin” (published in the Claremont Review of Books).

It is a crowning achievement of Western civilization and a rejoinder to the modern myths of the Left. As an evolutionary geneticist and a conservative, I take some interest in critiques of Darwinism. I have come to expect that every few years a new book by Michael Behe, a professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University, will trigger commentary relaying his skepticism of evolutionary theory to the interested public. And this will result in vociferous rejoinders from evolutionary biologists. But evolutionary biology is nothing for conservatives to fear, because it is one of the crowning achievements of modern Western civilization. It...

The “Fearing Evolution” Trope David Klinghoffer | @d_klinghoffer May 14, 2019 Writing at National Review, Razib Khan explains why “evolutionary biology is nothing for conservatives to fear,” since “it is one of the crowning achievements of modern Western civilization.” He takes aim at our colleague Michael Behe and urges against “rehashing the same old debates.” But as I’ve watched it over the past couple of decades, the evolution debate has itself rapidly evolved in interesting directions.Khan links to criticisms of Behe’s new book, Darwin Devolves, from snarling atheist Jerry Coyne. However, he doesn’t mention Professor Behe’s own extensive replies to his critics, collected on the...

Democrats, in their role as opponents of President Trump, have taken to calling themselves “the resistance.” But I was startled a few days ago when a thoughtful, much-admired conservative commentator used the same term on TV—casually, as if “the resistance” was just the obvious term. Everyone is saying it. It’s no accident that the left runs American culture. The right is too obsessed with mere mechanics—poll numbers and vote counts—to look up... Many intellectuals think Mr. Trump is vulgar. That includes conservatives... It never dawns on them that the president can’t stand them any more than they can stand him....

To prepare for General David Petraeus's long-awaited testimony on Iraq to Congress last week, the liberal pressure group MoveOn.org wrote itself into the history books with an anti-Petraeus ad so repulsive ... ~~ SNIP ~~ America's political spectrum a decade or more in the future will be defined by two parties both born of today's GOP after a natural and painless mitosis. There's at least as much distance between a Rudy Giuliani and a Mike Huckabee as there ever was between JFK and Nixon, or even Adlai Stevenson and Dwight Eisenhower. Americans traditionally like their two opposing parties to differ...

Not everyone in my family is an avid reader. With only the exception of my youngest daughter, however, we are all avid readers of Yale's Professor David Gelernter. In fact, each of us has at least one favorite book by him. For me, it's 1939: The Lost World of the Fair. For my wife, it's Drawing Life: Surviving the Unabomber. For my oldest daughter, it's Drawing Life and The Muse in the Machine: Computerizing the Poetry of Human Thought. My second oldest daughter also has two favorites by him, Machine Beauty: Elegance and the Heart of Computing and Mirror Worlds....

NOT LONG AGO RICHARD COHEN of the Washington Post wrote a column about Iraq headlined "As in Vietnam, dereliction of duty all over again." The Vietnam analogy has been part of the Iraq war story since the fighting started (in fact, since before it started). The Bush administration often deals with its critics by ignoring them. This time it can't. Too much rides on the president looking these critics in the eye and telling them: Damned right this is Vietnam all over again. Only this time we will not get scared and walk out in the middle. This time we...

FEBRUARY'S COMMENTARY has one of the most frightening essays of recent years, in which James Q. Wilson makes the case that Americans are polarized to an unprecedented extent; bitterly divided. Responsible conservatives should confront this problem and show the country how to solve it. Not to solve it is to invite catastrophe. Why does the burden fall on conservatives? Because they are running the federal government and it is their duty to lead.Wilson lists several causes of today's profound polarization. He mentions the divided, politicized press, one-issue pressure groups, the polarizing effects of higher education, and the rise of ideological...

A FEW DAYS AGO, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) made a speech urging the U.S., in effect, to get out of Iraq the way we got out of Vietnam. Leahy told the Senate that we cannot win in Iraq. "It has become increasingly apparent that the most powerful army in the world cannot stop a determined insurgency." (U.S. troops, Iraqi troops, long-suffering Iraqi civilians to Leahy: Thanks, senator, we needed that.) And Leahy announced that the president must lay out a public formula to tell the world just when U.S. troops will leave Iraq. Otherwise, Leahy said, he will urge the...

...Ideally, a profile would list characteristics that identify all criminals and only criminals, but usually there are no such (easily visible) characteristics. So the real question is this: Are we eager enough to prevent the crime in question to stop people (like bulky-backpack wearers or travelers who appear Middle Eastern) who we know might be guilty but almost certainly aren't? Are we willing to impose this inconvenience on many innocent people who fit the profile just to find a few guilty ones? If the goal is to preempt "ordinary" crimes (say theft or robbery) that hurt only a few individuals,...

Two news topics show why Democratic positions often strike Republicans as half-baked. First, the Title IX crusade to increase the number of female college athletes. (The Supreme Court turned down a Title IX challenge this week.) Second, Harvard President Lawrence Summers' revised view of women in science, and his ongoing penance for previous errors. (Harvard announced last month that it would be spending big bucks in the hopes of achieving gender equity among professors.) And then a liberal history professor spoke out on a third issue — and clarified the other two. He made it clear (accidentally) that affirmative action...

JOHN KERRY is famously hard to pin down; you can reach out to grasp his opinion only to find that it has flitted away like a bashful butterfly, or a goldfish you are trying to catch with your bare hands. But nowadays his pronouncements and campaign ads are easy to read. They suggest that Iraq is like Vietnam; that our top priority is accordingly not to win but to get out. John Kerry evidently believes, a propos Vietnam, that we should have run away sooner. Many Americans disagree. Many Americans believe that we should have stood by our friends until...

IT'S OBVIOUS not only that George W. Bush has already earned his Great President badge (which might even outrank the Silver Star) but that much of the opposition to Bush has a remarkable and very special quality; one might be tempted to call it "lunacy." But that's too easy. The "special quality" of anti-Bush opposition tells a more significant, stranger story than that. Bush's greatness is often misunderstood. He is great not because he showed America how to react to 9/11 but because he showed us how to deal with a still bigger event--the end of the Cold War. The...

LIEUTENANT GENERAL William Boykin, deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence and a highly decorated officer, has intimated that the United States is a Christian country and that he is, himself, a Christian. Journalists across the nation are shocked and horrified. Apparently the general has been traveling around the country speaking in churches, and has gone so far as to suggest that all religions are not equivalent and that, while he relies on his own God, the one bloody-minded terrorists praise and celebrate must be a different and a false one. Naturally he has apologized (to "those who have been offended...

The Japanese and Germans did, so why should the Baathists be any different? "YOUR COUNTRY sinks beneath Jewish-Anglo-American bombs. Your parents lie amid the ruins. Come avenge them." That might be a quote from the Iraqi information minister; it comes in fact from a leaflet printed by the SS and discovered in liberated Cologne, March 1945. The similarities between Iraq on the one hand, and Nazi Germany and wartime Japan on the other, are deep and important. If we take them seriously, they strengthen our convictions and change our expectations about the Iraq war. Many of the war's supporters expected...