Anthropology And The Politically Correct

 
Crossing the campus with Clem Meighan was somewhat daunting because it was hard to keep up with his long gimpy-legged stride.  The gimpiness came from an old South Pacific war wound he never talked about.  I had come to assume (wrongly, it turns out) that he had walked into a field of land mines.  I [...]

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Paradigms Lost; Paradigms Regained

Introduction
One of the more dismaying aspects of growing old is to find old ideas reappearing in new clothes–like the tricycle you had long ago got rid of showing up at a garage sale, badly repainted. Consider for example the currently popular cliche: “subtext.” It
 is what we used to call “subliminal message.” The difference is that one took its [...]

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The Fallacy Of The Selfish Gene

 
It is enigmatic to be celebrating the 30th Anniversary of the best-selling, The Selfish Gene since it is not just bad popular science but plain bad science. Though written by an Oxford University graduate and don, it is outmoded genetics, false evolutionary theory, poor social theory, vapid anthropology and, bad moral philosophy.
         “The selfish gene” [...]

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