He’s not giving up Darwinism without some remorse. “It means one less beautiful idea in our world,” says David Gelernter.
This isn’t someone you’d expect to reject Darwin. He lives and works at the heart of the intellectual establishment. He’s a renowned computer scientist at Yale University — the New York Times called him a “rock star” — and served on the National Council on the Arts. He explained in a recent essay in the Claremont Review of Books why he no longer believes Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. He makes similar points in a recent interview with the Hoover Institution’s Peter Robinson.
Gelernter, who is famous for predicting the emergence of the World Wide Web, credits three books with changing his mind. One is Darwin’s Doubt, by Stephen Meyer of The Discovery Institute. A second is The Deniable Darwinand Other Essays, by mathematician David Berlinski. A third is Debating Darwin’s Doubt, an anthology edited by David Klinghoffer.
Why Reject Darwinism?
Why did Gelernter reject Darwinism?
For one thing, he points to the fossils missing from the record. This bothered even Darwin. Why is this a problem? The number of fossils of major animal groups exploded during the Cambrian era. That means we should have lots of fossils of simpler “transitional” creatures in the precambrian period. But we don’t.
This isn’t someone you’d expect to reject Darwin. He lives and works at the heart of the intellectual establishment. He’s a renowned computer scientist at Yale University — the New York Times called him a “rock star” — and served on the National Council on the Arts. He explained in a recent essay in the Claremont Review of Books why he no longer believes Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. He makes similar points in a recent interview with the Hoover Institution’s Peter Robinson.
Gelernter, who is famous for predicting the emergence of the World Wide Web, credits three books with changing his mind. One is Darwin’s Doubt, by Stephen Meyer of The Discovery Institute. A second is The Deniable Darwinand Other Essays, by mathematician David Berlinski. A third is Debating Darwin’s Doubt, an anthology edited by David Klinghoffer.
Why Reject Darwinism?
Why did Gelernter reject Darwinism?
For one thing, he points to the fossils missing from the record. This bothered even Darwin. Why is this a problem? The number of fossils of major animal groups exploded during the Cambrian era. That means we should have lots of fossils of simpler “transitional” creatures in the precambrian period. But we don’t.
Evolution by Thomas Wensing is licensed under Flickr Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
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