Word: darwinism
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...scientist to be regarded as a revolutionary, his theory must gain acceptance both by other scholars and scientists, and ultimately by the public. Cohen's skills as a historian are abundantly obvious as he puts men like Newton, Galileo, Darwin and Freud to the revolutionary test by scrutinizing their own writings and the responses of both their contemporaries and historians to their work...
DIED. Alister Hardy, 89, one of Britain's most distinguished and unorthodox marine biologists, who waged a lifelong inquiry into ways of reconciling Darwin's theory of evolution with his own conviction that transcendental religious experience was a "biological fact"; of a stroke suffered two weeks ago, only two days before he was to receive formally the $185,000 Templeton Prize for progress in religion; in Oxford, England...
...takes on Hobbes, Hume and others for asserting that the human mind fundamentally is a sensory organ, rather than an instrument that can also intellectualize. He dismasts Darwin for categorizing man as simply an animal with higher sensory perceptions, rather than an organism that, alone among living creations, can conceive such abstractions as right and wrong. Adler is equally hard on determinists like Marx on grounds that if all consequences are predetermined, then no man can be held responsible for his acts...
...classic philosophy. He has no patience with any suggestion that these truths may be simply old opinions. "If philosophy were mere opinion," he writes, "there would be no philosophical mistakes." The fact that his own Great Books program at Britannica is chockablock with the works of Locke, Hume, Darwin and the others is, to Adler, no mistake at all. "It is important to know errors," he says. "A full understanding of truth is to understand the errors it corrects...
...however, most of the scholars responded to the lure of Darwin, insisting that creatures die out because they are no longer fit to survive and must give way to the supremacy of the new. That argument seemed to apply particularly well to the dinosaurs, which were denigrated as being too big, too slow, too pea-brained and too cold-blooded for their own good...