This biographical article is written like a résumé .(October 2021) |
David Berlinski | |
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Born | 1942 (age 81–82) New York City, U.S. |
Education | Columbia University (BA) Princeton University (PhD) |
Occupation | Author |
Children | |
Parent |
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Website | www.davidberlinski.org |
David Berlinski (born 1942) is an American mathematician who has written books about mathematics and the history of science as well as fiction. An opponent of evolution, he is a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, an organization which promotes the pseudoscience of intelligent design. Berlinski professes to be a skeptic about evolution, but he disavows belief in intelligent design. [1] [2]
David Berlinski was born in the United States in 1942 to German-born Jewish refugees who had emigrated to New York City after escaping from France while the Vichy government was collaborating with the Germans. His father was Herman Berlinski, a composer, organist, pianist, musicologist and choir conductor, and his mother was Sina Berlinski (née Goldfein), a pianist, piano teacher and voice coach. Both were born and raised in Leipzig, where they studied at the Conservatory, before fleeing to Paris, where they were married and undertook further studies. German was David Berlinski's first spoken language. He earned his BA from Columbia University and PhD in philosophy from Princeton University. [3] [4]
After his PhD, Berlinski was a research assistant in the Department of Biology at Columbia University. [5] He has taught philosophy, mathematics and English at Stanford University, Rutgers, the City University of New York and the Université de Paris.[ citation needed ] He was a research fellow at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Austria and the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHES) in France.[ citation needed ]
Berlinski has written works on systems analysis, [6] the history of differential topology, analytic philosophy, and the philosophy of mathematics. Berlinski has authored books for the general public on mathematics and the history of mathematics. These include A Tour of the Calculus (1995) on calculus, The Advent of the Algorithm (2000) on algorithms, Newton's Gift (2000) on Isaac Newton, and Infinite Ascent: A Short History of Mathematics (2005). Another book, The Secrets of the Vaulted Sky (2003), aimed to redeem astrology as "rationalistic"; Publishers Weekly described the book as offering "self-consciously literary vignettes ... ostentatious erudition and metaphysical pseudo-profundities". [7] In Black Mischief (1988), Berlinski wrote "Our paper became a monograph. When we had completed the details, we rewrote everything so that no one could tell how we came upon our ideas or why. This is the standard in mathematics." [8]
Berlinski's books have received mixed reviews. Newton's Gift,The King of Infinite Space and The Advent of the Algorithm were criticized on MathSciNet for containing historical and mathematical inaccuracies. [9] [10] [11] While the Mathematical Association of America review of A Tour of the Calculus by Fernando Q. Gouvêa recommended that professors have students read the book to appreciate the overarching historical and philosophical picture of calculus, [12] a review in The Mathematical Gazette criticized it for inaccuracy and lack of clarity, declaring, "I haven't learned anything from [Berlinski's] book except that the novel of mathematics is best written in another style." [13] Likewise, a review in the Notices of the AMS found that Berlinski's metaphor-heavy prose made his "tour" of calculus like a trip along the Amazon River, isolated in an air-conditioned boat with tour guides who are "chatty and slightly manic, willing to invent a bit when certain knowledge runs out." [14]
Berlinski, along with fellow Discovery Institute associates Michael Behe and William A. Dembski, tutored Ann Coulter on science and evolution for her book Godless: The Church of Liberalism (2006). [15]
Berlinski was a longtime friend of Marcel-Paul Schützenberger (1920–1996), with whom he collaborated on an unfinished and unpublished mathematically based manuscript that he described as being "devoted to the Darwinian theory of evolution". [16] Berlinski dedicated The Advent of the Algorithm to Schützenberger.
He is the author of several detective novels featuring private investigator Aaron Asherfeld: A Clean Sweep (1993), Less Than Meets the Eye (1994) and The Body Shop (1996), and a number of shorter works of fiction and non-fiction.
An opponent of biological evolution, Berlinski is a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, a Seattle-based think tank that is a hub of the pseudoscientific intelligent design movement. Berlinski shares the movement's rejection of the evidence for evolution, but he disavows belief in intelligent design. He describes his relationship with the idea of intelligent design as "warm but distant. It's the same attitude that I display in public toward my ex-wives." [1] "Unlike his colleagues at the Discovery Institute, ... Berlinski refuses to theorize about the origin of life." [1]
Berlinski's daughter Claire Berlinski is a journalist and his son Mischa Berlinski is a writer. [17] [18] He was married to the cellist Toby Saks.[ citation needed ]
Proceedings of the NATO international conference held in Binghamton, New York, August 15–19, 1977, sponsored by the NATO Special Program Panel on Systems Science.
Creationism is the religious belief that nature, and aspects such as the universe, Earth, life, and humans, originated with supernatural acts of divine creation. In its broadest sense, creationism includes a continuum of religious views, which vary in their acceptance or rejection of scientific explanations such as evolution that describe the origin and development of natural phenomena.
Creation science or scientific creationism is a pseudoscientific form of Young Earth creationism which claims to offer scientific arguments for certain literalist and inerrantist interpretations of the Bible. It is often presented without overt faith-based language, but instead relies on reinterpreting scientific results to argue that various myths in the Book of Genesis and other select biblical passages are scientifically valid. The most commonly advanced ideas of creation science include special creation based on the Genesis creation narrative and flood geology based on the Genesis flood narrative. Creationists also claim they can disprove or reexplain a variety of scientific facts, theories and paradigms of geology, cosmology, biological evolution, archaeology, history, and linguistics using creation science. Creation science was foundational to intelligent design.
Darwinism is a theory of biological evolution developed by the English naturalist Charles Darwin (1809–1882) and others, stating that all species of organisms arise and develop through the natural selection of small, inherited variations that increase the individual's ability to compete, survive, and reproduce. Also called Darwinian theory, it originally included the broad concepts of transmutation of species or of evolution which gained general scientific acceptance after Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, including concepts which predated Darwin's theories. English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley coined the term Darwinism in April 1860.
Evolution is the change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. It occurs when evolutionary processes such as natural selection and genetic drift act on genetic variation, resulting in certain characteristics becoming more or less common within a population over successive generations. The process of evolution has given rise to biodiversity at every level of biological organisation.
Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics with the major subdisciplines of number theory, algebra, geometry, and analysis, respectively. There is no general consensus among mathematicians about a common definition for their academic discipline.
Natural selection is the differential survival and reproduction of individuals due to differences in phenotype. It is a key mechanism of evolution, the change in the heritable traits characteristic of a population over generations. Charles Darwin popularised the term "natural selection", contrasting it with artificial selection, which is intentional, whereas natural selection is not.
Speciation is the evolutionary process by which populations evolve to become distinct species. The biologist Orator F. Cook coined the term in 1906 for cladogenesis, the splitting of lineages, as opposed to anagenesis, phyletic evolution within lineages. Charles Darwin was the first to describe the role of natural selection in speciation in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species. He also identified sexual selection as a likely mechanism, but found it problematic.
The Discovery Institute (DI) is a politically conservative think tank that advocates the pseudoscientific concept of intelligent design (ID). It was founded in 1991 in Seattle as a non-profit offshoot of the Hudson Institute.
William Albert Dembski is an American mathematician, philosopher and theologian. He was a proponent of intelligent design (ID) pseudoscience, specifically the concept of specified complexity, and was a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture (CSC). On September 23, 2016, he officially retired from intelligent design, resigning all his "formal associations with the ID community, including [his] Discovery Institute fellowship of 20 years". A February 2021 interview in the CSC's blog Evolution News announced "his return to the intelligent design arena".
Michael Joseph Behe is an American biochemist and an advocate of the pseudoscientific principle of intelligent design (ID).
Lamarckism, also known as Lamarckian inheritance or neo-Lamarckism, is the notion that an organism can pass on to its offspring physical characteristics that the parent organism acquired through use or disuse during its lifetime. It is also called the inheritance of acquired characteristics or more recently soft inheritance. The idea is named after the French zoologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829), who incorporated the classical era theory of soft inheritance into his theory of evolution as a supplement to his concept of orthogenesis, a drive towards complexity.
Phillip E. Johnson was a UC Berkeley law professor, opponent of evolutionary science, co-founder of the pseudoscientific intelligent design movement, author of the "Wedge strategy" and co-founder of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture (CSC). He described himself as "in a sense the father of the intelligent design movement". He was a critic of Darwinism, which he described as "fully naturalistic evolution, involving chance mechanisms and natural selection". The wedge strategy aims to change public opinion and scientific consensus, and seeks to convince the scientific community to allow a role for theism, or causes beyond naturalistic explanation, in scientific discourse. Johnson argued that scientists accepted the theory of evolution "before it was rigorously tested, and thereafter used all their authority to convince the public that naturalistic processes are sufficient to produce a human from a bacterium, and a bacterium from a mix of chemicals."
John Corrigan "Jonathan" Wells is an American theologian and advocate of the pseudoscientific argument of intelligent design. Wells joined the Unification Church in 1974, and subsequently wrote that the teachings of its founder Sun Myung Moon, his own studies at the Unification Theological Seminary and his prayers convinced him to devote his life to "destroying Darwinism." The term Darwinism is often used by intelligent design proponents and other creationists to refer to the scientific consensus on evolution. He gained a PhD in religious studies at Yale University in 1986, then became Director of the Unification Church's inter-religious outreach organization in New York City. In 1989, he studied at the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned a PhD in molecular and cellular biology in 1994. He became a member of several scientific associations and has published in academic journals.
Recurring cultural, political, and theological rejection of evolution by religious groups exists regarding the origins of the Earth, of humanity, and of other life. In accordance with creationism, species were once widely believed to be fixed products of divine creation, but since the mid-19th century, evolution by natural selection has been established by the scientific community as an empirical scientific fact.
The intelligent design movement is a neo-creationist religious campaign for broad social, academic and political change to promote and support the pseudoscientific idea of intelligent design (ID), which asserts that "certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection." Its chief activities are a campaign to promote public awareness of this concept, the lobbying of policymakers to include its teaching in high school science classes, and legal action, either to defend such teaching or to remove barriers otherwise preventing it. The movement arose out of the creation science movement in the United States, and is driven by a small group of proponents. The Encyclopædia Britannica explains that ID cannot be empirically tested and that it fails to solve the problem of evil; thus, it is neither sound science nor sound theology.
Neo-creationism is a pseudoscientific movement which aims to restate creationism in terms more likely to be well received by the public, by policy makers, by educators and by the scientific community. It aims to re-frame the debate over the origins of life in non-religious terms and without appeals to scripture. This comes in response to the 1987 ruling by the United States Supreme Court in Edwards v. Aguillard that creationism is an inherently religious concept and that advocating it as correct or accurate in public-school curricula violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.
Uncommon Dissent: Intellectuals Who Find Darwinism Unconvincing is a 2004 anthology edited by William A. Dembski in which fifteen intellectuals, eight of whom are leading intelligent design proponents associated with the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture (CSC) and the International Society for Complexity, Information and Design (ISCID), criticise "Darwinism" and make a case for intelligent design. It is published by the publishing wing of the paleoconservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute. The foreword is by John Wilson, editor of the evangelical Christian magazine Christianity Today. The title is a pun on the principle of biology known as common descent. The Discovery Institute is the engine behind the intelligent design movement.
Rejection of evolution by religious groups, sometimes called creation–evolution controversy, has a long history. In response to theories developed by scientists, some religious individuals and organizations question the legitimacy of scientific ideas that contradicted the young earth pseudoscientific interpretation of the creation account in Genesis.
Objections to evolution have been raised since evolutionary ideas came to prominence in the 19th century. When Charles Darwin published his 1859 book On the Origin of Species, his theory of evolution initially met opposition from scientists with different theories, but eventually came to receive near-universal acceptance in the scientific community. The observation of evolutionary processes occurring has been uncontroversial among mainstream biologists since the 1940s.
Evolutionary thought, the recognition that species change over time and the perceived understanding of how such processes work, has roots in antiquity—in the ideas of the ancient Greeks, Romans, Chinese, Church Fathers as well as in medieval Islamic science. With the beginnings of modern biological taxonomy in the late 17th century, two opposed ideas influenced Western biological thinking: essentialism, the belief that every species has essential characteristics that are unalterable, a concept which had developed from medieval Aristotelian metaphysics, and that fit well with natural theology; and the development of the new anti-Aristotelian approach to modern science: as the Enlightenment progressed, evolutionary cosmology and the mechanical philosophy spread from the physical sciences to natural history. Naturalists began to focus on the variability of species; the emergence of palaeontology with the concept of extinction further undermined static views of nature. In the early 19th century prior to Darwinism, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) proposed his theory of the transmutation of species, the first fully formed theory of evolution.