Introduction

At some schools and universities in the USA today students are learning a version
of ancient history that is strikingly different from what is being taught to
their counterparts in Europe.[1] This new narrative cannot be reconciled with
the traditional account, which is still being taught in the vast majority of
schools and universities. Advocates of the revisionist version ("the Afrocentric
narrative") claim that because of their inherent prejudice against Africans
and peoples of African descent, the traditionalists have ignored a significant
body of evidence. Advocates of the traditional version of ancient history insist
that their version ("the Eurocentric narrative") offers the best available
account of the known facts. Thus in the debate between the two groups there
is … Read the rest

Introduction

Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene is the kind of book
that changes the way that people look at the world. Its importance
is that it articulates a gene’s-eye view of evolution. According
to this view, all organisms, including human beings, are ‘survival
machines’ which have been ‘blindly programmed’ to preserve their
genes (see The Selfish Gene, p. v). Of course, extant
survival machines take a myriad of different forms – for example,
it is estimated that there are some three million different species
of insect alone – but they all have in common that they have been
built according to the instructions of successful genes; that
is, genes whose replicas in previous generations managed to get
themselves copied.

At … Read the rest

Dennis Healey once compared a verbal attack by one of his parliamentary
colleagues to "being savaged by a dead sheep." I was reminded
of this remark when I met the physicist Alan Sokal, the man who,
along with mathematician Jean Bricmont, has caused outrage and indignation
among the French intelligentsia first with his spoof post-modern
article published in the journal Social Text, and then for
his and Bricmont’s book Intellectual Impostures, which
combines a catalogue of misuses of scientific terms by predominantly
French thinkers with a stinging attack on what they call "sloppy
relativism"

Given this history, you’d expect Sokal to be more lupine than lamb-like,
but in fact, he is a friendly, chatty, effusive figure more interested… Read the rest