Why Darwin Matters_ The Case Against Intelligent Design - Michael Shermer [79]
6. Quoted in T. C. Riniolo, “The Attorney and the Shrink: Clarence Darrow, Sigmund Freud, and the Leopold and Loeb Trial,” Skeptic Vol. 9, No. 3 (2002), pp. 44–48.
7. Darrow’s defense echoes that used by the Menendez brothers’ attorney Leslie Abrams decades later, when she tried to get the boys off from the murder of their parents by arguing they were the victims of parental abuse.
8. Historian Richard Hofstadter called this “probably the most effective speech in the history of American party politics.”
9. Thomas H. Huxley, “The Origin of Species” (review), Westminster Review 17 (1860), pp. 541–70. Ernst Mayr, Toward a New Philosophy of Biology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 161. Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002). Richard Dawkins, A Devil’s Chaplain (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), p. 78.
10. Quoted in R. Bailey, “Origin of the Specious,” Reason (July 1997).
11. The three-hour briefing was held on May 10, 2000. Quoted in D. Wald, “Intelligent Design Meets Congressional Designers,” Skeptic Vol. 8, No. 2 (2002), pp. 16–17.
12. For a thorough discussion on the liberal resistance to evolutionary theory, particularly when applied to human behavior, see Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Viking, 2002).
13. Evolution denial is the doppelganger of Holocaust denial, in that evolution deniers use techniques of rhetoric and debate similar to those of Holocaust deniers. For a full discussion see my book Denying History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). See also Massimo Pigliucci, Denying Evolution (Sunder-land, Mass.: Sinauer, 2002).
14. Eugenie Scott and the National Center for Science Education track hundreds of specific incidents of teachers’ silence in the face of controversy. See www.ncse.org.
3. In Search of the Designer
1. Michael Shermer and Frank. J. Sulloway, “Religion and Belief in God: An Empirical Study,” in press 2006. We received a total of 1,002 responses out of 10,000 surveys obtained from Survey Sampling, Inc., Fairfield, Connecticut. The average age of respondents was 42.2 (SD = 15.9). Correlations and significance values were: being raised in a religious manner (r = .39, N = 985, t = 13.23, p<.0001), parents’ religiosity (r = .29, N = 984, t = 9.63, p<.0001), lower levels of education (r =−.21, N = 977, t =−6.67, p <.0001), gender (women are more religious than men, r = .15, N = 980, t = 4.90, p<.0001), coming from a large family (r = .12, N = 878, p<.001), conflict with parents (r =−.09, N = 959, t =−2.66, p<.01), and age (r =−.06, N = 976, t =−1.80, p <.08).
2. S. A. Vyse, Believing in Magic: The Psychology of Superstition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 84–85.
3. Clarke’s laws are available online at http://www.lsi.usp.br/~rbianchi/clarke/ACC.Laws.html. Clarke’s First Law: “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.” Clarke’s Second Law: “The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.” Clarke’s First Law was first published in “Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination,” an essay in his 1962 book Profiles of the Future. The second law was originally a derivative of the first and it became “Clarke’s Second Law” later, after Clarke proposed the Third Law in a revised 1973 edition of Profiles of the Future because, he said, “As three laws were good enough for Newton, I have modestly decided to stop there.”
4. I first proposed Shermer’s Last Law in my column “Shermer’s Last Law,” Scientific American (January 2002), p. 33. I do not believe in naming laws after oneself, so as the good book warns: the last shall be first and the first shall be last.
5. Voyager spacecraft speed and distances are available online at http://vraptor.jpl.nasa.gov/flteam/weekly-rpts/current.html#RTLT.
6. See Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual