The Mathematics of Evolutionary Biology - Professor Sarah Coakley

Damned electricity is wonky, again so I'll post a Gifford Lecture given by Sarah Coakley on the ongoing collapse of the basis of recent Darwinist orthodoxy, Hamiltonian "altruism," what Dawkins, Pinker, Dennett (to some extent) and, as she says, about 130 current big names in Darwinism wailed and moaned about in protest when one of the most eminent of them all,  E. O. Wilson, the founder of Sociobiology, defected from it citing its mathematical incoherency.   That collapse is one of the most interesting things in recent evolutionary biological circles, something which I am maybe a bit too proud to say, I never fell for.  I'd been under the influence of the dissident camp surrounding Science For The People, the side of Richard Lewontin and Stephen J. Gould because they made more sense and were not an obvious reversion to neo-eugenics.  I have, of course, become a total skeptic of natural selection as being more than a crude creation myth thought up by British aristocrats out of one of their more recent myths, the anti-Christianity of a state-supported Anglican devine, Malthusian economics.  It being the hegemonic ideology of biology and me being just what I am, I'm free to say that whereas it would end the career and respectability of someone respectable.  I love the freedom that comes with having no respectability to worry over. 

There have been enough of these cathedrals of materialist orthodoxy constructed, especially in biology and, especially, when they mix the science of biology with the pseudo-science of behavioral science, that rise high, are populated with clergy but which inevitably collapse as the corners that were cut in its foundation give way, that this looks very familiar with me.  Of course, in the college-credentialed idiocracy that populate the media and other fields requiring those credentials, the collapse isn't noticed until considerably after they happen.  It took well over a decade for the collapse of behaviorism and the death of B. F. Skinner to kill off that one. 

I don't know how you'll take Sarah Coakley's delivery, I will warn you that her very fine British literary style prose, the kind that is far more rapidly read and so not seeming to be as ponderous as it can in the out-loud reading of it, takes a while to get to the heart of things.   She's a very good writer and there is too much intro.   Aas Randy Rainbow said in that video I posted,  "Can you kick it up, honey.  This is TV." 

I don't hold it against her but I also have a deep prejudice against the received British style of English - but I don't hold her native tongue against her.   Here she is and very worth listening to with care,  Sarah Coakley