Dave Lull sends along ...

... this link tp Jerry Coyne's TLS review of Frederick Crews's Follies of the Wise, which I had seen earlier, but had hesitated over linking to myself: A plea for empiricism. The cause of my hestitation was simply that I have a mixed reaction to Crews's positions as outlined here. I certainly agree with him about Freud, but his notion that science and religion are necessarily incompatible strikes me as arrant nonsense. Science and religion shouldn't be confused with each other and shouldn't trespass upon each other, but to assert - as Crews must implicitly - that Francis Collins, the man who mapped the human genome, is somehow inferior as a scientist because he is also a Christian simply flies in the face of fact. To the assertion that science and religion are incompatible I would answer Father Copernicus, Father Lemaitre, Father Mendel, Father Teilhard de Chardin ... As for the idea that science always proceeds in a civilized manner, well Lysenko was a scientist, and so was Josef Mengele.

Update: Thanks also to Dave, here is an earlier, relevant post: What would science have done ...