Chuck,
 
I haven't read Ehrenbaum's piece yet--though I did see this article in
the Chronicle. I know some other writings of hers though, as she is a
fairly active voice in what has become known as the "science wars."
I've been following much of what has been going on in this raucous
discourse through the Chronicle, and also through some great WWW
sites. The funniest chapter in recent events was the physicist Allan
Sokal's parodically "post-modern" article in Social Text--a decidedly
PM journal which published it as a serious piece. The upraor has been
hilarious.
 
Less funny, though, are the implications. We still have people
shouting dogmatically and hyperbolically at each other instead of
conversing. Once again the hard-core science types see any attempt at
skepticical inquiry as some sort of threat to the Enlightened and
Rational foundations of western Civilization. And, also true to form,
the hard-core pomos--most of them with degrees in literature and
ignorant entirely of science--are writing some of the most tired,
self-serving, pea-soup nonsense prose imaginable about stuff they not
nothing of. Who'd a thunk when we all first learned from Thomas Kuhn
about paradigm clashes that it could become a spectator sport?
 
Dan Mouer
http://www.freedomnet.com/~dmouer/homepage.htm
 
 
 
 
>
> FYI
> Chuck Ellenbaum ><>
> College of DuPage
> Glen Ellyn, IL 60137  USA
> >>>>Academe Today's DAILY REPORT
> for subscribers of The Chronicle of Higher Education
> Here are news bulletins from The Chronicle of Higher Education
> for Tuesday, June 3.
> MAGAZINES & JOURNALS
> A glance at the June 9 issue of "The Nation":
> Questioning the postmodernist critique of biology
>
> The trend in anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies to
> dismiss the notion that human beings share certain biologically
> based commonalities has created a dangerous climate of
> intolerance in academe, write Barbara Ehrenreich, an author, and
> Janet McIntosh, a graduate student at the University of
> Michigan. In "The New Creationism," they compare such assertions
> of postmodernist and other leftist "antibiologists" to the
> theories of creationists. Some postmodernist thinkers, they
> write, portray evolutionary theory as "nothing more than a
> sexist and racist storyline created by Western white men." The
> problem with that approach, the authors say, is that it not only
> effaces the possibility that human beings have anything in
> common but also attempts to silence efforts to explore that
> domain. "Hence we have gone, in the space of a decade or two,
> from what began as healthy skepticism about the misuses of
> biology to a new form of dogma," they write. (The magazine may
> be found at your library or
> newsstand.)<<<<
>
> -------------------
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