From: Scientific American
In Defense of Wishful Thinking
Scientific American:
In my most recent post and others—and in chats with George Johnson and Robert Wright on Bloggingheads.tv—I rail against biological determinism and defend free will.
Some critics accuse me of letting wishful thinking cloud my judgment when it comes to these issues. They say that objective reality is objective reality, regardless of our subjective attitudes toward it.
“The man wants scientific results to conform to his notion of the way the world should be,” the evolutionary biologist and free-will denier Jerry Coyne scolds me, “and that’s always been a terrible mind-set for understanding nature.” Actually, science itself demonstrates that our hopes and fears about reality often shape it.
Read the whole story: Scientific American
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