David Berlinski

David Berlinski
Born	1942 New York City, USA
Residence	Paris, France
Occupation	Academic philosopher (Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton University)
Religion	Agnostic

David Berlinski (born 1942) is an American educator and author of several books on mathematics. Berlinski is a Senior Fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, the hub of the intelligent design movement. Though he criticizes the theory of evolution, Berlinski who is an agnostic, refuses to theorize about the origins of life.^[1] He has also written on philosophy and a variety of fictional works.

Early life

David Berlinski was born in the United States in 1942 to German-born Jewish refugees who had immigrated to New York City after escaping from France as the Vichy government was collaborating with the Germans. His father was Herman Berlinski, the noted American composer, organist, pianist, musicologist and choir conductor, and his mother was Sina Berlinski (née Goldfein), an American pianist, piano teacher and voice coach. Both were born and raised in Leipzig where they studied at the Conservatory, before fleeing to Paris where they were married and undertook further studies. German was David Berlinski's first spoken language. He received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton University.^[2]

Academic career

Berlinski was a postdoctoral fellow in mathematics and molecular biology at Columbia University^[3], and was a research fellow at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Austria and the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHES) in France. He has taught philosophy, mathematics, and English at Stanford, Rutgers, the City University of New York, the University of Washington, the University of Puget Sound, San Jose State University, the University of Santa Clara, the University of San Francisco, San Francisco State University, and taught mathematics at the Université de Paris.^{[clarification needed] [4][non-primary source needed] [5]}

Author

Mathematics and biology

Berlinski has written works on systems analysis, the history of differential topology, analytic philosophy, and the philosophy of mathematics. Berlinski has authored books for the general public on mathematics and the history of mathematics. These include A Tour of the Calculus (1997) on calculus, The Advent of the Algorithm (2000) on algorithms, Newton's Gift (2000) on Isaac Newton, and Infinite Ascent: A Short History of Mathematics (2005). Another book, The Secrets of the Vaulted Sky (2003), compares astrological and evolutionary^{[disputed – discuss]} accounts of human behavior.^{[citation needed]} In Black Mischief, Berlinski wrote “Our paper became a monograph. When we had completed the details, we rewrote everything so that no one could tell how we came upon our ideas or why. This is the standard in mathematics.”^{[6][non-primary source needed]}

Berlinski's books have received mixed reviews; Newton's Gift and The Advent of the Algorithm, his only two books to be reviewed on MathSciNet, were criticized for containing historical and mathematical inaccuracies ^[7][8] while the Mathematical Association of America review of A Tour of the Calculus recommended that professors have students read the book to appreciate the overarching historical and philosophical picture of calculus.^[9]

Collaborations

Berlinski, along with fellow Discovery Institute associates Michael Behe and William A. Dembski, tutored Ann Coulter on science and evolution for her book Godless: The Church of Liberalism.^[10] From the book jacket: "I couldn't have written about evolution without the generous tutoring of Michael Behe, David Berlinski, and William Dembski, all of whom are fabulous at translating complex ideas, unlike liberal arts types, who constantly force me to the dictionary to relearn the meaning of quotidian."

Berlinski was a longtime friend of the late Marcel-Paul Schützenberger (1920–1996), with whom he collaborated on an unfinished and unpublished mathematically-based manuscript that he described as being "devoted to the Darwinian theory of evolution."^{[11][importance?]} Berlinski dedicated The Advent of the Algorithm to Schutzenberger.

Fiction

He is the author of several detective novels starring private investigator Aaron Asherfeld: Less Than Meets the Eye, The Body Shop and A Clean Sweep, and a number of shorter works of fiction and non-fiction.^{[citation needed]}

Evolution

A critic of evolution, Berlinski is a Senior Fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, a Seattle-based think-tank that is hub of the intelligent design movement. Berlinski shares the movement's disbelief in the evidence for evolution, but does not openly avow intelligent design and describes his relationship with the idea as: "warm but distant. It's the same attitude that I display in public toward my ex-wives."^[12] Berlinski is a scathing critic of "Darwinism", yet, "Unlike his colleagues at the Discovery Institute, [he] refuses to theorize about the origin of life."^[12]

Berlinski appeared in the 2008 film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, in which he told interviewer Ben Stein that "Darwinism is not a sufficient condition for a phenomenon like Nazism but I think it's certainly a necessary one."^[13] He also says

It'd be nice to see the scientific establishment lose some of its prestige and power...Above all, it'd be nice to have a real spirit of self-criticism penetrating the sciences.^[13]

In his 1996 article, The Deniable Darwin, published in Commentary magazine, Berlinski says he is skeptical of evolution for a number of reasons, including the appearance "at once" of an astonishing number of novel biological structures in the Cambrian explosion, the lack of major transitional fossils transitional sequences, the lack of recent significant evolution in sharks, the evolution of the eye, and (in his view) the failure of evolutionary biology to explain a range of phenomena ranging from the sexual cannibalism of redback spiders to why women are not born with a tail.^[14] The article was described by historian of science Ronald L. Numbers as "a version of ID theory", and was ridiculed by philosopher Daniel Dennett as "another hilarious demonstration that you can publish bull—t at will—just so long as you say what an editorial board wants to hear in a style it favors."^[15]

Berlinski is a secular Jew and agnostic. Berlinski's views towards criticism of religious belief can be found in his latest book, entitled "Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions".^[16] In summary, he asserts that some skeptical arguments against religious belief based on scientific evidence misrepresent what the science is actually saying, that an objective morality requires a religious foundation, that mathematical theories attempting to bring together quantum mechanics and relativity amount to pseudoscience because of their lack of empirical verifiability, and he expresses doubt towards the Darwinian variation of evolutionary theory.

Criticism

A 2008 Slate magazine profile by Daniel Engber characterized Berlinski as "a critic, a contrarian, and — by his own admission — a crank [...and] zealous skeptic, more concerned with false gods than real ones."^[12] In that same article Berlinski said he "got fired from almost every job [he] ever had" before finding a career as a writer as a "maverick intellectual." Engber characterized Berlinski's viewpoints as:

Berlinski's radical and often wrong-headed skepticism represents an ascendant style in the popular debate over American science: Like the recent crop of global-warming skeptics, AIDS denialists, and biotech activists, Berlinski uses doubt as a weapon against the academy—he's more concerned with what we don't know than what we do. He uses uncertainty to challenge the scientific consensus; he points to the evidence that isn't there and seeks out the things that can't be proved. In its extreme and ideological form, this contrarian approach to science can turn into a form of paranoia—a state of permanent suspicion and outrage. But Berlinski is hardly a victim of the style. He's merely its most methodical practitioner."^[12]

Mark Perakh, a critic of the intelligent design movement, contends that Berlinski's writings are not scientific, but popular, and that Berlinski "has no known record of his own contribution to the development of mathematics or of any other science."^[17]

Responding to Berlinski's arguments concerning evolution, marine biologist Wesley R. Elsberry comments: "I personally like my 'at onces' to refer to events significantly shorter than ten million years."^[18] Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education described Berlinski's arguments in The Deniable Darwin as:^[19]

. . . The content of David Berlinski's article does not differ from more traditional creation-science material, though his tone is more genteel and his writing a lot more literate. . . . But true to the creation-science genre, his approach consists of constructing strawmen, then knocking them down with misinterpreted, faulty, or nonexistent data as well as carefully selected quotations from evolutionary scientists. . . .

Bibliography

Non-fiction books

• A Tour of the Calculus (Vintage, 1996) ISBN 0-679-42645-0
• Black Mischief: Language, Life, Logic, Luck (Boston: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988) ISBN 0-688-04404-2
• Deniable Darwin & Other Essays. (Discovery Institute, October 2009) ISBN 0-9790141-2-3
• Infinite Ascent: A Short History of Mathematics, 2005, ISBN 0-679-64234-X
• Newton's Gift: How Sir Isaac Newton Unlocked the System of the World, 2000, ISBN 0-684-84392-7
• The Advent of the Algorithm: The 300-Year Journey from an Idea to the Computer, (Harcourt, 2001), ISBN 0-15-601391-6
• The Advent of the Algorithm: The Idea that Rules the World, (Harcourt, 2000), ISBN 0-15-100338-6
• The Secrets of the Vaulted Sky: Astrology and the Art of Prediction, 2003, ISBN 0-15-100527-3
• The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions, (New York: Crown Forum, 2008), ISBN 0-307-39626-6

Fiction books

• A Clean Sweep. (St Martins Press, 1993) ISBN 0-312-08744-6
• Less Than Meets the Eye: An Aaron Asherfeld Mystery. (St Martins Press, 1994) ISBN 0-312-11298-X
• The Body Shop: An Aaron Asherfeld Mystery. (St Martins Press, 1996) ISBN 0-312-13935-7

Articles

• "The End of Materialistic Science", Forbes Asap magazine, 1996
• "The Deniable Darwin", Commentary, 1996
• "Has Darwin met his match?" (Letter), Commentary, 2003
• "What Brings a World into Being?", Commentary, 2001

References

1. ^ http://www.slate.com/id/2189178/entry/2189179/
2. ^ Berlinksi, David, The Well-tempered Wittgenstein, Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1968,
3. ^ Berlinski, David (1972). "Philosophical Aspects of Molecular Biology". The Journal of Philosophy 69 (12): 319–335. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2024776. 
4. ^ "David Berlinski, CSC Fellow". Discovery Institute. 2009. http://www.discovery.org/p/51. Retrieved 2009-10-15. 
5. ^ Phy-Olsen, Alene (2010). Evolution, Creationism, and Intelligent Design. Greenwood Press. p. 73. ISBN 978-0313378416. http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=WkXbY6_X90YC&pg=PA73&dq=Berlinski+was+a+postdoctoral+fellow+in+mathematics&hl=en&ei=DrdhTuStGYOp8QObvYGACg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CC8Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=Berlinski%20was%20a%20postdoctoral%20fellow%20in%20mathematics&f=false. 
6. ^ Berlinski, David (October 31, 1988). Black Mischief: Language, Life, Logic, Luck. Mariner Books. ISBN 0156130637. 
7. ^ http://www.ams.org/mathscinet/search/publdoc.html?arg3=&co4=AND&co5=AND&co6=AND&co7=AND&dr=all&pg4=AUCN&pg5=TI&pg6=PC&pg7=ALLF&pg8=ET&review_format=html&s4=Berlinski&s5=&s6=&s7=&s8=All&vfpref=html&yearRangeFirst=&yearRangeSecond=&yrop=eq&r=1&mx-pid=1815707
8. ^ http://www.ams.org/mathscinet/search/publdoc.html?arg3=&co4=AND&co5=AND&co6=AND&co7=AND&dr=all&pg4=AUCN&pg5=TI&pg6=PC&pg7=ALLF&pg8=ET&review_format=html&s4=Berlinski&s5=&s6=&s7=&s8=All&vfpref=html&yearRangeFirst=&yearRangeSecond=&yrop=eq&r=2&mx-pid=1766416
9. ^ Gouvêa, Fernando. "Read This! The MAA Online book review column". Mathematical Association of America. http://www.maa.org/reviews/tour_of_calculus.html. Retrieved February 10, 2011. 
10. ^ Coulter, Ann, Godless: The Church of Liberalism.
11. ^ Wilf, Herbert et al., "In Memoriam: Marcel-Paul Schützenberger, 1920-1996," Electronic Journal of Combinatorics, served from University of Pennsylvania Dept. of Mathematics Server, article dated 12 October 1996, retrieved from WWW on 4 November 2006.
12. ^ ^{a b c d} The Paranoid Style in American Science: A Crank's Progress, Daniel Engber, Slate magazine, April 15, 2008
13. ^ ^{a b} Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed (2008 film). Rocky Mountain Pictures. Directed by Nathan Frankowski.
14. ^ David Berlinski, "The Deniable Darwin", Commentary, Vol. 101, June 1996 No. 6
15. ^ Numbers, Ronald (1998). Darwinism Comes to America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. p. 20. ISBN 0674193121. 
16. ^ Berlinski, David. The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretenstions. Basic Books, 2008.
17. ^ "The main proponents of Intelligent Design, however, while being very active and loud in asserting their anti-evolution views, have so far produced no genuine scientific results related to their ID theory. Most of them, with a few exceptions, have produced very little of anything scientific in general. For example, David Berlinski, usually referred to as a mathematician, has authored popular books on mathematics, and papers against evolution, but has no known record of his own contribution to the development of mathematics or of any other science." Scientists Respond to the Orchestrated Assault of IDists on Professor Gross Mark Perakh. Science Insights, a publication of the National Association of Scholars, September 2003
18. ^ But Is It Deception? "The Deniable Darwin" examined..., Wesley R. Elsberry
19. ^ Letters from Readers, Commentary, September 1996

External links

• David Berlinski's Blog
• David Berlinski, Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture
  • Berlinski's articles listed at Discovery Institute
• Dr. David Berlinski: Introduction (22 clips on YouTube.com).
• Criticism of Berlinski's anti-evolution arguments

Persondata
Name	Berlinski, David
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Date of birth	1942
Place of birth	New York City, USA
Date of death
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