David Berlinski

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David Berlinski
Born

1942 (age 7374)

New York City, USA

Residence

Paris, France

Occupation Academic philosopher (PhD in philosophy

from Princeton University)

Website

www.davidberlinski.org

David Berlinski (born 1942) is an American philosopher, educator, and author. Berlinski is a senior
fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture. A critic of the theory of evolution,
Berlinski refuses to theorize about the origins of life, and describes himself as a secular Jew. [1] He
has written onphilosophy, mathematics and a variety of fictional works. His daughter, Claire
Berlinski, is a well known journalist.
Contents
[hide]

1Early life

2Academic career

3Author
3.1Mathematics and biology

3.1.1Collaborations

3.2Fiction

4Evolution

5Bibliography

6Notes

7References

8External links

Early life[edit]
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,
a composer, organist, pianist, musicologist and choir conductor, and his mother was Sina Berlinski
(ne Goldfein), a 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 PhD in
philosophy from Princeton University.[2]

Academic career[edit]
Berlinski was a research assistant in 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 tudes Scientifiques (IHES) in France. He has taught philosophy, mathematics, and
English at Stanford University, Rutgers University, 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 Universit de Paris.[clarification needed] [4][better source needed] [5]

Author[edit]
Mathematics and biology[edit]
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 (1995)
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(1988), 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]
Berlinski's books have received mixed reviews; Newton's Gift and The Advent of the Algorithm were
criticized by MathSciNet for containing historical and mathematical inaccuracies[7][8] while
the Mathematical Association of America review of A Tour of the Calculus by Fernando Q. Gouva
recommended that professors have students read the book to appreciate the overarching historical
and philosophical picture of calculus.[9]
Collaborations[edit]
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 (2006).[10]
Berlinski was a longtime friend of the late Marcel-Paul Schtzenberger (19201996), 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] Berlinski dedicated The Advent of the
Algorithm to Schtzenberger.

Fiction[edit]

He is the author of several detective novels starring private investigator Aaron Asherfeld: A Clean
Sweep (1993), Less Than Meets the Eye (1994) and The Body Shop (1996), and a number of
shorter works of fiction and non-fiction.

Evolution[edit]
A critic of the theory of evolution. Berlinski is a Senior Fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for
Science and Culture, a Seattle-based think tank that is a 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."[1] Berlinski is a scathing critic of evolution,
yet, "Unlike his colleagues at the Discovery Institute,...[he] refuses to theorize about the origin of
life."[1]
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."[12] 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. [12]

In his 1996 article, The Deniable Darwin, published in Commentary, 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 the failure
ofevolutionary biology to explain various phenomena ranging from the sexual cannibalism of redback
spiders to why women are not born with a tail.[13] The article was described by historian of
science Ronald L. Numbers as "a version of ID theory."
Berlinski is a secular Jew.[14] Berlinski's views towards criticism of religious belief can be found in his
book The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions (2008).[14] 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 the theory of
relativity amount to pseudoscience because of their lack of empirical verifiability, and he expresses
doubt towards the Darwinian variation of evolutionary theory.