Book Reviews:"Creative Evolution" & "Creative Evolution Revisited"

Review of Henri Bergson's Book: Creative Evolution (by Stephen P. Smith): Spirit, and the mystery implied by vitalism, is reduced to the deep mystery of time and its two windows. Bergson's vitalism appears to us as a great differentiation and fragmentation, followed by a division of labor. But the support given to our eyes to which appearance is given is a sentience capable of the most subtle awareness coming as hindsight, and this quality may go unnoticed in mere appearance that sees only differentiation. Is humanity doomed to its intellect, unable to find the intuition we need? I think there is some room for optimism in the development of an intuitionist logic! We looked an inductive thinking already, and how it opposes deductive thought. Induction is as an instinct that follows the happy-go-lucky habits of life, and it is an already recognized human faculty of reason. It is induction that has a close associations with intuition, particularly when we discover a deduction that contradicts our blind expectations given to us by induction. Wayward induction is found married to its faulty deduction, and what holds the two together is a naked emotionality that may fall for the circular thinking that Bergson`s warns us about. http://scigod.com/index.php/sgj/article/view/182

Review of Donald C. Austin's Book: Creative Evolution Revisited: A New Theological Theory of Evolution (by Stephen P. Smith): Suzan Mazur describes the evolution industry in crisis, given an apparent emptiness in the neo-Darwinian account. Mazur interviewed many world-wide scholars, and not just those that attended the 2008 meeting in Altenberg, Austria. Stewart Newman, Antonio Lima-de-Faria and Lynn Margulis provide among of the most interesting and credible accounts of an evolution that is not stuck in a dogmatic and hopeless neo-Darwinism. This is not to say that most scientists don`t still over prescribe Darwin`s simplistic theory, and some of these folks are interviewed in Mazur`s book. http://scigod.com/index.php/sgj/article/view/183