"Mankind Has Stopped Evolving." [View All]

[onager]

:wow:

Who said that? Some old-earth Creationist?

No...it was the current media go-to guy on science-y questions, the photogenic physicist Michio Kaku.

(Since it's the weekend, I'm catching up on my Pharyngula reading.)

I often enjoy seeing Kaku on TV, but even I've flinched a couple of times when he treated the Roswell Fundamentalists very gently.

A comment on the thread seems to identify the problem: I quite liked one of Kaku's earlier books on string theory, but I had the dubious pleasure of attending one of his talks in Birmingham about 7 years ago.

We were a gang of physicists and I remember getting absolutely infuriated with how vague and waffly he was, even within his own field. He is extremely specialised in a particular branch of theoretical physics, and seems to have no knowledge outside that field.

Very smart people who wander out of their field always remind me of the Nobel Prize co-winner (for the transistor) William Shockley. Late in life, Shockley decided he was an expert in genetics and went way off the deep end, right into a murky pool of openly racist idiocy.

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/02/why_do_physicists_think_they_a.php