Tuesday 19 February 2013

Kin selection's vs the John Templeton Foundation

Is it true that kin selection's opponents are funded by the Templeton Foundation?

Jerry Coyne alleges this:

Finally, much of the work on group selection has been funded by the John Templeton Foundation, an enormously wealthy organization with an agenda to harmonize faith and science. The idea of group selection, with its spiritual and religious connotations—the process is often used to explain the prevalence of religion and societal harmony—is right up their alley. So the proponents of group selection monopolize not only the megaphones but the funding. In science, money talks.
David Sloane Wilson (here), Jonathan Haight (here) and Martin Nowak (here) have all been linked to Templeton foundation funding. The 2010 attack on kin selection by Nowak, Tarnita and Wilson was funded by the Templeton foundation. They funded SuperCooperators, The Happiness Hypothesis and Darwin's Cathedral.

Nowak's grant was ten million dollars - we are not talking about peanuts here.

The Templeton Foundation funding puts a strange slant on the issue. It is strange to think that some of the skirmishes in the ancient battle between science and religion are now being shrouded in arcane mathematics and published in top science journals.

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