Niall Shanks
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Niall Shanks (18 January 1959 – 13 July 2011) was an English philosopher and critic of intelligent design.
Career
Shanks was born in Cheshire, England, was educated at Rossall School, and later at the University of Leeds and the University of Liverpool. Shanks left England for Canada in 1981 and earned his PhD at the University of Alberta, Canada in 1987. Shanks moved to the United States in 1987. For a number of years Shanks was a member of the Department of Philosophy at East Tennessee State University, where he also held positions in the Department of Biological Sciences and the Department of Physics and Astronomy. He then moved to Wichita State University where he was the Curtis D. Gridley Professor in the History and Philosophy of Science.[1]
Shanks served a term as President (2008–09) of the Southwest and Rocky Mountain Division of the
Shanks' early research interests were focused on issues in the philosophical foundations of quantum mechanics. He later wrote about the case against Intelligent Design and actively defended evolution. Beginning in the 1990s he explored the implications of evolutionary biology for biomedical research and was actively involved in this until his death. Shanks was also interested in the history of medicine and the role played by medicine in the scientific revolutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Research
Quantum theory
Shanks early work was focused on so-called
Animals, science and animal science
Shanks has explored the role played by animal experimentation in the contexts of anatomy and physiology during the renaissance. He has argued that animal experimentation provided a crucial driving force behind the method of analysis and synthesis that would come to play a central role in the emergence of the physico-chemical sciences in the 17th and 18th centuries. According to Shanks, the development of modern science flows from physik (i.e., medicine) to physics, and not the reverse as is commonly supposed. Physics would ultimately come to have profound implications for physiology, and these matters are explored by Shanks in his work on the writings of the great 19th century French physiologist, Claude Bernard. In the course of his explorations of the implications of the study of animals for the modern scientific view of the world, Shanks has explored the issue of animal consciousness and the question as to what, if anything, science can teach us about the mental lives of animals. Shanks has argued that there is no straightforward fact of the matter to settle disputes between those who have a very generous view of the mental lives of animals (for example, in some versions of cognitive ethology derived from the work of Donald Griffin), and those who favour minimalistic cognitive estimates (for example, some species of behaviorism). Shanks has argued that disputes about these matters hinge not on appeals to the facts, but rather on disputes about what the relevant facts are, and where these disputes do not themselves admit of a straightforward factual resolution.
Creationism
Shanks was a staunch defender of
Evolution and medicine
Shanks made contributions to debates on topics in what may be broadly characterised as
Publications
- Brute Science: Dilemmas of Animal Experimentation, co-authored with Hugh LaFollette. London: Routledge, 1996.
- Idealization in Contemporary Physics, N. Shanks (Ed.). Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998.
- Logic, Probability and Science, N. Shanks and R.B. Gardner (Eds.). Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000.
- Animals and Science: A Guide to the Debates. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2002.
- God, the Devil, and Darwin: A Critique of Intelligent Design Theory. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
- Animal Models in the Light of Evolution, co-authored with C. Ray Greek. Boca Raton, FL: Brown Walker 2009.
In addition, Shanks has written over fifty scholarly articles and is also the author of numerous book reviews.
References
- ^ a b c Prominent defender of evolution joins Wichita State University Staff
- ^ Niall Shanks dies
- ^ See W.D. Sharp and N. Shanks, 1993, "The Rise and Fall of Time-Symmetrized Quantum Mechanics", Philosophy of Science, vol. 60:488–499.
- ^ Who made us? What do you think?
- ^ See "Evolution and Medicine: The Long Reach of Dr. Darwin", http://www.peh-med.com/content/2/1/4, written with Rebecca Pyles, Ph.D., and "Are Animal Models Predictive for Humans", http://www.peh-med.com/content/4/1/2, written with Ray Greek, MD., and Jean Greek, DVM.