If there is pseudo-science, is there also pseudo-philosophy?
Back in 1995, fresh off my postdoc year at Brown University, I moved to Knoxville, TN, to take up my first tenure-track academic position, as an assistant professor of botany and evolutionary biology. I knew next to nothing of Tennessee, except that ads about Jack Daniels whiskey were popular in Italy… I was obviously excited to come to campus and begin setting up my new laboratory, devoted to plant evolutionary genetics. I was looking forward to recruiting graduate students and postdocs. As well as to making K-town, as some of the locals refer to it, my new home.
One thing I hadn’t counted on: Tennessee is the “buckle” of the Bible Belt, a place where close to 90% of the population embraces creationism and rejects evolution. I soon discovered that my neighbors thought I was more than a bit strange and that some of my undergraduate students warned their colleagues that by attending my lectures they were guaranteeing themselves a ticket to Hell. I became sufficiently well known in town — through newspaper articles and occasional appearances on the local television stations — that people followed me in the parking lot of the local bookstore to ask me, very politely, if I had read the Bible. I replied, equally politely, that I had, and counter-inquired about whether they had ever read The Origin of Species. They were shocked by the very idea.
