Ready for Intelligent Design?

Bob Richard gave the Ryerson lecture. He is the Morris Fishbein Professor in the History of Science and Medicine. The topic “The Narrative Structure of Moral Judgments in History: Evolution and Nazi Biology,” an examination of the work of the 19th-century German scholar Ernst Haeckel. Haeckel was widely regarded by historians as an intellectual force in Nazism because the theory of the races he developed had been interpreted to justify German superiority. Richards explored how historians use grammatical techniques to construct narratives, such as using different ideas of time and causal structure.