While a graduate student in English at Northwestern (late 70s early 80s), I had the good fortune to study with Gerald Graff and get acquainted with the criticism wars that were beginning to rage. If Graff had lived oh, say, 2,447 years ago, he and Socrates would have given each other much to think about. Like Socrates, Graff practices a method of query-based discussion or dialectic in which no one is allowed to finally rest in or on any single theory, image, or conclusion.The conversation can always continue. Graff has taught the conflicts or controversies from the earliest days of his career, long before the practice was coined as a slogan by various individuals and groups.

I agree to a point with those who consider it unfortunate that religious fundamentalists have co-opted Graff’s phrase, “teaching the controversies,” in their efforts to get creationist mythology (intelligent design) taught in public school science courses. But consider what violence religious fundamentalists of all faiths have resorted to when discussion stops. So, by all means, let the controversies continue to be taught and discussed, by everyone. The only way to determine whether someone or some idea is right or wrong is to test it in the laboratory of discussion. So let the discussions continue: teach those controversies! bring on the conflicts!

If I had continued with literary theory as a professional interest, Graff’s query-based, Socratic approach is most certainly the one I would have taken: not identifying with any one school of criticism, but, instead, continually questioning each school’s assumptions, methods, and conclusions. Taking such an approach you risk angering and alienating, but, what was it they called Socrates . . . oh yeah, a gadfly.

Let the controversies and the conversations continue.

I am sure I am not alone in saying thank you, Professor Graff.

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In his essay, “Consciousness: The Achilles Heel of Darwinism? Thank God, Not Quite,” Nicolas Humphrey writes:

Indeed, Paley’s argument may soon have to be turned on its head. For there will likely come a time in the not too distant future when a complex artifact found lying on the heath will not have had a maker but rather have been “grown” via a genetic algorithm.

Well, of course a watch lying in the grass found tomorrow will not have been so algorithmically grown, but, his point stands. What could be more irreducibly complex than, say, the smallest of mites crawling across a rose; yet, the algorithm of natural selection explains its growth through geological ages.

Humphrey goes on to some remarkable, theory-based speculations on why the existence of God is ironically proven by the logic of human evolution — what makes us human is the belief in a maker. More on this later.

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