Research

Pennock stands in front of a door at the Oxford Museum of Natural History labeled "Professor of Experimental Philosophy." He wears a T-shirt that says "There is GRANDEUR in this view of life…"— a quote from Darwin's Origin of Species.

The panels below represent some recent projects; click the images for further details.

Evolution & Epistemology

Scan of a page from Charles Darwin's notebooks showing his sketch of a phylogenetic tree of species relationships and the words "I think"
Evolving Intelligence (EI) Project
Logo of BEACON: An NSF Center for the Study of Evolution in Action. Features a simple lighthouse surrounded by a DNA double helix with one of its strands with the standard chemical bonds and the other a binary sequence of zeros and ones. Beams of light shine from the top of the lighthouse in both directions.
BEACON Center for the Study of Evolution in Action
Illustration from Lewis Carrol's book Alice in Wonderland depicting Alice pulling aside a curtain underneath the words "Curiouser and Curiouser"
ALICE – Associative Learning and Inquisitiveness in Cognitive Evolution

Vocational Virtue

Logo of the Scientific Virtues Project. A large red capital letter V over background images in woodblock print style of a person reaching through the sphere of stars to see what lies behind. Illustration includes iconic symbols for the atom, a chemical structure symbol, a double-helix DNA molecule, a Nautilus shell, a laurel sprig, a X-Y number axis, and a sequence of binary code.
Scientific Virtues Project
Cover illustration of Robert T. Pennock's book An Instinct for Truth: Curiosity and the Moral Character of Science. Cover art features the painting The Astronomer by Johannes Vermeer.
Logo of the VERITIES Initiative. A large green capital letter V over a woodblock print style background of horizontal lines in a frame.
VERITIES Initiative

Active Learning

Logo of the Avida-ED Project. Illustration of a simple glass Petri dish filled with blue, red, and yellow squares representing a small population of digital organism.
Avida-ED Project
HHMI logo of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
LEVERS grant: Leveraging Engagement and Vision to Encourage Retention in STEM
Salmon Run video game logo superimposed on arial view of river and terrain environment in the game.
Salmon Run video game

Science Denialism

Cover of Robert T. Pennock's book Tower of Babel: The Evidence against the New Creationism. Features a ruddy-colored cropped version of Pieter Bruegel's painting The Tower of Babel.
Scan of the first page of Robert T. Pennock's article "The Postmodern Sin of Intelligent Design Creationism"
Cover of Robert T. Pennock's edited book Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics. Features a photograph of a rabbit and an insert of Albrecht Dürer's print Young Hare.

Science & Society

Photograph portrait of C.P. Snow
Rethinking Scientific Literacy. Understanding the nature of science to bridge the two cultures involves not only its content and methods, but also its constitutive values.
Photograph taken by Hubble telescope of the Eagle Nebula 'Pillars of Creation'
Beyond Religion vs Science: Putting aside the creationism debate, these papers and presentations address more general philosophical reflections on science, religion, and society.

Liberty, Equality, Reality

A virtue-theoretic defense of the value of scientific truth in relation to freedom, justice, and peace.
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