Tom Bethell

Last updated

Tom Bethell
BornJuly 17, 1936
DiedFebruary 12, 2021(2021-02-12) (aged 84)
Occupation(s)Journalist, writer

Tom Bethell ( /bəˈθɛl/ ; July 17, 1936 February 12, 2021) [1] was an American journalist who wrote mainly on economic and scientific issues.

Contents

Life and career

Bethell was born and raised in London, [2] England. He was educated at Downside School and Trinity College, Oxford. A resident of the District of Columbia, he lived in Virginia, Louisiana, and California. From 1962 to 1965 he taught math at Woodberry Forest School, Virginia. He was married to Donna R. Fitzpatrick of Washington, D.C. [3] [4] [5] He was a senior editor of The American Spectator and was for 25 years a media fellow of the Hoover Institution. He was Washington editor of Harper's , and an editor of the Washington Monthly . [6]

In 1980, he received a Gerald Loeb Award Honorable Mention for Columns/Editorial for "Fooling With the Budget." [7] [8] [9]

Jim Garrison investigation

Bethell was hired as a researcher by New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison to assist with his prosecution of Clay Shaw for conspiracy to assassinate John F. Kennedy. [10] Bethell gave no credence to Garrison's charges that Shaw was involved. [11] Shaw was acquitted after the jury deliberated for about an hour.

Controversy

In 1976, Bethell wrote a controversial article for Harper’s Magazine titled "Darwin's Mistake". According to Bethell there is no independent criterion of fitness and natural selection is a tautology. [12] Bethell also stated that Darwin's theory was on "the verge of collapse" and natural selection had been "quietly abandoned" by his supporters. [13] These claims were disputed by biologists. [12] [13] The paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote a rebuttal to Bethell's arguments. [13]

Bethell was a member of the Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV-AIDS Hypothesis, [14] which denies that HIV causes AIDS. In The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science (2005), he promoted denial of the existence of man-made global warming, AIDS denialism, and denial of evolution (which Bethell denied was "real science"). [15] Bethell endorsed the intelligent design documentary-style film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed . [16]

Bethell died from complications of Parkinson's disease at his home in Washington, D.C. in February 2021, aged 84. [17]

Selected publications

Articles

Books

Book contributions

Related Research Articles

The Duesberg hypothesis is the claim that AIDS is not caused by HIV, but instead that AIDS is caused by noninfectious factors such as recreational and pharmaceutical drug use and that HIV is merely a harmless passenger virus. The hypothesis was popularized by Peter Duesberg, a professor of biology at University of California, Berkeley, from whom the hypothesis gets its name. The scientific consensus is that the Duesberg hypothesis is incorrect and that HIV is the cause of AIDS. The most prominent supporters of the hypothesis are Duesberg himself, biochemist and vitamin proponent David Rasnick, and journalist Celia Farber. The scientific community generally contends that Duesberg's arguments in favor of the hypothesis are the result of cherry-picking predominantly outdated scientific data and selectively ignoring evidence that demonstrates HIV's role in causing AIDS.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eric Hoffer</span> American moral and social conservative philosopher (1902–1983)

Eric Hoffer was an American philosopher and social critic. A conservative moderate with an atypical working-class background, Hoffer authored ten books over his career and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in February 1983. His first book, The True Believer (1951), was widely recognized as a classic, receiving critical acclaim from both scholars and laymen, although Hoffer believed that The Ordeal of Change (1963) was his finest work. The Eric Hoffer Book Award is an international literary prize established in his honor. The University of California, Berkeley awards an annual literary prize named jointly for Hoffer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter Duesberg</span> German-American molecular biologist (born 1936)

Peter Heinz Hermann Duesberg is a German-American molecular biologist and a professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is known for his early research into the genetic aspects of cancer. He is a proponent of AIDS denialism, the claim that HIV does not cause AIDS.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Punctuated equilibrium</span> Theory in evolutionary biology

In evolutionary biology, punctuated equilibrium is a theory that proposes that once a species appears in the fossil record, the population will become stable, showing little evolutionary change for most of its geological history. This state of little or no morphological change is called stasis. When significant evolutionary change occurs, the theory proposes that it is generally restricted to rare and geologically rapid events of branching speciation called cladogenesis. Cladogenesis is the process by which a species splits into two distinct species, rather than one species gradually transforming into another.

Various fringe theories have arisen to speculate about purported alternative origins for the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), with claims ranging from it being due to accidental exposure to supposedly purposeful acts. Several inquiries and investigations have been carried out as a result, and each of these theories has consequently been determined to be based on unfounded and/or false information. HIV has been shown to have evolved from or be closely related to the simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) in West Central Africa sometime in the early 20th century. HIV was discovered in the 1980s by the French scientist Luc Montagnier. Before the 1980s, HIV was an unknown deadly disease.

Phillip E. Johnson was an American legal scholar who was the Jefferson E. Peyser Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. He was an opponent of evolutionary science, co-founder of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture (CSC), and one of the co-founders of the intelligent design movement, along with William Dembski and Michael Behe. Johnson described himself as "in a sense the father of the intelligent design movement".

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Mark Arnold Wainberg, was a Canadian HIV/AIDS researcher and HIV/AIDS activist. He was the Director of the McGill University AIDS Centre at the Montreal Jewish General Hospital and Professor of Medicine and of Microbiology at McGill University. His laboratory primarily studies HIV reverse transcriptase, the molecular basis for drug resistance, and gene therapy. He received a B.Sc. from McGill University in 1966, a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1972, and did his post-doctoral research at Hadassah Medical School of the Hebrew University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Harvey Bialy</span> American molecular biologist and AIDS denialist

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<i>The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science</i> 2005 book by Tom Bethell

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References

  1. "Remembering Tom Bethell: Wordsmith of Courage and Controversy" Archived February 14, 2021, at the Wayback Machine . Kmjnow.com. Retrieved 17 February 2021.
  2. See: Jerry P. Shinley Archive: Thomas Bethell: Biographical Sketch from CA
  3. Trinity College, Oxford – missing members Archived 2008-04-21 at the Wayback Machine
  4. Tom Bethell explains why property matters
  5. Tom Bethell, Beliefnet Columnist Beliefnet.com Accessed July 20, 2008
  6. "Biography at Property Rights Foundation of America, Inc". Archived from the original on October 28, 2020. Retrieved September 28, 2007.
  7. "2 California Papers Lead Loeb Awards". The Washington Post . May 30, 1980. p. D3.
  8. "Loeb Award winners 1958–1996". Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing . April 2013. Retrieved February 6, 2019.
  9. "Historical Winners List". UCLA Anderson School of Management . Retrieved January 31, 2019.
  10. Tom Bethell, "Reality Check for Another Movie Myth," Los Angeles Times, December 1, 1991.
  11. Tom Bethell, "Was Sirhan Sirhan on the Grassy Knoll?", The Washington Monthly, March 1975.
  12. 1 2 Ruse, Michael. Philosophy of Biology. Prometheus Books, 2007, p. 22, 133-141. ISBN   978-1591025276.
  13. 1 2 3 Gould, Stephen Jay. "Darwin’s Untimely Burial." Natural History, Vol. 85, 1976, pp. 24-30. Republished in Gould, Stephen Jay. Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History. W. W. Norton & Company, 2007, pp. 39-45. ISBN   978-0393340419.
  14. Baumann, E.; Bethell, T.; Bialy, H.; Duesberg, P. H.; Farber, C.; Geshekter, C. L.; Johnson, P. E.; Maver, R. W.; Schoch, R.; Stewart, G. T. (1995). "AIDS proposal. Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV/AIDS Hypothesis". Science. 267 (5200): 945–946. doi:10.1126/science.7863334. PMID   7863335. S2CID   45222215.
  15. Bethell, Tom."Don’t Fear the Designer." National Review .
  16. Branch, Glenn. "Expelled and the Reviewers." National Center for Science Education , Vol. 28, Nos. 5-6, 2008, pp. 24–25.
  17. "Tom Bethell". Legacy.com. Retrieved July 13, 2021.