War News

From the start of the war the news out of Ukraine was, for the Russians, rarely good, and last week was no exception.

The first piece of bad news was that the Ukrainians used their new HIMARS missile systems,* donated by the U.S., to punch holes in a crucial bridge over the Dnipro river, thus making it much more difficult for the Russian troops occupying the major city of Kherson to be resupplied:

Ukrainian forces using U.S.-supplied precision artillery severely damaged a bridge vital to the Russian military's supply lines in occupied Kherson, Ukraine authorities said Wednesday.

"Successful missile strikes on bridges over the Dnipro River by #UAarmy create an impossible dilemma for russian occupiers in #Kherson," the Ukrainian Defense Ministry tweeted. "Retreat or be annihilated by #UAarmy. The choice is theirs."

The bridge is one of two crossings over the river that Russia uses to transport personnel and equipment to territories it occupies. The strike didn't aim to destroy the bridge but to make it impossible for the Russian military to use, Ukraine's Operational Command South spokeswoman Nataliya Gumenyuk said.

The second piece of bad news was that the Ukrainians announced that total Russian combat losses included more than 40,000 troops killed or wounded along with the destruction of 1,738 tanks and 3,971 armored vehicles.

Then the BBC reported on a speech by British MI6 chief Richard Moore who, speaking at the Aspen Security Forum, opined that recent Russian gains were "tiny" and that Russia was "about to run out of steam":

Our assessment is that the Russians will increasingly find it difficult to find manpower and materiel over the next few weeks. They will have to pause in some way and that will give the Ukrainians the opportunity to strike back.

On top of this are repeated reports of poor Russian morale and very costly Russian incompetence in the field. In one recent instance three Russian helicopters opened fire on their own troops on the ground. The troops fired back and downed one of the helicopters.

This episode came a week after Russian troops in Luhansk, trying to target a Ukrainian missile battery, accidentally shot down one of their own Su-34M fighter jets instead.

Whatever the final outcome of this barbaric war of aggression on the part of the Russians turns out to be, it has been an extraordinarily costly undertaking in terms of men, material and the Russians' reputation around the world.

If they do eventually prevail it'll be a perfect illustration of what's meant by a Pyrrhic victory, one from which it may take them decades to recover. *HIMARS is a mobile missile system that uses GPS to ensure very accurate strikes at up to 50 miles away. These missiles have allowed Ukraine to hit ammunition dumps behind Russian lines and to target command centers. This not only erodes Russian morale, it has also forced them to pull their ammunition back which lengthens supply lines and slows their ability to keep their own artillery and troops supplied.

Our Breathtaking World

Here's a brief video from Lad Allen that presents some amazing facts about the number of stars in our universe, the number of grains of sand in the world and the number of molecules of water in a single drop. Whether you're inclined to agree with the conclusion of the video or not, the physical facts it presents are not in dispute, and they are mind-blowing.

The video is only five and a half minutes long, but it will surely fill you with a sense of wonder at the size of the universe, both astronomically and microscopically:

An Atheist's Dilemma

Alfredo Metere is a senior research scientist at the International Computer Science Institute, and the University of California, Berkeley.

In an article at Cosmos he argues that the laws of physics leave no room for free will, that the universe is a deterministic system, and that all human choices were made inevitable by the initial conditions which prevailed at the Big Bang.

Here are some key excerpts from his argument:

One of the major fundamental questions in physics concerns the presence or absence of free will in the universe, or in any physical system, or subset, within it.

Physics is based on the idea that nature is mechanistic, which means that it works like a machine. A machine is just a system, and therefore, by definition, it is a collection of elements, each of them with a specific, possibly different function, all working together to achieve a specific purpose, general to the whole machine.

If we believe in the Big Bang Theory – and the universe’s continuous expansion is a strong indication that such theory must be correct – the initial state of the universe was a single point (known as a singularity) that then expanded to the cosmos we know and perceive today, which, of course, includes us.

If so, there is a causal relationship between the Big Bang and us. In other words, free will is not allowed, and all of our actions are just a mere consequence of that first event. Such a view is known as “determinism”, or “super-determinism” (if one finds it productive to reinvent the wheel).

Set aside the objection to Metere that according to quantum physics the universe is fundamentally indeterminate (See the argument developed at Evolution News by Michael Egnor), and bear in mind that most metaphysical naturalists are inclined to agree with Metere's analysis. Naturalism entails, though perhaps not strictly, a materialist view of reality, and materialism entails, though perhaps not strictly, a determinist view of human volition.

Atheism, materialism and determinism all cluster together so that those who hold one view, generally hold the other two as well. If they don't, they have to somehow reconcile what appears prima facie to be an inconsistency.

Now consider the awkward dilemma this places an atheist (metaphysical naturalist) in.

If atheism is true then materialism follows. Everything is ultimately reducible to, and explicable in terms of, material particles and the forces between them. And if materialism is true then determinism is true. There's no locus for free will in a purely material substrate like the brain.

Our choices are chemical reactions in our brain, and those reactions are caused by other chemical reactions, and so on back to the Big Bang.

All of those reactions are determined, so as Metere says, there's a causal relation between us and the Big Bang, and there's no room for any "choice" occurring outside that causal chain. But, if determinism is true then our beliefs are the product of non-rational chemical reactions, a coupling and decoupling of particles.

If that's so, then the belief that atheism is true is alo non-rational, so why should anyone believe it? Some people have the appropriate chemical reactions that lead to atheistic belief and others don't, but in neither case does the objective truth of things factor into the picture.

It might be objected that our beliefs are formed by reasons which stimulate the appropriate chemical reactions, but this is also problematic.

Our reasons are themselves ultimately determined by chemical reactions, so if our reasons are determined then we don't necessarily hold them because of their truth value, but because of a host of other causes, most of which are unknown and unknowable, and perhaps all of which are non-rational.

Moreover, reasons are ideas, and ideas are immaterial. How does a materialist account for the efficacy of immaterial ideas acting on material atoms and molecules to produce an immaterial belief?

Metere closes with this:

[O]ne can be tempted to interject that if free will does not exist, why do we punish criminals? It is not their fault, after all. A counter-argument to that is that punishment is the natural response to crime, such that global equilibrium can be sustained, and therefore punishment is just as unavoidable as the commission of wrongdoing.

In other words, the criminal commits a crime because he was determined to do so by the initial conditions of the Big Bang, and society's authorities punish him because they were determined to do so also by the initial conditions of the Big Bang.

If this is true then there's no real culpability, no moral responsibility, no right or wrong, and, if there is no God, no ultimate accountability. On this view, whatever is, is right, or at least not really wrong. In fact, on this view right and wrong simply mean what people with power like and what people with power don't like. That road leads to slavery and Auschwitz.

I wonder, if someone were to rape his daughter or torture his son to death, if Metere would think that it wasn't really objectively wrong. Perhaps he would, I don't know.

Metere is a very bright guy, so I'm sure he has answers to these questions. I just wish he would have included them in his essay.

Joe Pangloss

The character named Dr. Pangloss in Voltaire's novella Candide was the picture of optimism. No matter how bad circumstances around him were he was convinced that things were all okay.

President Biden is a Panglossian character. No matter how bad things are he's convinced, or at least let's on like he is, that everything is going to be just fine. As our economy plummets into a recession he denies that we're heading for recession. As inflation threatens the financial well-being of millions of Americans he insists that inflation is only temporary.

These aren't just isolated examples of Mr. Biden's sunny disposition. They seem rather to be symptoms of an inability to accept the calamitous consequences of his administration's actions.

Here, courtesy of Jim Geraghty at NRO, is a list of some of Mr. Biden's more egregious Panglossian moments:

• Early in his presidency, Biden insisted that that there was nothing significant about a sudden surge of illegal immigrants at the southern border in late winter: “It happens every single, solitary year: There is a significant increase in the number of people coming to the border in the winter months of January, February, March. That happens every year.” Under Biden, illegal border crossings and attempted crossings have reached their all-time highs, hitting new records, month after month.
• Biden’s public assessment of Afghanistan in July 2021 was infamously inaccurate: “I trust the capacity of the Afghan military, who is better trained, better equipped, and more re- — more competent in terms of conducting war.” “The Taliban is not the south — the North Vietnamese army. They’re not — they’re not remotely comparable in terms of capability. There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy in the — of the United States from Afghanistan.”
• Back on July 19, 2021, Biden declared that: “Some folks have raised worries that this could be a sign of persistent inflation. But that’s not our view. Our experts believe and the data shows that most of the price increases we’ve seen are — were expected and expected to be temporary. . . . There’s nobody suggesting there’s unchecked inflation on the way — no serious economist. That’s totally different.”
• Then in December, Biden declared of inflation, “I think it’s the peak of the crisis. . . . Developments in the weeks after these data were collected last month show that price and cost increase are slowing. I expect more progress on that in the weeks ahead.” Inflation was 7 percent then, and it is 9.1 percent now.
• Also in December, Biden addressed the buildup of Russian forces on the border of Ukraine: “What I am doing is putting together what I believe will be the most comprehensive and meaningful set of initiatives to make it very, very difficult for Mr. Putin to go ahead and do what people are worried he will do. That’s in play right now.” Apparently, those initiatives didn’t make an invasion difficult enough.
• Also in December, Biden insisted the supply-chain crisis that everyone warned about had never materialize: “The much-predicted crisis didn’t occur. Packages are moving, gifts are being delivered, shelves are not empty.” Yet the supply-chain problems continued into 2022.
• Also in December — this was a bad month! — Biden pledged that Americans would get 500 million free Covid-19 tests. Those tests didn’t start shipping until February, after the Omicron wave had surged through American households.
• In May, Biden said, “I think we’re going to be, in a matter of weeks or less, getting significantly more formula on shelves.” But since May, the formula shortage has actually gotten worse, not better.

It's hard to recall any historical figure who was so wrong so often about so much. President Biden is afflicted with chronic bad judgment and the nation which elected to the presidency a man who rose to prominence despite career-long mediocrity, is suffering for it.

Will AI Become Human?

Recently an engineer at Google made the startling claim that their computer, LaMDA, was actually sentient and self-aware. Here's some of the story:

A Google engineer named Blake Lemoine made news by claiming that a chatbot he developed was sentient and spiritual, and that it should have all the rights people have. Lemoine claimed the chatbot (named LaMDA, which stands for Language Model for Dialogue Applications) meditates, believes itself to have a soul, has emotions like fear, and enjoys reading.

According to Lemoine, Google should treat it as an employee rather than as property and should ask its consent before using it in future research.

This brought down a lot of criticism upon Google which subsequently relieved the engineer of his responsibilities for disseminating too much classified information:

Alphabet Inc's Google said on Friday it has dismissed a senior software engineer who claimed the company's artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot LaMDA was a self-aware person.

Google, which placed software engineer Blake Lemoine on leave last month, said he had violated company policies and that it found his claims on LaMDA to be "wholly unfounded."

"It's regrettable that despite lengthy engagement on this topic, Blake still chose to persistently violate clear employment and data security policies that include the need to safeguard product information," a Google spokesperson said in an email to Reuters.

Last year, Google said that LaMDA - Language Model for Dialogue Applications - was built on the company's research showing Transformer-based language models trained on dialogue could learn to talk about essentially anything.

Google and many leading scientists were quick to dismiss Lemoine's views as misguided, saying LaMDA is simply a complex algorithm designed to generate convincing human language.

A lot of people do believe that computers will one day surpass human beings in terms of what they can do and will, in fact, be superhuman. Computer engineer Robert J. Marks explains why this concern is misguided in his very interesting book Non-Computable You: What You Do That Artificial Intelligence Never Will.

According to Marks computers will never be human no matter how impressive their abilities may be. No machine will ever be able to match what humans are capable of.

Computers can impressively manipulate facts. They have knowledge, but as Marks explains on page 16 there's a difference between knowledge and intelligence:

Knowledge is having access to facts. Intelligence is much more than that. Intelligence requires a host of analytic skills. It requires understanding: the ability to recognize humor, subtleties of meaning and the ability to untangle ambiguities.

He writes:

Artificial Intelligence has done many remarkable things....But will AI ever replace attorneys, physicians, military strategists, and design engineers, among others? The answer is no.

The rest of the book is an entertaining explanation of why the answer is no.

In short, computers can only do what they're programmed to do and programs consist of algorithms developed by human agents. No one, however, can write an algorithm for the host of qualities and capabilities that humans have. They're non-algorithmic and thus non-computable.

Consider this partial list of things that human beings do that no algorithm could capture:

Human beings are aware, they know, they have beliefs, doubts, regrets, hopes, resentments, frustrations, worries, desires and intentions. They experience gratitude, boredom, curiosity, interest, pleasure, pain, flavor, color, warmth, compassion, guilt, grief, disgust, pride, embarrassment.

In addition, humans appreciate beauty, humor, meaning and significance. They can distinguish between good and bad, right and wrong. They can apprehend abstract ideas like universals or math.

They’re creative. They have a sense of being a self, they have memories which seem to be rooted in the past, either of recent or more remote origin. They have a sense of past, present and future. They have ideas and understand those ideas.

Computers do none of this. There's a vast chasm separating matter and conscious human experience.

The robot Sonny in the movie I, Robot notwithstanding, computers don't feel. A robot can be programmed to tell you it loves you but it doesn’t feel love.

Human beings have minds which are immaterial and which can't be reduced to electrical signals along neural circuitry. Material machines will never have a mind.

On Following the Crowd

Kylee Griswold writing at The Federalist about the Respect for Marriage act which the Senate may be considering soon. The RFM act would codify same sex marriage, a measure deemed necessary by proponents lest the Supreme Court overturn its Obergefell decision of 2015 which discovered such a right in the Constitution.

Griswold argues that those who disapprove of SSM should not be cowed by the majority, whether numerical or just vocal, who call them bigots. Just because a plurality endorses an idea doesn't make that idea reasonable or right.

She says this:

It’s OK to oppose the majority on this one. And thus it’s OK to oppose this piece of marriage-centric legislation.

First, marriage matters. It matters to the government, with traditional marriage rightly having distinct legal protections as the only union that naturally produces children — for the sake of whom those marriages should remain intact.

The government has no interest in people’s sexual behaviors except if those behaviors produce children, who are vulnerable for some 20 years of their lives and therefore must be legally protected in ways adults don’t need to be.

The legal protection children require is marriage, and thus marriage is not a sanction of any form of adult sexuality or affection but about children. And since same-sex relationships by nature cannot produce children, they don’t need government involvement.

But marriage matters for so many other things too, not least of which are physical health and wellness, societal flourishing, home building, and financial planning. It also matters to the God who created it — so it matters not what most people think.

Jack Phillips didn’t care what the majority thought when he kindly served gay customers yet declined to celebrate a same-sex marriage by designing a wedding cake. Neither did Barronelle Stutzman, who made friends with a frequent gay customer but couldn’t in good conscience participate in his homosexual wedding even though it meant losing almost everything.

They know marriage matters, and in their courage and conviction, they refused to jump off the cliff. Cowardly lawmakers who would go along with the majority on the Respect for Marriage Act would take another hacksaw to the lives and business of these two and so many others like them, whose First Amendment rights would just be further eroded by contrived rights.

Second, it isn’t a slippery-slope fallacy to recognize the ways in which the goalposts have shifted since Obergefell. What was once “two consenting adults in the bedroom” has become in-your-face, LGBT-positive programming for schoolchildren.

The right to marry has become the right to adopt a child. And “accept us” has become “affirm us.”

So far, anywhere “sexual orientation” has come to be foisted on the public, “gender identity” is sure to follow, and there’s no reason to believe Congress codifying a federal “right” to marry won’t spawn a federal “right” to any sex-specific space you so choose or the castration of children, doctors’ consciences be damned.

The ancient Greek philosopher Socrates admonished his pupil Crito that following the majority is not prudent: "[The majority] cannot make a man either wise or foolish, but they inflict things haphazardly.”

Socrates believed that the majority is often governed by their emotions rather than their reason. For him, wise persons are heroic figures, committed to doing what's reasonable, not what the masses tell them they should do, even if this means that they stand alone, even if it means that they suffer the obloquy of those who substitute insults and threats for reasons and argument.

Socrates was willing to die for what he believed, and did.

Unfortunately, few of our contemporary politicians and even fewer of our media personalities are similarly committed. Senator Joe Manchin (D. WV) is perhaps an exception. Most of his colleagues have their fingers perpetually to the wind or they do whatever their told to do by their leadership.

Anyway, I've written on some of the reasons for resisting same sex marriage here. In short, it's the another step, IMO, toward achieving a goal held by the left since at least the early 19th century - the abolition of marriage and the family.

American Exceptionalism

In a short work titled American Exceptionalism sociologist Charles Murray summarizes the characteristics which he thinks make, or made, America exceptional among nations.

He also gives a chapter to the criticisms that have been levelled at America, but here I'd like to focus on what he, as well as foreign observers like Alexis de Tocqueville, believes made this country special, and why millions of immigrants are confirming this judgment by their willingness to risk their lives in an arduous trek to get here.

Murray lists four elements that he identifies as "The elements of an exceptional culture:" Industriousness, Egalitarianism, Religiosity, and Community Life. He identifies three characteristics of each of these and makes the case that regarding these traits America and Americans were unique among nations in the 18th century.

Here's a short summary of his theme:

Industriousness (Self-reliance, hard work, getting ahead): It (industriousness) signifies the bone deep American assumption that life is to be spent getting ahead through hard work and thereby making a better life for oneself and one's children. The industriousness of Americans fascinated the rest of the world. No other American quality was so consistently seen as exceptional.

Egalitarianism (No aristocracy, identification with middle class, equality of human dignity): America was by no means a classless society, but Americans retained a strong sense that whatever class you were in was a matter of what you made of yourself, not who your family was, and an equally strong sense that richer does not mean more virtuous or of greater human worth.

Religiosity (Source of social activism, source of utopian aspirations, source of inner self-government): America was and still is the most religious country in the Western world and its religiosity has profoundly shaped it.

To quote John Adams, "We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."

Community Life (Civic engagement, neighborliness, social trust): Murray uses the phrase "Community Life" to, in his words, "capture the odd combination of volunteerism, widespread charitable giving, and engagement in the community that was at the heart of American exceptionalism in the nineteenth century."

There may be other traits that characterized America and set the fledgling nation apart from most of the rest of the world in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but these four, Murray believes, are certainly among the most prominent.

Sadly, to the extent that any of them have eroded so has our uniqueness.

What Would Aliens Look like?

At Big Think Dirk Schulze-Makuch has a couple of short essays in which he speculates on what intelligent alien life forms would like if such there be. He writes:

What do aliens look like? Inundated as we are with science fiction movies, where aliens come in all different shapes and sizes, one wonders what form a real extraterrestrial would take. You need only look at the diversity of life on our own planet, from bacteria to humans to oak trees, to get a glimpse of what might be possible.

The variety is amazing, even though all known life forms have pretty much the same biochemistry and all are based on DNA. Sci-fi directors might look further for inspiration, to extinct species like trilobites or the giant shark Megalodon. But the real pool of possibilities is surely many times greater.

When I was asked in a recent documentary on German TV how I would envision an intelligent alien, I suggested that they might look like a crow with little hands on the edges of their wings, maybe a bit more sophisticated than the claws that bats have on the end of their wings. In theory, that would allow the creatures to build things and become technologically advanced.

He goes on in another essay to speculate that,

Either way, we expect the extraterrestrials to be very different from us. It is implicit in the word we use to describe them: aliens.

If we venture into an inhabited universe, we are likely to run into beings that evolved under entirely different physical circumstances. Will we meet them as curious, friendly, fellow explorers? Predators and prey? Will we be delighted or disgusted by their strangeness?

We might be so confused by their otherness that we don’t even recognize them as living beings.

The view outlined by Schulze-Makuch in these essays is a common one - intelligent, technologically advanced beings from some other solar system or some other galaxy would have had a different evolutionary history and would thus obviously not look like us.

It's the popular view, but in his book The Miracle of Man geneticist Michael Denton argues very cogently that it's wrong. If there are intelligent, technologically advanced civilizations elsewhere in the universe the creatures who populate it would have to look pretty much like human beings.

Why?

Any life form in our universe must be subject to the constraints imposed by the chemistry and physics that governs this universe, and those constraints make it virtually necessary that intelligent, technologically advanced creatures have an ensemble of characteristics that in the end would make them look pretty much like we do.

They'd have to come from a planet similar to ours with copious amounts of water, an atmosphere with roughly the same percentages of oxygen and nitrogen, a temperature range suitable for life, etc. These factors would also constrain the anatomy and physiology of any creatures on the planet.

As Denton explains, for creatures to develop intelligence they have to be carbon-based - no other element including silicon, can substitute - and if they're carbon-based their biology will be similar to that of creatures on earth. To develop technology they'd have to be terrestrial creatures and oxygen breathers.

They'd likely have a brain similar to ours since ours has been found to be optimal for achieving the limits of biological intelligence, and unlike terrestrial apes, intelligent aliens would, like us, need to have a fully opposable thumb.

The creatures would also have to be able to use fire without which they never would've developed metallurgy and thus technology, but this means that they'd have to be able to secure and use fuel such as wood or coal. This would be very difficult if not impossible for any beings that lacked eyes, arms and hands. So, too, would tool use be difficult.

Bipedalism is also a necessity for any creature which uses tools, since it frees up the upper limbs, and achieving technology without using tools is incomprehensible.

Since the planet would have to be about our size its gravity would have to be about what ours is. This means that any creatures on it would have to be within a certain size range. They couldn't be too much smaller than are we because, inter alia, they would lack sufficient strength to hew lumber or mine ore.

Nor could they be much bigger since mass increases with the cube of one's height, but bone and muscle strength increase only with the square of the height. Thus, a much larger race of aliens would be less adroit and more fragile. Tripping and falling would be catastrophic (compare the fall of a toddler with the fall of an adult).

Denton explains much more and goes into much more detail in his book, but toward the end he says this:

Nature is uniquely fit not just for our biological being, for our aerobic terrestrial existence, and for our size and body plan, but also for our unique capacity for fire-making and for following the singular path through metallurgy to an advanced technology and a profound understanding of nature.

That claim can only be challenged by showing that, given the laws of nature and the structure of the cosmos, there is the possibility of fundamentally different types of biological life than ones based on carbon and water, the possibility of fundamentally different types of intelligent beings capable of making and controlling fire, and fundamentally different routes to an advanced technology and deep knowledge of the world, routes that do not pass through fire-making and metallurgy.

However, no credible alternatives of this sort have ever been proposed.

No single book or paper exists which provides a well-worked-out blueprint for a cell radically different from the canonical carbon-based cell, the basic building block of all life on Earth. No single paper or book exists which describes within the domain of carbon-based life an alternative biological design for an advanced organism comparable to modern humans possessed of a high metabolic rate and high intelligence.

Nor has an alternative design ever been proposed in any detail for an advanced intelligent aerobic organism capable of making and controlling fire. Nor is there a single paper which describes a substantially different route to an advanced technology and ultimately scientific knowledge.

One can imagine variations on the humanoid theme, of course, some more realistic than others. But to the degree that they are credible, they will be variations very close to the human form.

You can read a shorter summary of Denton's fascinating book here. Maybe somebody should send a copy to Mr. Schulze-Makuch.

Spell Woman

The University of Pennsylvania has decided to shout their progressive virtue by nominating swimmer Lia Thomas for the NCAA's "Woman of the Year" award. Thomas is something of an evolutionary prodigy, a woman with a male body, and is for that reason alone deserving of U of P's nomination.

I say evolutionary prodigy because when "cis" or even lesbian women compete against bigger, stronger women who happen to possess all the male accoutrements, the unfortunate female competitors who lack those advantages don't stand much of a chance. Thus, in the world of sports where it's Darwinian survival of the fittest, individuals like Thomas are the future.

Well, except that in Darwinian terms the advantages have to be passed on to offspring, and although we're assured that transgenders like Thomas can indeed bear children, no one has as yet seen it happen.

Lia Thomas

I say no one has seen it happen, but now that I think about it there was a case recently where something almost like it seems to have happened.

The case involved a 27 year-old prison inmate named Demi Minor serving a 30 year sentence for manslaughter who insisted that he was a she and should be incarcerated in a woman's prison. This demand was granted, and while housed amidst a female population this prisoner pulled off an incredible feat by impregnating two fellow female inmates.

It has never been heard of in all of history that a woman could impregnate another woman, but Minor seems to have done it, and I think he has not received the recognition that such an accomplishment deserves.

On a related matter, anthropologists are now realizing that it's transphobic to identify skeletal remains as male or female by virtue of the bone structure.

It's being brought to their attention that the bone structure tells them nothing about whether the individual actually identified as male or female, and thus it's implicit bigotry for the anthropologist to assume which one the person was simply based on anatomy.

Henceforth, in the absence of other clues, anthropologists are being admonished not to conclude anything about the gender of the skeletal remains.

Surely, this enlightened attitude will extend to contemporary forensic pathologists who examine remains found at a crime site. When police investigators inquire as to whether the remains are of a male or female the pathologist will simply have to reply that there's no way to tell what the individual identified as.

Indeed, even if the corpse is still in a state of relative undecay it'd be impossible to tell whether it's male or female without asking it, which is, of course, out of the question.

This may make solving the criminal case more difficult, but that's a small price to pay for adhering faithfully to the progressive transgender religion and avoiding the awful smear of being a transphobic bigot like the brat in this spelling bee:

Scientific Discovery Is Increasingly Pointing to God

I have an acquaintance who is a religious skeptic. He goes to church and sings in the choir, but he tells me that his reading of science has made it difficult for him to believe that the God of Judeo-Christian theology actually exists.

The repeated claims by atheistic scientists that modern science has made God superfluous has had an impact not only on my friend's thinking but throughout the culture. Polls show a significant decline in the number of people in the U.S. who consider themselves believers.

Yet, as philosopher of science Stephen Meyer argues in an opinion piece at Newsweek, most of the scientific discoveries of the last three decades actually confirm the theistic hypothesis and are unexpected on the naturalistic view that nature and the laws of physics are all that exist.

Referring to a survey taken by the Discovery Institute of which he is the Director, Meyer writes:

Perhaps surprisingly, our survey discovered that the perceived message of science has played a leading role in the loss of faith. We found that scientific theories about the unguided evolution of life have, in particular, led more people to reject belief in God than worries about suffering, disease, or death.

It also showed that 65 percent of self-described atheists and 43 percent of agnostics believe "the findings of science [generally] make the existence of God less probable.

Here are a few excerpts from the rest of his column:

....Yet....over the last century important scientific discoveries have dramatically challenged science-based atheism, and three in particular tell a decidedly more God-friendly story.

First, scientists have discovered that the physical universe had a beginning. This finding...contradicts the expectations of scientific atheists, who long portrayed the universe as eternal and self-existent and therefore in no need of an external creator.

Evidence for what scientists call the Big Bang has instead confirmed the expectations of traditional theists.

This confirmation is reinforced by discoveries over the past three decades or so which reveal that the fundamental physical laws and parameters of the universe are exquisitely fine-tuned. Had the values they have - such as the strength of the gravitational force - deviated by incomprehensibly minute amounts the universe either wouldn't exist at all or would be unsuitable for life:

Since the 1960s, physicists have determined that the fundamental physical laws and parameters of our universe are finely tuned, against all odds, to make our universe capable of hosting life.

Even slight alterations of many independent factors—such as the strength of gravitational or electromagnetic attraction, or the initial arrangement of matter and energy in the universe—would have rendered life impossible. Scientists have discovered that we live in a kind of "Goldilocks Universe," or what Australian physicist Luke Barnes calls an extremely "Fortunate Universe."

Not surprisingly, many physicists have concluded that this improbable fine-tuning points to a cosmic "fine-tuner." As former Cambridge astrophysicist Sir Fred Hoyle argued, "A common-sense interpretation of the data suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics" to make life possible.

The third discovery that confirms the claim that the universe and life are the products of an intelligent agent is the astonishing structure of the genetic code and the cells which contain it:

Third, molecular biology has revealed the presence in living cells of an exquisite world of informational nanotechnology. These include digital code in DNA and RNA—tiny, intricately constructed molecular machines which vastly exceed our own digital high technology in their storage and transmission capabilities.

And even Richard Dawkins has acknowledged that "the machine code of the genes is uncannily computer-like" — implying, it would seem, the activity of a master programmer at work in the origin of life.

At the very least, the discoveries of modern biology are not what anyone would have expected from blind, materialistic processes.

Scientific theories are predicated in part on what's called "explanatory power." The theory that can explain our observations most simply and plausibly is considered superior to alternative theories.

On this criterion theism is certainly superior to naturalistic atheism. The problem is that academia and the media are slow to publicize the fact and thus the larger culture is to a great extent unaware of it.

Meyer goes into a lot more detail on the three discoveries in his book The Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Scientific Discoveries That Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe. I also recommend two books by geneticist Michael Denton: The Miracle of the Cell and The Miracle of Man that anyone, especially those with some background in the sciences and who are willing to entertain a very serious challenge to naturalism, should read.

Good Guy with a Gun

Politicians aren't the first people who come to mind when you think of wisdom, but Sen. Chris Murphy (D, CT) recently delivered himself of one of the dumbest remarks any politician has ever uttered. After viewing the video of the failure of the police in Uvalde to take action against the man killing children in Robb elementary school last May 24th Murphy opined that:

The Uvalde video puts to bed, forever, the question of whether the way to deal with bad guys with guns is to make sure there are more good guys with guns. We've always known it was a gun industry created lie, designed to sell more guns. Now we just have the gut wrenching proof.

This comment is so ridiculous it's probably an insult to the intelligence of VP readers to point out to the distinguished senator the difference between necessary and sufficient conditions. It's a necessary condition to stopping the slaughter at Uvalde that good guys be armed, but it's not a sufficient condition. The good guys have to actually be willing to use their weapons to end the carnage.

Consider, as an example, a story out of Indiana that the senator from Connecticut ought to be told about since it certainly points up the absurdity of his assertion:

At least three people were killed and two others were injured in a shooting at an Indianapolis-area shopping mall on Sunday evening, police said.

Multiple people called 911 at around 6:05 p.m. local time to report an active shooter at the Greenwood Park Mall in Greenwood, Indiana, some 14 miles south of Indianapolis. An unidentified gunman had walked into the mall's food court and opened fire, according to Greenwood Police Chief Jim Ison.

Olivia Harding said she was at the Old Navy in the mall with her mom when they heard four gunshots and initially thought the nearby carousel was breaking down. But then they heard six more shots....

A person who was lawfully armed -- identified as a 22-year-old man from Bartholomew County -- shot and killed the gunman, according to Ison.

"The real hero of the day is the citizen that was lawfully carrying a firearm in that food court and was able to stop that shooter almost as soon as he began," Ison told reporters during a press conference on Sunday night.

Greenwood Mayor Mark Myers also confirmed that the suspect was "shot by an armed individual," whom he called a "good Samaritan."

"This person saved lives tonight," Myers said in a statement late Sunday. "On behalf of the City of Greenwood, I am grateful for his quick action and heroism in this situation."

Too bad that 22-year-old wasn't at Uvalde, but it's not too bad that Senator Murphy has to walk around Washington for the next couple of months with egg on his face. In the debate over gun control he seems to have pretty much lost whatever credibility he may once have had.

Materialism: The Teenage Princess

I ran across this old post in the archives and thought it'd be worth posting again:

One of the charming quirks in the behavior of young girls - my daughter's friends, for example - is that they instinctively defer all decisions involving the group to a particular individual as if she were somehow anointed by God for preeminence.

There need be no verbal communication in these interactions, they just happen as a matter of course, as if everyone tacitly understands that there's a hierarchy of status which no one in the group is to challenge.

If one of the lower ranking girls should have the temerity to dissent from the dictates of the alpha female - the teenage princess - the unfortunate young lady would suffer immediate social excommunication and be banished from the royal court.

I once asked my daughter why girls accept this state of affairs as normal, to which she replied with a shrug which suggested that she had no idea and that no one really wonders about it except me.

I thought of this, oddly enough, after reading writer Susan Ives' complaint that "Intelligent design disrespects faith, discounts faith, destroys faith."

Faith, Ives avers, is:

...belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence. Faith falls into the realm of metaphysics - literally, "beyond physics," the branch of philosophy that seeks to explain the nature of reality and the origin and structure of the world.

When we try to prove and promote the metaphysical through the physical - when we muddle faith and science - we are, in effect, saying that faith is not enough, that faith, like science, requires proof. Faith that requires proof is no faith at all.

Ms. Ives constructs a strange argument. Suppose it were the case that science demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt that the universe and everything in it were indeed the product of purposeful, intelligent engineering. Would Ms. Ives then feel that her faith was devastated beyond repair? Would she greet the news with fascination or would it throw her into a religious crisis?

Simply to pose the questions, I think, is to answer them.

Her confusion stems from a Kierkegaardian view of faith that makes it the more virtuous the less evidence there is to support it. Her view is that metaphysics and physics are sealed in airtight compartments without either ever leaking into the other. This is pretty naive.

The idea that faith is somehow vitiated by empirical evidence is really quite peculiar. Jesus, after all, offered his disciples plenty of empirical evidence that he was the Son of God and he expected those demonstrations to strengthen their faith, not destroy it.

All of that aside, though, Ms. Ives completely misrepresents Intelligent Design. ID is not an attempt to "prove" that God exists. Nor is it an attempt to demonstrate some tenet of religious faith to be true.

It is simply a conclusion inferred from observations of the physical world that powerfully suggest that the universe in general, and life in particular, appear strongly teleological.

If this teleology is not just an illusory appearance but a factual reality, it would certainly be of religious interest, just as Darwin's claims have been of religious interest to people, many of them atheists, but so what? Should we shrink from investigating the nature and structure of the cosmos just because it might bolster one's faith or encourage another one's skepticism?

Ms. Ives seems to be implicitly arguing that Christians and other theists should not be engaged in the scientific enterprise, nor should they be doing philosophy, because the more they understand about God's creation, and the more scientific and philosophical support they find for their religious beliefs in the creation they study, the more damage they'll do to their faith.

This is ludicrous, of course. Most of the great scientists of the past, Newton, Boyle, Maxwell, Galileo and so on were Christians who delighted in the attempt to understand more about God through their science. They were all "intelligent design" proponents though the term wasn't in use during their era, and they saw no problem in deriving nourishment for their faith from the fruits of their science.

What does all this have to do with teenage girls? Well, Ms Ives is either arguing that theists should not undertake to study the world or she's advocating a teenage princess version of theory precedence, viz that believers engaged in science and philosophy dare not presume to arrive at conclusions at odds with the reigning materialist paradigm.

Materialism is the tacitly acclaimed alpha theory that all must acknowledge, to which all must pay deference and which no one dare flout on pain of social ostracism and intellectual banishment. It's the metaphysical assumption whose rightful place, like that of the teenage princess, at the very top of the theoretical hierarchy is always assumed and never challenged.

Why Ms Ives thinks materialism should be granted this place of epistemological privilege, though, and what there is about materialism that has earned it such lofty status, she doesn't say. Perhaps the reason she doesn't is that, as with the teenage princess, there really is no good justification for the deference materialism expects to be shown.

It survives atop the heap only so long as people like Ms Ives unthinkingly assume it just belongs there.

Revolutions French and American

As America and France celebrated the anniversaries of their respective revolutions this month several commentators reflected on similarities between the two historic struggles.

Yet other than occuring within a decade or so of each other (1776 and 1789 are the years in which the American and French revolutions began) and aspiring to establish Constitutionally protected rights, the two revolutions and their aftermaths were really very different.

For instance:

• The French were seeking to topple their monarchy, Americans were seeking to withdraw from one.
• The French revolution led to instability and a series of tyrannies that lasted for decades. The American revolution led to a stable, ideologically moderate republic.
• The French revolution devolved into horrific bloodletting, The American revolution did not.
• The French revolution led to a regime that was exceedingly hostile to Christianity. The American revolution was led by men who were themselves Christians or sympathetic to Christianity.

Regarding this last point, Jeff Sanders at PJ Media writes:

Beginning in 1793, the French revolutionary government abolished the Catholic monarchy and confiscated all church property. Cities and streets that had been named after saints were given secular names. Some 30,000 French priests were exiled and hundreds were murdered by mobs.

The Christian calendar was replaced by one that measured the years beginning not with the birth of Jesus, but with the first year of the revolution. The seven-day week was also banned and replaced with a ten-day week.

Churches and monasteries across France were closed. The amazing abbey at Cluny (with its enormous library and archives) was burned in 1793. The church had been the largest in the Christian world until St. Peter's was built in Rome, but it was plundered and its stone was later used for buildings in town. Most of it is still nothing but ruins today.

Statues of saints and crosses were destroyed. Churches were forbidden to ring their bells.

In the French Revolution, the government banned Christian holy days such as Feast Days of Saints, Christmas, and Easter. In the place of these days, government leaders established a "Festival of Liberty" or a "Festival of Reason." The beautiful, magnificent Cathedral of Notre Dame became known as the "Temple of Reason" for a time, and people had services dedicated to their "Goddess of Reason."

Every attempt was made to erase any vestige of Christianity.

The famous revolutionary Maximilien Robespierre actually established his own religion — it was called "The Cult of the Supreme Being" (he was a deist). He inaugurated this new religion on June 8, 1794 (Pentecost on the Christian calendar) with a procession and "divine service."

Six weeks later the revolution turned on him, placed him in the same cell where Marie Antoinette had stayed before her execution, and he was sent to the guillotine on July 28, 1794.

The American Revolution, however, was not like that at all. In fact, in America the Christian faith has traditionally been nurtured and protected by society as a whole, and respected by government as part of every person's natural freedom of conscience (until recently). The First Great Awakening (a national revival led by such men as Jonathan Edwards) had a tremendous impact upon colonial America....

In America, Christians were part of the "revolution." Of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence, only two were confirmed deists (Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin). Two were Roman Catholic, and the other 52 were all members in good standing in orthodox Protestant churches.

They never saw themselves as anything else but Christians who were taking a stand for freedom against tyranny.

They saw their Christian faith as an ally, not as a hindrance. In fact, Sam Adams stated on July 4, 1776: "We have this day restored the Sovereign to whom all men ought to be obedient. He reigns in heaven, and from the rising of the sun to the setting, let His kingdom come." (He certainly was no deist.)

One of the signers of the Declaration was a clergyman himself, the Reverend John Witherspoon (ordained Presbyterian minister and president of the College of New Jersey [later Princeton] at the time).

The Continental Army was so full of ordained clergy in its ranks that the British would refer to those men as "the Black-Robed Regiment."

As for the bloodshed in the wake of 1789 Sanders writes:

Between 1793 and 1794 some 16,594 death sentences were handed out ... most without a trial (certainly not any kind of trial we would call fair today).

It was Robespierre himself who justified mass executions without trial. He believed that a government executing all suspected "enemies of the state" was actually being quite virtuous: "Terror is nothing more than speedy severe and inflexible justice; it is thus an emanation of virtue."

As noted above, Robespierre was himself taken to the guillotine in 1794, a condign end to the man who had condemned so many others to the blade.

Hawley v. Bridges

In a saner time in our history the recent exchange between Senator Josh Hawley and Berkeley law professor Khiara Bridges would've resulted in pleas for Ms. Bridges to seek professional help, but we find ourselves today in a culture that teeters on the brink of insanity so we should take beliefs such as hers seriously.

Here's what transpired between them in a Senate hearing a few days ago according to NBC News:

Hawley, a Republican from Missouri, asked Bridges, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, why she used the phrase “people with a capacity for pregnancy” when she described the impacts of abortion restrictions and bans.

“You’ve referred to people with a capacity for pregnancy — would that be women?” Hawley asked.

Bridges responded that many cisgender women, who identify with their assigned sex at birth, have the capacity for pregnancy and that many do not.

“There are also trans men who are capable of pregnancy as well as nonbinary people who are capable of pregnancy,” she said, referring to people who identify as neither male nor female.

Hawley shot back, “So this isn’t really a women’s rights issue?”

“We can recognize that this impacts women while also recognizing that it impacts other groups,” Bridges said. “Those things are not mutually exclusive.”

Hawley continued to press Bridges and asked her what the core of the right to abortion is about.

“So I want to recognize that your line of questioning is transphobic,” Bridges responded.

She continued, “And it opens up trans people to violence,” but then Hawley cut her off and the two began a tense exchange.

“I’m opening up people to violence by asking whether or not women are the folks who can have pregnancies?” he said.

Bridges responded with a statistic, noting that 1 in 5 transgender people have attempted suicide, and then Hawley interrupted her again: “Because of my line of questioning? So we can’t talk about it?”

Bridges continued, “Because denying that trans people exist and pretending not to know that they exist is dangerous.”

Hawley interrupted again: “I’m denying that trans people exist by asking you if you’re talking about women having pregnancies?"

As he asked his question, Bridges repeatedly asked him, “Are you?”

Bridges then asked Hawley if he believes men can get pregnant, and he said no. To which Bridges responded, “Then you’re denying that trans people exist. Thank you."

There's more that you can watch on the video:

A few thoughts on their dialogue:

Ms. Bridges is a law professor so she presumably understands that her tactic of accusing anyone who disagrees with her on the transgender issue of opening up trans people to violence is disingenuous. It's simply a way of attempting to discredit an opponent without having to make a case for why the opponent is wrong.

It's astonishing that she thinks that asserting a simple biological fact that men can't get pregnant makes one "transphobic" or is an act of "denying that trans people exist." How is it?

It's too bad that Senator Hawley didn't ask professor Bridges if she was aware of any actual instances of a biological male getting pregnant. If she is her answer would've been helpful; if she isn't how does she know it's biologically possible?

It's also unfortunate that the senator didn't think to ask the professor to explain the biomechanics of male conception. How exactly does it happen and what transpires in the transgender person's body that creates a child and allows the person to carry the child in the womb? Progressives often insist that they're science-based so it would've been helpful if she had been asked to elucidate the relevant biology.

If Professor Bridges and others wish people to go along with the notion that men can get pregnant they're going to have to explain the science behind how this happens and give examples of trans individuals who have accomplished it. Until then, they shouldn't be surprised when they encounter skepticism and astonishment when they claim it's possible.

After all, without evidence their belief is just a superstition, an instance of blind faith in their ideology. They certainly have the right to believe it if they wish, but they shouldn't expect everyone else to do so as well.

It'd be a worthwhile exercise for every candidate for political office during this election cycle to be asked the question Ms. Bridges asked the senator - "Do you believe men can get pregnant?" I wonder how many of them, especially among the Democrats, would welcome that question.

The Webb Delivers

NASA has released the first images taken by the James Webb telescope and they're gorgeous. The Webb telescope can see back in time 13.6 billion years to what the universe looked like just a few million years after it was born. This is 200 million years further than the Hubble telescope can see but as this Time article states that's a huge difference when we go back that far:

Webb is as much a time machine as it is an observing machine. The farther into space a telescope can peer, the farther back in time it’s looking, since images from distant objects—even traveling at the speed of light—take a very long time to reach us.

The image we see of a galaxy 13.6 billion light years away is thus not an image of how it looks today—but how it looked 13.6 billion years ago, during the universe’s infancy. The Hubble space telescope can see a maximum of 13.4 billion light years distant, and while the mere 200 million light-year advantage the Webb offers doesn’t seem like much, it’s in fact huge.

A great deal happened in that particular 200 million years and telescopes have been blind to it until now.

“The difference between what Hubble and Webb [see] is not like comparing someone who’s 70 years old to somebody who’s 71 years old,” said Scott Friedman, an astronomer with the Webb team, in a conversation with TIME last year. “It’s like comparing a baby who’s one day old to a baby who’s one year old, and that’s a huge difference.”

Webb's resolution is also greater than Hubble's. You can see the difference by comparing the following two images. The top pic was taken by Hubble and shows a portion of space about the size of a postage stamp held at arm's length against the sky. The bottom image is of a section of space the size of a grain of sand held at arm's length against the sky.

Most of the points of light in that pic are actually galaxies like our Milky Way. To give an idea of the scale, our Milky Way is 100,000 light years across (one light year is almost 6 trillion miles), and there are dozens of similar galaxies in just this small portion of the sky.

This is a picture of a cluster of five galaxies taken by the Webb:

These pictures are exciting (go to the link for more), but they're only the beginning of what astronomers hope Webb will deliver.

Mr.Biden's Numbers

Hot Air's Allahpundit calls it the worst presidential poll he's ever seen. The New York Times/Siena poll found President Biden at 33% among registered voters nationwide.

More than three-quarters of registered voters see the United States moving in the wrong direction. More than two-thirds of independents also now disapprove of the president’s performance, and nearly half disapprove strongly.

Among fellow Democrats his approval rating stands at 70 percent, but even that's a fairly low approval for members of a president's own party, and it's belied by the fact that 64 percent of Democratic voters say they'd prefer a different candidate to run in 2024.

According to the poll not a single demographic in his party prefers Mr. Biden to be the Democratic nominee in 2024. Neither of two essential elements of the Democrat base, African-Americans and young voters, want him to run. African Americans split 43/47 on the issue, and 94% (!) of Democrats under the age of 30 want someone else.

A Civiqs poll is even worse. On that poll the president's overall approval is only 29%, with only 19% of Independents and 36% of Hispanics willing to say that he's done a satisfactory job.

Mr. Biden has managed to anger both the left and the right, for different reasons. His foot-dragging on packing the Supreme Court, doing "something" about abortion rights, pushing the Green agenda, etc. has the left stewing while his Afghanistan debacle, inflation, the border catastrophe and energy policy have outraged the right.

Despite his historically poor performance there is still a glimmer of hope for the Democrats. Remarkably, the NYT/Siena poll shows that Mr. Biden would still defeat Mr. Trump (44%/41%) were the election held today. I wonder if there are many Democrats actually hoping that Mr. Trump will run and win the GOP nomination. He may, after all, be the only GOP candidate against whom they believe they have a chance.

Nevertheless, as The Federalist's David Harsanyi observes:

It’s certainly entertaining watching partisans feign excitement over their mollycoddled candidate holding a 44-41 lead in a national poll against a guy who is accused of sedition on virtually every news channel daily. What do these numbers look like when Trump (or someone like Ron DeSantis) is reminding voters what gas prices and their 401(k)s looked like before Covid?

Indeed, the left is again convincing themselves that winning a national poll means something. (Siena, incidentally, had Clinton up 17 points in its final 2016 poll.) There is no popular vote.

Biden must win states. And the president is underwater in almost every one of them, on almost every issue, in almost every poll. I’m no prognosticator or election expert — Biden might well win reelection — but none of that could possibly be heartening news for Democrats.

What Mr. Trump will choose to do is yet to be determined, but it's not at all clear what Mr. Biden can do to rescue his presidency, other than reverse course and adopt the policies of his predecessor. Tasting that piece of humble pie, however, is probably out of the question.

Modern Science Is the Offspring of Christian Theism

One of the myths of our age is that science is antithetical to religion. This would come as strange news to the men who pioneered the scientific revolution. As Rodney Stark notes in his fascinating book For the Glory of God, “Not only were science and religion compatible, they were inseparable--the rise of science was achieved by deeply religious Christian scholars.”

He goes on to write:

The Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth century was the … result of [Christian scholarship] starting in the eleventh century… Why did real science develop in Europe … and not anywhere else? I find answers to those questions in unique features of Christian theology… The “Enlightenment” [was] conceived initially as a propaganda ploy by militant atheists and humanists [e.g. Voltaire, Diderot and Gibbon] who attempted to claim credit for the rise of science [through promulgating] the falsehood that science required the defeat of religion.

Stark notes that,"It is the consensus among contemporary historians, philosophers and sociologists of science that real science arose only once: in Europe."

Why? Because Europe was strongly influenced by Christian theology which held that the universe was intentionally created for man by a rational, logical God, and that it could yield up its secrets by rational inquiry. Since God was rational His creation was not chaotic or random, but like His will for mankind, it was lawful and orderly.

No other belief system, whether secular or religious, offered a ground for belief in an orderly universe that could be studied rationally.

Stark researched "scientific stars" from 1543 to 1680, the era usually designated as the scientific revolution, and came up with a list of the top 52. Fifty of the 52 were Christians, at least 30 of whom could be characterized as devout. One (Edmund Halley) was a sceptic and one (Paracelsus) was a pantheist.

Here's a short version (8 pages) of Stark's argument for those who lack the time to read his book. One of the most devout of the scientists who initiated the scientific revolution was also one of the greatest geniuses in the history of science, Isaac Newton. Newton actually wrote more on theology in his lifetime than he did on science. This short video from the John 10:10 project gives some insight into the man and his beliefs:

Is Society Devolving?

The headline caught my eye: Darwin’s Theory Upended? Natural Selection May be Making Society More Unequal. I clicked on it to read the article and found that, though the information in it was interesting, nothing in it supported the headline.

The opening paragraph made it clear that the writer, Matt Higgins, doesn't understand evolutionary theory. He writes:

Charles Darwin’s natural selection theory is being put to the test. Darwin’s theory expounded that organisms which can better adapt to their environment are more likely to survive and produce more offspring. However, a new study by British researchers reveals natural selection may be making society more unequal.

Mr. Higgins implies that Darwin's theory states that evolution should produce greater social equality, but the theory suggests no such thing. In fact, it arguably suggests the opposite.

Mr. Higgins nevertheless cites research that has produced the almost banal finding that the lower socio-economic classes are, in evolutionary terms, outcompeting the upper classes:

Researchers from the University of East Anglia find that natural selection is favoring poorer people with little education. The study “shows how natural selection effects are stronger in groups with lower income and less education, among younger parents, people not living with a partner, and people with more lifetime sexual partners.”

On the flip side, natural selection “is pushing against genes” associated with highly educated individuals, people who have more lifetime earnings, those who have a low risk of ADHD or major depressive disorders, and those with a lower risk of coronary artery disease.

In short, the study found that the poorer, less educated demographic have more children than those who are wealthier and better educated and concludes that natural selection is making society more unequal. This doesn't seem at all surprising, but there's nothing in the research that contradicts evolutionary theory, nor, as far as I could tell from Mr. Higgins article, do the researchers make such a claim.

In fact, Mr. Higgins seems to be under the misconception that natural selection should always lead to societies that enjoy greater degrees of social equality, but nothing in the theory suggests that that should be the case.

Evolutionary theorists maintain that natural selection, by a process called differential reproduction, leads to populations that are better suited for survival in their environment than were their predecessors.

If the poor are more reproductively successful than the wealthy it hardly follows that Darwin is being overturned. Nothing in the theory says that evolution should lead to greater social equality. Indeed, that notion smacks more of Marx than of Darwin.

If Darwinism is overturned it won't be by citing sociological examples of how it's actually being confirmed. It'll be by way of a paradigm shift triggered among younger theorists who've become disenchanted with the inability of the theory to explain the origin of life and the enormous evidence for purpose and intentional design in the biological world.

For the Young Intellectual

Writing at The Washington Free Beacon, Matthew Continetti mentions that from time to time he's been asked by young men and women aspiring to become involved in the intellectual debates of our time what advice he would give to them.

He replies with a column titled "An Intellectual Starter Kit."

As you can imagine, he urges young intellectuals to read and to read voraciously. I personally don't see how it's possible to be an effective leader in any segment of our society that stresses ideas - whether politics, medicine, the military, the church, or anywhere - without being a reader, and I'm sure Continetti agrees.

He lists and explains five recommendations which I've given here along with my summaries of what he says in much more detail about them.

1. Be a generalist: Most of the noteworthy intellectuals of the twentieth century were well-rounded in philosophy, history, literature, politics and some science.
2. Don't skip the endnotes: There's often a treasure trove of information in the notes and they often suggest other books that are worth reading.
3. Explore the archives: This is advice geared more to those who'd like to work as writers for a journal and who want to absorb a journal's style.
4. Keep a notebook: Record quotes and passages that are specially noteworthy in everything you read. It can become a tremendous resource in one's own thought and writing.
5. Seek out educational opportunities: Seminars, lectures, online courses, etc. are excellent venues for sharpening one's own thinking.

For my part I think #1 and #4 are the two most helpful recommendations on his list. Read across a broad spectrum of disciplines, keep a record of the meaningful highlights of what you read, and, as C.S. Lewis and others have said, try to reread a book you read before in between new books.

When you reread a book it not only helps you to remember things about it you may have forgotten but you almost always see things in it that you didn't notice the first time around.

Check out the details of Continetti's advice for young intellectuals at the link.

A Caution about Consensus

We often hear nowadays that something is true because there's a consensus of experts who testify to its truth. Predictions of climate catastrophe, for instance, are sometimes reinforced by the claim that the vast majority of scientists believe we're headed for climate Armageddon.

Before we accept the consensus of the experts, though, it might be worth considering that some fifty former intelligence experts wrote in a letter that the Hunter Biden laptop story was probably Russian disinformation. As it turned out, however, the sordid and perhaps incriminating information on Hunter's laptop was actually put there by Hunter himself and the consensus of the experts turned out to be foolish and ill-informed.

When we're told that there's a consensus in favor of a certain claim we might reflect upon the words of the late Michael Crichton. Crichton was a science fiction writer (Jurassic Park, Andromeda Strain) of some renown and for whom there was little merit in the claim that "everyone knows that X is true." He writes:

I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks.

Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had.

Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results.

The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period.

Scientists operate in a "knowledge silo." They may be authoritative within the confines of their own silo, but when they jump into a different silo and speak on matters relevant to that other silo their authority is minimal.

We sometimes see such silo hopping when scientists opine on matters of ethics, religion and public policy. In such cases the scientist has wandered far from his area of expertise and his authority diminishes in proportion to his distance from his silo.

In any case, we'd do well to remember Crichton's admonition the next time we're told that there's a consensus among scientists about Covid, climate change, evolution, or whatever. The "experts" might all agree, but they may at the same time all be wrong. The history of science is littered with examples of a consensus that eventually came to grief.

One question we might ask is how many of these scientists have actually themselves studied the issue they're declaiming upon, and how many of them are just parroting what they've heard from others to whose authority they uncritically defer?

Naturalism's Conflict with Reason

Human reason poses an interesting problem for metaphysical naturalists of both a modern and a postmodern inclination. Metaphysical naturalists hold that only nature exists and that human beings are simply the product of impersonal forces. Naturalists who embrace a modern or Enlightenment worldview argue that reason is our most trustworthy guide to truth while postmoderns assert that reason is an inadequate guide to truth.

Yet both must employ reason in order to make their respective cases. The modern has to assume reason is trustworthy in order to argue that it's trustworthy, which is surely question-begging, and the postmodern has to assume reason is trustworthy in order to conclude that it's not trustworthy at all, which is surely self-refuting.

In neither case can it be said that the modern or the postmodern is thinking rationally. We can have confidence that our reason generally leads us to truth, especially metaphysical truth, only on the assumption that God exists, is Himself rational, and has created us in his image.

If we join the naturalist in assuming God does not exist then we must conclude that our rational faculties are the product of processes which have evolved those faculties to suit us for survival, not for the attainment of true beliefs. As Harvard's Steven Pinker puts it, "Our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes truth is adaptive sometimes not."

Here's philosopher Patricia Churchland on the same subject: "Evolution selects for survival and “Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost.”

And philosopher John Gray: "Modern [naturalism] is the faith that through science humankind can know the truth and so be free. But if Darwin's theory of natural selection is true this is impossible. The human mind serves evolutionary success, not truth."

Each of these thinkers embraces metaphysical naturalism, but on that view there's no basis for thinking that their reason is a trustworthy guide to truth which makes their claim that reason isn't a trustworthy guide to truth itself untrustworthy. What a muddle.

Anyway, a trio of philosophers discuss the conundrum in which naturalists find themselves in this video:

Atheist Backlash

An article by Kate Cohen in the Washington Post last week makes one wonder how well-informed a writer must be to work for the WaPo. Ms. Cohen is upset with the Supreme Court for several rulings this term which she alleges were based on religious, specifically Christian, bias and proposes an atheist "backlash."

Her opening sentences make clear her animus against religiously-motivated citizens:

With its ruling last week to retract federal abortion rights, the Supreme Court essentially declared it won’t protect Americans from a powerful minority who insist their God gets to make the rules for everyone. This week, it declared it will not protect students from the coercion inherent in official-led prayers to that same God.

It's odd that Ms. Cohen would think that Justice Alito's exceedingly well-argued opinion would be based on religious preference when there was no hint of religious belief anywhere in it or in any of the concurring opinions. Indeed, they could have all been written by atheists.

The Court also found, contra Ms. Cohen's mischaracterization, that the high school coach who prayed after games did not coerce his athletes to pray with him, rather they freely chose to join him. The Court's decision actually expands freedom rather than limiting it and protects the First Amendment rights of everyone.

Whereas many people see these rulings as a return to Constitutional sanity after fifty years of judicial activism untethered to the Constitution, Ms. Cohen sees them as an alarming intrusion of Christianity into our politics.

She evidently believes that only Christians think that Roe was bad law, even though the late pro-choice Justice Ginsberg thought it was ungrounded and arbitrary, as have many secular law experts since 1973. She also evidently believes that only Christians are pro-life even though there are many Jews, Muslims and atheists who believe it's wrong to kill unborn babies.

Setting aside the Constitutional argument, though, she is correct that many who believe a woman should have the right to kill her unborn baby are not religious, and there's good reason for this. If one has no belief in any transcendent moral authority then morality reduces simply to whatever I want. It's not immoral, if there is no moral authority, for me to kill a baby in the womb if I don't want it.

The only moral imperative is to look out for #1. The only question that governs one's moral decision-making is "What's in it for me?"

In any case, Ms. Cohen proposes an atheistic "backlash" against Christian influence, such as it is.

She begins with a gratuitous swipe at those who are alarmed at some of what's happening in our society:

Some people work up a good backlash using bogeymen and lies. They invent a completely fictional world of child grooming, elementary-school CRT classes and sports teams overrun by transgender girls. For our backlash, we don’t need to make anything up. To demonstrate the looming threat of theocracy, we can (as atheists tend to do) stick to the evidence: actual laws passed, platforms approved and rulings handed down.

If Ms. Cohen really believes that these are "completely fictional" concerns she's deluding herself, but set that aside. Her response is to recommend that people shout their atheism, so to speak:

So, if you haven’t done so already, now would be an especially good time to say, “You know what? I’m an atheist.” You could call yourself an “agnostic” if you want, a “nonbeliever” or a “humanist.” But a good backlash should pack a punch, and nothing punches like the word atheist.

Tell someone you’re an atheist. Start with yourself if you need to. Tell your spouse, your kids, your parents, your pastor, your political representatives. And if pollsters come calling, definitely tell them.

For someone who recommends sticking to the evidence, proclaiming one's atheism seems an odd tactic. After all, what is the evidence that atheism is true? There just aren't any compelling arguments in support of atheism and certainly no evidence that there is no God.

Sophisticated atheists recognize this and find themselves reduced to attacking reasons put forward by theists for believing that there is a God. Having little or no evidence in their favor they can only argue, feebly, in my view, that theists' arguments are unconvincing.

Ms. Cohen closes with this:

Make it clear that, to you, no legitimate public policy can be based on the supposed wishes of a supernatural being. Right-wing politicians will have to find some other moral justification for forcing women to bear children they don’t want, keeping students from getting the education they need and withholding health care that might save children’s lives while protecting the guns that might end them.

This is disturbing. She's explicitly stating that no one motivated by religious belief should be able to contribute to the shaping of public policy. This is pure bigotry. Why should religiously motivated citizens be excluded from the public square? What's the Constitutional warrant for relegating Christians to second-class status? Would she make the same claim about Muslims or, for that matter, atheists?

Moreover, her demand that "Right-wing politicians find some other moral justification" for their policies is just silly given that that's exactly what happened in the SCOTUS cases that inspired her column. In a free society citizens' motivation can be whatever it happens to be, religious or otherwise, but their public arguments should be grounded in the Constitution.

Indeed, conservatives, many motivated by a belief that all life is precious and that killing innocent babies is immoral, have based their public arguments for fifty years on the secular claim that there was no right to abortion anywhere in the Constitution.

Her demand is also silly for the reason mentioned above that insistence upon a moral justification rests ultimately on the belief that morality is grounded in a transcendent moral law-giver. Take that away and there's no "moral justification" for anything. Morality becomes nothing more than egoism and emotivism.

The Politics of Outrage

In the 60 days since the Dobbs decision leaked to the press there've been at least 92 instances of vandalism and violence against pro-life churches and crisis pregnancy centers.

As I mentioned in a previous post the reaction to the overturn of Roe is not producing rational defense of Roe and logical criticism of Dobbs. There's no obvious attempt show how Dobbs was wrongly decided, only anger at having what people thought had been a constitutional right shown not to have been a right at all.

Anger can be healthy, but it's not conducive to reasonableness, and over the past few years it has caused us to become more polarized, perhaps, than at anytime since the Civil War.

Anger generates antipathy for the people one sees as "the enemy," and it's a short step from antipathy to hatred and from hatred to violence.

Jonah Goldberg writes at The Dispatch about the baleful effects that anger has on a society and notes that traditional rules of conduct are guardrails against the excesses of outrage:

[A]cross the political spectrum, combatants are arguing as much from anger as from reason. The ubiquitous cultivation of rage in our politics is a siren song to venture off the path; to disregard the norms; to shout, “Screw the rules!”

It’s a calling to take a shortcut on the mistaken belief that the rules are for suckers and that the enemies’ rule-breaking is a justification for your own.

...Wisdom, if it tells us anything, tells us that the rules matter more for the hard cases, when passions are high and the shortcut to victory seems obvious. Indeed, we have rules for the hard cases precisely because it takes no courage to follow the rules when it’s easy.

When we let our anger control our behavior, when we rationalize disregarding the rules and allow our behavior to be governed by our hatreds and passions we're setting wisdom aside and putting our basest instincts in the driver's seat. This is invariably foolish:

There’s a reason we tell people to sleep on big decisions rather than making a choice when they’re overcome with emotion, because intense emotions can seduce us into making bad decisions.

But everywhere you look, politicians, activists, and rabble-rousers tell us you’re not angry enough. These days, “mobilize” is just a political consultant’s term to get our voters as [angry] as possible.

This is unsustainable. It is dangerous. And it will not lead to permanent victory, but permanent political warfare and the law of unintended consequences.

Anger has its place, but if it causes us to dehumanize others, to strip them of their dignity as persons, to damage, destroy and harm others and their property, then our anger has crossed the line and become evil.

Goldberg concludes:

Human nature—and conservatism itself—stands athwart all of this folly, shouting, “Stop!” Permanent political warfare need not stop at being merely political, and a people in a constant state of rage cannot be free.

“It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things,” Edmund Burke writes, “that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”

As the Greek philosopher Plato noted over two millenia ago, a people who can't subordinate their politics to a higher rationality and morality, who can't govern their social passions, is not fit for self-governance, and will ultimately find themselves ruled by a tyrant.

Happy Birthday America (Whatever's Left of You)

A Theory in Trouble

A long column by Stephen Buranyi at The Guardian gives us a peek at the loss of confidence among some scientists of the once unquestioned theory of Darwinian evolution.

Buranyi starts off with a clear and concise summary of the development of the modern Neo-Darwinian synthesis in the first half of the 20th century, culminating in the centenary in 1959 of the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species.

He follows this history with a description of how developments in molecular biology in the 1960s began to undermine that synthesis, particularly the discovery that natural selection did not play the crucial role it had been thought to play.

As one scientist put it:

The genes were changing – that is, evolving – but natural selection wasn’t playing a part. Some genetic changes were being preserved for no reason apart from pure chance. Natural selection seemed to be asleep at the wheel.

This realization threatened to undo the modern theory. If natural selection wasn't the driving force of evolutionary change what was?

Evolutionary biologists were stunned. In 1973, David Attenborough presented a BBC documentary that included an interview with one of the leading modern synthesists, Theodosius Dobzhansky.

He was visibly distraught at the “non-Darwinian evolution” that some scientists were now proposing. “If this were so, evolution would have hardly any meaning, and would not be going anywhere in particular,” he said. “This is not simply a quibble among specialists. To a man looking for the meaning of his existence, evolution by natural selection makes sense.”

Where once Christians had complained that Darwin’s theory made life meaningless, now Darwinists levelled the same complaint at scientists who contradicted Darwin.....

Other assaults on evolutionary orthodoxy followed....

Perhaps the biggest change from the theory’s mid-century glory days is that its most ambitious claims – that simply by understanding genes and natural selection, we can understand all life on earth – have been dropped, or now come weighted with caveats and exceptions. This shift has occurred with little fanfare.

The theory’s ideas are still deeply embedded in the field, yet no formal reckoning with its failures or schisms has occurred.

To its critics, the modern synthesis occupies a position akin to a president reneging on a campaign promise – it failed to satisfy its entire coalition, but remains in office, hands on the levers of power, despite its diminished offer.

Today the unity and optimism of 1959 has dissipated and biologists have become a fractious lot. One of the many findings that have thrown the discipline into turmoil is the discovery of the amazing phenomenon called plasticity.

This is the ability of some organisms to develop new or modified anatomical structures more rapidly than Darwinian gradualism allows:

Descriptions of plasticity are startling, bringing to mind the kinds of wild transformations you might expect to find in comic books and science fiction movies.

Emily Standen is a scientist at the University of Ottawa, who studies Polypterus senegalus, AKA the Senegal bichir, a fish that not only has gills but also primitive lungs. Regular polypterus can breathe air at the surface, but they are “much more content” living underwater, she says.

But when Standen took Polypterus that had spent their first few weeks of life in water, and subsequently raised them on land, their bodies began to change immediately. The bones in their fins elongated and became sharper, able to pull them along dry land with the help of wider joint sockets and larger muscles.

Their necks softened. Their primordial lungs expanded and their other organs shifted to accommodate them.

Their entire appearance transformed. “They resembled the transition species you see in the fossil record, partway between sea and land,” Standen told me. According to the traditional theory of evolution, this kind of change takes millions of years. But, says Armin Moczek, an extended synthesis proponent, the Senegal bichir “is adapting to land in a single generation”.

Senegal bichir

Buranyi gives other examples of plasticity and discusses the tension between traditionalist Darwinians and those who think it's time to move on from Darwinisn and the Neo-Darwinian synthesis of the last century.

The point, though Buranyi doesn't explicitly state it, is that naturalistic evolution is a theory that seems to be suffering the erosion of the most crucial element of any scientific theory - explanatory power. As scientific discovery continues apace the ability to explain what's being discovered in naturalistic terms seems to be diminishing.

These words serve as a suitable conclusion to the essay although they come early on:

Everyone agrees that natural selection plays a role, as does mutation and random chance. But how exactly these processes interact – and whether other forces might also be at work – has become the subject of bitter dispute.

“If we cannot explain things with the tools we have right now,” the Yale University biologist Günter Wagner told me, “we must find new ways of explaining.”

Perhaps the day is coming when among "other forces that may be at work" biologists will seriously consider an intelligent mind.