18 Trillion Feet

One of the marvels of our bodies' engineering is the compactification of DNA in each of the three trillion or so nucleated cells each of us possesses. DNA has been called the most efficient information storage device known to man and the following six minute video explains why.

As astonishing as the storage of our genetic code is the video hardly scratches the surface of the multiple layers of complexity involved. There are entire systems of proteins devoted to unraveling the double helix, reading off the code, repairing errors, replicating the code, integrating the epigenome and more.

See here for some additional details.

One of the most amazing examples of this bio-complexity is the ability of DNA to "make sense" at several different levels of structure. To see what I mean, imagine you read a paragraph in a book in which each word is read sequentially. The paragraph will have a meaning.

Now suppose you only read every third word and found that the paragraph still made sense but had a completely different meaning. That's how DNA works. Depending on where along the strand the "reader" begins it codes for different proteins and traits. (See here for a fuller explanation)

This is so baffling that many investigators doubt that there can be any naturalistic explanation and believe it points instead to an intelligent programmer who somehow designed the system.

In any case, watch the video and ask yourself how blind purposeless processes could have produced the ability to achieve this degree of compaction purely by chance.

Five Things Naturalistic Science Can't Explain

In his book Scientism and Secularism, philosopher J.P.Moreland lists and discusses five phenomena that naturalistic science cannot account for or explain but which fit comfortably into a theistic worldview. The five are these:

1. The Origin of the Universe: That the universe had a beginning is the consensus view among cosmologists, but if it had a beginning what could have caused it. If the universe encompasses all of space, time and mass-energy then all of this exists only when the universe comes into being, which means that the universe came into being out of nothing. How? The answer to this question lies outside the purview of science.

2. The Origin of the Laws of Physics: As with the universe in general, the fundamental laws of physics exist only insofar as the universe does. Apart from a universe there are no such laws. An explanation of why just these laws exist and have the properties that they do is not an explanation that science is equipped to provide. Science can only tell us what the laws are and what they entail. It can't tell us why they are.

3. The Fine-Tuning of the Cosmos: As we've written on VP numerous times in the past the fundamental forces, parameters and constants which form the fabric of the universe are calibrated to unimaginably precise values such that an infinitesimally tiny deviation in the settings of any one of several dozen examples would make either the existence of the universe impossible or the existence of any kind of significant life impossible. Possible explanations for this extraordinary state of affairs, such as the multiverse hypothesis, even if they're credible, are metaphysical conjectures which lie outside the realm of science.

4. The Origin of Consciousness: Mental states such as holding a belief, understanding a joke, doubting a proposition, feeling pain, sensing red, and recognizing the meaning of a text are phenomena which defy a scientific explanation. On the scientific view there was nothing but atoms, molecules and chemical compounds for eons of time until one day a completely different phenomenon, consciousness, emerged. How does physical matter produce conscious experience? Science has no plausible answer.

5. The Existence of Objective Moral Laws: Science can tell us what is the case in the natural world, but it cannot tell us what ought to be the case. It can explain why people have subjective moral sentiments, perhaps, but it cannot explain how objective moral duties could arise, where they would've come from, why they're binding upon us, and so on. Indeed, any such explanation, even were one possible on naturalism, would be philosophical, not scientific.

These five phenomena come from Moreland's book, but the summaries of them are mine. Moreland's treatment of each is much more detailed than what I've provided here, and he argues that each of these is more compatible with a theistic ontology than any of them are with naturalism.

I enthusiastically recommend his book to anyone interested in the philosophy of science, the explanatory limits of science, and/or the interface of science and theism.

Christian Nationalism

Pennsylvania state senator Doug Mastriano is running for governor of the state, and one of the allegations leveled against him by his opponents is that he's a "Christian nationalist."

So, is that a bad thing? It depends on what one means by it.

An article at MSN.com reports on a piece in the Washington Post that addresses Christian nationalism and in which the Post tries to clarify what's meant by the term. Christian nationalism, according to the Post is "an ideology that says Christianity is the foundation of the United States and that government should protect that foundation."

If that's what we're to understand by "Christian nationalism" it seems rather innocuous.

A lot of people believe that the foundational principles of the United States, the freedoms included in the first amendment, for example, are rooted in a Judeo-Christian worldview, and that the founders, whether or not they were Christians themselves, were heavily influenced by the Christian culture in which they lived.

Indeed, the concept of liberty and justice for all is, historically speaking, a uniquely Christian idea, and the claim that Christianity influenced the founding of this nation is clear to anyone who has read their Tocqueville.

Most people believe, moreover, that government should protect that foundation by protecting the principle of religious liberty.

So, if that's all Mastriano, or any other Christian nationalist, believes then almost anyone who is a Christian in the U.S. would be ab defino a Christian nationalist.

But further along in their column the Post adds a twist that subtly alters the definition:

As part of our research, we examined the percentage of Americans who, over the past 15 years, said they agree or strongly agree with this Christian nationalist statement: “The federal government should declare the United States a Christian nation.”

So now they appear to implicitly define a Christian nationalist as one who wants the federal government to officially declare the U.S. to be a Christian nation.

Here we should be inclined to balk.

It's one thing for a citizen to acknowledge that the U.S. was founded on Christian principles and to expect the government to protect the principles upon which the nation was founded, the principles contained in all of our founding documents. It's quite another for a citizen to hold that the federal government should declare the U.S. to be officially Christian.

It's hard to picture specifically what such a declaration would even mean in practice. Would it entail making Christianity a state religion, a circumstance which our founders explicitly sought, for good reason, to avoid?

As the founders knew from Europe's experience, state religions can be oppressive, and receiving state favoritism often corrupts the religion.

So, however much Christianity influenced our founding it seems unwise at this stage in our history, a stage in which there's far more religious diversity present in our population than was present 250 years ago, to formally declare the U.S. to be officially a Christian nation.

If that's the sort of Christian nationalist Doug Mastriano is, though, he's probably going to alienate a lot of voters who might otherwise be inclined to vote for him.

The Clotting Cascade

A new episode of Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe's Secrets of the Cell has been released and it's fascinating. In this 16 minute episode Behe explains the amazing cascade of events that occur when we get a simple scratch.

Why is it that when we are cut we don't continue to bleed?

Well, of course it's because the blood clots, but how does this clotting happen, and, if purposeless Darwinian processes are what produced living things, how did such an extraordinary system as the clotting cascade ever come about through unguided physical processes with no intervention from an intelligent agent of some kind?

Watch as Behe takes us through a discussion of these questions.

Carnivorous Plants

One of the perplexities of modern evolutionary theory is how structures, systems, and abilities evolved that are completely superfluous to an organism's survival. Natural selection, according to the theory, acts upon genetic variations, favoring those that suit the organism for its environment and culling from the population those which don't.

But nothing in the theory explains, or at least explains well, biological extravagance, notwithstanding that we see such extravagance all around us.

Some while ago Evolution News ran an essay that discusses three examples of biological phenomena that far exceed anything that would have been necessary for fitness. The three are the Venus Flytrap, the stripes on a zebra, and the prodigious memory capability of the human brain. Here's what they said about the Venus Flytrap:

New work by researchers in Germany, published in Current Biology, shows that this plant can count! The team's video, posted on Live Science (see below), shows how the trigger hairs inside the leaves generate action potentials that can be measured by electrical equipment.

Experiments show that the number of action potentials generates different responses. Two action potentials are required to close the trap. When closed, the plant starts producing jasmonic acid. The third spike activates "touch hormones" that flood the trap with digestive juices. The fifth spike triggers uptake of nutrients.

The struggling insect will trigger some 50 action potentials. The more they come, the more the trap squeezes tighter and tighter, as if knowing it has a stronger prey. The squeezing presses the animal against the digestive juices, also allowing more efficient uptake of nutrients.

"It's not quite plant arithmetic, but it's impressive nonetheless," says Liz Van Volken­burgh of the University of Washington in Seattle. "The Venus flytrap is hardwired to respond in the way that's now being described," she says.

Wayne Fagerberg at the University of New Hampshire in Durham agrees. "Obviously it doesn't have a brain to go 'one, two, three, four'," he says. "Effectively, it's counting. It's just not thinking about it."

In our experience, "hardwired" things that can count and activate responses are designed. This elaborate mechanism, involving multiple responses that activate machines on cue, seems superfluous for survival.

The Venus flytrap has photosynthesis; it can make its own food. The argument that it needs animal food because it lives in nutrient-poor soil is questionable; other plants, including trees, do fine without animal traps.

Here's a video that shows the Venus Flytrap in action:

How did such an astonishing ability, not just the ability to capture and digest prey but also the ability to count, ever evolve through blind, purposeless processes in a plant?

The trap mechanism is exceedingly complex and also completely gratuitous, but the digestion of the prey itself requires extensive modifications and genetic changes, all of which would have been unnecessary for the plants' survival and pretty much useless until they were all in place.

This kind of engineering requires foresight, and foresight, as biochemist Marcos Eberlin notes in his book by that title, is not a trait possessed by blind, impersonal Darwinian processes. It requires a mind.

Systemic Racism

One of the myths of our time is that our culture is shot through with systemic racism. Actual racism has been so difficult to document in the twenty first century that in order to keep alive the dogma that we live in an inveterately racist country, those who profit from the dogma have had to invent "systemic racism."

This is the claim that racism permeates all of our institutions, but is so subtly diabolical that it's very hard to detect. Indeed, the inability to detect it is sometimes considered proof of how insidious it is.

To the extent that the existence of systemic racism is argued for, the argument is usually based on disparities - disparities in prison populations, wealth distribution, education achievement, etc. In order for the disparity argument to work, however, systemic racism has to be the only possible explanation for disparities.

If it's possible that disparities could have other causes besides racism then the systemic racism explanation loses its force for all but those who desperately want it to be true.

Anyway, there's a short video put out by Prager U. that features a woman, a convert from the left, who argues that systemic racism does indeed exist, but it's not what you might think it is.

Check it out.

Your Skeleton

I wonder how many of us think about how amazing our skeletal system is until we injure it. Here's a clever video that shows the articulation of every one of the 206 bones in your body.

Enjoy:

Why the Young Don't Vote

I was listening the other day to the host of a local talk show discussing with some college kids the lack of interest in politics among young people and why the young are so unlikely to vote.

The host thought that youthful apathy was a shame, but I didn't see what the problem was.

Why should young people care about politics? Most people become interested in the process when they start paying taxes, owning property, raising families, and serving in the military.

It's when they become invested in society and start thinking seriously about their future that they begin to see the importance of the ideas which will determine that future. Until then they're much too preoccupied with their studies, sports and the opposite sex to spend the time it requires to learn about what's going on in the political arena.

The problem, in my opinion, is not that young people don't care about politics. That's normal.

Nor is it a problem that they don't vote. Those who don't keep abreast of the affairs of state are doing the right thing by not voting.

The problem is that our politicians, in an attempt to exploit the ignorance of the young for their own political gain, lowered the voting age from 21 to 18 in 1971 thereby enfranchising a demographic group which is very unlikely to go to the voting booth with an informed opinion on whom they should vote for.

It does not enhance democracy to have an electorate consisting of large numbers of uninformed voters. It's bad enough that many people over 21 really have no well-thought out idea why they're voting for the person they are, but it makes the problem worse when we add to their number by encouraging 18 year-olds to join them.

While we're on the subject here's a voluntary voter disqualification test. If you can't get at least twelve answers correct perhaps you should consider recusing yourself from voting while you bone up:

1. Which political party is most likely to let you keep most of your paycheck?
2. Which political party is most likely to appoint judges who will rule on matters of law according to what the constitution says?
3. Which political party is most likely to scale back spending on national security?
4. Which political party looks most favorably on abortion even after birth, gender surgery on minors, and the secularization of society?
5. Which political party is most likely to reduce the flow of illegal immigration into the U.S.?
6. Which political party is most likely to favor measures which will make us a "color-blind" society?
7. Who is the current Secretary of State? Vice-President?
8. Which party currently controls the House of Representatives?
9. Which party currently controls the Senate?
10. Who is the current Speaker of the House? Senate Majority Leader?
11. Who were the last two justices appointed to the Supreme Court?
12. Who is the current Chief Justice of the United States?
13. Which party favors policies which would lower the price of oil and gasoline by increasing the supply?
14. Which party is more likely to try to make it easier for businesses to operate profitably?
15. What was the annual inflation rate for the month of September?

-----------------------

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Answers:

1. Republican
2. Republican
3. Democrat
4. Democrat
5. Republican
6. Republican
7. Anthony Blinken, Kamala Harris
8. Democrat
9. Democrat
10. Nancy Pelosi, Charles Schumer
11. Amy Coney Barrett, Ketanji Brown Jackson
12. John Roberts
13. Republican
14. Republican
15. 8.2%

How'd you do?

An Attempt to Evade the Hard Problem

In an interesting article at Mind Matters News neurosurgeon Michael Egnor critiques an attempt by a materialist neuroscientist named Anil Seth to circumvent what philosopher David Chalmers called "The Hard Problem" of consciousness (You can watch a video featuring Chalmers discussing the Hard Problem here).

Egnor starts off by explaining what the "Hard Problem" is:

Philosopher David Chalmers famously divided the problem of understanding how consciousness is related to the brain by distinguishing between the easy and hard problems of consciousness.

The easy problem of consciousness is typically faced by working neuroscientists — i.e., what parts of the brain are metabolically active when we’re awake? What kinds of neurons are involved in memory? These problems are “easy” only in the sense that they are tractable.

The neuroscience necessary to answer them is challenging but, with enough skill and perseverance, it can be done.

The hard problem of consciousness is another matter entirely. It is this: How can first-person subjective experience arise from brain matter? How do we get an ‘I’ from an ‘it’? Compared with the easy problem, the hard problem is, from the perspective of materialist neuroscience, intractable.

By this Egnor means that the hard problem is trying to explain how electro-chemical activity in the brain is converted into sensations like the color red or the fragrance of perfume or how electro-chemical reactions in the brain give rise to a meaning when you read a page in a book.

No one knows how this happens. It's one of the deepest mysteries of the universe. If one is a dualist of one kind or another, and believes that we have an immaterial mind or soul, then perhaps this faculty is in some way involved in this mysterious translation from the physical materiality of brain function to the immaterial sensations of color or pain.

But if one is a materialist then that solution is not available to her, and so the nature of the bridge between the material and the immaterial is completely inexplicable.

One way out of the impasse is to simply deny that one's conscious experience is anything more than an illusion - what Seth calls a "controlled hallucination" occasioned by the integration of sensory inputs by the brain hemispheres.

In other words, consciousness is an illusion created by the complex interactions of the two hemispheres of the brain.

Egnor elaborates on Seth's view:

...the essence of his theory of consciousness is that the brain integrates a cacophony of sensory inputs to fabricate an explanation for perceived reality — a “controlled hallucination” — that we call consciousness.

This view, that consciousness is, in one sense or another, the consequence of massive parallel processing going on in neural circuits in the brain, is common among modern neuroscientists.

But it can’t be true.

Egnor cites two phenomena as reasons why Seth's "controlled hallucination" theory doesn't fit the facts:

...consider the neurological consequences of split brain surgery and the congenital brain condition called hydranencephaly.

In split brain surgery, neurosurgeons cut the massive bundle of nerve fibers connecting the cerebral hemispheres in order to lessen the propagation of seizures in patients with epilepsy. The two brain hemispheres are disconnected — information from one hemisphere cannot readily be transmitted to the other.

This radical disconnection of the brain hemispheres causes massive interference with the [sensory inputs that Seth posits as the source of our hallucination of consciousness] but, contrary to what Seth’s theory seems to predict, there is no impairment of consciousness whatsoever.

Patients with split brains (I have performed the surgery myself) have very subtle perceptual disabilities of which they are almost always unaware, and there is no impairment in consciousness.

Contrary to what Seth's theory would predict, despite the patient having his brain cut in half, his consciousness remains undivided and unimpaired.

An even more difficult problem for Seth's theory of “controlled hallucination” is hydranencephaly:

Hydranencephaly is a condition in which children are often born without brain hemispheres. The cause is usually a massive intrauterine stroke that destroys all of the brain above the brainstem.

Nearly all of the perceptual circuits on which Seth’s theory depends are not merely cut, but are completely destroyed, yet children with hydranencephaly are fully conscious.

I have cared for these children myself (I am a pediatric neurosurgeon). Although they are quite handicapped, they are certainly conscious, interactive, and show a full range of emotions — laughter, crying, glee, fear, and such.

Complete destruction of the cerebral hemispheres is fully compatible with consciousness.

Seth’s theory that consciousness is a “controlled hallucination” occasioned by integration of massive sensory inputs by the brain hemispheres falls apart when we consider that disconnection of the hemispheres — and even destruction of the brain hemispheres — is compatible with full consciousness (despite profound sensory and motor disabilities).

Egnor concludes that,

Only a dualist or idealist understanding of the mind–brain relationship can survive the evidence provided by split brain research and routine clinical experience with children with hydranencephaly.

The only “controlled hallucination” here is the belief that materialism can explain the mind.

As an addendum, Egnor's article includes this video of a child born with hydranencephaly and missing 80% of his brain. As the viewer can see, the child, though severely disabled, is still fully conscious:

Egnor adds this note:

Jaxon Buell (2014–2020) died at five years of age due to complications from his condition (80% of his brain missing). “Jaxon was unable to walk or talk, but his parents shared his many milestones on the now-deleted Facebook page We Are Jaxon Strong, where followers saw him smiling and appearing to communicate with noises and eye contact.” – People magazine (April 7, 2020)

Political Taxonomy

If you've been paying any attention at all to the political talk surrounding the upcoming election (Tuesday, November 8) you've probably read or heard mention of liberals and conservatives, socialists and libertarians, far left and far right. Unfortunately for those new to the political scene, or just casual observers, the terms are rarely defined so their meanings are often poorly understood.

I thought it might be helpful to correct this lack of understanding by rerunning a post (slightly updated) that's been featured on VP during other election seasons, and which explains some basic differences between the various political ideologies:

Probably one reason a lot of people steer clear of politics is that they find the ideological labels (as well as words like ideological itself) to be confusing. Terms like left, right, liberal, conservative, progressive, libertarian, fascism, socialism, and communism are thrown around a lot by our punditry, but they're rarely accompanied by any explanation of what they mean.

This post will try to correct that omission so that as we get closer to the election readers might have a somewhat better understanding of what they're reading and hearing.

For starters, let's define a political ideology as the set of principles which guide and inform one's social, economic, and foreign policies. It's a kind of political worldview. All the terms listed above denote various political ideologies.

The following diagram will give us a frame of reference to talk about these terms:

Let's start on the right side of the spectrum and define the terms going right to left. Each of them expresses a different understanding of the role of government in our lives and a different understanding of the rights citizens possess vis a vis the state.

I have one quibble, though, with the diagram. I personally don't think either anarchy or mob rule belong on it since neither is a stable ideology. They both either evaporate, as did Occupy Wall Street, or they morph into communism or fascism.

With that said, let's consider the remaining elements of the spectrum:

Libertarianism: This is the view that the role of government should be limited largely to protecting our borders and our constitutionally guaranteed rights. Libertarians believe that government should, except when necessary to protect citizens, stay out of our personal lives and out of the marketplace. They are also very reluctant to get involved in foreign conflicts.

Senator Rand Paul who was an early candidate for the Republican nomination for president in 2016, is perhaps the most well-known contemporary libertarian politician. The late Ayn Rand (who wrote Atlas Shrugged and for whom Rand Paul is named) is a well-known libertarian writer.

Conservatism: Conservatives tend to lean toward libertarianism in some respects, particularly in their belief in free markets, but see a somewhat more expansive role for government. The emphasis among conservatives is on preserving traditional values and the Constitution and also upon limiting governmental authority in the federal government in Washington and giving it back to the states and localities.

Conservatives are reluctant to change the way things are done unless it can be shown that the change is both necessary and has a good chance of improving the problem the change is intended to address.

Conservatives take a strict view of the Constitution, interpreting it to mean pretty much what it says, and oppose attempts to alter it by judicial fiat. Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas is a conservative. Conservatives also oppose government interference in the market by over-regulation and oppose high tax rates as being counter-productive.

They generally oppose illegal immigration and believe in a strong national defense, but, though more willing to use force abroad when our interests can be shown to be threatened, are nevertheless leery of foreign adventures.

Senators Tim Scott and Tom Cotton are contemporary conservative politicians, and the Wall Street Journal opinion page generally promotes a conservative point of view.

Moderates: Moderates tend to be conservative on some issues and liberal on others. They see themselves as pragmatists, willing to do whatever works to make things better.

They tend to be non-ideological (although their opponents often interpret that trait as a lack of principle). Senator Joe Manchin is considered a moderate politician and Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan would be an example of a moderate journalist.

Liberalism: Liberals endorse an expansive role for government. They take a loose view of the Constitution, interpreting it according to what they think the Founders would say if they wrote the document today.

They tend to think that traditional values shackle us to the past and that modern times and problems require us to throw off those impediments. They agree with libertarians that government should stay out of our personal lives, but they believe that government must regulate business and tax the rich and middle classes to subsidize the poor and their "Green" energy agenda.

They tend to hold a very strong faith in the power of government to solve our problems, a faith that conservatives and libertarians think is entirely unwarranted by experience. Joe Biden campaigned for president as a liberal politician, but he has governed as a progressive.

Progressivism: Progressivism can be thought of as hyper-caffeinated liberalism. Almost all prominent members of today's Democratic party are progressives as are many in the mainstream media and on cable networks like CNN and MSNBC.

Progressives often see the Constitution as an obstacle to progress.

Whereas conservatives view the Constitution as a document which protects individual rights, progressives see it as an archaic limitation on the ability of government to promote social and economic justice. They tend to be indifferent to, or even disdainful of, traditional values and institutions such as marriage, family, and religion.

Progressives are essentially socialists who are reluctant, for whatever reason, to call themselves that. A humorous depiction of progressivism can be found here. Former President Barack Obama and former candidate Hillary Clinton are progressives as is current VP Kamala Harris.

Socialism: As stated in the previous paragraph, socialists are progressives by another name. Both progressives and socialists desire that power be located in a strong central government (they're sometimes for this reason referred to by their opponents as "statists.") and both wish for government to be involved in our lives "from cradle to the grave" (see this ad which ran in the 2016 presidential campaign). They favor very high tax rates by which they hope to transfer wealth to poorer communities and reduce the disparity in income between rich and poor.

Perhaps one difference between socialists and progressives is that though both would allow corporations and banks to be privately owned, socialists would impose more governmental control over these institutions than progressives might. Senator Bernie Sanders is an example of a contemporary socialist and Venezuela is an example of a socialist country.

Fascism: Typically fascism is considered an ideology of the right, but this is a mistake. Fascism, like communism, is a form of totalitarian socialism. Indeed, the German Nazis as well as the Italian fascists of the 1930s were socialists (The Nazi party was in fact the National Socialist Party).

Fascism is socialist in that fascists permit private ownership of property and businesses, but the state maintains ultimate control over them. Fascism is usually militaristic, nationalistic, and xenophobic. It is totalitarian in that there is usually only one party, and citizens have few rights.

There is no right to dissent or free speech, and fascists are prone to the use of violence to suppress those who do not conform.

Those on the far left on campus who shout down speakers and professors whose message they don't like are, unwittingly perhaps, adopting fascistic tactics. Paradoxically, so is Antifa, which is shorthand for "anti-fascist."

Vladimir Putin is often called an authoritarian but has in recent months increasingly governed like a classical fascist.

Communism: Like fascism, communism is totalitarian and socialist, but it's a more extreme brand of socialism. Under communism there is no private ownership. The state owns everything.

Moreover, communism differs from fascism in that it is internationalist rather than nationalist, and it traditionally didn't promote a militaristic culture, although it certainly doesn't shy from the use of military force and violence to further its goals. Like fascism, however, communism does not permit free speech, and those who dissent are executed, tortured or cruelly imprisoned.

Few completely communist nations remain today, though throughout much of the twentieth century the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, China, Cuba and many other Asian and African states were all communist. Today North Korea is probably the only truly communist nation. Many other former communist countries are today evolving into various forms of fascism.

Scarcely any contemporary politicians would admit to being communists though some of Barack Obama's close associates and friends over the years, such as Bill Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, Van Jones, and mentor Frank Marshall Davis are, or were, all communists.

Senator Bernie Sanders denies being a communist but he has throughout his life been sympathetic to communist governments, even spending his honeymoon in the old Soviet Union.

I hope this rather cursory treatment of the various points on the political spectrum will be helpful as you seek to make sense of what you're seeing, hearing and reading about the upcoming elections.

The Uniqueness of Earth

An article at Salvo (subscription required) drives a spike into the notion that the galaxy, and perhaps the universe, are filled with habitable planets and that intelligent life elsewhere in the cosmos is an inevitability.

The article, by astronomer Hugh Ross, observes that the conviction that there simply must be life out there somewhere and that our earth is not unique in being fit for sustaining life is based on four assumptions:

1. The density and kinds of planets throughout our galaxy and all other galaxies in the universe are roughly the same as what we observe in the vicinity of our solar system.
2. About 20 percent of all planets are habitable.
3. Life inevitably will arise on all habitable planets.
4. The probability of a technologically advanced civilization arising from simple life-forms is better than one chance in 10 billion.

Each of these assumptions, especially #3, is deeply problematic, but Ross focusses in this article on #2.

The belief that 20% of all planets are habitable is based on the fact that of the 3000+ planets discovered so far, 20% of them lie at a distance from their star that would permit water to exist in the liquid state. Since water is a necessary condition for life, it's assumed that these planets could sustain living things.

Ross points out, however, that though water is a necessary condition for life, it's not a sufficient condition. There are, in fact, nine different "habitable zones" and all nine must overlap in order for life to exist on a planet.

In addition to the water habitable zone there are also the following:

1. Ultraviolet habitable zone
2. Photosynthetic habitable zone
3. Ozone habitable zone
4. Planetary rotation rate habitable zone
5. Planetary obliquity habitable zone
6. Tidal habitable zone
7. Astrosphere habitable zone
8. Electric wind habitable zone

Ross explains each of these zones in his recently released book Improbable Planet, but in the Salvo article he simply observes that:

Typically, these zones do not overlap. For example, the distance a planet must be from its host star so that it receives enough ultraviolet radiation to enable the synthesis of many life-essential compounds, but not so much as to kill living things, is rarely the same distance that a planet must be from its host star for liquid water to possibly exist on its surface.

For 97 percent of all stars, the liquid water habitable zone does not overlap the ultraviolet habitable zone.

Thus,

A planet is a true candidate for habitability only if it simultaneously resides in all nine habitable zones....So far, astronomers have measured the characteristics of 3,484 planets. Only one of all these 3,484 planets resides in all nine known habitable zones. That one is Earth.

For all we know there may be other habitable zones in addition to these nine, but there are in any case several conclusions to be drawn from the information Ross provides us. First, the principle of mediocrity - the principle, held by many naturalistic scientists, that the earth is not exceptional in any significant way - is ludicrous.

Second, the notion that residence of a planet in the water habitable zone is sufficient to justify hopes that life could exist on that planet is naive.

When the necessity for all nine habitable zones overlapping is combined with the dozens of other parameters that any planet must possess in order to be suitable for life suggests that life-sustaining planets are probably extremely rare.

In fact, if it turns out that such planets are not reare that finding in itself would be so astonishing as to point to intelligent, purposeful engineering of the universe.

Is There Life After Death?

Robert Lawrence Kuhn hosts a show titled Closer to the Truth which features guests from various philosophical and scientific disciplines who offer fascinating insights into their areas of expertise.

One recent episode featured an interview with philosopher J.P.Moreland who has written extensively in the philosophy of mind.

In this 11 minute episode Kuhn and Moreland explore the question of life after death. It's an interesting discussion and one which is, as Moreland notes at the end, one of the most important questions in life.

If, as materialists maintain, we just are our bodies and there's nothing else that comprises our self then it becomes much more difficult to believe that there's any sense in which we survive our physical death.

On the other hand, if our physical, material bodies are not all there is to us, if we also possess an immaterial soul or mind which is crucial in the expression of our consciousness, then life after physical death becomes much more plausible.

Here's the episode and Moreland's take on the question:

The Inflation Numbers

Matthew Continetti at The Washington Free Beacon discusses last week's inflation report for September:

Last Thursday the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that consumer price inflation, at an 8.2 percent annualized rate, was higher than expected through September.

The rate has been 7.9 percent or higher each month since last February and is the highest it's been in over 40 years. When Mr. Biden took office the rate was 2.5 percent. Mr. Biden sees no evil, however. Continetti writes that the White House...

...doesn’t see any troubles. According to President Biden, the most recent BLS data are superfluous. After all, everybody already knows that "Americans are squeezed by the cost of living: that’s been true for years, and they didn’t need today’s report to tell them that."

As a matter of fact, Biden said in a statement, rising costs are "a key reason I ran for President." And anyway, the situation is under control. "My policies—that Democrats delivered—directly tackles [sic] price pressures we saw in today’s report."

As is his inveterate habit, our Fabulist in Chief is spinning another yarn here. Continetti explains:

I don’t remember Biden staking his 2020 candidacy on inflation. He couldn’t have. The inflation hadn’t happened. It didn’t arrive until the spring of 2021. By which time Biden was living—during weekdays, at least—at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Nor do I recall Biden warning the country about the coming threat of rising prices. To the contrary: Varsity Joe was captain of "Team Transitory." The "temporary" inflation would subside, he and his teammates argued, as kinks in the supply chain got worked out and the Federal Reserve tightened the money supply.

Also as is his custom, the finger of blame gets pointed everywhere but at his own self:

By the winter of 2022, Biden was blaming high prices on corporate greed and "Putin’s price hike." Now he says inflation is the fault of the opposition party.

No reason is provided; this president isn’t into causality. "If Republicans take control of Congress," Biden warns, "everyday costs will go up—not down."

This is a very odd claim to make since gas averaged about $2.17 in 2020 before Democrats took over in January 2021 and prices soared.

Here's a chart showing the inflation rate over the last few years:



Find more statistics at Statista.

What caused inflation to rise so fast and so far? Government spending and a policy of trying to strangle oil and gas production. Continetti explains President Biden's spending in more detail at the link.

It's ironic that Mr. Biden promised that no one earning under $400,000 will have their taxes increased, but inflation is a tax and it's hurting everyone, especially those on fixed incomes.

It's also ironic that the Biden administration has done everything it can to kill the fossil fuel industry, but they're outraged at the Saudis for not selling us cheaper gas. They've also decided that the Venezuelan tyrants are not such bad guys after all and are seeking to relax sanctions on Venezuela so that they'll sell us their petroleum.

Our energy policy certainly seems weird.

The Quiet Epidemic

There's a silent epidemic stalking the U.S., but it's not one borne by a virus or bacterium. It's a psycho-social affliction that harms both the elderly and the young, especially young men.

It's a major cause of illness, suicide and other forms of early death among young men, and, according to Marisa G. Franco at The Economist, "is more fatal than a poor diet or lack of exercise and as corrosive as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day."

It's loneliness. One wouldn't think with all the social networking and opportunities for developing relationships in our culture that loneliness would be such a problem, but it apparently is.

In his book Bowling Alone Robert Putnam wrote that social capital - things like civic and political participation, religious participation, workplace networks, informal networks, mutual trust, and altruism - increased in the US until the 1970s and then suddenly decreased and has continued to decrease right up to the present.

The erosion of social capital has been accelerated by, among other things, the decline of church membership, the weakening of family ties, and a diminution of community involvement.

This is tragic given that human well-being depends on interpersonal interactions and relationships.

Prolonged loneliness is associated with an increased risk of depression, anxiety, dementia, stroke and heart disease, so it needs to be taken very seriously.

Part of the problem is that people today often live far from their families and the people they grew up with.

Once upon a time most people spent their whole lives in the community into which they were born, but that's no longer the case.

Many of us go off to school, or relocate across the country, or even overseas, chasing the available jobs and opportunities.

While this may be reasonable, perhaps even necessary, it means we often lack the ability, or opportunity, to ‘put down roots’, and thus build up a network of friends and relations that could be relied upon to counteract eventual loneliness.

It’s interesting, and maybe surprising that a 2018 survey of 20,000 Americans found fewer elderly people experienced loneliness than did younger people, even though older folks were less likely to be able to do anything about their loneliness.

Older teens and young adults, seem to be hit hardest by loneliness, and their sense of isolation became especially acute during the Covid pandemic.

It’s ironic, though, that in a world of social media so many young people are so lonely.

It’s also extremely dangerous. Hannah Arendt in her classic work The Origins of Totalitarianism writes that totalitarianism feeds on lonely people by giving them a sense of belonging to something greater than themselves.

The sense of belonging fills the void once occupied by family, religion and community.

She states that, “...terror can rule absolutely over men who are isolated against each other and that...one of the primary concerns of all tyrannical government is to bring that isolation about.”

Thus, it is the ambition of tyrants, especially tyrants on the left, to fragment the family, destroy the church, and eliminate a sense of community.

Arendt wrote that, “What prepares men for totalitarian domination...is the fact that loneliness...has become an everyday experience of the ever growing masses of our century.”

It's alarming that we see these same trends toward weakening the family, religion and community in many of the cultural trends and public policies that are occurring today.

Are we being set up for a serious assault on our freedom? Will the epidemic of loneliness make it easier for a totalitarian party to accomplish what tyrants have achieved in country after country ever since the French Revolution in 1789?

Putin's Folly and Russian Losses

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has taken an awful toll on Russian men and machines. According to Vodkapundit in PJ Media, reports coming out of Latvia claim that as many as 90,000 Russian troops are classified as "irrecoverable loss."

These are troops who have been killed or seriously wounded or went missing since hostilities began last February 23rd.

The numbers are based on a report from a Latvian web site called "iStories" founded by Russian journalists and whose sources include a former officer of the Russian special services, and an active FSB intelligence officer.

The loss amounts to almost half of the 190,000 men who were sent into Ukraine last winter.

This is an astonishingly high casualty rate, and the Kyiv Posts' figures for lost armaments are equally as shocking:

One wonders how long the Russian people, and Putin's intelligence officers, generals and members of his inner circle are going to tolerate this before they decide that Russia and Russian families have suffered enough in this pointless war.

Understanding Darwinism and Believing in it

Keith Blanchard (who apparently has no particular expertise in biology) wrote a column for The Week a few years ago that gained some attention at the time and which perpetuates some common misunderstandings.

The ostensible purpose of his article was to exhort people to embrace evolution as science and not as a matter of faith. As Blanchard says, we should understand evolution, not believe in it.

If his point is simply that we can grasp the basic elements of evolutionary theory without making a doxastic commitment to them ourselves, well, then that seems a little banal, but if his point is that if you understand those elements you will presumably believe them to be true then his point is manifestly, glaringly, false.

There are many people who understand the main idea of Darwinian evolution perfectly well, but who reject it nonetheless. Many of those who reject evolution are not so much hostile to the idea of some kind of universal relationship among living things, but rather the way naturalistic metaphysics is smuggled in along with the less innocuous aspects of the evolutionary package.

I might add that I have no quarrel with evolution. It may in some sense be true for all I know.

My quarrel is with naturalism and naturalistic views of evolution which tell us that evolution is a blind, unguided, completely natural process. That's a claim that goes well beyond the empirical evidence.

In other words, human beings may have arrived here through some sort of descent through modification, but if so, there's much reason to believe that there was more to our developmental journey as a species than purely unintentional, unintelligent, physical processes like mutation and natural selection.

At any rate, Blanchard offers a summary of the basic claims of evolutionary theory which, were they correct, could apply to any kind of biological evolution, naturalistic or intelligently directed. The problem is, Blanchard's summary describes evolutionary theory as it stood about fifty years ago.

Few evolutionists accept Blanchard's view today as anything more than a heuristic for elementary school children.

Here's his summary with a few comments. For a much more extensive critique of Blanchard's essay go here.

Blanchard writes:

• Genes, stored in every cell, are the body's blueprints; they code for traits like eye color, disease susceptibility, and a bazillion other things that make you you.

No doubt our genes code for many aspects of our physical body, but Blanchard does not say that they code for everything that makes us us and for good reason. There's no genetic explanation for some our most important traits. It's a mystery, for example, how genes could possibly produce human consciousness, or many behaviors in the animal kingdom.

How, after all, does something like an immaterial mind arise from material interactions of chemical compounds in the brain? Not only do we have no explanation for how conscious experience arises in individual persons, we have no explanation for how such a thing could ever have evolved by physical processes in the human species.

The same is true of behaviors. All birds of any particular species behave similarly, but how do genes, which code for proteins which in turn form structures or catalyze chemical reactions, produce a behavior?

It's no more clear how molecules of DNA can produce behavior than it is how molecules of sucrose can produce the sensation of sweet.

• Reproduction involves copying and recombining these blueprints, which is complicated, and errors happen.

Yes, they do and those errors are almost always dysgenic. They detract from fitness not enhance it, just as an error in copying computer code is much more likely to cause a system to crash than it is to cause it to work better.

• Errors are passed along in the code to future generations, the way a smudge on a photocopy will exist on all subsequent copies.

As I said above, a smudge is a flaw. As similar "smudges" accumulate the result is not a new and different picture of high quality, it's an increasingly weaker and useless representation of the old.

• This modified code can (but doesn't always) produce new traits in successive generations: an extra finger, sickle-celled blood, increased tolerance for Miley Cyrus shenanigans.

These examples, particularly the last, are dysgenic to human beings. Polydactyly may not be dysgenic but neither does it confer a survival advantage. If it did it would spread through the population, but it hasn't.

• When these new traits are advantageous (longer legs in gazelles), organisms survive and replicate at a higher rate than average, and when disadvantageous (brittle skulls in woodpeckers), they survive and replicate at a lower rate.

This is the selectionist theory of evolution, i.e. that natural selection, acting on genetic mutations, drives evolution. It is held today by few biologists because it's fraught with empirical difficulties. In order to finesse these difficulties biologists have adduced other mechanisms such as genetic drift to do the heavy lifting in evolution.

In fact, as Michael Behe pointed out in his book The Edge of Evolution, any theory based on fortuitous mutations defies probability. Many traits require several specific mutations occurring at almost the same time in an organism, and the chances of this happening are astronomically low.

I repeat, this might have happened through a long evolutionary process, but to say that the process was completely natural (a claim Blanchard doesn't make, by the way) is to go beyond empirical science and enter the realm of faith and metaphysics, and even the belief that it happened at all requires a considerable amount of blind faith.

We can understand the basic lineaments of evolutionary theory, but that doesn't mean that it's appropriate to believe that the process actually happened. To believe in it is to have faith that the theory is the true explanation for how we got to be here.

There are people who understand the theory and who believe it's true. There are people who understand the theory and don't believe it, and there are many who understand it and are agnostic, believing that the scientific evidence often conflicts with the theory, as Stephen Meyer has so powerfully shown in his first two books Signature in the Cell and Darwin's Doubt.

In my opinion, a humble agnosticism with respect to the actual mechanisms by which life originated and diversified is the most intellectually prudent course.

I'm far more confident, however, in the truth of the claim that however we came to exist as a species it's far more probable that it was the result of the purposeful agency of an engineering genius than that blind chance accomplished the equivalent of producing a library of information entirely unintentionally.

A Hopeless Bind

The late Robert Jastrow was a highly accomplished astronomer and an agnostic. He was also a materialist, i.e. he maintained that everything that exists can be explained in terms of matter and the laws which govern it. For a strict materialist there are no immaterial substances like minds, souls or God.

In the short video below Jastrow explains how his agnosticism and materialism combine to place him in a hopeless philosophical bind, and yet he refuses to relinquish them.

Here's the video:

If the universe came into existence, which it obviously did, then it must have had a cause. Whatever caused the universe must have not only transcended the universe - which means it must have transcended space, time and matter - but it must also have been incomprehensibly powerful and intelligent.

It's plausible, too, to think that the fine-tuning of the structure of matter on both the very tiny and the extraordinarily large scales, as well as the exquisitely precise values of the forces, parameters and constants of the universe, all suggest that this intelligent agent had a conscious purpose in creating a universe that could sustain life.

If it did have a conscious purpose then it was a personal agent since conscious purposes are attributes of personal beings.

So Jastrow's hopeless bind is that his agnostic materialism prevents him from acknowledging that there are any non-physical agents acting in or on the universe while his science tells him that there must be a transcendent, non-physical, personal cause that brought the universe into being.

One wonders if he carried that bind with him to the grave or if he finally resolved it.

Soul, Mind, Spirit and Immortality

Robert Lawrence Kuhn hosts a show titled Closer to the Truth. Kuhn's guests are thinkers from various disciplines who offer fascinating insights into their areas of expertise.

One recent episode featured an interview with Christian philosopher J.P.Moreland who has written extensively in the philosophy of mind.

In this 11 minute episode Kuhn and Moreland explore the relationship that Moreland believes exists between soul, mind and spirit.

Whether or not any or all of these faculties actually exist Moreland's articulation of them is certainly interesting.

Check it out:

Is Naturalism Incompatible 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:

The same argument is an integral part of philosopher Alvin Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism which he discusses in this video:

The Epigenome

Recall your tenth grade biology class wherein you learned that the code or blueprint for building a living organism was contained in the DNA in the nucleus of the cell. Segments of DNA form genes and these code for proteins and those build the body of the organism.

Well, biologists are learning that that's only part of the story, and maybe a very small part at that. It's beginning to look as if the information that directs the construction and maintenance of the organism is dispersed throughout the cell and maybe even throughout the organism.

This is the thesis of a new book by Thomas Woodward and James Gills who argue that beyond the organism's genome (the set of genetic instructions contained in DNA) there is a deeper level of instruction, the epigenome, that is to the genome what the submerged part of an iceberg is to its tip.

Their book is titled The Mysterious Epigenome and according to Casy Luskin who reviews the book at Evolution News and Views, it's a very accessible introduction which is geared toward the layman interested in the biological sciences. Luskin quotes the authors:

In probing the operation of DNA, scientists have learned much more about a second biological encyclopedia of information that resides above the primary information stored within our DNA.

Researchers have discovered a complex system in the cell -- sophisticated "software" situated beyond DNA -- that directs DNA's functions and is responsible for our embryonic development and the differentiation of a single, fertilized egg cell into more than two hundred cell types in a mature body.

This higher control system is also implicated in aging processes, cancer, and many other diseases. It guides the expression of DNA, telling different kinds of cells to use different genes, and to use them in the precise ways that meet the needs of those different cells.

This "information beyond DNA" plays a crucial role in each of our sixty trillion cells, telling the genes exactly when, where, and how they are to be expressed.

[T]he living cell possesses vast riches of life-enabling codes, which go far beyond the spiral thread of DNA itself. Information, in a diversity of usable forms, is lodged in virtually every corner of the cell, from the outer cortex to the centrosome, with its system of microtubules, to the histones with their decorated tails, to the methylation patterns attached to DNA.

The mutual integration of these systems and layers of information is a marvel to behold. Unraveling these complex relationships will surely occupy the diligent study of biologists for decades to come.

Luskin himself asks the question that is inevitably raised by the discovery of this new layer of information in the cell:

Could this newly discovered information arise by the Darwinian mechanism? A key issue addressed by the book has to do with the implications of the epigenome for the debate over Darwinian theory and intelligent design.

The authors believe this new information points to "irreducible complexity" in the cell, and ask: "How can scientists account for a nature-driven origin of the cell's complexity when they stumble upon new layers of information -- a whole new system of coded-language -- above and beyond the cell's DNA?"

Woodward and Giles close by pointing out the challenge posed by the epigenetic revolution to materialist views of evolution:

[T]he epigenome adds tremendous pressure to the already-weak Darwinian explanatory apparatus. Random changes, inherited over generations, must not just explain the explosion of DNA as one moves up the purported tree of life; one must also now explain by these mindless mechanisms the rise of each sophisticated layer of the epigenome.

Biologists are just beginning to understand this new source of information. Indeed, the whole field is really on the cutting edge of a fascinating biological frontier. As Luskin says:

The newly discovered layers of cellular complexity they discuss are astounding. What's even more astounding is the likelihood that if Woodward and Gills were to rewrite this book in another five years, they would have much more to add about known levels of cellular epigenetic information.

The deeper we probe, the more we learn, the more complex, the more information-rich, we find living cells to be. It makes the old 20th century materialism seem almost quaint.

Here's a computer animation which shows in greatly simplified form how the cell constructs proteins. The question that it raises is how the cell knows how and when to perform all these operations? What's the "control center," so to speak, that coordinates and directs all of this activity, and how did such an amazing thing ever evolve?

The amazing choreography of all this makes one wonder if perhaps the panpsychists (those who believe that everything is pervaded by mind) aren't on to something. Perhaps mind, or a Mind, pervades the whole universe and is responsible for the information-rich mechanisms we find in living cells.

The Argument Clinic

Why is it that we can't have disagreements about politics, religion, whether to get vaccinated or not, climate change, evolution or a host of other topics without people losing their tempers, and not uncommonly, their minds? Why is it that disagreements ruin friendships and split families?

I know of married couples who've divorced over political disagreements, and I'm sure there are couples who've experienced serious tension in their marriage over religion.

It seems that it'd be good for those of us who enjoy the to and fro of engaging with friends, family and acquaintances around ideas that are important to us to keep in mind that there are more important things than proving ourselves right on this or that issue.

It would be good to keep in mind that those who disagree with us will not be won over to our way of seeing things if our demeanor is arrogant, scowling and angry. They certainly won't find our opinions compelling if we resort to insulting them or their ideas.

The most effective way to disagree is with a humble attitude, acknowledging to ourselves and to the other person that we could be wrong about whatever it is we are discussing. A winsome approach, full of humility and humor, is likely to be far more persuasive than pummelling one's interlocutor with polemical body blows.

In almost every instance, it'll be more important that we love the person with whom we're engaged in conversation than that we "win" an argument with them. After all, as an old aphorism has it, "A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still."

If the other person gets angry and insulting then it's better that we change the subject to something less contentious. What good can come of continuing it under those circumstances anyway?

If we can love those with whom we disagree, if we can say, "I don't think you're correct, but you're more important to me than my being right," I think we'll be much more attractive to those who differ with us and much more effective in presenting our views and gaining those views a serious hearing.

Political, philosophical and religious differences are important, in many cases extremely so, but they're not the most important thing. The most important thing is that we treat each other with dignity, respect and kindness.

Folks on social media often don't treat each other that way, but we should.

It's also important to remember that an argument is not a shouting match or an insult fest. An argument is simply an attempt to defend what one believes to be the truth of some matter by putting forth reasons for believing it.

If doing this devolves into people yelling at each other then it's no longer an argument, it's a quarrel or a verbal brawl.

Anyway, writing this post brought to mind an old Monty Python skit titled The Argument Clinic. It's pretty funny:

Moral Evil

It's de rigeuer in fashionable circles nowadays to scoff at the use of the word "evil," at least when it's used in a moral sense. Our elites have no reluctance to employ the word as a description of corporations or their political foes, but they often roll their eyes when someone suggests that moral evil exists in individual people.

The aversion to this notion seems like a case of willful blindness, however, since the evidence is so overwhelming that many of our fellow human beings are indeed evil. In fact, "evil" doesn't seem a sdtrong enough word to describe muvch of what happens in this world.

The rape, torture and murder of Ukranian civilians by Russian troops is one obvious example, but there are many others. Consider the following statistics gleaned from several sources via Google:

• In communist China, tens of thousands of Uyghur muslims are imprisoned in concentration camps, and there are credible reports that they're often executed in order to harvest their organs for sale on the black market. Sometimes the organs are taken while the victim is actually conscious.
• Nearly 5900 Christians were killed for their faith in 2021. Thousands more were imprisoned or driven from their homes and jobs.
• 126 million children worldwide are forced to work in hazardous conditions like mines or with dangerous chemicals or machinery.
• At the end of last year, 28 million people were in forced labor and 22 million were living in a forced marriage. That means nearly one out of every 150 people in the world are caught up in modern forms of slavery. The number of people in forced labour or forced marriage ballooned by 10 million between 2016 and 2021.
• 1.2 million children are trafficked each year.
• 2 million children are forced into pornography or prostitution each year.
• 5.7 million children are sold into debt bondage or other forms of slavery. Both girls and boys are frequently abused in these conditions.

These are just a few of the data points that could be cited, and these don't even include accounts coming from horrific torture chambers like North Korea. Even so, if these are not sufficient to demonstrate to someone the existence of moral evil then that person simply has no moral sensibility.

That, of course, is the definition of a psychopath.

Bowling Alone

In the year 2000 Robert Putnam released his much cited book Bowling Alone which described the erosion over the previous thirty years of what Putnam called "social capital" or what we might call "community."

The book documented, among other things, an epidemic of loneliness in our society. Brett Reeder quotes from and summarizes Bowling Alone:

"For the first two-thirds of the twentieth century a powerful tide bore Americans into ever deeper engagement in the life of their communities, but a few decades ago--silently, without warning--that tide reversed and we were overtaken by a treacherous rip current."

Thus, social capital increased in the US until the 1970s and then suddenly decreased right up to the present.

This theme is consistent across seven separate measures of social capital, including: political participation, civic participation, religious participation, workplace networks, informal networks, mutual trust, and altruism.

Neuroscientist Dean Burnett at Science Focus writes:

Our social interactions are a huge factor in how we think, act, and see ourselves, because much of our brains is dedicated to social cognition. Completely depriving someone of any human contact is a recognised form of torture.

Basically, human well-being depends on interpersonal interactions and relationships.

It’s no wonder that prolonged loneliness is associated with many serious health consequences such as an increased risk of depression, anxiety, dementia, stroke and heart disease, so an epidemic of it should be taken very seriously.

Prior to the 1960s people often spent their whole lives in or near the neighborhood in which they were born, but Burnett points out that that's no longer the case:

The fact is, spending your whole life in the same community and region is not the default now. Many of us go off to university, or relocate across the country, even across continents, chasing the available jobs and opportunities (just ask any academic).

[This] means we often lack the ability, or opportunity, to ‘put down roots’, and thus build up a network of friends and relations that could be relied upon to counteract eventual loneliness.

He also notes that, perhaps surprisingly, loneliness does not solely afflict the elderly:

The traditional image tied to the loneliness epidemic is that of an older person, past retirement age, living alone, because the modern world and the march of time has deprived them of the ability to interact with close friends and family. And while there are undoubtedly many examples of such people out there, recent evidence suggests that the actual picture is more complex.

For instance a 2018 survey of 20,000 Americans found fewer elderly people experienced loneliness than younger generations, even though the older generations were less likely to be able to do anything about their loneliness.

Especially, according to a recent study at Harvard, older teens and young adults, who seem to be hit hardest by it overall, particularly during the pandemic.

It's ironic that the heaviest consumers of social media are often among the loneliest people on the planet.

Reeder lists seven suggestions Putnam urges society to implement to alleviate the tragic consequences of a society that no longer places the same value on community and interpersonal relationships as it once did:

1. First, he suggests educational reforms be undertaken, including improved civics education, well designed service learning programs, extra curricular activities and smaller schools.
2. He argues for a more family-oriented workplace which allows for the formation of social capital on the job.
3. He encourages further efforts at new urbanism.
4. He would like to see religion become both more influential and at the same time more tolerant.
5. The technologies that reinforce, rather than replace, face-to-face interaction should be encouraged.
6. Art and culture should become more interactive.
7. Finally, politics requires campaign reforms and a decentralization of power.

Given the baleful effects that loneliness has on people you'd think that there'd be an enormous push to implement these measures, and although there's been some progress in several of them, we apparently still have a long way to go.

Ten Democrat Anchors

As we sail toward November's mid-term elections the Democrat ship seems to be dragging a number of anchors that threaten to pull them underwater at the polls.

The Democrats appear to be in trouble mainly because their policies have been extraordinarily short-sighted and harmful to the nation and are associated with cultural trends that many if not most people find intolerable.

Here are ten examples:

1. Massive spending that has fueled inflation.
2. Requiring those who didn't go to college or who paid their way to subsidize the debt incurred by others.
3. Crippling oil and gas production which makes it more expensive to live and heat our homes.
4. A frustrating tolerance of crime, releasing felons from jail or refusing to prosecute criminals in the first place.
5. The desire to defund police departments while crime is surging.
6. Normalizing and subsidizing homelessness and addiction in our cities.
7. Facilitating massive illegal immigration and refusing to do anything to stop it.
8. Promoting the teaching in public schools of racially divisive content, particularly the notion that racism is a uniquely and indelibly white sin.
9. Promoting the cult of transgenderism in our schools and institutions.
10. Using their ideological hegemony in academia and the media to "cancel" those who dissent from progressive orthodoxy.

Because each of these is a Democrat vulnerability, political ads for Democratic candidates scarcely mention any of them. Instead they've focused on three issues they hope will have purchase with voters:

1. Democrats' determination to make unlimited access to abortion legal.
2. Their conviction that climate change is an existential threat.
3. Their characterization of the January 6th riot as an "insurrection" fomented by Republicans.

Whether Democrats can stave off Republican gains in November and retain their majorities in the House and Senate will depend on whether voters think those last three issues are more important and more credible than the first ten.

Why Beauty?

One characteristic of living things that has thrilled everyone who has ever considered it is the astonishing level of beauty they exhibit. Consider, as an example, this bird of paradise:

or this blue dachnis:

Why are living things like birds and butterflies so beautiful? Darwin thought that females selected mates based on their fitness and that this sex selection caused beauty to evolve as a by-product.

This is still the reigning explanation today (although it doesn't explain the beauty of flowers), but as an article by Adrian Barnett at New Scientist explains, not everyone is on board with this explanation, maybe not even Darwin himself. Here's an excerpt:

“The sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail… makes me sick,” wrote Darwin, worrying about how structures we consider beautiful might come to exist in nature. The view nowadays is that ornaments such as the peacock’s stunning train, the splendid plumes of birds of paradise, bowerbirds’ love nests, deer antlers, fins on guppies and just about everything to do with the mandarin goby are indications of male quality.

In such species, females choose males with features that indicate resistance to parasites (shapes go wonky, colours go flat if a male isn’t immunologically buff) or skill at foraging (antlers need lots of calcium, bowers lots of time).

But in other cases, the evolutionary handicap principle applies, and the fact it’s hard to stay alive while possessing a huge or brightly coloured attraction becomes the reason for the visual pizzazz. And when this process occasionally goes a bit mad, and ever bigger or brasher becomes synonymous with ever better, then the object of female fixation undergoes runaway selection until physiology or predation steps in to set limits.

What unites these explanations is that they are all generally credited to Darwin and his book The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. Here, biologists say, having set out his adaptationist stall in On the Origin of Species, Darwin proposed female choice as the driving force behind much of the animal world’s visual exuberance.

And then along comes Richard Prum to tell you there’s more to it than that. Prum is an ornithology professor at Yale University and a world authority on manakins, a group of sparrow-sized birds whose dazzling males perform mate-attracting gymnastics on branches in the understories of Central and South American forests.

Years of watching the males carry on until they nearly collapsed convinced him that much of the selection is linked to nothing except a female love of beauty itself, that the only force pushing things forward is female appreciation. This, he says, has nothing to do with functionality: it is pure aesthetic evolution, with “the potential to evolve arbitrary and useless beauty”.(emphasis mine)

As Prum recounts, this idea has not found the greatest favour in academic circles. But, as he makes plain, he’s not alone.

Once again, it seems Darwin got there first, writing in Descent that “the most refined beauty may serve as a sexual charm, and for no other purpose”. The problem is, it seems, that we all think we know Darwin.

In fact, few of us go back to the original, instead taking for granted what other people say he said. In this case, it seems to have created a bit of validation by wish fulfilment: Darwin’s views on sexual selection, Prum says, have been “laundered, re-tailored and cleaned-up for ideological purity”.

The difficulty here, at least for me, is that it doesn't explain why animals would have developed a sense of beauty in the first place.

Pair-bonding and reproduction certainly don't require it, obviously, since many organisms - including humans, it must be admitted - successfully reproduce without benefit of physical attractiveness.

So why would some organisms evolve a dependence upon beauty, and what is it in the organism's genotype that governs this aesthetic preference?

Could it be that animals, or at least some of them, are intelligently designed to simply delight in gorgeousness?

To Relieve Poverty Get Government Out of the Way

Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute wrote a book a few years ago titled The Inclusive Economy: How to Bring Wealth to America’s Poor in which he argues that the primary reasons for poverty in this country are the laws and policies enacted by the government which make it harder for the poor to escape to the middle class.

He talks about his thesis in an article at National Review Online. His article opens with this:

Why are people poor? Conservatives and liberals offer very different explanations.

Conservatives point to a “culture of poverty” and suggest that much deprivation is the result of flawed choices and behavior by the poor themselves. They point to a strong correlation between poverty and a failure to follow the so-called “success sequence”: finish school, get a job, get married, and only then have children. Relatively few people who do those things end up in poverty.

Liberals, on the other hand, say that that is all very well, but choices are always constrained by the circumstances in which people live. Therefore, conservatives are wrong to discount structural factors, such as racism, gender-based discrimination, and economic dislocation, that can help shape people’s choices.

There is truth to both explanations. One can’t strip the poor of agency by treating them as if they were little more than chaff blown by the wind, with no responsibility for their choices. But neither should we ignore the context in which those decisions are made. For all the progress we have made, not everyone starts with an equal opportunity.

Tanner argues that five areas of government policy impede economic and social progress among the poor.

Criminal Justice: Studies show that a criminal record dooms an inmate's children to poverty, and having a criminal record makes it harder to get a job and get married once released, both of which increase out-of-wedlock births.

Tanner cites a 2016 statement from President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers:

Having a criminal record or history of incarceration is a barrier to success in the labor market, and limited employment or depressed wages can stifle an individual’s ability to become self-sufficient. . . . Further, criminal sanctions create financial and emotional stresses that destabilize marriages and have adverse consequences for children.

Education: Poor children generally find themselves stuck in failing schools. These schools are not failing because they don't receive enough money, rather they fail for a host of socio-economic reasons that indeed may be intractable.

The problem is that there are lots of motivated kids languishing in these schools who are essentially being taught nothing. The answer is to give parents a choice as to where their children will go to school.

Tanner writes:

An effective anti-poverty program would break up the government education monopoly and limit the power of the teachers’ unions. One can debate the precise merits of charter schools vs. vouchers vs. tuition tax credits, but, in the end, we must give parents more choice and control over their children’s education.

You'd think that people who talk about social justice would be on board with this, but it's the left which has over the years consistently thwarted attempts to give parents more options in their children's schooling.

Housing Policy: According to Tanner, government zoning and land-use policies can add as much as 40 percent to the cost of housing in some cities.

In places such as New York City and San Francisco, the zoning cost is even higher, at 50 percent or more, and these regulations don’t merely increase the cost of rent which already consumes a big chunk of a poor family's resources; they effectively lock the poor out of areas with more jobs or better schools.

Savings: Tanner asserts that, "Asset tests for public programs punish the poor for saving. And Social Security squeezes out opportunities for the poor to save for themselves. We need to reconfigure a wide variety of current policies to encourage thrift, saving, and investment."

Inclusive Economic Growth: Tanner urges our leaders "to pursue policies such as low taxes, reduced government debt, and deregulation, policies that spur investment, entrepreneurship, and the economic growth that will increase the wealth of our society."

He goes on to add that,

[I]t’s not enough to encourage economic growth if the poor remain locked out of participation in that growing economy. That means we need to eliminate barriers such as occupational-licensing rules, occupational zoning, and the minimum wage.

For example, it's estimated that more than 1,100 different professions (25 to 30 percent of all job categories) require a license in at least one state, from florists to funeral attendants, from tree trimmers to make-up artists. The removal of licensure barriers not only unlocks employment and entrepreneurial opportunities for the poor in low-skill occupations but also lowers prices.

Similarly, occupational zoning can prevent a poor person from starting a small business in his or her home. And minimum-wage laws can block low-skilled workers from getting that first job, and therefore a start on the economic ladder.

Liberals will cheer Tanner's advocacy of criminal justice reform while conservatives will applaud his remaining four policy recommendations. The larger point, though, is that government bureaucracy, mandates and general officiousness does more to hurt the poor than to help them.

That's another assertion that conservatives will register strong agreement with.

Unfortunately, the poor, generally, keep voting for people who think that the way to eliminate poverty is to enact policies that make it harder for people to overcome it.

He concludes with this:

An anti-poverty agenda built on empowering poor people and allowing them to take greater control of their own lives offers the chance for a new bipartisan consensus that rejects the current paternalism of both Left and Right.

More important, it is an agenda that will do far more than our current failed welfare state to actually lift millions of Americans out of poverty.

It all makes sense to me.