Animal Consciousness

Discovery Magazine tells us that a group of scientists have issued a declaration announcing that animals possess consciousness:

An international group of prominent scientists has signed The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness in which they are proclaiming their support for the idea that animals are conscious and aware to the degree that humans are -- a list of animals that includes all mammals, birds, and even the octopus.

While it might not sound like much for scientists to declare that many nonhuman animals possess conscious states, it's the open acknowledgement that's the big news here. The body of scientific evidence is increasingly showing that most animals are conscious in the same way that we are, and it's no longer something we can ignore.

What's also very interesting about the declaration is the group's acknowledgement that consciousness can emerge in those animals that are very much unlike humans, including those that evolved along different evolutionary tracks, namely birds and some encephalopods.

"The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective states," they write. "Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors."

Consequently, say the signatories, the scientific evidence is increasingly indicating that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness.

That animals have conscious states is not a new hypothesis. What's new - and surprising - is the claim that they're conscious to the same degree humans are. I say it's a surprising claim because nothing in the article really supports it.

How do these scientists know that animals don't experience the world in a manner similar to that of humans who are sleepwalking or under anesthesia? Humans in this state are aware of their environment and interact with it, but they're not fully conscious of it. Perhaps animal consciousness is similar.

Or how do we know that animals aren't conscious in the same way that a zombie is conscious? A zombie could have all the sensory inputs that a normal person has and display all the same behavioral outputs but still not be self-aware, or understand, or doubt, or believe, or have any of the first person experiences that humans have. They're simply flesh and blood robots. Nothing in the story explains why these scientists have ruled this possibility out.

In any case, consciousness continues to be a fascinating impediment to materialists who wish to reduce the world to nothing but matter and energy. Consciousness, whether human or animal, vigorously resists these kinds of reductionistic explanations, which suggests, to paraphrase Shakespeare, that there are more things in heaven and on earth than we dream of in our science.

It Could've Been Worse

The Daily Show has put together a couple of political ads, one for each candidate, which are pretty creative. The first, a satire on Mitt Romney's flip-flopping, gets good toward the end where he's depicted "rebuilding" himself in order to appeal to conservatives.

The second ad uses Mr. Obama's own words to illustrate his campaign theme and the entire basis he's offering to voters for re-electing him - as bad as things are they could've been worse. Enjoy:

The Daily Show
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Junk DNA

An article in New Scientist (subscription required) describes what researchers are discovering about the human genome and how it works. It's turning out that our cellular machinery is far more complex than anyone imagined just a couple of decades ago.

It's also turning out that one of the widely-accepted assumptions - the assumption that vast amounts of DNA were little more than vestigial junk (an assumption that intelligent design people have been predicting for fifteen years would turn out to be false) - is turning out to be false. Researchers are finding that as much as 80% of our genetic material has a function in the cell and that number appears to be a lower limit.

All of which is to say that however the cellular machinery came about it's becoming increasingly unlikely with every passing year that it came about by purely purposeless, mechanistic processes.

Here's an excerpt from the New Scientist article:

After the genome was sequenced, another major project was launched to try to understand which bits of the genome do what. The results, released this week, reveal that our genome is far more complex and mysterious than biologists imagined just a decade ago.

Back in the 1960s, a beautifully simple picture emerged. Our DNA consisted of recipes for proteins. The double helix could be unzipped to allow RNA copies of these recipes to be made and sent to the protein-making factories in cells. But by the 1970s, it had become clear that only a tiny proportion of our DNA codes for proteins - just 1.2 per cent, we now know. What about all the rest? Some assumed it must do something, others suggested it was mostly junk. "At least 90 of our genomic DNA is 'junk' or 'garbage' of various sorts," the geneticist Susumu Ohno wrote in 1972.

Ohno knew, though, that some of the DNA that didn't code for proteins still played a vital role. For instance, the process of making RNA copies of genes - transcription - involves clusters of proteins binding to specific sequences near the genes. These proteins - called transcription factors - control the activity of genes by either boosting or blocking transcription, so the sequences to which they bind are known as regulatory DNA or switches.

So how much DNA acts a switch, or has some other function? To provide an overall picture of which parts of the genome do what, the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) project was set up in 2003. It involves many teams around the world using a variety of techniques. The results of a pilot study looking at just 1 per cent of the genome were released in 2007. This week, the results of its study of the entire genome were released, with the publication of more than 30 papers in Nature and other journals.

Among other things, ENCODE looked for switches that control gene activity. The researchers did this by taking known transcription factors and seeing which bits of DNA these proteins bound to. So far, they have found 4 million sites, covering 8.5 per cent of the genome - far more than anyone expected.

Even this is likely to be a gross underestimate of the true number, because ENCODE hasn't yet looked at every cell type, or every known transcription factor. "When we extrapolate up, it's more like 18 or 19 per cent," says Ewan Birney of the European Bioinformatics Institute in Cambridge, UK, who is coordinating the data analysis for ENCODE. "We see way more switches than we were expecting, and nearly every part of the genome is close to a switch."

You can read the entire article at the link for free for the next four days.

It used to be that anyone who believed that living things were the product of intentional, intelligent engineering were thought to be benighted, hopelessly superstitious, credulous simpletons. It seems that that description is currently shifting toward those who insist that this breathtaking complexity could just happen by mindless accident.

Why He's Still Ahead

John Hinderaker at Powerline wonders why it is, given the state of the economy and the failure of the President to articulate any plan for getting us out of the morass we're in, that Mr. Obama is still leading in the polls:

On paper, given Obama’s record, this election should be a cakewalk for the Republicans. Why isn’t it? I am afraid the answer may be that the country is closer to the point of no return than most of us believed. With over 100 million Americans receiving federal welfare benefits, millions more going on Social Security disability, and many millions on top of that living on entitlement programs–not to mention enormous numbers of public employees–we may have gotten to the point where the government economy is more important, in the short term, than the real economy. My father, the least cynical of men, used to quote a political philosopher to the effect that democracy will work until people figure out they can vote themselves money. I fear that time may have come.

If Mr. Obama wins in November it will be another historical milestone to add to his achievement as the first black president. It'll be the first time a president was ever reelected with unemployment this high. Hinderaker is surely correct that when so many people are dependent upon government, attempts to reduce its size and power fall on deaf ears, but I think there's also another dynamic at play.

I can't prove it, but I suspect that another part of the reason Mr. Obama is still afloat is that there are a lot of people who would vote for him no matter how bad the economy is simply because he's black, he's pro-choice, and he's "cool."

The people hardest hit by unemployment are African Americans, but, unlike years past when the choice was between two white candidates, a large number of African Americans will vote for Mr. Obama whether they have a job or not. The same is true of many women who care more than anything else about keeping abortion legal. Mr. Obama could be found to be giving state secrets to the Russians and many people will still vote for him for these two reasons alone.

Nor should we underestimate the "cool" factor. There are perhaps millions of people who will vote in November who have no grasp whatsoever of the issues that are being debated, but they know whether a candidate is cool or not, and they'll vote for cool over competence every time. They voted for JFK over Nixon largely on that basis, they voted for Bill Clinton over George H. W. Bush largely for the same reason and reelected him over Bob Dole again because he was cool and Dole was not. George W. Bush ran against Al Gore and John Kerry, elections in which the coolness factor was a wash, but in 2008 it reemerged with unfortunate consequences for the hapless and decidedly uncool Senator McCain. And in 2012 cool is once again pretty much on the side of President Obama.

The notion that the state of the economy will make a difference is, in my opinion, simply mistaken. It only matters if the candidates are both the same race and of approximately equal "coolness."

I know this is not a very flattering picture of those who would vote for someone largely on the basis of superficialities, and I repeat that I can't prove it, but there you have it. I'd bet that many if not most people who'll vote in November couldn't even name five Supreme Court Justices or their own U.S. Senators. They don't know much about the national debt and deficits, and they don't much care. What they do care about is that Mr. Obama is black, he's pro-choice, and he's cool.

Obamacare in One Sentence

Dr. Barbara Bellar is a physician running for the Illinois State Senate. At a recent event she summed up Obamacare in one single, very long, but very incisive sentence:

It's interesting that scarcely anyone among the Democrats touts the Affordable Care Act as a reason to reelect the President. If they do, they stick to glowing generalities and don't talk much about the details. Little wonder.

The Fundamental Nature of Reality

At Big Questions Online Andrew Briggs ponders the ultimate nature of reality and wonders whether, at bottom, everything is information. It's an intriguing question. What is the fundamental reality that makes up our world and ourselves?

Generations of scientists have assumed it was matter made of atoms, but as we learn more about the atom it seems that the appearance of materiality that the world presents to our senses is in fact something of an illusion, a trick played on our senses by something even more fundamental than matter. After all, when we dissect an atom down to its tiniest constituents we find that they're really just ghostly manifestations of energy (whatever that is). They seem to be nothing more substantial than a mathematical abstraction.

We find that these subatomic particles don't play by the same rules that macroscopic material objects play by. Subatomic particles can be in two different places simultaneously, a phenomenon called superposition, and they can also affect each other even though they're at opposite ends of the universe moving away from each other at the speed of light, a bizarre phenomenon called quantum entanglement.

If matter turns out not to be the fundamental reality what would be? If, as Briggs suggests, it's information then that suggests an even more basic reality, i.e. mind, that underlies everything. That would really upset the metaphysical applecart because if mind is the fundamental reality then we're but a few short steps, philosophically speaking, from the conclusion that God, or something very much like God, exists.

The Benediction

One of the most incongruous events of the recent Democratic convention was the closing prayer offered by Cardinal Timothy Dolan. Dolan's prayer was a gentle rebuke of practically everything that was said in the first two days of the gathering. During the early speeches speaker after speaker affirmed the necessity of preserving a mother's right to choose to terminate her pregnancy, even at taxpayer expense, and the need for taxpayers to pay for other people's birth control.

Dolan's prayer essentially called on God to confute all those demands, using phrases like, “Grant us the courage to defend life…waiting to be born, welcomed and protected.”

He also prayed for “life, without which no other rights are secured,” and that God would grant us "the right to life so we can choose liberty and happiness."

He added this: "We praise You for the gift of life, grant us the courage to defend it.”

These petitions to the Almighty on behalf of innocent children won him the contumely of hundreds of liberal/progressives who showered the twitter-sphere with ugly imprecations and foul exhortations to the Cardinal to commit acts which, let us just say, the Church deems sinful. It's funny that liberals call for civility and decency in our political discourse but often feel no obligation to behave with civility and decency themselves.

Anyway, here's the video of Dolan's closing prayer. It's really quite remarkable, given the venue and the convictions of the people gathered there.

Pastor Freed from Iranian Death Row

Long time readers of Viewpoint may recall our posts a year ago on Yousef Nadarkhani a Christian pastor, condemned to death in Iran for apostasy. Details are still sketchy, but it seems that Nadarkhani has, after three years in prison, been released. Evidently, the prayers and outcry from around the globe convinced the Iranians that executing him would be a public relations disaster:

Iranian Pastor Yousef Nadarkhani, who was originally sentenced to death in his native country for his Christian faith, was acquitted of apostasy charges and released from custody.

Nadarkhani, 32, was imprisoned for three years and waiting execution for refusing to renounce his Christian faith. His charges were lowered to evangelizing to Muslims, which carried a three-year sentence. He was released with time served, according to the American Center for Law and Justice, a Washington-based watchdog group that had been campaigning for the pastor's release.

Yousef Nadarkhani

You can read more on his release here.

Noonan on the DNC

Peggy Noonan's take on the Democratic National Convention is insightful and interesting. She seems sad that the party has devolved into something far different than the party of Harry Truman and JFK, but her analysis confirms my own thoughts as I watched the proceedings, and she expresses those thoughts far more eloquently than I could.

Here's part of her column in which she employs the adjective "extreme" in its proper context, doubtless as a satire on the promiscuous use of the word as a description of Republicans whose views are anything but extreme:

Was it a good convention?

Beneath the funny hats, the sweet-faced delegates, the handsome speakers and the babies waving flags there was something disquieting. All three days were marked by a kind of soft, distracted extremism. It was unshowy and unobnoxious but also unsettling.

There was the relentless emphasis on Government as Community, as the thing that gives us spirit and makes us whole. But government isn't what you love if you're American, America is what you love. Government is what you have, need and hire. Its most essential duties—especially when it is bankrupt—involve defending rights and safety, not imposing views and values. We already have values.

Democrats and Republicans don't see all this the same way, and that's fine—that's what national politics is, the working out of this dispute in one direction or another every few years. But the Democrats convened in Charlotte seemed more extreme on the point, more accepting of the idea of government as the center of national life, than ever, at least to me.

The fight over including a single mention of God in the platform—that was extreme. The original removal of the single mention by the platform committee—extreme. The huge "No!" vote on restoring the mention of God, and including the administration's own stand on Jerusalem — that wasn't liberal, it was extreme. Comparing the Republicans to Nazis — extreme. The almost complete absence of a call to help education by facing down the powers that throw our least defended children under the school bus—this was extreme, not mainstream.

The sheer strangeness of all the talk about abortion, abortion, contraception, contraception. I am old enough to know a wedge issue when I see one, but I've never seen a great party build its entire public persona around one. Big speeches from the heads of Planned Parenthood and NARAL, HHS Secretary and abortion enthusiast Kathleen Sebelius and, of course, Sandra Fluke.

"Republicans shut me out of a hearing on contraception," Ms. Fluke said. But why would anyone have included a Georgetown law student who never worked her way onto the national stage until she was plucked, by the left, as a personable victim? What a fabulously confident and ingenuous-seeming political narcissist Ms. Fluke is.

She really does think — and her party apparently thinks — that in a spending crisis with trillions in debt and many in need, in a nation in existential doubt as to its standing and purpose, in a time when parents struggle to buy the good sneakers for the kids so they're not embarrassed at school . . . that in that nation the great issue of the day, and the appropriate focus of our concern, is making other people pay for her birth-control pills. That's not a stand, it's a non sequitur. She is not, as Rush Limbaugh oafishly, bullyingly said, a slut. She is a ninny, a narcissist and a fool.

And she was one of the great faces of the party in Charlotte. That is extreme. Childish, too.

In the early paragraphs of her piece Noonan delivers one of the most masterfully crafted insults (directed at Vice-President Biden) I think I've ever read. It employs language a bit stronger than one might wish, even if one thinks it merited, but it'll probably go down in the annals of journalism as a classic. Check it out at the link.

Compromise and the Ratchet Effect

Politics is all about compromising, we're often told, and when one side refuses to cooperate there's gridlock and nothing gets done. The liberal media tell us that the reason the Obama administration has failed to solve our nation's economic problems is that the conservatives in congress simply refuse to compromise.

Actually, there are two good reasons why conservatives don't, and shouldn't, compromise with liberals. One is that compromise is based on trust, and conservatives simply don't believe that Democrats can be trusted. Back in the early '90s George H.W. Bush campaigned on a pledge not to raise taxes. The Democrat leadership, however, managed to convince him that if he would ignore his pledge and raise taxes they would agree to cut spending. Both sides would anger their base, to be sure, but we'd achieve a lower deficit and maintain fiscal sanity (those were the days), and the country would be better for it.

Well, Bush agreed to raise taxes, breaking his "no new taxes" promise and all but ruining his chance of reelection, but the Democrats never reduced spending. In fact, with the increased tax revenue they decided to increase spending. The memory of being bamboozled by the Democrats makes todays conservative Republicans very leery of liberal promises.

The second reason is that conservatives believe that compromising with liberals is a losing proposition even when they don't immediately get swindled. This is because of the ratchet effect inherent in any compromise between one party which wants to maintain the status quo and another which wants radical change.

Here's how the ratchet works: Consider a series of numbers from 1 to 10 representing the various positions on any issue. The national consensus is, let's say, at 4 on some issue, but liberals want to take it to 10. So they propose a compromise that would move the issue to 6. As soon as conservatives agree to this "compromise" they've already lost the battle and will soon lose the war because we, as a society, are now moving in the direction the liberals wanted to take us all along.

Some years later, the Democrats propose another compromise. They propose that we move to 8. If the conservatives agree then we've moved almost completely to the liberal goal. Conservatives have gotten nothing and liberals are almost home, and of course there's no going back to 4. Anybody who suggests a return to the status quo ante is labelled a reactionary. The process continues over time until the nation is finally at a 10. If conservatives refuse to go along they're called obstructionists and do-nothings.

Here's something else: Even when society has been moved to 10 on a given issue liberal/progressives cannot be satisfied. The 10 is now the new status quo, and if progressives are satisfied with the status quo they're no longer progressive. They must, in order to be a progressive in good standing, continue to push the envelope ever further to the left. Because of the ratchet what was unimaginable yesterday, becomes a fringe view today and a mainstream view tomorrow. Meanwhile, those who think we never should have moved away from 4 in the first place are called "extremists."

Take gay marriage as an example. When the gay rights movement first got under way it was a movement that asked only for tolerance of an "alternative lifestyle." Americans agreed, but then the request for tolerance morphed into a demand for acceptance and then into a demand for approval. Once that was largely achieved we were confronted with further demands that gays be allowed to marry. If the ratchet ever crosses that threshhold, which seems inevitable, what'll be left for a good progressive to fight for?

Right now campaigns to make polyamory legal seem way out on the fringe, but once gay marriage is codified polyamory will probably move much closer to the mainstream. Even further out on the fringe are those who wish to remove barriers to consensual sex between men and boys, but once polyamory has been ratcheted into place pedophilia will not seem so bizarre.

What's bizarre, after all, is simply what we're not used to. As Alexander Pope wrote:

Evil is a monster of such frightful mein,
that to be hated needs but to be seen.
But seen too oft, familiar with her face,
First we endure, then we pity, then we embrace.

When one believes his position is correct, whether on any moral, social, or economic issue, compromise is an abandonment of his principles. If politicians are willing to betray their principles just to appear "reasonable" to the media then they've also betrayed the trust the people have placed in them and should be voted out of office.

God and the Democrats

The Democrat delegates to their convention had earlier this week quietly removed language from their party platform that recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and also voted to expunge the phrase "God-given potential" from their document, presumably because a lot of delegates don't want to give the impression that they might think God is in some way relevant to our public life.

Their seeming willingness to stick their thumb in the eye of both Jewish and Christian voters won them considerable opprobrium so on Wednesday the leadership, apparently at the urging of President Obama who foresaw a needless disaster in the making, moved to have the language restored. The voice vote on restoring the language was inconclusive (it required a 2/3 vote) so on the third attempt the motion was declared passed despite the fact that the nays seemed to actually outnumber the yays, and the delegates erupted in a chorus of boos at the undemocratic manner in which the change was rammed through despite the wishes of the delegates.

This presented the nation with the charming spectacle of a substantial number of liberal Democrats voting "no" on both our Israeli allies' right to decide where they will have their own capital and on a tacit recognition in their platform of the existence of God. I'm sure it's not the picture that the Democrats wanted, but it shows the extent to which the party has become the party of secularism and the party of indifference to Jewish concerns.

Here's a video of the debacle:

Incidentally, President Obama has in the past declared that the question of the Israeli capital should be a matter of negotiations with the Palestinians. It's not his position, at least not his public position, that Jerusalem is, or should be, recognized as the Israeli capital.

Yahoo has the story here.

Having spent much of the first two days demanding that women have the right to a tax-payer funded abortion at any stage of a pregnancy and demanding, too, that the Republicans help them raise taxes, it seems that the Democrats are happy now to present themselves to the nation as the party of death, taxes, and secularism.

Sounds like an electoral trifecta.

The Vacuity of Evolutionary Ethics

The recent edition of the journal Science (subscription required) has a review by Rudolph Griss of a new book by atheistic biologist E.O. Wilson titled The Social Conquest of Earth. At one point Griss says this:

As intriguing as self-understanding may be from an intellectual point of view, Wilson sees it as a means to an end: something that must be achieved if humans are to bring their unsustainable and destructive lifestyle to a halt. He laments, "We are needlessly turning the gold we inherited from our forebears into straw, and for that we will be despised by our descendants." We are not only polluting our planet beyond recognition, we are also bidding good-bye forever to species after species. Wilson tells us to grow up, to stop making excuses and shuffling off responsibility onto deities. We alone are responsible for the future of our planet. The sooner we understand who we are and where we come from, the sooner we will know where we need to go.

I thought this was interesting because Wilson seems to assume that we have some sort of moral obligation to future generations not to despoil and deplete the planet, but where does such an obligation come from? Who imposes it? Why is it wrong to exploit the earth's resources to make our lives as comfortable as we can and let future generations fend for themselves? Our descendants may despise us for acting this way but why should we care? What's wrong with selfishness?

It may seem obvious to some readers that of course we have a duty to care about the planet and our descendants, but it's not obvious to me at all that we do, or at least it's not obvious to me that an atheist has any grounds for believing that we do.

Indeed, I don't think Wilson, who is a Darwinian materialist, can cogently answer any of the above questions, because for the atheist there simply is no answer. To paraphrase philosopher Richard Rorty*, for the secular man there's no answer to the question, why not be selfish. Or to paraphrase Richard Dawkins*, what's to prevent us from saying that selfishness is right? That's a genuinely difficult question.

If we're simply the product of blind, purposeless Darwinian processes which enabled us to succeed in the struggle for survival then to suggest that we should not be selfish, that we should suppress our instincts and deny ourselves the benefits of the earth's largesse for the sake of generations yet to come, is absurd.

The only basis for thinking that we have a duty to conserve the earth's resources is the belief that a transcendent moral authority, a God, has imposed upon us the obligation to be stewards of the earth and to care about the well-being of others. Take away the divine source of that obligation, as Wilson does, and the obligation itself disappears.

Atheists delight in calling theists irrational, but what's more irrational, believing that we have a duty to care for the planet because the creator of the universe imposes that duty upon us, or believing that we have a duty to care for the planet even though there's nothing at all that could possibly impose such a duty upon us?

If Wilson thinks we do have such a duty then maybe he should reassess his commitment to atheism.

You can read more about Griss' review of Wilson's book at Evolution News and Notes.

* I substituted the word "selfish" for Rorty's original word "cruelty," and I substituted "selfishness" for Dawkin's original word "Hitler."

Diet, Dementia, and Insulin

New Scientist has a fascinating article on recent research showing that Alzheimer's disease is connected to insulin which is connected to a high fat/sugar diet. Here's the lede:

Suzanne De La Monte's rats were disoriented and confused. Navigating their way around a circular water maze - a common memory test for rodents - they quickly forgot where they were, and couldn't figure out how to locate the hidden, submerged safety platform. Instead, they splashed around aimlessly. "They were demented. They couldn't learn or remember," says de la Monte, a neuropathologist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

A closer look at her rats' brains uncovered devastating damage. Areas associated with memory were studded with bright pink plaques, like rocks in a climbing wall, while many neurons, full to bursting point with a toxic protein, were collapsing and crumbling. As they disintegrated, they lost their shape and their connections with other neurons, teetering on the brink of death.

Such changes are the hallmarks of Alzheimer's disease, and yet they arose in surprising circumstances. De la Monte had interfered with the way the rats' brains respond to insulin. The hormone is most famous for controlling blood sugar levels, but it also plays a key role in brain signalling. When de la Monte disrupted its path to the rats' neurons, the result was dementia.

Poor sensitivity to insulin is typically associated with type 2 diabetes, in which liver, fat and muscle cells fail to respond to the hormone. But results such as de la Monte's have led some researchers to wonder whether Alzheimer's may sometimes be another version of diabetes - one that hits the brain. Some have even renamed it "type 3 diabetes".

If they are right - and a growing body of evidence suggests they might be - the implications are deeply troubling. Since calorific foods are known to impair our body's response to insulin, we may be unwittingly poisoning our brains every time we chow down on burgers and fries. People with type 2 diabetes, who have already developed insulin resistance, may be particularly at risk. "The epidemic of type 2 diabetes, if it continues on its current trajectory, is likely to be followed by an epidemic of dementia," says Ewan McNay of the University at Albany in New York. "That's going to be a huge challenge to the medical and care systems."

All of which highlights the importance of eating healthier foods and taking exercise to reduce your risk of dementia. It may even be possible to reverse - or at least decelerate - some of the cognitive decline in people who already have Alzheimer's, by targeting the underlying insulin resistance. If so, that would suggest new treatments for the disease, which has so far evaded any attempt to treat it.

There's much more at the link. The story suggests dietary supplements that, if this research is correct, can help stave off or decelerate dementia.

Extremists

Whenever someone in politics calls someone else "extreme" or "extremist" it's safe to assume that all they mean is that the person to whom they are referring disagrees with them. The word has, like the word "racist," been used so much it has lost its meaning and its punch.

The latest target to be vilified by the term is Paul Ryan, the GOP candidate for vice-president. Ryan, and others for that matter, have been labelled "extreme" because they hold the following views:

• They believe that marriage should be between a man and a woman.
• They believe that the second amendment grants the right to own and carry a firearm.
• They believe that abortion kills an innocent life and should be reserved for the most dire of circumstances.
• They believe that a nation should control its borders and that people who are here illegally should not be granted the same rights as are granted to citizens.
• They believe that terrorists should be treated as threats to society and to innocent people and that taxpayers should not be required to subsidize a comfortable existence for them in prison.
• They believe that we can't continue to spend money we don't have and that if we're going to save entitlements from going bankrupt we have to fundamentally change the way we do them.

If you believe any of these things then you, too, are an "extremist" and as such your views deserve to be dismissed, disregarded, and even suppressed by those who deem you to be so odious as to hold opinions as reprehensible as these.

Ironically, those who hold the opposite views are never called extremists. For example, those who want to change two thousand years of tradition by allowing gays to marry, those who wish to ban firearms in the hands of private citizens, those who would extend "abortion" even to living infants, those who advocate open borders and unrestricted immigration, and those who believe that we can continue to borrow and spend and hang an anchor of debt around the necks of our children are never called extremists.

Yet if anything in our current political landscape is extreme those positions surely are.

The Faith of a Darwinian

Once upon a time a boy went for a walk with his uncle along a country road. As they walked along the boy happened to notice that atop a thirty foot high telephone pole a rock, which appeared to weigh at least twenty pounds, was perched.

"How did that get there?" the boy inquired of his uncle.

"Well, lad," the uncle replied, "a strong wind once blew and picked up the rock and dropped it atop that pole."

This seemed very improbable to the boy, but who was he to question his wise uncle?

They walked a little further and the boy began to notice that on the top of each fence post they passed there was a turtle. "How did those get there?" the boy asked his uncle, "Did someone put them there?"

"No, my good boy," the uncle replied. "Apparently there were long boards that leaned against the poles to form ramps which enabled the turtles to wander to the top."

This also seemed unlikely to the child and he took on a puzzled expression. "Are you sure somebody didn't put the turtles there, uncle?"

"Of course," the man replied confidently. People used to think that turtles were placed atop posts deliberately, but we've come to see that that's all superstitious nonsense that simply requires too much faith to believe. We know better today. The turtles used ramps."

"But there aren't any ramps anywhere around. What happened to them?" the child asked disingenuously.

"They obviously must have blown away," replied his sagacious uncle.

The boy was perplexed. He thought that it took an awfully strong dose of credulity to think that turtles climbed ramps to get to the tops of the fence posts.

"What's the matter?" his uncle asked perceiving his consternation.

"Well, I just have one more question," the youngster answered. "How did the ramps get there in the first place?"

The moral of the story is that when one encounters something as improbable as turtles on posts or stones atop a pole, it's safe to assume they didn't get there by accident.

Out of Touch Republicans

There's one criticism that Democrats often make of Republicans that I think is inarguably accurate. Democrats accuse Republican politicians of being out of touch, and they certainly seem to be, but the people they're most out of touch with are their own supporters.

Two recent episodes illustrate the point. The first was Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin's claim that raped women don't often conceive and that even if they do they shouldn't abort the baby. Republicans from Romney on down were incensed. Rather than pointing out the obvious that - setting aside Mr. Akin's questionable biological understandings - his views on abortion are those of most of the world's Catholics and Evangelicals and are certainly more defensible and less extreme than the view of Mr. Obama that a live-born infant should be allowed to die if the mother had tried to have it aborted, they instead unanimously called for Mr. Akin to disappear.

Yet, among Missouri voters Mr. Akin is still a popular alternative to incumbent Claire McCaskill, especially among Republicans, and polls show him recovering from the initial burst of bad publicity suffered for his unwise remark about how the female body responds to emotional trauma.

A second example was the reaction of the Republican elites to Clint Eastwood's presentation at the Republican convention last Thursday night. The party mucky-mucks were aghast at what seemed to be a rambling, somewhat off-color skewering of President Obama, but the folks on the floor and watching on television apparently loved it. You can watch it here if you wish.

Mike Huckabee has a particularly hard-hitting piece on the Akin affair here, and Jonah Goldberg at National Review has some interesting reflections on Clint Eastwood's boffo performance at the convention.

I wonder if we'll not soon see a lot of the party's big-wigs start moon-walking away from their earlier disavowals and condemnation of both Akin and Eastwood. The man who should be leading the backtrack pack is, as Huckabee points out, Karl Rove who has managed to become as unpopular among conservatives as he is among liberal Democrats.

President or King?

Over the last four years it has not been uncommon to hear people ask why it is that President Obama is not more popular. After all, he's genial, witty, boasts a charming smile and a lovely family. What's not to like? The answer offers itself that those who remain unseduced by Mr. Obama's personal charisms surely must disdain him for his skin color. From here it's but a short step to the conclusion that to oppose Mr. Obama is prima facie evidence of racism.

This is, of course, ludicrous, but it's a popular meme in places like MSNBC where it has been frequently alleged that joking about the birther controversy, or Mr. Obama's penchant for golf, or citing his connections to Chicago are all code-speak for racial animosity toward the President. Don't ask how that might be because trying to explain the reasoning behind what's said on MSNBC often has the same damaging effect on one's brain cells as does alcohol.

At any rate, the obvious reason why much of the country is disenchanted with Mr. Obama is that they're very concerned about his policies. His spending has so burdened us with debt that it's probably fair to say that very few of today's young people will enjoy the same standard of living as did their parents and grandparents. His hostility toward business has perpetuated an unfavorable business climate and a high unemployment rate that have lasted longer than any since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

But one of the deepest concerns that many Americans have about Mr. Obama is how he views the office of the presidency itself. Increasingly, he appears to be taking on the role of an autocrat rather than a president. Here's what I mean: We live in a democratic republic in which the people govern themselves through their elected representatives. The laws that are promulgated by the legislature ideally reflect the will of the people. When they don't the legislators find themselves out of work, as many of them did in 2010.

A president should respect the people's will. He's there to serve them, not to rule them. He's there to execute the laws enacted by our representatives. Thus, when Mr. Obama takes it upon himself to unilaterally decide which laws he will enforce and which he won't, when he takes it upon himself to change, by fiat, the laws as they were debated and voted upon, he's acting more like a sovereign than a president. We decided early in our history that we would not be ruled by a sovereign, but Mr. Obama doesn't seem to understand that, and this has many Americans very troubled.

In what ways has the president disregarded the will of the people? I'll mention three:

• He has issued an executive order that substantively alters the welfare reforms of the 1990s.
• He has decreed that young people in the country illegally will be granted legal immunity.
• He has essentially waived provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act that he thought too burdensome.

Understand, that the merits of each of these steps are not what is in dispute. They may be good or they may not, but in our system of government if a law should be changed it's to be changed by the people's representatives, not by a president acting as if he were a king. If an administration can simply choose not to enforce laws the president doesn't like then which law is next? And if he can pick and choose which laws to enforce, what's to stop him from deciding that his government will no longer recognize the rights granted in the 1st or 2nd amendments to the Constitution?

At the moment, of course, the president is still subject to the courts, but if he wins a second term and can add one more liberal jurist to the Supreme Court who will, like the four already there, simply rubber-stamp whatever he wants to do, then this country will have become a very different place than it was even ten years ago.

Some might say that this is all baseless paranoia. Maybe so, but perhaps it's the case that those who say that are themselves deluded and naive. In any case, why take the chance? We don't need as president someone who acts as though he sees himself as a benevolent dictator.

For Political Wonks

The liberal side of the media spectrum has been trying hard to tarnish Paul Ryan's speech at the Republican National Convention the other night by accusing the vice-presidential candidate of having lied about a number of claims he made in his acceptance speech.

Perhaps their foremost complaint was Ryan's assertion that despite candidate Obama's 2008 promise to keep a GM plant in his home town open for "a hundred years" the plant closed down the following year.

Obama's votaries among the pundits have been insisting that the plant closed before Obama came to office and therefore Ryan was distorting the facts to make Obama look bad in his speech.

Jim Geraghty at National Review sets the matter straight. It turns out that Ryan wasn't lying after all.

The liberal website ThinkProgress raised several additional objections to Ryan's speech, all of which are equally misplaced according to Avik Roy at Forbes. Among the accusations made by ThinkProgress are these:

Charge #1: Paul Ryan accused Obama of cutting Medicare by $716 billion, but Ryan’s own budget preserved those cuts.

Charge #2: Paul Ryan criticized Obama for ignoring the recommendations of the Simpson-Bowles deficit commission. But Ryan voted against those recommendations himself.

Charge #3: Paul Ryan blamed Obama for Standard & Poor’s downgrade of American government debt from AAA to AA+, but Paul Ryan is actually to blame because he resisted tax increases that would have closed the deficit.

Charge #4: Paul Ryan opposed the stimulus, but he lobbied for stimulus grants that went to his district.

Roy makes the case that none of these allegations are nearly as incriminating as those who make them would have us believe. They're either wildly overstated, they tell only part of the story, or they're otherwise misleading.

Those wonkish types who don't mind wading through the political tall grass should go to the link and check out Roy's essay.

When a Calorie Is Not a Calorie

So you're on a diet and counting calories and wondering why you're still not losing (or gaining) weight? The reason may be that the calorie content of the food listed on the package is not really what your body is taking from that food.

Rob Dunn explains why in an illuminating essay at Scientific American. He writes that:

Fat, it has been estimated, has nine calories per gram, whereas carbohydrates and proteins have just four; fiber is sometimes counted separately and gets awarded a piddling two. Every box of every food you have ever bought is labeled based on these estimates; too bad then that they are so often wrong.

Estimates of the number of calories in different kinds of foods measure the average number of calories we could get from those foods based only on the proportions of fat, carbohydrates, protein and sometimes fiber they contain (In essence, calories ingested minus calories egested). A variety of standard systems exist, all of which derive from the original developed by Wilbur Atwater more than a hundred years ago. They are all systems of averages. No food is average.

Differences exist even within a given kind of food. Take, for example, cooked vegetables. Cell walls in some plants are tougher to break down than those in others; nature, of course, varies in everything. If the plant material we eat has more of its cell walls broken down we can get more of the calories from the goodies inside. In some plants, cooking ruptures most cell walls; in others, such as cassava, cell walls hold strong and hoard their precious calories in such a way that many of them pass through our bodies intact.

It is not just cooked vegetables though. Nuts flagrantly do their own thing, which might be expected given that nuts are really seeds whose mothers are invested in having them escape digestion. Peanuts, pistachios and almonds all seem to be less completely digested than their levels of protein, fat, carbohydrates and fiber would suggest. How much? Just this month, a new study by Janet Novotny and colleagues at the USDA found that when the “average” person eats almonds she receives just 128 calories per serving rather than the 170 calories “on the label.”

According to Dunn there are lots of other factors involved in determining how many calories we derive from a portion of food. Everything from the length of our intestines to the kind of microbes we have in our intestines to whether we're lactose intolerant to how long we cook and grind up our food all determine how many calories we harvest from it. Dunn's article is interesting, especially so for those concerned about diet and nutrition.

Does "Truth" Exist?

We find ourselves living in an age in which a lot of people have come to believe that the very notion of a truth that is true for everyone, independently of each person's personal subjective feelings, is obsolete. The belief that there is no objective truth is one of the hallmarks of what is sometimes referred to as the post-modern era.

Philosopher William Lane Craig takes a question on his website from a reader who has embraced the skeptical view that objective truth doesn't exist.

The reader puts his question this way (slightly edited for clarity):

Dr. Craig, life has become absurd to me. Conversations with several individuals in my school years have taught me that most do not think that there is such a thing as truth, rather the word is only a matter of opinion and therefore has no absolute meaning. At the end of my conversations it has been revealed to me that anything that is not a scientific fact is false, and that this thing truth is only a coping mechanism that human beings have created to make it appear that life has meaning, but in reality it has none. How do you as a Philosopher/Theologian deal with this? I am anxious for your response!

The first thing to note about this claim that there is no truth, indeed it's the first thing Craig says in his reply, is that the claim is self-refuting. If there really is no truth then the claim that there is no truth must be false.

And if the claim that there is no truth is true then, again, the claim is false because there is at least one truth, i.e. that there is no truth.

There's much more that can be said about this, and Craig subjects the denial of truth to a deeper analysis at the link. Given the skepticism about truth that exists in some quarters, his response is important.