If a Tree Falls in the Forest

In my classes we recently discussed the question of what we mean when we say that something is real. One aspect of our experience we specifically addressed were sensory phenomena like color, fragrance, taste, and sound.

Students often hold the view that these phenomena are objectively real, that sugar is sweet regardless of whether anyone ever tastes sugar, the sky would be blue even if there were never any living things on earth to see it, and so on.

After we had moved on to other topics I came across an article that describes how music is transferred to a computer and then to the listener's ear. The description illustrates the point that a piano, for example, doesn't actually make music. The music is made in our brains. If there's no ear to hear it, no brain to interpret what the ear hears, there simply is no music.

Here's the article's description of the process of recording music for storage on a computer:

• The acoustic waves were picked up by a microphone and converted to electrical pulses.
• The pulses were converted by an analogue-to-digital (A-to-D) converter into numbers representing the frequencies and dynamics of the waveforms.
• The digital signals were compressed by an algorithm into a coded representation storable on an external medium, such as an MP3 file.
• The code was written as magnetic spots on a hard drive according to a storage algorithm that does not necessarily store them in physical order.
• On demand, a read head on the drive reconstructed the bits in their proper sequence and transmitted them as electrical pulses to the central processor.
• The CPU relayed the file to a router, where the file was packetized and sent over the internet to a specified address, possibly traversing electrical wires, the air (radio transmissions), or space via an orbiting satellite along the way.
• The destination site’s router reassembled the packets into a file for storage on a “cloud” server such as YouTube or SoundCloud.
• The website embedded the file’s location in its local server, which you, the listener, accessed by means of touch, using a mouse, keypad, or touchscreen.
• Your computer’s sound card converted the digital signals into audio output through speakers.

Notice that at no point in this process is there the sensation of sound. Nothing is actually heard. The article's description stops here, but if we were to continue the bullet points we could say that,

• The audio output of the speakers consists of waves of energy traveling through the air like waves in a slinky.
• When these strike an ear they're transformed into an electrical impulse that travels along the auditory nerve.
• When that impulse reaches the brain it's converted, in some mysterious, marvelous way that no one understands, into the sensation of music.

Until that final event happens there is no music, no sound at all. The music is created by our brain and the relevant sensory apparatus. Sound is a sensation that we experience and without the involvement of a sense there can be no sensation. To insist that sound exists even though no one hears it is like insisting that pain exists even though no one feels it.

And if that's true of sound and pain it must be true of all of our other sensory experiences as well.

And if that's true what would the world be like if we had additional senses, or fewer senses? Why think that the world is exactly the way we perceive it to be, or, for that matter, anything at all like we perceive it to be?

Just something to think about over the weekend.

A Goldilocks Collision

Astronomer Hugh Ross, in a 2014 article at Salvo, discussed some of the current theories on the formation of our moon. Those theories posit a collision between an object about the size of Mars with the early earth and require such an astonishing precision in the masses, momentum and timing of the colliding objects that it's almost literally incredible that it happened at all.

Our astonishment is magnified by the fact that our moon, which is virtually unique in our solar system in terms of the ratio of its size to that of the earth and its proximity to the earth, has to have almost exactly the properties it has in order for life to be sustained on earth.

Like the story of Goldilocks and the three bears who sampled her porridge, everything about the collision had to be just right. Check out this computer simulation of the collision:

Robin Canup, the author of one of the more popular theories on the moon's origin, wrote that, "Current theories on the formation of the Moon owe too much to cosmic coincidences."

And earth scientist Tim Elliott observed that the degree and kinds of complexity and fine-tuning required by lunar origin models appear to be increasing at an exponential rate. Among those who study lunar origin, he notes, "the sequence of conditions that currently seems necessary in these...versions of lunar formation have led to philosophical disquiet."

Ross adds that,

Thanks to the exquisitely fine-tuned nature of this impact event, the collision:

1. Replaced the earth's thick, suffocating atmosphere with one containing the perfect air pressure for efficient lung performance, the ideal heat-trapping capability, and the just-right transparency for efficient photosynthesis.
2. Gave the new atmosphere the optimal chemical composition to foster advanced life.
3. Augmented the earth's mass and density enough to allow it to gravitationally retain a large, but not too large, quantity of water vapor for billions of years.
4. Raised the amount of iron in the earth's core close to the level needed to provide the earth with a strong, enduring magnetic field (the remainder came from a later collision event). This magnetic field shields life from deadly cosmic rays and solar x-rays.
5. Delivered to the earth's core and mantle quantities of iron and other critical elements in just-right amounts to produce sufficiently long-lasting, continent-building plate tectonics at just-right levels. Fine-tuned plate tectonics also performs a crucial role in compensating for the sun's increasing brightness.
6. Increased the iron content of the earth's crust, permitting a huge abundance of ocean life that, in turn, can support advanced life.
7. Salted the earth's interior with an abundance of long-lasting radioisotopes, the heat from which drives most of the earth's tectonic activity and volcanism.
8. Produced the moon, which gradually slowed the earth's rotation rate so that eventually advanced life could thrive on earth.
9. Left the moon with a just-right mass and distance relative to the earth to stabilize the tilt of the earth's rotation axis, protecting the planet from rapid and extreme climatic variations.
10. Created the moon with the just-right diameter and the just-right distance relative to the earth so that, at the narrow epoch in solar-system history when human life would be possible, humans on earth would witness perfect solar eclipses, which would help them make important discoveries about the solar system and universe.

If we didn't have a moon like the one we have we wouldn't be here, and yet the existence of our moon is such a highly improbable occurrence that anyone who studies it is almost overwhelmed by how fortuitous it is.

No wonder, then, that many of the people who study it, astronomers like Ross, believe that the earth/moon system, just like virtually every other aspect of cosmic architecture, is not an accident, but is rather the intentional product of an unimaginably intelligent and powerful engineer.

There's much more in Ross' article. It was written nine years ago which leads one to wonder how much more we know about the moon today that adds to the breathtaking scope of coincidences than was known in 2014.

The Miracle of Mathematics

Perhaps the grandest pursuit of contemporary theoretical scientists is their search for a single theory that would explain all the laws of physics in a single equation. The quest is based on the assumption that there's a rational unity to the universe, that the universe can be completely explained mathematically.

Suppose, though, that the standard explanation for the origin of the universe, that it came into being in a massive expansion of mass/energy from a single infinitely dense point, is true. If so, why should scientists, or at least naturalistic scientists, assume that a mindless eruption of mass/energy out of nothing should obey the laws of mathematics? Where does the math that describes the world come from?

A fellow at Uncommon Descent quotes several very bright people on this question.

For example, there was this from Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner who wrote in 1960 that,

The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve.

Wigner also wrote this:

certainly it is hard to believe that our [mathematical] reasoning power was brought, by Darwin’s process of natural selection, to the perfection which it seems to possess.

It is difficult to avoid the impression that a miracle confronts us here, quite comparable in its striking nature to the miracle that the human mind can string a thousand arguments together without getting itself into contradictions, or to the two miracles of the existence of laws of nature and of the human mind’s capacity to divine them.

In a 1952 letter to his friend Maurice Solovine, Albert Einstein stated that the mathematical order of the cosmos and the fact that we can comprehend that order is something of a miracle:

You find it strange that I consider the comprehensibility of the world ... as a miracle or as an eternal mystery. Well, a priori, one should expect a chaotic world, which cannot be grasped by the mind in any way .. the kind of order created by Newton’s theory of gravitation, for example, is wholly different.

Even if a man proposes the axioms of the theory, the success of such a project presupposes a high degree of ordering of the objective world, and this could not be expected a priori. That is the ‘miracle’ which is constantly reinforced as our knowledge expands.

There lies the weakness of positivists and professional atheists who are elated because they feel that they have not only successfully rid the world of gods but “bared the miracles.”

The astonishing ability of human reason to comprehend the universe, the fact that the universe is explicable in terms of our mathematics, is very difficult to explain on any naturalistic view of the universe's origin. Why should scientists entertain the expectation and hope that they'll eventually discover a single unified theory that explains everything? Why, on naturalism, should they assume that there's an underlying rational, mathematical structure to the cosmos?

The fact that there is such a structure makes sense on a theistic worldview but is simply a leap of blind faith on any naturalistic view.

As David Klinghoffer, writing at Evolution News, once put it:

Why in the world would a scientist blithely assume that there is or is even likely to be one unifying rational form to all things, unless he assumed that there is a singular, overarching intelligence that has placed it there? Why shouldn’t the world be chaotic, utterly random, meaningless?

Why should one presume that something as orderly and rational as an equation would describe the universe’s structure?

I would argue that the only finally reasonable ground for that assumption is the belief in an intelligent Creator, who has already thought into the world the very mathematics that the patient scientist discovers.

Whatever the case, it truly is remarkable that the universe lends itself to rational inquiry by intelligent minds. Is this just an enormously improbable coincidence or is Klinghoffer correct?

Imagine that an 18th-century linguist constructed an entire language - replete with grammatical rules, a dictionary, etc. - completely in his mind. Imagine that he then learns of the discovery of tribe of people previously unknown to exist who spoke exactly that language.

Few would think that a coincidence. Rather they'd think instead that the linguist must've know about this tribe. Coincidences like that are so astronomically improbable as to cast a lot of doubt on the linguist's honesty.

The relationship of mathematics to the world is something like that. Mathematicians create mathematical systems and then it's discovered that they actually describe phenomena in the physical world.

This is why people like Einstein and Wigner think this correlation to be a "miracle."

This short video gives further explanation of the problem:

Bad Idea

Republican candidate Nikki Haley has floated the idea that we should use our military against Mexico's drug cartels. Emotionally, that's an attractive proposal; rationally, it's not so clear. National Review's Jim Geraghty walks us through why:

I don’t think that it’s just because I’ve watched Clear and Present Danger a bunch of times that I hope we have exceptionally clear objectives, plans, and terms of engagement for this proposal — including how we define victory, and when we would declare the operation complete and over.

Because this proposal sounds like a messy, dirty war against transnational criminal organizations known for their exceptional ruthlessness and brutality, that also have exceptional practice at sneaking into our country.

You think we have hostage crises now? Roughly 1.6 million Americans live in Mexico, and tens of millions of U.S. tourists go there each year. If a cartel wants to make retaliatory attacks against American civilians, it will have a near-limitless supply of easy targets.

Cartels are indisputably evil and violent, a menace, an enemy of the United States and its people. But their primary objective is almost always to make a profit. They’re not “at war” with us in the way that a traditional terrorist group is.

The cartels aren’t out to topple our government or establish a theocracy. They’re more akin to the mafia.

Look, if someone can point to compelling evidence that sending a cruise missile into some cartel chief’s mansion really will make a serious and lasting dent in the drug trade, I’m all for it. This wouldn’t be the first time that U.S. military forces have played a role in the war on drugs.

But our experience in the drug war has been that taking out one kingpin creates a messy fight among the underlings and lieutenants to fill the power vacuum, followed by the gradual emergence of another kingpin.

This doesn’t mean we stop attempting to arrest, capture, prosecute, and incarcerate kingpins. But it’s a question of which tool is most effective for achieving our objective. Using the military to blow up drug labs or bases of operation isn’t quite like trying to use a sledgehammer to kill a fly, it’s more like using a flamethrower to kill mosquitos. I mean, you might get them, but you’re going to create a lot of new problems in the process.

Geraghty goes on to discuss a few more drawbacks, such as using our military in a sovereign country which hasn't requested it and doesn't want it.

Just how cooperative do you think these governments will be on anything — including migration and enforcement of borders — if we start bombing targets in their countries against their will? Are we willing to occupy any territory in the course of executing these operations?

Are you starting to see how this could get very complicated and difficult to end, very quickly?

There's more at the link, but he concludes with this:

How can so many voters in the current GOP electorate be convinced that interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan were catastrophic failures that cost the country far too much in blood in treasure, and sending arms to Ukraine is a terrible waste with no moral dimension or geopolitical upside, but using U.S. military forces to launch a war against drug cartels in Mexico and Central America is going to be easy-peasy?

There's a political principle called the Law of Unintended Consequences that says that any novel action, unless thoroughly thought-through, is very likely to produce consequences that were completely unforeseen, unintended and often catastrophic.

Conservatives have raised this principle almost to the status of a totem, progressives almost completely disregard it. It seems to me that conservative reverence for it is much the wiser course, which is why we should be very careful about undertaking any military action in Mexico.

The Amazing Structure of the Genetic Code

Imagine a software code of 0s and 1s in a long string, and imagine that if you read off each digit in sequence the string coded for a particular meaning, but if you only read off every third digit the string coded for a completely different meaning. Now imagine the improbability of such a code being produced by random combinations of 0s and 1s by completely mindless processes and forces.

If you do this little thought experiment, you get some idea of the complexity of the DNA code in the nuclei of every cell of our bodies, and why so many people not committed a priori to naturalistic materialism believe that the code had to be the product of an intelligent mind.

DNA is not quite like the preceding example, but it does have overlapping codes whose regulation is carried out by a complex of proteins which themselves couldn't have existed until the code for them existed. But the code couldn't have come about until the proteins were available to allow the code to be read.

An article by biologist Ann Gauger at Evolution News discusses this property of what biologists call "alternative reading frames." She uses this graphic to illustrate:

Gauger goes on to explain:

If you look at the figure ... you’ll see the sequence of DNA from a human mitochondrion: AAATGAACGAAA and so on. Above in red you see the nucleotides (ATCG) have been grouped in threes, and a letter assigned to each. Each group of three is a codon, and each unique codon specifies a particular amino acid, indicated by the red letters: K W T K I, etc. That is the protein sequence that the DNA specifies for that particular way of reading the DNA.

That way of reading the DNA, with that set of groups of three, is called a reading frame, because it establishes the frame for the way we read the information in the gene. In this case it encodes the protein ATP8.

If DNA were a human code, then it would be inconceivable to have a code that could be read in more than one frame at a time. By this I mean starting at one nucleotide and getting one sequence and starting at another nucleotide and getting another sequence with a different meaning.

But that is exactly what happens in this stretch of mitochondrial DNA. Look below the nucleotides to a different set of letters in blue. Notice that they are offset from the first reading frame by two nucleotides. This changes the way the nucleotides are read. The first codon is ATG, the second AAC, and so on. And the resulting protein, ATP6, has a very different sequence from that of the first, ATP8.

That's not all. DNA is double-stranded and when the strands separate in order to be read it's possible that both be read simultaneously, one forward and one backward, so that six different proteins can be coded for by a single segment of DNA.

This is an absolutely stupefying level of complex information, and the notion that it could've come about in some primordial environment as a result of eons of blind, undirected chance requires herculean credulity.

The simplest and most plausible explanation for the complexity of the DNA code is that it was engineered by an intelligence.

The only way to avoid that conclusion is to eliminate any possibility of such an intelligence at the very outset, to decide that no such intelligence exists and that therefore the DNA code must have been generated by blind impersonal forces no matter how improbable that would be. But why decide that? What reason can be adduced upon which such a decision might be based? Why assume that no such agent exists when the existence of such a being would explain so much, not just about DNA, but about the world and life generally?

The only reason anyone makes that assumption is that they have a strong preference that no such being exist and they allow their preference to shape everything else they believe.

The conclusion that an intelligent agent must've been involved in the development of the structure of the DNA code certainly seems warranted by the evidence. The big question, then, is what might be the nature of the intelligent agent that designed and created this code? Who or What might it be?

Gauger doesn't address that question, but her article is still very good.

Is Some Knowledge A Priori?

The following is adapted from a post at Tough Questions Answered:

Philosophers who study how we know things (epistemologists) have long debated whether we have innate or intuitive knowledge. This kind of knowledge is often referred to as a priori knowledge. It is knowledge that one has prior to, or independently of, sense experience. It cannot be proven by experience.

The debate over a priori knowledge is important to theists because naturalists often deny the existence of most kinds of a priori knowledge and claim that we can only know what we observe with our senses. That is, they tend to be empiricists and hold that all significant knowledge is known a posteriori.

However, do we know that raping little children for fun is wrong? Most people would say “yes”, but this is an example of a priori knowledge, because we don’t come to this conclusion by observing the world around us – we just know intuitively that raping little children for fun is wrong.

Consider the following eleven examples of propositions that have been proposed as a priori knowledge by epistemologists. They're taken from several different categories of knowledge: mathematics, knowledge of “greater than,” laws of logic, morality, deductive logic, causality, knowledge of space, knowledge of God, and introspective knowledge:

1. If John is taller than Mary and Tom is taller than John, Tom is taller than Mary.
2. 5 + 7 = 12
3. Nothing is both red and green.
4. Some sentences are not both true and false.
5. If Socrates is a man and all men are mortal, Socrates is mortal.
6. Every event has a cause.
7. All material objects have size.
8. A greatest possible being necessarily exists.*
9. It is wrong to harm people just for the fun of it.
10. If I believe I exist, I exist.
11. P and not-P cannot be both true at the same time in the same way.

In order to be an example of a priori knowledge the proposition has to be true and not believed on the basis of perception, memory, or testimony. It must be self-evident and we must apprehend it intuitively.

So, do you believe that any of the above examples are known apart from any sense experience other than that involved in learning the meaning of the words? If so, you believe there is some knowledge that we have a priori. * This is the conclusion of what's called the ontological argument for the existence of God.

Capitalism's (Nearly) Miraculous Achievement

As the ideological left continues its long march through the institutions, particularly our universities, young people seem to growing much less disposed toward capitalism and much more favorably inclined toward various permutations of Marxism.

Polls show that socialism is increasingly popular among college students and many of their professors, but this increasing support for socialist economic nostrums among so many Americans is very difficult to understand given the enormous success of capitalism in increasing the well-being of so many people around the globe.

Here are a few statistics adapted from a site called Human Progress:

• In 1870 the average European life expectancy was 36 years. Globally, the figure was 30 years. Today, the numbers are 81 and 72 years respectively.
• In 1820 90% of the world's population lived in extreme poverty. Today it's only 10%.
• In 1800 43% of the world's children died before their fifth birthday. Today it's 4%.
• In 1816 only 0.87% of the world's people lived in a democratic society. Today it's 56%.
• In 1800 people living in France, at the time one of the world's richest countries, lived on 1846 calories per day. In Africa, the contemporary world's poorest continent, people now live on an average of 2624 calories per day.
• In 1800 88% of the world's population was illiterate. Today only 13% are illiterate.

Since the turn of the century the numbers are equally remarkable:

• GDP per person has risen globally by 52% since 2001, while infant mortality dropped 38% worldwide.
• Since 2001 life expectancy around the world has risen 6% and people in sub-Saharan Africa are living a full decade longer than they did prior to 2001.
• At the same time hunger has declined 33% globally since 2001, and undernourishment has decreased 27%.

These are astonishing statistics. Despite the fact that some people today live in horrendous circumstances the number who do is far less than it was a century ago and many of those who do live in penury exist in socialist dystopias like North Korea, Venezuela and Chad.

It's free markets, not centralized economic control, that have wrought this wonderful advance in human well-being, yet many people will vote in 2020 for politicians who want to kill the goose that's laying the golden eggs.

Here's a graph from Human Progress that shows the stunning explosion in GDP growth that the world has made since capitalism became more widespread in the 19th century:

According to the folks at Human Progress humanity has produced more economic output over the last two centuries than in all of the previous centuries combined. And this burst of wealth-creation led to a massive decrease in the rate of poverty.

In 1820, more than 90 per cent of the world population lived on less than $2 a day and more than 80 per cent lived on less than $1 a day (adjusted for inflation and differences in purchasing power).

By 2015, less than 10 percent of people lived on less than $1.90 a day, the World Bank’s current official definition of extreme poverty.

Why would anyone advocate undoing this modern near-miracle for human well-being in favor of policies that have consistently thrust into abject misery the people who live under them? Hopefully, someone will ask that question of the progressive leftists in our political class the next time they're up for election.

The Collapse of the New Moral Order

Beginning in the early 20th century and gaining momentum after WWII the advance of secularization posed a serious challenge to the Judeo-Christian value system that had prevailed in this country throughout most of its history. The moral duties that constrained our proclivity toward selfishness, violence, dishonesty, infidelity and general unwholesomeness were grounded in Biblical injunctions to refrain from these behaviors and those injunctions were ultimately grounded in the will of God.

As our nation grew more secular, however, Biblical morality and the will of God lost purchase with a growing faction of our population. In their place our cultural elites foisted upon us a new moral order rooted in three secular values, but with no objective basis in a transcendent moral authority that can, and will, hold us accountable those secular values were like moral sand castles at the edge of the incoming tide, and like sand castles it was just a matter of time before they began to wash away.

Gerard Baker has an illuminating column on this in the Wall Street Journal (subscription) in which he discusses the three primary values in the secular moral order and explains why they're beginning to collapse. Here are his first few paragraphs:

The new moral order our secularist elites have been busy constructing since the end of the Cold War is collapsing around them.

Over the past 30 years, the values of Judeo-Christian belief that had inspired and sustained Western civilization and culture for centuries have been steadily replaced in a moral, cultural and political revolution of the postmodern ascendancy. But the contradictions and implausibilities inherent in this successor creed have been increasingly exposed, and its failure to supply the needs of the people is discrediting it in the popular mind.

This new edifice has been built around three principal pillars: First, the ethical primacy of global obligation over national self-interest, in economic and geopolitical terms, but most directly and consequentially in a rejection of the morality of national borders and an embrace of something like open-door immigration.

Second, a quasi-biblical belief in climate catastrophism, in which man’s essential energy-consuming sinfulness can be expiated only by massive sacrifice of economic progress.

Third, a wholesale cultural self-cancellation in which the virtues, values and historic achievements of traditional civilization are rejected and replaced by a cultural hierarchy that inverts old prejudices and obliges the class of white, male heterosexuals to acknowledge their history of exploitation and submit to comprehensive social and economic reparation.

This fall, throughout the West, on three continents, each of these three pillars is crumbling.

The collapse of the first pillar is seen most vividly in the non-policy of the Biden administration toward illegal immigration and the consequent tsunami of illegal aliens flooding into communities all across the country. This tide of immigrants is putting enormous pressure on resources everywhere and threatens in some places like New York City to produce fiscal collapse. Perhaps, some opine, that's the goal.

Baker points toward Great Britain for evidence of the incipient collapse of the second pillar due to the high economic burden of doing away with gasoline powered vehicles, but he could've aimed closer to home where infatuation with the green agenda has led to the erection of vast wind farms on both land and sea. These wind farms are an aesthetic scourge, but much worse, they're disasters for birds, bats and maybe whales.

On land, wind turbines kill a minimum of a million birds each year just in the U.S. Ocean turbines presumably kill even more and, although the progressive media and politicians scoff at it, there's growing evidence that these turbines are also killing whales as this interview with Michael Shellenberger reveals:

Baker also looks abroad for evidence that the third pillar, cultural self-annihilation, is wobbling, but right here in America we're beginning to see signs of pushback against some of its more unsavory manifestations - e.g. the sexualization of our children, the teaching of critical race theory in our schools and the denigration of America and its history.

Whether that pushback will amount to a counter-revolution or come to nought can't be foreseen, but it is remarkable that Donald Trump, who rightly or wrongly is seen as the champion of those who are fed up with our cultural decline, is tied with or leading Joe Biden in the polls for the 2024 election. This, despite being faced with four indictments and a host of other political and personal liabilities. Where would he be in the polls if he wasn't carrying all that baggage?

Baker concludes that many in the West have simply had enough of our leaders’ insistence on dividing us by race and other attributes rather than uniting us around our common national identity and adds that,

The pillars are crumbling. The fight will go on. We don’t know what will replace this new moral order. But we can at least hope for a restoration of the traditional values that, ironically, through economic and cultural enrichment and political and civil liberation, permitted the West to indulge in this orgy of self-immolation in the first place.

Humans Aren't Just Animals

It's been said that the 20th century abolished the difference between man and animal (via Darwinian materialism) and that the 21st century seeks to abolish the difference between man and machine (via AI, among other things).

Whether the latter effort will be successful remains to be seen, but the conflation of man with other mammals is hard to credit. The differences between human beings and animals are not simply quantitative - humans are not simply more intelligent - they're qualitative as well.

Humans, for example, have a sense of beauty and a desire to be surrounded by it. We possess a sense of humor, a sense of morality, a sense of the transcendent, an ability to create music and an ability to think abstractly, all of which are unique in the animal kingdom.

Paul Gosselin, in his book Flight from the Absolute, adds a few more unique human capacities. He writes that in addition to some of the aforementioned, mankind's abilities include:

...the awareness of his own existence, awareness of his future death (even when not imminent), his ability to develop and perceive his identity, his ability to develop a belief system and build a culture/civilization on this basis.

Perhaps, though, the most amazing ability possessed uniquely by humans is language. Gosselin quotes linguist Noam Chomsky who wrote:

When we study human language, we are approaching what some might call the "human essence," the distinctive qualities of mind that are, so far as we know, unique to man ....this creative aspect of normal language use is one fundamental factor that distinguishes human language from any known system of animal communication.

Ideas have consequences. Gosselin observes that if the difference between humans and animals is only quantitative we're led to the conclusion that there's no reason to treat humans differently from animals. He quotes philosopher Mortimer Adler in this regard:

If a difference in degree justifies a difference in treatment, why would not superior men be justified in treating inferior men in whatever way men think they're justified in treating non-human animals....[Men] kill animals for for the enjoyment of the sport; or, ... for the purposes...of medical research.

Now, if these actions can be justified by nothing more than a difference in degree between human and non-human animals, why is not the same justification available for the actions of Nazis or other racists?

Indeed, the superior/inferior distinction has been used throughout human history to justify all manner of slaughter and slavery.

"But," someone might object, "humans have a responsibility to act differently because we're aware of what we're doing." Yes, but then we're not only conceding that humans are indeed unique, we're imputing to them a special responsibility that no other creature has. Where does this responsibility come from? If we're solely a product of blind, purposeless evolutionary forces how can we be burdened with any responsibility other than, perhaps, to insure our own survival?

We humans insist that we have a responsibility to treat others as equals, not as inferiors, and not only this but a responsibility, too, to preserve the earth's resources for future generations. But such responsibilities only exist if they're imposed on us from outside ourselves.

The naturalistic view that tells us that we're just an animal leaves no room for any such outside imposition of responsibility, nor can it it account for it by invoking the evolutionary process. It is, in other words, a totally baseless assumption, an article of blind faith, that the naturalist has no reason for holding other than that it makes him feel good.

Russian Difficulties

An article at Strategy Page discusses the difficulties Russian troops are facing in their invasion of Ukraine. Here's an excerpt from a somewhat longer piece:

The senior Russian military leadership is still in shock over the catastrophic losses they suffered since they invaded Ukraine in early 2022. These losses are a military secret in Russia but widely distributed and discussed in the West.

So far Russia has lost 279,000 troops (dead, permanently disabled, prisoners, deserters and missing), 13,000 armored vehicles (a third of them tanks), 7,000 artillery systems and over 8,000 unarmored transport vehicles used to carry troops, supplies, fuel, munitions and equipment.

The loss of so many trucks has caused delays in supplying the troops and frequent shortages of essential supplies.

There were also heavy losses of command posts and field headquarters. The Ukrainians have the ability to rapidly locate and attack Russian command posts and headquarters which appear in the combat zone. The heavy and constant losses of these crucial Russian C2 (command and control) facilities led to a breakdown in the ability to effectively deploy and control combat units.

Russian soldiers who were captured complained of supply shortages, the lack of prompt or any treatment for casualties as well as not reporting the names of soldiers who died so their families would know what happened to their kin and claim death benefits. There was such a shortage of officers that troops often went days or weeks without seeing an officer.

Even communication by radio was often absent. While cellphones were forbidden in the combat soldiers, many Russian soldiers had them and used them to report the lack of leadership, supplies and much else in the combat zone. Ukrainian intelligence has long monitored these calls and reported useful information to front line commanders and those who plan attacks with missiles or artillery.

Eventually the Russians did respond to these problems and addressed some of them. Front line command posts were housed in underground bunkers and communications went by wires laid on the ground to troops and higher headquarters. The wire was vulnerable to accidental cuts or deliberate attack.

Meanwhile the Ukrainians had access to encrypted wireless communications via the Starlink satellite system. Russia would sometimes use electronic jammers to disrupt the Starlink signal, but the jammers could not operate long because their jamming signal could be located and attacked by missiles, artillery or even ground attack. Nothing like heavy machine-gun and mortar fire from nearby Ukrainian troops to shut down or destroy a Russian jamming effort.

It's hard to believe that troop morale can be very high among soldiers forced to fight a defensive war in which they're not really defending their homeland and when they're expected to fight with inadequate supplies and equipment.

What would it take for the Russians to simply give up and flee back to Russia, especially as the weather gets colder and wetter?

Butterfly Metamorphosis

A week or so ago I did a post on the amazing migration of Monarch butterflies. Today I want to rerun an older post that features another marvelous aspect of butterfly biology - metamorphosis. A couple of short videos excerpted from Illustra Media's film titled: Metamorphosis: The Beauty and Design of Butterflies highlight the incredible difficulties faced by any purely unguided and natural account of the origin of metamorphosis.

Why such a process would have ever evolved in the first place and how it could have done so are questions for which the standard Darwinian model has no plausible answer.

There's a bit of overlap in the two videos but not much:

Speaking for myself, it's of course logically possible that such a process evolved but the idea that the process evolved unaided by any intelligent, purposeful guidance seems to me quite literally incredible.

Sowing Division

Christopher Rufo, in his excellent new book America's Culture War, notes that the media has a highly polished ability to convince people of narratives that have no basis in fact. One such narrative that the progressive media seems intent on foisting upon us is that the United States is a deeply and inveterately racist country.

Rufo points out that among those who identify as Democrats only 32% believed that racism was a "big problem" in the U.S. in 2009, but by 2017 that number had more than doubled to 76%. The increase is due mostly to the amplification of that message by the media, but the message is in conflict with the empirical evidence.

Rufo writes,

Racism, by almost any measure, has declined in the United States [since the 1960s]. The laws have guaranteed equal treatment since the passage of the civil rights legislation of the mid-1960s. Racist attitudes among whites dropped precipitously following that time period, with virtually no opposition to interracial marriage, integrated schools, and integrated neighborhoods by the mid-1990s.

Police killings of black men decreased by 72% between 1965 and 2005 - and...the vast majority of these incidents were in response to deadly threats [to the lives of the police or others].

Finally, in 2008 the United States elected its first black president, Barack Obama, which, at the time, was heralded as a racial watershed.

Part of the reason why so many people think the racial situation is so very much worse today, it must be said, is due to sheer ignorance of the facts. For example, one survey in 2021 asked Americans how many unarmed black men they believed were killed by police in 2019:

The majority of self-described "very liberal" respondents estimated that the number was at least 1000, with one-fifth of those respondents estimating that the number was at least 10,000.

Even among self-described "moderate" voters, more than a quarter believed that the police had killed at least 1000 unarmed black men over the course of the year.

The real number...was 14.

Why are so many people so uninformed that they would have such a profound misconception of the actual truth? It certainly seems as if our media has to shoulder the bulk of the blame. After all, where else do people get the news that forms the basis of their opinions?

They would probably deny it but it certainly seems that the left-wing media has an ideological interest in advancing racial discord in our society. One way to accomplish this is to promote the myth that we are a deeply racist country and to count on the masses of people to not bother to check to see if that myth is actually true.

The Astonishing Krebs Cycle

The Krebs citric acid cycle is a complex process that occurs in the mitochondria of most of the cells in our bodies, resulting in the production of molecules like ATP (Adenosine triphosphate) which are the fuel that sustains life. Without the tiny ATP molecule our bodies would shut down just like an engine that had run out of gasoline.

Amazingly, the extremely complex series of reactions leading to the production of ATP occurs in even primitive bacteria so it must have appeared very early on in the history of life and therefore arisen very rapidly, which is astonishing to think about given the enormous complexity of the cycle:

The Krebs Citric Acid Cycle

The naturalistic view is that the evolution of this cycle occurred without any direction, without any guidance, without any goal in sight, that all the pieces were assembled from pre-existing chemicals, arranged by random trial and error through the mechanism of genetic mutation and natural selection. Its emergence required an almost miraculous defiance of probability.

This is not to say it didn't happen that way. It could have, and lots of very intelligent people think it did, even though when they write about it they can't help but use telic language (i.e. language that implies a goal or purpose).

Consider this excerpt from a well-known 1996 paper (I've put some of this excerpt in bold face to emphasize the language of purpose and design the researchers feel compelled to use to describe the Krebs cycle):

During the origin and evolution of metabolism, in the first cells, when a need arises for a new pathway, there are two different possible strategies available to achieve this purpose: (1) create new pathways utilizing new compounds not previously available or (2) adapt and make good use of the enzymes catalyzing reactions already existing in the cell. Clearly, the opportunism of the second strategy, when it is possible, has a number of selective advantages, because it allows a quick and economic solution of new problems.

Thus, in the evolution of a new metabolic pathway, new mechanisms must be created only if ‘‘pieces’’ to the complete puzzle are missing. Creation of the full pathway by a de novo method is expensive in material, time-consuming, and cannot compete with the opportunistic strategy, if it can achieve the new specific purpose.

We demonstrate here the opportunistic evolution of the Krebs cycle reorganizing and assembling preexisting organic chemical reactions....

Once the design of a new metabolic sequence is achieved, a refinement of the pathway may be necessary, and then, a further optimization process will move the design toward maximum efficiency by reaching optimal values of rate and affinity constants of enzymes.

Such an optimization process as a result of natural selection is also a well-documented feature of biological evolution.... the design of the pentose phosphate and Calvin cycles can be mathematically derived by applying optimization principles under a well-established physiological function.... By considering the first stages in the history of life, we may attempt to determine logically under what conditions the Krebs cycle was organized and what its first purpose was.

This language is of course intended to be metaphorical, but the point is that it's exceedingly difficult to describe the origin of pathways such as those comprising the Krebs cycle without comparing it to an engineering problem solvable by intelligent agents. In fact, the metaphorical, telic language often employed by scientists serves, perhaps unintentionally, the purpose of obscuring how improbable it is that this cascade of chemical reactions and others like it would have somehow arisen by chance genetic mutations and natural selection.

Here's another metaphor:

Suppose a card dealer shuffles a deck and lays the cards out on the table one at a time. We're assuming that the cards already exist and don't have to be manufactured (some of the chemicals in the Krebs cycle did not already exist before the Krebs cycle evolved).

Let's also assume that the dealer has a goal in mind (nature has no goals in mind). The dealer's goal is to obtain a sequence in which each suit from ace to king appears in the order hearts, spades, diamonds, clubs.

Let's further assume that whenever he fails to get the ace of hearts as the first card he reshuffles the deck and starts over. When he does get an ace of hearts he then lets it lay and tries for a two of hearts. If he doesn't get a two of hearts on the first attempt he reshuffles the entire deck and starts over. And so on.

How long would it take to get the sequence he has in mind? This is a bit like the difficulty confronting the chance evolution of a complex system like the Krebs cycle, but with the evolution of the Krebs cycle, at least the naturalistic version, there's no goal in mind, and indeed no mind at all. Just random trial and error, chemicals bumping about, until something useful is hit upon and somehow retained and eventually added to.

Of course, an intelligent card dealer, even a child, can order the cards in the desired pattern, but desired patterns, goals, and certainly intelligent dealers, are prohibited in naturalistic explanations.

The naturalist declares that he relies on science and not on faith in non-natural intelligent agents, but it seems to me that it should take a lot more faith to believe that the Krebs cycle could have arisen with no intelligent input to guide its development than to believe that it arose through the intentional agency of a biochemical genius.

Sexual Orientation

A question that often arises in our cultural controversies has to do with the percentage of people in our population who consider themselves to be same-sex attracted.

Sociologist Ryan Burge notes, for example, that a report from Brown University indicated that 38% of their student body identifies as homosexual, bisexual, queer, asexual, pansexual, questioning, or other. When that same poll was conducted ten years earlier, that share was just 14%.

Burge wonders whether Brown is an outlier or are huge percentages of college students truly either not straight or cisgender? Sifting through the data from a recent survey conducted by FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) he finds that in a sample of some 39,000 college students between the ages of 18 and 25, the numbers are somewhat more modest.

Here's a graph which presents his findings:

I wonder, though, how representative of the overall population college students are. Young people in this cohort are often experimenting or in rebellion against traditional standards so in the general population I'd imagine that the percentage of straights would be considerably higher and the percentage of non-binaries and gays would be much lower.

This is just speculation on my part, however. Perhaps Burge will publish another study in the future that'll offer some clarification.

Meanwhile, there are several other graphs related to this topic at the link and anyone interested is invited to check them out.

Making Peace with the Russians

Why would Ukraine not be interested in some sort of peace deal with Russia? Quite simply because they don't have any reason to think that the Russians would stick to the terms of such a deal and lots of reason to think that they'd violate it.

For example, the Russians signed on to the Geneva Conventions which explicitly prohibit the torture and other maltreatment of prisoners of war. Nevertheless, the Ukrainian soldiers who've found themselves in Russian custody have been subjected to horrific tortures and starvation.

Jillian Kay Melchior has a column in the Wall Street Journal in which she gives us an idea why Ukraine would be reluctant to settle for a peace deal to end the current conflict.

Melchior tells us that 2,500 Ukrainians have been released in prisoner exchanges since February 2022, when Russia’s full-scale invasion began and cites the testimony of one of them, a man named Serhii Rotchuk.

She writes:

Mr. Rotchuk says he was beaten, was subjected to electrical shocks, and had needles jammed under his fingernails. He says he witnessed a lot of “blunt trauma of the legs, blunt trauma on the ribs, chest, and sometimes on the head.”

He describes his captors as “professionals” who can inflict painful wounds that don’t leave bruises. “Now I have a big problem with my knees, my joints,” as well as “permanent stress, I think.”

Mr. Rotchuk's experience was evidently not unique:

Samer Attar, a Chicago physician who has volunteered in Zaporizhzhia region, was present for one prisoner exchange during the summer of 2022. He recalls seeing “scores of young men,” all of them “emaciated” and “sickly looking.”

After their release, Ukrainian soldiers are handed off to professionals like Tetiana Sirenko, who is deputy director for psychological work at a clinic run by the Health Ministry.

She says nearly all the former prisoners she has treated endured electrical shocks, which can cause long-term cardiovascular damage. “A very common thing done to men is electrodes placed on their genitals and other parts of their body,” she says.

“Then there are also things like breaking fingers and bones, tearing out fingernails, and beatings on the heels.”

She has also treated cases involving “a lot of sexual violence—gang rapes, raping with objects.”

Russians sometimes brand their victims, and if they discover a patriotic tattoo, they may cut off “the skin and some of the flesh under it,” Ms. Sirenko says. A few of her patients were filmed as they were tortured, and the Russians sent the footage to their families.

Ms. Melchior concludes her column with this:

Given Russia’s lawless brutality, Ukrainians have no confidence it would abide by any negotiated peace, and they fear domination more than war.

Given what the Russians did to POWs in their custody it doesn't take much imagination to predict what they'd do to Ukrainian civilians, government leaders and military personnel if they were ever in a position to do so.

That's why those in the West calling for a peace deal are being ignored by the Ukrainian government. There's no point in making a deal with thugs like the Russians.

Scientism and Self-Refutation

Philosopher J.P.Moreland has written a fine book titled Scientism and Secularism (2018) from which some of what follows has been borrowed. Scientism is not to be confused with science, but scientists, particularly naturalist or materialist scientists, are often proponents of scientism. Scientism is actually a philosophical view which holds, paradoxically, that science is the only reliable means of apprehending truth.

The late cosmologist Stephen Hawking famously declared in a book he co-authored with Leonard Mlodinow titled The Grand Design (2010) that "philosophy is dead" and that all the answers to life's important questions, at least those that can be known, are to be answered henceforth by science.

Hawking is here giving expression to his scientism, the view that all the important questions can either be answered by science or not answered at all, and that the methodologies of science are the only valid path to truth and knowledge. All other ways of knowing must give way to the supreme authority of science, especially the natural, or "hard" sciences like physics and chemistry.

Scientism is a common view, but not only does it have some serious liabilities, the notion that science supersedes philosophy is surely false.

There are at least three things wrong with scientism:

1. It's self-refuting.
2. It's false that science is the only sure way of knowing truth.
3. It's false that philosophy is dead. If it were then science would be impossible.

Scientism is self-refuting because the claim that only what is testable by the methods of science can be true is itself a philosophical claim. The claim itself is not subject to being tested through the methods of science. Thus, the basic claim of scientism itself must be false.

Nor can science be the only way of knowing since there are many other things we can know with at least the same level of certainty as we know any of the deliverances of science.

For example, which do you know with stronger certitude, that atoms are the basic building blocks of matter or that torturing children for fun is evil? The latter is not a scientific claim at all, it's a metaphysical claim, yet most of us are far more sure of its truth than we are of the truth of the claim about atoms.

There are other examples of things we know that do not lend themselves at all to scientific demonstration. For example, I can know: that I took a walk on my last birthday, that I hold certain beliefs about science and philosophy, that I have an itch in my foot, that sunsets are beautiful, that justice is good; and I can know the basic laws of math and logic, e.g. I know that 2 + 2 = 4, and I know that if a proposition (P) entails another proposition (Q) then if P is true so must Q be true.

Not only do we all know such things, we know them with far more certainty than we know the truth of the claims of scientists about, say, global warming, atomic theory or Darwinian evolution.

Moreover, science depends for its very existence upon a series of assumptions, none of which are themselves scientific. All of them are philosophical, so if philosophy is dead where does that leave science?

Here are some examples: The law of cause and effect, the law of sufficient reason, the principle of uniformity, the belief that explanations which exhibit elegance and simplicity are superior to those which don't, the belief that the world is objectively real and intelligible, the belief that our senses are reliable, and the belief that our reason is trustworthy. All of these are philosophical assumptions that cannot be demonstrated scientifically to be true.

Scientism is a bid by some materialists to assert epistemological hegemony over our intellectual lives and especially over the disciplines of philosophy and theology. However, just as similar attempts in the 20th century such as positivism and verificationism fell victim to self-referential incoherence, so, too, does scientism.

The claim that science is uniquely authoritative and that we should all recognize and bow to its supremacy is quite simply false.

A Short Argument Against Naturalism

One consequence of a naturalistic worldview (i.e. the view that the natural world is all there is) is that atheism would be very likely to be true, and if atheism is very likely to be true then materialism (i.e. the view that everything in the universe reduces ultimately to matter and energy, there are no immaterial substances like mind or soul), would be very likely to be true.

Now, materialism entails that every thought we have is solely the product of chemical reactions in the brain, but if that's the case what reason do we have for thinking that any of our thoughts are actually true? Why think that neurochemical reactions would or could produce true thoughts?

How, after all, could atoms swirling around on a neuron be expected to reliably produce a truth?

And if, given materialism, our thoughts can't be trusted to be true, what confidence can a materialist have for thinking that materialism, naturalism and atheism are true?

It would seem that naturalism, if we follow it consistently to its logical conclusion, leads to complete epistemological skepticism, including skepticism about the truth of naturalism.

The only escape from this problem for the naturalist is simply to decide to exercise blind faith in his neurochemistry to lead him to trustworthy beliefs, but ironically blind faith is one of the things he criticizes religious people for having.

A World from Pure Thought

Several years ago philosopher Nick Bostrom put forward the notion that the universe and everything in it is actually a massive simulation designed by humans living in the distant future. A recent article at Mind Matters discusses an update of Bostrom's original idea.

The Mind Matters article plays off an earlier piece at Big Think by Paul Ratner.

Philosopher Nick Bostrom famously considered this in his seminal paper “Are you living in a computer simulation?,” where he proposed that all of our existence may be just a product of very sophisticated computer simulations run by advanced beings whose real nature we may never be able to know.

Now a new theory has come along that takes it a step further – what if there are no advanced beings either and everything in “reality” is a self-simulation that generates itself from pure thought?

Bostrom imagined that the universe was physical but that humans in the future had achieved such a high degree of technological prowess that they were able to design computer programs which simulated the world we now inhabit and us as well.

Even the process of evolution itself could just be a mechanism by which the future beings are testing countless processes, purposefully moving humans through levels of biological and technological growth. In this way they also generate the supposed information or history of our world. Ultimately, we wouldn’t know the difference.

The current hypothesis, though, is that the universe is not material at all but is pure thought. It's an "idea" that has somehow generated itself.

The hypothesis takes a non-materialistic approach, saying that everything is information expressed as thought. As such, the universe “self-actualizes” itself into existence, relying on underlying algorithms and a rule they call “the principle of efficient language.”

Under this proposal, the entire simulation of everything in existence is just one “grand thought.”

How would the simulation itself be originated?

It was always there, say the researchers, explaining the concept of “timeless emergentism.” According to this idea, time isn’t there at all. Instead, the all-encompassing thought that is our reality offers a nested semblance of a hierarchical order, full of “sub-thoughts” that reach all the way down the rabbit hole towards the base mathematics and fundamental particles.

Physicist Sir James Jeans anticipated something like this all the way back in 1930 when he wrote that, “The universe looks more and more like a great thought rather than a great machine.”

Denyse O'Leary (under the pen name "News") at Mind Matters points out the significance of this:

The most significant element of this new theory is surely that it is explicitly a theory of “panconsciousness” and non-materialism. Thus it bears comparison with newer theories of consciousness, which are explicitly panpsychist.

Panpsychism is the view that everything in the universe from the largest stars to the tiniest particles are all conscious to one extent or another. Panpsychism has been around for a long time but is becoming more mainstream now because the classical materialism (or physicalism) of the 19th and 20th centuries simply cannot explain many of the phenomena that scientists are observing, especially in quantum mechanics.

O'Leary continues:

However off-the-beaten-track this ... hypothesis may seem, it does solve two problems:

First, it offers an account of consciousness that conforms to what we experience. Materialist accounts generally fail at that. Famously, Darwinian philosopher Daniel Dennett describes consciousness as a user illusion. It’s not really there. Which prompts the question, whose illusion is it then? The [new theory] sees human consciousness as a sub-thought of a grand thought.

Agree or disagree, that is somewhat closer to what we experience.

Second, the researchers’ approach — that the universe simulates itself into existence — gets rid of the problem of infinite regress (what simulated the universe?), in the same way that “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” gets rid of it.

Of course, as noted above, anything that simulates itself into existence as “one grand thought” might as well be God.

What O'Leary is saying is that if consciousness is indeed the ultimate reality, if the universe is a grand thought, if information is the fundamental stuff of the world, then there must be a mind in which the thought resides and which is the source of the information out of which the world is constructed.

That mind must transcend the universe of space, time and matter and it must also possess unimaginable knowledge and power. Indeed, as O'Leary states it would seem to be almost indistinguishable from God.

The more science discovers about the world, the more untenable the old naturalistic materialism of the last two centuries seems to be and the more compelling is the conclusion that God, or something very much like God, has created the universe and is holding it all together.

The Monarch Miracle

Every Autumn an estimated 100–200 million monarch butterflies migrate two thousand to three thousand miles between the United States/Canada and Mexico. While there are other populations of monarchs, including in western North America, South America, the Caribbean, and Australia, the population in eastern North America is the best known because of its amazing migration.

Monarch Butterfly

For example, they're the only butterfly species known to make a two-way migration.

They can travel between 50 to 100 miles a day during their 3000 mile journey to Oyamel fir forests in the Mexican mountains nearly two miles above sea level.

They roost in the trees in a dozen or so of these mountain areas from October to March, often returning to the same tree in which their ancestor roosted the previous year.

In late summer in northeastern North America dwindling food supply and shorter days trigger the Monarch's migratory impulse. A generation that has hatched after mid-August begins the trek south for wintering grounds they've never been to before. Most summering Monarchs live for about two to six weeks, but this migrating generation can live up to nine months.

The migrants travel during the day and roost at night, often in the same trees that previous generations used as roost sites during their migration.

During the summer their range covers close to 400,000 square miles, but when they finally arrive in Mexico they squeeze into territories of less than half a square mile.

Monarch's roosting in Mexican Oyamel fir trees

One of the most amazing aspects of this is that these butterflies, with brains the size of a pinhead, can navigate so unerringly across thousands of miles of terrain. Researchers believe that they use a complex system which involves ultraviolet sunlight, a magnetic compass, the position of the sun and an internal clock.

Their internal clock tells them the time of day. In the morning when the sun is rising they navigate to the west of it. At noon they fly toward it and in the afternoon they fly to the east of it. This strategy keeps them flying due south as depicted in these figures:

Another amazing fact is that the generation that made the long trip from the northeast and over-wintered in Mexico is not the generation that returns to the northeast. This generation begins the trip back in the spring but they reproduce and die along the way.

The second generation continues the migration, but they, too, reproduce and die along the way. It's the third generation that makes it back to the summering grounds in the northeast, but they also reproduce and die, so it is their offspring that begin the cycle all over again in August.

There's an interactive feature here that shows the Monarch's pattern of migration. All of this raises questions:

How does each year's crop of butterflies "know" the route to take to get back to the same trees in Mexico that their ancestors left from when they've never done it before?

How do those butterflies born along the return trip "know" to continue the migratory flight and "know" which direction to take?

What is the source of the information needed for these insects to complete this astonishing journey?

And how would all this have come about through a blind, purposeless process like natural selection and genetic mutation?

Comparisons of migratory monarch genomes with the genomes of non-migratory monarchs has revealed that some five hundred and thirty genes are involved in migratory behavior so that means that in the history of the species there must have been a minimum of five hundred thirty genetic mutations, all of which were random but which fortuitously produced the ability to successfully make this migration.

While these mutations were accumulating in the genome what purpose did they serve and if they served no beneficial purpose why were they retained for eons of time until finally enough mutations accumulated in enough individuals to produce a behavior which, obviously, was totally unnecessary for the butterfly's survival?

Moreover, Monarchs are believed to have evolved about two million years ago so the migrating variety must've split off from the ancestral stock sometime thereafter. Thus, at the most, those 535 mutations must've accumulated within the last two million years, a very short time for all that evolution to have taken place - at least it's a very short time if the evolution were unguided by any outside intelligence.

If this all came about naturalistically that would be almost miraculous, which is ironic since naturalism discounts miracles.

It's possible, of course, that this migratory behavior could've evolved by unguided, purposeless processes, in the same sense that it's possible that elephants could've evolved the ability to fly, but it takes a king-sized portion of blind faith to dogmatically insist that it did.

Children's Books

Concerned parents and conservative thinkers have for some time been expressing dismay at the sort of books that public schools are putting on their library shelves even at the elementary level. The books, they say, are pure pornography and have no place in a public school, and especially not in an elementary school.

Progressives, including the President, have criticized those who protest having their children exposed to such fare, calling them "book banners" and other taunts. When parents have gone to school board meetings to inform the board and the public what's actually in these books they've had their microphones cut off and have been otherwise prevented from quoting from the contents of these volumes.

The fact that no one is calling for the books to be "banned," rather merely not stocked in public schools, as was the practice in this country throughout our history until the day before yesterday, is a detail that the critics studiously ignore.

The fact that parents are prevented from reading from the books at school board meetings in a room full of adults because the books are too salacious for the ears of the adults is very strange since the school boards evidently have no problem with young children reading from them in their classrooms.

In any case, ignoring the parents' and others' concerns is getting more difficult. Aymann Ismail, a writer for the liberal online journal Slate decided to see for himself what some of those books actually contained. He was surprised.

He describes his experience with It's Perfectly Normal, a book recommended for ages 10 and up. Ismail considered himself pretty liberal about such matters, but even he admits to being shocked:

I felt sure that as a 34-year-old father of two there would be nothing in there that would offend my sensibilities. I’d heard nothing but glowing reviews from sex-ed pros about the child-friendly language in the book. But flipping through the book’s pages finally, I was a little shocked.

I had an involuntary reaction to seeing the nude cartoons, like I needed to make sure I was alone and hide the book. I skimmed ahead to look at the rest of the book briskly. On virtually every page I stopped to examine, I was confronted with detailed drawings of genitals.

It felt like every page had a cartoon of a naked body…

On Page 9, I came across the first illustration I recognized from the controversy. In the chapter “Making Love,” there are three graphic images that show adult bodies having sex. There is no visible penetration, but it’s still eye-popping.

I was sure I wouldn’t hand this book to my kids when they are 10. And I began to wonder if in my own allergy to the book-burning fervor, I had been a little too dismissive of the parents at the root of this fight…

It’s Perfectly Normal, more than any other frequently banned title I have flipped through, challenged my view. The images are not “pornographic,” and it’s obvious that anti-gay sentiment is partly fueling the objection to the book. But the images are graphic, and it’s startling to me to think they’re intended for kids who aren’t even in middle school yet.

It's Perfectly Normal is evidently not the worst book you might find in your child's school library.

Senator John Kennedy the other day read passages from a pair of commonly shelved books in a Senate hearing and caused something of a brouhaha among his colleagues.

You can watch Senator Kennedy's reading here if you're so inclined. I'm not going to put it up on VP because the excerpt he reads is too disgusting and vile.

Nevertheless, if shining a light on what public schools are exposing our children to forces the supporters of this stuff to have to publicly defend it he has performed a noble public service.