The Left's Golden Opportunity

Those who think that the current media excitations over the Dick Cheney shooting mishap are simply due to media narcissism and pique at having been kept in the dark are, in my opinion, misreading this affair.

The left once again has had their hopes and expectations raised to the point where they can scarcely contain themselves. Maybe Cheney was drunk. Maybe Mr. Whittington will die. Maybe this will be a case of negligent homicide. Oh, if only. Then Cheney can be removed from office, and the way would be clear to impeach Bush, if they win the Senate in November, without having to worry about Cheney taking over. What a godsend!

Look for the left-wing media to refuse to let this episode go. It has breathed new life into their heretofore moribund hopes for toppling the administration and exacting the desire for revenge that has lay festering in their hearts since January of 2000. All their other anticipations and fantasies have come to naught. Like Wile E. Coyote trying to dynamite the RoadRunner, their machinations keep blowing up in their face, but maybe this time will be different. Maybe this time the stars are favorably aligned.

It is sad, though, that the left seems always reduced to having to hope for calamity in order to gain a political triumph. They have to hope for failure in Iraq, a faltering economy with people out of work, and now the death of a 78 year old gunshot victim. If you think this is too cynical, ask yourself this: How many leftists would be delighted at a complete success in Iraq and a booming economy, if these developments made Bush look good, and how many would view Mr. Wittington's potential death as a tragedy if it made Dick Cheney vulnerable to criminal prosecution?

Science and Pseudo-Science

Amanda Gefter has written an article in The Philadelphia Inquirer which considers the claim that string theory is pseudo-science and that in the wake of the Dover trial scientists would do well to shun it. She thinks this is wrong-headed and that any comparisons between string theory and Intelligent Design are inapt.

Her column is interesting, but in the end she fails to make her case. Excerpts from her essay are set off in block quotes followed by my comments:

The recent ruling in Dover, Pa., against the mention of intelligent design in biology textbooks was a small cultural victory for science - not because intelligent design posed a genuine threat to the theory of evolution, but because the decision showed the public that there is an important difference between science and pseudoscience.

In the wake of the trial, scientists are being criticized, even by their own colleagues, for working on anything that might be construed as pseudoscience - and string theory is drawing most of the heat. An intense controversy has erupted regarding the status of this potential "theory of everything," which aims to describe the whole universe in one fell swoop: space, time, and everything in it.

According to string theory, the fundamental building blocks of matter are not dimensionless point particles but tiny, one-dimensional strings. What appear to us as different kinds of particles are actually different vibrations of the same string. String theory might be able to reconcile Einstein's general relativity (the theory of gravity) with quantum mechanics (the theory of matter), but that's because in the theory, gravity turns out to be just another string vibration.

String theory requires extra dimensions of space that have never been detected, and it describes not one universe but a near infinity of them. Parallel universes, invisible dimensions... these fantastic concepts are not directly observable, so the critics cry: "It's not science!" They appeal to the philosopher Karl Popper, who said that what distinguishes science from pseudoscience is that science can be falsified through experiment. In Popper's scheme, string theory and intelligent design can be lumped into the same category of untestable claims, and critics can make allegations that string theory is no better than religion.

There they go again. Repeat after me, Amanda, ID is not religion - unless religion is defined in so broad a way as to include almost everything, including naturalistic materialism, within its scope. ID holds that some aspects of the universe and life bear the marks of intentional, purposeful agency. It makes no claims about the agent itself much less what our responsibilities and relationship to that agent may be.

ID does not claim that the agent is the ultimate reality or that it is the ultimate source of all that is, or that it is independent of all else. These are standard divinity claims, the sorts of claims that make any belief system religious, and they are simply absent from Intelligent Design theory. Parenthetically, we might note that they are not absent from materialism which does make such assertions about the material universe. Thus materialism is more of a religious belief system than is Intelligent Design.

Case Western physicist Lawrence Krauss, whose latest book, Hiding in the Mirror, has stirred the controversy, feels that science's current struggle against political and religious agendas makes string theory a dangerous liability. As he writes in the journal Nature, the scientific status afforded to string theory "opens us up to otherwise avoidable attacks, particularly from those who would include religious ideas in high school science curricula."

But the real danger is not string theory's lack of experiments - it is the misrepresentation of what scientific theories are all about. Sure, falsifiability is a key component of the scientific method. But there is something that matters more: the power of explanation. History reveals that the structure of a theory itself - its internal mathematical consistency, its scope, and its beauty - often determines whether it is accepted as science.

This is misleading. These qualities are not used to decide whether or not a theory is genuine science but rather to arbitrate between competing scientific explanations. It's ironic that when some ID advocates argue that their theory is appropriate in a science class it's objected that ID is pseudo-science because it can't be tested. When, however, other hypotheses that are welcomed in science classes are challenged as being non-science the criteria of what constitutes genuine science are shifted to aesthetic appeal or elegance.

For instance, it is commonly said that the 1919 observation of the bending of starlight around the sun was fantastic confirmation of Einstein's theory of general relativity. And in the public eye, it was. But in reality the results were far from conclusive - perhaps only 30 percent. Still, no one would have rejected the theory based on the outcome of that experiment. When Einstein was asked what he would have done had the experiment falsified his prediction, he replied, "I would feel sorry for the dear Lord. The theory is correct."

Ms Gefter is now getting confused. She's jumping from talking about whether a theory is legitimate science to how scientists decide whether a theory is superior to its competitors. These are two completely different matters, and nothing she says about Einsteinian relativity here helps us to answer the question of how we can tell whether a theory is scientific. That relativity was a scientific theory was never questioned because it was testable and, indeed, Gefter describes one such test. The question the bending of starlight raises for relativity has nothing to do with whether its valid science but rather whether or not it's a better explanation than the classical Newtonian model.

Why this confidence? Because the theory is breathtakingly beautiful. It takes phenomena once thought to be separate and unifies them to simplify the world, to pare it down, to inch closer to the core of reality. It enlightens and it explains. General relativity might eventually fail a test, but it will be replaced only by a better explanation.

Indeed, but we need to remind Ms. Gefter that she's wandered off the topic. Again, the questions before us are what constitutes a genuine scientific theory, and do string theory and/or ID qualify?

In the Dover courtroom, proponents of intelligent design could be heard repeating their mantra: "Evolution is just a theory. It's not a fact." Scientists would then point out the categorical error: A theory is a framework to explain the facts. A theory is one level up from fact, so the mantra ought to go, "Evolution is not just a fact. It's a theory."

The theory of intelligent design is not only not falsifiable; there is simply no way to test it. But that is not the main reason it is not science. The main reason is, that ID does not actually explain anything. When we ask, "Why is the world the way it is?" it answers, "Because it was designed that way." The world is the way it is because it is that way. That might be the furthest from a useful, satisfactory explanation you can get.

This is incorrect. ID does not answer that question by saying "because it was designed that way." At least, I've never heard anyone give that answer. The world is the way it is because if it were much different in any of its fundamental laws, constants, or parameters, life, at least conscious life, could not exist in it.

This claim, by the way, affords us the opportunity to test ID. Scientists could simply construct computer models of possible worlds with significantly different initial conditions or physical and chemical laws and then show that such worlds would still be compatible with conscious life. If it could be demonstrated that life could indeed exist in a wide spectrum of possible worlds that would certainly undermine the ID argument that this world is fine-tuned for living things. I doubt that anyone will try this, though, because very few scientists believe that such a test would bear fruit. Most of them acknowledge that the fine-structure of our cosmos is precisely adjusted to astonishingly fine tolerances, and that if it weren't almost exactly the way it is life would have either never arisen or never survived.

String theory has problems, too. But while intelligent design is untestable in principle, string theory is just really hard. It is quite possible some clever scientist will devise a way to test it. Physicists have some ideas, but it is not going to be easy. In his new book The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design, string theory's inventor Leonard Susskind writes: "To divine the fundamental laws of nature that govern a world 16 orders of magnitude smaller than any microscope will ever see is a very tall order. It will take not only cleverness and perseverance, but it will also require tremendous quantities of chutzpah."

How does Ms. Gefter know that ID is in principle untestable? Aside from the fact that I just mentioned a possible test there's nothing of which we know that tells us that intelligence is undectable. One need not be able to detect the designer, after all, in order to be able to detect purposeful design. The evident design of the universe may someday turn out to be so overwhelming to anyone who examines the evidence that scientists will not even try to escape the conclusion that there is a designer, but if so they will not have to be able to detect the designer in order to come to that conclusion.

But why assume that the designer itself cannot be observed? We could only conclude that a designer cannot be observed if we knew a priori that the designer is by nature an unobservable entity, but how does Ms Gefter know that? Just because the designer is not part of this universe doesn't mean that it cannot be detected. If string theorists hold out hope that other universes will someday be detected why not hold out the same hope that we will one day muster the "cleverness, perseverance, and chutzpah" to detect intelligent agents in those other universes who are capable of designing things in ours?

As Columbia University physicist Brian Greene says, "String theory is a work in progress. It is science because in its decades of development it has always adhered to the well-established methodology of theoretical physics. So far, we have not revealed enough about string theory to extract detailed predictions that are within reach of today's technology. If, however, we believed that this latter goal of testing string theory were permanently unattainable - as it most certainly is for ID as currently presented - we would no longer work on the theory. As of now, there is no way to tell how things will pan out. But that's what theoretical physics is all about: Devise theories, analyze them with rigorous mathematical tools, do your best to extract experimental predictions, and test them. No one can predict how long each individual step in this progression will take." So be patient!

In other words, string theory does not meet the standards of real science just yet, but it will someday. How do we know this? Because we earnestly believe that it really is science. This sounds very much like a religious faith commitment or incantation rather than the words of a scientist, but in any case, why couldn't something similar be said on behalf of ID? Conducting a test for an intelligent designer is surely very hard, but maybe someday we'll figure out a way to do it.

If, for example, we could figure out a test to see if specified complex patterns with high information content could be produced purely by chance and physical processes, then ID would be disconfirmed. We don't know yet how such tests would be put together or how they will pan out, but be patient!

In the meantime, mathematical consistency could provide its own sort of falsification. Mathematics is the language science uses to describe the world, and if the equations of a theory lead to nonsensical results, the theory is mathematically falsified. Intelligent design cannot be described mathematically, so, to use physicist Wolfgang Pauli's famous phrase, "it's not even wrong."

Perhaps ID is "not even wrong," but Ms Gefter's claim certainly is. Simply because something cannot be described mathematically does not mean that it's not good science. If it did mean that then large chunks of paleontology, archeology, botany, forensic entomology and a host of other disciplines would not be real science.

Moreover, just because something can be described in mathematical terms does not mean that it is science. With no empirical content or basis for testable predictions it's hard to see how string theory could be anything other than theoretical mathematics. If it's objected that it should nevertheless be studied in physics departments because it may offer a true explanation for the universe then it could be replied that we should also study intelligent design in science classes since intelligence may well turn out be the true ultimate explanation for the universe.

It may be that the claim that the universe and life did not arise solely through natural forces cannot be analyzed mathematically, but even if that's true what follows? Can the claim that life arose from non-life be described mathematically? Can the proposition that purely physical processes sufficiently explain the origin and subsequent diversification of life be described mathematically? Ms. Gefter wants to set the bar high enough that IDers can't leap over it, but in so doing she inadvertantly eliminates from the science department of many universities a lot of people whose work is regularly published in scientific journals.

But the fate of string theory is unlikely to be decided by experiment. It will be decided when a physicist wakes up one day and slaps his forehead and yells, "Aha! Now it all makes sense!" If string theory can stitch together the facts of the world that do not quite fit, if it can explain why the universe is the way it is, no one will conjure the ghost of Popper. Yes, string theory is lacking in testable predictions, but more important, it is lacking some underlying principle to give it deep explanatory power. Still, scientists pursue it because they see paths of unification, shards of beauty, glimmers of ultimate reality. And that determination to explain the mysteries of the universe no matter how difficult the task, and the refusal to accept easy pseudo-explanations in place of truth, is a telltale sign of genuine science.

So, the telltale sign of genuine science is that it offers simplicity of explanation, elegance, and insight into ultimate reality. In other words, Ms. Gefter assures us, genuine science is thoroughly metaphysical. This being so, we wonder what it is about the assertion that the cosmos and life display evidence of having been purposefully designed and do not appear to have been produced solely by chance and blind forces that disqualifies that assertion as a genuinely scientific claim?

According to Amanda Gefter's reasoning, nothing at all.

The Lesser Evil

This might be an intentional leak to concentrate the minds of the mullahs in Tehran, or it might mean that Iran is in for a couple of rough nights sometime in the next year or so:

Strategists at the Pentagon are drawing up plans for devastating bombing raids backed by submarine-launched ballistic missile attacks against Iran's nuclear sites as a "last resort" to block Teheran's efforts to develop an atomic bomb. Central Command and Strategic Command planners are identifying targets, assessing weapon-loads and working on logistics for an operation, the Sunday Telegraph has learnt.

They are reporting to the office of Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, as America updates plans for action if the diplomatic offensive fails to thwart the Islamic republic's nuclear bomb ambitions. Teheran claims that it is developing only a civilian energy programme. "This is more than just the standard military contingency assessment," said a senior Pentagon adviser. "This has taken on much greater urgency in recent months."

The prospect of military action could put Washington at odds with Britain which fears that an attack would spark violence across the Middle East, reprisals in the West and may not cripple Teheran's nuclear programme. But the steady flow of disclosures about Iran's secret nuclear operations and the virulent anti-Israeli threats of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has prompted the fresh assessment of military options by Washington. The most likely strategy would involve aerial bombardment by long-distance B2 bombers, each armed with up to 40,000lb of precision weapons, including the latest bunker-busting devices. They would fly from bases in Missouri with mid-air refuelling.

The Bush administration has recently announced plans to add conventional ballistic missiles to the armoury of its nuclear Trident submarines within the next two years. If ready in time, they would also form part of the plan of attack. Teheran has dispersed its nuclear plants, burying some deep underground, and has recently increased its air defences, but Pentagon planners believe that the raids could seriously set back Iran's nuclear programme.

We are deeply concerned about the consequences of a military strike on Iran. If a dozen simple drawings can throw the Muslim world into an apoplectic rage imagine what a massive bombing of Iran's nuclear facilities would do. Oil shipments from the region will probably be stopped and suicide terrorism will skyrocket. Worse, if it's just a bombing mission with no invasion and regime change then the problem will just be deferred, not solved, but if there is an invasion it would doubtless become an extremely ugly affair.

Nevertheless, John McCain is correct when he says that as bad as a last-resort military strike might be, a nuclear-armed Iran would be far worse.

Slogan Contest

Bookworm Room has a slogan contest going on in which readers can vote for their favorite conservative slogans in a number of different categories. Some of them are really clever and funny. One of our favorites is in the slogan about Democrats category:

Democrats: A 40 year war on poverty and still no exit strategy.

Clever. There are many more at the link.

Accidents Happen. Ask Bill.

As the whole civilized world has heard by now V.P.Dick Cheney accidentally shot a hunting companion Saturday. Michelle Malkin braces for the inevitable:

I'm very thankful [the injured man] is doing fine. Unfortunately, this is very bad news for the White House--and not just because of the inevitable late-night jokes that will inundate the airwaves over the next week. The Dems will exploit this accident to smear Cheney as incapable of being trusted, weak of mind, etc. The resignation rumors will fly again. And the biography of a man who has served this country so well and so honorably for so many years will be overshadowed by a single, ill-fated hunting mishap.

Malkin's right, it's bound to happen, but one of her readers puts matters in perspective. Says he: "I'd [still] rather hunt with Dick Cheney than ride with Ted Kennedy."

Me too.

Anyway, the Democrats are in no position to try to use unfortunate accidents to discredit the Veep, not after the lengthy skein of accidents and other misfortunes that befell so many who were drawn into the Clinton orbit over the years.

Too Eager to Cast the First Stone

Jimmy Carter, exemplar of ethical rectitude, played Nathan to George Bush's David as he castigated the president last week for conducting warrantless surveillance of suspected terrorists. Mr. Carter stood strong and tall in his condemnations and denunciations of the encroachments upon our civil liberties perpetrated by the Bush administration, who, in their perfidy, he inadvertantly likened to the Kennedy administration.

So, it comes as a minor surprise that St. Jimmy, when he was president, engaged in exactly the same nefarious behaviour for which he flogs President Bush. Here's the lead of this interesting story:

Former President Jimmy Carter, who publicly rebuked President Bush's warrantless eavesdropping program this week during the funeral of Coretta Scott King and at a campaign event, used similar surveillance against suspected spies. "Under the Bush administration, there's been a disgraceful and illegal decision -- we're not going to the let the judges or the Congress or anyone else know that we're spying on the American people," Mr. Carter said Monday in Nevada when his son Jack announced his Senate campaign.

"And no one knows how many innocent Americans have had their privacy violated under this secret act," he said.

The next day at Mrs. King's high-profile funeral, Mr. Carter evoked a comparison to the Bush policy when referring to the "secret government wiretapping" of civil rights leader Martin Luther King.

But in 1977, Mr. Carter and his attorney general, Griffin B. Bell, authorized warrantless electronic surveillance used in the conviction of two men for spying on behalf of Vietnam. The men, Truong Dinh Hung and Ronald Louis Humphrey, challenged their espionage convictions to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, which unanimously ruled that the warrantless searches did not violate the men's rights.

In its opinion, the court said the executive branch has the "inherent authority" to wiretap enemies such as terror plotters and is excused from obtaining warrants when surveillance is "conducted 'primarily' for foreign intelligence reasons."

That description, some Republicans say, perfectly fits the Bush administration's program to monitor calls from terror-linked people to the U.S.

I don't know what they call this sort of behavior in Georgia, Mr. Carter, but around here, it's called H-Y-P-O-C-R-I-S-Y. You can read about it in the Bible under P-H-A-R-I-S-E-E-S.

Creeping Dhimmitude

Diana West offers a lesson on the meaning of dhimmitude:

We need to learn a new word: dhimmitude....Wherever Islam conquered, surrendering dhimmi, known to Muslims as "people of the book [the Bible]," were tolerated, allowed to practice their religion, but at a dehumanizing cost.

There were literal taxes (jizya) to be paid; these bought the dhimmi the right to remain non-Muslim, the price not of religious freedom, but of religious identity. Freedom was lost, sorely circumscribed by a body of Islamic law (sharia) designed to subjugate, denigrate and humiliate the dhimmi. The resulting culture of self-abnegation, self-censorship and fear shared by far-flung dhimmi is the basis of dhimmitude. The extremely distressing but highly significant fact is, dhimmitude doesn't only exist in lands where Islamic law rules.

This is the lesson of Cartoon Rage 2006, a cultural nuke set off by an Islamic chain reaction to those 12 cartoons of Muhammad appearing in a Danish newspaper. We have watched the Muslim meltdown with shocked attention, but there is little recognition that its poisonous fallout is fear. Fear in the State Department, which, like Islam, called the cartoons unacceptable. Fear in Whitehall, which did the same. Fear in the Vatican, which did the same. And fear in the media, which have failed, with few, few exceptions, to reprint or show the images. With only a small roll of brave journals, mainly in Europe, to salute, we have seen the proud Western tradition of a free press bow its head and submit to an Islamic law against depictions of Muhammad. That's dhimmitude.

Not that we admit it: We dress up our capitulation in fancy talk of "tolerance," "responsibility" and "sensitivity." We even congratulate ourselves for having the "editorial judgment" to make "pluralism" possible. "Readers were well served... without publishing the cartoons," said a Wall Street Journal spokesman. "CNN has chosen to not show the cartoons in respect for Islam," reported the cable network. On behalf of the BBC, which did show some of the cartoons on the air, a news editor subsequently apologized, adding: "We've taken a decision not to go further... in order not to gratuitously offend the significant number" of Muslim viewers worldwide. Left unmentioned is the understanding (editorial judgement?) that "gratuitous offense" leads to gratuitous violence. Hence, fear - not the inspiration of tolerance but of capitulation - and a condition of dhimmitude.

How far does it go? Worth noting, for example, is that on the BBC Web site, a religion page about Islam presents the angels and revelations of Islamic belief as historical fact, rather than spiritual conjecture (as is the case with its Christianity Web page); plus, it follows every mention of Mohammed with "(pbuh)," which means "peace be upon him"-"as if," writes Will Wyatt, former BBC chief executive, in a letter to the Times of London, "the corporation itself were Muslim."

There's more of this excellent column at the link.

Muslim Moderates

Charles Krauthammer writing on Muslim moderates in the WaPo:

Have any of these "moderates" ever protested the grotesque caricatures of Christians and, most especially, Jews that are broadcast throughout the Middle East on a daily basis? The sermons on Palestinian TV that refer to Jews as the sons of pigs and monkeys? The Syrian prime-time TV series that shows rabbis slaughtering a gentile boy to ritually consume his blood? The 41-part (!) series on Egyptian TV based on that anti-Semitic czarist forgery (and inspiration of the Nazis), "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," showing the Jews to be engaged in a century-old conspiracy to control the world?

A true Muslim moderate is one who protests desecrations of all faiths. Those who don't are not moderates but hypocrites, opportunists and agents for the rioters, merely using different means to advance the same goal: to impose upon the West, with its traditions of freedom of speech, a set of taboos that is exclusive to the Islamic faith. These are not defenders of religion but Muslim supremacists trying to force their dictates upon the liberal West.

And these "moderates" are aided and abetted by Western "moderates" who publish pictures of the Virgin Mary covered with elephant dung and celebrate the "Piss Christ" (a crucifix sitting in a jar of urine) as art deserving public subsidy, but who are seized with a sudden religious sensitivity when the subject is Muhammad.

If a true moderate is one who condemns desecrations of all faiths then there are precious few Muslim moderates in the world. Of course, by this standard there are doubtless too few moderates of any faith or ideology. It's a sad thing that it's so easy for us to be outraged when our sacred icons are attacked but to yawn indifferently when those of others are gratuitously insulted.

Claiming Too Much

From time to time we read the claim that evolution is the heart of modern biology and the even more extravagant claim that it actually drives all of science. Next time you read that and wonder if it's true remember this essay by Philip S. Skell, Emeritus Evan Pugh Professor at Pennsylvania State University, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. We noted Skell's paper some time ago, but it seems to be currently receiving new exposure and appeared in our Sunday paper just today:

Darwin's theory of evolution offers a sweeping explanation of the history of life, from the earliest microscopic organisms billions of years ago to all the plants and animals around us today. Much of the evidence that might have established the theory on an unshakable empirical foundation, however, remains lost in the distant past. For instance, Darwin hoped we would discover transitional precursors to the animal forms that appear abruptly in the Cambrian strata. Since then we have found many ancient fossils - even exquisitely preserved soft-bodied creatures - but none are credible ancestors to the Cambrian animals.

Despite this and other difficulties, the modern form of Darwin's theory has been raised to its present high status because it's said to be the cornerstone of modern experimental biology. But is that correct? "While the great majority of biologists would probably agree with Theodosius Dobzhansky's dictum that 'nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution,' most can conduct their work quite happily without particular reference to evolutionary ideas," A.S. Wilkins, editor of the journal BioEssays, wrote in 2000.[1] "Evolution would appear to be the indispensable unifying idea and, at the same time, a highly superfluous one."

I would tend to agree. Certainly, my own research with antibiotics during World War II received no guidance from insights provided by Darwinian evolution. Nor did Alexander Fleming's discovery of bacterial inhibition by penicillin. I recently asked more than 70 eminent researchers if they would have done their work differently if they had thought Darwin's theory was wrong. The responses were all the same: No.

I also examined the outstanding biodiscoveries of the past century: the discovery of the double helix; the characterization of the ribosome; the mapping of genomes; research on medications and drug reactions; improvements in food production and sanitation; the development of new surgeries; and others. I even queried biologists working in areas where one would expect the Darwinian paradigm to have most benefited research, such as the emergence of resistance to antibiotics and pesticides. Here, as elsewhere, I found that Darwin's theory had provided no discernible guidance, but was brought in, after the breakthroughs, as an interesting narrative gloss.

In the peer-reviewed literature, the word "evolution" often occurs as a sort of coda to academic papers in experimental biology. Is the term integral or superfluous to the substance of these papers? To find out, I substituted for "evolution" some other word - "Buddhism," "Aztec cosmology," or even "creationism." I found that the substitution never touched the paper's core. This did not surprise me. From my conversations with leading researchers it had became clear that modern experimental biology gains its strength from the availability of new instruments and methodologies, not from an immersion in historical biology.

When I recently suggested this disconnect publicly, I was vigorously challenged. One person recalled my use of Wilkins and charged me with quote mining. The proof, supposedly, was in Wilkins's subsequent paragraph:

"Yet, the marginality of evolutionary biology may be changing. More and more issues in biology, from diverse questions about human nature to the vulnerability of ecosystems, are increasingly seen as reflecting evolutionary events. A spate of popular books on evolution testifies to the development. If we are to fully understand these matters, however, we need to understand the processes of evolution that, ultimately, underlie them."

In reality, however, this passage illustrates my point. The efforts mentioned there are not experimental biology; they are attempts to explain already authenticated phenomena in Darwinian terms, things like human nature. Further, Darwinian explanations for such things are often too supple: Natural selection makes humans self-centered and aggressive - except when it makes them altruistic and peaceable. Or natural selection produces virile men who eagerly spread their seed - except when it prefers men who are faithful protectors and providers. When an explanation is so supple that it can explain any behavior, it is difficult to test it experimentally, much less use it as a catalyst for scientific discovery.

Darwinian evolution - whatever its other virtues - does not provide a fruitful heuristic in experimental biology. This becomes especially clear when we compare it with a heuristic framework such as the atomic model, which opens up structural chemistry and leads to advances in the synthesis of a multitude of new molecules of practical benefit. None of this demonstrates that Darwinism is false. It does, however, mean that the claim that it is the cornerstone of modern experimental biology will be met with quiet skepticism from a growing number of scientists in fields where theories actually do serve as cornerstones for tangible breakthroughs.

Good thing Professor Skell is retired. If he weren't he soon enough would be with opinions as heretical these.

Happy Darwin Day!

Viewpoint wishes all of our readers a safe and happy Darwin Day as you celebrate the 197th birthday of Charles Darwin today. We hope you enjoy the festivities that you surely have planned for this happy occasion, even though it would have no doubt mortified the self-effacing Mr. Darwin to know that his birthday was being marked by the sorts of raucous merrymaking being planned throughout Europe and the United States.

While we're at it, there's something odd about this particular memorial. Can you think of any other commemoration that is observed on the 197th anniversary? The 100th, 200th, 250th anniversaries, sure, but the 197th?

In any event, party up. Or down. Whatever.

Convincing Proof

Gosh. These photos are certainly damning. You thought the Muslim reaction to the Danish cartoons was violent, wait until MoveOn.org circulates among their faithful these pictures of Bush being chummy with Jack Abramoff. Screaming lefties by the zillions will be storming the White House gates like French peasants storming the Bastille.

Well, Bush and Abramoff are in the same room, aren't they? He is shaking hands with Abramoff's Indian clients, isn't he? What more proof do you need that Bush is corrupt?

Media Dhimmis

More examples of media hypocrisy courtesy of Andrew Sullivan:

"Thursday, CNN broadcast a story on how common anti-Semitic caricatures are in the Arab press and illustrated it with - you guessed it - one virulently anti-Semitic cartoon after another. As the segment concluded, Wolf Blitzer looked into the camera and piously explained that while CNN had decided as a matter of policy not to broadcast any image of Muhammad, telling the story of anti-Semitism in the Arab press required showing those caricatures. He didn't even blush," - Tim Rutten, Los Angeles Times, today.

Rutten has a challenge to the mainstream media: will they avoid any images of the upcoming anti-Catholic movie, "The Da Vinci Code"? Of course, they won't. And, I might add, I hope they won't. Here's a bleg to readers: please keep your eyes open for media representations of objects or images blasphemous to strict Christians and Jews. Last week, for example, the cartoon series, "Drawn Together," depicted Jesus refusing to extend compassion for one of the characters and eventually puking. Have you heard of it? South Park has Jesus as one its regular characters, and a recent South Park episode portrayed a statue of the Virgin Mary, with blood exploding out of her [rectum] onto the face of the Pope.

So Fox won't portray tame images of Muhammad, but they will broadcast "Passion of the Christ II: Crucify This." Here's the full compendium of Jesus references on Family Guy. You wanna see Jesus turn water into "funk"?

Why is this hypocrisy? Because except for a few outlets and a number of blogs the media adamantly refuses to show the cartoon depictions of Muhammad that have stirred up turmoil around the world. They have no qualms about publishing degrading portrayals of Christ and the Virgin Mary in their news reports, but they're suddenly seized with multicultural sensitivity when it comes to a few banal drawings of the Islamic Prophet.

So much for liberal pieties about being willing to fight to the death for your right to be offensive. Those words are easy to utter as long as the danger is far away, but when it gets a little close the number of people on the left who really mean it shrinks to a close approximation of zero. The media should either refuse to participate in the gratuitous trashing of symbols sacred to all theistic religions, including Christianity, (our recommendation) or grow a spine, refuse to truckle to the threats of the Islamists, and show the cartoons.

Update: Michelle Malkin has more on the incomprehensible absurdity of the Islamic protestors here. You read this stuff and all you can do is shake your head that so many people can be so benighted.

The War on Drugs

Jonathan Last argues persuasively in The Weekly Standard that we are winning the war on drugs:

There's a wonderful scene in the movie Traffic in which a captured drug kingpin, played by Miguel Ferrer, is being interrogated by two federal agents. Ferrer says to them disdainfully: "You people are like those Japanese soldiers left behind on deserted islands who think that World War II is still going on. Let me be the first to tell you, your government surrendered this war a long time ago."

It's a brilliant bit of filmmaking; it's also bunk. Over the last five years, while no one was paying attention, America has been winning its war on drugs.

The cosmopolitan view has long been that the fight against drugs is a losing battle; that the supply of drugs pouring into America is never-ending; that drug lords are unrelenting zombie-supermen--kill one, and five more spring up.

The American drug problem grew to epidemic proportions throughout the 1960s and 1970s. In 1979, agencies of Health and Human Services and the National Institutes of Health performed a national household survey of illicit drug use; substances included marijuana, cocaine, heroin, banned hallucinogens and inhalants, and unauthorized use of sedatives, stimulants and analgesics. As of 1979, the numbers were horrifying: 31.8 percent of teens ages 12 to 17 had used drugs; 16.3 percent of them had used in the last month. Among those ages 18 to 25 it was worse: 69 percent had used at some point; 38 percent in the last month.

But throughout the '80s, those numbers shrank. Sophisticates derided "Just Say No," but by 1993, only 16.4 percent of 12- to 17-year-olds had used, and only 5.7 percent had used in the last month. In the 18-to-25 age bracket, 50.2 percent had tried drugs, but only 15 percent had used in the last 30 days. It was a remarkable success.

From 1993 to 2001, the numbers become less rosy: Among ages 12 to 17, the percentage of youths who had tried drugs increased almost twofold. In the 18-to-25 crowd, the increase was less marked, but still noticeable.

There's a reason we pay so much attention to these two age groups. As Tom Riley, the director of public affairs at the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), explains: "If people don't start using drugs as teenagers--the mechanism of addiction clicks much more quickly in the developing brain--then they are unlikely to ever go on to serious drug abuse. If we can reduce the number of teens who use drugs, we change the shape of the problem for generations to come."

After 2001, the tide turned again. Since then, teen drug use is off nearly 19 percent. Which means that 700,000 fewer teens are using drugs today than just a few years ago.

Last goes on to explain why. Check it out at the link. Meanwhile, we're wondering why we're not hearing about this marvelous news in the MSM. Or is the answer so obvious that we sound utterly foolish and disingenuous suggesting that we're puzzled by the MSM not reporting good news?

Aligning With the Strong Horse

There's not been much in the news lately about developments in Iraq, but Bill Roggio is on the job to update us about what is transpiring between the Sunnis and al-Qaeda in Anbar province. Here's his lead:

Further details emerge about the developing rifts between the native elements of the Iraqi insurgency and al-Qaeda and their Islamist allies. Army Major General Rick Lynch, the spokesman for Multinational Force Iraq, acknowledged the infighting has occurred in Anbar province; "Many times these citizens are urged by their local tribal leaders to rid the area of the insurgent influence... In Fallujah and Ramadi, citizens have established checkpoints to keep insurgents out and six al Qaeda leaders have been killed in the area since September."

According to Maj. Gen. Lynch, the increase in tips from over a year ago has skyrocketed by 240 times the number reported last year. The Department of Defense reports "Iraqi civilians provided more than 1,300 tips to coalition and Iraqi security forces... That is a huge improvement from the 47 tips received in January 2005... Of all the valid calls received by the Ministry of Interior's national tips hotline, 98 percent provided actionable intelligence... Most calls are about terrorist activity... but calls also come in about kidnapping, murder and other criminal activity."

Knight Ridder Newspapers indicates that neighborhood watches are forming in the Baghdad neighborhood of Hai al-Salam, which consists of "Shiite Muslims, Sunni Muslims and Christians." The increase in "kidnappings, assassinations and random violence" pushed the residents to band together across sectarian lines and defends their neighborhoods. When the Iraqi Army and police were unable to provide the security needed for the neighborhood, the residents of Hai al-Salam "erected roadblocks and checkpoints and put neighborhood men to work as guards."

The conventional media wisdom is that Iraq is unravelling faster than we can keep it tied up, but, unsurprisingly, the conventional media wisdom is evidently wrong. To be sure, it is taking longer to bring Iraq under control than most in the administration thought that it would, and it's virtually certain that more Americans have died than had to. Yet, despite the awful cost in blood and treasure, something unprecedented in human history is happening in that tragic land.

A diverse, mostly Arab nation of twenty five million people, riven by ethnic and religious animosities, is gradually shaking off the dysfunctional habits formed over decades of oppression and moving slowly but inexorably toward a stable democracy. It really is remarkable, and if it does happen, and if Afghanistan continues to develop along the lines already established, George Bush will ultimately be regarded as the most visionary foreign policy leader in the history of the free world.

Two Kinds of Democrats

This column in the New York Times by Adam Nagourney and Sheryl Stolberg quotes Democratic leaders who lament the missed opportunities and woeful state of the current Democratic party. These pols and party leaders believe that the Bush administration is weakened and that they should be poised to sweep the field in November, but for the reasons they adumbrate, they're just not likely to pull it off. The article has received a lot of acclaim, even from conservatives, and is worth the time to read.

Our take, though, is that much of what the Democrats quoted in the Times' piece are complaining about is really symptomatic of a more fundamental crisis within the party. Their problem is this: There are basically two kinds of Democrats. There are those who deep down know that were they president they probably would have read the intelligence reports on WMD in Iraq the same as Bush did and privately, at least, don't really blame him for taking the action he did. Nor do they really fault him for the messy post-war situation because a lot of it was unforseeable and some of it has been overblown. Nor do they blame him for the NSA surveillance that he's authorized. They know that were they in his shoes they'd probably do the same thing. They also have to acknowledge that his economic measures have brought us out of a recession and have given us a healthy economy, at least in the near term. In other words, Bush's policies have not been very much different than what a moderate Democrat might himself endorse if he were president.

The second kind of Democrat, by contrast, is fervently anti-war, anti-tax cut, anti-Patriot act, pro-appeasement, pro-gay marriage, pro-abortion, and pro-socialism.

The first group, the moderates, can't present a significant alternative to the American people because they simply don't have one. They're reduced to criticizing Bush around the margins, but largely they have no voice because whatever they would advance as policy is not substantively different from what the president is already doing.

The second kind of Democrat has a dramatic alternative to Bush's policy but they dare not present it in toto to the American people, at least not ingenuously, because they know the American people would contemptuously reject it. Thus, they're left with no recourse but to either shut up, which they won't do, or to so vilify and smear Bush that if people won't vote to elect them at least they'll vote to eject him and his party.

They're blinded by their contempt for Bush personally and frustrated by their inability to thwart him. Driven by their loathing, they emerge regularly in the media to disparage his administration in the most uncivil, hate-filled accents, and to seek to salvage whatever political victories they may by whatever means necessary, whether it be through obstructionism, personal vilification, or perhaps, should they win enough seats in 2006, impeachment. If their only motivations were hate and a lust for power they would behave in no different fashion than the one in which they are presently behaving. Their behavior conveys the clear impression that the nation's welfare and that of its people is not for them a genuine, or at least not a primary, concern.

The fundamental problem for the Democratic party, then, is that those who could wield power have no clear alternative to what Bush is doing to offer the voters, and those who have a clear alternative are not attractive, either in terms of the image they present nor in terms of the alternative they offer. Compounding the problem is that it is this latter group which dominates and controls the levers of power within the party.

The only solution to this crisis is for the party to sever its left wing, to rid themselves of the influence of the extremists in the blogosphere and Hollywood, and to mute liabilities like Howard Dean, Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Ted Kennedy, et al. Even this, however, is a measure fraught with dangers. Should the left, disenchanted with, or divorced from, the Democratic party, start up a third party with their not inconsiderable bankrollers, it would siphon away so many votes from the Democrats that they'd be relegated to permanent minority status.

It seems as if no matter what they do they lose unless Bush is caught in some scandal. It's a shame that they've come to the point where their only hope of finding favor with the electorate is that the other guy disgrace himself.

Moral Non-Equivalence

The local paper had a blurb yesterday on the cartoon wars. I can't link to it because the paper's web site can only be navigated by those who can also solve Rubik's Cubes in under sixty seconds, and consequently I am unable to locate an e-copy of the article. Here is the relevant portion, in any event:

A well-known Dutch-Belgium Islamic militant organization, the Arab-European League, posted anti-Jewish cartoons on its website, calling the crude drawings an exercise in free speech. One showed Anne Frank, a young Jewish victim of a Nazi concentration camp whose diary was published posthumously, lying naked in bed with Adolf Hitler.

A couple of things to note here: First, we're surprised that Islamic militants are suddenly enthusiastic about free speech. We shouldn't be, of course, since one of their favorite tactics has been to use the values of the West against it. The same cultural-religious milieu that produced the Taliban and al-Qaeda is likely to quickly grow weary of free expression, especially since it is the greatest threat to the tyrannies they would impose.

Secondly, anyone who thinks that the largely innocuous cartoons depicting Mohammed which have inspired mindless frenzy in the Islamic world are in any way similar to the coarse depiction of a young girl murdered by the Nazis in a sexual embrace with her murderer is a hopeless bonehead.

Surely one reason why Islamic culture still languishes in the deserts of medievalism is that it cultivates little imagination for anything other than creative ways of destroying and killing, and what it does inspire, such as the Anne Frank drawing, is too often suitable fare only for the very dim-witted.

There is cleverness, however, in the use of violence and threats to intimidate the Western media. Now that Muslims have shown that they can impose their will and their religious beliefs on much of the non-Muslim world (see here for an appeasement update), the question arises as to what they will demand next.

Having insured that few newspapers will see fit in the future to run anything that might outrage tender Muslim consciences, will they next demand that all images of women in slacks or skirts be expunged from public spaces because they offend Muslim sensibilities? Will they insist, on pain of rioting in the streets, that advertisements for alcohol be prohibited? Or that Western markets cease their sale of pork? On what grounds will the West resist such extortions if they will not defend freedom of speech and freedom of the press in the present circumstance?

If Muslims are successful in bullying the West into suppressing the basic freedoms it has long cherished, they will have made a giant stride toward coercing the West into tacitly accepting the bleak standards of their primitive religion and submitting to a state of de facto, and abject, dhimmitude.

Michael Behe's Defense

In a twelve page tour de force Michael Behe presents his response to Judge Jones' criticisms of him in Kitzmiller. Since Behe was the defendants' lead witness much of the Judge's opinion derogated his testimony. Behe considers the relevant passages from the decision and TKOs the Judge's finding in about the first page or two. In his calm, professional manner Behe implicitly confirms the point we made in our own analysis of the decision - the Judge, whose experience in scientific matters was doubtless limited in his previous capacity as state liquor control board chairman, was clearly out of his depth. Sensing his inadequacy, perhaps, the judge simply chose to play it safe by accepting uncritically whatever the plaintiff's witnesses told him and rejecting whatever he heard from the defendants. His claim that Intelligent Design is not genuine science has about it the scent of a purely arbitrary judgment on his part, and Behe explains why.

Here's his conclusion:

The Court's reasoning in section E-4 is premised on: a cramped view of science; the conflation of intelligent design with creationism; an incapacity to distinguish the implications of a theory from the theory itself; a failure to differentiate evolution from Darwinism; and strawman arguments against ID. The Court has accepted the most tendentious and shopworn excuses for Darwinism with great charity and impatiently dismissed evidence-based arguments for design.

All of that is regrettable, but in the end does not impact the realities of biology, which are not amenable to adjudication. On the day after the judge's opinion, December 21, 2005, as before, the cell is run by amazingly complex, functional machinery that in any other context would immediately be recognized as designed. On December 21, 2005, as before, there are no non-design explanations for the molecular machinery of life, only wishful speculations and Just-So stories.

Behe's paper is a masterwork of well-reasoned argument and will repay anyone interested in this issue for the time invested in reading it.

The House of Islam

A friend forwards us an essay by Sam Harris on the current crisis boiling over in dar al-Islam. I don't agree with Mr. Harris on some very important issues (He's strongly antipathetic to Christianity, for instance), but in this excellent essay he consistently hits the nail squarely. Here are a few excerpts. If you go to the link, be sure to read his comment at the end as well:

Let us take stock of the moral intuitions now on display in the House of Islam: On Aug. 17, 2005, an Iraqi insurgent helped collect the injured survivors of a car bombing, rushed them to a hospital and then detonated his own bomb, murdering those who were already mortally wounded as well as the doctors and nurses struggling to save their lives. Where were the cries of outrage from the Muslim world?

Religious sociopaths kill innocents by the hundreds in the capitols of Europe, blow up the offices of the U.N. and the Red Cross, purposefully annihilate crowds of children gathered to collect candy from U.S. soldiers on the streets of Baghdad, kidnap journalists, behead them, and the videos of their butchery become the most popular form of pornography in the Muslim world, and no one utters a word of protest because these atrocities have been perpetrated "in defense of Islam." But draw a picture of the Prophet, and pious mobs convulse with pious rage. One could hardly ask for a better example of religious dogmatism and its pseudo-morality eclipsing basic, human goodness.

It is time we recognized - and obliged the Muslim world to recognize - that "Muslim extremism" is not extreme among Muslims. Mainstream Islam itself represents an extremist rejection of intellectual honesty, gender equality, secular politics and genuine pluralism. The truth about Islam is as politically incorrect as it is terrifying: Islam is all fringe and no center. In Islam, we confront a civilization with an arrested history. It is as though a portal in time has opened, and the Christians of the 14th century are pouring into our world.

Islam is the fastest growing religion in Europe. The demographic trends are ominous: Given current birthrates, France could be a majority Muslim country in 25 years, and that is if immigration were to stop tomorrow. Throughout Western Europe, Muslim immigrants show little inclination to acquire the secular and civil values of their host countries, and yet exploit these values to the utmost-demanding tolerance for their backwardness, their misogyny, their anti-Semitism, and the genocidal hatred that is regularly preached in their mosques.

Political correctness and fears of racism have rendered many secular Europeans incapable of opposing the terrifying religious commitments of the extremists in their midst. In an effort to appease the lunatic furor arising in the Muslim world in response to the publication of the Danish cartoons, many Western leaders have offered apologies for exercising the very freedoms that are constitutive of civil society in the 21st century.

The U.S. and British governments have chastised Denmark and the other countries that published the cartoons for privileging freedom of speech over religious sensitivity. It is not often that one sees the most powerful countries on Earth achieve new depths of weakness, moral exhaustion and geopolitical stupidity with a single gesture. This was appeasement at its most abject.

The idea that Islam is a "peaceful religion hijacked by extremists" is a dangerous fantasy-and it is now a particularly dangerous fantasy for Muslims to indulge. It is not at all clear how we should proceed in our dialogue with the Muslim world, but deluding ourselves with euphemisms is not the answer. It now appears to be a truism in foreign policy circles that real reform in the Muslim world cannot be imposed from the outside. But it is important to recognize why this is so-it is so because the Muslim world is utterly deranged by its religious tribalism.

This is outstanding commentary on the events of these past few days. Harris' whole piece is an important read and we encourage you to check it out.

The Evolutionary Leap to Sex

The local paper had an article last Monday about the Avida program run by Robert Pennock at Michigan State. It's a computer simulation of Darwinian evolution in which organisms, called Avidians, diversify and evolve much as real organisms are believed to do in the natural world. The program is interesting, but, despite the attempts by some to employ it in the battle against Intelligent Design, it's really quite irrelevant to that issue. We wrote about Avida a year ago (see here) and cited a critical piece by Jonathon Wells which makes this point pretty clearly.

Nevertheless, this passage in the article in our paper piqued our interest:

For instance one of [Pennock's] students is trying to show the evolution of sex. In the basic Avida program, organisms reproduce asexually, but the student changed the code to allow simulated sexual reproduction in order to understand the evolutionary advantages. While there are many theories on the subject, "everyone agrees we don't have an answer on [how sex evolved]," Pennock said.

Hmmm. Let's see. In order to get the Avidians to switch from asexual to sexual reproduction an intelligent programmer had to intervene and "mutate" the software code to facilitate the switch. From the Avidians' standpoint this looks an awful lot like a miracle, doesn't it? Isn't this confirmation of the sort of thing that IDers have been saying about evolution for the past two decades - that it doesn't happen apart from intelligent input? Just asking.

The Jihad Against Cartoons

If you haven't yet seen the cartoons that have "precipitated" the spontaneous riots among Muslims offended by depictions of their Prophet, and most people haven't because very few people are showing them, you can view them here. If you're expecting something truly horrifying or degrading you'll be greatly surprised.

Omar at Iraq The Model has some interesting thoughts on all this:

We have a piece of wisdom here that says "The bird got mad at the grain field!" which as you can see means that sometimes people make stupid decisions that can harm only their own interests, yet they think that by doing what they did they would harm those they're boycotting. This saying applies to all Muslim countries in general and to our interim government in particular.

Our brilliant transportation minister Salam al-Maliki who is a Sadrist, by the way, announced that his ministry will suspend all projects and contracts with Denmark and Norway and said that Iraq will stop accepting any donations or offers concerning Iraq's reconstruction! Who are they harming by doing this? Denmark? No, ... they are harming no one but Iraq and Iraqis.

I give up! I have to comment on the general situation...I swear that 90%+ of the protestors in Muslim countries have not seen the cartoons and do not know the name of the paper, and when I say that I'm sure of it because I have access to the web 24/7, and I spent a really long time searching for the cartoons and couldn't find them until a friend emailed me a link.

You know that those cartoons were published for the 1st time months ago, and we here in the Middle East have tons of jokes about Allah, the prophets and the angels that are way more offensive, funny and obscene than those poorly-made cartoons, yet no one ever got shot for telling one of those jokes or at least we had never seen rallies and protests against those infidel joke-tellers.

What I want to say is that I think the reactions were planned to be exaggerated this time by some Middle Eastern regimes and are not mere public reaction. And I think Syria and Iran have the motives to trigger such reactions in order to get away from the pressures applied by the international community on those regimes. However, I cannot claim that the Muslim community is innocent for there have been outrageous reactions outside the range of Syria's or Iran's influence but again, these protests and threats are more political than religious in nature.

One last thing, even if the entire EU apologizes it won't change a thing; fanatics in our countries here had always considered the west their infidel arrogant crusader enemy and no apology no matter how big or sincere can change that.

Omar is no doubt right. This is not about the cartoons. This is another skirmish in Islam's long war against the West, and the West will never win that war by trying to appease the Islamists.

Speaking of appeasement, the hypocrisy in some of the American MSM is fulsome. Many press organs which refuse to run the drawings out of sensitivity to Muslim beliefs nevertheless had no such compunctions about showing Andres Serrano's Piss Christ or Chris Ofili's dung splattered Holy Virgin Mary. The reason the major newspapers are not showing the cartoons is that they have been intimidated and cowed by Muslim threats. They'll show material offensive to Christians because they do not fear Christians. They fear Muslims and with good reason. The least they could do is be honest about it.