Assault on Academic Freedom

Here's more on the upcoming film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. The film is a documentary that reveals the extent of the Darwinian inquisition against any and all heretics, no matter how slight their deviation from the materialist orthodoxy. It also reveals, apparently, how Darwinism, alone among all intellectual disciplines, is slowly gaining state sanction and protection from any and all challenges.

RLC

Moral Equivalence and Michael Vick

Forthwith some questions raised by the Michael Vick situation:

How does the abhorrent torture of dogs for pleasure differ in any significant moral way from a late-term abortion or from certain types of animal hunting? If Vick had set the dogs loose on his property, and he and his friends hunted them down and killed them, what would the moral distinction be between that and hunting, say, a bear? If there is no significant distinction then what's the distinction between killing dogs in a hunt and killing them in a dogfight?

Perhaps, someone might reply, the difference lies in the brutality to which the unfortunate dogs were subjected, but then what's the moral difference between what was done to these animals and ripping the limbs from an unborn baby and crushing its skull? Why do people who think abortion should be legal gasp in horror that Michael Vick and his friends would be so barbaric as to force dogs to fight each other and to brutally kill the ones which lose.

Is it because they think the unborn baby is not a person? Neither is the dog. Is it because the woman's body is her property and she has the right to do with her property as she pleases? Vick was on his property, doesn't he have the right to entertain himself as he sees fit as long as no one else is harmed?

I'm not defending Vick. I'm just wondering why people who condone violence against the unborn and big-game animals are so sickened by what Vick is charged with doing. If any of our readers can explain this to me, I'd be grateful.

RLC

P.Z. Myers and Academic Fascism

Atheistic biologist P.Z. Myers is evidently being sued for some unkind reviews of a book on evolutionary biology he posted on his web site. The suit seems frivolous, but in response to the news of it Myers said this:

I still stand by my review, and now I'm a bit disturbed that someone would think criticism of a scientific hypothesis must be defended by silencing its critics.

Hmm. Myers thinks it disturbing that someone would want to silence critics of a scientific hypothesis, yet Myers is the same guy who exclaimed that he wanted to fire any teacher who's critical of Darwinism in the classroom. Here are his words:

"Please don't try to tell me that you object to the tone of our complaints. Our only problem is that we aren't martial enough, or vigorous enough, or loud enough, or angry enough. The only appropriate responses should involve some form of righteous fury, much butt-kicking, and the public firing and humiliation of some teachers, many schoolboard members, and vast numbers of sleazy far-right politicians.

"I say, screw the polite words and careful rhetoric. It's time for scientists to break out the steel-toed boots and brass knuckles, and get out there and hammer on the lunatics and idiots. If you don't care enough for the truth to fight for it, then get out of the way."

We learn here what we might call the P.Z. Principle of scientific theory review. It can be stated thus: Criticism of scientific theories should never be prohibited or constrained unless it is one's own favorite theory which is being criticized. In that case the critic should be severely punished by the academic storm troopers.

Intellectual fascism is alive and well among the Darwinians and the sound of breaking glass fills the air.

RLC

Sunday Column

The fifth in a series of columns I've been invited to do for our local Sunday paper appeared yesterday. I wrote on why many Americans have grown suspicious of their Muslim neighbors and what Muslims might do to allay those suspicions. Here's the column:

Muslims are understandably annoyed and offended that since 9/11 they've been subjected to suspicion and scrutiny in airports and elsewhere, a treatment they perceive as unjust.

It goes without saying that in a nation founded on toleration of religious difference we must not impute to all members of Islam the guilt of a minority, even if it's a large minority, who commit acts of terrorism. No doubt there are in the United States and Europe many Muslims who feel their religion is compatible with the principles of freedom and equality upon which Western nations have been built and to which much of their success is owed. No doubt there are many Muslims who wish for nothing more than to live in peace with their non-Muslim neighbors.

That having been said, there are a lot of non-Muslims, people of good will, who would dearly love to hear more young Muslims unequivocally affirm those principles and distance themselves from those who wish to supplant them, by whatever means necessary, with Islamic law.

Mark Steyn, in his book America Alone, observes that it's only a relative few Muslims who blow up trains and airplanes but that guilt extends far beyond the relatively small circle of killers.

Around the murderers, he writes, are others who form a series of concentric rings:

"...the terrorist bent on devastation and destruction prowls the streets, while around him are a significant number of people urging him on, and around them is a larger group of young male co-religionists gleefully celebrating mass murder, and around them a much larger group of "moderates" who stand silent at the acts committed in their name, and around them a mesh of religious and community leaders openly inciting treason against the state, and around them another mesh of religious and community leaders who serve as apologists for the inciters, and around them a network of professional identity-group grievance-mongers adamant that they're the real victims, and around them a vast mass of elite opinion in the media ... too squeamish about ethno-cultural matters to confront reality, and around them a political establishment desperate to pretend this is just a managerial problem that can be finessed away with a few new laws and a bit of community outreach. It's these insulating circles ... that bulk up the loser death-cult and make it a potent force."

Beyond these circles, one hopes, there is another ring of Muslims who deplore the practice of killing apostates, beating women, executing homosexuals, calling Jews pigs and monkeys, and resorting to violence to spread Islam. But how large is that circle and who's in it?

Some months prior to 9/11 I attended a talk given by an imam in a neighboring county. He was an affable and impressive fellow, and I was taken with his enthusiasm for the work of his mosque. During the Q&A I asked him this: If it ever came to pass that Muslims were in the political majority in this country would our Constitution and Bill of Rights be in jeopardy? The eloquence he had displayed throughout his lecture suddenly fled him, and he seemed at a loss for a reply. Most of the members of my group got the distinct impression that with all his hemming, hawing, qualifications and obfuscations he was trying to find a way to say "no" without lying.

Theocracy, state control of both religion and the press, inequality based on religion and gender, cruel punishments, extreme intolerance, hatred of non-Muslims, religious war and so on, are all enjoined by the Koran, many of its devotees tell us, but they're all proscribed by the laws and values which have evolved in this nation since the 17th century.

It's because so many of us who would like to live harmoniously with Muslims in our communities are afraid that what those Muslims themselves want is to be altogether rid of us and our way of life that we can't help feel uneasy in their presence. It's because we wonder what went through their minds when they saw the World Trade Towers fall that we sometimes experience a twinge of concern about their democratic bona fides.

So, here's a question many Americans wish to ask of our Muslim neighbors: "Do you sympathize with efforts, whether peaceful or otherwise, to abrogate the Bill of Rights and establish in their stead Koranic law?"

To the extent American Muslims are silent or ambiguous on this question, they'll continue to attract the suspicions of other Americans.

No doubt many Muslims will think this unfair, and perhaps it is, but they shouldn't blame us. They should blame instead their co-religionists who claim to speak on behalf of the True Faith and who desire to see every infidel, and his children, dead.

That, too, is a little unfair.

RLC

Mother Teresa's Crisis of Faith

When I started reading David Van Biema's essay in Time on Mother Teresa titled "Crisis of Faith" I confess I expected the worst. Here, I feared, was a hit piece that would expose the sainted Teresa as a spiritual fraud and hypocrite. I was happy to discover about half way into it that it was really no such thing. It was, on the contrary, a portrait of a deeply committed, but deeply anguished, human being.

Here's a summary: Letters have come to light that Teresa wrote to spiritual mentors and confessors throughout her life which reveal that beginning shortly after she initiated her ministry to the poor in India she was beset by a sense of the absence of God. She longed to feel God's presence in her life and work, but almost never did. Instead she experienced for almost her entire adult life a persistent spiritual dryness, emptiness, and doubt.

Nevertheless, she persevered for over fifty years right to her death. She resolved to live her life for God whether she felt His presence or not. She learned from her experience and from her correspondents that faith isn't a feeling. It's not a matter of living moment by moment with God's presence manifest in our hearts. It's living with, and for, God regardless of how, or what, we feel. Faith is a commitment, it's not a feeling.

For Teresa that meant a lifetime of anguish and perplexity as she puzzled over why God seemed so remote and inaccessible. Like Christ on the cross she felt that God had forsaken her, yet she refused to let her feelings rule her will. She lived for Christ and hoped and trusted that all would someday become clear.

Every believer experiences what she experienced although perhaps not so acutely or for so long. It was, perhaps, her particular cross. That's part of what made her such a remarkable woman and what made her faith such a marvelous example for the rest of us. Faith based on a constant feeling of God's presence is not faith at all. It's not trust at all. It's a kind of infatuation. The true "knights of faith," as Kierkegaard called them, are people who live as God wants them to live regardless of how they feel.

Everyone who aspires to understand the idea of "faith" should read Van Biema's article to the end. It's worth the time.

RLC

Shut Up and Sing

Ted Nugent, the libertarian rocker, debases our politics with vile rants like this one. One of our biggest political problems is that people on opposite sides of the ideological divide don't just disagree, they don't just dislike each other, they don't respect each other either. If we're ever going to solve the problems we face as a nation we have to be able to work with those we don't like, and that means we have to treat each other with some respect.

People like Nugent, with their disgusting name-calling and thinly veiled threats simply inflame hatred and divide us even further. What he says on the video is much worse than what the Dixie Chicks said and that was bad enough. I know he's just a rocker, but Nugent's brand of political discourse has no place in a civil society.

RLC

Sojourners on Iran

Jessica Wilbanks of Sojourners offers her thoughts on U.S./Iranian relations. She is, like all of us, eager to avoid war with Iran, but her essay seems to ignore the real problem, which is that Iran is not particularly eager to avoid war with us. In fact, they're already engaged in it. Ms Wilbank's key passage is this:

Last February, 13 representatives of national religious groups and denominations, led by the Mennonite Central Committee and the American Friends Service Committee, journeyed to Iran in an effort to build bridges of understanding between our two nations. Rather than approaching Iran as the "axis of evil," they met with Muslim and Christian leaders, government officials, and Iranians from many walks of life. Through listening and sharing their own stories, they returned from Tehran with new hope for an easing of tensions between Iran and the U.S. Specifically, they call on the two countries to take the following steps:

• immediately engage in direct, face-to-face talks;
• cease using language that defines the other using "enemy" images;
and
• promote more people-to-people exchanges, including among religious leaders, members of Parliament/Congress, and civil society.

While in Iran with the ecumenical delegation, Sojourners/Call to Renewal representative Jeff Carr was struck by the dramatically different narratives Iranians and Americans told of the history between the two nations: the CIA's overthrow of Iran's democratically elected leader, the installation of the shah, the 1979 revolution, the ensuing hostage crisis, and the current nuclear standoff....The first step to reconciling the tension between the U.S. and Iran is to learn one another's stories.

Dramatically different stories, indeed, but I'm not sure why Ms Wilbanks leaves so much out of the Iranian "story." Perhaps it's because she suspects that were the American people to "learn the Iranian story" they'd be far less hopeful that anything short of military action will be of any avail. Ms Wilbanks makes no mention, for instance, of Iran's substantial support for and control of Hamas, Hezbollah and other terrorist groups around the world. She makes no mention of Iran's manifest commitment to building nuclear weapons, nor does she mention Iran's repeated threats to use those nukes against Israel. She makes no mention of Iran's hope that they will hasten the coming of the 13th imam by precipitating a military cataclysm in the Mideast, and she makes no mention of Iran's complicity in destabilizing Iraq and in the deaths of American soldiers.

The three recommendations of the ecumenical delegation amount to merely talking our differences to death while Iran continues to prepare for nuclear war or at least nuclear blackmail. If the ecumenical delegation wishes to expunge the language of enemy images from the discourse of international affairs then they should prevail upon Iran to stop training Iraqi insurgents and sending them back to Iraq to kill Americans and Iraqi civilians. They should prevail upon Iran to stop sending deadly IED's and other weapons into Iraq. They should prevail upon Iranian leaders to cease calling for the obliteration of Israel. In short, they should demand that Iran cease acting like an enemy and then maybe we can cease thinking of Iran as an enemy.

I have no problem with talks and cultural exchanges. They have their place, but they are no substitute for clearly and concisely identifying the evils we face in the world, nor are they a substitute for the use of force if force should become necessary.

I have just one question for Ms Wilbanks, and it is absolutely crucial for her credibility that she and others who hold her views answer it forthrightly: If sending religious leaders and scholars to Iran does nothing to dissuade them from their nuclear program, as it almost surely will not, should the world, nevertheless, stand by and allow Iran to develop nuclear weapons, or should they not?

This is really the only question that needs to be answered. Of course we should try diplomacy to resolve our difficulties. Of course we should turn to the U.N. to try in its characteristically feckless way to disarm Iran. To say this is simply to state the obvious, but, if all these fail, then what? What is the last resort? That's the question, Ms Wilbanks.

RLC

Simply Sick

If we gave out a "scum of the earth" prize this guy would certainly be eligible. He's an American Muslim who considers the beheadings of the young Korean missionaries by the Afghan Taliban a delightful prospect. They were, in his opinion, instrumental in the conversion of Muslim children to Christianity and thus deserve a grisly death.

Some Muslims have so little confidence in the ability of their religion to compete against Christianity on the field of ideas that their only recourse is to employ violence, threats and intimidation. That's bad enough, but to anticipate with glee the slaughter of these young Koreans, most of whom are young women who came to Afghanistan as angels of mercy to the suffering and deprived Afghan people, is simply sick.

I'm sure we'll soon be hearing loud denunciations of this creature from the moderate Muslim community. Or not.

Parenthetically, it's important, perhaps, to note the difference we see illustrated in this tragic episode between Christian martyrs and Muslim martyrs. Most, if not all, Christian martyrs are people who who did no harm to anyone else and who are killed by others because of their faith in Christ. Muslim martyrs are people who die in the act of savagely murdering others on behalf of Allah. The difference is as the difference between heaven and hell.

RLC

Re: Pressing His Luck

According to Strategy Page the cause of the explosion in the video we linked to a couple of days ago was a premature detonation of the mortar. We had speculated that it might have been return artillery fire, but not having any military experience whatsoever, we'd be better off not speculating about such things.

RLC

Lousy Leadership

John Gibson interviews Pastor Juan Gray of Jacksonville who "argues" that black witnesses to crime should refuse to cooperate with police because the police are racists.

Gray is still living in the 1950's, and he sounds almost completely detached from rationality in this interview. Almost nothing he says makes any sense. In Gray's world it's better to have thugs and murderers preying upon the innocent than to help the police put them in jail.

Unfortunately, with leaders like this man in their communities, African-Americans will continue to comprise a significant portion of the American underclass for a long time to come.

RLC

Ben Stein Is Bad to the Bone

A new movie is coming out in February that promises to toss the Darwinians into a tizzy. Go here to view the trailers for Expelled.

HT: Uncommon Descent

RLC

Standing Tall

Nicholas Sarkozy is in the process of leading France in an about-face on its relations with the U.S. The administration's critics have been telling us for four years or more how George Bush has been the cause of an erosion of respect for the U.S. in Europe, but both France and Germany have nevertheless elected leaders who want to be much closer to Bush than did their predecessors.

The fact is that most people respect strength, though they may not like it, and despise weakness. Bush has stood firm, most prominently on Iraq and Afghanistan, and even if the Euros don't like the war many of them respect Bush, if only grudgingly, for the strength of his resolve.

The cut-and-runners may be more to the Euros' liking because they affirm their own inclinations, but no one is going to respect them. People always respect firmness even when that firmness is put to evil purposes, as it was by Hitler and Stalin, and they always disdain weakness even when the weakness conforms to what people themselves would want to see done.

In the twentieth century people like Winston Churchill, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John II were all deeply respected for their resolve and courage even if they were deeply disdained for their politics. On the other hand, the Neville Chamberlains of the world live on in ignominy even though they were widely praised in their day for their appeasements and capitulations. Quitters are never admired, even by those who call upon them to quit.

George Bush is not right about everything, but he is steadfast and determined, and those who think that that discredits America in the eyes of the world either don't understand human psychology or they're simply indulging in wishful thinking.

RLC

Unspeakable Evil

Is this the sort of barbaric evil that awaits all the people of Iraq as soon as we pull out?

Five-year-old Youssif is scarred for life, his once beautiful smile turned into a grotesquely disfigured face -- the face of a horrifying act by masked men. They grabbed him on a January day outside his central Baghdad home, doused him with gas and set him ablaze. It's an act incomprehensibly savage, even by Iraq's standards today. No one has been arrested and the motive remains unknown.

In a war-ravaged city torn by sectarian violence and marked by acts of vengeance, this attack's apparent randomness stands out as an example of what life has become in a place where brutality -- even against young children -- is a constant.

"They dumped gasoline, burned me, and ran," Youssif told CNN, pointing down the street with his scarred hands where his attackers fled.

As he sucked his thumb, he repeated, "I was burning." He tried to put the flames out himself. It looks as though this boy's face melted and then froze into rivers cutting through swollen hard flesh. It's hard to see the energetic outgoing child his parents describe beneath the sullen demeanor that defines Youssif today.

"He's become spiteful, I am not sure why," said his mother, Zainab. "He is jealous of everyone. If I say the slightest thing to him, he cries. He's sensitive." Even things like eating have become a chore. His face contorts when he tries to shovel rice into his mouth, carefully angling the spoon and then using his fingers to push the little grains through lips he can no longer fully open.

He has also become jealous of the baby sister he used to dote on. "I sit sometimes at night and cry," Zainab said, her voice heavy with guilt. "If only I hadn't let him go outside, if only I hadn't let him play."

It was on January 15 that masked men attacked her boy, their identities still unknown. Zainab said she was upstairs at the time.

"I heard screaming. I thought someone was fighting or something," she said.

She ran downstairs, saw her son and fainted. When she came to, she barely recognized her child. "His head was so swollen, you couldn't see his eyes, and his nose was pushed in."

"There was blood," she added, shuddering slightly. "The skin was melted off."

He spent two months in the hospital recovering from the severe burns. These days Youssif spends most of his time indoors, in front of the computer. It's only then that traces of the 5-year-old in him emerge. "He can't play outside with the other kids," Zainab said. "The other day they were playing, and he came in crying. I asked him, 'What's wrong?' and he said, 'They won't play with me because I am burned.'"

She said he once wanted to be a doctor and he loved kindergarten. "He used to be the one who would wake me up every morning, saying let's go to school," Zainab recalled. She coaxed him to tell me the few words he knows in English. "Girl, boy, window, fan," he said, his voice barely audible, the words barely intelligible. Doctors told the family there is little more they can do to help Youssif. The family can't afford care outside Iraq.

So Zainab has taken a massive risk by telling her story to the world. Her husband works as a security guard, and it's too dangerous for him to talk to the media. "I'd prefer death than seeing my son like this," Zainab said.

All she wants is for someone to help her little boy smile again.

Update: A charity has offered to pay all the costs for reconstructive surgery for Youssif. You might have thought that the charity was an Islamic organization since little Youssif is a Muslim, but you would have been mistaken. The charity is the Children's Burn Foundation. See Hot Air for the details.

RLC

Positive Review of <i>The Edge</i>

The Philadelphia Inquirer has just insured that it will be henceforth the object of much calumny and opprobrium from the Darwinian establishment. It has published a review of Michael Behe's book The Edge of Evolution that actually takes the book seriously enough to explain what Behe's argument is and, what's more, praises it.

Here's the crux of science writer Cameron Wybrow's review:

Behe's new book, The Edge of Evolution, provides some hard numbers, coupled with an ingenious argument. The key to determining the exact powers of Darwinian evolution, says Behe, lies with fast-reproducing microbes. Some, such as malaria, HIV, and E. coli, reproduce so quickly that within a few decades, or at most a few millennia, they generate as many mutations as a larger, slower-breeding animal would in millions of years. By observing how far these creatures have evolved in recent times, we can estimate the creative limits of random mutation.

In the case of malaria, the creative limits appear quite low. Over the last few thousand years, several thousand billion billion malarial cells have been unable to develop an evolutionary response to the sickle-cell mutation, which protects its human bearers from malaria. On the other hand, malaria has proved able to develop Darwinian resistance to the antibiotic chloroquine. This resistance is based upon two simultaneous mutations affecting a malarial protein.

Yet this rare double mutation has occurred fewer than 10 times since chloroquine was introduced 50 years ago, during which time a hundred billion billion malarial cells have been born. If this indicates the typical rate of occurrence of double mutations, then the Darwinian transformation of our pre-chimp ancestor into homo sapiens, which would have required at least some double mutations, would have taken at least a thousand trillion years, a time span greater than the age of the universe....

The response to Behe has been predictable. The editors of the major print media have assigned known enemies of ID to trash the book - Richard Dawkins for the New York Times; Coyne for the New Republic; Miller for Nature; Ruse for Toronto's Globe & Mail. A large part of each review is ad hominem, concerned with Behe's alleged religious agenda, his minority status among biologists, and other irrelevant matters. In Dawkins' review, the science is barely touched, and it's not clear from Ruse's review that he has even opened the cover of the book. Behe deserves better. The Edge of Evolution makes a serious, quantitative argument about the limits of Darwinian evolution. Evolutionary biology cannot honestly ignore it.

Read the rest of Wybrow's review here.

RLC

An Atheist's Plea to Atheists

Well-known skeptic writer Michael Shermer has penned an open letter to the more militant of his atheist brethren imploring them to adopt a less strident, more tolerant tone. The letter is interesting although I'm not suure what it's doing in Scientific American.

RLC

Israeli Missile Defense

According to Strategy Page,

Israel is going ahead with installing the Iron Dome anti-rocket system. This is a defensive system with a unique twist. Iron Dome radars (there are two of them) quickly calculate the trajectory of the incoming rocket (Palestinian Kassams from Gaza, or Russian and Iranian designs favored by Hizbollah in Lebanon) and do nothing if the rocket trajectory indicates it is going to land in an uninhabited area. But if the computers predict a rocket coming down in an inhabited area, a $40,000 guided missile is fired to intercept the rocket. This makes the system cost-effective. That's because Hizbollah fired 4,000 rockets last year, and Palestinian terrorists in Gaza have fired over six thousand Kassam rockets in the past six years. But over 90 percent of these rockets landed in uninhabited areas.

Very clever, those Israelis.

RLC

Pressing His Luck

I don't know how this made it onto YouTube, but it's a slow-motion video clip of a jihadi paying the ultimate price for trying to kill people with a mortar.

There's no explanation of what happens, but I suspect that his initial round was tracked by computerized artillery and the return fire was deadly accurate. He should have taken off after he shot the first round, but he evidently wanted to increase the chances that he maimed or killed someone.

RLC

Academic Re-education Camps

Science welcomes eccentrics and heretics, those whose opinions and theories shake established orthodoxies. Well, at least it used to. That was until the orthodoxies concerning women, homosexuality and transgenderedness, race, religion and evolution all came under the aegis of secular leftism. Now one challenges those orthodoxies at considerable peril to one's professional and personal well-being.

Ask, for example, Lawrence Summers about what happens when one transgresses the leftist dogmas about gender. Ask Charles Murray about what happens when one flouts the dogmas concerning race. Ask Richard Sternberg what happens when one violates the dogmas concerning Darwin or Guillermo Gonzalez about what happens when metaphysical materialism is called into question.

Now J. Michael Bailey is feeling the force of academic intimidation and character assassination that accompanies any hypothesis that wanders too close to the barbed wire perimeters of the leftist gulag:

In his book, Bailey argued that some people born male who want to cross genders are driven primarily by an erotic fascination with themselves as women. This idea runs counter to the belief, held by many men who decide to live as women, that they are the victims of a biological mistake - in essence, women trapped in men's bodies. Dr. Bailey described the alternate theory, which is based on Canadian studies done in the 1980s and 1990s, in part by telling the stories of several transgender women he met through a mutual acquaintance. In the book, he gave them pseudonyms, like "Alma" and "Juanita."

Other scientists praised the book as a compelling explanation of the science. The Lambda Literary Foundation, an organization that promotes gay, bisexual and transgender literature, nominated the book for an award.

But then the roof caved in. Read the story for the details of the ordeal to which Bailey is being forced to undergo.

The left-wing python is slowly squeezing the life out of academic research. By insisting that all findings conform to what is ideologically acceptable and punishing those who dissent our universities have undergone a sex change of their own, so to speak. They have exchanged their traditional role as marketplaces of ideas for more "progressive" roles as institutions of indoctrination for our young and re-education camps for those unfortunate souls so foolish as to deviate from the party line.

RLC

For What It's Worth

Breitbart has the story of an AP-Ipsos poll which found that 22 percent of liberals and moderates said they had not read a book within the past year, compared with 34 percent of conservatives:

Among those who had read at least one book, liberals typically read nine books in the year, with half reading more than that and half less. Conservatives typically read eight, moderates five.

By slightly wider margins, Democrats tended to read more books than Republicans and independents. There were no differences by political party in the percentage of those who said they had not read at least one book.

I wonder if the disparity between liberals and conservatives has something to do with the fact that liberals are often academics and conservatives are often businessmen. The former might be expected to read more than the latter.

In any event, I don't think we can draw any significance from these numbers without knowing what sorts of books are being read by the two groups. If one group reads a lot of novels and another reads a lot of history chances are the former is going to read more books in a year than the latter.

What is troubling, though, is that:

One in four adults say they read no books at all in the past year. Of those who did read, women and seniors were most avid, and religious works and popular fiction were the top choices.

The survey reveals a nation whose book readers, on the whole, can hardly be called ravenous. The typical person claimed to have read four books in the last year - half read more and half read fewer. Excluding those who hadn't read any, the usual number read was seven.

"I just get sleepy when I read," said Richard Bustos of Dallas, a habit with which millions of Americans can doubtless identify. Bustos, a 34-year-old project manager for a telecommunications company, said he had not read any books in the last year and would rather spend time in his backyard pool.

Twenty-five percent of us don't read at all, and those who do - assuming that by "religious works" is meant stuff like the Left Behind series - read mostly to be entertained. Sadly it appears that Americans do not hold the gifts of language, literacy, and learning in very high esteem.

I was reminded by this survey that both Karl Rove and George Bush read a book or two a week, and Bush's reading is not just light entertainment (see the link for a sample). His reading evinces an intellectual curiosity far above that of most Americans and probably beyond that of most of those who criticize him for being mentally obtuse.

RLC

Artificial Life

So, according to this AP story scientists are within a couple of years of producing a living cell from the chemical constituents of life:

Around the world, a handful of scientists are trying to create life from scratch and they're getting closer. Experts expect an announcement within three to 10 years from someone in the now little-known field of "wet artificial life."

"It's going to be a big deal and everybody's going to know about it," said Mark Bedau, chief operating officer of ProtoLife of Venice, Italy, one of those in the race. "We're talking about a technology that could change our world in pretty fundamental ways-in fact, in ways that are impossible to predict."

One of the leaders in the field, Jack Szostak at Harvard Medical School, predicts that within the next six months, scientists will report evidence that the first step-creating a cell membrane-is "not a big problem." Scientists are using fatty acids in that effort.

Szostak is also optimistic about the next step-getting nucleotides, the building blocks of DNA, to form a working genetic system.

His idea is that once the container is made, if scientists add nucleotides in the right proportions, then Darwinian evolution could simply take over.

"We aren't smart enough to design things, we just let evolution do the hard work and then we figure out what happened," Szostak said.

This is a very odd statement. Szostak is saying that blind, random chance is more ingenious than human intelligence. He'd have us believe that unguided, unintelligent accident is a better engineer than human minds.

Anyway, they may be successful in manufacturing a functional cell - who knows - but if so, then the only observed case of life having appeared from non-living precursors will be one in which the development was guided by an intelligent agent. We will then have actual experience of life being produced by intelligent designers, but we will still have had no experience of life being formed by purely unintelligent processes. We will, in other words, have empirical reason to believe that biogenesis can be effected by minds but no empirical reason to believe that it can be effected apart from minds.

What, then, will be the most reasonable inference - that life probably appeared through physical processes alone or that it is at least partly the result of intelligent action?What scientific, as opposed to philosophical, grounds will anyone have for insisting upon a purely physicalist explanation for the origin of life?

RLC