A Better Way

Dr. Scott W. Atlas is a professor and chief of neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical Center and a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution at the university. He's an expert on health care and is very cool to the various health care reform proposals being bandied about by congressional Democrats. To read much of the reportage on the matter one might think health care in America ranks near the bottom of the Western world. In an op-ed piece in the Washington Times, however, Dr. Atlas points out that this simply isn't true:

Inexplicably, the facts published in the world's top medical journals about our system continue to be ignored:

• Americans have the best survival rates from cancer and most serious diseases, and the most rapid decline in breast and prostate cancer deaths despite being hindered with severe obesity and the largest burden of smokers over 50 of any Western nation.
• Americans have the most successful, most available treatment for chronic diseases like high blood pressure and high cholesterol.
• Americans have the shortest wait times for life-changing surgeries, like cataract and hip replacements, that may not increase survival but greatly impact quality of life.
• Americans have the best access to the newest, most effective drugs.
• Americans have the quickest access to the safest, most advanced medical technologies.
• Americans have the easiest access to specialty doctors, doctors of their choice, doctors who lead the world in health care innovation, regardless of what metrics are assessed.

Instead of solely considering costs, shouldn't we ask if Americans are willing to die sooner from cancer, to give up access to specialists, to be refused safer, more accurate diagnostic imaging, to lose the most accessible screening programs, and to lose their autonomy in pursuing treatments for their families? Shouldn't we ask if Americans want to replace the most advanced and successful medical care in history with the restricted care and lower cost social programs of Europe, and insure the less than 5 percent of people who don't buy insurance but receive care anyway?

What needs reformed is certainly not the quality of care. The problem is keeping the quality high while making it cheaper, and nothing the Democrats are proposing will accomplish that:

The Max Baucus plan is paid by massive taxes on existing insurance plans that exceed our government's arbitrary threshold and by significant cuts to Medicare. Its Federal Exchange overtly skews the playing field by subsidizing - directly or indirectly - insurance plans that meet government definitions, and by penalizing existing plans that don't, plans already held by millions of Americans. The House proposals force a government-run "public option" - an option that shifts huge numbers of privately insured Americans to become the burden of an already unsustainable, taxpayer-funded entitlement program that ultimately eliminates private insurance choices.

A public option would interpose bureaucrats between doctors and patients, restricting access to new drugs, to innovative new cures, and to choice of doctors. It is already proven a failure the world over, even by our own Medicaid program, where government-imposed, below-cost payments have created patients who cannot even find doctors to care for them. While Congress and the administration claim otherwise, costs to the taxpayer increase, and choice and access disappear with a public option.

Meanwhile, serious alternative solutions that reduce costs but do not harm the excellence already in our health system are totally ignored, including:

• Allowing people to shop for insurance across state lines at competitive prices.
• Stripping back on costly coverage mandates that most Americans may not value, like acupuncture, massage therapy, in vitro fertilization, and wigs.
• Expanding the availability of high-deductible plans for catastrophic coverage with health savings accounts, making insurance a good value for the millions of Americans who can afford insurance but (perhaps wisely) don't buy it.
• Bold tax reforms like refundable tax credits, cash even for those who pay no income tax, or vouchers instead of tax deductions, to foster personal ownership and control of insurance, creating millions of value-seeking shoppers.
• Forcing doctors and hospitals to post prices, qualifications and outcomes - information that is essential to value-based purchasing and fundamental for stimulating competition.

Atlas could also point out the exorbitant cost of medical malpractice insurance and the expense of a medical school education. Both of these are costs that get passed on to the consumer, but the Democrats' are not inclined to do anything about either. Instead Democrats, if their plan is eventually passed, will make criminals out of those who don't want insurance and choose not to buy it. Under their plan, people who, for whatever reason, don't think they need health coverage will nevertheless be forced to buy it or pay a penalty. If they don't pay the penalty they will go to jail. This is an unprecedented abridgement of individual freedom in this country, but taking a way freedom is simply what progressives do whenever they have the power to do it.

RLC

Lots of <i>Assuming</i> Going On

There's an interesting article on human evolution at MSNBC. The piece starts out by claiming that Neanderthals were a separate species from modern Homo sapiens, but everything in the article suggests that Neanderthals and H. sapiens interbred and produced feertile offspring. Since the ability to produce fertile offspring is the distinguishing characteristic of a species the finding that Neanderthals and H. sapiens were interfertile would mean that they're really members of the same species.

Indeed, none of the alleged predecessors of modern humans are actually known to have been unable to breed successfully with H. sapiens. It's simply assumed that sexual unions between them would have been sterile because it's assumed that they were different species. And it's assumed that they were different species because it's assumed that H. sapiens is the culmination of a long evolutionary history with lots of ancestral species leading up to it. But, for all we really know, creatures like H. habilis and H. erectus could have been conspecific with H. sapiens. We simply don't know whether they were capable of producing fertile offspring or not.

Of course, if it were ever found that these members of genus Homo were all the same species it would throw modern human evolution models into a state of complete chaos, so I suppose we have to assume that they really were all distinct species.

RLC

The Day the Music Died

Mark Butterworth observes that there has never been so much talent or ambition in the music world but that that world is on life support. Young and/or unknown artists, particularly writers and composers, simply lack the resources to do quality work. Here's why:

Recorded music costs a lot of money, but recorded music isn't making any money.

Here are a few facts: ... U.S. album sales in 2008: More than 115,000 albums were released, but only 110 sold more than 250,000 copies, a mere 1,500 topped 10,000 sales, and fewer than 6,000 cracked the 1,000 barrier -- further evidence that sales of recorded music are not the way of the future for artists.

Butterworth laments that the production costs of recorded music are so high as to exclude all but the already highly successful artists and even they make little money on their albums. The value of recording them lies in the reknown they bring to the artist who can parlay that fame into sold-out concerts and other venues:

Yes, I know people have home studios and are cranking out tunes by the millions and putting them on their Facebook or MySpace pages, but nearly 100% of them are crap.

Crap, you say? Why? Talent often requires a good deal of instruction, competition, and criticism to develop to the point where it becomes good enough to interest others. Hobbyists don't get that. Hollywood does a good deal of development, and yet 95% of their movies are nearly unwatchable now, and never has so much money been spent on film except for one thing -- the writing. Old Hollywood often spent 25% of a film budget on writing alone. Even the best-paid writers now get nothing like that much.

One hundred thousand or so books a year are published in the USA now, yet millions more are written...and of those 100K, few make money.

So, here are some interesting questions: Assuming he's right about all this, what is the future of music in our culture? Will we be seeing a decline in the quality of our popular music (many would argue that we already have)? Is the decline inevitable? What would it take to reverse it and is it worth reversing? Is a government bailout of the music industry on the horizon?

RLC

Compassion Genes

As part of the discussion of free will and determinism in my philosophy classes we talked about evolutionary psychology and the idea of the "selfish gene." One of the foremost popularizers of this view is Robert Wright who in the lecture below claims that human compassion and the Golden Rule are genetically based and hard wired into our biological nature by evolution.

This view is fraught with problems. For example, Wright seems to argue that because we have the genes for compassion that therefore compassion is good, but then cruelty and selfishness must also be genetic. So, why are they not good? What standard does Wright use to decide that compassion is good and cruelty is not? Unfortunately, he has none other than that he prefers one and not the other. It's a purely arbitrary judgment on his part. He likes what compassion does and dislikes what cruelty does, and so he declares compassion good, and counts on an audience steeped in the subliminal assumptions of a Judeo-Christian heritage to agree with him. He could have made the same argument, though, substituting cruelty, and it would be just as valid. If our genes program us to act cruelly, which they surely must, then cruelty is good.

The first nine minutes or so of the video are the most interesting:

How do we know that we have a "compassion gene" anyway? Such a gene has never been found and its existence is purely speculative, but it leads us to one of the interesting aspects of Wright's hypothesis. The theory that there is a gene for compassion may be testable. If Wright's correct then as we elucidate more and more of the genome we should be able to find genes that program us for compassionate behavior. If we don't the idea of a genetic basis for morality becomes much less likely to be true, and we'll have to look elsewhere for a basis for human moral sentiments.

RLC

Wide of the Mark

I don't like the title on this graph, but the data it reflects are too important to ignore just because the heading is more tendentious than I'd like:

The red line is the actual unemployment rate. The other lines represent what we were promised by the Obama administration. Either these people were lying to us about the effects their massive stimulus package would have or they're just incompetent. I prefer to believe the latter explanation. It's more charitable but no more comforting.

RLC

Leaving the Left

A feminist leftist named Meryl Yourish explains why she has become a feminist conservative. In a nutshell, she realized that the Left is hostile to most of the things she believes in.

Today, I will be voting in the blowout victory of Republican candidate for governor Bob McDonnell, and it's highly likely that I will be voting for pretty much the entire Republican ticket.

Only nine years ago, I voted for Al Gore and the straight Democratic ticket in New Jersey-line A all the way, as the slogan went. (Funny how even though the position of Line A was a coin flip, the Dems had Line A almost every single year I voted in NJ.)

The question is, who changed: Me, or them?

Well, I've changed. I have become more centrist, and less willing to part with my hard-earned dollars because a politician says he can spend my money better than I. I'm definitely tired of state-run charity programs for the perpetually unemployed. Or the state wanting to run my healthcare. (Or, for that matter, auto companies and banks.)

But there were two major turning points in my march towards the center. The first came on September 11, 2001. The second came in the bloody Israeli spring of 2002. That was when I realized that the left-leaning crowd that I ran with didn't think that Israel had the right to use military means against the Palestinians to stop the terrorists. That was when I realized that the left-leaning crowd that I ran with were justifying Palestinian suicide attacks against Israelis by using the excuse that the Palestinians were oppressed. That was when I realized that the left-leaning crowd I ran with was full of anti-Semites who call themselves anti-Zionists.

You can find the rest of her essay at the link. There really are two kinds of people. There are those who value individual liberty and will fight to keep it, and there are those who hold their liberty cheap and are eager to surrender it to a government whose design is to gain as much control over our lives as it can. Ms Yourish, evidently, belongs to the first group. Most of those in power in Washington today hope you belong to the second.

RLC

Of Course Converts Should Be Killed

Many in America seem to think that Islam is just one religious option among many and that we need to respect and even honor both the religion and those who embrace it. What these same Americans are sometimes unaware of is the systemic violence which saturates Islam and Islamic culture.

Those who live in Muslim societies but who are not Muslims are considered second class citizens, dhimmis, and are often persecuted and expected to pay tribute to their Muslim masters. If they don't truckle to their overlords they're often killed.

If one is gay in Islamic culture one is executed. If a girl gets romantically involved with a man of whom the father doesn't approve she is often killed.

Those who criticize or "blaspheme" the Prophet or the faith are subject to death, and those who wish to leave the faith are also subject to death. People who convert to Christianity often live in fear of their lives.

Byron forwards this article by former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum which offers a glimmer of hope that some of this may be changing and that Muslims may be beginning to realize that we're no longer living in the 7th century. Here's the lede:

Three Muslim students approached me after I had finished a speech at Harvard University. I was there to talk about the threat of radical Islam across the globe, as part of the Ethics and Public Policy Center's Program to Protect America's Freedom.

The students, one man and two women, wore Western-style clothes and spoke English with little or no accent. They disputed my description of Islam as it's practiced in the Middle East, maintaining that al-Qaeda's version of Islam in no way reflects the Islam that is practiced around the world.

So I asked them a question: Should apostates - Muslims who convert to another religion - be subject to execution?

One of the women quickly said no. She insisted that she was free to leave Islam if she wanted to, and that she knew other people who had done so without a problem - in the United States.

I said I wasn't talking about her and others' freedom of religion in this country. What if they lived in a Muslim-majority country?

Silence. Eventually, the young man blurted out, "That's different."

Why? I asked. I recall him saying, "Because in Muslim countries, Islam and the government are one, and converting from Islam is the equivalent of treason against the government, punishable by death." The two women agreed.

The glimmer of hope, obviously, comes later in the article.

It's hard for many Americans to imagine that people still think this way, but they do. To read something like this gives a deeper understanding and appreciation, perhaps, of what our Founding Fathers were trying to avoid as they crafted the Constitution and the doctrine of non-interference by the government in matters of personal religion. It also gives a deeper appreciation of the words of John 8:32.

RLC

Re: Inner Life

Many thanks to Beth for sending us a link to a site which features a frame by frame explanation of what's going on in the video titled Inner Life of a Cell. If you go to the link scroll down about a page or so to find the explanations.

RLC

Ending the Cycle of Poverty

Andrew submits a very thoughtful and perhaps provocative response to a post that appeared on Viewpoint last August titled Why No Supermarkets?. I thought it might be worthwhile to put his reply on the Home page rather than the Feedback page and invite your comments. Here are his thoughts:

Your [Viewpoint's] assessment that the lack of responsible fathers in the inner-city certainly hits on an element of the problem with inner-city populations, but I think that the largest part of the problem goes a little further. This is a tough topic for me because it raises feelings and thoughts that are hard to temper. I should point out that my observations may come off as leaning toward racist; however, I would like to state outright that for any observation I make about the inner-city population, it will almost wholly apply to certain population groups that are Caucasian. My gripe is not against any particular ethnicity, but about the sub-culture that propagates the cycle I am about to describe. Reader be warned, this could get hairy.

We can thank Lyndon Johnson for our society's current state of affairs with the inner-city population. His social programs and desire for a Great Society amounted to a Great Dependence on government for Americans everywhere. Following the lead of his predecessor, FDR, Johnson set forth and accomplished the goal of setting a precedent for the government to help "people in need." The only problem is, the system creates entire generations of people in need from their parents who were themselves people in need.

My wife is a counselor for a large organization that provides counseling for children in inner-city schools. I want to point two things out. The organization only operates in inner-city schools because that is where the kids who have government assistance go to school. Second, as a result of the former, her company does not provide services in non-inner-city schools; not because those children don't have needs but because it is not profitable to operate in a school where each individual insurance company has to approve therapy and certify the counselor. Translation, money for the state is easy to get.

Here is the great trap. No one wants to take from children. I completely understand. Children are the true victims here. But as soon as they cease to be children, they become propagators of the problem. If you get nothing else, walk away with this:

The cycle of systemic dependence hinges on the benefits paid for the continual irresponsible conception of children.

The children that my wife counsels have "diagnosed" disorders. These disorders range from ADHD to aggressive tendencies toward authority. Problem is, I would speculate that most of them are not the product of genetics or genuine medical conditions, but instead the product of being raised in an environment where the child is not nurtured and/or properly cared for.

It basically works like this. A non-working mother with a diagnosed child can get Supplemental Security Income in the amount of about $650.00 for the first child. Now, no one is going to get rich off of $650.00 per month, but a single mother who receives SSI is immediately eligible for Section 8 housing and an entire swath of other government programs from welfare and food stamps to cash assistance.

So the cycle operates like this. Woman has child (or children) before she even finishes high school. With no system of family support she cannot go to work so she goes on welfare and government assistance. Not knowing how to raise children, she treats them like [crap] because it is the only thing she has ever known. Naturally, the children are misbehaved, subsequently diagnosed [with a disorder], and she receives more money from the government. Her children follow her pattern and the cycle continues.

Now, you might be tempted to brush this off as an overly racist, broad stroke stereotype of the inner city. I will concede that, clearly, not all people in the inner city are like this, but I believe that the problem has reached critical mass and is now like a reaction that cannot be controlled... at least not in our current state of affairs. Let me throw out some real-life scenarios.

My wife has a client who has two brothers (all three receive services). The three of them have sixteen cousins from one daddy spread over seven mommies. The government is tossing money at these parents for having kids.

Children in the inner city are starving. My wife's greatest tool in positive reinforcement therapy is KFC. They eat like it's their last meal.

Women who walk their children to school typically drop them off wearing pajamas ... and pick them up six hours later wearing the same slippers and pajamas. Maybe they just work third shift, right?

The mommies who do actually get dressed look like someone you would expect to take 'cash for services'. Hey, let's not knock the hip-hop look... but let's do point out that they dress in designer clothes while their children wear what amounts to barely more than unwashed rags.

On the day before mandatory PA Act 80 half school days, every child has a big, round, bright orange sticker placed on his or her back alerting parents to the fact that the next day is a half day. When the school dismisses early there are anywhere from 50 to 100 children sitting in the hallway outside of the office. Most of them sit there until 3:00 pm.

Children get dropped off from cars with thumping bass and shiny wheels. They come to school hungry, unbathed, and with tattered clothing, [but] there's a playstation or xbox in almost every home.

Drive through any section 8 housing area and count the number of satellite dishes hanging off the side of the building.

If a woman plays her cards right and has children she can receive benefits well into her 50's if her last child is born when she is in her late 30's.

The bottom line is this. The inner city isn't producing fathers capable of raising children. Further, the inner city is systematically producing generation after generation of dependence on government programs.

I have a solution that guarantees that I'll never be elected to office. Here it goes:

For every man/woman [below the poverty line? RLC] that has a child, the government offers a $10,000.00 tax-free check (for each parent) to undergo reversible sterilization (tube-tie and snip-snip). Parents who accept government assistance will be required to be self-sufficient within 10 years. If they are not, their children are taken away. Men who father children but do not pay adequate child support are imprisoned in labor camps that produce certain resources needed for infrastructure (asphalt, etc). These aren't slave labor camps. They work 40 hours per week and receive compensation which is first dispersed to their children, then given to them. They stay in prison until their child turns 18. The 10 year period of government assistance will be accompanied by generous assistance for education or vocational training. The government will require insurance companies to pay for the reversal procedure for a person who becomes self-sufficient and wishes to have more children.

The idea here is to get the cycle below critical mass by causing a decline in the population that is misusing government funds. Only then can social programs function as they were intended. As it stands right now, a man and a woman can multiply themselves by factors of 10 or more causing the cycle of dependence to grow geometrically. By reversibly sterilizing willing participants and imprisoning men who recklessly procreate we can start to send this sub-culture into population decline.

My plan would take decades, but I think it would save money right off the bat. What do you think?

AD

Bad Omen

You know the Democrats are in trouble when self-described liberal journalists are voting Republican. That's what Jonathan Berr did Tuesday and he explains the desperate state of affairs that has brought him to this traumatic pass here. In short, Berr, who knocked on doors for Obama in 2008, is just fed up with high taxes, corruption, inefficient big government, and nasty campaigning, but if that's so, one wonders, why is he a Democrat? Anyway, if liberals are so disaffected that they're voting Republican in deep blue states like New Jersey, the mid-term elections a year from now will be to Democrats something like what the Highway of Death was to the Iraqi army in 1991.

Here's Berr:

The last thing this liberal member of the media elite -- as perceived by many of our readers -- ever expected to do was vote for a Republican like Chris Christie for governor and reject incumbent Jon Corzine. But in my home state of New Jersey, the Democrats are more often part of the problem rather than the solution. My disgust with the party of my registration is a long time coming.

Why should Republicans be the only ones to dislike high taxes, corruption and fiscal mismanagement? Taxes in New Jersey are unbelievable: My monthly tax bill is equivalent to half my mortgage payment. New Jersey's state/local tax burden of 11.8% of income is the highest in the country, well above the national average of 9.7%, according to the Tax Foundation, which says the state's business-tax climate ranks 50th, that is, dead last in the nation. The Star Ledger of Newark reports that the average property tax bill is now $7,045, which eats up about 10 percent of the annual income in the average New Jersey household. The state budget is projected to be $8 billion short for the next fiscal year.

Corruption is horrendous. Dozens of people were recently arrested in one of the biggest scandals in years. In July, former State Sen. Wayne Bryant, once one of the most powerful people in Trenton, was sentenced to four years in federal prison for trading his clout as budget chairman for a job at a state medical school that required little work to boost his taxpayer-funded pension.

Read the rest at the link. It's no wonder Christie won big.

RLC

New Edition of <u>Origin</u>

Ray Comfort is a writer who likes to engage atheists in debate. He has recently published an edition of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species that has thrown his opponents into a tizzy. They're not upset so much with the text of the book that he has had reprinted because that is left as Darwin wrote it, except for the omission of several chapters. Instead they're mostly up in arms over his introduction in which he quotes some of Darwin's beliefs about race and women.

Dan Gilgoff blogs at U.S. News & World Report and he's carrying a back and forth between Comfort and National Council on Science Education executive director Eugenie Scott, a stout Darwinian and atheist. Comfort's initial salvo is pretty interesting. Here he is on his provocative introduction to Darwin's famous work:

Why are many atheists so angry? Why are they talking about book burnings, threatening to resist the giveaway and rip out the Introduction, etc.? Why was richarddawkins.net encouraging people to collect copies and rip out the Introduction? Professor Dawkins himself said that even though "a lot of people seem to be very worried about this," he wasn't at all worried. Why did he then tell Toronto university students to tear out the Introduction? There have been more than 140 different editions of On the Origin of Species, many with special Introductions, so what's the big deal with this one? If I am (as Professor Dawkins says) "an ignorant fool," why are so many feeling threatened by what I've written? Surely, the Introduction will be ignorance and foolishness, and simply confirm the students' presuppositions that intelligent design isn't worthy of even a first look.

There's a reason that they are deeply concerned.

The Introduction quotes Charles Darwin saying that blacks are closer to gorillas than whites and that natural selection has left men more intelligent than women. It also has quotes from Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf showing Hitler's undeniable links to evolution. Of course, Hitler also used Christianity to further his political agenda, but my point is that Nazi Germany was the natural outcome of what Darwin called "one general law." Darwin said the law of natural selection is "Let the strongest live and the weakest die" (Chapter Seven, "Instinct"). Adolf Hitler put the theory of Darwinism into practice.

The Introduction also defines an atheist as someone who believes that nothing created everything-which is a scientific impossibility. Professor Dawkins believes that nothing created everything, and his belief is a big intellectual embarrassment to his followers.

For her part Scott chastises Comfort for the aforementioned omission of several chapters and for misrepresenting evolution by overplaying the paucity of fossilized transitional forms in his Introduction. I think Scott's being a little misleading here, but read her for yourself, and let's wait for Comfort's reply to see how he answers her.

RLC

Inner Life

The visual titled Cell Size and Scale moved Dave Kurz to write to remind us of another fascinating video that we've featured in the past but which is worth running again. It's titled The Inner Life of the Cell (produced by Harvard University), and it's a computer sim of just a few of the processes that occur 24/7 in each of the trillions of cells in our bodies.

It's simply breathtaking to see on this incredibly tiny scale such exquisite complexity and organization. Notice especially the marvelous protein transport mechanism that looks and works like a stick-figure Atlas carrying the world on his shoulders.

Now that you've watched this you might need to be deprogrammed. After all, some find the temptation to think that this was all intentionally designed by an intelligent agent to be irresistable. So, to avoid falling prey to superstitious nonsense, close your eyes real tight and repeat ten times: "This all came about by chance. This all came about by chance...."

RLC

Religious Defamation

The price of freedom is eternal vigilance and nowhere is that more true than at the United Nations. Secretary Hillary Clinton deserves praise for giving what some described as a tough statement opposing a move in the U.N. to enact an anti-defamation resolution that would be binding on all member nations. This may sound like a good thing on the face of it, but in fact such policies would restrict freedom of expression and freedom of religion. The following is from a Christianity Today report:

The United Nations General Assembly is expected to vote soon on a pending anti-defamation resolution sponsored by the Organization of the Islamic Conference.

"Some claim that the best way to protect the freedom of religion is to implement so-called anti-defamation policies that would restrict freedom of expression and the freedom of religion," Clinton said at a press conference on Monday. "I strongly disagree."

"The protection of speech about religion is particularly important since persons of different faiths will inevitably hold divergent views on religious questions," Clinton said. "These differences should be met with tolerance, not with the suppression of discourse."

Experts consider the UN anti-defamation effort mostly a reaction to the 2005 publication of cartoons in a Danish newspaper that depicted the prophet Muhammad. Carl Moeller, president of Open Doors USA, is lobbying against the resolution this week because he fears people could be criminalized for converting from Islam or speaking against Islamic teachings.

Nina Shea, director of the Center for Religious Freedom of the Hudson Institute, expressed concern over another Human Rights Council resolution on freedom of opinion and expression passed in early October: "[The council] expresses its concern that incidents of racial and religious intolerance, discrimination and related violence, as well as of negative racial and religious stereotyping continue to rise around the world ... and urges States to take effective measures, consistent with their obligations under international human rights law, to address and combat such incidents."

The resolution, proposed by the United States and Egypt, does not include the term "defamation of religion," but Shea worries that such language could criminalize preaching that another religion is false.

"They're introducing language about religious hatred or negative religious stereotyping that is quite new and immediately seized upon by some of the restrictive governments in the world," Shea said.

There's more at the link. We in the U.S. often take our freedoms for granted, but we need to realize that there are those both here and abroad who find the freedoms we treasure to be a decadent blight on society. We need to realize that the freedoms to discuss ideas and to practice whatever religion we choose are fragile and despised and could be easily lost should we cease to be vigilant.

If it ever came to pass that we allow ourselves to become apathetic about the what's going on in the world around us then we would be proven unworthy of those freedoms. Thomas Jefferson once observed that a nation that expects to remain ignorant and free expects what never was and never will be. He was right, and that's why we must never think that politics and world affairs are for other people to worry about.

RLC

Life's Solutions

Bradford at Telic Thoughts points us to a provocative article in the Sydney Morning Herald on biologist Simon Conway Morris. Morris is an interesting thinker, a devout Christian and committed evolutionist whose book, Life's Solutions, makes the case that evolution is not random or blind but that it's guided by principles we do not yet understand that make the emergence of conscious intelligent beings who can understand the universe inevitable. Here's a sample:

In a view considered almost heretical by ultra-Darwinists such as Richard Dawkins, Conway Morris suggests that evolution cannot explain everything in biology, that the idea of evolution as entirely random is flawed, and that convergent evolutionary processes had to produce intelligence - as they have, not only in humans but apes, crows and dolphins.

The usual mantra of evolutionists is randomness: mutations, catastrophes, virulent microbes, in which any particular outcome, including us, is a complete fluke. Not so, says Conway Morris.

"I ... suggest that evolutionary processes are endowed with a considerable degree of predictability, making humans inevitable. Sophisticated intelligence - where you can use imagination, think ahead, identify alternatives - has evolved independently a number of times, in the great apes, crows, and dolphins.

One of the reasons Conway Morris has proved controversial, perhaps, is that he is a Christian, a committed supernaturalist, though that plays no part in his biology. Another reason might be that he doesn't mind prodding the ardent atheists who have turned Darwinian natural selection into a virtual religion, finding in it the explanation for all sorts of human questions far beyond the development of species.

Conway Morris thinks that science and religion are more similar than most people realise, and that philosophical questions always accompany science.

[He] believes evolution follows a deeper structure, as do other sciences, such as physics. In quantum mechanics many things don't make sense, he says, but the suspicion is that when scientists understand what now baffles them there will be another level of understanding. "In biology, the constraints of evolution must point to a deeper level of arrangements." By this he does NOT mean God, but natural laws that transcend Darwinism. It is now legitimate to speak a logic to biology.

A particular mystery that eluded Darwin, and Darwinists ever since, he thinks, is consciousness, or mind. It is much more complicated than allowed by the "neuromythologists" (what philosopher Raymond Tallis calls those who say that mind is entirely reducible to physical processes in the brain).

"Attempts to provide a materialistic explanation haven't worked. If they had, the people who provided them would be in Stockholm getting their Nobel Prize."

We take self-aware matter (us) for granted, but in fact it's very peculiar, he says. One group, especially biologists, think consciousness is self-explanatory, emergent in some fashion; another, mainly philosophers, insist matter cannot explain minds. "Darwin's idea that the brain secretes mind as the liver secretes bile doesn't work. The roots of intelligence go much deeper than we realise, and go beyond animals. Slime moulds have something we can fairly call memory." Conway Morris pictures the brain as something like an antenna, embodied in a mind world.

In the Guardian, he suggested that if the universe is the product of a rational mind, and if evolution is the search engine that, in leading to consciousness, allows us to discover the fundamental architecture of the universe, then things not only make better sense but are also much more interesting.

What I remember taking from Conway Morris' book, which I read several years ago, is that he seems to endorse a kind of theistic evolution. This is the theory that God packed all of the biological potential for living things into the initial conditions of the Big Bang and that this potential unfolds according to laws established by the Creator to insure that what He wants to exist, will.

In other words, for Conway Morris, evolution is the means by which God produced the extraordinary diversity of living things. Perhaps he's correct, I don't know, I'm more inclined toward intelligent design myself, but I'm quite sure he's closer to the truth than are the materialists who hold that the marvels of living things are all just a grand coincidence produced by the blind accumulation of millions of highly improbable accidents.

RLC

Cell Size and Scale

The University of Utah genetics department has a fascinating illustration of the relative sizes of biological structures. To view it go here and move the slide at the bottom of the picture to the right. Notice how the size grid in the upper left corner changes as you zoom in on these tiny structures. Very cool.

Thanks to Uncommon Descent for the tip.

RLC

Bad Advice

Our local paper ran a column on Sunday by Philadelphia radio talk show host Mike Smerconish that produced a few smiles at the breakfast table.

Smerconish, a Republican, I think, is of the opinion that the GOP needs to move toward the political center because polls show that only something like 20% of voters self-identify as Republicans. The party is losing membership, we're told, so the solution lies in becoming more like Democrats. The problem with Smerconish's analysis is that his cure for what ails the party is exactly what is producing the ailment. The majority of people in this country self-identify as conservatives regardless of which party they associate with, which suggests to me that, contrary to Smerconish's claim that the residuum left over from the recent exodus are not conservatives but rather people who don't much care. Many of the defectors from the GOP are conservatives who've left in disgust with a party that insists on playing the Washington Generals to the Democrats' Harlem Globetrotters.

A good recent example of this was the selection by the New York Republican poobahs of Dede Scozzafava to run in the New York 23rd congressional district. Ms Scozzafava is a Nancy Pelosi Democrat cross-dressing as a Republican, proof of which came when she dropped out of the race and promptly endorsed the liberal Democrat candidate. Conservative Republicans are completely turned off by the sort of political pragmatism that led the GOP to put Scozzafava up for election in the first place.

Perhaps Smerconish and those who share his view don't think that principles should matter in politics. Perhaps they think that being in the winning party is the only thing that's important. Most conservatives are not so concerned about Republican party success, however. In fact, many conservatives really don't much care for the party that has betrayed its principles repeatedly since George Bush senior promised he wouldn't raise taxes and then promptly did. They don't much care for a party whose leadership betrayed their principles on earmarks, as Tom DeLay did in the 90s, or which betrayed their principles with massive entitlement and bailout programs as George Bush the younger did during his tenure.

Conservatives' relationship with the GOP is strictly a marriage of convenience. They vote Republican because that's where candidates are most likely to be found who share their values of personal freedom and small government, but if the party is going to nominate people who when elected will govern no differently than the current crop of Democrats who seem determined to tax and spend us into abject bankruptcy, why should anyone who opposes this remain in the Republican party?

Smerconish insists that Republicans have to end their infatuation with the right and, astonishingly enough, he names Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, and Mitch Romney as the sort of extremist ideologues the GOP should eschew. Now I ask any fair-minded Republican to explain to me what it is about these three that makes them ideologically distasteful, or puts them outside of the party mainstream. You may not like their personalities, you may not like their religious commitments, but what, exactly, is it about their ideology that Smerconish finds too extreme? He doesn't say. One wonders who Smerconish would hold aloft as an exemplar of Republicanism. Olympia Snowe? Arlen Specter?

It's always amusing to me that in a time when we're being governed by the most radical Democratic party in history - a cohort of radical progressives which controls both Houses of Congress, the White house, much of the judiciary, almost all of the entertainment industry, the educational establishment, and much of the traditional media - we're informed that it's the GOP that's too extreme. We're admonished to avoid the likes of terrifying fringies like Palin, Huckabee and Romney. Meanwhile, the extreme Left is pulling us so far to their end of the spectrum that we teeter on the brink of socialism, and Smerconish is abetting this calamity by urging Republicans to abandon their principles and jump on board the Democrats' train. Why aren't we reading hand-wringing exhortations calling upon the Democrats to at least toss a glance in the direction of the American mainstream as they undo 200 years of prosperity and 100 years of world leadership?

I'm sure Democrats are resting a little easier today knowing that the GOP is getting advice from people like Mr. Smerconish.

RLC

Election Eve

Tomorrow is an election day and there are three races that have garnered considerable national attention among the political punditocracy. First is the congressional race in upstate New York pitting Conservative party candidate Doug Hoffman against Democrat Bill Owens. This started out as a three party race, but liberal Republican Dede Scozzafava dropped out over the weekend. Hoffman is currently ahead by 15 points despite the fact that Scozzafava has endorsed Owens.

Another big race is the New Jersey gubernatorial contest between incumbent Democrat mega-millionaire Jon Corzine, his Republican challenger Christopher Christie, and Independent Chris Daggett. Corzine, who made his fortune on Wall Street, will have spent as much as $30 million of his own money to win this election, but Jersey politics are so soaked in the stench of corruption that on election eve Corzine and Christie are neck and neck. If Daggett weren't in the race Christie would probably win handily. President Obama has stumped for Corzine, but it's not clear yet whether that has made any difference.

The third key race is for the governorship of Virginia. Here the Republican Robert McDonnell enjoys a comfortable lead over Democrat Creigh Deeds. McDonnell is a moderate, but is also pro-life and is attracting a lot of independents to his campaign. As of this writing he's up by 11 points.

So what, if anything, is the importance of these races? Perhaps their greatest significance lies in the fact that they give the lie to those who say that Republicans are in trouble if they keep running pro-lifers or fiscal conservatives. That's a myth not borne out by the facts. The shame of it is that so many Republicans seem to believe it.

RLC

Clarification

It seems that a number of readers understood me to be saying in the recent post on teacher training that prospective secondary teachers should take course work only in the discipline they intended to teach. This is, however, not what I meant to say. I believe that anyone who stands in front of a classroom should have a well-rounded education and know much more than just history or just science or just math. My point was that many of the education courses in methods, theory, and techniques that education majors are required to take, to the extent that they're helpful at all, would be more meaningful to teachers after they've been in the classroom for a while.

The best way to learn to teach is to do it, and to do it under the guidance of an accomplished professional. That's why I think student teaching should be a two semester internship. Young secondary teachers need three things to be successful in the classroom: They need to have a love for what they do, they need to have a knowledge of their field, and they need to have the kind of personality that enables them to develop positive relationships with kids. The only one of those that can be taught is the second. Everything else a teacher needs to excel in his or her profession comes with experience.

RLC

Taking Pity

Last Tuesday night the American Freedom Alliance sponsored a debate as part of its Darwin Debates series. The evening featured an exchange between David Berlinski, an anti-Darwinian agnostic and author of the book The Devil's Delusion and a prominent California atheist whose performance must have been so inept that David Klinghoffer, a journalist covering the event, chose out of kindness not to mention his name in his report. Klinghoffer is an intelligent design advocate but he was so embarrassed for the atheist presenter that he couldn't bring himself to add to the man's discomfiture by further publicizing it. Here's Klinghoffer:

Tuesday night at the Beverly Hills Library, with David Berlinski debating an atheist before a mixed crowd of friends and foes of religion, I experienced a lifetime first.

As a journalist writing about people and events, I've often had occasion to change or withhold someone's name or otherwise disguise his identity. Almost always this is because the person in question never asked to be part of my story, is not a public personality and never sought to be, did nothing seriously blameworthy, but would be embarrassed by having his words or actions reported in public. So I don't identify him. On Tuesday, listening to the debate, for the very first time in my experience I encountered a situation where someone was indeed seeking to make a name for himself but I felt nevertheless it would be cruel to give his name or institutional affiliation in my account of the event.

David Berlinski's atheist opponent is that person. The poor guy! He was so hopelessly outgunned and outmanned as a thinker, debater, and speaker that I just can't bring myself to give you his identity. He probably has his name on a Google Alert. Who doesn't? Even though it was entirely his free choice to put himself up against Berlinski in defense of his non-belief, I don't have the heart to worsen his embarrassment.

The rest of Klinghoffer's account is here.

It turns out that the guy Klinghoffer's compassion would not permit him to name is no rookie to the culture war. He's a leader in the California atheist community. If you're curious you can go here to read about him.

Pretty soon it should become apparent that the problem for atheists isn't that they keep putting up second stringers against intelligent design's (or Christianity's) varsity in these debates. The problem is that these people are trying to defend a position, atheistic materialism or naturalism, that is extremely difficult to defend. When the opposition has all the best arguments even a Demosthenes would struggle to sound persuasive.

As more talented young theistic intellectuals enter the fray roiling the marketplace of ideas, and more debates like this one take place, it'll eventually dawn on the public and the media that advocating atheistic materialism is like trying to promote belief in a geocentric universe. You can try it, but you better not do it in front of an educated audience.

RLC

Cultural Literacy

Sol Stern at City Journal has written an excellent article that's a must-read for everyone concerned about education in this country. Stern writes about the career of E.D. Hirsch whom those of a certain age will remember for his best-selling Cultural Literacy, written back in the late 80s. Hirsch pointed out to a nation in thrall to the ideas of progressive education "experts" that the approach we were following in educating children was all wrong. We had bought the progressives' idea that what was important was that students be taught not facts, but rather how to learn. Teaching the process of learning was believed to be more important than teaching any particular content. Subsequently, achievement scores plummeted.

Here are the first few paragraphs from Stern's essay:

At his Senate confirmation hearing in February, Arne Duncan succinctly summarized the Obama administration's approach to education reform: "We must build upon what works. We must stop doing what doesn't work." Since becoming education secretary, Duncan has launched a $4.3 billion federal "Race to the Top" initiative that encourages states to experiment with various accountability reforms. Yet he has ignored one state reform that has proven to work, as well as the education thinker whose ideas inspired it. The state is Massachusetts, and the education thinker is E. D. Hirsch, Jr.

The "Massachusetts miracle," in which Bay State students' soaring test scores broke records, was the direct consequence of the state legislature's passage of the 1993 Education Reform Act, which established knowledge-based standards for all grades and a rigorous testing system linked to the new standards. And those standards, Massachusetts reformers have acknowledged, are Hirsch's legacy. If the Obama administration truly wants to have a positive impact on American education, it should embrace Hirsch's ideas and urge other states to do the same.

Hirsch draws his insights from well outside traditional education scholarship. He started out studying chemistry at Cornell University but, mesmerized by Nabokov's lectures on Russian literature, switched his major to English. Hirsch did his graduate studies at Yale, one of the citadels in the 1950s of the New Criticism, which argued that the intent of an author, the reader's subjective response, and the text's historical background were largely irrelevant to a critical analysis of the text itself. But by the time Hirsch wrote his doctoral dissertation-on Wordsworth-he was already breaking with the New Critics. "I came to see that the text alone is not enough," Hirsch said to me recently at his Charlottesville, Virginia, home. "The unspoken-that is, relevant background knowledge-is absolutely crucial in reading a text." Hirsch's big work of literary theory in his early academic career, Validity in Interpretation, reflected this shift in thinking. After publishing several more well-received scholarly books and articles, he received an endowed professorship and became chairman of the English department at the University of Virginia.

Hirsch was at the pinnacle of the academic world, in his mid-fifties, when he was struck by an insight into how reading is taught that, he says, "changed my life." He was "feeling guilty" about the department's inadequate freshman writing course, he recalls. Though UVA's admissions standards were as competitive as the Ivies', the reading and writing skills of many incoming students were poor, sure to handicap them in their future academic work. In trying to figure out how to close this "literacy gap," Hirsch conducted an experiment on reading comprehension, using two groups of college students. Members of the first group possessed broad background knowledge in subjects like history, geography, civics, the arts, and basic science; members of the second, often from disadvantaged homes, lacked such knowledge. The knowledgeable students, it turned out, could far more easily comprehend and analyze difficult college-level texts (both fiction and nonfiction) than their poorly informed brethren could. Hirsch had discovered "a way to measure the variations in reading skill attributable to variations in the relevant background knowledge of audiences."

Stern's account of what followed makes fascinating reading, especially if you're in education, planning to enter the profession, or have young children or grandchildren in school. It would also be a great article to share with any teachers you might know. Here's one more graph to give you sense of where he's going with the piece:

More powerfully than any previous critic, Hirsch showed how destructive these instructional approaches were. The idea that schools could starve children of factual knowledge, yet somehow encourage them to be "critical thinkers" and teach them to "learn how to learn," defied common sense. But Hirsch also summoned irrefutable evidence from the hard sciences to eviscerate progressive-ed doctrines. Hirsch had spent the better part of the decade since Cultural Literacy mastering the findings of neurobiology, cognitive psychology, and psycholinguistics on which teaching methods best promote student learning. The scientific consensus showed that schools could not raise student achievement by letting students construct their own knowledge. The pedagogy that mainstream scientific research supported, Hirsch showed, was direct instruction by knowledgeable teachers who knew how to transmit their knowledge to students-the very opposite of what the progressives promoted.

The tragedy is that at least two generations of students have been "educated" to think that learning facts is unimportant. Perhaps future generations will not be so badly cheated.

RLC