Discovery Institute: Materialist evolution = no love

February 15, 2017 • 1:05 pm

If you can stomach the Discovery Institute’s “Evolution News and Views” site, you’ll see David Klinghoffer’s lastest post, “What Darwinists don’t tell you: Valentine’s Day edition,” making a religiously motivated and badly misguided criticism of evolution.

First, though, if you’ve followed the Intelligent Design (ID) issue, you’ll know that the founding manifesto for ID, the infamous “Wedge Document,” had as its overweening goal not just the destruction of evolutionary theory, but the destruction of materialism itself as the guiding principle of science. The “governing goals” from that document are given below; if you can’t read them, they are “To defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural, and political legacies,” and “To replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human being are created by God.”

screen-shot-2017-02-15-at-12-20-52-pm

That, of course, is because despite its claims, Intelligent Design is the product of a purely religious agenda, and materialism, absent religiously based metaphysics, is anathema to that agenda. If you overthrow materialism, everything supernatural and theistic can become part of science, and evolution is only aspect of that program.

And so Klinghoffer takes me to task, in my Darwin Day beef that I didn’t get awarded the DI’s “Censor of the Year” award, for pushing materialism—though I did it in a little joke. Klinghoffer is absolutely obsessed with me, scouring this site for things he can mock, and so he says this:

This bleak vision, the human being as meat machine, is on vivid display, though mixed with a clumsy childlike enthusiasm, in the writing of emeritus University of Chicago evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne. On Darwin Day, for instance, he chided me for the hope that evidence of design will overcome Darwinian censorship: “I’m sorry to say that, I think, Klinghoffer will go to his Maker (disassociated molecules) before a teleological view of life permeates evolutionary biology.”

Imagine trying to sell “disassociated molecules” to the public, with their human intuitions, fears, and longings. Darwinists like Coyne or Dawkins, Bethell observes, are their own worst enemies.

I don’t think so! My first trade book, Why Evolution is True, is the #1 “evidence for evolution” book going, and keeps selling to the public, high school classes, and college courses. The worst enemies of evolution are in fact not evolutionists, whose atheism doesn’t seem to have prevented people from accepting evolutionary theory and fact, but religious believers, who simply won’t accept evolution because it either denies scripture or has implications they don’t like. Using the “stridency” of Dawkins as an excuse for rejecting evolution is just that—an excuse. I haven’t ever heard anyone say, “You know, if Dawkins would just shut up about atheism, I’d buy evolution in a second!” That’s not the way it works.

Klinghoffer continues:

To these thoughts, add our colleague Jonathan Witt’s observation for Valentine’s Day over at The Stream. From Darwinian materialism, he notes, a denial of the reality of love must follow:

“Evolutionist Daniel Dennett called Darwinism a “universal acid” that “eats through just about every traditional concept … dissolving the illusion of our own authorship, our own divine spark of creativity and understanding.”Dissolve those things and there’s no room for romantic love to be anything very exalted.

Biologist E.O. Wilson is just as blunt. When Darwinian science conquers all, we will view the human brain as just the “product of genetic evolution by natural selection.” And the mind “will be more precisely explained as an epiphenomenon of the neuronal machinery of the brain.”

But surely we can rescue things like art, religion and poetry, right? No, Wilson insists. Evolution teaches us that all of it was “produced by the genetic evolution of our nervous and sensory tissues.”

Evolving Away Love

So what becomes of Valentine’s Day, of all of those romantic longings and pledges to love, honor and protect, maybe even till death do us part? Yes, glands and instincts are involved. Only a gnostic would deny that, and Christianity threw Gnosticism out on its ear at the Incarnation and the Resurrection.

But Darwinian science goes further. It insists the stuff of Valentine’s Day is all glands and instincts, and beneath those, all brain chemistry — a soulless concoction of matter and energy stirred up in the alchemist’s lab we call evolution.”

Of course, it would have to be that way. A materialist understanding of evolution robs us of virtually everything that makes life rich and worth living, if we’re honest about it with ourselves. What, really, is left? Eating? Animal rutting? Pursuing status or dominance in a manner hardly different from the way chimps and chickens do?

As Sean Carroll has pointed out so well in his latest book The Big Picture, there are realities at different levels, and so saying that, at bottom, love rests on our hormones and our genes does not deny that there is such thing as love. That’s like saying there’s no such thing as a stomach ache because the pain all rests on molecules. If you ask me if I’ve ever been in love, I’d say “Certainly!”  For love is an emergent property, one of many qualia that appear from the interaction between our genes and our environments.

If what Klinghoffer says in his last paragraph is true, then evolutionists would be a soulless lot, unappreciative of art, music, and literature, unable to fall in love, and bereft of basic human emotions. But we all know that’s not true. Eating and rutting are part of life for sure, but most evolutionists I’ve known don’t spend all their time trying to copulate or fill their maws.

At the end, poor Klinghoffer is still fuming that ID, though he sees it as scientifically true, hasn’t yet been accepted:

Meanwhile, intelligent design is not permitted to make its own scientific case. Or when it does so, ID scientists are put down by censors or drowned out by media spokesmen with endless chants of “creationist, creationist, creationist.” What a mad world!

No, what a smart world, for real science isn’t motivated to affirm a prior theistic commitment, and thus it rejects the contentions and arguments of ID.

If you go back to the Wedge Document, you’ll see that it has both 5-year and 20-year goals, which Wikipedia summarizes:

The wedge strategy was designed with both five-year and twenty-year goals in mind in order to achieve the conversion of the mainstream. One notable component of the work was its desire to address perceived social consequences and to promote a social conservative agenda on a wide range of issues including abortion, euthanasia, sexuality, and other social reform movements. It criticized “materialist reformers [who] advocated coercive government programs” which it referred to as “a virulent strain of utopianism”.

Beyond promotion of the Phase I goals of proposing Intelligent Design related research, publications, and attempted integration into academia, the wedge strategy places an emphasis on Phases II and III advocacy aimed at increasing popular support of the Discovery Institute’s ideas. Support for the creation of popular level books, newspaper and magazine articles, op-ed pieces, video productions, and apologetics seminars was hoped to embolden believers and sway the broader culture towards acceptance of intelligent design. This in turn would lead the ultimate goal of the wedge strategy; a social and political reformation of American culture.

In 20 years, the group hopes that they will have achieved their goal of making intelligent design the main perspective in science as well as to branch out to ethics, politics, philosophy, theology, and the fine arts. A goal of the wedge strategy is to see intelligent design “permeate religious, cultural, moral and political life.” By accomplishing this goal the ultimate goal as stated by the Center for Science and Culture (CSC) of the “overthrow of materialism and its damning cultural legacies” and reinstating the idea that humans are made in the image of God, thereby reforming American culture to reflect conservative Christian values, will be achieved.

The 20-year goals appear on page 4 of the Wedge Document. Klinghoffer and his buddies better get cracking. The Document was drafted in 1998, and they’ve got just about one year left to get ID to permeate all of American life and to overthrow materialism as well.

Here’s a pro-tip for Klinghoffer: you’d be better off producing some science supporting ID than to waste all your time scouring evolutionists’ websites so you can mock their views. After all, Darwin didn’t get evolution accepted among rational people by mocking creationists. No—he had evidence. 

h/t: Ken P.

On the non-reading of books by Americans

February 15, 2017 • 11:00 am

I’ve long heard the claim that the average American reads less than one book a year, but a Pew Poll released last November shows that that’s not accurate—in two ways. First, as I note below, the concept of “books read by the average American” isn’t accurate, as the concept of “the average American” is meaningless on this issue. More important, that figure is in fact an underestimate, for 74% of American have read at least one book in the year preceding the survey, and the median value among Americans is four books per year (the median is the number of books read that is exceeded by half the population, and not achieved by the other half; in other words, it’s the number of books read that divides the population into equal moieties). The mean, as I show below, is much higher than that.

The full report (based on phone surveys of 1,520 adults age 18 or over) is here, but the general results are shown in the following figure:

ft_16-11-23_readbookwhohasnt

The data above are for at least one book, but the full report gives the median values:

screen-shot-2017-02-15-at-8-48-29-am

In the Appendix you can see that the mean (average) number of books is much higher than the median, which means one thing: a few Americans read a lot of books while many more American read few books. The disparity is large, with the mean being roughly three times higher than the median:

screen-shot-2017-02-15-at-9-01-06-am

The upshot:

  • Women read more than men
  • Blacks and Hispanics read less than non-Hispanic whites
  • Young people read more than older people (I suspect that some of this reading is assigned for school)
  • As expected, the amount of reading goes up with level of education, as it does with income (they did not, as far as I know, remove the cross-correlation of these factors, or with ethnicity and education)
  • Urban dwellers are more likely to have read at least one book, but don’t differ from the suburban or rural population in the median number of books read.

Finally, despite the wider availability of e-books and audiobooks in recent years, American’s still prefer to read paper books than the other two types, though the number who have read e-books and audiobooks has grown in the past five years.  But the number who have read at least one book in paper, or in any format, has remained fairly constant.

pi_2016-09-01_book-reading_0-01

I don’t have much to say about that; four books a year seems like a decent amount, though I’m sure many of us read a lot more than that.

In the end, the question, “how many books does the average American read” can’t be answered meaningfully because “the average American”, whoever that is, is not at issue. One meaningful answer is this: the average number of books read by an American is 12. But even that misses a lot of the information, for given the skew in the number of books read per year, which must look something like what’s below, another important result is this: far more than half of all Americans read fewer than 12 books.

skew_3
In a “right skewed” distribution, like this, the mean exceeds the median. This would be the kind of plot you’d get if you put “number of books read” on the X-axis and “number of Americans reading each number of books” on the Y-axis

h/t: Grania

Poor Nemo!

February 15, 2017 • 10:00 am

by Matthew Cobb

Here’s a gorgeous photo of clownfish, which just won the photographer, Qin Ling of Canada, an award in the Behaviour category at the Underwater Photographer of the Year competition (click to enlarge) – you can see all the winners here.

5760

Ling’s photo is entitled ‘Your home and my home’. Look closely at these Nemos. Look at their mouths. Those little eyes peeking out. They are not drawn on, as PCC(E) first suggested, nor are they Photoshopped. And they are not babies. They are isopods (like pillbugs or woodlice), which are parasitic. They eat the fish’s tongue, and then replace it, sitting in there, presumably getting first dibs on the food as it comes in. They occasionally turn up on people’s dinner plates when folk order fish and get a crustacean chaser.

The photography judge said:  “Six eyes all in pin-sharp focus, looking into the lens of the author … this was one of my favourite shots of the entire competition.”

Isn’t nature wonderful?

*********

JAC: Let me add two references and two videos.  You can read Carl Zimmer’s take on these parasites at National Geographic, or Wikipedia’s entry on Cymothoa exigua, the “tongue-eating louse,” which appears to be the only species that does this.

Here’s a video, which has only one photograph:

Here’s another video with photos; it claims that this is the only case in which one organism replaces another organism’s body part:

Four Republicans propose a bill to abolish the Environmental Protection Agency

February 15, 2017 • 9:00 am

Well, it’s been only about three weeks since the Trumpster took office, and if it wasn’t our country at stake, American politics would constitute a humorous soap opera. Already we’ve had the Failed Mexican-Financed Wall, the overturned immigration orders, the realization that it won’t be so easy after all to get rid of the Affordable Care Act, Nordstromgate (with the U.S. Office of Government Ethics now asking the White House to investigate Kellyanne Conway for telling people to “go buy Ivanka’s stuff”), the resignation of national security advisor Michael Flynn, the new revelation that Trump aides had repeated contact with senior Russian intelligence officials before the election, the criticism of Trump’s attitude to the judiciary by his own nominee for the Supreme Court, the conversion of the Mar-a-Lago Club’s terrace into a national security venue, complete with confidential information open to onlookers, and so on. And it hasn’t even been a month! What will it be like after four years???

And that’s just the administration. The legislature, emboldened by victory, is also up to no good, and one of their dumbest feats to date is the proposal, on February 3, of a House bill to abolish the Environmental Protection Agency. Yes, you heard me right. Here’s the entire short bill:

screen-shot-2017-02-15-at-5-39-33-am

It was introduced by Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, who had the temerity to put a “black is white” post about it on his Facebook page:

screen-shot-2017-02-15-at-5-51-31-am

Gaetz’s partners in crime (all Republicans, of course, and all from the South) are the bill’s cosponsors: Barry Loudermilk (Georgia), Thomas Massie (Kentucky), and Steven Palazzo (Mississsippi). All have abysmal stands on the environment, and some have been vocal critics of the EPA. NBC News gives more information on these representatives, but also reassures us that the bill has virtually no chance of passing, especially since a similar bill  (though not as draconian) was introduced six years ago. (Go here to see other reasons why it won’t pass.)

While some conservatives are praising the proposal, the legislation has little chance of getting through both chambers of Congress.

“It’s hard to imagine Congress being willing to do so, and the American public would almost certainly virulently oppose such a move,” Ann Carlson, an environmental law professor at the University of California-Los Angeles Law School, told Bloomberg BNA in March.

Since its creation in 1970 under President Richard Nixon, the EPA has grown into an agency with an $8 billion fund. And throughout its history, politicians have called to end the EPA both on the campaign trail and through legislation.

Six years ago, Sen. Richard Burr, R-North Carolina, introduced a bill with 15 co-sponsors to consolidate the Energy Department and the EPA, but the proposal never made it through the Senate. And earlier that year, as a 2012 presidential candidate, New Gingrich proposed abolishing the agency, as well

I’m not worried that this bill will pass, as it’s unthinkable to get rid of an agency like this (of course with Trump the unthinkable has become thinkable), but it’s symptomatic of the follies that have now become licensed with the Chief Clown as President.

Readers’ wildlife photos

February 15, 2017 • 7:30 am

Reader Cameron Way of Fort Collins, Colorado sent a passel of photos that, he said, depicted “playing” in his backyard. He identifies them as fox squirrels (Sciurus niger), but isn’t sure.

1998-squirrels-1024x

2021-squirrels-1024x

2023-squirrels-1024x

2026-squirrels-1024x

2029-squirrels-1024x

When I asked him if they were playing or fighting, he responded, “I don’t know if they were fighting, but there was a lot of this, also,” and sent two more pictures. Now I have no idea if this is mock copulation between two same-sex squirrels, real copulation, or simply a wrestling hold, but it seems that it wasn’t merely playing. It could have been “practicing.”

2070-squirrels-1024x

2074-squirrels-1024x

 

Wednesday: Hili dialogue

February 15, 2017 • 6:30 am

Good morning on Wednesday February 15, 2017. It should be National Leftover Candy day, but it’s actually National Gumdrop Day and National Chewing Gum Day. It’s also National Flag Day of Canada, celebrating the adoption of its current flag in 1965:

800px-canada_flag_halifax_9_-04
O Canada!

And can somebody tell me why the hockey team is called the “Maple Leafs” rather than the “Maple Leaves”?

On this day in 1923, Greece became the last country in Europe to adopt the Gregorian calendar. In 1946 ENIAC, described by Wikipedia as “the first electronic general-purpose computer” was “formally dedicated” at The University of Pennsylvania—whatever it means to dedicate a computer. (Did they break a bottle of champagne on it?) On February 15, 1971, British coins became decimalized, and, in 2001, the journal Nature published the first draft of the human genome. A Nobel Prize has not been awarded for that achievement.

Notables born on this day include Galileo (1564) and Jeremy Bentham (1748). Bentham’s real mummified head and skeleton, the latter dressed up in his clothes and sitting in a chair (with a wax replica head), are still preserved at University College London; see photo below.

enhanced-buzz-wide-28113-1441198129-7
Jeremy Bentham’s head

Also born on this day were Susan B. Anthony (1820), Ernest Shackleton (1874), Art Spiegelmann (1948), and Matt Groening (1954). I highly recommend reading Spiegelmann’s Maus, a graphic novel using animals (mice, pigs and cats) to illustrate the Holocaust. It is a fantastic novel/artwork, and was the first such book to win a Pulitzer Prize (1992). This year is the 25th anniversary of the book, and you can buy a special edition at Amazon by clicking the screenshot below:

51tcttyhql
Those who died on this day include Nat King Cole (1965), Mike Bloomfield (1981), Richard Feynman (1988), Martha Gellhorn (1998), and Howard K. Smith (2002). Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili insists that the loving she gets from everyone is merely her due (below she’s getting fusses from Marta, Elzbieta’s daughter):

Marta: Hili, admit that you’re spoiled by everybody.
Hili: I will not admit it.
dsc00005c
In Polish:
Marta: Przyznaj, Hili, że jesteś przez wszystkich rozpuszczana.
Hili: Nie przyznam.

Out in frigid Winnipeg, Gus got a Valentine: a special arrangement of the crunchy, smelly dried shrimp that he loves so much. Here’s a video of him nomming his Valentine:

And here’s a new Simon’s Cat, just up yesterday for Valentine’s Day. It depicts the love between cat and staff:

A baby elephant’s first steps

February 14, 2017 • 2:30 pm

I don’t know much about these videos except that they’re of African elephants (probably the bush elephant, Loxodontia africana). This one shows a baby elephant’s first halting steps, accompanied by loud complaining. Notice how both adults try to help it up.

. . . and a 10-minute video of an elephant giving birth and the baby’s arrival. Notice how, still covered with the birth membrane, it’s immediately surrounded by adults, no doubt to protect it from predators. They try to help it up, and constantly examine it with their trunks. And, lo and behold, it’s alive and it gets up!

Happy Valentine’s Day!