The ID Report

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

For some reason, Arts and Letters Daily, which I often visit, is always publishing materialist stuff, whether it is well sourced or not, but almost never non-materialist stuff.

Anyway, here’s a really silly piece from CSICOP - a group of unidirectional materialist skeptics - denying that prayer works.

Now, I agree that there are some serious logistical difficulties in determining whether prayer works. The main one is - how can you be sure that no one is praying for a given person? Ridding the world of prayer would be no easy task. Some old, venerable, and popular religious organizations pride themselves on the fact that no minute passes without prayers offered up, all over the planet. How can you ve sure that you are not touching their invisible wires?

The “skeptical” piece linked above, thought worthy of publication by Arts and Letters Daily, opines as follows on studies of intercessory prayer:

To date, such studies of intercessory prayer have not shown it to improve health-care outcomes. In contrast to thoughts themselves, the brain activity from which thoughts arise does consist of energy—electrochemical energy within neural circuitry. Reading this teeming energy in millions of circuit neurons and translating it into the thought or prayer arising from it seems theoretically impossible for even a supernatural being.

But what can this mean? Who knows what a supernatural being can do? Surely that was never a serious object of study?

The only relevant reference I could find in an article that significantly lacked detail was to the famous STEP study. In this study, inept handling of offers for intercessory prayer inadvertently reversed the enormously powerful placebo effect that many patients experience (you get better because you believe you will).

Quite the contrary, offers of prayer without a suitable context turned prayer into a nocebo effect (you get worse because you believe you will).

Far from demonstrating that intercessory prayer does not work, the study demonstrated that it can work all too well - that is, ineptly handled, intercessory prayer can become a nocebo effect. (Logically, then, correctly handled, it should be a positive effect.) There are still key problems with understanding what, exactly, is happening with intercessory prayer, of course, but the STEP study definitely showed, by reversing the effect, that it made a difference.

Mario Beauregard and I discuss the STEP study and its findings in The Spiritual Brain, to be released in September. Meanwhile, I advise you to be skeptical of the sort of “skepticism” that does not even discuss the details of the STEP study.

Why not? Because that would mean acknowledging that prayer can work, in principle, which is bad for their business.

Golly, if this is the best that unidirectional skeptics and materialists can do - get me a broom, somebody, and a pile of recyclable trash bags.

Other Mindful Hack posts:

Citing no evidence, only opinion, New York Times apprises the world that everyone knows that materialism is true and that therefore there isn’t really a soul.

The Spiritual Brain provides lots for some people to like and others to be mad about.

Canadians tiring of atheist tirades?

Frank Tipler tries to prove Christianity through physics

Also, recently at the ID arts site:

A mammoth sculpture, a major new find in early human art (35 000 ya) suggests that sophistication in art appears suddenly.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

My friend and colleague Deborah Gyapong reports on a recent talk by Dr. John Patrick, Ottawa pediatrician and retired professor of medicine, noting that

the “Darwinian myth” is becoming the “ordering myth” for the West, replacing the Christian story, with potentially disastrous consequences.

“Who would you rationally trust when we legalize doctor-assisted suicide?” he asked. “A Darwinist physician or a doctor who believes in judgment after death?”

Darwin’s theories of natural selection, survival of the fittest and of evolutionary progress are making an impact on health care, even though Patrick describes the art of medicine as “very anti-Darwinist” in its care for the sick and the vulnerable. But that is changing as society becomes “profoundly incoherent,” he said.

Patrick was speaking at a conference of Christian medical doctors, June 3-9 at St. Augustine College in Ottawa. Unfortunately, other speakers attempted to soothe the audience with tales of some kind of accommodation with Darwinism, as long as the Darwinists would just remember that Darwinism is not supposed to be the ordering myth of the West. Yeah really.

The most interesting aspect of the current aggressive promotion of evolutionary medicine (Darwinism in medicine and veterinaray practice ) is its sheer clinical uselessness.

The proclamations are grand, to be sure:

"Nothing in biology makes sense, except in the light of evolution," is the oft-quoted title of a 1973 article for biology teachers by the great evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky. In it, he writes, "Seen in the light of evolution, biology is, perhaps, intellectually the most satisfying and inspiring science. Without that light it becomes a pile of sundry facts some of them interesting or curious but making no meaningful picture as a whole."

Evolution's role is equally central in the subset of biology addressing human health and disease. The co-evolution of humans and our pathogens, the rapidly shifting resistance of those pathogens to our antibiotics, and our persistent vulnerability to chronic disease all gain significance when viewed in the context of continuing evolution. These subjects form the core of "Darwinian medicine," also known as "evolutionary medicine."

But how exactly do these ills "gain significance when viewed in the context of continuing evolution"? For the purpose of counselling and treatment of the patient in the present day, it hardly matters when they appeared or who - besides immediate ancestors and sibs, and people who live nearby - has them.

Consider, for example, an illness for which there is apparently a genetic predisposition: alcoholism. Fundamentally, the patient has decisions to make (Will I drink or not? Will I get drunk or not?) What if Alley Oop had the same problem? What if he didn't?

For that matter, what if there is really no genetic predisposition to alcoholism? It makes no difference to the patient in the end. He either drinks or he doesn't, and accepts the consequences.

One could say the same thing about obesity, that other scourge of the family practitioner's office in prosperous countries everywhere. If the Willendorf Venus was fat, so what? What if she had been thin? I doubt that most Stone Age women were as certain of their next meal as she must have been. But in the end, today's woman decides whether she wants obesity, along with its problems, or not. And she's the only one who can really do something about it.

Similarly, with antibiotic resistance (an often-cited passage in the Gospel According to Darwin), I have it on good authority that the main cause of the resistance is overprescription (and other overuse) of antibiotics. We helped the bugs get where they are. We could stop helping them. But that doesn't mean telling the old, old story of Darwinism over and over again; it means getting patients to accept alternative treatments. They will only do that if they can be persuaded that other approaches work.

I suspect that Darwinian medicine will just go the way of evolutionary psychology. I wonder how much harm it will do first.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Nearly six hundred new species of crustacean were discovered recently by a deep sea probe (ANDEEP), 80 percent of which are new to science:

Recent expeditions to Antarctica's Southern Ocean have uncovered nearly 600 never-before-described organisms inhabiting that blackened abyss, including the carnivorous moonsnail. "Astonishingly high and unexpected" is how Angelika Brandt from the Zoological Museum Hamburg in Germany, describes the vast biodiversity she and colleagues have discovered in the depths of the Southern Ocean. Not quite the words I'd use, but then again, you'd have to stop me from screaming first.

Jasmin Malik Chua's article, "Aliens of the Deep", points up the fact that many ocean creatures are still unknown, especially those of the deep sea.

The reader who kindly sent me the link comments that many of these crustaceans look a lot like crustaceans of many millions of years ago. If so, that wouldn't be any surprise because a recent find that included soft body parts showed that crustaceans have not changed much in 425 million years:

'What is particularly interesting is the remarkable evolutionary stasis this fossil demonstrates,' said Dr Siveter. 'There are many species alive today of the myodocopid group of ostracodes, to which this fossil belongs, and the detail of the fossil shows us that they haven't actually changed much in 425 million years.'

This is one of the problems of evolution, called stasis: Complex body plans arise early and persist for hundreds of millions of years, with little change.

As Australian biologist Stephen E. Jones writes,

The history of most fossil species includes two features particularly inconsistent with gradualism: 1. Stasis. Most species exhibit no directional change during their tenure on earth. They appear in the fossil record looking much the same as when they disappear; morphological change is usually limited and directionless. 2. Sudden appearance. In any local area, a species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and `fully formed.'" (Gould, 1977a, p.14). "For millions of years species remain unchanged in the fossil record," said Stephen Jay Gould, of Harvard, "and they then abruptly disappear, to be replaced by something that is substantially different but clearly related" (Lewin, 1980, p.883). "At the core of punctuated equilibria lies an empirical observation: once evolved, species tend to remain remarkably stable, recognizable entities for millions of years. The observation is by no means new, nearly every paleontologist who reviewed Darwin's Origin of Species pointed to his evasion of this salient feature of the fossil record. But stasis was conveniently dropped as a feature of life's history to he reckoned with in evolutionary biology. And stasis had continued to be ignored until Gould and I showed that such stability is a real aspect of life's history which must be confronted .... For that was Darwin's problem ... Stasis, to Darwin, was an ugly inconvenience." "The principal problem is morphological stasis. A theory is only as good as its predictions, and conventional neo-Darwinism, which claims to be a comprehensive explanation of evolutionary process, has failed to predict the widespread long-term morphological stasis now recognized as one of the most striking aspects of the fossil record." (Williamson, 1981, p.214).

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

I gather that the move by the Council of Europe to portray intelligent design theory as a threat to human rights has been put off - for now.

A number of things could be said about the Council of Europe’s move. First that you can be sure that the Council will be back later. Second, no matter what they get, they will want more. They can't help that. Materialism is failing and there are ever more "enemies" to suppress.

Third, that the Council twists the definition of "human rights" into something straight out of British political journalist George Orwell’s urgent mid-twentieth century warnings: Human rights means being protected by the State from anyone who might challenge your thinking.

Read the rest here.

Also, my latest webbed column: Can you choose to help? Or are you just a victim of your selfish genes?

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Here are the recent additions to this file of columnists' views on the intelligent design controversy.

Adams, Mike S. suspects (June 4, 2007) that popular Darwinism is supported mainly as a way of avoiding responsibility for sexual choices:

My understanding of (and disrespect for) the underpinnings of modern feminism was actually fostered by a biologist who once made a very candid remark about the foundation of his support of Darwinism. When asked about the lack of evidence supporting Darwinism – the fossil record, etc. – he confessed there was a very human reason for his faith in evolutionary theory despite the lack of scientific evidence. He confessed that if Darwinism were not true, he wouldn’t be able to sleep around.

At the heart of his support for Darwinism was a desire to get God out of the picture by any means whatsoever. And his desire to get God out of the picture was in turn motivated by his desire to copulate with as many people as possible without feeling guilty. I wonder whether some untenured psychologist would dare to publish a paper called “A Cognitive Dissonance Theory of Human Devolution.” I think we all know the answer to that question. (June 4, 2007)

A tricky case to argue nowadays, when so many people think that they are beyond virtue rather than beneath it, but Adams argues it fearlessly.

Krauthammer, Charles offers a cute play on words, riffing evoluton off intelligent design, to talk about endless campaigning in electoral politics. This column offers an interesting study on word use in the controversy (June 8, 2007):

WASHINGTON -- In Britain, Canada and other civilized places, national elections are often called, run and concluded within six weeks. In America, election campaigns go on forever. It used to be one year, now it's two. No one planned this, but like other evolutionary artifacts (the Founders applied intelligent design to the general makeup of the U.S. government but never foresaw formal political parties, let alone the endless campaign), this crazy improvisation embodies a certain wisdom.

Limbaugh, David identifies consensus science as the way scientists deal with contrary data that they do not want to acknowledge (May 4, 2007). The consensus is that there is no such data:

Tom Bethell, in his "Politically Incorrect Guide to Science," quotes author Michael Crichton as saying that consensus science "is an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had."

We are witnessing a similar phenomenon on the subject of evolution versus intelligent design. Evolutionist Richard Dawkins, explains Bethel, believes that evolution is not a debatable topic. "I'm concerned about implying that there is some sort of scientific argument going on," said Dawkins. "There's not." Meanwhile the Intelligent Design movement is gathering courageous and impressive adherents who would debate the notion that no debate is going on

O'Reilly, Bill dismisses the current pop atheists:

the atheists will never get it. The universe and the earth is so complex, so incredibly detailed, that to believe an accidental evolutionary occurrence could have exclusively led to the nature/mankind situation we have now, is some stretch of the imagination. I mean, call me crazy, but the sun always comes up, while man oversleeps all the time.
So bless you, Richard Dawkins, and all the other non-believers. As long as they don't attack people of faith, I have no problem with them. As my eighth-grade teacher Sister Martin once said: "Faith is a gift."

But not everybody gets to open the box.

In point of fact, the current crop of atheists has not come up with anything new that is of any importance, and Darwinism is not helping them any either.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

And what rough beast, his hour come round at last
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?

- William Butler Yeats, "Second Coming"

The effort to recast Darwin as a religious man, more religious in fact than the common run of Christians and other believers, in the runup to the bicentennial of his birth is well under way in many quarters:

Darwin counted himself an agnostic, but in his reverence for the creative agency of nature we should count him a devoutly religious man. "There is a grandeur in this view of life," he famously wrote on the last page of The Origin of Species. The grandeur of which he spoke of has more of the divine about it than did the anthropomorphic idol who occupied the thoughts of his contemporaries.

This musing by Chet Raymo (April 22, 2007) is a typical encomium. Go here, here, and here for examples of ridiculous hagiography whose authors take it all quite seriously. For intolerance, unreasoning fanaticism, and belief in miracles, there is no religious bunny anywhere like the serious Darwinist.

But recently, my attention as attracted to Lifetime: Songs of Life & Evolution a musical by British composer David Haines, with somewhat catchy songs, sung by people "with a mission to spread the good word about evolution."

There are tributes to scientific thinkers like Richard Dawkins ("I'm a selfish gene and I'm programmed to survive") and the occasional evolutionary insight ("Water does for trees what my blood does for me"). The performance concludes with "Four Billion Years," an appeal for humans to honor our evolutionary heritage by preserving diversity.

It's unclear whether The Scientist reviewer Isani Ganguli (April 27, 2007), who promises that "The family that sings (about evolution) together, stays together" understands that "somewhat catchy" is damning with faint praise. But that doesn't really matter as much as it would with other musicals. The MIT performance, and/or others like it, stands a good chance of being fronted to captive school audiences, expected to applaud. Which raises an interesting question.

Despite the fact that Darwinists insist that their concerns are secular, it is painfully obvious that a religious agenda lies at the heart of Darwinism: As the creation story of a new materialist religion, Darwinism is advanced with missionary fervour in settings that are neutral and secular in name only. And its ablest exponents are hostile to the free exercise of other religions.

Now, if you ask what would happen if the courts got involved, two different answers must at present be given. What should happen is quite obvious, in terms of Western world public policy. It was ably expressed by a lawyer friend who comments that, in principle, every religion is entitled to put on pageants for the children of the faithful. Indeed, that is precisely the limitation under which religions generally suffer. He predicts that the Darwinists have gofed bigtime:

They don't realize it yet, but when they do they are going to realize they've made a mistake. The same thing with the pro-evolution booklets they've prepared for kindergartners.

An effective panel presentation or court presentation on how evolution's advocates are turning it into a religion would show the correspondences between the newly developing pro-evolution programs and past, well-established religions

- kindergartner booklets vs. Sunday school booklets
- pageants, heroic exaltation of Darwin the man as a kind of prophet or inspired founder
- celebration of Darwin Day (does it commemorate his birthday? book publication day? Whatever it commemorates, religions commemorate analogous events in the lives of their founders)
- the vehement denunciations by Darwin's acolytes of all other religions (similar to the way in which Christian missionaries in the early middle ages converted the Germanic tribes)
- insistence on government support (recall again how Christianity converted Europe by, first, converting kings, and then having the kings declare Christianity the state religion - read the book The Barbarian Conversion)
- take-over of sacred places of the old religion by having Darwin-Day sermons, by recruiting religious leaders to make pro-Darwin statements (historically churches were often built on old pagan sites)
- the claim that Darwinism is "fact" not theory, etc.
- sacred bones. Christian churches have the bones of the saints; Buddhist stupas the toe-nail-clippings of Buddha; evolution is built on sacred bones, that the evolutionists read meanings into in the way that the pagan priests of Caesar's time read meaning into scattered bones.

Most interesting, especially the part about the sacred bones.

One of the things I have found most telling about the human evolution controversies over the years has been the frantic demand for ASSENT - to this or that human, ape, neanderthal or whatever as the primordial Adam or Eve, as intelligent or otherwise, as interbreeding with humans or not - in situations where there is almost no evidence. Whatever all that has been, it has not been science.

Now, here is my lawyer friend's key idea:

My point is that this is not merely a philosophical/logic argument -- it is actual sociological and cultural data. The conduct of the evolutionists itself demonstrates that they want it to function in the public mind as a religion.

However, I m not as optimistic as he. Given the current elite accommodation of Darwinism, what will really happen in the courts may be another matter. Another lawyer warns me that courts today are seldom sympathetic to anyone protesting compulsory indoctrination in materialism as a guide to life, and recommends great caution in pursuing cases. Increasingly, Western wllrd judges are elite materialists, whether they profess to be Christians or not. (Christianity can only be tolerated, in their view, where it does not conflict with materialism.) Increasingly, if you doubt materialism, something is assumed to be wrong with you, a childhood glitch or tick maybe.

And Darwinism is just the religion to suit the modern North American elite. It features boatloads of "selfish gene" nonsense, and an indulgence for any passion or vice whatever that does not happen to violate some current public health policy. It is as impervious to correction based on fact as any medieval saint's legend. And you are definitely NOT supposed to ask whether the stories are "true." They are told for your greater moral benefit, ... to help you be a better Darwinist.

Go here for a sendup of Darwinism, but caution! Do not eat or drink while laughing. We may be forced to fund the bilge or sit through it, but we are still allowed to laugh, apparently.

Meanwhile, no creed could better fit the great Irish poet Yeats' "rough beast" than Darwinism. Read the rest of the poem and you will see exactly what I mean.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In “Evolution, Religion and Free Will” (American Scientist, Volume 95, 294ff), Gregory W. Graffin and William B. Provine found that, of 149 eminent evolutionists polled, 78% were pure naturalists (no God) and only two were clearly theists (traditional idea of God). Some were in between these poles. The authors describe most of them as deists (some sort of divinity might have got things rolling but it is not God in any sense that Christians understand).

They note that the evolutionary biologists scored the lowest so far in any such poll. They described the vast majority of their respondents as “metaphysical naturalists”, “materialists”, and “monists”. In other words, these are people who are serious about their materialism and atheism.

These evolutionary biologists generally view religion as a product or byproduct of human evolution so that “... evolution is the means to understanding religion, whereas religion as a ‘way of knowing’ has nothing to teach us about evolution.” The authors stress that “Seeing religion as a sociobiological feature of human evolution, while a plausible hypothesis, denies all worth to religious truths.”

So these are the people who are provide the framework for the educrats who are entitled to tax you in order to interpret life to children in publicly funded school systems.

Mainstream media, covering the intelligent design (ID) controversy, warn you that most ID advocates are Christians or other theists. But how many have told you what I just did - that most of the people who strongly promote a no-design universe and no-design life forms are atheists? This has been true, by the way, for the better part of a century, ever since James Leuba started his surveys in 1914. So now, do you understand why there is an intelligent design controversy?

How do scientists who say they believe in God cope? Not well, if one goes by Brit paleo prof Simon Conway Morris. Conway Morris provides a textbook example of uselessness, while speaking to Texas students:

"There is no reason an evolutionary biologist could not subscribe to something transcendent," explained Morris to the Baylor Lariat, Baylor University’s student newspaper. "It would be a mistake to assume that all scientists are materialists, and they are not."

Actually, statements like that border on infamy. Most key evolutionary biologists in North America are aggressive materialists, and they do not subscribe to "something transcendent".

Although Conway Morris does claim to be a Christian, it is hard to know, based on his statements in the linked piece, whether he accepts anything that could come into direct conflict with atheistic materialism. "In the final analysis", he insists, only Jesus matters. But heaven and earth shall pass away before that final analysis makes any real difference, it seems.

Here are some additional stories I posted at the Post-Darwinist:

Has a new planet, just like Earth, really been found?

Darwinian atheist Richard Dawkins as pop cult figure

Jonathan Wells' Politically Incorrect Guide to Intelligent Design now in Czech.

"Junk" DNA now hailed as "powerful" regulator. Score one for the intelligent design hypothesis

Humungous fungus challenges what we mean by a "life form"

Me? Something against Francis Collins? No! Basically, if you have some mouthy teen shouting that he won’t go to church any more because he has discovered polynomials, and therefore he is going to go out and get his thingummy pierced - Collins is a good choice. On the other hand, ...

Another reason to ignore legacy mainstream media coverage of the intelligent design controversy (especially when it's not right around the corner from you)

Materialism (naturalism) is seslf-defeating, according to philosopher

Complex central nervous systems developed early, study suggests

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

Stuff you might want to know if you are not just a bunch of chemicals running around in a bag

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Evolutionary psychology: Why Clan of the Cave Bear makes more sense as a novel than as a science.

Atheist gives millions to Catholic schools

Quantum weirdness and consciousness

New neuroscience blog questions pop science media's neuro-this and neuro-that.

Articles of interest on atheists, materialists, consciousness, and tenured authoritarian crackpots

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Yeah, the show's back in town. And with most of the original cast, too.

I mean the poll, recently reported by USA Today, that shows that 66% of Americans think that the statement, "Creationism, that is, the idea that God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years" is definitely or probably true.

This is wonderful poll question for people who believe that Uncle Sam's alter ego is Santa Claus. I wonder how much public money Darwin lobbies in high science will screw out of US taxpayers in order to try to change their minds - with about as much success as they have had in the past - zilch.

As I pointed out in By Design or by Chance?, the human history that most people would recognize is certainly less than 10,000 years old. Ur of the Chaldees, the city Abraham left in order to wander in the desert, is about 6500 years old. The Great Pyramid is only about 4500 years old. Apart from wordless outliers like the Willendorf Venus and the Cave of Lascaux, we have only the empty speculations of "evolutionary psychology" for the vast stretches of time before then. So real history is relatively recent.

And that is a significant fact. Something happened to human beings relatively recently (less than ten thousand years ago) that did not happen to lemurs, toads, or ants. And it is a mark of the enormously heavy investment that the American materialist elite has made in materialism that it is at such pains to try to convince everyone else of its peculiar delusion that nothing really happened.

To see what is at stake here, consider the following three propositions:

1. Five million years ago, your ancestors were lemur-like creatures screaming in the trees.
2. You are about 60% water.
3. Your DNA is 98% identical to that of a chimpanzee.

All sensible humans who are not materialists will respond to any one of these propositions, "So?"

Now, any one of them may happen not to be true. For example, because I am a woman, I am more likely to be about 50% water (because fat binds less water than muscle does, and women store proportionately more fat).

But either way, half of me is the same stuff as Lake Ontario. But what does that mean? It means you can replicate that half by pouring yourself a glass of water. So that's the half you don't need to bother about.

Similarly, the fact that our ancestors may have screamed in the trees millions of years ago is actually of vastly less significance than the events of the last ten thousand years. Just as the similarities of our DNA with that of chimpanzees mainly tells you that most of what you need to know about a human being is not in the DNA.

The real reason that most Americans simply don't go along with elite opinion about the origin of human beings is that they are relatively freer than other peoples to dissent from their elite, and they know - as any sensible person who thinks about the matter must know - that the materialist view of human beings is nonsense. And they rightly reject everything connected with it.

Something did happen less than ten thousand years ago that forever separated us from Lake Ontario and from whatever screams in the trees. And I think the solid 66% on the poll question are trying to say that, even though they are forced to fund the propagandists of the elite through their taxes.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Ted Davis, a historian of science who has often spoken against the ID guys, has weighed in heavily on the side of Guillermo Gonzalez in the recent tenure denial scandal:

From where I sit, the impact of Dr. Avalos’ deeds is not hard to see: he poisoned the environment for Dr. Gonzalez, by undermining his academic reputation and isolating him at Iowa State*and all based on a book that is actually one of the best popular books about science in recent years. I am an expert on the history of religion and science in the United States (my current project on modern America has received significant support from the National Science Foundation), and in my opinion Dr. Gonzalez’ treatment of historical topics in The Privileged Planet is far superior to the treatment of comparable topics in Sagan’s famous series. His debunking of the so-called “Copernican principle,” associated with the late Harvard astronomer Harlow Shapley, is an excellent corrective to the false view of Shapley, Sagan, and many other scientists that Copernicus somehow “demoted” humanity by moving us out of the center of the universe. As Dennis Danielson has shown decisively (in an ! article in American Journal of Physics and in The Book of the Cosmos), Copernicus and his followers believed no such thing, and Gonzalez’ clear explanation of the details helps the record straight for many in the general public. A leading historian of astronomy, Owen Gingerich of Harvard (a former student of Shapley), justly praises Dr. Gonzalez for this in his recent book, God’s Universe (Harvard University Press, 2006), itself yet one more example of a scientist offering a religious interpretation of his work to the general public.

Read more here.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Evolutionary psychology :Goodbye cruel US - prof claims EP's future is Asia

Recently, someone from Europe (who says he is "very sceptical of intelligent design theory") drew my attention to a "horrible" article he found in the Google cache.*

In it, evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller, an assistant prof at the University of New Mexico, outlines plans for "The Asian Future of Evolutionary Psychology." in Evolutionary Psychology 2006.4: 107-119 From Miller we learn that evolutionary psychology (the attempt to derive human behavior from the factors that either (1) helped human ancestors survive or (2) were accidental traits that may or may not have helped them survive) isn't catching on in Europe and the United States. (You know, the infidelity gene, the violence gene, the God module, the altruism spot, and other such assured results of modern science ...)

Briefly, Miller senses that evolutionary psychology is not nearly as popular as it ought to be in the West, but not to worry, Asia is overtaking the West. He paper suggests ways to market it to the East.

Here are some excerpts from his analysis:

Altogether, if we exclude the likely anti-Darwinian cultures of Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and the Philippines, the current and emerging Asian powers include a total of 2.9 billion people – half the world’s population, and about four times as many people as in the U.S. and E.U. combined. These Asians already have high literacy rates, high average IQs, fast-growing economies, and a relative freedom from memetic infection by the Abrahamic religions. Psychology is already becoming hugely more popular at Asian universities (Zhang and Xu, 2006). That is the current state of play, as of 2006.

Noting that if current trends continue, there will be six to eight times as many Asian behavioural scientists as EuroAmerican ones, he explains that the children of newly affluent Asians will

... grow up materially spoiled but emotionally neglected. They will take prosperity for granted. They will rebel against conspicuous consumption, seek alternative paths to status, and adopt the ancien-régime norms of conspicuous leisure and self-actualization. They will start college in economics or genetics, but then they will fall in love, take drugs, read Chuck Palahniuk novels, have existential crises, and end up majoring in psychology. (So it goes.) Their moneyobsessed parents will be appalled at first, but gradually realize there’s a certain cachet in being able to brag about a kid with a Ph.D. The second and third generation of Asian middle-class youth – not the first generation – will drive the Asian dominance in behavioral sciences by mid-century.

Well that's some prospect, all right.

Miller believes that Euro-America is doomed to become a scientific backwater by 2050 (page 8), so even if evolutionary psychology could hop off the breathless pages of the pop science press, it would be wasted on the lands of its birth. He suggests just forgetting Euro-America, noting,

the U.S. is morphing into a fascist-fundamentalist plutocracy that will never seriously support Darwinian research.

Europe is so-so in his view, but the real future is Asia. If his colleagues work "hard, fast, and smart":

We could gain the first-mover advantage in shaping their intellectual outlook for decades to come. We nurture the emotional bonds of collaboration and mentorship. They appreciate our attention and respect. No one else from the Western behavioral sciences is bothering with poor old Asia. Evolutionary psychology becomes the dominant paradigm in all the key psychology departments ... Evolutionary psychology is still misunderstood, mocked, rejected, and reviled in the U.S. and Europe. But we don’t care. We’re playing the science version of the board-game Risk: whoever wins Asia probably wins the game.

He lists the factors that he thinks will help, including such claims as

Buddhist-influenced cultures understand adaptive self-deception; they view human cognitions, emotions, and preferences as self-interested illusory constructs that may serve biological goals, but that do not reflect objective reality

and

in contrast to sex-negative European monotheism, many Asian cultures are more sex-positive, more urbane, and more sophisticated (consider the Kama Sutra, Tantric Buddhism, Hindu temple carvings, Thai sex tourism, geisha culture, etc.)

Indeed, Miller, imagining himself and his colleagues as intelligent aliens, enthuses,

The U.S. is anti-intellectual and deeply religious, frenzied by consumerist self-indulgence and belligerent nationalism, veers between puritanical hypocrisy and pornographic narcissism, and has no serious national media or science journalism. China, by contrast, has a five-thousand-year tradition of intellectual progress, values education and ideas, is strongly secular, and will soon be the world’s most populous, prosperous, and progressive country. I would land my flying saucer in Zhejiang Province, not New Mexico.

Well, Geoffrey, don't let anyone deter you.

It's significant that the subtext of Miller's paper is that, despite strenuous promotion in the science media, evolutionary psychology has - at least to judge from his account - failed to catch on in the lands of its birth.

As Mario Beauregard and I detail in The Spiritual Brain, there are very good reasons for that. The general uselessness and irrelevance of Darwinian fairy tales is the main one. Granted, if people believe in a Darwinian fairy tale of caves long ago, it may influence them, for good or ill. But the same may be said of stories like The Ugly Duckling or The Lord of the Rings, whose authors never claimed that they were writing science.

All that said, I am puzzled about how to respond to my European correspondent. "Very sceptical" of the intelligent design of the universe, is he? Well, then, the sort of "horrible" enterprise he drew to my attention IS the alternative. He'd better either get used to it or rethink his opposition to ID.

But wait a minute - aren't the evolutionary psychologists being urged to pack themselves off to points East? Perhaps his best plan would be to see them off at the airport, cheering wildly.

EP, don't phone home.

(*Also here as a .pdf, also the citation on his site.)

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Is the altruism spot edging out the God spot as the latest "hardwired" fad in pop science?

Secularism: Early postmortem results links and comments on some thoughtful reflections on secularism and Islam.

An early rejection of intelligent design a key factor in best-selling author Christopher Hitchens' atheism.

Some thoughts on the alleged "talking ape" interview on ABC
"The ape hasn't anything to say, in particular, that requires a high level of language skill. If he is under your control and you force him to learn some routine for a box of candy, he must comply - whether you are operating a circus act or a lab. But beyond a certain point, it all sounds like cruelty to me."

Do you really need a brain? You might be surprised.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Kevin Wirth
ARN Director of Media Relations and Product Development

Here is a claim frequently made against IDers:
"People in intelligent design do not understand what science is."
Nissimov, Ron. 2000. "Baylor Professors Concerned that Research Center is Front for Promoting Creationism in Classroom." The Houston Chronicle, June 2.

This claim is often leveled against Intelligent Design (ID) supporters, scientists, and academicians, and like most broad swipes against any large group, it's a false claim with little merit that can easily be disproved.

If the remark were somewhat tempered, with the addition of just one word, I might be more willing to tolerate it. Something like: "SOME people in intelligent design do not understand what science is"

But even then, I'd have to say that such IDers would be in the minority. The fact is that most folks within the ID movement really DO understand, and more important - ACCEPT - the basic principles of science, the precepts of scientific discovery, and so on. People who administer this false claim against IDers typically fail to make some very important distinctions.

1) Many ID scientists practice science in exactly the same manner as their non-ID counterparts. Where the IDers differ with their non-ID brethren lies in the conclusions they reach. After all, we don't accuse all vegetarians of failing to understand the benefits of eating meat simply because they don't choose to. Vegetarians are completely capable of understanding everything about meat-eaters - they have simply decided to take a different path. If someone claimed that all vegetarians didn't understand what it means to be a meat eater, or what the benefits are, I think we could easily see the sham in such a preposterous notion - so why not apply the same logic when considering IDers?

2) Many practicing IDers have advanced degrees in fields that qualify them to render comments that may not be in accord with the mainstream. And after all, it is only by stepping outside of the mainstream that new discoveries are made.

3) IDers take on an additional perspective that others are unwilling to adopt. This doesn't mean that IDers are unable to understand what science really is, or refuse to practice good science. What it means is they bring a unique approach to the table that many others do not. The fact that someone is willing to contemplate ID concepts doesn't mean the individual is deficient in their understanding of science - on the contrary - they are typically quite capable in their chosen field. They are compelled, however, to see the evidence of science in a different light - a non-Darwinian one.

Critics often attempt to dismiss or marginalize IDers by relegating them into the same category as flat-earthers, tea-leaf readers, and horoscope technicians. People who understand science do not agree with such concepts - and that includes most IDers.