The ID Report

I am conscious that I am in an utterly hopeless muddle. I cannot think that the world, as we see it, is the result of chance; and yet I cannot look at each separate thing as the result of Design.

-- Charles Darwin, in an 1860 letter to his friend Asa Gray, a designist

What if you were lied to all your life that a square was a circle? Oh yes, you were told, it's natural to have contrary thoughts, but you must not be deceived by appearances; those things that look like squares are not. They are merely apparent squares. And in reality, you are politely informed, they not only are circles, they must be, because an all encompassing Theory of Circumfusion requires them to be, and you must believe the Theory of Circumfusion. And what if you did? Despite all that was in you; despite what you instinctively and empirically knew, what if you believed? What if?

Imagine that you really bought the lie. You began to see reality not as circles and squares, but as circles and the illusion of squares. And suppose over time you trained yourself, through constant reminder that what you see as squares are not squares, but circles; you actually saw only circles. Now where others see circles and squares you see only circles and imperfect circles. In fact, you find you are somewhat proud of the fact that you seem to be one of the very few people that can understand the Theory of Circumfusion to the extent that you see reality so wonderfully enveloped with circles. You teach with grand authority that your discipline is that of the study of circles that give the appearance of being squares. In fact, your reality becomes so self-evidently true you almost forget that others still see squares.

But you can't forget. Picture your constant chagrin, if not downright irritation, at the constant use among lay people and uninformed (redneck, you say) scientists of the language of squareness. To make matters worse, squareness is always insisted on by the "straight" and "square" crowd, those who speak in vexatious pleonasms such as reference to "straight-edged squares" (as if there are any other kind). They are not squares! you want to shout, they are circles that only have the appearance of squareness! You try your best to be nice, but you find yourself blogging about imbeciles and the mentally ill who adamantly refuse to believe the scientific Theory of Circumfusion and persist in the delusion of the existence of true squareness.

Finally, you hit upon the perfect answer. A brilliant solution! The answer, so stunningly elegant a resolution that you are surprised it has not already been tried: simply remove the term "square" and the concept of squareness from the vocabulary! Simply deem the concept of squareness "inappropriate" and require that no one ever again use the term "square" when speaking, writing, or, you hope, even thinking about reality. Certainly then, you hope, all reality would be seen properly as circles, and the Theory of Circumfusion would finally be free of all the endless parade of pesky detractors.

Sound absurd? It is absurd. But absurdity is the natural destination of wrong ideas pressed against an unyielding reality. And such absurdity represents the pinnacle of thinking darkened by Darwinism, where a reality plain to all stands starkly against an insistent muddle all too plain. The problem for Darwinists lies with the term "design". The term best describes everything we see in nature, but, insist Darwinists, it simply cannot be; The Theory will not allow it. Never mind what your eyes see, never mind what your hands touch, never mind what your ears hear, you must, as atheist co-discoverer of DNA Francis Crick insists biologist do, constantly remind yourself that what you see was not designed but evolved.

On the question of design, Darwinists from Darwin to Dawkins struggle with language developed for reality as we see it, to communicate reality as they wish us to see it. For years, in addition to preaching the gospel of "apparent" design, Richard Dawkins tried a muddled attempt at coining the term designoids to describe the Darwinian requirement of non-designed design. His concept of designoids, like most of his truth claims, not only reeks of tautological nonsense (designoids are things that look designed, and things that look designed are designoids), it sounds dorky. By his definition he is a designoid. So be it, the rest of us will pass on such rubbish demanded by science beholden to an imagined reality. And "apparent" design? Dawkins seems too slight a thinker to realize that deeming design "apparent" is not only linguistically problematic, it is a scientifically useless contradiction in terms. Something is either designed or it is not. And like knowing someone is "apparently pregnant", knowing something is "apparently designed" imparts no useful knowledge.

The latest gift of Darwinian absurdity came in the pages of the gloriously serious-sounding Journal of Zoological Systematics and Evolutionary Research where Columbia University's W.J. Bock surrendered to an Orwellian coward's solution: simply eliminate the troublesome "D" word altogether. Rather than have biologists distracted repeating the mantra, "it is not designed, it is not designed, it is not designed," Bock's solution is to remove even the "concept of design" from all "biological explanations". Design is "inappropriate" in biology, according to Bock, and "should not be used in evolutionary theory." Bock's necessary retreat to absurdity is doubly ineffective, as it does not solve his problem. Because, as he recognized indirectly by admitting that "substitute terms are awkward and not really informative", if you remove the concept of design from biology, there is nothing informative left! All is awkwardness because biology is design. As atheist Richard Dawkins admits, "biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose."

Biological things look designed! Remove design and there's nothing left to look at in biology. But importantly (and correctly), according to Bock and others, keep design and there's nothing to talk about in evolutionary theory. This dilemma is exactly what muddled Darwin himself: keep the theory in spite of the empirical evidence, or yield to the evidence and ditch the theory. Unwilling to forsake their chosen theory, and unable to marshal language appropriate to Darwinian surreality, Darwinists have decided to change what they can in vain hopes of altering what they can't. Like little gods attempting to remake nature into their own image, Darwinists believe that by banning the term "design" from explanations in biology, design itself will not need explaining.

Good luck. But here's a workable compromise: drop the term "design" in evolutionary theory where it makes no sense and keep it in biology where it makes perfect sense. The two really have little need for each other. Biology can continue to operate (as it does, truth be told) in terms of design, and because there is no English word for "apparently-designed-yet-actually-unintelligently-caused" with respect to observed objects, evolutionary theory can adopt a more proper substitute term: adesign. Adesign is quite simply the absence of design. Adesign leads to adesignism, which, like its linguistic counterparts atheism and agnosticism, is a belief system defined by what it denies. By creating a clear contrast between design and adesign, the new terminology precisely captures the heart of the origins inquiry: nature exhibits either some design which is true design requiring intelligence, or all adesign which is simply an occurrence requiring no intelligence. There is no other logical choice.

Darwinists will resist the term adesign, because ironically it is too perfect of a description, and will drive the kind of clarity they resist to continue hiding behind an obfuscation of pseudo-science and religious motivation. Bock himself, for example, laments about design that, "the term carries with it too many undesirable connotations, such as the existence of a creator, and should not be used in evolutionary theory." Undesirable connotations? Perhaps, just as to one who believed a lie that he could fly might find gravity burdened with too many undesirable connotations. But with the new terms of debate, science controls: a designist is one who believes the design evident in nature is exactly that--true design. An adesignist is one who holds that what others see as design in nature is not design of any kind; it is simply an unlikely occurrence of unintelligent natural processes. Game on! Let the science begin.

And for those like Bock who apparently have religious motivations for their views, the new terminology of adesign has the added benefit of ferreting out the hidden religious component of the debate, and forcing clarity at a scientific level. A designist need not be a theist, but he or she may be a theist without inconsistency. Likewise, an adesignist is not required to be an atheist, but he or she may be an atheist without inconsistency. Further, the new terminology will drive logical precision directly at the point of greatest confusion, the supposed conflict between religion and science. A religious designist who claims to be a scientific adesignist (e.g., a theistic evolutionist) would seem to be taking a contradictory position, and should be required to explain. Likewise, a scientific adesignist who claims to be a religious designist (e.g., a Darwinist claiming to believe in a creative God) must explain this position clearly, because such a position is contradictory on its face.

Bock concludes his paper by saying: "Actually the living world as we see it is the result of chance because all of the attributes of these organisms evolved and the process of evolution is stochastic. To paraphrase a well-known statement by Einstein, God apparently does play with dice." Aside from the blatantly sophomoric tautology posing as a scientific explanation here ("the living world is the result of chance because all the attributes evolved by chance"), one must wonder--why do Darwinists care about God, much less his dice?

Adesignists, including Darwinists who believe in God and theistic evolutionists (there is no practical difference) risk embarrassing themselves talking about God for one reason: to keep the confusion alive regarding the Darwin-busting fact of design in nature. Confusion is the ally of a wrong worldview, and those who deny design in biology, particularly for fear of the "connotations" of a designer, must rely on silly thoughts about God and dice as they spin their worldview in a whirlwind of illogic and ever-growing deception.

Tell me, Darwinist: Are you intelligently designed?

Roddy Bullock is a freelance writer and the Executive Director of the Intelligent Design Network of Ohio and is the author of The Cave Painting: A Parable of Science, published by and available from Access Research Network.

Send comments to: roddybullock@idnetohio.com.

If you like this essay, go here for many more.

Copyright (c) 2009 Roddy M. Bullock, all rights reserved. Quotes and links permitted with attribution.

Publisher and agent inquiries welcome.

References:

Darwin quote: http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/darwinletters/calendar/entry-2998.html

W.J. Bock, Department of Biological Sciences, Columbia University, Design-an inappropriate concept in evolutionary theory,
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/121639230/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0

Relevant quote: "The concept of design is inappropriate in biology and should be eliminated from all biological explanations."

Richard Dawkins quote about appearance of design: Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1996), p. 1.

Richard Dawkins quote about redneck creationism: Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1996), p. 251.

Richard Dawkins' concept of designoids: Richard Dawkins, Climbing Mount Improbable, (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1996). For a full critique, see The Cave Painting, A Parable of Science, End Note 10.

For more on the term "adesign" see: Roddy M. Bullock, Proposing a New Lexicon for Understanding in the Evolution/Intelligent Design Debate, at http://www.ohiointelligentdesign.com/lexicon.html

by Kevin Wirth
ARN Director of Product Development

Quite often I come across some fairly hypocritical commentary emanating from the Dork Side of the Farce. The topics of these bulletins range from "15 things that are wrong with ID" to other delightful tidbits of smugly painted sanctimonious preaching intended to help those who might otherwise be mislead to spot the errors of ID. I guess if ad hominem attacks or vitriol doesn't work, then breathtaking hypocrisy might fare better. A recent example of this would be New Scientist book review editor Amanda Gefter's recent commentary on "How to spot a hidden religious agenda." In it, she attempts to help her readers detect "religion in science's clothing."

But as I read her piece, I couldn't help but notice that nearly every single item she mentions as a problem with the religious-like thinking she is so intent on hammering has a direct corollary with evolutionary thinking as well. It's so interesting how critics can see the imperfections with someone else's perspective, yet fail to see the same exact problem with their own. Not only that, but many of her conclusions (as is typical of many like her who try to correct how IDers define themselves and their mission) are clearly either imprecise, cherry-picked, or flat-out wrong. Nothing like knocking down straw men (and women).

Take for example just one of her comments, where she claims that "If an author wishes for "academic freedom", it is usually ID code for "the acceptance of creationism."

Well, perhaps this is true for some Ms. Gefter, however, it also means a whole lot more than that to many others. The case for academic freedom NEEDS to be pressed in our legislatures because freedom is being suppressed right and left in academia. It's a much needed response to what Big Science is typically unwilling to do: allow dissent to be freely expressed without exterminating those who disagree.

In case some are not paying attention (and clearly, Gefter isn't), freedom of expression is a rare commodity within academia and science (just check out my earlier post "Big Science Takes A Huge Hit for Snubbing AIDS Research Dissenters"). To be sure, an educator CAN express his or her opinion about problems with Darwinian concepts, but 5 seconds later the hooked cane has jerked them off the scientific stage with lame cries of "religion," "separation of church and state," or "pseudoscience!" And, behind the curtain and out of sight of the audience the dissenter gets the living daylights beaten out of him by self-assurred ideological thugs who see themselves as the saviors of science education. And these are the same folks who bemoan the use of water-boarding as an inhumane torture tactic. Meanwhile, educators who thought they were free to express themselves about SCIENCE (not religion) often lose their job, career, families, degrees, and on and on because they dared to dissent.

Gefter, like many others, attempts to set up the issue on a false premise, ie, that the goal of academic freedom legislation is to insert "creationism" or "religion" into public school science classes. Actually, this legislation is an effort to ensure freedom of SCIENTIFIC dissent, which I realize is a far-fetched concept for folks like Gefter, who think we should only allow others to express an evolutionary point of view. Anything critical of evolution or smacking of Design is "religious." But get this: many educators are not allowed to present articles critical of evolution to their students even if taken directly from some of the most prestigious and peer-reviewed science journals on the planet. If the article shows any problems with evolution, then it should not be distributed to highly impressionable students based on the alleged "religious motivations" of the educator. And this is despite the fact that the article has already passed muster within the rigors of the scientific establishment.

Meanwhile, educators who advocate evolution are free to use their authoratative influence to persuade their students to accept the view that the "appearance of design" is not "actual" design. Fortunately, many students these days aren't buying it.

Academic FREEDOM means having the freedom to express one's views without fear of punishment. And that is cearly something Darwin Dorks like Gefter have not yet learned how to handle or appreciate. According to them, freedom should be reserved only for those with the "correct" view of science.

Fortunately, someone else did us a service and created a well-written parody of Gefter's incredibly disingenuous piece.

Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

For readers who would like to find out more about what happens to Darwin Dissenters, and many others who have suffered discrimination for being Darwin skeptics, I recommend grabbing a copy of "Slaughter of the Dissidents," which can be ordered here.

Seattle area writer and Darwin skeptic Kevin Wirth is a founding member of ARN (formerly Students for Origins Research). He is also the Senior editor, contributor, and publisher of the book "Slaughter of the Dissidents: The Shocking Truth About Killing the Careers of Darwin Doubters" by Dr. Jerry Bergman (2008). This is the most comprehensive book published to date documenting the extent and types of discrimination against Darwin Dissidents. He is also the publisher of Caroline Crocker's upcoming book about her experience as an Expelled University professor which is scheduled to be released sometime in early 2009.

To read more essays by Kevin Wirth, click here.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Kevin H. Wirth, all rights reserved. Quotes and links are permitted with attribution.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

I am informed by Animal Planet that most animals that have ever lived have gone extinct. This looks like a very interesting series, and it raises an issue that I think should properly be part of any discussion of evolution: How and why do life forms go extinct?

Here is one way of looking at it: How did medicine get to be such a useful discipline?: Not by explaining how and why people stay alive, but by explaining how and why they die (and - what we are really paying for, of course - how to prevent early death).

So thanks, Animal Planet, for starting to unpack the question of how all existing members of a life form can just die out. Are they doing something wrong? More important, is it something we could actually prevent?

Let's say we learned that the "Weird Macacque" is dying out, due to a monkey version of AIDS (yes, yes, of course I made up both the species and the disease, for illustrative purposes). Should we try to prevent that? How much should we invest in the problem, as opposed to investment in human health or in the welfare of less obviously endangered species?

This just in: I am also informed by Animal Planet that every monkey knows his place until he is pushed too far. I would have said the same about anteaters and coyotes, one of whom recently killed a chihuahua in Toronto. I am happy to report that almost everyone has sided with the coyote.

Look, here in Toronto, we have standards, okay? Just because you can breed a dog that looks like a rat ... don't push your luck! In the priceless words of the Toronto Star (Web edition),

Coyotes usually feed on rabbits, squirrels and mice but have been known to go after cats.

So, while I am here anyway, keep your overfed pussy indoors. It's better for her for a number of reasons; this is just another one to pay attention to.

This is a coyote - a canine somewhat smaller than a wolf.

Also just up at the Post-Darwinist:

Darwinism and popular culture: One for the "unabashed bigotry" files

Animal Planet: Extinction Confronted - perhaps honestly, even

Evolutionary psychology: Another reason to ignore it

Intellectual freedom in Canada: Piercing the darkness! Fighting off the moral basis for a backward society

Intellectual freedom in Canada: Opposing the moral basis for a backward society

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 Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

A friend, Wintery Knight, who probably lives in a place as boring as I do (currently cold and dull much of the time, except for enlivening ideas!),, notes

In nature, the values of physical constants, (e.g. - the force of gravity), are set at the instant when the universe is created. Initially, atheists assumed that the constants could be any value, and life would still exist. But the progress of science has shown that if these constants were altered even slightly, then the resulting universe would not permit life. For example, physicist Brandon Carter has shown that if the force of gravity were stronger or weaker by 1 part in 10 to the 40th power, life-sustaining stars could not exist. While each possible value of the force of gravity is equally unlikely, the vast majority of these possibilities prohibit complex life of any kind. That means that any one value picked at random is as likely as any of the others, but it is overwhelmingly likely that the one picked will not permit life.

And how do atheists respond to the evidence of a universe that is finely-tuned for life? Well, there are two responses I’ve seen. The first is to speculate that there are actually an infinite number of other universes that are not fine-tuned, (i.e. - the gambler’s fallacy). All these other universes don’t support life. But, lucky us, we just happen to be in the one universe that popped into being out of nothing, and is fine-tuned to an incredible degree for life. What’s that you say? “Wintery! How can we be sure that these other universes even exist?” Why, you just have to have faith, because there is no way of directly observing these other universes. So, to be an intellectually-fulfilled atheist, you have to believe in a billions and billions of demons unobservable universes.

My own view is that atheism is dead in the water, except for its political appeal.

If there is no God, everything politicians want to do is okay.

But if there is a God, they better look out that they are not harming his people or his creation, right?

It's not hard to see why lots of people with a big agenda would prefer that there isn't really a God so - conveniently - they can't be caught by human law enforcement, when they do things they know are wrong.

I do not think that the world we live in is like that. Everything they do and everything I do matters. And it will all be brought back to tem sooner or later.

Also Wintery Knight talks about divine hiddenness - the way in which God reveals himself only somewhat - for good reason.

My sense, as a Catholic Christian, is that God does not want to force people to believe in him. Anyone can see - looking at the history of the world - that people are better off if they believe in God than if they believe in multi gods, ghosts, or superstitions that have never done good for those who believed in them.

Many people worldwide have starved who could have been fed, and many have died who could have lived, if only they had access to knowledge. Real knowledge. Not worthless propaganda.

This is what I mean by real knowledge. Knowledge that matters.

Also just up at Colliding Universes, my blog about competing materialist and non-materialist theories about our universe:

Science fiction: When the numbers run out?

Billions of Earths in our galaxy?

Science shows that the universe shows evidence of intelligent design

Science fiction: The Losting corridor

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 Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

According to Emily Singer at Technology Review, we are looking at "A Comeback for Lamarckian Evolution?: Two new studies show that the effects of a mother's early environment can be passed on to the next generation." (February 04, 2009):

The effects of an animal's environment during adolescence can be passed down to future offspring, according to two new studies. If applicable to humans, the research, done on rodents, suggests that the impact of both childhood education and early abuse could span generations. The findings provide support for a 200-year-old theory of evolution that has been largely dismissed: Lamarckian evolution, which states that acquired characteristics can be passed on to offspring.

"The results are extremely surprising and unexpected," says Li-Huei Tsai, a neuroscientist at MIT who was not involved in the research. Indeed, one of the studies found that a boost in the brain's ability to rewire itself and a corresponding improvement in memory could be passed on. "This study is probably the first study to show there are transgenerational effects not only on behavior but on brain plasticity."

Basically, the living conditions of mice and rats affected the apparent genetic inheritance of their offspring. Mice genetically engineered to have memory problems not only improved when their environment was enriched, but passed the improvement on to their offspring.

In the opposite direction, rats raised by stressed, abusive mothers showed modifications to their DNA, and grew up to be poor mothers. That might just be learned experience, of course, but

In the new study, researchers also had healthy mothers raise the offspring of stressed mothers, and found that the problems were only partially fixed. That suggests that the changes "were not due to their neonatal experience," says David Sweatt, a neuroscientist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, who oversaw the study. "It was something that was already there when they were born." The research was published online last month in Biological Psychiatry.

The results of both studies are likely to be controversial, perhaps resurrecting a centuries-old debate. "It's very provocative," says Lisa Monteggia, a neuroscientist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, in Dallas. "It goes back to two schools of thought: Lamarck versus Darwin."

Here's an interesting observation from Singer's article:

"If the findings can be conveyed to human, it means that girls' education is important not just to their generation but to the next one," says Moshe Szyf of McGill University, in Montreal, who was not involved in the research.

Well, cultures that don't believe in educating girls do correlate highly with a low quality of life ...

Considering the ridicule heaped by Darwinists on Lamarckian theory over the years, this is just another example of why Darwin's theory is in trouble in what is supposed to be its hour of big triumph. In reality, it is mainly a triumph in the pop media and out-of-touch religious denominations and museums.

See also this article by Sharon Begley, co-author of The Mind and the Brain.

Remember - one gene codes for one protein? Also. you ARE your genes? And all that? Uh ...

Darwin's odd musings on circumcision. Believe whatever you like. He certainly did.

Also just up at The Post-Darwinist:

An excellent specimen of bluting for Darwin

United Church of Canada celebrates Darwin - en route to oblivion

If you accept the argument in Descent of Man, you accept a racist argument

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 Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Discovery Institute writes to say,

Zogby Poll Shows Dramatic Jump in Number of Americans Who Favor Teaching Both Sides of Evolution

Surprisingly Strong Support Seen Among Democrats and Liberals

A new Zogby poll on the eve of Charles Darwin's 200th birthday shows a dramatic rise in the number of Americans who agree that when biology teachers teach the scientific evidence for Darwin's theory of evolution, they also should teach the scientific evidence against it. Surprisingly, the poll also shows overwhelming support among self-identified Democrats and liberals for academic freedom to discuss the "strengths and weaknesses" evolution.

Over 78% of likely voters agree with teaching both the evidence for and against Darwin's theory, according to the new national poll.

"This represents a dramatic 9-point jump from 2006, when only 69% of respondents in a similar poll favored teaching both sides," said Discovery Institute's Dr. John West. "At the same time, the number of likely voters who support teaching only the evidence that favors evolution dropped 7 points from 21% in 2006 to 14.4% in 2009." More here.

Here's the poll.

I personally believe that the change in the numbers is due to the strident celebration of Darwin by materialist atheists who need his theory to be true, despite evidence, and are simply out of step with what most people think. Oh yes, and dim Bible School profs.

"No conflict between science and religion," says the prof. Yeah sure, but what does the prof think science is, and what does he think religion is? Darwin thought that black people were closer to gorillas than white people are. Is that really science?

Also, the universe shows overwhelming evidence of design. Is that really religion?

Except that it would be idolatry, I am inclined to get down on my knees and thank the "new atheist" movement, and especially, Richard Dawkins, for these results.

Everyone now just wants the window to be opened, to dissipate the foul air.

Also just up at The Post-Darwinist:

Darwinism and popular culture: Seattle DOESN'T love Lucy? Oh, ... how could they not?

Darwinism and popular culture: The point of his theory is - surprise, surprise - a No God religion

The Cambrian explosion: Why Darwinism is just propaganda for a worldview you do not really want

Message to Darwinists: Quit lying about Darwin's racism. It is not doing you any good

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 Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

NOTE: In honor of Darwin's 200th birthday, this is a special repeat performance of my February, 2008 essay. Enjoy, a fresh new essay is on the way! -- RMB

The problem is not, as is sometimes popularly held, that religion opposes science. The problem is that religion has joined science. -- Cornelius G. Hunter, Science's Blind Spot, the Unseen Religion of Scientific Naturalism

Sunday, February 12, 1809 witnessed the birth of two babies destined to change the world. One lived a life so momentous he is remembered today with his iconic bearded visage engraved on paper money and a special day set aside in February to honor his birthday. The other is U.S. President Abraham Lincoln. Charles Darwin, looking quite bum on the backside of Her Majesty's ten-pound note, is the one set to give the global community its first unholy holy-day. Move over Lincoln, make room for the "emancipator of the mind" as this February we all celebrate Darwin Day with the most anti-religious religion on earth: Humanism.

Touted as "an international recognition of science and humanity," this year's Darwin Day Celebration is a sponsored program of those whose "program" also includes a theology of active God-denial--The Institute for Humanist Studies. Humanists are those thought-suppressing free thinkers bound up in the faith of naturalism who prattle about preaching a Godless hope for the future (their Godless hope for the past speaking for itself). Believing themselves free, contemporary Humanists are simply the latest group happily enslaved to atheism. And while Darwin is certainly responsible for gifting Humanists with intellectual fulfillment, "celebrating" may be the wrong response for all who recall last century's frequent outbursts of "science and humanity".

Complementing Darwin Day by complimenting Darwin's Way are a host of Humanists and their Darwinist allies pushing this year's Evolution Weekend. Coming to a church-like facility near you, Evolution Weekend represents the religious outreach arm of Darwinism. Realizing God-thoughts come in many varieties, Evolution Weekend replaces past year's overly exclusive Evolution Sunday as one religious group's "attempt to be more welcoming to members of all religions." Like a gift horse of the Trojan style religious Humanists are rolling (with open mouth but no one looking) into traditional religious orders everywhere offering "sermons" and "meaningful conversations" to show that "religion and science are not adversaries."

Holy Cow(ards)! Darwinists succumb to theophobic spasms every time someone whispers "intelligent design" within a mile of a public school, and yet they wish to breeze into traditional churches to have "meaningful conversations"? Cowards all! Such Darwinists are adversarial poltroons who forbid meaningful conversation in the school building but nevertheless wish to freely trumpet their trumpery in the church building. And, sadly, it's working. No longer required to don ill-fitting sheep skins, wolves in wolf clothing now mingle freely among the sheepish they find conveniently unattended by anyone versed in twaddle detection. Religion and science not adversaries? It depends on which religion and what science. But be warned, wolves and sheep are not adversaries either, for long.

History shows that transparent duplicity thrives among ideologues high on certainty and low on tolerance. Certainty, like safety, is better in numbers, and Darwinists know they have the upper cultural hand in a world steeped in the faith of naturalism--the philosophical idea that all nature can be explained as the sole result of unguided physical processes. Regardless of the actual truth of the matter, with Origin of Species in one hand and a sword in the other, Darwin's miscreant recreants believe might makes truth-be-damned right. As a result the world is faced with a growing number of distorted-truth brokers in a new breed of merciless humans: religious Darwinists. Whether Holy, Wholly, or Holey, Darwin may not be Lord or God, but he is almighty.

Holy Darwinists find Darwinism not merely a scientific theory but the necessary creation story for a Godless faith they call atheism. Ironically, being strong in Darwin and the power of his might doesn't stop Holy Darwinists from spending more time talking about God than do most Christians, Jews or Muslims. Seemingly obsessed with God-thoughts, Holy Darwinists write books about Him, make speeches about him, engage in debates about Him, and generally prove his existence by displaying their utter hatred for Him. Being coarse and generally uncultured in speech and action, Holy Darwinists are nevertheless the vanguard of the breed. Like an embarrassing zealot of any faith, the faithful are loath to intervene in their blasphemous mission to roll over any opposition; after all, they consider, Holy Rollers may be an embarrassment, but they are our embarrassment.

Wholly Darwinists are those for whom Darwinism is simply a convenient creation story said to unify all of biology, a narrative uncritically accepted with little or no thought. Likely the largest of the Darwinian tribes, these Cultural Darwinists fail to understand why anyone really cares about the "origins debate" in the first place. Convinced there is no controversy, and wishing to avoid argument on a subject for which disagreement is merely another academic distraction and unproductive exercise, Wholly Darwinists abide by the maxim: "Darwin said it, I believe it, that settles it." However, like a pew-warming Methodist confronted by a Bible-bashing atheist, Wholly Darwinists can get downright feisty when confronted with faith-challenging facts. With nowhere to go but a faith in another's faith, Wholly Darwinists are prone to vocally hold to the dogmatic line they were told is true. Believing that all scientific challengers to naturalistic Darwinism are automatically religiously motivated, Wholly Darwinists would rather fight than switch. And for a group that denies having a god in this fight, Wholly Darwinists can be a scrappy little bunch.

On the positive side, small but growing numbers steadily discover the Darwinian Underground, virtual catacombs filled with those conflicted souls who understand Darwinism fully. Because Darwinism wholly understood is Darwinism understood as holey, Holey Darwinists live like doubters in a monastery, convinced of a new truth but vested in the old. With every passing day bringing a flood of indoctrination-defying evidence, Holey Darwinists live lives of exceptionally quiet desperation. Like modern Galileo's convinced of data over dogma, Holey Darwinists are understandably hesitant to challenge religious authorities Galileo-style. Watching their openly doubting brothers get flattened by the Holy Rollers causes Holey Darwinists to carry on cautiously, devotedly partaking in public services while feeling forsaken in private devotions.

While Holey Darwinists blog under assumed names and Wholly Darwinists enjoy a state of bliss, Holy Darwinists reign over a merciless hierarchy of ecclesiastical thugs. Ready to crush dissent at the first whiff of non-Darwinian incense, Holy Darwinists are hell-bent on ending careers, ruining reputations, and disrupting the personal lives of every person who seeks in any way to seriously propose material, observable evidence that threatens el-Darwin. Employing the ACLU, tenure boards, and foul-mouthed blogs of adult junior-highers, Holy Darwinists resemble the Papal Inquisition, sans integrity. After all, even 12th century heretic chasers never dreamed of infiltrating the Bons Hommes et Bonnes Femmes of the Cathars with "Catholic Weekend".

By singling out "evolution" as "science" in search of peace with religion, dogmatic Darwinists finally have solid evidence for something: the true nature of the question, "where do we come from?" With no thought of "Gravity Weekend" or "Photosynthesis Weekend", Evolution Weekend emissaries reveal the true ideological conflict not as "religion versus science" but as "science in the service of naturalism versus science in the service of truth". After all, if Evolution Weekend warriors were informed and honest (the probability of the combination being almost nil) they would admit that true religion and false science are indeed adversaries. But Darwinists believe neither exists except, perhaps, among redneck creationists, so who cares?

As with all duplicitous endeavors, there is tragic irony in Evolution Weekend. Like the self-righteous man on the gallows seeking last second support from above, today's Darwinist missionaries may find their desires fulfilled in unexpected ways. Ignoring St. Huxley's warning against science suicidally adopting a creed, Darwin's religious proselytizers mistake the gallows for a stage and misjudge the gathered crowd as entirely adoring. But as they grandstand atop the trap door of religious motivation wrapped in scientific piety, many there watch with mixed emotions, not only at the spectacle, but at the specter of creed-laden origins science falling to a sudden end.

Roddy Bullock is the Executive Director of the Intelligent Design Network of Ohio (www.idnetohio.com) and is the author of The Cave Painting: A Parable of Science, published by Access Research Network. Send comments to: roddybullock@idnetohio.com.

Copyright (c) 2008 Roddy M. Bullock, all rights reserved. Quotes and links permitted with attribution.

Publisher and agent inquiries welcome.

References:

Cornelius G. Hunter, Science's Blind Spot, the Unseen Religion of Scientific Naturalism
http://www.amazon.com/Sciences-Blind-Spot-Scientific-Naturalism/dp/158743170X/ref=pd_sim_b_img_2

Darwin Day info: http://www.darwinday.org/

Humanist Info: Institute for Humanist Studies
http://humaniststudies.org/hm3.html

Evolution Weekend info:
http://www.butler.edu/clergyproject/rel_evolution_weekend_2008.htm

Info on the Inquisition against the Cathars: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catharism

Thomas Henry Huxley quote: Science commits suicide when it adopts a creed.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Researchers at Sweden's Karolinska Institute have
shown that

intensive brain training leads to a change in the number of dopamine D1 receptors in the cortex.

Their results can be of significance to the development of new treatments for patients with cognitive impairments, such as those related to ADHD, stroke, chronic fatigue syndrome and ageing.

"Changes in the number of dopamine receptors in a person doesn't give us the key to poor memory," says Professor Lars Farde, one of the researchers who took part in the study. "We also have to ask if the differences could have been caused by a lack of memory training or other environmental factors. Maybe we'll be able to find new, more effective treatments that combine medication and cognitive training, in which case we're in extremely interesting territory."

Of course, the brain can only be trained by first reaching and persuading the mind.

This is good news for seniors struggling with memory loss.

Neuroscience: Individual brain cells spotted in act of retrieving memories

Andrew Newberg: Meditation helps, but (how many times do we have to say this?), you must work at it

Long overdue TV series: Mysteries of the Mind

Neuroscience: Yes, we do think while we are asleep

A key question regarding our minds: Double consciousness

Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose

Also just up at The Mindful Hack:

Neuroscience: "Social neuroscience" is down for the count

Call for papers on the scientific study of consciousness

A Beautiful Mind: When the mind restores order to the brain?

Religion: When bad things are done by (supposedly) good people ...

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 Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

By Robert Deyes
ARN Correspondent

The public view of science has often been a romantic one and to some extent justifiably so. Paleontology, for example, has often conjured up images of "rough and tumble field expeditions to remote and often harsh climes" with a "Raiders of the Lost Ark machismo" being commonplace among many of today's fossil collectors (Ref 1, p.43). Even the well-known 'reussites de la science'- those accomplishments of science that marked the 20th century- carry with them no less an amount of intrigue and suspense. Einstein's first conceptualization of the extension of his 'special theory of relativity', for example, came to him as a sudden flash of genius while he was sitting in the patent office in Berne. Einstein would later describe his idea as the 'glucklichste Gedanke meines Lebens' (translated as "the happiest thought of my life" Ref 2, p.178).

There is one accomplishment that stands out as spectacular for the simple reason that it changed the way scientists looked at the origins of multicellular life. The discovery of the Burgess Shale in the Canadian Rockies by the American geologist Charles Doolittle Walcott in the summer of 1909 was an occurrence that required both good fortune and opportunity (Ref 3, p.42). It likewise satisfies our romantic view of scientific discovery. According to folklore, Walcott was riding on horseback together with his wife Helena and son Stuart when his wife's horse stumbled on a rock. Dismounting his horse, Walcott broke open the rock to reveal a host of soft-bodied fossils (Ref 3, p.42). In the days that followed Walcott and his party found more fossils amongst the pieces of broken shale that covered the neighboring hillside. So it was that several years later, after a number of return expeditions to the Burgess Shale, Walcott would describe his finding as "the finest and largest series of Middle Cambrian fossils yet discovered" (Ref 3, p.44).

The relevance of Walcott's discovery becomes all too clear when we consider that it represents an apparently sudden origin of multi-cellular organisms during a period of the earth's history known as the Cambrian (Ref 4, p.97). Furthermore, almost all extant animal phyla appeared in a 5-10 million year period (Ref 4, p.97). Seen in the context of earth's history, such a time span is "but a blink of an eye" (Ref 4, p.97).

In an article that appeared in the Proceedings Of The Biological Society Of Washington, philosopher Stephen Meyer and colleagues noted how during the Cambrian, "many novel animal forms and body plans (representing new phyla, subphyla and classes) arose in a geologically brief period of time" (Ref 5). Paleontologist Niles Eldredge described the Cambrian explosion as a global event in which, "very suddenly, and at about the same horizon the world over, life showed up in the rocks with a bang" (Ref 6, p.24). Biophysicist Cornelius Hunter talked about the Cambrian explosion as, "one of the major 'big bangs' of biology"- a narrow window within which, "the major groups in the fossil record made abrupt appearances" (Ref 7, p.69). Evolutionists David Raup and Steven Stanley similarly drew attention to the abrupt appearance of fossils at the beginning of the Cambrian (Ref 8, p.8).

The most puzzling aspect about the Cambrian explosion lies in the observation that very few organisms present in the strata leading up to the event are in any way ancestral to the Cambrian fauna (Ref 4, p.98). There are now numerous sites around the world that confirm the findings of the Burgess shale including the Maotianshan shales in the Yunning Province in China, well known for their well-preserved, soft-bodied fossils (Ref 9). In the words of biologist Casey Luskin, the emerging picture of phyletic disparity and complex body architecture in the absence of preceding transitional forms "strains traditional evolutionary explanations" (Ref 4, p.98).

Fighting against the evidence and relying simply on the preconceived expectations of what the record should show, some scientists today still promote the viewpoint that the Cambrian explosion was preceded by an extensive period of unrecorded evolution from a small number of common ancestors (Ref 8, p.22). Others posit that an increase in atmospheric oxygen following the evolution of photosynthetic plants allowed animals to grow to a larger size (Ref 9). And yet rather than providing a mechanism through which the Cambrian fauna evolved from simpler organisms, such a stance does little more than cite a hypothetical environmental trigger. The detail of how evolution took place remains conspicuously absent.

Charles Darwin dedicated a section in the latter chapters of The Origin of Species to deal specifically with the rather serious problem that the Cambrian posed to his theory of natural selection. He wrote:

"If the theory be true, it is indisputable that before the lowest Cambrian stratum was deposited long periods of time elapsed, as long as, probably far longer than, the whole interval from the Cambrian age to the present day..To the question why we do not find rich fossiliferous deposits belonging to these assumed earliest periods prior to the Cambrian system, I can give no satisfactory answer" (Ref 10, pp.438-439).

While Darwin struggled with the facts, he made brave attempts to get around the problem. His initial approach was simply to dismiss the apparent explosion of life as an unsurprising consequence of an imperfect fossil record (Ref 10, pp.441-442). Darwin built a hypothesis based on oscillating sea levels. He proposed that the shifting of sea sediments had forever removed the evolutionary continuum of Precambrian life (Ref 10, pp.441-442). To Darwin the sudden emergence of the Cambrian fauna could thus be considered as a mere artifact of the shifting of sediments (Ref 10, pp.441-442). Indeed plate subduction is a real phenomenon and might have forever destroyed the Precambrian record of history (Ref 3, p.32). But such facts hardly give us permission to let our imaginations run rampant over what evolution might or might not have done before the Cambrian.

Darwin's hope was that further research would unearth the presence of preceding transitional animal forms in the underlying strata. As of yet, these transitional forms have not been found. Nevertheless, in other areas of research the incompleteness of the fossil record has been latched onto as a given from which to subsequently define how all animal life evolved from one or a few common ancestors. One such area involves looking at the similarities in genes of diverse animals and, from these, establishing possible ancestral links between them (Ref 12). Perhaps unreasonably, the assumptions that are made in these phylogenetic comparisons are (i) that differences in specific genes have arisen through the process of mutation (Ref 11) and (ii) that the rate of mutation can be used as a 'molecular clock' of sorts from which to trace back the existence of common ancestral forms (Ref 12).

Several studies have been published using molecular phylogenetic comparisons that suggest a period of animal divergence far earlier than the Cambrian (Ref 11, 13). Gregory Wray and colleagues for example have published genetic sequence data that, they conclude, shows phyletic divergence having occurred almost 1 billion years ago (Ref 11). Their data was based on the sequence analysis of seven genes and involved comparing sequences for each of these genes in chordates and seven invertebrate phyla. In another study, Russell Doolittle and his team from the Center of Molecular Genetics at UCSD compared amino acid sequences from 57 enzymes and likewise concluded that animals had diverged considerably earlier than the Cambrian explosion (Ref 13).

Attractive as it may seem, the picture painted by both Wray's and Doolittle's groups faces a serious problem- it assumes a huge period of unrecorded evolution between the proposed ancestor and the Cambrian fauna. Furthermore, estimates on when such a divergence actually occurred vary dramatically depending upon which genes are sequenced and analyzed. For example Doolittle and his team predicted a deep divergence of 670 million years for the initial divergence of animal phyla (Ref 13) while Wray and his colleagues opted for a much deeper origin- approximately 1.2 billion years ago (Ref 11).

Defining a single 'molecular clock' is problematic in itself given that mutations in DNA do not occur at a constant rate (Ref 3, p.143). This clearly makes it very difficult to draw any conclusions about a possible deep divergence of fauna as David Bottjer, former president of the US Paleontological Society, noted:

"To estimate the timing of the origin of various major animal groups, Gregory Wray of Duke University and colleagues used a molecular clock rate based on vertebrates (animals that have a backbone). Their results, published in 1996, postulated that bilaterians diverged from more primitive animals deep into the Precambrian era, as much as 1.2 billion years ago. Follow-up studies using the molecular clock produced estimates for this split that varied significantly, ranging from as old as one billion years ago to as young as just before the Cambrian period. Such discrepancies naturally generated doubts about the technique, and a more recent study...placed the last common ancestor of bilaterian animals at...somewhere between 573 and 656 million years ago. But even this data sparked controversy. It had become clear that only actual fossils would furnish incontrovertible evidence for the time at which bilaterians had emerged" (Ref 14)

Given such uncertainty, it seems paradoxical that zoologist Richard Dawkins should write about an impending enlightenment from the "one true tree of life" that will be obtained from current and future genome research (Ref 15, p.112). Dawkins lays down his bold claims, seemingly oblivious to the questionable nature of molecular clocks:

"A spin-off benefit, which will perhaps have its greatest impact in the United States, is that full knowledge of the tree of life will make it even harder to doubt the fact of evolution. Fossils will become by comparison irrelevant to the argument, as hundreds of separate genes, in as many surviving species as we can bear to sequence, are found to corroborate each other's accounts of the one true tree of life." (Ref 15, p.112)

Of course some evolutionary biologists have answered the clocks irregularity by proclaiming the broadest range of possible outcomes,

"natural selection should work at markedly varying rates in different lineages at different times: very rapidly in complex forms adapting to rapidly changing environments, very slowly in stable, well adapted populations" (Ref 16, p.129).

The extension of this proclamation has been that, over vast periods of time, the molecular clock should smooth out thereby increasing the accuracy of measurements. Why then do Wray's and Doolittle's estimates on a hypothetical origin of multicellular life differ so dramatically?

Obviously the idea of common descent amongst members of the animal kingdom formed an integral part of Darwin's main thesis (Ref 10, pp.149-160). In the only diagram that appears in the entirety of The Origin Of Species, Darwin himself drew a 'tree of life' in which he proposed that species would produce new varieties. In keeping with his theory of natural selection, Darwin proposed that only those variations that were somehow beneficial would be "preserved or naturally selected" (Ref 11, p.150). Darwin was well aware that such a tree of life would require huge amounts of time perhaps as much as "a thousand or more generations" between defined varieties (Ref 11, p.151). The climactic conclusion to his tree of life was that after many thousands of generations, the amount of variation would be so significant so as to justify defining the new variants as individual species (Ref 11, p.153).

Darwin's tree of life invariably called for a series of varieties or transitional intermediate forms leading up to the Cambrian. Yet the fossil record does no where show this fundamental requirement. Such an absence of intermediates is by no means trivial. To re-iterate the paleontological viewpoint made above, we cannot simply claim as fact 500-700 million years of unrecorded evolution. In short, the Cambrian explosion threatens at least one of the key pillars of Darwinism- that of gradual change over time.

References
1. Niles Eldredge (1985), Time Frames: The Rethinking of Darwinian Evolution and the Theory of Puctuated Equilibria, Published by Simon and Schuster, New York

2. Abraham Pais (1982), Subtle is the Lord, The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein, Oxford University Press, New York

3. Simon Conway Morris (1998), The Crucible of Creation; The Burgess Shale And the Rise of Animals, 1st Ed, Oxford University Press

4. Michael Behe, Eddie N. Colanter, Logan Paul Gage, Phillip Johnson, Casey Luskin, J.P. Moreland, Jay W. Richards (2008), Intelligent Design 101: Leading Experts Explain The Key Issues, Kregel Publications, Grand Rapids, Michigan

5. Stephen Meyer (2004), The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories, Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington Volume 117, no. 2, pp.213-239

6. Niles Eldredge (1987) Life Pulse: Episodes From The Story of The Fossil Record, Facts On File Publications, New York

7. Cornelius Hunter (2001) Darwin's God, Evolution and the Problem of Evil, Brazos Press, A division of Baker Book House Company, Grand Rapids, Michigan

8. David Raup and Steven Stanley (1971), Principles of Paleontology, W. H. Freeman and Company, San Francisco

9. Early Cambrian Chengjiang; China Fossils- "A Window Into The Cambrian Explosion", See http://www.fossilmuseum.net/Fossil_Sites/Chengjiang.htm

10. Charles Darwin (1859), The Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection Or The Preservation of Favored Races In the Struggle For Survival Modern Library Paperbacks Edition (1998), New York

11. Gregory Wray, Jeffrey Levinton, Leo H. Shapiro (1996), Molecular Evidence For Deep PreCambrian Divergences Among Metazoan Phyla, Science, Vol.74, pp.568-573

12. Laura E Maley and Carles R Marshall (1998), The Coming of Age of Molecular Systematics, Science, Vol 279, pp.505-506

13. Russell F. Doolittle, Da-Fei Feng, Simon Tsang, Glen Cho, Elizabeth Little (1996), Determining Divergence Times of the Major Kingdoms of Living Organisms with a Protein Clock, Science Vol 271, pp.470-477

14. David Bottjer (2005), The Early Evolution of Animals, Scientific American, August 10th, 2005

15. Richard Dawkins (2003), A Devil's Chaplain, Published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson London, UK

16. Stephen Jay Gould (1992), The Panda's Thumb- More Reflections In Natural History, Published by W.W Norton and Company, New York

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Go here to hear the play online. Basically, here's the idea:

Fuller has an interesting premise: A postmodern talk show on which Charles Darwin (Chuck) and Abe Lincoln (Abe), whose birthdays fall on the same day, appear. They are interviewed, and decide if they want to stay in the present or go back to wherever they are now (not disclosed as a matter of broadcast policy). There are two hosts - the big hair hostette (Sheila) and a wisecracking dude on a short lead (Jack). Here's just a snippet:

ABE [bemused]: Like it or not, Darwin, it seems that you've been turned into the God behind the new science of Genesis!

CHUCK [looks cross]: I fail to see the humour in all this. My good name has been misappropriated for some sophisticated form of alchemy!

SHEILA: Chuck, lighten up! The stuff works - at least most of the time. I mean - I've got this recent testimonial from an expert. Listen to what he says: "Genes are digitally coded text, in a sense too full to be dismissed as an analogy. Like human words they have the power to hurt and to heal, and that power is the greater because, given the right conditions, genetic words can dictate with stronger predictability than most human imperatives."

CHUCK: That sounds like the ravings of some theologian still stuck in the seventeenth century with his Book of Nature and Book of God.

SHEILA: No, Chuck! That's Richard Dawkins. He's on your side. He's the greatest evolutionist ever produced by television!

More here.

Also just up at Post-Darwinist:

For one night only!: Hear Steve Fuller's "Lincoln and Darwin" play

Darwinism: Well then, no birthday cake for you, David!

Twitter account for the Post-Darwinist

Polls: Slight majority of Britons are okay with intelligent design

Teaching evolution: A note from The Cranky Professor

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 Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Podcast: Dr. Robert Marks and the Evolutionary Informatics Lab: Marks, a Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, ran afoul of Texas's Baylor University when he started to show that a number of computer programs that seek to prove Darwinian evolution mainly prove that hope springs eternal. The U took his Web site down. He has a paper coming up for publication on this subject, if it is not suppressed. Listen here.

Here biologist Ralph Seelke, a University of Wisconsin-Superior prof, explains why Darwin's theory of evolution should not be treated as a Scripture that one is forbidden to doubt or criticize.

Here plant geneticist Mauricio Alcocer Ruthling, Director of Graduate Studies at the Universidad Autónoma in Guadalajara, Mexico, talks about the genetic barriers that limit evolution, based on the study of plants. (I suppose that is why we don't have flower beds outside the local McDonald's with Ronald McDonald's face showing on all the flowers? It's NOT like they wouldn't have thought of it ... )

Here is a video series from the U.S. State of New Mexico on teaching about the evolution controversy, courtesy Joe Renick.

Apparently, in New Mexico,

New Mexico Biological Origins Education Bill
The bill stipulates that teachers cannot be prohibited from including relevant scientific information on either the strengths or weaknesses pertaining to biological and chemical evolution when those subjects are taught in the public schools. (Note that this bill does not place a requirement on teachers.)

The bill pertains solely to the teaching of scientific information and specifically does not protect the promotion of any religion, religious doctrine, or religious belief.

Students may be held accountable for knowing and understanding material taught, but they may not be penalized because they subscribe to a particular position on biological evolution or chemical evolution.

I guess the Darwin Police had better get on this right away. Darwin police, don't say you haven't been warned. Imagine, this is happening in the Holy Year of the bicentenary of Darwin's birth!

Also, at The Post-Darwinist:

Intelligent design and high culture: Ben Stein bounced from commencement ceremony!

Podcasts and video in the intelligent design controversy

The Economist now knows for sure that Darwinism is more important than science achievement

Wintery Knight: Also, some LIKE it cold

Coffee break: FAQ 2: Note to "real scientists" - stay OUT of police work

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 Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

If you got a bit of birthday money, Ben Wiker's 10 Books That Screwed Up the World: and 5 Others That Didn't Help would be a good use of your dimes. Wiker, senior fellow at St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology, is also the author of Moral Darwinism: How We Became Hedonists.

Wiker makes clear that he is not saying that the books he criticizes should be censored, still less that you shouldn't read them. He encourages us all to read them - critically appreciating the fundamental defects, warps, and wrongness of the ideas. These ideas underlie and help to explain many disorders of popular culture today. Unfortunately, however, they are usually treated with sanctified solemnity in hushed lecture halls, presided over by establishment figures who may be alarmed by criticism.

For example, we often hear people say "If it feels good, do it!", "Feelings matter way more than facts," or "He can't help doing that, it's his genes/hormones/upbringing/society." One aspect of fixing the problem is exploring the origin of such ideas and asking people to think critically about them.

Wiker starts with four books that he considers "preliminary" screw-ups:

Machiavelli's The Prince (on how to govern without morals and get away with it)

Descartes's Discourse on Method (a failed attempt to rescue us from materialism),

Hobbes's Leviathan (on why morals don't really matter), and

Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men (more of same).

Wiker discusses the books in order of writing, not "worst"-ness)

About the worldview offered by The Prince specifically, Wiker says,

As we shall see in subsequent chapters, yielding to the temptation to do evil in the service of good will be the source of unprecedented carnage in the twentieth century, so horrifying that to those who lived through it, it seemed hell had come to earth (even though it was largely perpetrated by people who had discarded the notion of hell). The lesson learned - or that should have been learned - by such epic destruction is this: once we allow ourselves to do evil so that some perceived good may follow, we allow ever greater evils for the sake of ever more questionable goods, until we consent to the greatest evils for the sake of mere trifles. (p. 14)

As an example, he cites a recent report that women in the Ukraine were being paid $180 for their babies - to be aborted and used in beauty treatments. Few, even among the most strongly pro-choice, would want to think of abortion as a means of making some spare cash - yet that is apparently what happened.

Machiavelli, whose style is copied by many modern politicians, counselled the importance of merely appearing to be religious - appearing at prayer breakfasts, endorsing "values," and ... and then ... enacting what sort of legislation?

Discussing Descartes's Discourse on Method, Wiker addresses Descartes's famous claim, "I think, therefore I am":

... it is simply ridiculous to single out thinking as the act by which I know I am existing. One could just as easily use hearing, smelling, or coughing ... I am not denying that thinking is more fundamentally human than hearing, smelling, or coughing, but only calling attention to the point that Descartes' argument is not somehow essentially tied to thinking. It is only this: that while I am doing X (whatever X is), I cannot doubt my existence because I have to exist to do X.

Many people who have awakened from deep unconsciousness to considerable pain will understand what Wiker means: You hurt, therefore you exist. The nature of your existence remains to be determined.

Also, he asks,

If Descartes is the father of modern dualism, what does dualism itself beget? A walking philosophical bipolar disorder, a creature who dwells in dual extremes, either as wholly a ghost or entirely a robot. One day he feels that he is a god, a purely spiritual being, capable of completely mastering and manipulating all nature (including his own body) as he would any machine, and the next day believes that he is a purely material being, a helpless machine entirely mastered by the mechanics of nature.

Our culture has seen plenty of both phases.

About Rousseau and Hobbes, he comments,

If we might be a bit glib, whereas Hobbes's men in the state of nature were gorillas - nasty, brutish, and curiously short - Rousseau's primitive men were suave, peaceful, innocent, carefree, and cheerfully libidinous bonobos. Rousseau therefore gave us a new Adam, a carefree, make-love-not-war ancestral archetype who became the societal ideal of the "free love" movements. (p. 45)

The modern "evolutionary psychology" movement is largely dedicated to giving Hobbes's and Rousseau's imaginings the veneer of science, by explaining how these conflicting origins of human behaviour supposedly promoted our survival.

But now, here are Wiker's ten key books, and a brief comment on their relation to the current intelligent design controversy, as it plays out in popular culture:

Ten Worst Books 1: Marx and Engels's The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)

John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism (1863)

Ten Worst Books 3: Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man (1871)

Ten Worst Books 4: Friedrich Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil (1886)

Ten Worst Books 5: V. I. Lenin's The State and Revolution (1917)

Ten Worst Books 6: Margaret Sanger's The Pivot of Civilization (1922)

Ten Worst Books 7: Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf (1925)

Ten Worst Books 8: Sigmund Freud's The Future of an Illusion (1927)

Ten Worst Books 9: Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa (1928)

Ten Worst Books 10: Alfred Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948)

Fifth book that didn't help: The fifth book that didn't help? Betty Friedan's the Feminine Mystique (1963)

Next: Ten Worst Books 1: Marx and Engels's The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)

(Note: This post is part of a series that looks at Ben Wiker's 10 Books That Screwed Up the World: and 5 Others That Didn't Help. Wiker discusses the books in order of writing, not "worst"-ness.)

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 Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

The Manifesto was written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. It outlined the doctrines of communism, which became the dominant political movement in the twentieth century. The movement collapsed in the 1980s due to unworkable economic ideas. Surviving communist states are relics, dominated by aging "heroes" of the communist revolution or their relatives or other hand-picked successors.

Ten Books author Ben Wiker, points out that atheist materialism was central to the communist idea of society:

Marx was an atheist and a materialist. The two go together; the denial of spiritual entities means the affirmation of all reality as purely material. What, then, is a human being? He is an animal that, like every other animal, must provide for his own material well-being. As human beings are furless animals with paltry claws and less than menacing teeth, they need to go much further than other animals in having to labor to produce things for their own sustenance and protection. The more complex he society and the more diverse the things it produces, the more complex is the division of labour that produces them.

[ ... ]

If we might indulge Marx's passion for simplicity we could put his entire argument in a slogan: "You are what you produce." This includes the ideas you produce. That is, human ideas are one more product of human labor, and Marx believes they are decided by a society's modes of production. (p. 63, 64)

Plenty of room for dehumanization here, and it certainly happened.

Communism killed so many people that considering any other question when evaluating its legacy is a challenge. But here is something to consider:

Even in non-communist societies, sympathizers planted the idea that the government is responsible for providing a sense of meaning or purpose in one's life. Traditionally, that has been the role of religions and philosophies. Government has played the lesser role of suppressing national enemies, crime, and vice (as acknowledged by social consensus).

Once government becomes the source of meaning and purpose, it quickly aspires to unlimited powers, including the arbitrary power of life and death over all citizens. That happened with communism and with its racist variant, national socialism (Nazism). (For a discussion of such political movements in general, whether nationalist, internationalist, racist, or politico-religious, go here.)

Today, due to Marx and Engels's legacy, many people even in democracies have difficulty with the idea - fundamental to democratic government - that government exists to solve a limited and specific sphere of problems, and that citizens have civil rights that government cannot simply remove in order to solve those problems more easily.

Next: John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism (1863)

(Note: This post is part of a series that looks at Ben Wiker's 10 Books That Screwed Up the World: and 5 Others That Didn't Help. Wiker discusses the books in order of writing, not "worst"-ness.)

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 Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "ten worst books" author Ben Wiker's view,

There are more ways to destroy the human race than reducing it to a pile of smoldering corpses, and John Stuart Mill championed one of the most drab, utilitarianism. Even so sympathetic a scholar of Mill as Max Lerner felt compelled to say of Utilitarianism that Mill's "little book ... leaves a trace of dust in the mouth." For the unsympathetic, Utilitarianism leaves considerably more than a trace, perhaps enough to fill one's shoes and socks as well. Yet no one can gainsay the enormous influence that Mill's "little book" has had. (p. 73)

Why was the utilitarian idea that "pleasure = good and pain = bad a problem?

If morality is reduced to pleasure and pain, must be included in the moral calculation. But here's the contradiction in the logic. Once we add the entire sentient population of every fish, fowl, reptile amoeba, gorilla, and so forth, the task of ranking and balancing pleasures and pains becomes impossible. A sparrow cannot experience the pleasures of parsing Greek, but if Mill were to use that to deny "quality" to the sparrow's experience of pleasures, then the sparrow's advocate would reply that Mill cannot experience the pleasures of natural flight. Indeed, in the balance of all sentient beings, the sum of our human experience of pleasure and pain is negligible. Of course, modern animal rights activists say exactly this.

And it is not a question of avoiding cruelty to animals. Animal rights advocates oppose medical experimentation on animals that eventually helps animals, never mind people. So it becomes self-destructive in the long run. Wiker sums up

He could not envision, for example, the most likely outcome of utilitarianism: that it would lead to a society addicted to ever more intense, barbaric, and self-destructive pleasures, and that its members would be gibbering cowards in the face of even the smallest pains.

We are, I presume, all familiar with THAT legacy, well catered for in popular culture.

Next: Ten Worst Books 3: Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man (1871)

(Note: This post is part of a series that looks at Ben Wiker's 10 Books That Screwed Up the World: and 5 Others That Didn't Help. Wiker discusses the books in order of writing, not "worst"-ness.)

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 Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

When I first started this chapter, I was afraid it was going to be yet another attempt to whitewash Darwin's racism - but by then perhaps I should have known Wiker better:

Reading Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man forces one to face an unpleasant truth: that if everything he said in his more famous Origin of Species is true, then it quite logically follows that human beings ought to ensure that the fit breed with abandon and that the unfit are weeded out. Attempts to disengage Darwin from the eugenics movement date from a bit after World War II, when Hitler gave a bad name to survival of the fittest as applied to human beings. But it is impossible to distance Darwin from eugenics; it's a straight logical shot from his evolutionary arguments. (p. 85)

So I can safely recommend this chapter to young people; it is not simply another sugar-coated lie from publicly funded museum curators and textbook authors, anxious to remove all suggestion of challenging historical fact from their presentations.

It was inevitable that Darwin would be a racist. He believed that new species arose regularly from killing the intermediates:

It is a law of evolution that the most closely related species or sub-species are those most likely to come into conflict, and so, in a series of closely related species or sub-species stretched across a spectrum - say, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H - the middle ones get knocked out in the struggle, and the two most distant and distinct (A and H) survive as the fittest. (Ten Books, p. 95)

Nothing like that actually happened, of course. When Europeans began to arrive in northern North America in the sixteenth century, they discovered Aboriginal peoples who had been living here for maybe ten thousand years - who were little different from their own ancestors not many centuries ago. Indeed, in what is now Canada, the Hudson's Bay Company men were advised to marry the daughters of local Aboriginal magnates, as the best way to ensure a good supply of furs for the Company (rather than having them sold to competitors).

But today's Darwinists seldom wonder why Darwin's favoured ideas on these subjects did not pan out. Worship of Darwin as a sort of secular deity currently prevents evaluating his theses seriously.

Also, Wiker refreshingly refuses to cater to the nonsense about Darwin "inventing" the idea of evolution. What Darwin actually did was make evolution a respectable theory for Brit toffs to espouse.

For some fifty years or more, evolution had been associated with political radicals, the kind of thing bandied about by French revolutionaries and gutter atheists.

Yes, you read that right. Contrary to popular opinion, Darwin did not "discover" evolution. It had wafted about radical circles for at least one, if not two centuries , before Darwin, and can be traced back to the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus. But Darwin wasn't preaching to the radical choir. He wanted his theory to be heard by the more politically conservative bastions of England's scientific elite. Ten Books, p. 87

Essentially, the toffs were stuck with the idea that we are all equally human. That's what the Bible, for example, says - as do many other revered sources. But the toffs didn't believe such sources. However, they did not at first know how exactly to discredit them. Darwin provided them with a "scientific" means of discrediting them, so that the hoped-for break

will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.

So there it was at last. A "scientific" excuse for the imperial toffs' existing sense of vast superiority and entitlement over other races. And the rest is, alas, history.

Darwinists have such a hold now over pop science culture that, incredibly, they have somehow managed to link Darwin and Abraham Lincoln as liberators. In my view, a popular culture that accepts such a link needs to be liberated from dangerous illusions.

Next: Ten Worst Books 4: Friedrich Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil (1886)

(Note: This post is part of a series that looks at Ben Wiker's 10 Books That Screwed Up the World: and 5 Others That Didn't Help. Wiker discusses the books in order of writing, not "worst"-ness.)

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 Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Nietzsche is widely reviled as the philosopher of the Nazis, and he certainly spelled out his views in no uncertain terms in Beyond Good and Evil. As Wiker puts it,

Nietzsche's view was that the utilitarians made mediocrity into a morality, a mediocrity aimed at the most animal-like, herd-like type of existence, a kind of "slave" morality that cared only for comfort and trivial pleasures and shrank from every harsh demand. But this goes against all that has, in the past, made man great, and so the trend must be reversed. There must be a revolution against the democratic, utilitarian spirit, the spirit that equalizes everything, thereby extinguishing the notion of greatness itself ... (P. 105)

Essentially, Nietzsche agreed with Darwin that war was the source of evolutionary development (p. 106):

The similarities between Darwin's account and Nietzsche's are obvious: all rising above the merely animal is caused by struggle, war, and the brutal elimination of the less fit by the stronger. Nietzsche believed this to be the core natural truth of aristocracy - that the better should rule over, and hence should use, the lesser. "The essential characteristic of a good and healthy aristocracy" is that it "accepts with a good conscience the sacrifice of untold human beings who, for its sake, musts be reduced and lowered to incomplete human beings, to slaves, to instruments."

Wiker notes one difference between Darwin's account of human nature and Nietzsche's - Darwin was trying to account for why people felt sympathy for others' suffering, but Nietzsche saw this sympathy as a destructive development.

So, to Nietzsche, if Darwin was right, exploitation and destruction of weaker peoples were both inevitable and correct responses to historical circumstances. They were what Nietzsche famously called the "will to power". (p. 108) Darwin's effort to discover why people did not always carry out such acts was, on Nietzsche's view, a waste of time.

While Nietzsche's views were generally discredited following World War II, when the Holocaust became general knowledge, to this day, evolutionary psychologists go to a great deal of trouble to explain away "altruism" - a tendency to favour the other party in a transaction instead of oneself - as somehow helping one's own selfish genes.

All such views are, of course, based on genetic determinism - the view that a human being is controlled by genes and that the mind is an illusion created by the buzz of our neurons, guided by genes. Thus a person cannot simply develop an independent idea - based on personal observations (whether correct or erroneous, whether beneficial or harmful to himself) - about how to live. This view is still very current in the popular science press.

Next: Ten Worst Books 5: V. I. Lenin's The State and Revolution (1917)

(Note: This post is part of a series that looks at Ben Wiker's 10 Books That Screwed Up the World: and 5 Others That Didn't Help. Wiker discusses the books in order of writing, not "worst"-ness.)

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 Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Lenin, the architect of now-defunct Soviet communism wanted to destroy traditional Western societies. That claim is often made against partisans of one cause or another, but in Lenin's case, it happened to be true, and he made no secret of it. As Wiker says,

Lenin seemed to savor the notion of violence. There could be no compromise with capitalism or capitalists. The bourgeoisie, the oppressive capitalist class, must be ferociously annihilated by the workers they oppressed, and a new revolutionary government built on the corpses.

Hence, the tens of millions dead, worldwide.

It's worth noting that, to Lenin, were he alive today, anyone who owned a doublewide on a lot somewhere would be part of the middle class bourgeoisie. He wasn't out to get fat cats. He hated private property period.

Lenin sets out his view clearly in The State and Revolution (1917):

To understand the full, macabre nature of the Bolshevik state, we need to grasp that Lenin, following Marx and Engels, viewed the state as a purely negative thing - an idea that came ultimately from Hobbes. Hobbes declared, we recall, that our natural condition is pre-social and amoral. In the state of nature, we can do anything we like, even kill and eat other human beings. But this amoral condition is chaotic, precisely because other human beings want to kill and eat us. Since we become caught in a state of war, we all decide to give up our right to do anything we please and give some individual absolute power over all of us. This sovereign of civil society is the state, since his will, however arbitrary, is law. Hence Hobbes portrayed the state as entirely negative: born out of chaos, it exists only to suppress chaos.

Marx, Engels, and Lenin adopted this idea, but rather than focusing on individuals in the state of nature, they focused on classes. Thus, the "state is the product and the manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms." That is why the state does not and cannot act as "an organ for the conciliation of classes. If there could be reconciliation, Lenin thunders, there wouldn't be a need for the state to begin with. The state is by definition irredeemably oppressive.

And so forth, from Lenin. It's not hard to see how Lenin's view of politics readily adapted itself to a staggeringly effective killing machine.

One thing that really helped Lenin was the new popularity of the view that humans are simply another species of animal. While Darwin and his followers advanced this cause dramatically, as we have seen, it was neither a new idea nor exclusive to them. It meant, for example, that in the twentieth century, Lenin's followers could plan famines among their own people, in much the same way that forest rangers may decide to cull deer or stage a controlled burn in a national park. That the twentieth century can perhaps be called the Age of Genocide was due largely to Lenin's followers, and their low view of human life.

(Note: Deer are sometimes culled because, in excess, they can prevent forest regeneration by eating too many seedling trees. Controlled burns can prevent forest wildfires by strategically removing stands of trees, creating open areas that the fire cannot pass.)

Next: Ten Worst Books 6: Margaret Sanger's The Pivot of Civilization (1922)

(Note: This post is part of a series that looks at Ben Wiker's 10 Books That Screwed Up the World: and 5 Others That Didn't Help. Wiker discusses the books in order of writing, not "worst"-ness.)

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 Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Birth control pioneer Sanger thought that the pivot of civilization was getting rid of the carriers of supposed bad genes. Fat genes. Rat genes. Frat genes. Whatever. In her hands, the glorious cause was never about personal choice. It was about eugenics. Or, as Margaret liked to say: More children from the fit, less from the unfit.

So what happens?

If crime, pauperism, alcoholism, and general feeble-mindedness (however defined) are thought to be the result of genetic imperfections, then the eugenist will want to get rid of those genes by getting rid of the gene carriers. All it takes to construct a devouring eugenic juggernaut is the suspicion that there is some connection between particular genes and particular imperfections. In Sanger's deranged mind, a low or even moderate IQ was linked inextricably to nearly every social ill. It doesn't matter that she was wrong, what matters is if enough other people think she's right, and pseudo-science becomes well-funded public policy.

And people can actually be punished with babies.

Next: Ten Worst Books 7: Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf (1925)

(Note: This post is part of a series that looks at Ben Wiker's 10 Books That Screwed Up the World: and 5 Others That Didn't Help. Wiker discusses the books in order of writing, not "worst"-ness.)

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 Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Hitler's Mein Kampf is pretty famous, even among people who are not allowed to read it. (Hitler, of course, was the architect of the Holocaust, which murdered most Jewish people in Europe (about 6 million), along with some hundreds of thousands of others.)

I got into trouble when I was 15, because I wanted to read Mein Kampf. It was 1965, and I lived beside the Christie Pits in Toronto, where anti-Semitic riots had occurred in the 1930s.

The local librarian wanted to know why I wanted to read it. I said simply and truthfully that I was the daughter of a World War II veteran and I wanted to understand the history. I had already read William Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich several times, and had a fairly good grasp of the basic dates and such. I had also listened to many World War II reminiscences from my father and one of his brothers, but none of that got to the root of the war.

The librarian was satisfied that I did not represent some hate organization, and she gave me a copy.

Well, I spent about two hours reading Mein Kampf one summer morning and quickly formed the impression - from the prose style alone - that the author was a boring egotist. I quickly returned the book.

Here is one of Ben Wiker's comments:

... Hitler took himself to be that rarest of things, the union of philosopher and king, political philosopher and practical political leader, program-maker and politician in one. Put this way, Hitler seems almost noble, until we realize that, the philosophy to which he ascribed was an amalgam of Machiavelli, Darwin, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche (as mixed with the racial theories of the Frenchman Joseph-Arthur, comte de Gobineau). We might say that whatever hesitations to action one finds in Darwin, Schopenhauer, or even Nietzsche, Hitler casts aside with the ruthlessness of Machiavelli. (p. 152)

All this said, of course, Wiker quite appropriately reminds us that Hitler was not a person of original ideas. He was always borrowing from more original minds, and seeking power to enact the ideas. As for what he thought about the spiritual heritage of Europe, this must suffice:

Of course, Hitler's moral outlook on life was a quasi-Nietzschean form of spiritualized Darwinism. Christianity was useful as long as it supported Hitler's program. Liberal Christianity, with its flexible doctrine and morality and emphasis on curing social ills, could be particularly useful. But conservative Christianity - with its dogmatic claims and moral commandments, as expressed in such actions - was to be attacked whenever it contradicted the regime. The real religion of the Reich was not Christianity but the Wagnerian mystical Germanism that so entranced Nietzsche. (p. 160)

Mysticism gone wrong can do an appalling amount of evil.

Next: Ten Worst Books 8: Sigmund Freud's The Future of an Illusion (1927)

(Note: This post is part of a series that looks at Ben Wiker's 10 Books That Screwed Up the World: and 5 Others That Didn't Help. Wiker discusses the books in order of writing, not "worst"-ness.)

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 Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

One thing I really like about Ben Wiker is his zero level of popular illusions. For example, here is what he says about Sigmund ("all you really want to do is kill your father and marry your mother, and religion is really about your messed-up relationship with the dad you killed and ate - back when you were a cave man, which is why you don't remember") Freud:

Most of this speculation was impure fantasy, a bizarre projection of Freud's fundamental wish that religion be discredited by the most salacious conjectures he could conjure.

[ ... ]

Contrary evidence from experts didn't bother Freud or his devout disciples, however. His wish that his theory be vindicated had determined his use of the experts to begin with. "What he wanted from the experts," notes [biographer] Gay, "was corroboration; he pounced on their arguments when they sustained his own, disregarded them when they did not." In a spectacularly uncritical and hence revealing outburst written near his life's end, Freud defended his cherry-picking of evidence and his obstinate refusal to accept the ever-mounting counter-evidence gathered by ethnologists against his theses: "I am not an ethnologist, but a psychoanalyst. I had the right to pick out of the ethnological literature what I could use for my analytical work." (pp. 172-73)

Somewhat like the right Darwinists give themselves to seize on some minor bit of information that supports their case, and ignore the vast mountain that doesn't.

Freud was in the "man as beast" tradition of Hobbes:

... for all the claims of Freud's originality, he is ultimately indebted to Hobbes for his assumptions and also to those who followed Hobbes's lead. (And to be fair to Freud, he realized that what he was saying had already been proclaimed by "other and better men" who stated it "in a much more complete, forcible, and impressive manner. We are also not surprised, given the length of the pedigree of this view and the centuries it had to seep into the soil of the West and poison it, that the notions of the holy criminal and anti-social hero would eventually take hold of the intelligentsia and hence the popular imagination. (P. 169)

Wiker's comments, touched a nerve, at least for me, because I have so often found my nerves grating against films in which some criminal is portrayed as holy (with grossly inappropriate and dramatically unlikely explanations for his behaviour) and some anti-social hero is portrayed as somehow the righteous one (which so rarely happens in real life).

Freud's star has fallen pretty far these days, because the current epidemic of false knowledge has replaced him with evolutionary psychology, which has the advantage of offering us a bigger circus, including lots of apes and monkeys.

The most significant question is, how did Freud's ideas ever get taken seriously in the first place? I remember when they were absolutely dominant in popular culture, and on the lips of every local pundit. For that, I fear, there will be no accounting.

Next: Ten Worst Books 9: Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa (1928)

(This post is part of a series that looks at Ben Wiker's 10 Books That Screwed Up the World: and 5 Others That Didn't Help. Wiker discusses the books in order of writing, not "worst"-ness.)

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 Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Margaret Mead's book, Coming of Age in Samoa, promoted the idea that promiscuity is natural and normal - fronted in typical publically funded sex ed courses today. Of course it wasn't true and couldn't have been true, but it was just what the age of advertising - using sex as its main selling feature - needed to hear. As Ben Wiker explains,

Mead's battle cry, then, is that we need to march forward and create a new era, "when no one group claims ethical sanction for its customs, and each group welcomes to its midst only those who are temporarily fitted for membership."

Then, Mead beams, "we shall have realised the high point of individual choice and universal toleration which a heterogenous culture and a heterogeneous culture alone can attain."(P. 189)

Now, a huge controversy has raged for decades about Mead's findings, which simply do not fit the known history of Samoan social life.

But Samoan social life did not really matter anyway. What mattered was assembling evidence, real or imagined, for the benefits of promiscuity for teenagers. Wiker notes that anthropology was the perfect discipline for Mead to infest:

According to Orans, himself a practicing anthropologist, "From its inception, its practice has often been profoundly unscientific and positively cavalier in its willingness to accept generalizations without empirical substantiation." Anthropology was thus the perfect scientific cover for cultural analysis that was no more scientific than the state of nature imagined by Hobbes and Rousseau. (p. 191)

And, as with Freud, every pundit somehow "knows" that Mead's pseudo-science was true. But, as Wiker cautions,

Bad books screw up the world only if they are consumed eagerly by those who are hungry to hear their messages.

Well, in the twentieth century, hundreds of millions of people were hungry for her messages - and many saw how they might make money off them.

Next: Ten Worst Books 10: Alfred Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948)

(This post is part of a series that looks at Ben Wiker's 10 Books That Screwed Up the World: and 5 Others That Didn't Help. Wiker discusses the books in order of writing, not "worst"-ness.)

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 Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, Alfred Kinsey helped touch off the sexual revolution, but The Kinsey Institute refused Ben Wiker's request to quote from the book. So he had to rewrite the chapter to "footnote everything very exactly, so that you, the reader, may skirt the Kinsey Institute's blackout."

Why a blackout? Well, Wiker says,

Even without the full light of day shining on Kinsey's private darkness, we should have known better. His Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (or, for short, the Kinsey Report ) is a scientific sham that could have been exposed on its first release. In fact, many of its obvious defects were pointed out at the time. But the truth is that, as with Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa, too many people were eager to hear the sexual sermon preached by Kinsey, and the pseudo-scientific trappings simply helped to ease their consciences. (p. 197)

Curiously, Kinsey's views had a relationship to Darwinism:

... Kinsey was a passionate Darwinist, earning his Ph.D. from Harvard University in entomology and becoming a world-class expert on the gall wasp. Kinsey saw infinite and continual variation in nature as an essential evolutionary fact, not just of gall wasps, but even more important, of human beings and their endless sexual variations. There were no boundaries in nature: one species blended into another just as seamlessly as one human sexual proclivity shaded into another, all without a trace of sharp boundary.

[ ... ]

Reaching beyond Darwin to Machiavelli, we see on a deeper level a kind of Machiavellian assertion that the world should be defined by what most people actually do, rather than by some kind of pie-in-the-sky notion of what they should do. (pp 198-199)

It must have been very good news to some people that traditional ideas about what we ought to do are pie in the sky.

Next: The fifth book that didn't help? Betty Friedan's the Feminine Mystique (1963)

(This post is part of a series that looks at Ben Wiker's 10 Books That Screwed Up the World: and 5 Others That Didn't Help. Wiker discusses the books in order of writing, not "worst"-ness.)

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 Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

I well remember Betty Friedan's book, The Feminine Mystique. I read it in 1964 (I was fourteen), and couldn't make much sense of it. The unhappy women described in the book had way higher incomes and more opportunities than we ever did.

When my mom got back from babysitting, she would often give me the money, to run to the grocery store and buy extra stuff for supper. Yet my mom later became one of the first graduates of the Quo Vadis nursing school in Toronto, which aimed to get older women, whose children were in their teens, to consider nursing as a late life career.

So if life was so oppressive for us in those days, why was she able to do this?

Ben Wiker comments:

As even her sympathetic biographer Daniel Horowitz notes, Friedan presented a distorted view of the real situation and feelings of suburban housewives in the 1950s, reporting anything that was negative and suppressing anything that was positive, kneading the data to fit her need for a crisis and ignoring (as Marx did) anything that contradicted her grand, abstract thesis. (p. 222)

As a matter of simple fact, living conditions in the United States and Canada improved significantly during the 1950s and 1960s, with the further spread of electricity, refrigeration, et cetera. The spread of labour-saving technologies enabled women to consider jobs outside the home.

Still, Friedan's words (she died in 2006) were pretty powerful stuff at the time. In my own view, what made her book so powerful was the offer of an urban society where even the most privileged women could see themselves as victims and all could fashion any type of life they wanted. And that is pretty much the offer widely available now - for better or worse, due to increasingly branded lifestyles.

Overall, the influence on the intelligent design controversy of all the books Wiker identifies is this: They taught ways of thinking that promote materialism. Materialism is, thanks to their influence, so natural now to the popular science press that no one would think of questioning it, even when it does not conform to the evidence. This problem will take a long time to resolve.

There is room for a few good books in the world.

Further resources for Ben Wiker's Ten Books That Screwed Up the World:

Wiker talks about his book. Here is a YouTube video.

(This post is part of a series that looks at Ben Wiker's 10 Books That Screwed Up the World: and 5 Others That Didn't Help. Wiker discusses the books in order of writing, not "worst"-ness.)

Back to beginning: Ben Wiker picks 10 Books That Screwed Up the World and explains how

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 Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).