The ID Report

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).