Daily Archives: March 18, 2021

In an online Masterclass recently, I was asked what I thought was the biggest single lesson that biomedical companies could learn from biological evolution.

Thats a hard question, because it forces me to choose from many really important learnings that our industry could and should take from Generalised Darwinism, as my field is known.

To be honest, my answer might be any one of half a dozen important lessons and the one I pick depends, in part, on what real-world issue is at the top of my mind at that minute. In this case, for example, Id just had another conversation with an ambitious senior leader who wanted to make a giant leap forward in his business.

As a result of that conversation, the lesson I chose was meant to balance that executives aspiration. As ever, let me perambulate around the science on my way to what is a very important practical issue.

Slowly does it

An early argument against Darwinian evolution was that the incremental phenotypic changes caused by small genetic mutations cant possibly explain the emergence of new species.

The argument goes that a tiny change in, for example, colouring or speed doesnt make enough difference in survivability for the new variant to out-compete the existing population. By this argument, evolution only works if big leaps occur from one generation to the next.

As is the way of science, there were years of trench warfare about this but eventually, the big leap camp and the gradualists made a truce. Most evolution occurs very gradually and big leaps are exceptional.

This position is supported by computer modelling, which shows that even the smallest of survival advantages can cause quite rapid shifts in population genetics.

White edges

Does the same observation hold true in the evolution of business models? The business press and airport bookshops are all lovestruck with a few rare examples of giant leaps like Amazon and Zara and, in an abuse of Clayton Christensens original work, almost every little change in business practice is now dubbed disruptive.

But look more closely and you will see that most sustained business success is the aggregation of many small changes that have had a bigger impact than you might expect. In the financial services industry, for example, weaving a small advantageous position from publicly available information is called a white edge, as distinct from the black edge of insider trading.

In any industry, it is white edges, rather than big leaps, that seem to account for the sustainable growth of successful business models.

These advances are characterised by low-visibility and detailed hard work, so these little steps dont make such exciting headlines or book covers, but they describe the reality of business success much better than the high profile cases.

Where to look

As I research the success of business models in biomedical markets, I can see emerging examples of white edges being won and lost. What I find fascinating is that these examples are scattered all over the value chain in both obvious and less obvious places.

The most obvious examples are the use of data analytics in commercial functions. Companies like Eversana are working with biomedical companies to find white edges in information about patients and professionals. Less frequently written about are edges in the supply chain, which companies like Alteryx aim for.

Both companies marketing material makes it sound like they enable giant evolutionary leaps. In reality, the more prosaic truth is that they help their clients do the nitty-gritty grunt work. And that is what it takes to create those small but valuable improvements in business effectiveness.

Biomedical edges

What Eversana, Alteryx and similar companies do is often a transplantation of ideas from other industries whose challenges are similar to pharma and medtech.

Im sure they tailor their approach but they lean heavily on lessons from other sectors. As someone who focuses on our industry, Im even more interested in companies who enable white edges in the parts of the value chain that are uniquely biomedical.

A good example of this is what ColabON is doing in the area of regulatory affairs. The complex and fragmentary nature of the regulatory environment is one of the characteristics of pharma and medtech and faster, better regulatory approval is a uniquely biomedical place to create evolutionary edges.

So, its fascinating to see how firms like ColabON are helping companies weave advantage out of what, historically, have been seen as a cost centre rather than a source of competitiveness.

Think small and big

That both biological and business advantage comes mostly from small edges rather than big leaps is very important to how we run our businesses.

It doesnt mean we should abjure ambition the big leaps can still matter but it does mean we should embrace edging.

Small edges may be difficult to find and may perhaps be a little boring. But they make a big difference. And thats the biggest lesson biology has for business.

Read this article:

Edging towards success - PMLiVE

In mid-February, Texas was crushed by an unprecedented cold snap and a collapsing energy grid.

As Americans continue to take stock of the climate tragedy and its brutal aftermath, it's crucial to shine a spotlight on the alarming ideologies that fueled this twin crisis in Texas and how it can happen again.

On February 16, as millions of Texans entered into a second day of freezing temperatures, power outages and water restrictions, Colorado City's former mayor Tim Boyd chastised his fellow Texans on Facebook for being "lazy" and "looking for a damn handout!"

Setting aside the question of whether demanding services one pays for is a "handout," Boyd's comments were cruel and insensitive. Fortunately, they received the hostile reception they richly deserved.

Boyd's cold-hearted comments were not just callous. Recent Facebook posts by Boyd echo and amplify a dangerous brand of Republican orthodoxy, conjuring a dark and dangerous past.

I study and teach political rhetoric at San Jos State University in Silicon Valley. Since 2015, my research has specifically focused on demagoguery, fascism and most recently, Adolf Hitler's re-emerging rhetoric.

Given my area of expertise, research and what I am witnessing unfold before me, it is impossible not to warn others about the blatant echoes of Nazi rhetoric in Boyd's postand the threat posed to Americans, and by extension, the free world.

Boyd's comment, in particular that, "Only the strong will survive and the weak will parish [sic]," is a near-perfect distillation of Social Darwinism, the ideology that powered Nazi dogma. It should alarm every American.

Hitler's belief in Social Darwinism is well-documented, and he also made pithy declarations about it. In a 1923 speech, delivered to the League of Nations, Hitler stated, "The whole of Nature is a mighty struggle between strength and weakness, an eternal victory of the strong over the weak."

Note how Hitler is subtly describing his beliefs about what happens when nature is left to its own devices. When he repeated the point four years later to the Nazi Student League, he was more direct: "It is an iron principle: the weak must fall so the strong can live."

In the context of the larger speech, "the weak must fall" can easily translate into "the strong must make the weak fall" and "one proves one is strong by destroying the weak."

The latter is also a closer approximation of the theories Hitler expounded in his fanatical autobiography Mein Kampf. He directly advocated segregating or eliminating "contaminants" and declared, "Those who want to live, let them fight, and those who do not want to fight in this world of eternal struggle do not deserve to live."

It's not hard to hear Social Darwinist resonances in Boyd's original comment and subsequent clarification once you begin to pay attention. After Boyd was struck by the public backlash to his initial post, he clarified in a post that was later deleted that he "was only making the statement that those folks that are too lazy to get up and fend for themselves but are capable should not be dealt a handout."

Boyd's statements are not equivalent to Hitler's political speeches, but they're steeped in a similar rhetoric of the survival of the fittest. The shared inference that "the strong" are more valuable than "the weak" is undeniable, and both at least imply that nothing should be done to protect the latter.

We must resist the temptation to dismiss Boyd's post as inconsequential. Even after resigning as Colorado City's mayor, he's still a fitting representative of his party, given how the "survival of the fittest" mantra has become an organizing principle of the Republican Party.

Take for instance Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick's remark about COVID restrictions in March 2020: "Those of us who are 70-plus, we'll take care of ourselves. But don't sacrifice the country, don't do that, don't ruin this great America." In short, the strong will survive and the weak apparently aren't as important as the economy.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott's recent lifting of COVID restrictions, likewise, rolls the dice with people's lives, as do similar measures in Mississippi, West Virginia and other states led by Republican governors. And the same themes were on full display in the Republican efforts to sabotageor at least critically delaypassage of the American Rescue Plan Act.

To be sure, neither Tim Boyd, Dan Patrick, nor Greg Abbott are Adolf Hitler. But it's not necessary to predict another Holocaust to be horrified by ominous rhetorical resonances.

The lesson is not that contemporary politicians are modern-day Hitlers, but rather that Hitler's example shows how easily "the strong will overcome the weak" can metamorphose into "the strong must allow the weak to perish" or even "the strong must eradicate the weak."

In conditions where people have already died in significant numbers, the metamorphosis is less a possibility than an existential threat.

Contemporary American Social Darwinism is rarely as overtly brutal as Hitler's, but it nevertheless reinforces the principle that some lives are more valuable than othersand that the weak must fall so the strong can live.

As Texans recover from the current crisis, and as other crises arise around the country, all Americans would do well to reject leaders who treat some of their constituents' lives as valuable and others as expendable.

When Americans votewherever we livewe'd do well to root out leaders who try to convince us that some lives are worth sacrificing on the altar of "the strong."

Ryan Skinnell is an associate professor of rhetoric at San Jos State University, the author of "Faking the News: What Can Rhetoric Teach Us about Donald J. Trump" and a Public Voices Fellow with The OpEd Project.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.

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Only the Strong Will Survive? American Echoes of a Dark Past | Opinion - Newsweek

Photo: John Lennox in Against the Tide.

Is it plausible any longer to view our cosmos as coming from chance interactions of matter and energy from pure dumb luck? Thats the question that Oxford University mathematician John Lennox will address in a live webinar this coming Thursday, March 18, at 12 noon Eastern time, sponsored by our friends at the C. S. Lewis Society. Dr. Lennox starred in the recent theatrical film Against the Tide, with actor Kevin Sorbo. The webinar, part of the Cutting Edge series, will tackle the most compelling new evidence that shows our universe is the result of brilliant design.

The online event is FREE and Lennox is himself never less than brilliant and charming. Please register in advance here.

Also check out the new course on Intelligent Design & Darwinism to be team-taught by Lennox along with Tom Woodward, Stephen Meyer, Michael Behe, and Jonathan Wells. Including online and in-person options, that will run March 25 through April 22 over five consecutive Thursday evenings. More information is here. Dr. Woodward, C.S. Lewis Society Executive Director, is the organizer of the course and the Cutting Edge webinar series.

Read more:

Webinar with John Lennox: The Brilliant Design of Our Universe - Discovery Institute

Photo credit: Max Berger via Unsplash.

In a previous three-part article (here, here, and here), I explored how Darwinian materialism has degraded the arts the narrative arts in particular. But there is hope.

Modern science has uncovered breathtaking evidence of design in nature in the exquisite nano-technology of even the tiniest single-celled organisms, in the delicate fine-tuning of the cosmos (without which organic life would be impossible), and at countless points in between. Celebrating this growing evidence of intelligent design (ID) can help rescue the arts from the nihilism and ugliness they have descended into in many quarters.

ID does so in part by reopening the door into theism, to belief in a transcendent maker of heaven and earth. If you recognize, for instance, that the eye was fashioned by a master designer rather than by blind evolution, youre likely to be more open to theism. And that openness has some distinct advantages vis--vis the arts:

First, under theism, art isnt a postmodern babel of competing interpretations without foundation. Theism makes it easier to see reality, and art, as an ordered, meaningful landscape that we have some chance of understanding.

Second, under theism, author and audience are free to explore narrative struggles between moral darkness and light as something more than empty moral posturing. The way is cleared to rightly regard great literature and film as an authentic wrestling with real and universal moral principles.

And third, with ID restoring the possibility of the transcendent and the divine, the sublime in literature, film, and the other arts can once again be regarded as more than a mere biochemical trick of evolutionary biology.

With that as background, lets look at some examples of narrative art that recognize that life is a work of intelligent design, rather than merely a byproduct of mindless natural forces.

Well start with William Shakespeare (15641616) and his playHamlet. Early in the drama, Prince Hamlet is dismayed that after his father, King Hamlet of Denmark, died, his mother rushed off to marry the late kings brother, Claudius, an ignoble drunkard unworthy of Prince Hamlets mother or the crown.

Not long after this, what appears to be the ghost of King Hamlet appears to his son and says that Claudius poisoned him so as to seize his throne and his wife. Prince Hamlet isenraged, of course, but he cant move on his Uncle Claudius until he can corroborate the ghosts story. After all, for all Hamlet knows, the spirit is really a demon come to trick him into killing a man falsely accused.

So Prince Hamlet looks for a way to confirm the ghosts claim, and, in the meantime, struggles with profound depression bordering on madness. In one of his famous speeches, he speaks to two of his friends from university who have just arrived for a visit. They notice his dark mood and ask him about it. Hamlets reply beautifully conveys the old truth that our lives are marked by both shadow and light, by depravity and decay but also by nobility and the sublime:

I have of late, butwherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, forgone allcustom of exercises, and, indeed, it goes so heavilywith my disposition that this goodly frame, theEarth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this mostexcellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave oerhangingfirmament, this majestical roof, frettedwith golden fire why, it appeareth nothing to mebut a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors.

What a piece of work is a man, how noble inreason, how infinite in faculties, in form and movinghow express and admirable; in action how likean angel, in apprehension how like a god: thebeauty of the world, the paragon of animals andyet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

The world is wondrous; the world is fallen. Man is sublime; man is a sweaty animal, doomed to die and turn to dust in the ground. The whole play, at one level, is a meditation on this theme of light and shadow, of what mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal (16231662) calledgrandeurandmisre, of the high and the low in life.

We see it in the plot and action of the play, where the lowest deeds bump up against some of the noblest. We see it in Hamlets meditations on life. We see it in the way the tragical and the comical are mixed, sometimes in the same scene, and in a way that strengthens rather than weakens them. (The gravedigger/funeral scene is an outstanding example.)

In mingling the tragic and comic thus, Shakespeare was working out of a Judeo-Christian aesthetic tradition manifest in the great Gothic cathedrals of the Middle Ages. There, the most sublime architectural features exist side by side with comically grotesque gargoyles. This aesthetic tradition seeks to encompass, understand, and, where possible, redeem all of creation because it was created by a most good and gracious God, who promises to make all things new, and who was even willing to become flesh and have himself nailed to an ignoble Roman cross in order to accomplish that goal.

This vision of the world also inspired Europes scientific revolution. Under Christendom, the grubby physical realm isnt viewed as inherently evil or ignoble, as it was by many of the ancient Greek thinkers, and so physical experimentation was encouraged.

There are other interesting conjunctions between the aesthetic tradition of Shakespeare and the medieval outlook that helped birth the scientific revolution. Here, suffice to say that the rich aesthetic and moral vision we find in Shakespeare is only possible where good and evil, nobility and treachery, the sublime and the sordid, are recognized as real, and where life is understood as far more than matter in motion.

To be clear, the intelligent design manifest in biology alone doesnt get you to theism, much less to the great Gothic cathedrals or to Shakespeare. The design in life, by itself, doesnt tell us who the designer was. It just identifies certain things in nature as intelligently designed. But it does open a door that Darwinian materialism wants to keep shut. And through that open doorway we can reach something like the aesthetic and moral landscape that Shakespeare and the makers of those great cathedrals inhabited.

Shakespeare, though, lived long before Charles Darwin (18091882). How might an author who rejects materialism respond to a cultural landscape ravaged by Darwinism and its fellow travelers Hegelianism, hyper-rationalism, logical positivism, Marxism, nihilism?

We have an answer in the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky (18211881). Shortly after DarwinsOn the Origin of Speciesfirst appeared, and when various strands of nihilistic radicalism were threading their way through Europe, Dostoevsky published one of his masterpieces,Crime and Punishment. In the novel, the young man at the center of the story decides he should rob and murder an old woman to escape poverty, free himself from the moral order, and set himself on the path to greatness a Nietzschean superman in the making.

The novel is, among other things, a critique of lawless nihilism. But rather than deploy two-dimensional villains to discredit nihilism, Dostoevsky creates richly complex characters to explore what is attractive about it, even as he depicts a protagonist all but destroyed by its intoxicating ideas. The novel also explores how a contrasting set of ideas and examples Christian theism have the power to redeem.

The work is an excellent model for any aspiring novelist who wants to take on those pernicious ideas that laid the philosophical foundations for Darwinism and that Darwinism reinforced.

Jump forward another century, and we have a short story by the Pulitzer Prize-winning American author John Updike (19322009) that confronts materialistic thinking and answers it with an explicit design argument.

The story, Pigeon Feathers, is about a boy in a small town who has begun to grow conscious of his own mortality, and who wrestles with doubts about life after death and his Christian faith.

The boy, David, likes to read and has consumed everything from the humorous stories of P.G. Wodehouse toThe Time Machineby H.G. Wells, with its foreboding depiction of a dying universe far in the future. In the barn on his familys property, David comes across more books. One of them is another work by H.G. Wells, a history of the world. The boy flips to the part about Jesus. There Wells provides a completely naturalistic reading of the life of Jesus, no miracles allowed. No resurrection.David feels ambushed by Wellss flippant dismissal of Jesus as a mere man. The narrator tells us that he soon

lost his appetite for reading. He was afraid of being ambushed again. In mystery novels people died like dolls being discarded; in science fiction enormities of space and time conspired to crush the humans; and even in P.G. Wodehouse he felt a hollowness, a turning away from reality that was implicitly bitter, and became explicit in the comic figures of futile clergymen. All gaiety seemed minced out on the skin of a void.

The boy talks with his churchs pastor about death and the afterlife. The young pastor tells him that Abraham Lincoln lives on after his death only in the good deeds he did.

David finds no consolation in this. If youre dead as a stone, what good does it do you for people to fondly remember you? The boy doesnt want to die and have the lights just go out whoosh nothingness. He wants to live.

He asks his mom about it, sure that she will be horrified by the pastors betrayal of Christianity. But no. She defends the pastor and tries to pacify her son. She says its greedytodesire eternal life after death; just enjoy each day you have.

David isnt sure what to believe. Maybe the pastor and his mom are right. He realizes that just because he wants to live eternally doesnt make it so. Maybe its true that when you die, thats the end.

He goes back to the barn. One of his chores is to kill the pigeons that roost there. He shoots six of them, and the story ends with a description of him going outside to bury them:

He had never seen a bird this close before. The feathers were more wonderful than dogs hair, for each filament was shaped within the shape of the feather, and the feathers in turn were trimmed to fit a pattern that flowed without error across the birds body. He lost himself in the geometrical tides as the feathers now broadened and stiffened to make an edge for flight, now softened and constricted to cup warmth around the mute flesh. And across the surface of the infinitely adjusted yet somehow effortless mechanics of the feathers played idle designs of color, no two alike, designs executed, it seemed in the controlled creature, with a joy that hung level in the air above and behind him. Yet these birds bred in the millions and were exterminated as pests.

Into the fragrant open earth he dropped one broadly banded in slate shades of blue, and on top of it another, mottled all over in rhythms of lilac and gray. The next was almost wholly white, but for a salmon glaze at its throat. As he fitted the last two, still pliant, on the top, and stood up, crusty coverings were lifted from him, and with a feminine, slipping sensation along his nerves that seemed to give the air hands, he was robed in this certainty: that the God who had lavished such craft upon these worthless birds would not destroy His whole creation by refusing to let David live forever.

Updike gives us a design argument here, and more. We can infer a designing intelligence behind the astonishing artistry of the pigeons feathers; and from this we can infer something about the designer: here is an artist who cares deeply about his creation.

In this story Updike has offered not only evidence of a caring Creator, but also a model of excellence the modelpar excellence for the human artist to emulate.

Continue reading here:

Intelligent Design and the Restoration of Story - Discovery Institute

Marie Stopes opened Britains first clinic offering birth control advice to married women. Born in Edinburgh in 1880, Stopes was an author, womens rights campaigner and trained paleobotanist. She railed against the Catholic church and the male-dominated medical establishment. And her work including her 1918 book Married Love was pioneering.

She was also a fierce advocate for eugenics. This is the practice or advocacy of controlled selective breeding to improve the quality of a populations genetic composition. She called for the hopelessly rotten and racially diseased to be sterilised and was vehemently opposed to interracial marriage. While her more famous publications were relatively benign, the bulk of her writing reveals a woman preoccupied with the unfit who was convinced by the powers of birth control to improve the biological quality of Britains population.

Reproductive rights and access to birth control are fundamental to womens autonomy and key components of the feminist cause. In writing Married Love and establishing her birth control clinic, Stopes played a part in the development of reproductive rights in Britain. It is tempting, then, to use this centenary to celebrate her.

Traditionally, centenaries are moments for commemoration. They are often opportunities for either jingoistic festivity or collective grief. This is a dichotomy that leaves little space for nuance or careful consideration of the mixed legacies of problematic figures or events. So now, as the UK wrestles with its history and how it is told, anniversaries pose plenty of questions about how we should reckon with controversial figures who were driven by motivations that we should, by now, have rejected.

Despite her manifest successes, Stopes is a contentious character. In 2020, Marie Stopes International changed its name and now goes by the abbreviated MSI Reproductive Choices. Established in the 1970s to expand on Stopes birth control work, the organisation provides sexual and reproductive healthcare worldwide.

MSI Reproductive Choices said that their decision was accelerated by the Black Lives Matter Movement and recognition that history writing and representation are always in dialogue with the contemporary moment. As such, how we choose to commemorate Stopes and her work is a potent topic now. Particularly as the current government is seeking to intervene in how historians and heritage organisations choose to represent the British past.

It is simultaneously true that Stopes was a pioneering advocate for (some) women and their reproductive rights and that she was a sometimes vicious eugenicist. Few people in history were comedy villains or uncomplicated saints. But, we can do better than this balance-sheet approach to the past. It is not enough to simply acknowledge the flaws of those we seek to celebrate. Instead, we need to understand the fundamental role these wrongs played in their actions, attitudes and decision-making.

Stopes was a product of her age eugenics was everywhere in early-20th-century Britain. I do not say that to excuse her writings or absolve her of her sins. But rather, to draw attention to the fact that intellectual life in this period of British history was profoundly coloured eugenics a malevolent worldview that still has currency and continues to inflect our politics and ideologies today.

Rather than offer a straightforward celebration or condemnation of Stopes, it is perhaps more productive to use her as a tool to continue a conversation about reproductive rights, feminism, and the enduring legacy of eugenic thought. The historical details about her life and beliefs suggest that birth control activism had inequalities and cruelty baked into it from the very start.

They show how dependent supposedly progressive ideals in the early 20th century were on eugenics and social Darwinism (the use of Charles Darwins theory of evolution by natural selection to justify certain social, political, or economic ends). And they reveal how feminist activism undertaken by middle-class white women has so frequently taken place at the expense of their poor, minority ethnic, queer, disabled and trans sisters.

Another problem with centenaries is that despite their efforts to memorialise and remind, they place temporal distance between the then and now. As we use this marker as an opportunity to reflect on the troubling history of the birth control movement in Britain, we must remember that these problems have not been resolved.

Eugenic ideals persist. Birth control is not always a straightforward instrument of freedom and autonomy. And narrow and exclusive versions of feminist activism continue. History is no static object of study, not least because it remains a constant presence in our lives today.

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Marie Stopes opened the UK's first birth control clinic 100 years ago she was also a eugenicist - The Conversation UK