Category Archives: Darwinism

Image: Alfred Russel Wallace, via Wikimedia Commons.

Casey Luskin, writing here yesterday, is quite right about the term anti-evolution. In fact, I must admit that the so-called anti-evolution charge against intelligent design is what sparked my initial interest in Alfred Russel Wallace some years ago. I quickly realized that Wallace, co-founder of the theory of evolution by natural selection, advocated a strongly teleological biology, a sort of proto-ID, that could hardly be considered in any sense anti-evolution. So the term itself is not only inaccurately applied to ID, it is also grossly unhistorical.

I might suggest revising another term, theistic evolution. This phrase is bandied about as a way to make the world safe for Darwinism. Biologist Kenneth Miller has based his career on it. But actually Id refer to the Ken Millers, the Karl Gibersons, etc., etc., as what they really are: Darwinian theists. I wont now launch into the many problems with Darwinian theism, but the phrase is far more accurate and descriptive than simply theistic evolution. Wallace in this sense was a theistic evolutionist, but certainly NOT of the Ken Miller variety. So my point is that a lot of terms have become commonplace in discussions of evolution, many of them poorly descriptive, even deceptive, and wholly inaccurate.

More:

Another Problem with the Anti-Evolution Label - Discovery Institute

Photo: Stephen Meyer, by Nathan Jacobson.

With their Cutting Edge webinar series, our friends at the C. S. Lewis Society are doing a service by bringing the brightest minds together to make the case for design in nature. Earlier this month, the societys Executive Director, Tom Woodward, interviewed Oxford mathematician John Lennox. That was as wonderful as you would expect. You can see it here now if you missed the discussion, explaining the most compelling new evidence that shows our universe is the result of brilliant design.

Tonight at 7:30 pm Eastern time, Stephen Meyer talks with Dr. Woodward about Dr. Meyers new book, Return of the God Hypothesis. Please register for that here.

Upcoming webinars also sound great, and you are encouraged to join in:

The conversation with Stephen Meyer is part of an online and in-person course, Darwinism & Intelligent Design. More information about that is here. Tom Woodward is the organizer of the course and of the Cutting Edge webinar series.

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CS Lewis Society Webinars with Meyer (Tonight!), Behe, Wells, and Ferrer - Discovery Institute

What if judgment day is nearer than humankind thought? What Roland Emmerichs 2012 attempts to do is to visually re-enact the Biblical apocalypse in all its visceral grandeur, and as cities and countries are overtaken by catastrophic natural forces, the epic scale of the grand narrative is revealed, albeit with a degree of American supremacy. Due to a solar disturbance of a massive scale, the Earth faces the imminent threat of a cataclysmic event, and a sort of social Darwinism is acted out.

The disaster film builds many characters, only to kill them in the wake of the doomsday events, but Chiwetel Ejiofor (Adrian the geologist), John Cusack (Jackson the sci-fi writer), and Thandie Newton (the Presidents daughter), some of the highlights of the cast, remain to write the future of civilization. If the film has baffled you to the end, and we believe it should, we have your back. SPOILERS AHEAD.

The ancient prophecies of the Mayans have a date for the ending of the world. It happens to be in the year 2012. A cataclysmic event in the solar body is heating Earths core, and it happens only once in 640,000 years. There are earthquakes of small magnitude and other natural disturbances, and the media is worried. The film begins with a worried geologist from America, Adrian Helmsley, who gets to know from the Indian astrophysicist, Satnam Tsurutani, about the collapse.

Helmsley hurries back to Washington to show his findings to the Chief of Staff, Carl Anheuser, who understands the gravity of the situation and takes Adrian to the President. The President, Thomas Wilson, is a man of ideas and experience, and he sets a policy action in motion. The governments of the leading countries in the world have known about the catastrophe, and they have been preparing for the moment for several months.

Two years ago, in the G8 Summit in British Columbia, China, along with the G8 countries, agreed to build nine arks (and not spaceships) to face the apocalypse, and each craft would have the capacity of a hundred thousand people. In the Tibetan territory of China, a large manufacturing hub and port are being constructed, and a local boy named Tenzin joins the arc. Back in America, sci-fi author Jackson Curtis (Cusack) does not lead the most perfect life.

His book has sold only about 500 copies, his marriage has ended in a divorce, his wife has custody of his children, and he works as a chauffeur of a wealthy Russian named Yuri Karpov. Jacksons ex-wife Kate lives with her boyfriend, Gordon Silberman, and the two children, Noah and Lilly. Jackson takes the children on a camping trip to the Yellowstone National Park, where he discovers a lake that has been turned into a volcanic bog.

He is taken to Adrian, the geologist who happens to be a fan of his book, Farewell Atlantis. After taking his leave, he comes across Charlie Frost, a conspiracy theorist and a radio show host with relevant information on the apocalypse. Jackson is terrified to see the truth in Charlies claim, and he takes the children back to Kate. Yuri gets the notification of boarding the ark, and at his order, Jackson goes to escort his children, Oleg and Alec, to safety.

But Los Angeles is crumbling down, and they must hurry their way towards the aircraft that will take them to the ark. Its a good day for the apocalypse, and while the world breaks down under them, the aircraft heads to the mythical Cho Ming valley, where the ark is prepared to commence its journey. Will the world be annihilated, then? Will the lands be taken over by the seas? It certainly feels so.

If you have lived till now, you know that 2012 was quite an ordinary year compared to 2020. I am, however, talking about the film, which sets the date of the apocalypse as December 21, 2012, following Nostradamus and the Mayan calendars claims. In the narrative of the film, Charlie is the first one to claim that the world will end on a specific date, and the rest of the film works to reinstate the claim.

There have been speculations about the ending of the world in 1998, the millennium, and 2012. 2012, the film, attempts to build its narrative on the premise of the worlds ending declared by conspiracy theorists, whose rumors instilled great paranoia in some people at the end of the first decade of the century. Coupled with actual global warming incidents and human exploitation of nature (like the shrinking of the Aral Sea), these rumors stroke an ominous chord for many.

People created doomsday bunkers and gathered food supplies for the supposedly imminent apocalypse. However, when we talk about the cinematic universe of the film, it manages to avert the possibility of a complete collapse of human civilization in the final moments of exposition. From the beginning, the film sees through an essentially anthropomorphic and particularly Christian lens in its modern-day retelling of the story of Noahs Ark. In that regard, it remains hopeful till the end.

The hope is embodied in the figure of the optimistic writer Jackson Curtis and the righteous scientist Adrian Helmsley, and in the end, it seems that humanity has survived the cathartic catastrophe. However, there are class divides apparent amongst the global populace, and not everyone has the same fate. Satnam, the astrophysicist who first blew the whistle, is not saved. As the mega-tsunami floods the entire subcontinental plateau, we see Satnam embracing death. The latent message is one professed by social Darwinism, that the survival of the fittest presupposes certain political, social, and economic positions.

Throughout the film, the audience has seen massive volcanic eruptions, seismic shifts, and skyrocketing waves taking down iconic cities. In a climactic scene, the ark hits Mount Everest, but the people within it are saved by Gods grace. Asia and America, as we know them, submerge in water, and Mount Everest is no longer the highest peak in the world. However, in a final moment of discovery, Africa is the only continent that has survived the apocalypse, and the Drakensberg Mountains near the Cape of Good Hope is the new highest point of the world.

However, there is a goof here. The scientist tells the team that the mountain is situated in Kwazulu, Nepal, while the screen shows a location in southern Africa. We all know that Nepal is in Asia. Leaving this minor glitch aside, it seems that humanity lives to see another day. The ark takes up speed as it moves towards the Cape of Good Hope. While the world is not inhabitable per se, much of the worlds population has died, and it remains unsure whether the ark people will be welcomed in Africa. However, the film manages to reinstate faith in humanity in the final moments.

Towards the end of the narrative, the ark is headed towards the Himalayas, while there is a major malfunction in the craft. The hydraulic gate is jammed, which allows water to flow into the vehicle. Jackson and the crew have submerged in water, but in a terrible feat of achievement (its not his first one), Jackson manages to pull the obstruction and close the gates. At the same time, the ark hits Mount Everest, and while the impact is supposed to destroy the ship, its a miracle, and they are saved. While Gordon convincingly dies in the trap, the catastrophe brings Jackson and Kate closer.

Read More: Where Was 2012 Filmed?

Read the rest here:

2012 Ending, Explained | Do They Survive in the End? - The Cinemaholic

Photo: Joshua Swamidass, by J. Nathan Matias, via Flickr (cropped).

My colleague David Klinghoffer has a superb post on a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed by Joshua Swamidass, a computational biologist who believes that colleges and universities that include creation science (undefined) in their curriculum should be blacklisted by the educational and scientific community and potentially lose their accreditation. He argues that only science courses that adhere to national norms (also undefined) should count for credit toward science degrees. Its clear from the context that one workable definition of national norms is what Darwinists believe.

Presumably, evolutionary psychology, multiverse theory, materialist neuroscience, transgender pediatrics, and the emerging rivulets of woke science and woke mathematics could nestle on the national norms pedestal, whether Swamidass wants them to or not.

Not only is Swamidasss proposed censorship, directed against Christian colleges, an affront to academic freedom on scientific questions of evolution and human origins, it is a gateway to unlimited litmus tests for the latest fashionable atheist and woke science. You dont think survivors survived explains life? You dont think there are more than two sexes? You dont think the multiverse is testable science? You dont think the mind is more than meat? No graduation or scientific career for you!

Notably, Swamidass completely leaves out the one criterion that is the cornerstone of accreditation of educational institutions: outcome metrics. Accreditation generally hinges on the question: how do graduates of an institution compare with other graduates on standardized tests, graduation rates, professional employment and accomplishments, etc.? I dont know (and Swamidass has nothing to say about it) how students from Christian colleges compare, but is it well established that homeschooled kids (who are disproportionately taught by conservative Christian families) score almost 100 points higher on the SAT and score correspondingly higher on the ACT than the national average. Christian colleges and universities that teach creation science (I use the term loosely, as does Swamidass) may also teach evolution, but they treat Darwinism as a theory, and they examine it critically.

How do undergraduates from Christian colleges perform on the science portions of GRE exams? If we are to accredit based on curricular content, we must examine all curricular content (lets start with implicit atheism, materialism, and wokeness) and lets use outcome metrics as the gold standard. My suspicion, based on the outstanding performance of homeschooled students on standardized testing, is that students from colleges that teach creation science do very well in comparison with their peers from colleges that teach atheist science.

It is certainly possible and I believe likely that students in universities that teach creation science understand more about Darwinism, not less, because they are taught to examine Darwinian theory as science, not as dogma.

Its noteworthy that among developed countries the United States is both the most creationist nation and the uncontested leader in science. For myself, I think theres a clear cause-and-effect relationship. Inference to Gods design is a powerful engine for scientific investigation, and has been since the Scientific Revolution, which was led largely by devoutly Christian scientists. In any case, it is certainly hard to credibly argue that creationism has held back science in any meaningful way. Compare the scientific productivity of the predominately Christian United States to the scientific productivity of the atheist Soviet Union. Compare the scientific productivity of largely Christian South Korea to atheist North Korea. Compare the scientific productivity of tiny largely Christian Taiwan to the scientific productivity of atheist China. Christianity is the most powerful engine of modern science in my view, and atheism is everywhere a science-killer (and people-killer, but thats for another discussion).

Physics Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman noted that science is the belief in the ignorance of experts. Swamidasss demand that science be handcuffed by national norms is exactly the opposite of what is necessary for good science. Every orthodox but false scientific theory in history was a national norm at one time or another. Science has been and remains beset with countless false theories eugenics, the imperative for population control, global cooling, and junk DNA were in their day the national norms in science. It was academic freedom and diversity of opinion that allowed science to advance beyond these historic errors.

The only way to truth in science is to permit and even encourage challenges to orthodoxy. Science is inherently the process by which orthodox beliefs about nature are challenged, and indoctrination of students in atheist and materialist dogma is the antithesis of science. Students educated in creation science, unlike their counterparts in explicitly or implicitly atheist institutions, understand the issues and controversies in science, and this understanding is the hallmark of real scientific knowledge.

Swamidasss demand that accrediting agencies blacklist Christian universities that challenge the atheist dogma that plagues modern science is reprehensible, and if enacted would trample on the rights of Christians and on the quality of American science. Diversity of opinion and inclusion of unorthodox perspectives is the indispensable ingredient of good science. Whatever he may have intended, Josh Swamidass calls for what amounts to the cancellation of Christian colleges.

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Joshua Swamidass and the Cancellation of Christian Colleges - Discovery Institute

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.

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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

Photo: Flies in amber, by Manukyan Andranik, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons.

I have been reviewing philosopher Michael Ruses book,On Purpose. (See my post yesterday,here.) I turn now to certain problems with his work. First, Ruses dismissal of all other teleological positions save his own presumes that science has moved on (153) since current evolutionary theory has ruled all transcendent forms obsolete. Anything else has to remain your opinion trumped by todays Darwinian science (153). Such scientistic reductionism is troubling, revealing a fallacy that C. S. Lewis has calledchronological snobbery,the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited([1955] 1991, 114). This occurs elsewhere, as when Ruse dismisses debates over intelligent design and the anthropic principle because they have a very old-fashioned look about them. A bit like arguing about whether it is moral for women to use the pill (128).However, arguments for the kind of external teleology and vitalism in biology along with cosmic fine-tuning that Ruse so glibly dismisses hardly belong to a bygone era (Denton 1998; Gonzalez and Richards 2004; Schnborn 2007; Sheldrake 2012; Lewis and Barnes 2016; Turner 2017). Ruses comparison with the pill seems more silly and strained than clever and convincing.

Ruses chronological snobbery might be forgiven if the claims he makes for Darwinism can be unequivocally substantiated. But add to scientistic reductionism and chronological snobbery a third interrelated objection:Whiggishness. The obsessive Darwinian triumphalism on almost every page suggests Herbert Butterfields coinage as the unfortunate tendency . . . to praise revolutions provided they have been successful. . . and to produce a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the present, an unwarranted factual abridgment causing presentist extravagance to fly into the sky . . . when in reality it requires to be brought to earth ([1931] 1965, v, 99). For example, Ruse applauds DawkinssThe Selfish Gene(1976) for demonstrating that humans are simply survival machines taking God and vital forces and those sorts of things out of the equation. Molecules in motion is all we have (86). But the selfish gene concept has received harsh criticism then and now for its many misconceptions and untestable assertions (Langley 1978; Wade 1979; Noble 2011). As Charles Langley noted, Everything is revealed to Dawkins [and apparently to Ruse] by a glimpse of Darwinian theory, but the concept is untrue to the science of evolutionary biology (1978, 692). Chapters nine on Human Evolution and ten on Mind form the core of Ruses Darwinian infatuations. Darwins hedgehog follows Darwins bulldog, Thomas Henry Huxley, in showing that comparisons of human and chimp brains prove that we did come from monkeys (156). These monkey-to-man links are nonetheless at best superficial and at worst (particularly in Huxleys case) calculated subterfuges (Cosans 2009). Ruses proclaimed significance of our genetic affinities with chimps is equally overrated (Cohen 2007). In fact, Alfred Russel Wallaces insistence that it is difficult to explain human exceptionalism those unique human capacities for abstract thought, mathematics, music, art, etc. by the conventional operations of natural selection, the very principle he cofounded, is still very much in play (Varki, Geschwind, and Eichler 2008; Diamani 2009). While easy extrapolations of bonobo and other primate-to-human behaviors might be the preferred answer in that freshman biology exam, some very good scientists would favor different answers (Penn, Holyoak, and Povinelli 2008;Bolhuis and Wynn 2009; Shettleworth 2012). Yet Ruse blithely asserts his Darwinian monism as if an undisputed fact.

Of course if it serves to make his point, Ruse readily abandons his chronological snobbery in favor of Noam Chomskys sixty-odd year-old research that showed convincinglythat language is not something purely cultural but that all languages . . . share certain innate deep structures a kind of biological ground plan on which everything is based (173). But Chomskys much-touted universal grammar or grammatical recursion is in serious doubt. The Pirah people of South America vis--vis Daniel Everett have taught Chomsky his most important linguistics lesson, namely, that language appears to indeed be a cultural tool of human invention rather than a product of evolutionary determinism (Everett 2011; Wolfe 2016; Wood et al. 2017).

Additional examples of such fallacies could be heaped upon Ruses head, but any more might invite charges of cruelty to hedgehogs. In fairness, despite Ruses adamant convictions and his constant use of science as a synecdoche for Darwinism, he has always exhibited a surprising sense of proportion. For example, he chides his fellow Darwinians for their Darwin Day excesses, complaining, The next thing is they will be putting him in a manger (210-211). For more on this see hisDarwinism as Religion(2017). Ruse is true to his Darwinian progenitors. One is reminded of Huxleys recoiling against the Comtian positivists of his day passionate enthusiasts like Frederic Harrison and John Henry Bridges for trying to make science a religion. Ruse is also well aware that Darwinian evolution has become an authors playground and a publishers paradise, admitting some years ago that Darwin and his ideas are being co-opted for all sorts of ends (Ruse 1996, 231). The Darwin Industry shows few signs of reducing production. Although you will not find it here, he has been pretty hard on the so-called New Atheists too.

Tomorrow, MichaelRuse on Purpose: A Conflicted Response.

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Michael Ruse on Purpose: The Flies in the Ointment - Discovery Institute