Category Archives: Darwinism

Assessment task: Social Darwinism in Australia

In 2002 a movie called Rabbit Proof Fence was released. It tells the story of three Aboriginal girls in Australia who escape from a detention centre after being taken from their homes to be trained as domestic workers. They set off on a trek back home, using the rabbit proof fence to help them keep moving in the right direction. Read these two very different reviews of the same movie, and then answer the questions that follow. (suggested answers appear below the questions).

Review 1

Based on true events, "Rabbit-Proof Fence" is a moving story of racial prejudice, and amazing endurance as three girls walk 1,500 miles to find their mothers in 1930s Australia.

Special detention centres were set up across the continent to keep the mixed race children from "contaminating" the rest of Australian society, and orders were given to forcibly remove "half-caste" children from their families. It was a disastrous, racist policy that brought about the misery of the so-called "stolen generations".

With an epic journey ahead of them, three girls set out to find their way back home by following the rabbit-proof fence that stretches across the Outback.

By highlighting the realities of this hidden genocide (unbelievably, the policy continued until the early 70s), "Rabbit-Proof Fence" stands as a powerful, worthy testimony to the suffering of the stolen generations.

- Adapted from http://www.bbc.co.uk

Review 2

A hit movie based on myth and misunderstanding, by Peter Howson (Minister for Aboriginal Affairs 1971-72)

The Australian film Rabbit Proof Fence presents a dramatic story about three young half-caste Aboriginal girls who ran away from a Western Australian settlement in which they were placed in 1931. Two girls are portrayed as returning to their mother's community by the almost super-human feat of walking for nine weeks along 1500 miles of rabbit proof fence. After being diverted from the other two, police returned their cousin to the settlement.

The story of the separation of the rabbit proof fence girls rests only on a story told 35 years later by one of the girls to her daughter.

When he received reports these girls were being allowed to run wild amongst whites and were in danger, Neville (Chief Protector of the Aborigines) acted responsibly to assist with the serious problem of child neglect. Only those judged most in need of care were removed.

- Adapted from an article in The Australian, 11 March 2002

Questions

Read the two very different movie reviews of 'Rabbit Proof Fence'.

1. Which review says that 'Rabbit Proof Fence' was historically reliable? (1)

2. Which review says that 'Rabbit Proof Fence' was historically unreliable? (1)

3. Do you think the BBC review is accurate to refer to what happened to Australian Aborigines as 'genocide'? (2)

4. Give a reason why Review 2 defends the policy towards the Aborigines. (1)

Extended writing

From what you have learnt about Social Darwinism in Australia, write an essay in which you argue with Reviewer number 2 and Explain the other evidence there is to support Review number 1. (30)

Suggested answers

1. Review 1

2. Review 2

3. Yes. Definition of genocide: the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group (x1)

Yes, Aborigines almost exterminated by European conquest and colonisation (X1)

4. Reason, the reveiw was written by a Minister of Aboriginal Affairs

Extended writing

Outcome: Need to develop a coherent argument - need to explain the concept of Social Darwinism and then explain how it affected Aborigines.

Content selection:

The author of Review 2 implemented a paternal attitude towards Aborigines.

He thought 'they' were different, and had to be 'looked after' to avoid 'them' being a danger to themselves.

Definition of Social Darwinism

19th century western science Darwin/evolution

Applied falsely to human beings

Physical characteristics linked to mental and behavioural characteristics

Classified into 'races'

Europeans regarded as superior

Justification for colonialism and conquest

Regarded the 'other' as primitive and uncivilised

Not unique to Australia

British colonised Australia

Found people living there

Saw Australian aboriginal as inferior 'race'

Europeans had weapons

Exterminated, hunted and killed 90% died

Discriminatory Laws controlled Aborigine's lives

Examples of laws

Stolen generation

Children of mixed descent removed from parents

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Assessment task: Social Darwinism in Australia | South ...

A group of intellectuals has exposed a deep rift within Serbian society by challenging the veracity of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.

Local media say the unidentified "organized citizens" submitted an anti-Darwin petition to parliament in Belgrade, signed by dozens of intellectuals.

The initiative calls for a review of the teaching of Darwinism -- the evolutionary history of life on Earth accepted by the overwhelming majority of the scientific community -- and demands that the religiously inspired theory of creationism be taught in Serbian schools alongside evolution.

The petition's organizers say their goal is to challenge the dominant status of Darwinism in schoolbooks, arguing it is just one of several theories of human creation and that they question the science behind it.

"I tell you that the [Darwin] theory of evolution and claiming that man came from monkeys [sic] offends all [religious] believers, not just Orthodox [Christians]," said Belgrade University professor Ljiljana Colic, whose failed attempts as education minister to oust Darwinism from the school curriculum led to her resignation in 2004.

Colic told Danas.rs that she was happy to sign the petition because she "absolutely agrees with everything written in it."

Zeljko Tomanovic, dean of the biology department at Belgrade University, countered: "It is the old creationist ideas that are totally anachronistic and unscientific. There is no scientific knowledge that supports the aforementioned claims [of creationism] and that deny evolution."

In addition to the signatures of certain elites in Serbia, the petition has been championed by several leading newspapers.

The issue has divided the country, and pro-creationists have tapped into an anti-Western, antiglobalist current that has festered in Serbia as high unemployment (16 percent in 2016) and a stagnant economy combine with Brussels' perceived indifference toward Belgrade's aspirations for closer relations and eventual EU membership.

"There is a disillusionment with liberal democracy and even an anger against the West," an RFE/RL Balkan correspondent said, adding that "this dogmatic, conservative movement is on the rise."

Those who fear the rising influence of the Serbian Orthodox Church -- manifested in the push to teach creationism in schools -- are worried that such proposals will dilute the country's education system and lower public discourse on science and other important topics.

The National Assembly said it had received the petition, which had been signed by 166 people, including doctors, professors, priests, and politicians, some of them reportedly also members of the Serbian Academy of Sciences.

But the Academy of Sciences said that "we don't share the petition's views" and added that only two of its members had signed the document. Initial media reports said dozens of academicians had signed.

Aleksandar Jerkova, a member of parliament's Science, Education, and Technology Committee, told Danas.rs that he regretted that "the signatories to this petition are not engaged in solving the really important problems in education [facing Serbian schools] that will determine the future of our country."

He added that the standards and curriculum in Serbian schools were at a "20th-century level" and this anti-Darwin petition will "take the schools back to the [standards] from the start of the 19th century."

Belgrade resident Stevan Karic agreed, telling RFE/RL: "I don't know [about this creationism initiative].... I think it's reverse evolution."

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Adam & Eve Challenge Darwinism In Serbia - RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty

Sam Harris is no stranger to controversy. Known as one of the Four Horsemen of New Atheism, critics have accused the neuroscientist and author of being racist and Islamophobic for his comments, including suggesting we should profile Muslims at airports. He also raised eyebrows in a 2015 when he laughed along with gay conservative Douglas Murrays transphobic comments during an episode of Harris podcast Waking Up. Most recently, Harris interviewed Charles Murray, co-author of the infamous 1994 book The Bell Curve, which suggests Black people are genetically predisposed to low IQs. According to Harris, the controversy surrounding the book is due to political correctness:

People dont want to hear that a persons intelligence is in large measure due to his or her genes, and there seems to be very little we can do environmentally to increase a persons intelligence even in childhood. Its not that the environment doesnt matter, but genes appear to be 50 to 80 percent of the story. People dont want to hear this. And they certainly dont want to hear that average IQ differs across races and ethnic groups.

Unfortunately, Harris must have missed the memo that the truth is more complicated than that.

For starters, critics are quick to point out Murray and co-author Richard Herrsteins scholarship is shoddy at best and outright political propaganda at worst. In a 1995 Scientific American article, psychologist Leon Kamin noticed that one of their sources was a 1991 paper by Richard Lynn comparing the average IQs of people of different ethnicities which, according to Kamin, reported only average Matrices scores, not IQs; the other studies used tests clearly dependent on cultural content. He also claimed that Murray and Herrnstein ignored social and economic factors that lead to individual success and instead just focus on IQ. Then theres the fact that Murray and Herrnstein devote two chapters of The Bell Curve criticizing affirmative action, which led Kamin to believe the book was politically motivated (Wikipedia) refers to Murray as a libertarian conservative).

Scientific American revisited The Bell Curve last month in the wake of Murrays recent return to the spotlight. Although data shows an average lower IQ in Black people than white people, data analyst Eric Siegel says that Murray and Herrnstein never explained why they researched IQ differences among different ethnicities. By never spelling out a reason for reporting on these differences in the first place, he writes, the authors transmit an unspoken yet unequivocal conclusion: Race is a helpful indicator as to whether a person is likely to hold certain capabilities. Even if we assume the presented data trends are sound, the book leaves the reader on his or her own to deduce how to best put these insights to use. The net effect is to tacitly condone the prejudgment of individuals based on race. Seigel also echoes Kamins belief that Murray and Herrnstein had a political agenda since the last chapter of the book suggests political policies that might help society progress in light of their findings, including simpler tax codes, decreasing government benefits that could incentivize childbearing among the low-income, and increasing competency-based immigration screening.

As far as whether or not intelligence is hereditary well, its complicated. According to Robert Plomin, a deputy director of the MRC Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Center at Kings College London, there are genetic differences that affect differences in intelligence test results, but we all share 99.5 percent of our three billion DNA base pairs, so only 15 million DNA differences separate us genetically. Also, according to Plomin, genes only tell half of the story while environmental factors tell the other half. In other words, the claim that IQ differences between different ethnicities is mainly because of genetics with no outside factors is bunk.

The Bell Curve is just one example of sciences darkest chapters: scientific racism Its been around since the beginning of time, but became especially prominent with the advent of Social Darwinism (not to be confused with Darwins original theory of evolution), which basically said White Europeans were more evolved than other races and therefore superior. Its no wonder Hitler was a big fan of Social Darwinism.

Now Im not suggesting Harris is an outright bigot. I never met him, so I cant say who he is as a person. However, this does bring up a common problem even among skeptics: picking and choosing facts that support a narrative. Harris often criticizes the so-called Regressive Left for silencing people that disagree with them and with the recent incident involving Murray and Middlebury College, its easy to assume Murrays telling the truth and whiny snowflakes just dont want to listen. Im not interested in debating whether or not Murray has a right to speak at college campuses, but I am interested in whether or not his claims are true. So far the science says its way more complicated that Murray and Harris think.

Trav Mamone is a queer trans blogger who write about the intersections of social justice and secular humanism at Bi Any Means. They also host the Bi Any Means Podcast and co-host the Biskeptical Podcast.

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Is The Bell Curve Scientific Racism? - Paste Magazine

Eric Metaxas at BreakPoint is one of our favorite popular commentators on evolution. In a broadcast, he takes note of our commentary here. As we noted last month, Octopus Genetic Editing Animals Defy Their Own Neo-Darwinism.

From Metaxas on how The Octopus Outsmarts Darwin Again:

The Tel Aviv researchers found tens of thousands of such RNA recoding sites in cephalopods, allowing a creature like the octopus to essentially reprogram itself, adding new riffs to its basic genetic blueprint. In other words, these invertebrates dont care that they didnt inherit the smart genes. They make themselves smart, anyway.

Of course, an animal cant be the author of its own intelligence, and this is not a process anyone believes cephalopods perform consciously. Rather, it is a marvelous piece of adaptive programming built-in to their biology.

Darwinists have tried to spin this feat as a special kind of evolution. But the folks at Evolution News cut through this nonsense and identify RNA editing for what it is: non-evolution.

Neo-Darwinism did not make cephalopods what they are, they write. These highly intelligent and well-adapted animals edited their own genomes, so what possible need do they have forblind, random, unguided evolution?

This is also an emerging field of research, which means its possible, in theory, that other organisms make extensive use of RNA editing, and were just not aware of it, yet.

If, as one popular science website puts it, other creatures can defy the central dogma of genetics, the implications for Darwins tree of life, and his entire theory, are dire.

But if cephalopods and the complex information processing that makes them so unique are in fact the result of a Programmer of a Designer the waters of biology become far less inky.

A friend asks if this phenomenon is an example of Lamarckism, according to which organisms evolve by adapting to their environments and then passing on newly acquired characteristics to their offspring. We wouldnt call it that, but we do call it a problem for neo-Darwinism. Among other reasons, thats because it reveals that organisms need much more information than is provided by DNA sequences. Therefore, DNA mutations cannot provide sufficient raw materials for evolution.

This latest research is impressive, but RNA editing is not new. As Eric Metaxas smartly anticipates, there is indeed extensive RNA editing in other organisms, too including humans.

Care for documentation? Find it here:

That would make the problem for Darwinism even more acute than Eric suggests.

Photo: Octopus tetricus (Gloomy Octopus), by Sylke Rohrlach (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

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More on Octopus RNA Editing A Problem for Neo-Darwinism - Discovery Institute

Politics | Funding | People | Publishing | Events | Policy | Education | Trend watch | Coming up

Pro-Europe win raises scientists hopes Researchers in France reacted with relief and optimism to Emmanuel Macrons sweeping victory in the countrys presidential elections on 7 May. Macron decisively defeated his far-right opponent Marine Le Pen, the leader of the Front National party, who had threatened to take France out of the European Union. The pro-European president-elect promised in his campaign to save Frances research and higher-education budgets from cuts and to launch a science-driven innovation programme to create jobs.

Jeff J. Mitchell/Getty

Cap on grants The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, will limit the amount of funding that scientists supported by the agency can hold at any one time. The policy, announced on 2 May, is intended to make it easier for early- and mid-career scientists to obtain NIH grants. The agency said it will not set a hard limit on the number of grants or the amount of funding that individual researchers can receive. Instead, it will introduce a grant-support index that assigns a point value to each type of grant on the basis of its complexity and size. Currently, just 10% of grant recipients win more than 40% of the NIHs research money.

Mixed societies A total of 36 women were inducted last week into the leading scientific societies of the United States and the United Kingdom. On 2 May, the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) announced 84 new members, 23 of whom (27%) are women. And on 5 May, the Royal Society, Britains oldest and most prestigious scientific society, named 13 women (26%) in its 2017 class of 50 fellows. In addition, NAS president Marcia McNutt, a geophysicist, was made a foreign member of the Royal Society.

New shores David Lipman is stepping down as director of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) in Bethesda, Maryland, the institute announced on 3May. Lipman, who has directed the NCBI since its creation in 1988, was responsible for launching the literature database PubMed and the DNA-sequence repository GenBank, along with other public bioinformatics databases. Lipman will now serve as chief science officer at a private food-science company, Impossible Foods in Redwood City, California.

Failed deal Dutch universities have failed to reach a new agreement with Oxford University Press (OUP) over access to the publishers academic journals. On 1 May, the Association of Universities in the Netherlands, which led the negotiations, said that the countrys research universities were unable to agree to the British publishers latest licensing proposal, because it did not include an offer for affordable open access to research articles in OUP journals. The Netherlands aims to make the results of all publicly funded science freely accessible by 2020.

Secret mission After nearly 718 days in space, the US Air Forces unmanned X-37B spaceplane landed at NASAs Kennedy Space Center in Florida on 7 May. The reusable plane, which looks like a miniature space shuttle, was on an unspecified mission to carry out experiments in orbit. It was the fourth and longest flight yet for the military programme, and the first to land in Florida rather than at an Air Force base in California.

US Air Force

DIY memo The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) in Stockholm has called on European Union member states to review their procedures for authorizing do-it-yourself gene-engineering kits produced in the United States. The kits, which are intended to contain a harmless strain of the common laboratory bacterium Escherichia coli, use CRISPR precision-editing technologies and are targeted at citizen scientists. The move followed the discovery in March by German authorities that some kits had been contaminated with pathogenic bacteria, including some multidrug-resistant strains. Germany has since banned their import. The ECDCs assessment report concluded that the risk of infection to users is low.

Dead flowers A paperwork blunder has led to the accidental destruction of a valuable botanical reference collection, according to media reports. In March, biosecurity officers with the Australian quarantine authorities destroyed allegedly mislabelled samples of rare nineteenth-century daisies, which the French National Museum of Natural History in Paris had sent on loan to Brisbane. Australian authorities have asked for a review of the incident, the BBC reports.

Call for diversity Canadian universities must develop plans to diversify the composition of some of their most prestigious posts, according to a requirement announced on 4May by a trio of science-funding agencies. The new rule applies to the Can$265-million (US$194-million) Canada Research Chairs Program, which funds an estimated 1,600professorships at Canadian higher-education institutions. By December, universities with five or more research chairs must present a plan to increase the representation of women, indigenous peoples and other minority groups, as well as people with disabilities. Progress reports are required annually, and the agencies warned that failure to fulfil the requirements could result in the withholding of funds.

Advisers axed The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has dismissed at least five academic researchers from a scientific advisory board. The scientists were notified on 5May that their appointments to the 18-member Board of Scientific Counselors had expired and would not be renewed, according to media reports. An EPA official said the agency would consider replacing them with representatives from EPA-regulated industries. The US House of Representatives has also passed a Republican-sponsored bill to restructure another EPA advisory board; critics say the legislation would make it easier for industry representatives to serve.

Nazi review Germanys Max Planck Society has launched a 1.5-million (US$1.6-million), three-year study to discover as much as possible about the victims of Nazi euthanasia programmes whose brains were acquired by scientists for neuroscience research. Around 200,000 physically or mentally disabled people were murdered during the programmes. On 2May, the society named a four-member international team that will try to identify those victims whose remains are still in Max Planck institutes and those who were interred in a special ceremony in 1990. The team will also try to reconstruct exactly what happened to the brain preparations, and how they may have been used in research and research publications.

Irrational doctrine Serbias evolutionary society has expressed concern over a renewed attack on Charles Darwins theory of evolution by some 170Serbian academics, including engineers, physicians, artists, philosophers, journalists, teachers and clergy. On 3 May, the group signed a petition to include the teaching of creationist theory in schools and universities. The academics also claim in a letter to the education and science ministry, the parliament, Serbias Academy of Sciences and Arts and its leading universities that Darwins dogmatic theory lacks scientific confirmation. In response, scientists with the evolutionary society said that the signatories and their creationist reasoning lack understanding of simple biology. In 2004, the Serbian education ministry had attempted in vain to ban evolutionary theory from school curricula.

Charitable donations to British universities surpassed the 1-billion (US$1.3-billion) milestone for the first time last year. The 110 universities that took part in the latest RossCASE survey of charitable giving secured a total of 1.06billion in philanthropic income in the academic year 201516. Donations were up 23% on the previous year and have almost tripled over the past 12 years. Fifty-five per cent of this income came from organizations, and 45% from individual donors.

Source: Council for Advancement and Support of Education

1516 May A Royal Society meeting in Newport Pagnell, UK, addresses how long-term climate change has affected marine palaeolandscapes.

1519 May The International Conference on Precision Physics and Fundamental Physical Constants takes place in Warsaw.

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DIY gene engineering, an attack on Darwinism and a probe into Nazi science. - Nature.com

commentary By Robert H. Nelson | 13 mins ago Does God exist? Michael Peligro, CC BY-ND

The question of whether a God exists is heating up in the 21st century. According to a Pew survey, the percentage of Americans having no religious affiliation reached 23 percent in 2014. Among such nones, 33 percent said that they do not believe in God an 11 percent increase since only 2007.

Such trends have ironically been taking place even as the rational probabilities for the existence of a supernatural God have been rising. In my 2015 book, God? Very Probably, I explore five rational reasons why it is very probable that such a God exists.

In 1960, the Princeton physicist and subsequent Nobel Prize winner Eugene Wigner raised a fundamental question: Why did the natural world always so far as we know obey laws of mathematics?

Most working mathematicians today believe that mathematics exists independent of physical reality. It is the job of mathematicians to discover the realities of this separate world of mathematical laws and concepts. Physicists then put the mathematics to use according to the rules of prediction and confirmed observation of the scientific method.

But modern mathematics generally is formulated before any natural observations are made and many mathematical laws today have no known existing physical analogues.

Einsteins 1915 general theory of relativity, for example, was based on theoretical mathematics developed 50 years earlier by the great German mathematician Bernhard Riemann that did not have any known practical applications at the time of its intellectual creation.

In some cases, the physicist also discovers the mathematics. Isaac Newton was considered among the greatest mathematicians as well as physicists of the 17th century. Other physicists sought his help in finding a mathematics that would predict the workings of the solar system. He found it in the mathematical law of gravity, based in part on his discovery of calculus.

At the time, however, many people initially resisted Newtons conclusions because they seemed to be occult.

How could two distant objects in the solar system be drawn toward one another, acting according to a precise mathematical law? Indeed, Newton made strenuous efforts over his lifetime to find a natural explanation but in the end he conceded failure. He could say only that it is the will of God.

Despite the many other enormous advances of modern physics, little has changed in this regard. As Wigner wrote, The enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and there is no rational explanation for it.

In other words, as something supernatural, it takes the existence of some kind of a God to make the mathematical underpinnings of the universe comprehensible.

Other leading physicists and mathematicians have since offered similar views.

The great British physicist Roger Penrose in 2004 put forward a vision of a universe composed of three independently existing worlds mathematics, the material world and human consciousness. As Penrose acknowledged, it was a complete puzzle to him, how the three interacted with one another outside the ability of any scientific or other conventionally rational model to explain.

How can physical atoms and molecules, for example, create something that exists in a separate domain that has no physical existence, human consciousness?

It is a mystery that lies beyond science.

This mystery is the same one that existed in the Greek world view of Plato, who believed that abstract ideas (above all mathematical) first existed outside any physical reality. The material world that we experience as part of our human existence is an imperfect reflection of these prior formal ideals. For Plato, the realm of such ideals is the realm of God.

Indeed, in 2014 the MIT physicist Max Tegmark argued in Our Mathematical Universe that mathematics is the fundamental world reality that acting in a God-like fashion drives the universe.

The workings of human consciousness are similarly miraculous. Like the laws of mathematics, consciousness has no physical presence in the world; the images and thoughts in our consciousness have no measurable dimensions.

Yet, our nonphysical thoughts somehow mysteriously guide the actions of our physical human bodies. This is no more scientifically explicable than the mysterious ability of nonphysical mathematical constructions to determine the workings of a separate physical world.

Until recently, the scientifically unfathomable quality of human consciousness inhibited the very scholarly discussion of the subject. Since the 1970s, however, it has become a leading area of inquiry among philosophers.

Recognizing that he could not reconcile his own scientific materialism with the existence of a nonphysical world of human consciousness, a leading atheist, Daniel Dennett, in 1991 took the radical step of denying that consciousness even exists.

Finding this altogether implausible, as most people do, another leading philosopher, Thomas Nagel, wrote in 2012 that, given the scientifically inexplicable the intractable character of human consciousness, We will have to leave [scientific] materialism behind as a complete basis for understanding the world of human existence.

The supernatural character of the workings of human consciousness offers a second strong rational grounds for raising the probability of the existence of a supernatural God.

Darwins theory of evolution in 1859 offered a theoretical explanation for a strictly physical mechanism by which the current plant and animal kingdoms might have come into existence, and assumed their current forms, without any necessary role for a God.

In recent years, however, traditional Darwinism and later revised accounts of neo-Darwinism have themselves come under increasingly strong scientific challenge. From the 1970s onwards, the Harvard evolutionary biologist Steven Jay Gould, for example, complained that little evidence could be found in the fossil record of the slow and gradual evolution of species as theorized by Darwin.

In 2011, the University of Chicago evolutionary biologist James Shapiro explained that, remarkably enough, many micro-evolutionary processes worked as though guided by a purposeful sentience of the evolving plant and animal organisms themselves a concept far removed from the random selection processes of Darwinism.

With these developments bringing standard evolutionary understandings into growing question, the probability of a God existing has increased correspondingly.

For the past 10,000 years at a minimum, the most important changes in human existence have been driven by cultural developments occurring in the realm of human ideas.

In the Axial Age (commonly dated from 800 to 200 B.C.), world-transforming ideas such as Buddhism, Confucianism, the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, and the Hebrew Old Testament almost miraculously appeared at about the same time in India, China, ancient Greece and among the Jews in the Middle East these peoples then having little interaction with one another.

The development of the scientific method in the 17th century in Europe and its modern further advances have had at least as great a set of world-transforming consequences. There have been many historical theories, but none capable of explaining as fundamentally transformational a set of events as the rise of the modern world. It was a revolution in human thought, operating outside any explanations grounded in scientific materialism, that drove the process.

That all these astonishing things, verging on miracles, happened within the conscious workings of human minds, functioning outside physical reality, offers further rational evidence in my view for the conclusion that human beings may well be made in the image of [a] God.

In his commencement address to Kenyon College in 2005, the American novelist and essayist David Foster Wallace said that Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.

Even though Karl Marx, for example, condemned the illusion of religion, his followers, ironically, worshiped Marxism. The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre thus wrote that for much of the 20th century Marxism was the historical successor of Christianity, claiming to show the faithful the one correct path to a new heaven on Earth.

In several of my books, I have explored how Marxism and other such economic religions were characteristic of much of the modern age. So Christianity, I would argue, did not disappear as much as it reappeared in many such disguised forms of secular religion.

That the Christian essence, as arose out of Judaism, showed such great staying power amidst the extraordinary political, economic, intellectual and other radical changes of the modern age is a fifth rational reason for thinking combined with the other four that the existence of a God is very probable.

(Robert H. Nelsonis a professor ofpublic policy and the University of Maryland)

Read more from the original source:

Five rational arguments why God (very probably) exists - Religion News Service

CNSNews.com

Darwinism in Question with Discovery: Octopi Edit Their Own Genes CNSNews.com It's a mind-boggling coincidence that Darwinists have long dismissed with euphemisms like, convergent evolution. But octopi, squid, and cuttlefish seem to have altogether missed the memo about Darwinism, because new science is revealing another way ...

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Darwinism in Question with Discovery: Octopi Edit Their Own Genes - CNSNews.com

Charles Darwin. Political economy would be revived as a rounded subject of inquiry, informed by understanding of the world and history. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

In recent decades the world economy and society have been changing at an unprecedented rate. According to Unesco, the total number of qualified scientists and engineers undertaking research has soared to about 10 million, of which a fifth are in China. Technical inventions have emerged ever faster, providing us with new gadgets and machines, along with new ways of engaging with one another and organising the institutions within which we live.

This has brought us great benefits, but it has also brought dangers and damage: weapons of mass destruction, global warming, the economic bubble and collapse caused by new financial tricks, global tax evasion and tax avoidance, high-tech monopolies, and the diffusion of powers of information and misinformation resulting from new means of communication.

We need to put aside the long-established Newtonian vision of a harmonious economy with negligible innovations

To navigate these new conditions we need to be on the watch for innovations, technological and non-technological, and to analyse their probable consequences. We need to adopt a Darwinian vision of a restless, evolving economy and society that is shaped by competitive selection of successful innovations from the many that fail.

We need to put aside the long-established Newtonian vision of a harmonious economy with negligible innovations in which demand and supply tend to maintain equilibrium in markets and the whole economy. That vision of the capitalist system was plausible when it was expounded, in words, not algebra, by Alfred Marshall more than a hundred years ago. But it does not bear scrutiny today.

Since the crash of 2008, economists have tended tacitly to abandon the Newtonian model and turn to empirical studies. But these have concentrated on economic phenomena that can be measured in statistics among which links may be sought. The many unmeasurable aspects of social and economic phenomena have been largely ignored; and it has been assumed that if an association is discovered it will continue into the future.

The adoption of the Darwinian approach would liberate economists from this myopia. It would mean that the subject of study was social evolution and all its causes, measurable and unmeasurable. Political economy would be revived as a rounded subject of inquiry, informed by understanding of the world and history, as it was for its founder, Adam Smith. It would not promise a distant Utopia, as Newtonian economics and Marxism have done in their different ways. Instead it would invite study of what is happening and the possible responses to it, as a prelude to politico-moral debate by all-comers.

Here are three disparate examples of actual or potential benefits of the approach:

In my book, Public Corruption: The Dark Side of Social Evolution, I asked, Why was corruption cleaned up in northern Europe in the late 18th and 19th centuries?

If rulers gained and held power by corrupt means, for them to abolish corruption would have been political suicide. I found an evolutionary explanation in military-cum-economic competition: when the development of firearms gave advantage to costly, trained, standing armies, states that could raise tax and spend it on their army with least corruption (for example, the highly militarised Prussia as it expanded to become Germany), were at an advantage and expanded or induced their neighbours to clean up in competition with them a process that no longer operates since arms have become cheap relative to national income.

Before the financial crisis of 2008, economic forecasters, using models that projected past statistical relationships into the future, kept predicting that the boom would continue. They failed to see that it was being fed by a growing mountain of lending based on new financial tricks that were unsustainable. Had they been Darwinians, looking out for dangerous innovations and working closely with the bank regulators, the crisis and subsequent depression might never have occurred.

Economists are so steeped in the assumption that human beings are rational meaning they make choices only by pleasure-pain calculus that when confronted by evidence that that is not so, they commonly speak of deviations from rationality. They have ignored that our behaviour is governed by primal instincts as well as reason, and that denial of instincts has blinkered their understanding of incentives to work and other aspects of economic behaviour. A Darwinian would look at behaviour in the round as the product of past genetic and social evolution and current innovations.

In short, the adoption of Darwinism would be a return to reality, and morality.

Continued here:

How do we fix our 21st century economy? Look to Darwin - The Guardian

Photo Credit: Dr. Pear

At the turn of the twentieth century, many immigrant and native-born Jews in the United States unyoked themselves from religious observance. However, the same period also witnessed a parallel phenomenon the forging of a distinctly American form of Orthodox Judaism.

At a particular moment in the 1920s, according to historian Jenna Weissman Joselit, this new breed of Jewish Americans had set before themselves a two-fold goal: to rebuke and repudiate the reformers and to deal effectively and happily with the great task of Americanization.

The Orthodox rabbis who spearheaded this effort were easily riled by descriptions of Orthodoxy as Old World, backward, or out of date. They sought to fashion an American Orthodoxy that was as aesthetic, cultured, and engaged with contemporary issues as it was rooted in tradition.

Quite naturally, then, a number of Orthodox leaders addressed the issue of Darwinism, made timely by the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925. By the dawn of the twentieth century, major Reform exponents like Rabbis Emil G. Hirsch and Joseph Krauskopf had formulated well-known articulations of Judaisms compatibility with Darwinian thought, a consensus position in Reform Judaism that won out after initial debate in the 1870s and 1880s.

Orthodoxy remained equivocal about Darwinism, although significant rabbinic figures, Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch and Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, for instance, wrote that it was compatible with Jewish belief, even if they did not embrace it outright.

However, despite the contention of American Orthodox rabbis that Judaism ought to respond to the issues of the day, there was no consensus about how to respond: was Darwinism part of the Reform program, in which case it should be combated? Or was it simply representative of Americanization and modernity, in which case it should be embraced?

The tension among Orthodox rabbis is exhibited in the pages of the communitys journal, The Jewish Forum. In 1926, two young and determined Manhattan-based rabbis published positions on the theory of evolution in that well-read monthly.

Rabbi Leo Jung of the Jewish Center was a capable scholar and lifelong leader of American Orthodox organizations. Rabbi David de Sola Pool, spiritual leader of Congregation Shearith Israel (also known as the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue) was similarly a leader within a number of important organizations and a skilled orator with a love of history. Both received ordination from the Hildesheimer Rabbinical Seminary in Berlin. Both carried strong attachments to British forms of intellectualism to boot. And their Upper West Side congregations were well within walking distance of one another.

Despite these similarities, their respective positions on Darwinism were far apart. Rabbi Jung questioned the very basis of the theory of evolution while Rabbi Pool readily espoused it.

In July 1925, John Scopes, in a rather theatrical and public legal case, was found guilty of violating Tennessees Butler Act that forbade the teaching of evolution, as it denie[d] the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible. Rabbi Jung made his position on the Scopes Trial clear in the March 1926 issue of The Jewish Forum. He provocatively wrote:

For the benefit of those whom the tragic-comedy of Tennessee may have disturbed, let me state here deliberately and publicly that there has hitherto been no single piece of incontrovertible evidence even to the effect that man lived more than 5686 years ago.

In contrast, Rabbi Pool drew a different lesson from the controversy. Writing in the April issue of the same periodical, he contended that: the theory of evolution [has] taught us to see the unity of God in the infinite variety of life, and even that the rabbis of ancient days caught a glimpse of the origin of species by means of natural selection as part of Gods plan for creation.

The differences between two rabbis who were otherwise so similar demands an explanation. There are several possible answers, but a consideration of these rabbinic leaders in their particular congregational settings can shed a good deal of light.

Rabbi Pool led the oldest Jewish congregation in the United States. Shearith Israels members took great pride in its long American history, probably dating back to the 1720s. In 1907, Rabbi Pool was called to help lead the synagogue by his cousin, Rabbi Henry Pereira Mendes.

Rabbi Mendes belonged to a group of young traditionalists who were well educated scientifically as well as religiously, and who came out in strong support of Darwinism in the 1880s, for instance, in the editorial pages of The American Hebrew.

They actually used Darwinism in their polemics against the Reform movement, arguing that Reform Judaism, in its eagerness to reinvent the religion, violated Darwins and philosopher Herbert Spencers principle of gradualism by suggesting that religion should progress rapidly, in great leaps, rather than incrementally.

Rabbi Mendes and his colleagues suggested that the American traditionalist camp better reflected Darwinian understandings of gradual evolution applied to a traditions adaptation to contemporary environments. Rabbi Pool, as well as many other young Orthodox rabbis, followed suit, seeing the embrace of Darwinism as in no way out of step with their religious sensibilities.

But while Rabbi Pool was leading a congregation that boasted a long history of stable Orthodox perspectives, Rabbi Jung found himself in a radically different situation. Rabbi Jungs Jewish Center was established just seven years before the Scopes Trial, in 1918. Rabbi Jung became the synagogues second rabbi only four years later in 1922. The congregation and its founding rabbi, Mordecai Kaplan, had parted ways due to Rabbi Kaplans expression of positions contrary to Orthodox theology, such as his hesitations on the principle of Divine Revelation.

Actually, Rabbi Kaplan had in fact felt alienated from the theological positions of Orthodoxy from the earliest years of his career. His biographer, Mel Scult, has argued that Rabbi Kaplan emphasized the import of biological and social evolution in his view of religion, and that it was at Columbia in the first years of the twentieth century that he integrated the work of his adviser, Franklin Giddings, as well as Herbert Spencers teachings, into his own thought.

While the full-blown transformation to Reconstructionism would take decades, Rabbi Kaplan began expressing his discomfort and disagreement with Orthodoxy in the years preceding the Scopes Trial.

As Rabbi Kaplan was still affiliated with Orthodox Judaism at the time, his radical theological notions stung other Orthodox rabbis. Rabbi Bernard Drachman, a former professor of Rabbi Kaplans at the Jewish Theological Seminary and the rabbi at Manhattans (Orthodox) Park East Synagogue, wrote a critique of the latters views in 1921, stating: The cause of causes in producing a breakdown of religious sentiment and practice is the growth of a materialist and naturalistic concept of the universe. He bemoaned not only Rabbi Kaplans famous denial of Divine Revelation, but also his assault on God as Creator.

Rabbi Jung realized that his young Manhattan congregation lacked the communal and theological stability that Rabbi Pool enjoyed sixteen blocks away. Rabbi Jung was at the eye of a storm, fighting for every congregant, and considered himself as a defender of an Orthodoxy under fierce attack in the 1920s.

While the defense against what he termed Kaplanism did not detract from Rabbi Jungs mission to display Orthodoxys sophistication and elegance, it likely made him hesitant to embrace concepts that seemed radical in their adjustments to Jewish thought, especially one like Darwinism, which Rabbi Kaplan himself had placed at the center of his reconstruction of Judaism.

The differences between Rabbis Jung and Pool with regard to Darwinism map onto the differences between their respective congregations. Rabbi Pool, in his rooted and stable community, was perpetuating a view that was put forward by his predecessor and mentor forty years earlier regarding the compatibility of Darwinism and Judaism. Rabbi Jung, in the midst of a crisis brought on by his predecessors revolt against traditional Jewish theology, which itself related to evolutionary concepts in the sociology of religion, expressed a rejectionist position toward evolution.

Therefore, somewhat ironically, Rabbi Pools support of Darwinism did not emerge despite tradition but because of the tradition of predecessors like Rabbi Mendes and teachers like his father-in-law, Rabbi Hayyim Hirschenson, as embodied and stabilized by the 250-year old congregation he led.

Rabbi Jungs rejection of Darwinism, on the other hand, is not merely the preservation of old beliefs but a conscious reaction against what he viewed as a pressing danger to Orthodoxy in America.

In each case, questions of doctrine are addressed not in a theoretical vacuum but within the context of living, breathing communities whose histories shape their receptivity to new ideas.

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How Two New York Rabbis Responded To The 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial - The Jewish Press - JewishPress.com

In the evolution debate, a key issue is the ability of natural selection to produce complex innovations. In a previous article, I explained based on engineering theories of innovation why the small-scale changes that drive microevolution should not be able to accumulate to generate the large-scale changes required for macroevolution. This observation perfectly corresponds to research in developmental biology and to the pattern of the fossil record. However, the limitations of Darwinian evolution have been demonstrated even more rigorously from the fields of evolutionary computation and mathematics. These theoretical challenges are detailed in a new book out this week, Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics.

Authors Robert Marks, William Dembski, and Winston Ewert bring decades of experience in search algorithms and information theory to analyzing the capacity of biological evolution to generate diverse forms of life. Their conclusion is that no evolutionary process is capable of yielding different outcomes (e.g., new body plans), being limited instead to a very narrow range of results (e.g., finches with different beak sizes). Rather, producing anything of significant complexity requires that knowledge of the outcomes be programmed into the search routines. Therefore, any claim for the unlimited capacity of unguided evolution to transform life is necessarily implausible.

The authors begin their discussion by providing some necessary background. They present an overview of how information is defined, and define the standard measures of KCS (KolmogorovChaitin-Solomonov) complexity and Shannon information. The former provides that minimum number of bits required to repeat a pattern the maximum compressibility. The latter relates to the log of the probability of some pattern emerging as an outcome. For instance, the probability of flipping five coins and having them all land on heads is 1/32. The information content of HHHHH is then the negative log (base 2) of 1/32, which is 5 bits. More simply, a specific outcome of 5 coin flips is equivalent to 5 bits of information.

They describe how searches in engineering for some design outcome involve the three components of domain expertise, design criteria, and iterative search. The process involves creating a prototype and then checking to see if it meets the criteria, which functions as a teleological goal. If the initial design does not, the prototype is refined and the test repeated. The greater the domain expertise, the more efficiently adjustments are made, so fewer possibilities need to be tested. Success can then be achieved more quickly.

They demonstrate this process with a homely example: cooking pancakes. The first case involves adjusting the times the pancakes were cooked on the front and on the backside. An initial pancake was cooked for two random times, and it was then tasted. Based on the taste, the temperatures were then adjusted for the second iteration. This process was repeated until a pancakes taste met some quality threshold. For future cases, additional variables were added, such as the amount of milk used in the batter, the temperature setting, and the added amount of salt. If each variable were assigned a value between 1 and 10, such as the ten settings on the stove burner, the number of possible trials increased by a factor of 10 for each new variable. The number of possibilities grows very quickly.

For several variables, if the taster had no knowledge of cooking, the time required to find a suitable outcome would likely be prohibitively long. However, with greater knowledge, better choices could be made to reduce the number of required searches. For instance, an experienced cook (that is, a cook with greater domain experience) would know that the time on both sides should be roughly the same, and pancakes that are too watery require additional flour.

This example follows the basic approach to common evolutionary design searches. The main difference is that multiple trials can often be simulated on a computer at once. Then, each individual can be independently tested and altered. The components of each cycle include a fitness function (aka oracle) to define that status of an individual (e.g., taste of the pancake), a method of determining which individuals are removed and which remain or are duplicated, and how individuals are altered for the next iteration (e.g., more milk). The authors provide several examples of how such evolutionary algorithms could be applied to different problems. One of the most interesting examples they give is how NASA used an evolutionary algorithm to bend a length of wire into an effective X-band antenna.

In this way, the authors demonstrate the limitations of evolutionary algorithms. The general challenge is that all evolutionary algorithms are limited to converging on a very narrow range of results, a boundary known as Baseners Ceiling. For instance, a program designed to produce an antenna will at best converge to the solution of an optimal antenna and then remain stuck. It could never generate some completely different result, such as a mousetrap. Alternatively, an algorithm designed to generate a strategy for playing checkers could never generate a strategy for playing backgammon. To change outcomes, the program would have to be deliberately adjusted to achieve a separate predetermined goal. In the context of evolution, no unguided process could converge on one organism, such as a fish, and then later converge on an amphibian.

This principle has been demonstrated both in simulations and in experiments. The program Tierra was created in the hope of simulating large-scale biological evolution. Its results were disappointing. Several simulated organisms emerged, but their variability soon hit Baseners Ceiling. No true novelty was ever generated but simply limited rearrangements of the initially supplied information. We have seen a similar result in experiments on bacteria by Michigan State biologist Richard Lenski. He tracked the development of 58,000 generations of E. coli. He saw no true innovation but primarily the breaking of nonessential genes to save energy, and the rearrangement of genetic information to access pre-existing capacities, such as the metabolism of citrate, under different environmental stresses. Changes were always narrow in scope and limited in magnitude.

The authors present an even more defining limitation, based on the No Free Lunch Theorems, which is known as the Conservation of Information (COI). Stated simply, no search strategy can on average find a target more quickly than a random search unless some information about that target is incorporated into the search process. As an illustration, imagine someone asking you to guess the name of a famous person, but without giving you any information about that individual. You could use many different guessing strategies, such as listing famous people you know in alphabetical order, or by height, or by date of birth. No strategy could be determined in advance to be better than a random search.

However, if you were allowed to ask a series of questions, the answers would give you information that could help limit or guide your search. For instance, if you were told that the famous person was contemporary, that would dramatically reduce your search space. If you then learned the person was an actor, you would have even more guidance on how to guess. Or you might know that the chooser is a fan of science fiction, in which case you could focus your guessing on people associated with the sci-fi genre.

We can understand the theorem more quantitatively. The size of your initial search space could be defined in terms of the Shannon Information measure. If you knew that one of 32 famous people was the target, the search space would correspond to log (base 2) of 32, which is 5 bits. This value is known as the endogenous information of the search. The information given beforehand to assist the search is known as the active information. If you were given information that eliminated all but 1/4 of the possible choices, you would have log (base 2) of 4, which is 2 bits of active information. The information associated with finding the target in the reduced search space is then log (base 2) of 32/4, which is 3 bits. The search-related information is conserved: 5 bits (endogenous) = 2 bits (active) + 3 bits (remaining search space).

The COI theorem holds for all evolutionary searches. The NASA antenna program only works because it uses a search method that incorporates information about effective antennas. Other programs designed to simulate evolution, such as Avida, are also provided with the needed active information to generate the desired results. In contrast, biological evolution is directed by blind natural selection, which has no active information to assist in searching for new targets. The process is not helped by changes in the environment, which alter the fitness landscape, since such changes contain no active information related to a radically different outcome.

In the end, the endogenous information associated with finding a new body plan or some other significant modification is vastly greater than that associated with the search space that biological offspring could possibly explore in the entire age of the universe. Therefore, as these authors forcefully show, in line with much previous research in the field of intelligent design, all radical innovations in nature required information from some outside intelligent source.

Image: Mandelbrot set, detail, by Binette228 (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

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Evolutionary Informatics: Marks, Dembski, and Ewert Demonstrate the Limits of Darwinism - Discovery Institute