Dark Clarity

The honorable babies

2011-01-31T17:19:00.001+01:00

The Squeezing of the Middle Class | The Lonely Conservative

WHY? Why would I continue to deny my own happiness, when my sense of honor only gets me punished? When it’s what everyone else counts on in order to make their flawed scheme work? What do I owe, here? To whom do I owe it really? I spent my entire life putting other people and my financial obligations ahead of my happiness, ahead of my chance to live while I’m here on the earth and not just exist in some gray zone, making sure MY bills are paid.

I would never have imagined, three years ago, that I would resent the very, very rich and the less fortunate. Both of them are doing just fine, it’s us in the middle who are being crushed only because we managed to stay in the middle. With no help, by the way. Under our own steam. Never asked for a thing, swallowed the disappointments and kept working and paying bills. Did all of these things because our value systems said it was right and we are not owed anything. And my government, those who insist on “governing” me are so disconnected from it, are so oblivious to the rising desperation in the country. We don’t matter.

Well, I’m Egypt tonight. I’ve had it. It’s unthinkable for me—a responsible, honorable, traditional, independent woman—to entertain the idea of just walking away.

Oh, my! Whatever will the responsible, honorable, traditional, independent people do? Do you think they might beg for a government handout? The prophet of the Galtistas would call that a less spectacular revolt. I'm revolted already.

Phony Libertarians

2010-10-23T06:54:00.001+02:00

Tea & Crackers | Rolling Stone Politics

Vast forests have already been sacrificed to the public debate about the Tea Party: what it is, what it means, where it’s going. But after lengthy study of the phenomenon, I’ve concluded that the whole miserable narrative boils down to one stark fact: They’re full of shit. All of them. At the voter level, the Tea Party is a movement that purports to be furious about government spending — only the reality is that the vast majority of its members are former Bush supporters who yawned through two terms of record deficits and spent the past two electoral cycles frothing not about spending but about John Kerry’s medals and Barack Obama’s Sixties associations. The average Tea Partier is sincerely against government spending — with the exception of the money spent on them. In fact, their lack of embarrassment when it comes to collecting government largesse is key to understanding what this movement is all about — and nowhere do we see that dynamic as clearly as here in Kentucky, where Rand Paul is barreling toward the Senate with the aid of conservative icons like Palin.

Early in his campaign, Dr. Paul, the son of the uncompromising libertarian hero Ron Paul, denounced Medicare as “socialized medicine.” But this spring, when confronted with the idea of reducing Medicare payments to doctors like himself — half of his patients are on Medicare — he balked. This candidate, a man ostensibly so against government power in all its forms that he wants to gut the Americans With Disabilities Act and abolish the departments of Education and Energy, was unwilling to reduce his own government compensation, for a very logical reason. “Physicians,” he said, “should be allowed to make a comfortable living.”

The Tea Party is truly pathetic. They are a tragic parody of right-wing libertarianism.

The Tea Party today is being pitched in the media as this great threat to the GOP; in reality, the Tea Party is the GOP. What few elements of the movement aren’t yet under the control of the Republican Party soon will be, and even if a few genuine Tea Party candidates sneak through, it’s only a matter of time before the uprising as a whole gets castrated, just like every grass-roots movement does in this country. Its leaders will be bought off and sucked into the two-party bureaucracy, where its platform will be whittled down until the only things left are those that the GOP’s campaign contributors want anyway: top-bracket tax breaks, free trade and financial deregulation.

The rest of it — the sweeping cuts to federal spending, the clampdown on bailouts, the rollback of Roe v. Wade — will die on the vine as one Tea Party leader after another gets seduced by the Republican Party and retrained for the revolutionary cause of voting down taxes for Goldman Sachs executives.

On page 2 of this article, we see some of Taibbi’s clarity: he praises Ron Paul for his honesty and sincerity, noting that an “anti-war, pro-legalization Republican won’t ever play in Peoria, which is why in 2008 Paul’s supporters were literally outside the tent at most GOP events, their candidate pissed on by a party hierarchy that preferred Wall Street-friendly phonies like Mitt Romney and John McCain.”

Then he points out how after the election, “tens of thousands of Republicans who had been conspicuously silent during George Bush’s gargantuan spending on behalf of defense contractors and hedge-fund gazillionaires showed up at Tea Party rallies across the nation, declaring themselves fed up with wasteful government spending.”

I’ll admit I’ve never talked to anyone who actually admitted to attending a Tea Party rally as a supporter. But I have talked to plenty of libertarian, anti-government, alternative-currency, and Patriot Movement folks over the past 15 years. To the extent that these same people may make up the Tea Party, I feel sorry for them.

TEA-Party Hypocrisy: How Much Socialism Is Acceptable?

First, most TEA-party activists don’t vote on principle. They don’t hate socialism and government theft and abuse as a rule. If they did they would have been just as exercised about socialism, big government, fascism, dubious legislative tactics, deficits and the national debt during George W. Bush’s term in office. But they were silent. The greatest increases in national debt since WWII came during the presidencies of Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II. Here’s the best chart I’ve seen illustrating national debt growth. During these decades TEA-parties were non-existent. Silence. They don’t oppose Socialism on principle, they oppose the other guys’ socialism. That is, they oppose socialism for causes they don’t agree with at the moment. They don’t vote on principle, they vote pragmatically to get a government that benefits them in ways they want.

The first point simply grows out of the second: TEA-partiers don’t really oppose socialism. They are socialists. They believe in using government theft to fund causes they personally benefit from. They denounce—via chant and mantra—Obamacare as a government takeover of health care. The TEA-parties rage when Obama proclaims something so bold as “Our government is finally bringing prescription drug coverage to the seniors of America.” But, ironically, those are not Obama’s but Bush’s exact words after signing a $550 billion Medicare bill into law in 2003. TEA-parties fume when Obama wants to overhaul health care. But Bush could pass “the largest overhaul of Medicare in the public health program’s 38-year history,” and there’s not a word. At the time, only nine Senate Republicans opposed the measure due to its exorbitant cost. Where was fiscal conservatism? Where was the huge public outcry then? Where was the organized protest of big government, government takeover, and huge debts then?

Why do I keep going on about the Tea Party? Because they are merely the most recent manifestation of a type of “conservativism” that I despise: the conservativism of Republicans who don’t actually believe most of what they say and cynically calculate everything to meet some foolish, short-term political objective.

Five Truths that Republicans Hate

1. Most Republicans are as socialist as the Left. While not as socially liberal as the left—not advocating equality, gay rights, feminism, etc., etc.—Republicans have proven every bit as fiscally liberal with the exception of the last year or so when political convenience has changed their rhetoric. . . .

2. Public schooling is a socialist institution, paid for like a social welfare scheme, where socialist teachers teach socialism to conservatives’ kids. It was designed as an anti-conservative institution and operates openly as an anti-conservative institution. Yet most conservative parents still mock homeschooling and refuse to put their kids in even a private school. Some Christians argue they’re salt and light—”we just need prayer back in schools!” The only prayer any kid should be praying in school is “Mom! Dad! Please! Get me out!”

3. There is no such thing as private property as long as property taxes and the threat of liens exist. Bad-mouthing Obama’s socialism rings hollow until you pressure your state, county, and municipal officials to abolish property taxes. Of course, you’d also have to argue against public schooling as well, for about 75% of property taxes go to pay for public schools.

4. There is nothing inherently or historically conservative about our national standing military. It was a Republican-led effort that ignored everything the American founders wrote about the dangers of standing armies and centralized the state militias into a national army, the outlawed state militias. . . . Progressives love war inherently: it was one aspect that grew directly out of social Darwinism. Conservatives fight when necessary to protect their own land and freedom, except against property taxes, apparently.

5. Republicans were the original spend-and-tax, big-government Progressives, and remain so today. The same Republican men who nationalized the military, in order to fund their progressive ideals, created, promoted, and signed into law the Sixteenth amendment (national income tax) which had the side-effect of rendering the IRS a permanent institution. . . .

The Very Angry Babies

2010-06-14T18:39:00.002+02:00

The Very Angry Tea Party - Opinionator Blog - NYTimes.com

The implicit bargain that many Americans struck with the state institutions supporting modern life is that they would be politically acceptable only to the degree to which they remained invisible, and that for all intents and purposes each citizen could continue to believe that she was sovereign over her life; she would, of course, pay taxes, use the roads and schools, receive Medicare and Social Security, but only so long as these could be perceived not as radical dependencies, but simply as the conditions for leading an autonomous and self-sufficient life.

The author of this essay might say that I am one of those who believes in individual autonomy despite the evidence. I admit that this is an article of faith for me.

Where I differ from Bernstein is on the source of individual autonomy. Bernstein suggests that individual autonomy is essentially illusory, that our relationship with government is permanent. Therefore, any suggestion of illegitimacy in a particular government, or temporarily in any government at all, appears to Bernstein as nihilism. Bernstein doesn't use the term anarchism, since he is speaking to purely philosophical issues. Anarchism is technically advocacy for a condition of no earthly government, whereas nihilism is a denial of all values. For someone who believes that all values and all rights derive from government, anarchism would seem like the denial of existence itself. This is where Bernstein enters the realm of fantasy, since individuals actually do exist outside of their status as sovereign subjects.

On the other hand, I agree with Bernstein in his criticism of the self-deception in the Tea Party rhetoric:

Tea Party anger is, at bottom, metaphysical, not political: what has been undone by the economic crisis is the belief that each individual is metaphysically self-sufficient, that one’s very standing and being as a rational agent owes nothing to other individuals or institutions. The opposing metaphysical claim, the one I take to be true, is that the very idea of the autonomous subject is an institution, an artifact created by the practices of modern life: the intimate family, the market economy, the liberal state. Each of these social arrangements articulate and express the value and the authority of the individual; they give to the individual a standing she would not have without them. . . .

If stated in enough detail, all these institutions and practices should be seen as together manufacturing, and even inventing, the idea of a sovereign individual who becomes, through them and by virtue of them, the ultimate source of authority. The American version of these practices has, from the earliest days of the republic, made individuality autochthonous while suppressing to the point of disappearance the manifold ways that individuality is beholden to a complex and uniquely modern form of life.

This, unfortunately, is absolutely true. Most people do not live autonomously, they never will, and they are literally incapable of doing so. They congratulate themselves constantly on their brilliance at conning the rest of society into providing for them disproportionately compared to the amount of actual benefit they provide to others. Their social value is so astronomically high compared to the transactional value of their activities that they like to think of themselves as immortal and wise Olympians striding thunderously across the landscape. Their self-aggrandizement is unchallenged and their ungratefulness is regarded with awe by the less fortunate. Then something goes wrong with the multilevel marketing scheme and they get really angry.

Most Tea Partiers are lying to themselves and everyone else with their infantile "going John Galt" blathering. They are just like babies who scream and blubber before holding their breath, all in an effort to manipulate Mommy and Daddy into meeting their demands instantly. I like to call such babies "Galtistas" because they are imaginary radicals pushing a phony political agenda, all in order to garner more government benefits for themselves. They are not anarchistic; they are not autonomous; they are insolent, obnoxious, spoiled brats who would have been stoned to death in another time and place.

The Whitewashed Tea Partiers

2010-04-20T07:12:00.002+02:00

Want some health insurance hypocrisy? ‘Course ya do!

Let’s just suppose you’re a typical upstanding, self-righteous Galtista: someone who despises Obama and all his commie buddies; someone who clings desperately to your constitutional right to resist the IRS and the HHS with an AK-47 and a rocket launcher; someone who gets really angry at all the scum-sucking low-life parasites trying to steal your earthly treasures; someone who fervently defends your corporate employer’s right to purchase your health insurance; someone who has gone hoarse screaming about the rights of old people to get all the VA, Medicare, and Social Security benefits they’ve got coming from the feds; and of course you are disgusted that a pinko slob like myself would ever dare to suggest that private health insurance is not a conservative, libertarian, Christian solution to feeding your need for Viagra, Oxycontin, and Lipitor.

Most of all, you claim that all of your political and economic ideology is explicitly based on your devout “Christian” religious beliefs.

Well, the good news is that if you are NOT a hypocrite, you will be released from Obama’s slave markets. You are home free, bud: free to dance around in your camo getup at the next Tea Party rally without any fear that you will be forced into a death camp run by Obama’s Nazi nurses in black latex.

The law creates a religious exemption for those who are members and faithful adherents of a “recognized religious sect or division” with “established tenets or teachings” barring the “acceptance of the benefits of any private or public insurance.”

For individuals who do not belong to a denomination with specific bans on insurance, therefore, personal religious objections will not exempt them from the mandate.

But even for Muslims, who may belong to a sect with clearly established teachings banning insurance, the bill still presents a problem.

For many Muslims, conventional health insurance is considered forbidden, because it is based on a system of uncertain outcomes akin to gambling on the future and the charging of interest.

The health-care reform bill’s language, however, specifically states that for a sect to qualify for the religious exemption, it must fall within the definitions of section 1402(g) of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986. That section requires a sect to have been in constant existence since at least Dec. 31, 1950, and requires the sect to reject not only insurance but also have sworn off receiving all benefits from the U.S. Social Security system.

According to the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies website, traditional Amish groups may dodge the mandate because they have been exempted from participating in Social Security for decades.

“The Amish viewed it as a form of commercial insurance, which they opposed,” explains the website produced by Elizabethtown College in the Plain People country of Lancaster County, Pa. “They believe that members of the church should care for each others’ physical and material needs. Thus, most of them do not pay into Social Security or receive payments from it. In some states, the Amish have also been exempted from workers compensation (insurance for on-the-job injuries) for the same reason.” Does your faith free you from forced Obamacare?

Oh, I’m sorry . . . you say your Bible is missing the parts about how believers are supposed to care for each other in the local church? Well, Jesus has some choice words for you:

Matt 15:7 “You hypocrites, rightly did Isaiah prophesy of you:
Matt 15:8 ‘THIS PEOPLE HONORS ME WITH THEIR LIPS, BUT THEIR HEART IS FAR AWAY FROM ME.
Matt 15:9 ‘BUT IN VAIN DO THEY WORSHIP ME, TEACHING AS DOCTRINES THE PRECEPTS OF MEN.’”

Wrestling with the Faithless

2010-02-16T21:53:00.002+01:00

Havelock Ellis has stated that, “The man who has never wrestled with his early faith, the faith that he was brought up with and that yet is not truly his own–for no faith is our own that we have not arduously won–has missed not only a moral but an intellectual discipline. The absence of that discipline may mark a man for life and render all his work ineffective. He has missed a training in criticism, in analysis, in open-mindedness, in the resolutely impersonal treatment of personal problems, which no other training can compensate. He is, for the most part, condemned to live in a mental jungle where his arm will soon be too feeble to clear away the growths that enclose him, and his eyes too weak to find the light.”

The Necessity of Atheism (1933), by D.M. Brooks

One of the tiresome themes in atheist writings is the assertion that everyone is raised with some kind of religious superstition that they need to triumphantly throw off once they are exposed to the blinding light of reason and science.

It’s tiresome because the “brights” repeat it over and over, even though it is completely false.

It is obvious that children are born accepting the world at face value and trying to somehow fit everything together so that they will know what to expect and how to react. This is a form of superstition, because they construct ad hoc explanations without having any real basis for testing their validity.

Moreover, children generally learn a variety of rules, stories, common sayings, truisms, slogans, jingles, proverbs, propaganda, and myths from their parents, teachers, peers, TV shows, comic books, music, movies, church, books, and so forth. These sorts of information comprise the child’s cultural understanding of reality.

Rarely does anyone think critically about themselves, their society, or the world at large until they reach the teenage years. By “thinking critically,” I mean really analyzing claims and testing them, checking historical evidence, comparing opposing arguments, and closely reading source texts. In fact, some people never do anything like this, since they get all their information from TV news, politicians, blogs, Twitter, musicians, and stand-up comedians.

However, if someone had the aptitude and opportunity to think critically, they would start doing it around age 12 or 13. That is why this general age range is commonly known in many cultures and religions as the age of accountability.

Now then, this process is no different for children raised by rationalistic scientific atheists, because a child is neither rational nor scientific. Moreover, the propositions of atheism and philosophical naturalism are not obvious or natural for a child; they are idealistic artificial constructs as much as any medieval theology.

But the adult atheist, having undergone a dramatic conversion at age 14 from Pharisaic churchianity to slobbering Darwin-worship or Marx-adoration, cannot help but overflow with evangelical passion and a desire to smash the idols of his youth. And so he naturally starts by assuming that every religious person around him is simply in a state of arrested development, numb to the wonders of the created world and the pleasures of free will.

For myself, having been raised in an overwhelmingly secular society by liberal scientific atheist parents who looked at religious people with a mixture of amusement and contempt, I find this condescending and disingenuous. There is only a tiny proportion of the population who reach adulthood without critically analyzing their religious faith. Some are directly assaulted by the obnoxious New Atheists or the hedonistic, idolatrous culture; most are driven by their hormones to simply challenge everything their parents say; and many are encouraged by their parents to be accountable for their own faith. This is a tradition in even the most insular traditional religious communities, who recognize that a mindless follower is an incipient troublemaker who will mindlessly follow the destroyers of tradition.

Yet, the arrogant atheist simply can’t let go of the idea that, since atheism seems so obvious and logical to him now, anyone who disagrees must be either lying for political reasons or still encumbered by the religious mythology learned as a child. Their zealotry is impressive but misguided; they would do better to criticize Christians for not being enough like Jesus, who disdained politics and religious convention.

Modeling Pointless Justifications

2010-02-02T08:26:00.001+01:00

Little Green Footballs points to this catastrophic discovery by a climate science journalist:

Kris Wilson, an Emory University journalism lecturer and a former TV news director and weatherman himself . . . surveyed a group of TV meteorologists, asking them to respond to Coleman’s claim that global warming was a scam. The responses stunned him. Twenty-nine percent of the 121 meteorologists who replied agreed with Coleman—not that global warming was unproven, or unlikely, but that it was a scam.* Just 24 percent of them believed that humans were responsible for most of the change in climate over the past half century—half were sure this wasn’t true, and another quarter were “neutral” on the issue. “I think it scares and disturbs a lot of people in the science community,” Wilson told me recently. This was the most important scientific question of the twenty-first century thus far, and a matter on which more than eight out of ten climate researchers were thoroughly convinced. And three quarters of the TV meteorologists Wilson surveyed believe the climatologists were wrong.

Oh, surely this will make no difference at all to the professional scientists. I mean, they are the experts at reviewing each others’ work, and these simple-minded “weather girls” have really nothing to say about it.

Skepticism is, of course, the core value of scientific inquiry. But the essay that Coleman published that week, on the Web site ICECAP, would have more properly been termed rejectionism. Coleman wasn’t arguing against the integrity of a particular conclusion based on careful original research—something that would have constituted useful scientific skepticism. Instead, he went after the motives of the scientists themselves.

Oh my, it isn’t skepticism–its REJECTIONISM. Skepticism is good; but arguing against conclusions without having done careful original research is bad.

I would like to say to Charles Homans, that that remark is completely hypocritical. I am certain that, like most of the “science lovers” who earnestly vilify everyone they hate, he has never done any original research. In fact, there are a huge number of “skeptics” who know only that they despise anyone who contradicts their favorite celebrity scientists, journalists, and PR hacks. They do no research and, in my experience engaging with them, most of them do not even trouble to read the actual studies they spitefully defend. Many of them know less than I do, since all they do is read lists of talking points written for the uneducated “true believers.”

Of course, it’s possible they really are not concerned with “scientific consensus,” and are simply engaged in a politically driven public relations campaign. In that case, it would be very important for all the weather forecasters to be on board.

More striking is the fact that the weathercasters became outspoken in their rejection of climate science right around the time the rest of the media began to abandon the on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand approach that had dominated their coverage of the issue for years, and started to acknowledge that the preponderance of evidence lay with those who believed climate change was both real and man-made. If anything, that shift radicalized the weathermen. “I think the media is almost sleeping with the enemy,” one meteorologist told me. “The way it is now, there is just such a bias as to what gets out.”

Again with the obsession over popular opinion! For some reason, just when journalists had decided that there was no controversy, that they could stop pretending to be objective and just go whole-hog into free PR for the global warming acceptionists, just at that time the weathercasters decided that there was something fishy. How could they be so callous as to deny the journalistic consensus?

Meteorology has a deceptively close relationship with climatology: both disciplines study the same general subject, the behavior of the atmosphere, but they ask very different questions about it. Meteorologists live in the short term, the day-to-day forecast. It’s an incredibly hard thing to predict accurately, even with the best models and data; tiny discrepancies matter enormously, and can pile up quickly into giant errors. Given this level of uncertainty in their own work, meteorologists looking at long-range climate questions are predisposed to see a system doomed to terminal unpredictability. But in fact, the basic question of whether rising greenhouse gas emissions will lead to climate change hinges on mostly simple, and predictable, matters of physics. The short-term variations that throw the weathercasters’ forecasts out of whack barely register at all.

This is another totally disingenuous remark. It’s all so simple and predictable, except when it isn’t, which is when they try to actually explain it. It’s simple and predictable from a distance, only because they are oversimplifying the overall system and plugging it into a computerized model. Yet, for some reason, they can’t actually predict anything using these models.

This is the one explanation that everyone who has mulled the question seems to agree on—and indeed, when I spoke with meteorologists who were skeptical of or uncertain about the scientific consensus, it was the one thing they all brought up. “Meteorologists know our models,” Brian Neudorff, a meteorologist at WROC in Rochester, New York, told me. “There’s a lot of error and bias. We’ll use five different models and come back with five different things. So when we hear that climatological models are saying this, how accurate are they?”

This is the crucial point. The weather forecasters are in the same position relative to the climate scientists as engineers are to theoretical physicists, or as doctors and molecular biologists are to evolutionary biologists. For some reason, “theories” that can’t actually be used in the real world just don’t mean much to someone whose job depends on producing results on a regular basis.

People like Charles Johnson, PZ Myers, and Ed Darrell will whine on and on and on about how stupid you are for questioning evolutionary theory: how deliberately ignorant, anti-science, anti-intellectual, illiterate, politically biased, fascist, dishonest, insincere, or crazy you are for not just bowing down and kissing the boots of your natural masters.

Yet, when it comes to the bottom line, medical schools don’t feel the need to teach “evolutionary medicine” because evolutionary theory provides absolutely no practical benefit for physiology, biochemistry, medicine, or any therapy at all. Biologists and psychiatrists alike denounce evolutionary psychology as “just-so stories” because, in fact, it has absolutely no benefit for psychological therapy or counseling. Molecular biologists and genetic engineers do not use evolutionary theory because it has nothing to do with their actual work. And now we see that weather forecasters have no use for climate science because it provides absolutely no predictive value.

Look, I’m an engineering school dropout. I only wish I could have stuck it out and learned everything they could have taught me, because I would be making four times as much now. But at least I learned how to mathematically model physical systems in engineering school, and later on I worked in a factory where I learned how to make theoretical models actually work with real materials and real systems. This has given me an appreciation for how science actually contributes to society and technology: it just provides a framework and a justification for the people who do the real work. And when those people say that some overeducated stuffed shirt doesn’t know how to make a real model and doesn’t understand the limitations of models, that makes me ask them why I should care about their “theory.”

No, I’m not going to make all sorts of facetious arguments about how their models are constructed or how their theory is worked out. Only another geek can argue with someone totally steeped in the pedantic details of a narrow specialty. It’s kind of like the pointless theoretical arguments of medieval Scholasticism, nineteenth-century idealism, or Marxist socialism: Who cares anyway, if they don’t actually have anything useful to say? At bottom, they are just trying to justify their personal prejudices.

If Biologists Believed in Evolution . . . Maybe They Could Fly

2009-11-10T21:45:00.005+01:00

Larry Arnhart, an honest evolutionist, gives us this:

Oddly enough, it really is true that many biologists have no great interest in evolution, and they certainly don't see evolution as a bridge across all of the intellectual disciplines.

This point comes up in the first issue of the EvoS Journal: The Journal of the Evolutionary Studies Consortium. One of the articles is by Neil Blackstone. Neil is a colleague of mine at Northern Illinois University. He's an evolutionary biologist in the biology department. We have team-taught a course on evolutionary topics that is cross-listed in the political science and biology departments. He has complained to me that his fellow biologists often show little interest in evolutionary reasoning.

Why don't more biologists believe that evolution is important for their research? Have they been bought off by the creationist Illuminati? Blackstone notes the following:

As one of the most cited scientific journals in the world, the contents of Science thus provide an excellent barometer for the role of evolutionary theory in modern biology. Certainly, first inspection of this celebration of Darwin suggests a large role: the cover, the editorial, book reviews, and a special section of scientific reviews all suggest a congratulatory “Happy Birthday, Mr. Darwin.” Closer examination, however, reveals that the articles focusing on evolution primarily deal with only a limited range of the biological hierarchy—particularly organisms and genes. Here as elsewhere, articles that describe the intricate workings of molecular cell biology rarely mention evolution. Two explanations are possible: either evolutionary theory has no relevance to molecular cell biology, or this relevance is being ignored.

Blackstone goes on to survey recent research in a particular area of molecular biology, concluding as follows:

All of this groundbreaking work on STAT3 was apparently carried out and reported without any reference to the evolutionary history of eukaryotic cells. One might surmise from reading this literature that such an evolutionary view could not possibly add any insight to the still on-going investigation of the curious case of STAT3.

Then Blackstone presents his argument for why evolutionary theory should be considered in this area of research. However, he only gives an outline for how to think about the issue, rather than a research program, noting that his objective was "merely to point out that there is a robust evolutionary context for the molecular crosstalk between modern mitochondria and the cell nucleus." Too bad all the folks doing the actual research never figured this out. Blackstone is quite frustrated by their ignorance and insensitivity, so he whines:

Rather than being ignored by molecular cell biology, this context can and should be the starting point of any investigation.

It should be, we learn, not because the other approach was unsuccessful, but just because it is really mean to ignore evolutionary theory. This is apparently a common complaint:

Biology departments are often divided (e.g., ecology and evolutionary biology [EEB] and molecular cell biology [MCB]). Members of EEB and MCB typically apply for support to different funding agencies, publish in different journals, and teach different courses. Evolutionary biology is typically taught by EEB faculty, and such a course tends to reflect evolutionary research, i.e., organisms and genes. Most other biology courses might never mention the possibility of using evolutionary theory as a predictive tool to explore the particular subject matter.

Huh! Imagine that! Science professors who don't think they should waste time teaching their students about evolution, since they don't believe it has predictive value!

This has long been known at medical schools, where evolution is rarely taught:

Perhaps part of the problem in convincing medical practitioners to embrace evolution is the nature of the science. Evolutionary hypotheses about human physiology are notoriously hard to investigate, given humans’ long generation times.
Add to this the fact that the field has failed so far to provide clinically useful findings and you see why medical schools lack interest, says Lewis. “There is much about explanation and understanding but little about treating and curing,” he says.

And most biology educators have not traditionally had much use for evolutionary theory:

What do biochemistry, developmental biology, molecular biology, and neurobiology have in common? Evolutionary concepts related to these topics have not traditionally played a prominent role in an educator's toolbox. But that needn't be the case any longer. In October 2008, four prominent scientists presented examples from current research that can help educators incorporate evolutionary theory into each of these biological subdisciplines. [Illuminating Biology: An Evolutionary Perspective]

Yet, Blackstone goes on to criticize molecular cell biology for lacking "predictive direction," even while he admits that it has (without any help from evolutionary theory) had "many outstanding successes."

Blackstone finishes up with this astounding admission about the unscientific approach of evolutionary theory:

Ultimately, a complete evolutionary synthesis will balance the value of both holistic evolutionary thinking and reductionist molecular approaches.

Darn those reductionists! They're always so focused on observable "empirical results" and analytical methods! Is this part of a creationist plot to entice scientists to focus on definable, specific, material causes instead of doing holistic thinking?

Blackstone, though, is merely echoing part of the editorial statement for the EvoS Journal:

Another important objective of EvoS Journal is to provide an outlet for poetry, fiction, photographs, graphic art, cartoons, music, videos and other arts productions inspired by evolution. A strong argument can be made that evolution will never become accepted by the general public until it is communicated in ways that go beyond dry intellectual discourse. While we’re at it, even intellectuals should go beyond dry intellectual discourse in their exploration and celebration of evolutionary themes!

Oh my, it's a celebration of evolutionary themes! Who knew that the observance of Darwin's birthday could lead to such exciting cultural expressions of piety and rapture!

The 'man' effigy is the centre of the festival, both figuratively and literally. This year, the 12-metre human shape hovered over a thorny forest — a tangled bank — atop a giant double helix. The DNA molecule provided a powerful artistic meme, representing both life's capacity to evolve through genetics, and perhaps something that needs to be overcome through non-genetic evolutionary paths. Viewed from a different angle, the man seemed to float above a field of sea lilies, placing this celebration of human consciousness in an ancient evolutionary context.
The most striking image at this year's Burning Man, expressed in various ways across the city, was the famous "ascent of man" progression from great ape through to modern human, with the Burning Man icon representing the next step. This sequence resonated with the advance in human culture realized in Burning Man. One vision was the Fishbug, Chimera sententia, a creature rising out of the playa with an arthropod tail, amphibian body, mammalian trunk and oversized primate brain.

Well, there was another time when evolutionists were very excited about cultural expressions of evolutionary theory and they went far beyond dry intellectual discourse in their attempts to communicate with the general public. How did that work out?

It was obvious to everyone in Darwin’s day that, if true, his theory would have momentous consequences for our understanding of humanity. Yet, by the early 20th century, evolutionary theory was largely restricted to the biological sciences and avoided for most human-related subjects. The use of evolutionary theory to justify social inequality, which became labeled Social Darwinism, was part of the problem (Dickens, 2000). Another problem was the allure of minimalistic theories, such as behaviorism in psychology (Lemov, 2005). As a result of this legacy, it is possible and even likely that college students in human-related subjects will not receive any evolutionary training whatsoever during their higher education.

So, the whole Social Darwinism experiment was a public relations disaster, even though it was wildly popular with liberals and Nazis in the twentieth century. Behaviorism never really caught on with anyone who had a moral conscience, and will probably be remembered mostly as the theoretical background for A Clockwork Orange. The key is to identify some popular superstitions and show how they are supported by evolutionary "science." This is the method of evolutionary psychology.

The other article cited by Arnhart describes the trials of some young evolutionary psychologists. One, Aaron Goetz, had long had a "passion for evolution." Unfortunately, he didn't like science:

Evolution grabbed my interest in high school, but the “particulate” nature of most of the biology courses I had taken discouraged me from pursuing evolutionary biology. I was (and still am) fascinated by whole organism biology and absorbed in macroevolution but turned off when zooming in to the cellular level. Golgi bodies and ATP transport systems (whatever those are) never excited me.

All those big words are scary! But salvation awaited Goetz from a predictably nonscientific source:

In the summer of 1999, I borrowed from the bookshelf of my friend’s grandparents a copy of Daniel Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. While reading about skyhooks, cranes, and natural selection as universal acid, I was introduced to EP. It immediately made sense to me.

Another EP convert was Sarah Hill. She assumed early on that all scientific inquiry was tied to evolution, and so was shocked to find out that some academics are not convinced:

I quickly came to the painful realization that cultural anthropology is not the study of the evolutionary foundations of cultural variation. In fact, the mere mention of “evolution” or “biology” was met with hostility and suspicion by my fellow graduate students and professors. I was accused of being racist, misogynist, and nothing more than another fool brainwashed by the patriarchy. This experience can be neatly summarized in the succinct reply given to me by my advisor to a teary-eyed inquiry about why others were responding to me the way that they were in class. He said “But, Sarah, those are all just-so stories.” I was devastated.

What's going on here? More crypto-creationists, even in the hallowed halls of liberal academia? What a massive conspiracy against The One True Faith!

Karol Osipowicz was also blindsided:

I decided to pursue a graduate degree in neuroscience, a field based in biology, where I assumed evolutionary theory is rigorously adhered to. Unfortunately, even though most of my colleagues are well versed in Darwin, Dawkins, etc. and happy to apply the principles of evolution to any biological problem, most of them still refuse to apply it to cognition.

Steven Platek encountered even more prejudice from real scientists:

While I initially was enthused about working in a biology department, I soon came to realize (to my surprise) that many biologists do not accept the tenets of an evolutionary psychology. It was an eye opener for me.

The sufferings of the EP crowd are summed up as follows:

Common in each of our accounts is some experience with others’ hostility toward EP. Whether coming from a colleague, a reviewer, or student, those who take an evolutionary perspective will likely experience hostility, sometimes spilling into belligerence. Space limits us from articulating and responding to all of the sources of this hostility (see Confer et al., 2009 for a full discussion), so we will just mention one general source here. EP is truly iconoclastic.

They're just rebels challenging the entrenched powers of creationism, which are bafflingly disguised as liberal humanities departments and experimental science departments. However, there is hope for their salvation:

The illumination of evolutionary theory will foster growth in those who seek the light, as well as attract those who fumble like moths against brilliance beyond their comprehension.

Seek the light, even as some fumble like moths against brilliance beyond their comprehension! Oh rapture! Oh joy! Oh Darwin!

If only we could extend evolutionary reasoning across all areas of biology, maybe then we could start making advances in biotechnology. We could stumble forth from the dark ages of the twentieth century, that sad legacy of stagnation in technological and scientific progress. All this time, since the rediscovery of Mendel's laws and the development of genetics in the twentieth century, we could have been making wondrous advances in genomics, bioengineering, bioinformatics, gene splicing, genetically modified crops, molecular biology, medical science, and numerous other life sciences, if only more biologists had believed really really hard in evolutionary theory and sprinkled lots of fairy dust on their lab coats.

Why are you here?

2009-10-08T22:16:00.001+02:00

What did you go out into the World Wide Web to see? A reed shaken by the wind?

But what did you go out to see? A man dressed in a suit and tie? Those who wear a suit and tie are in corporate offices! But what did you go out to see? A blogger? Yes, I tell you, and one who is more than a blogger.

But to what shall I compare this generation? It is like the children sitting on the couch, who call out to the other children, and say, 'We played house music for you, and you did not dance; we complained about the death of culture, and you did not mourn.'