Remember the good old days, when the conservatives were aware of and admitted to their worldview honestly? Like Ray Mummert, for instance.
We've been attacked by the intelligent, educated segment of the culture.
We still get hints of that refreshing forthrightness now and then, as in this recent testimony of a Dover school board member:
"The only people in the school district with a scientific background were opposed to intelligent design ... and you ignored them?" he asked.
"Yes," Geesey said.
More often, though, we're getting strange comments that leave us sophisticated liberal academics scratching our head in puzzlement. Has Hugh Hewitt received instruction in irony, or can he really be this delusional?
The right's embrace in the Miers nomination of tactics previously exclusive to the left - exaggeration, invective, anonymous sources, an unbroken stream of new charges, television advertisements paid for by secret sources - will make it immeasurably harder to denounce and deflect such assaults when the Democrats make them the next time around.
This is troubling. We are supposed to be the masters of the soi-disant cynical barb that no one gets, other than our fellow elitists. We're the ones who are supposed to be chuckling over our dry martinis at the stupefied rubes who don't even know that we're mocking them. I'm afraid I'm going to have to maintain that Hewitt seriously believes in the innocence of Republicans. Anything else would be too discomfiting.
I felt the same way on reading this strange article. It starts off in a way I found agreeable:
The culture war is part of a collision of two world views. Can the disagreements between these world views be settled through rational discussion? This can only happen if both sides are amenable to reason. If one side withdraws from the interaction of ideas and throws up defenses against reason, the possibility of authentic conversation is negated.
True enough. I think one of our major problems in the struggle against creationism is that the creationists have abandoned the principles of evidence and reason, and therefore rational arguments based on what we have observed have little impact. But wait…what's this? He goes on…
The Left is terrified of a thinking conservative's powers of reason, and some of them characterize our rationality as abusive, insensitive, and chauvinistic. For example, Richard Dawkins, the unofficial leader of the evolution movement, called Intelligent Design (ID) scientists "bully boys," in the 11/05 edition of Natural History. Dawkins offered no example of bullying, of course. The relentless rationality of ID scientists is indeed intimidating, in the sense that powerful ideas can intimidate the weak-minded. We might take pity on Mr. Dawkins, who feels "bullied" by ideas that clash with his own, except that he uses power and intimidation through the science establishment to silence the voices of dissent.
The "relentless rationality of ID scientists"…this has got to be a joke, right? No one could possibly be so insane that they think Michael Behe is "intimidating", or that the Discovery Institute is kindling the flame of the Enlightenment. This long essay is loaded with bizarre statements like that, though—the conclusion that the author is just plain bonkers is unavoidable. His portrayal of college life is just unreal.
Nowhere is the gloom of unreason deeper than in academia. I watch college students walking slumped as they gaze upon the sidewalk, and I wonder what they have to be sad about. If a professor has just extinguished the light of reason in them, they have a lot to grieve about. A part of their humanity has been crushed.
Students aren't happy all the time—we stress them out with homework, and we do occasionally fail them on exams, and they've got their own lives where they worry about friends and jobs and their future—but I've found that when the lightbulb clicks on and they understand something cool about science, that's a good thing. Hutchison reveals fairly quickly what he considers to be ideas that "extinguish the light of reason", and we learn what he's really talking about: he doesn't much care for education that contradicts his silly dogmas.
He has three lines of evidence that college educations indoctrinate students into irrationality.
One is that we don't teach God's law, that we don't respect Scalia's idea that Christian judges are better. We need to teach our judges Christian metaphysics! It's the only reasonable thing to do.
Another is an amazing rant against quantum physics. It's a major source of anarchy, war, and corruption in Western civilization. Apparently, Werner Heisenberg shot Hutchison's dog.
Was the handsome young Heisenberg an evil genius, driven half-mad by his grandiose theories and dreams of glory? Of course he was. His denial of causality and the objective existence of natural substances and events undercut reason, a faculty designed to perceive order in nature. Reason helps to keep us sane, balanced, and modest. When Heisenberg let go of reason, and let in the dark forces of irrationality, he became unhinged.
I'm sure no one will be surprised that much of his ire is directed at "Darwinism". This is the part I understand best, so let's see if his anti-evolutionary screed is actually based on reason, or not. As you might guess, "or not" is the correct answer.
Darwin's original model of evolution by natural selection was more logical than the present evolution model. The survival of the fittest had a certain logic to it that helped to compensate for the accidental nature of the development of a species. However, the discovery of DNA in 1953 by James Watson and Francis Crick led to a crisis for the evolution model. DNA brought evolutionists to an unavoidable realization that natural selection can produce variations within a species (micro-evolution), but cannot change one species into a new species (macro-evolution). New information must be introduced into the genetic code (DNA) in order to produce a new species. Natural selection cannot provide this new information. Furthermore, the new information must be integrated harmoniously into an orderly new system of biological parts. Hence, a new species cannot be produced by natural selection alone.
Wow. This summary has absolutely no correspondence with reality. Mr Hutchison has taken a glimmering of some few barely comprehended facts and built an entire myth around them.
DNA was discovered in the 19th century, and was proposed even then as the vehicle carrying hereditary information. Watson and Crick figured out the structure of the molecule, which made it clear how information could be encoded in it. It did not cause a crisis for evolution—quite the contrary, it energized the idea. Modern molecular biology, the discipline based on our understanding of the structure of DNA, has been a major source of information in analyzing evolution ever since.
It is true that natural selection does not provide new information, but no one has ever claimed that it does. Molecular biology and genetics explain where new variants come from, and no, it isn't from Jesus.
The evolutionists revised their model to hypothesize that gene mutations provide the new information in the DNA for the evolution of a species. However, mutations are random and involve damage to the genes. The evolutionists have yet to explain how the new information is to be integrated into the orderly system of a new species. Every species represents a harmonious, orderly system of biological parts, and every species has a unique system all its own.
Gene mutations cannot design a system. The right information inserted into the wrong system is useless. The pancreas genes of a porcupine are worthless to a man because the human biological systems are different. A new system for a new species must have an orderly design--and each species has a unique design that represents a high level of order. According to Polanyi, a high level of order cannot come to being through random events. To assume that order can accidentally appear amidst chaos is to indulge in magical thinking and to deny reason.
Again, mutations weren't discovered after 1953—they are a 19th century concept, and their incorporation into evolutionary theory occurred in the early years of the 20th century. It's troubling that a self-styled proponent of reason can't even get elementary facts straight.
The rest is just chaos. Yes, we can observe how new information is integrated into an organism. Want an explanation? Read a book. I recommend Endless Forms Most Beautiful(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). It should be obvious that novel and varying genetic information is not difficult to incorporate into an organism: just look at the diversity present in your fellow human beings. Those obvious differences represent, to a degree, genetic differences.
The nonsense about porcupine pancreas genes is absurd. We don't know much about porcupine genetics, but I suspect they aren't any more different from us than are mice—and we use the same genes to form a pancreas. Which genes is he thinking of? Pax-6? Insulin promoter factor? Carboxypeptidase? We've got 'em all.
As for the claim that you cannot create order through only random events—true enough. Except evolution is not random.
Gene mutations are accidental changes in genetic information that occur randomly. Mutations represent damage to genes that usually result in pathologies or death. How can such contaminated and mangled data provide the basis for developing a new species? Can these fractured genes even be thought of as "new information"? Are they not corrupted old information? Are we to build a fresh new species from broken genes? One has to suspend the reasoning powers to go along with the post-DNA evolutionary model.
A mutation is a malfunction of the genetic code. A malfunction of sophisticated equipment disables the equipment, rather than making it more efficient. In the rare cases in which a mutation is not disabling, it can only move the system to a lower degree of order, not to a higher degree of order. In contrast, the assembly of an integrated system is always a move up in the degree of order, because a system embodies a higher level of order than a collection of parts. A table full of jigsaw parts resembles chaos, but the completed puzzle has order and presents a coherent picture that is printed upon the surface of the connected pieces.
No, a mutation is a change in sequence information. It happens all the time; every one who reads this article was born with a handful of novel mutations. They aren't dead or disabled. We have evidence of new traits arising from mutations, and that mutations can increase the information in a system.
After the discovery of how DNA encoded information in its sequence, we saw exactly how mutations can work. Point mutations can change single amino acids in a protein, or modify patterns of gene activation. Duplications can create whole new stretches of genetic information.
An accumulation of mutations can never create a higher degree of order, or a new species. A species will go extinct after the first few rounds of mutations, just as a jigsaw puzzle cannot be solved after a few rounds of damaged pieces. The reason why most species do not go extinct is that breeding outside of immediate family members introduces a fresh line of genes that can bypass the lethal mutations. Dual genders are God's plan to triumph over accumulating corruptions. It also works against the idea that evolution can proceed through mutations. Every time a creature breeds, his mutations are superseded.
We each carry a collection of new mutations; are we extinct?
If sex is required to prevent extinction, how come asexual bacteria are so successful?
Mr Hutchison needs to brush up on his basic Mendelian genetics. Mutations are not "superseded". They may be masked by heterozygosity, but they're still there.
Wait, wait…Hutchison is working himself up to a fine froth here, and just has to erupt into the plaintive wail of the cultural conservative:
Just as the marriage of those who are not biologically related bypasses inherited mutations, the wholesome, stable, faithful marriage of a man and woman can shelter the children from the passing down of the accumulating moral corruptions of prior generations, and from the general wickedness of society. A "family curse" is passed down through weak and broken marriages, illegitimate sexual unions, and the marriage of close relatives. The shattering of marriages and the separation of sex from marriage leads to the accumulation of moral corruptions and psychological disorders in a society. The breakdown of the family must lead to increasing disorder in society.
This really doesn't have anything to do with molecular biology or genetics, and he's clearly making the naturalistic fallacy. Stable societies have a variety of different strategies, and this isn't an issue that is resolved by simple-minded genetics. Need I add that evolutionists have happy marriages, and fundamentalist Christians get divorced?
Just as promiscuous sex must lead to social disorder, the accumulation of mutations must lead to pathological disorders and the extinction of a species. The evolutionists have yet to produce a single example of mutations that lead to macro-evolution--precisely because mutations cannot lead to a higher order. All the examples offered by evolutionists of change through mutations are variations within a species, and many such changes involve the introduction of a pathology. For example, thoroughbred horses are often psychotic, frequently sick, and prone to far more diseases than humans contract. Inbreeding to produce champion race horses results in a frail and unstable breed, due to the accumulation of mutations. However, no one can mistake a beautiful thoroughbred horse for any other species than a horse.
Since I have my copy of the November Natural History magazine, I've got the information at my fingertips that shows this is false. We have documented instances of evolution in Littorina obtusata, Anolis sagrei, Jadera haematoloma, Vestiaria coccinea, Gambusia affinis, and Oryctolagus cuniculus. These are not pathologies (well, except maybe those Australian rabbits are pathological to the mind of an Australian.) These observations have not found fish turning into rabbits, of course, but since that's not what evolution predicts, that isn't a problem.
The evolutionist's vain search for "constructive mutations," if such a thing is possible, trains their minds to tune out order and to search for randomness. Polanyi's axiom--that all that scientists can rationally know is patterns of order against a background of randomness--directly contradicts what the evolutionists are trying to do their research. Therefore, working within the evolution model tends to make one less rational. One has to close down his rational powers and indulge in magical thinking to envision the emergence of order from disorder. Irrational people posing as rational people often cheat to get the desired results of their ill-conceived experiments. Evolutionists routinely report micro-evolutionary variations with a species as macro-evolutionary developments of new species--which is a fraud. However, they are not yet brazen enough to call a thoroughbred horse a new evolutionary species.
Speciation has been observed. I don't see what is fraudulent about it…perhaps Mr Hutchison can clarify.
His claim that scientists tune out order is nonsense. That's what science is all about—trying to discern the order, the rules underlying observed phenomena. I'd have to turn that argument around, and point out that the creationists are trying to tune out chance.
Meanwhile, Intelligent Design scientists are focusing their attention upon the order of complex integrated systems as the design of species. They are developing a new science of rationality. Just as the rational Polanyi moved from science to the philosophy of knowledge (epistemology), a new rational philosophy of human nature as a product of intelligent design is inevitable. Amidst the jungle of irrationality, rationality is making a comeback. Reason, as an innate faculty of human nature, cannot be suppressed forever.
He can't even conclude with a sensible sentence. 1) Reason is not an innate faculty. It requires hard work and discipline to maintain, and it is very easy to lapse from it. 2) It can be easily suppressed. People find it comfortable to fall back on tradition and easy answers, and are especially attracted to reassuring myths that, contrary to reason, tell them that they are special and protected and valued by invisible, super-powerful guardians. Intelligent Design creationism is not a science, and is not rational—it is not constructed on the basis of evidence (they have none) or logic (ditto). It is pure wishful thinking, an attempt to fill in gaps in our knowledge with beneficent and impalpable gods designers.
This article was clearly an attempt to appropriate the terms "reason" and "rationality" for the creationists, but I'm afraid that all Mr Hutchison has accomplished is to cement his affiliation with "ignorance" and "lunacy".
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