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In C.S. Lewis' The Magician's Nephew, Aslan modifies a normal horse to make him a talking horse and then later gives him wings and makes him a flying, talking horse. What if he transformed him further so that he looked and acted just like a human? Would he be a horse still? Would he be human?

There's now a method of modifying the DNA in a blood or hair sample to make it appear to be someone else's DNA.

I saw this on an SVU episode from earlier this season that was on last night while I was finishing up grading an exam. I was hoping they'd just made it up, but I guess not. This is the kind of discovery that it might be immoral to publish if there weren't any way to distinguish the modified DNA from original DNA, but it seems they have concocted a method to detect the subterfuge.

I've found the same gross misrepresentation of the pro-life position on stem cell research in several different places over the last few weeks. The most surprising place to find it is in a philosophical work in a chapter on the moral status of the fetus. Referring to the position that moral status begins at conception, Anne Fagot-Largeault says:

Since the 1980s, however, there have been extraordinary advances in scientific technology, and these have brought into sharp relief some of the drawbacks of the preceding position. In fact, the position leads to some unconscionable outcomes. On the one hand, it implies that an embryo that is, for example, the carrier of the genetic defect that results in Down syndrome has the same right to live as a non-carrier. On the other, the view entails that we must not use embryonic research in order to strive to eliminate such maladies as Thalassemia -- to do so, according to this view, would entail choosing between the lesser of two evils. In general, this implies a very tragic conception of the moral life, namely that whenever humans substitute their choices for those of God, they can only make matters worse.

Nowadays, this position has lost much of its force. With the explosion of stem cell research, there are so very many cells that have embryonic potential that the supposed natural organic distinction that was once relied upon has crumbled under its own weight. The claim that stem cells have an enigmatic ontological status itself now seems enigmatic. [Fagot-Largeault, "The Fetus in Perspective: The Moral and the Legal" in Laurence Thomas, ed., Contemporary Debates in Social Philosophy, p.117.]

What seems enigmatic to me is why anyone would think the pro-life view on stem cells is that stem cells themselves have any moral status. If you stuck a stem cell in a woman's uterus, I wouldn't be holding my breath waiting for it to implant itself and begin developing. You have to alter a stem cell to make it an embryo for that capability to develop, just as you have to alter an egg by fertilizing it or turning it into a clone to give it that potential. No one thinks stem cells themselves have any special status. The only opposition to embryonic stem cell research is that acquiring the stem cells involves killing an embryo. It's not that there's anything special about the stem cells that should lead us to protect them. It's that the embryos should have protection as human beings. Stem cells can be acquired in other ways, and no one objects to those ways. It's hard to exaggerate how unfair it is to the pro-life view on stem cells to claim that anyone assigns some enigmatic status to stem cells themselves or that the embryonic potential of stem cells somehow undermines the distinction between what counts as an organism and what doesn't. There's no scientific reason to support the confusion of (a) stem cells that have potential to become embryos and (b) embryos themselves.

This isn't the first time I've seen this ridiculous portrayal of the pro-life position. I've seen it several times now, but it's pretty disturbing to find it in an academic paper in a philosophy textbook. The author isn't actually a trained philosopher. She's a biologist. But that's no excuse. biologists should be aware of the positions they're writing in response to if they're going to publish essays in philosophy textbooks arguing philosophically against those positions. That I've seen the very same argument in unrelated places suggests to me that perhaps there's a more widespread misconception going around among those who favor killing embryos for the greater good of people who weren't killed at the embryonic stage.

It's hard for me to resist commenting, while I've got the above quote in front of me, on her line about an embryo with the genetic defect leading to Down syndrome and an embryo without such a defect. It's hard to see how it's unconscionable to think those two embryos have the same moral status. It's hard even to see how it's conscionable to think the two embryos have a different moral status. Even those who immorally think it's perfectly all right to abort a fetus purely because it has Down syndrome (a view that a lot of pro-choicers think is horrific, I should add) do not justify such an argument on the view that such a fetus has less moral status than any other fetus. They justify it based on compassion for the fetus that, if they abort it, will never have the supposedly-awful life that they project Down syndrome people to have. There's never any suggestion of the fetus itself having less right to life. It's that view that I find unconscionable, and my reasons for finding it unconscionable make as much sense even on pro-choice premises.

There's one other argument in the quoted passage that makes no sense to me. A lot of people think there are some things that are wrong enough that it requires a huge amount of good being at stake to overcome the moral resistance to doing it so that it would be potentially all right. Killing a human being is one of these. On pro-life principles, it's not going to be easy to get around this problem for policies that lead to killing a lot of human beings whose existence only occurred in order to kill then, in order generate lines of stem cells that have some undefined possibility of leading to some good medical treatments if they can get around the tumor problem and if the more promising stem cell methods without the moral problems doesn't get there soon. That's a pretty clear moral argument, one that I admit involves controversial premises, but none of those premises involves a distinction between (a) making choices and (b) refraining from making choices so that God's can occur instead. The important distinction in the pro-life argument about embryos is that the moral prohibition on killing human life doesn't get easily overcome even if there's a great potential for good that comes from it, as anyone outraged at Joseph Mengele's research could attest to. It's not that making any old choice between two evils should lead to inaction, as if inaction means we don't interfere with God but action means we do. It's that doing some things would be so bad that even good consequences wouldn't be enough to overcome the moral wrongness of the action. You can only conclude that it's opposed to what God wants once you establish its moral wrongness. That's not part of the argument at all. It's the implication of the conclusion of the argument.

A U.S. District Court in California has ruled that it's unconstitutional for a public school teacher to say that creationism is superstitious nonsense. According to Supreme Court precedent going back to 1984, the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution doesn't mean merely what it says (which is just that the government can't set up a state religion) but extends even to government employees saying something that a reasonable person might take to count as endorsement of a particular perspective endorsing or disapproving religion. Add to that the conviction that creationism is religion, and you get this result. This does seem to me to be a direct application of current Supreme Court precedent and the standard view of creationism as religion (which the Supreme Court has endorsed, at least in one instance of the use of the term and a U.S. appeals court has declared to be applicable to intelligent design as well, although that judgment is only legally binding in one of the three federal court districts of Pennsylvania, just as this current decision is only legally binding on one of four federal court districts in California). [For the record, my detailed evaluation of the last case is here.]

Now I don't happen to think this is the right result, for several reasons. For one, the term 'creationism' can mean a lot of different things. It could mean the view that the the Earth is 6,000 years old, more precisely known as young-earth creationism. Some hold this view because they believe scripture teaches it, in which case it counts as a religious belief. Others claim to find it taught by science, in which case their support for it is of the kind that should count as science, even if it's bad science. The Supreme Court has declared that since it is taught in scripture, and science the scientific reasoning being presented is not good science, it can't be of the kind that should count as science. That claim has always seemed wrong to me, and I think this result is exactly what follows when you take such a view. If it's not of a scientific kind, then deriding it as bad science is also not of a scientific nature but of a religious nature (even if it's against a religious view).

But the term 'creationism' can also mean simply that there's a divine being who created. That's often a religious belief. It can also be a philosophical conclusion of arguments that have been present throughout the entire history of Western philosophy and have been held alongside religious beliefs by some but independently of religious beliefs by others. Thomas Aquinas, for example, presented arguments for God's existence that did not rely one bit on any religious beliefs. Lots of thinkers have believed in a creator without thinking they have any religious obligations to that creator. So even that kind of creationism isn't clearly religious, although it often is. Intelligent design arguments fall into this category if they conclude with the belief in a divine creator (rather than a more open conclusion, e.g. merely that there is some designer, which could be aliens if we're talking about biological ID arguments rather than cosmological fine-tuning ID arguments).

When a teacher says that creationism is superstitious nonsense, absent a context, it's not clear what that teacher means. It's certainly not obvious to me that it's a derision of particularly religious elements in any particular one of these things creationism can mean. But I do suspect that most people saying something like this aren't going to be sensitive to any of the distinctions I've just outlined, and they probably do intend to think of creationism as a religious teaching. Given some of the other statements this particular teacher made, I think this is especially likely in this case.

President Obama announced today that he's lifting the ban on government funding for the destruction of living, complete human organisms in the embryonic stage. In his speech announcing this change, the President declared the choice between faith and science to be a false dichotomy, thus insinuating that the objections from the pro-life side (which are, in the popular mind, associated with faith rather than the philosophical backing that they tend to have among most pro-lifers) are anti-science. He speaks of pro-life objections as coming from thoughtful and decent people, which might suggest that he doesn't think such views are anti-intellectual, as many of my philosophical colleagues typically assume them to be. But in presenting his view as the middle road between the anti-science and pro-faith view on one side and the pro-science and anti-faith view on the other, it's hard to avoid the suggestion that pro-life objections are anti-science.

This becomes clearer later in his speech. He sees this order as part of a larger move to restore the promotion of good science. He sees it as a recovery from Bush Administration resistance to good science. Aside from the fact that those who make such claims have a pretty distorted view of what the Bush Administration actually did and what policies it actually supported in general, the claim is particularly ludicrous in this case. The pro-life objection to destroying human embryos has nothing to do with science or anti-science. It's based on a philosophical conclusion, that human life at any stage has the moral status that human life at any other stage has. The most science can show is that what empirical features are true of human life at any stage, not what moral status something with certain empirical features must have. That's a philosophical question, not a scientific question, and it's one the current President claimed to be beyond his pay grade, so he can't consistently now claim that science does give the answer in as clear a way as this speech insists.

The argument for full moral status does not deny the empirically-observable facts about human development. Consciousness, complexity of thought, fully-formed organs, and other features sometimes thought to be necessary for full moral status are simply irrelevant, according to the standard pro-life picture, and nothing science observes will tell us otherwise. It takes a philosophical presupposition to resist that conclusion, a presupposition not shared by the pro-lifer. So labeling the pro-life view anti-science is grossly unfair and unbecoming for the President of the United States, particularly when he's just called such people thoughtful and decent. Ironically, Obama's own position is also based on an ideological assumption that there's nothing wrong with killing an embryonic human being, and yet he says in this speech that "scientific decisions" should be "based on facts, not ideology". I won't call this hypocrisy, since he may simply not know what he's doing, but his words and actions are certainly inconsistent.

There's a further insult to pro-lifers hidden in this speech. He says, "with proper guidelines and strict oversight, the perils can be avoided". What perils does he mean? It sounds as if he's saying that the ethical objections can be handled by applying proper guidelines and oversight, but it's hard to see how that would be unless the proper guidelines and oversight would prevent the killing of any embryos for the purpose of deriving stem cells, and that's exactly the policy he's trying to remove with this executive order. So it's as if he wants people to get the impression that proper oversight and guidelines will avoid all the objections being raised against this research, when in reality the only way to have guidelines and oversight of that nature would have been to retain the Bush policy, which was already the ingenious middle way between the two extremes, one that recognized the value of the research while not allowing further human organisms to be destroyed. Now President Obama wants to claim that spot by abandoning Bush's middle-ground view and going for the more extreme view that refuses to recognize any of the moral objections of a sizable minority of the American populace (something like 41% according to one poll).

Sam was interviewed for the local news broadcast tonight for a parent reaction to today's decision that there's still absolutely no reason to believe that autism is caused by vaccines. They included some brief family footage without the boys (with me in full mountain man mode) and a still shot of the boys' latest pictures. She's got a link to the video in her post.

Does anyone know if there's a way to download video in that kind of streaming format? I know there used to be a way to do it by changing the filename extension, but I don't remember how to do that, and I'm guessing it no longer works the same way. Update: Got it. Thanks, Jonathan I!

I've been wanting to post some thoughts on a recent piece by Richard Gray in The Telegraph on a new book by Adrian Desmond and James Moore that details Charles Darwin's anti-slavery motivations. I've been putting it off, but I decided it would be fitting to write it up on the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth. Gray points to some journals from Darwin's voyages on the Beagle and letters of family members that reveal his disgust at the practice of enslaving fellow humans and involvement in the abolitionist movement. This is so contrary to the false portrayal of him in some circles that applies later Social-Darwinist ideas to Darwin himself, something he never endorsed and would not have tolerated.

This wasn't all that surprising to me, even though I didn't know of his outright abolitionist views. After all, Darwin was such a strong supporter of the common descent of all humans in explicit opposition to views that had different ancestries of different races without a single common ancestor population for humans. Such views were around in his day and had been put to use in support of slavery. In this way Darwin was closer than some of his contemporaries to the view found among many Christians that three races had arisen from Noah's three sons, with further divergence later on at the tower of Babel.

There were alternative Christian (or, I would argue, sub-Christian) views at the time as well, most notably the outright racist idea borrowed from Islam that the curse on Ham's son Canaan was really a curse on all of Ham's descendants (or more precisely the darker-skinned ones, in contrast to Canaan's middle-eastern descendants in what became Israel, who were the actual group referred to in the Genesis curse). This view involved a number of curse elements not in the Genesis text that mentions Noah's curse on Canaan, including intellectual and moral inferiority to other races among the darker-skinned Hamites from Africa and the moral justification of slavery (rather than the text's simple report that Canaan would serve Shem and Japheth without saying whether it would be morally ok for those who enslaved them). So not all support for slavery came from the view that humans arose in different and unrelated races in different parts of the world completely independently. But it's easy to see how Darwin's opposition to that view was part of his motivation for providing an account of human origins that resisted such a view.

Two things have occurred to me while reflecting on this and reading some people's responses to it. One is that it's a clear case of being motivated to adopt a thesis based on ideology. It's true that Darwin's support for the view ultimately is supported by his actual reasons presented in his work. He does in fact give arguments for his view, and he expects people to accept his view based on those arguments rather than because of his ideological motivation. It's probably true that he accepted it at least in part based on those arguments and not because it happened to fit with his preferred social view. At least he believed the arguments supported the view. But he did have an ideological motivation.

The irony is that his intellectual descendants refuse to allow an exactly parallel situation with supporters of intelligent design, who present arguments for their view that don't rely on ideological assumptions, expect people to accept the view based on such arguments, and probably believe the view at least in part because of those arguments. At least they see those arguments supporting the view. Yet opponents of intelligent design regularly deride intelligent design proponents for having ideological motivations to want to find arguments for their theistic view. I haven't yet seen anyone of that ilk deriding Darwin for his parallel motivation. Perhaps that's merely because they happen to agree with Darwin's motivation but don't agree with theism. If so, then it's an unfair double-standard, because it can't be in principle intellectually dishonest to believe something you have arguments for but also have ideological reason to want to be true unless that's true of every case of believing something you have arguments for and ideological reason to want to be true. But it's common among those who are anti-ID to confuse the motivation for an argument with its theoretical basis, as I've pointed out before.

I was really looking forward to the eleventh Star Trek film, due out in a few months now. Casting Zachary Quinto as young Spock was brilliant, and I'll have to see the movie for that even if for no other reason, although I think loyalty to the franchise would be sufficient grounds to see it anyway. But I'm no longer holding my breath about whether it will be a good movie. If it is, I'll be pleasantly surprised, but I'm not expecting as much as I had. I was already a bit skeptical about a script written by the writers responsible for the recent Transformers movie, which was fun but was certainly not interesting script-wise. It was fun mostly because of the visuals. The main human character was painful to watch, and the storyline wasn't all that interesting given the richness of the Transformers material available in the comic books.

It was this interview with script writer Robert Orci that put a full stop to my optimism, though, for two reasons. The most important is that the assurances of producers that I've been seeing that it will be faithful to Trek canon for the fans while still doing something new for newcomers turn out to be a mere facade, given Orci's explanation of why he says it's faithful to canon. But I think the theory of time travel he endorses will also make the movie painful for me to watch, even if it won't be as painful as most Trek time travel stories are.

First, this is how Orci understands the time travel in this movie to work. He recognizes that there's a problem with any time travel theory that allows changing the past, although I don't think he makes it clear exactly why it's a problem. The real reason it's a problem is because if the past happened, then it follows that it didn't get changed, so when you go back you can't change it. If you can change it, then it's not the past. He gets into grandfather paradox issues, but I think those are derivative problems. The main reason is that it just makes no sense to think of changing the past. You can't make something that already was one way no longer be that way but be another way.

There's only one plausible way to interpret time travel stories that seem to change the past (other than the people didn't know what really happened and thus thought they changed something but actually only did what had already happened). If I travel back in time and do something that didn't happen, I must have traveled somewhere other than my past. If I ended up in an alternative time line somehow, then it makes sense to do what seems like changing the past. But the past of my time line doesn't change, and that time line continues on without me. The time line I entered always had me entering at that point and thinking I'd changed the past. This is the only way to make changing-the-past stories internally consistent, but it's still not a genuine change of the past, which the authors of those stories would usually not want.

So I applaud Orci for preferring this to the usual time travel approach. It's an improvement. There are still big problems with it, though. It would seem odd if time travel that doesn't change the past goes to our past and time travel when you do seem to change things ends up at other time lines. So a plausible version of this view must have every instance of time travel involve going to a similar time line, where it can generate a change that makes it diverge from the original one. The unwelcome consequence is that there isn't really anything that we can just flat-out call time travel. It's all Sliders-like world-jumping but with time travel too. You can never just time travel. That's an odd result.

Also, it does disastrous things to the fabric of a narrative in a fictional work that takes years and even decades to weave. Little did we know that the Star Trek canon time line isn't a constant world at all. Every time there's been time travel the characters have moved to a different world. We have no idea what happened after the events of City on the Edge of Forever in the time line that our characters began in. With such a view, it's not surprising that Orci wouldn't mind completely revising Star Trek history, because Spock of the TNG period going back to pre-TOS times and changing things would result in a different time line. That it violates canon is perfectly ok, even if the changes are drastic and far-reaching. It's a way to destroy the canon of Trek history while insisting that the original time line is untouched. It's crazy to think this won't anger fans who see Trek canon as something to build on, not to alter with impunity. It seems Orci wants to go by the letter of his time travel theory in good Pharisaical fashion to ignore the spirit of observing Star Trek canon while technically allowing it to remain in a time line that the movie doesn't follow (except to show that Spock and Nero will presumably never be in that time line again).

Worse still, Orci acts as if this theory of time travel is based on hard science, which just isn't true. The many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is certainly held by a handful of scientists working in the philosophical end of theoretical physics. It's a far cry from being the majority view, as far as I've been able to tell, though, and it's certainly nothing in the area of being demonstrable by experimentation. I think, in fact, that it's in principle completely impossible to verify or falsify it. There are several other interpretations of quantum mechanics, and the only reason I know of for preferring the many-worlds interpretation is that it avoids the most plausible fine-tuning arguments for an intelligent designer, not a very compelling scientific reason. If Orci is willing to reinterpret all of Trek canon because of misinformation about what science teaches, that's unfortunate. I hope I'm wrong, but I'm hardly confident with the future of the franchise resting partly in his hands, judging by what this interview reveals. I thought maybe they would finally have an odd movie better than some of the even movies. I'm not so sure now.

Barack Obama should not appoint Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to head the Environmental Protection Agency, as has been reported that he might do. This is for totally non-partisan reasons. I don't expect Obama to appoint a moderate on the environment. I would hope he doesn't choose someone who regularly presents inaccurate factual information and gives credence to discredited studies that feed panic.

He makes radical statements and then stands by them while under public criticism. For example, he claimed in 2002 that factory farming is more of a threat to American democracy than Osama bin Laden and refused to moderate his comment under pressure from those who called him on it. He has published criticisms of the Bush administration riddled with lies, distortions, and ad hominem attacks. He accepts conspiracy theories about Republicans stealing the 2004 election.

But the most important reason for me is alarmism about autism and vaccines, which is downright anti-scientific. The most that's been shown about autism and vaccines is that the symptoms of autism tend to be noticeable around an age when several vaccines tend to be scheduled. Correlation isn't causation, and in this case there's an obvious explanation for the correlation. The symptoms begin appearing at an age when, for completely independent reasons, certain vaccines are given. So Kennedy does nothing more than feed anti-scientific panic. Parents of autistic kids hear this stuff, accept it without looking into it, and end up treating their kids as having been stolen from them. Instead of accepting their kids for who they are, they spend all their time pretending they don't have any anymore and trying to make other parents feel guilty for causing their children's autism by taking steps to protect them and other kids from dangerous and life-threatening microbes. They seek to divert funds into wild goose chases instead of recognizing that autism has at least a significant genetic component (which is now very well established) and that the only thing that will likely be available to help their kids is to give them intensive help, something very hard to do if you spend all your time chasing windmills in the political blame game. Never mind the fact that they're risking their kids' lives by not vaccinating them, which has already led to a resurgence in diseases that had been nearly eradicated.

Anyone who has any sympathy for the many complaints, more from the left but also from the right, about the Bush Administration's attitude toward science should oppose Kennedy as an appointment for any important government position but especially to head the EPA. [And I note that some prominent anti-ID bloggers are avoiding hypocrisy on this issue by opposing Kennedy.] If he goes forward with this appointment, it's a huge political mistake. It will mean people can call him anti-science in more ways than just on abortion (see #3). But it's even worse as a policy mistake, given how much damage someone like Kennedy could do.

Avery Tooley has posted a response to an argument that the high incidence of low birth weight among black Americans is a sign that slavery's legacy still has a biological impact. There are places the argument isn't careful enough. Avery points out one. It would be more helpful to figure out what's different between cases of blacks with low birth weight and blacks with more normal birth weight than simply to notice a difference on average between blacks and whites. The details of the particular cases might make all the difference.

But there are other problems with the argument also. [What follows comes from a comment I left on Avery's post.] They notice that blacks in the U.S. have lower birth weight than blacks born in Africa living in the U.S. But that's the same comparison used in the IQ debate, and it's still a debated comparison. Thomas Sowell, John McWhorter, and others cite it to show that black kids in the U.S. don't have as high a cultural expectation to develop their natural potential in certain kinds of intelligence. But those on the other side of the issue point out that the immigrants to the U.S. are self-selecting. They're more inclined to be smarter and harder-working to begin with. Perhaps they're more inclined to be healthier too, since healthier people are more likely to be positive and looking to improve their lot in life. Perhaps.

Where that response fails with IQ is that second-generation studies show that the drive to do well falls rapidly among immigrants' children and especially grandchildren if the children weren't themselves born here). That means it's cultural in some way, but that cultural impact could be because racism gets them down, from cultural opposition to acting white, or some combination of those and maybe other things too. But it's clearly not entirely a biological thing, even one resulting from the effects of slavery. So the question is whether birth weight falls rapidly in the second generation of black immigrants. Then we'd have some sense of whether it's a biological effect that continues to the next generation or a cultural effect, which could again have several explanations, perhaps many of which contribute to a larger story. I'd have to say that I'm skeptical of this proposed biological effect myself.

Commenter Mafarmerga couldn't understand why I think the decision in the Dover, PA trial in Pennsylvania was grossly incompetent, so I thought I'd catalogue my reasons in a separate post.

I should note for the record that I'm not questioning whether the result of the decision was right, and I'm not commenting at all on some matters in the case (such as the ridiculous disclaimer they wanted to put on the textbooks). I'm merely pointing out that many of the arguments the opinion presents are not just bad but complete howlers. They're not the sort of thing that reasonable people can disagree about, and there are plenty of arguments that I do put in that category, including some on issues I have a very firm view on (such as abortion). To be in that category, you have to begin from different moral premises or different views of rights or justice. Many of the views defended in this opinion are simply unreasonable. Only an irrational or ignorant person could defend them. They involve misstatements, misrepresentations, ignorance of the history of philosophy, and simply fallacious inferences. I wouldn't give them a passing grade on a philosophy exam. I'll number my points to keep them separate in my mind as I go.

1. Jones says a reasonable student would see teaching ID as an endorsement of religion because religious people have said similar things. But this argument is pretty insufficient. It's true that so-called scientific creationists have talked about gaps in evolution, and one version of ID can be thought of as explaining things unexplained by evolution. But that doesn't mean ID is the same thing as scientific creationism, and it doesn't mean ID is religion. That's just a non sequitur.Saying there are unexplained things in a scientific theory isn't endorsement of religion just because one religion-derived view with scientific language uses a similar argument. You could never arrive at creation science unless you started with the assumptions of certain way of reading Genesis, a particular religion. ID requires neither a particular way of reading a particular religious text or any particular religious views at all. There's a huge difference.

2. Jones accepts John Haught's claim that design arguments are religious, citing Thomas Aquinas as someone who held the view. Yet Aquinas would be the first to insist that his design argument is not remotely based on religious revelation. He distinguishes between general revelation and special revelation, and he says you can't know special revelation is true apart from faith. You can know general revelation is true just by using reason. His design argument is the Fifth Way, and the Five Ways are five of his arguments for the existence of God starting from general revelation, using reason as available to anyone without the use of faith. The argument is much older than Aquinas anyway. It goes back to Plato at least, who does not use it to support any religious beliefs, and Xenophon puts it in the mouth of Socrates, who was put on trial for rejecting the religion of his time. Whatever Socrates was up to was more properly philosophical.

3. He makes much of the fact that Aquinas notes that the designer is the same being most people call God. Aquinas doesn't say that step of the argument can be known by reason, at least if that means concluding that this being has all the characteristics of God as revealed in scripture. Each argument he gives offers one or a few divine attributes as demonstrable, and then he concludes that you can know by reason that a being with many of the divine attributes exists. He doesn't think you can show that God is a Trinity or that God is of one essence with the human being we call Jesus. He does think you can show a necessarily existent, omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good being who explains all the contingent things found within the universe, who designed things at some level in order to explain the purposed appearance of things. That happens to be true of the being he believes in by faith, and he thinks they're the same being, but he doesn't argue for this based on religion. His arguments aren't religious arguments. It's simple historical ignorance on Haught's part to claim that they're religious, assuming Jones represents Haught fairly to begin with.

I know this is one of my pet peeves, but it's a good pet peeve to have, since far too many people misrepresent the abortion debate as being about when life begins. When life begins is a scientific matter, and anyone who recognizes that should have a hard time seeing the plain meaning of Joe Biden's statement as follows as outright endorsement of relativism about science:

MR. BROKAW: If Senator Obama comes to you and says, "When does life begin? Help me out here, Joe," as a Roman Catholic, what would you say to him

SEN. BIDEN: I'd say, "Look, I know when it begins for me." It's a personal and private issue. For me, as a Roman Catholic, I'm prepared to accept the teachings of my church. But let me tell you. There are an awful lot of people of great confessional faiths--Protestants, Jews, Muslims and others--who have a different view. They believe in God as strongly as I do. They're intensely as religious as I am religious. They believe in their faith and they believe in human life, and they have differing views as to when life--I'm prepared as a matter of faith to accept that life begins at the moment of conception. But that is my judgment. For me to impose that judgment on everyone else who is equally and maybe even more devout than I am seems to me is inappropriate in a pluralistic society. And I know you get the push back, "Well, what about fascism?" Everybody, you know, you going to say fascism's all right? Fascism isn't a matter of faith. No decent religious person thinks fascism is a good idea.

I'm very sure that Biden didn't mean what he said. He surely doesn't think scientific truth is all a matter of what you happen to believe any more than Nancy Pelosi thinks life doesn't really begin at conception when she quotes church fathers against the current Roman Catholic view (thus in effect quoting religion against science, ironic as that is from the highest-ranked (in one measure, anyway) Democrat in the United States. Both of them mean to be talking about moral status and perhaps personhood. But it's not at all clear what exactly he intended to say about it. He obviously couldn't have meant some kind of thoroughgoing moral relativism because of his last statement. What generates the relativist-sounding move is not that it's about moral views, where a moral relativism of some sort then kicks in once you enter moral territory. He both has some notion of what a decent religious person is (which sounds objective, even though it uses a value-laden term 'decent') and some notion that a view has to be held by a decent religious person to count as appropriate in a pluralistic society, which he takes to rule out Hitler's fascism.

What I'm least sure of is what he really thinks about all those religiously held beliefs. When he says he knows when it begins for him, does he want to say that any deeply-held religious belief is true for the person who holds it, in which case there's really no religious truth, just religious feelings? Or does "I know when it begins for me" function as an equivalent expression to "I know when I think it begins". It's a bit awkward to take it that way, but it would be something like "As for me, I know when it begins, but I'm not going to expect others to understand that because it involves faith, and I respect their conflicting religious traditions.

Is that overly charitable? Keep in mind that this is Joe Biden.

In the media feeding frenzy on Sarah Palin in the last six days, some completely inappropriate and ridiculous questions have dominated the coverage I've paid attention to (which has consisted mostly of NPR, as it happens). Many of the questions getting major play would never be asked of a man, and some are actually illegal to ask at job interviews. But there have been a few genuine issues in the mix. I want to look at one that almost everyone reporting on it has gotten wrong, both in the mainstream media and on blogs (and it's taken me a lot of work to keep inaccuracies and misrepresentations out of her Wikipedia article).

It stems from a brief answer in a political debate when she was running for governor, which she was able to follow up on in an interview the next day. I have found exactly one source that details her response, although it doesn't actually include the exact wording of the question, exact wording that might actually be very important. Here is the exchange during the gubernatorial debate:

The volatile issue of teaching creation science in public schools popped up in the Alaska governor's race this week when Republican Sarah Palin said she thinks creationism should be taught alongside evolution in the state's public classrooms. Palin was answering a question from the moderator near the conclusion of Wednesday night's televised debate on KAKM Channel 7 when she said, "Teach both. You know, don't be afraid of information. Healthy debate is so important, and it's so valuable in our schools. I am a proponent of teaching both."

I'd love to know what the question was, because I don't know what her answer means otherwise. Debate between both is a good thing. Both of what? The author of the article says creation science and evolution, but I don't trust a newspaper writer to be careful with important distinctions. Some people call intelligent design arguments creation science, despite there being a world of difference between the two categories. One is science done very badly. The other is a long-standing philosophical argument form that goes back to Plato and Xenophon whose current versions include a premise based on scientific fact but whose conclusion might be questioned, because it's an inference to the best explanation, and that sort of argument is by its very nature only probabilistic, and these particular arguments (depending on the version) can admit of alternative explanations that others will argue are the actual best explanation. So I'd like to know what they were discussing before I can interpret even her first sentence.

There's also an issue of what she means by teaching it. Does she mean (a) requiring it in the curriculum, (b) allowing teachers to include it in the curriculum, or (c) allowing teachers to discuss it if students happen to bring up the issue in class? The same article, which as I said is the only one a serious search could turn up from the time, goes on to describe her interview the next day, giving some much-needed clarification on the second issue. In short, she holds (c). (Unfortunately, it doesn't help very much on the first issue.)

In an interview Thursday, Palin said she meant only to say that discussion of alternative views should be allowed to arise in Alaska classrooms: "I don't think there should be a prohibition against debate if it comes up in class. It doesn't have to be part of the curriculum." She added that, if elected, she would not push the state Board of Education to add such creation-based alternatives to the state's required curriculum. Members of the state school board, which sets minimum requirements, are appointed by the governor and confirmed by the Legislature. "I won't have religion as a litmus test, or anybody's personal opinion on evolution or creationism," Palin said. Palin has occasionally discussed her lifelong Christian faith during the governor's race but said teaching creationism is nothing she has campaigned about or even given much thought to.

My mutants and race piece is in its second draft now, which I'll be sending off tomorrow. I do have some questions that I hope some familiar with recent X-Men occurrences might be able to help with. One of the comments I got back from the editors is that I was taking mutants to be literal mutants, which would mean genes mutated and led to their powers, and these genes would be different genes, genes having something to do with the abilities they end up getting. Nightcrawler's fur would be related to the kinds of genes that produce body hair. Cyclops' force beams would have some connection to genes that affect the eyes. Wolverine's healing factor would come from mutated genes that ordinarily relate to the immune system.

Well, the problem with this, according to my editor, is that the third X-Men movie has a completely different explanation of mutants. They're aren't literal mutants in the sense the term is usually used in biology. Instead, they have this one gene in common. In the movie, they call it the Mutant-X gene. At least that's how it sounds. I later found out this actually does appear in the comic books after I stopped reading them in the mid-90s, and they call it the X-Gene. So maybe it's not the Mutant-X gene in the movie but the mutant X-Gene.

This explanation is just downright stupid. How is it that this one gene explains the variety of powers across all mutants? Also, how did one gene just suddenly appear in all these unrelated people? Whoever came up with this idea knows pretty much nothing about genetics. I did some looking around in Wikipedia, and I found some blog posts about the mutant gene (including this one, which was somewhat helpful). Apparently the Beast, in House of M #2, says the X-Gene is technically a cluster of genes. That's a little better, I suppose, because it allows for different genes to be part of the cluster. Also, the X-Gene was supposed to be scattered throughout humanity but only activated in certain people, and those are the mutants. That's how humans can produce mutant children.

Given that mutants sometimes produce children with the same powers and sometimes end up with children with different or no powers, it seems to me that the X-Gene must not guarantee any particular powers but simply means there's a potential for powers. Without the X-Gene, there will be no powers. When the Scarlet Witch removes the X-Gene from the majority of mutants and the entirety of non-mutants, all the mutants without the gene end up becoming normal humans. So my suspicion is that this would have to be an activator gene (or cluster of genes), and what determines the specific powers is something else. The X-Gene itself is simply an activator, one that probably just isn't turned on in normal humans but is turned on in mutants.

If this is the official explanation in the comic books and the movies, then it changes significantly how my argument in this chapter will work. I think my conclusion still holds, but the argument for it is completely different from what it was in the first draft. So what I'm wondering is if this seems to fit with the recent comic books, since I haven't read any of them. I may have some of them, since I continued to buy them for a little while after I stopped reading them, and I did inherit some more even later from my brother that I haven't read. I don't think I have any House of M, though. I just looked and didn't see any, even though I thought I had some. So what I'd love is if someone could direct me to specific issues where this stuff is discussed, and then I can see if I might have them or if someone could confirm that this is pretty much the official explanation of mutants at this point. If it is, I need to focus on this. If it's not, and it's still sort of up in the air with the more traditional explanation still possible, then I can keep most of what I've written and just add some more on the new explanation.

Update: Someone else has arrived at a similar view, but it assumes one X-gene. If we trust the Beast's analysis, you could make it much more complex, with several genes contributing to activation of the powers, and perhaps all or a certain number of them need to be present. Also, the Celestials, in seeding the human populace with the necessary genetic material for mutations of this sort, might not have included anything like the latent genes to be activated or the activation genes but might simply have placed the necessary genetic materials, with the necessary factors for those eventually to reach a point where they do what happens later on. This would explain a few isolated mutants throughout history and a much more concentrated appearance of mutants in the late 20th century. I like the suggestion that mutates (who get powers later in life due to some stimulus like radiation) have something else activate their latent powers in the way that the X-Gene does with mutants.

Kristina Chew at Autism Vox discusses the latest Stanley Fish post at the NYT blog. For those who are unfamiliar with Fish, he's probably the most prominent American postmodernist in the academy today. He doesn't really accept any truth about normative matters, at least nothing independent of the conceptual system of those who are doing the thinking and speaking. There's no standard of morality, justice, fairness, impartiality, goodness, badness, or anything else in the general vicinity.

There are clearly things he doesn't like, and according to his view there's nothing that I can say to criticize him for holding negative attitudes about certain behavior, at least if that criticism is to be legitimately what I think criticism is. There's also nothing he can do to criticize me legitimately. Technically, if criticism is allowable within my scheme then it's ok for me to criticize, and the same is true for him. But such criticism isn't what we normally mean when we criticize. It in fact has no truth content, if truth is about the facts about right and wrong, good and evil.

So it's not surprising that I'm going to find Fish's comments on autism to be the most unhelpful ones I've ever seen. I prefer those who think they can "get their child back" (as if the kid in front of them either isn't their child or isn't a child at all) by engaging in a certain diet or preferring death to autism by refusing to keep their children safe with vaccinations. At least those people have something to talk about. They admit to holding views that can be subject to examination, even if many of them ignore any such information that might refute their preconceptions.

I think there's a very interesting argument to be had about whether autistic people are disabled to the point where they would be better off being healed or whether they're fine the way they are and should be taken seriously when they insist that they wouldn't accept a cure if it were found. Fish is right to point out the parallels with deafness, since many similar issues arise there. That's a good discussion to have, and you may end up answering differently for the two conditions. They're not exactly parallel.

But here's an argument that just won't do. Pretend that there are no norms and that any discussion of someone as abnormal is just a power play. Then argue that it's illegitimate to call people abnormal because there's no agreed-upon notion of abnormality. Fish doesn't quite draw that conclusion, but I think it's what he's suggesting. The reason he doesn't draw it is because he's too smart to do so. He knows it would be inconsistent, because such a notion relies on what legitimate and illegitimate, and he can't allow such a dichotomy. It can't be illegitimate to call people abnormal, because that presupposes that some things are legitimate and others aren't, and any such claim is really just a power play. Of course, he doesn't really avoid the problem by saying that. Calling something a power play means he's positively attributing to it a property and saying that the person doing it has a certain motivation. That's something his view doesn't allow him to do, since you can never have access to someone's intentions.

So you're left with a big muddle, as is always the case with a thoroughgoing relativism that's supposed to apply to everything and yet by its own standards can't apply to everything, since it's all relative. As I said, I'd rather see people citing falsehoods that can be responded to. I'm more comfortable writing a post like this, because it's in my field. Fish's view is a philosophical one, and I'm at home pointing out the inconsistencies of his Sophistical view (and I mean that literally; his view is a variant of the one Plato summarizes from Protagoras the Sophist in his Theaetetus dialogue). Nevertheless, I have much more respect for the ignorant, anti-intellectual posturing of Jenny McCarthy on this issue than I do for the very smart but very foolish (in the biblical sense) Stanley Fish.

I do have to say, though, that I appreciate his intellectual honesty in admitting that the argument he presents applies as much to NAMBLA and laws against murder as it does to racial or gay rights issues. He denies endorsing the argument at the end. But he says there's no theoretical difference between the NAMBLA or murder argument and the racial discrimination argument. The logic is the same, he says. He's right if you start with his premise that all sense or normality, goodness, morality, and justice are mere social constructs that have no basis in genuine moral truths. Without that, you really can't distinguish between what's wrong with a man who gets a young boy to go through the motions of consenting to sex and what's perfectly ok with interracial marriage. You're done once you accept Fish's premise, and there's no room for debate or even for drawing conclusions, which is why he doesn't do so. As I said, he's very smart compared to the average college student relativist, who doesn't know when to stop and gets tied up in knots very easily. But what he's doing is just as foolish, perhaps more so because he's got less excuse. After all, he's the smart, privilege, better-educated one.

I haven't seen Expelled, and I probably won't, but I've read some reviews of it across the spectrum of thought about design arguments and the particular species of them that people are calling Intelligent Design. It's been a nice occasion for everyone to say pretty much the same old things, with virtually all opponents of ID misrepresenting it pretty drastically amidst a few legitimate complaints and many supporters overstating their case, confusing some of the same basic distinctions ID opponents regularly confuse, and setting up science against religion rather than what the argument itself is supposed to suggest, which is that science and religion are in fact compatible.

So this film has drawn out much of the same nonsense that usually gets thrown around. Yet occasionally some real gem pops up that strikes me as insightful and helpful, and this time around I see that in Mollie Hemingway's wonderful critique of the media coverage surrounding this film. Several interesting points stand out:

1. She notices that the mainstream media have largely ignored this. That seems right from what I've seen. She only cites two examples, one that she doesn't think got the film quite right and the other that even I can see gets it completely wrong.
2. She compares it in style and tone to the strident, ideologically-colored, often fact-challenged documentaries of Al Gore and Michael Moore. Since I've seen none of the above, I can't comment, but it's an interesting suggestion.
3. She points out that Moore and Gore have garnered far more mainstream media coverage, not just of their documentaries, but of the issues their documentaries are about.
4. She also takes note of opinion media's much more substantial treatment of the film, and I think that's even much more obviously true when you take into account blogs (which she doesn't mention).

She doesn't really draw the conclusion that's just begging to be drawn and that I think she's suggesting. Whether a strident, ideological, fact-questioned documentary garners media attention and brings about a significant discussion of a certain issue seems to depend on what it's about or what ideology is behind it. It's unclear which it is in this case, which may be why she doesn't draw the conclusion explicitly. Is it because it's an ideology that's associated with conservatism and in particular religious conservatism? Or is it because of the issue rather than the viewpoint? Would a documentary by Michael Moore on the idiocy of intelligent design have the same no-impact result as this film has had in the major media? Would a conservative documentary starring Ben Stein but on health care or the Iraq war have the same attention Moore got with his films on those subjects?

My suspicion is that the answer is no in both cases, which if true means it's the ideology and not the topic that has made the difference. That doesn't demonstrate the point the documentary aims to make (which is about academic freedom), but it does demonstrate a similar point about which views are considered kosher by the establishment media.

Scientists keep discovering the number 10^122 occurring in mathematical relationships in the natural world [hat tip: GeekPress]. The last time this happened, it was when 10^4 kept appearing in both electromagnetic and strong/weak nuclear contexts, and it turns out that it signaled a common relationship between the two. So scientists are concluding that the best explanation is some common, underlying factor that explains why the same ratio keeps coming up.

Now here's what I'm wondering. If we're just one universe among a huge number, and the constants in each universe are different, then we just happen to be the universe with these constants. So why assume some common explanation for why the constants are the ones we've got? Doesn't the multiple universe explanation make the search for a common explanation otiose? At least that's what you'll hear if you try to make an inference to the best explanation when the constants happen to be in the narrow range that allow for the development of life. So what's different about this inference to the best explanation when both arguments involve what cosmological constants we happen to find ourselves with?

It's amazing how often I find people using the language of design to describe evolutionary explanations. Consider the following account of how chameleons evolved the ability to change colors [hat tip: Geek Press]:

However, the reason why they first evolved this ability to flash bright colours was previously unclear.

Scientists report in the journal Plos Biology that it was to allow them to signal to other chameleons.

Pay attention to how that's worded. They evolved the ability to allow them to do something rather than to allow them to do something else. It doesn't say that they developed the ability by random chance, and the ones who had it survived or reproduced more because the ability benefited them in survival or reproduction. It says that they evolved it so that they would be able to stand out among other chameleons. This looks like a purpose statement to me.

Consider also this similarly-framed explanation:

Scientists think vertebrae evolved to help our ancient predecessors swim more powerfully by stiffening the body so attached muscles could generate more force.

This is the language of design. It makes sense to speak of something evolving to help the species accomplish something only if there was something that guided the evolutionary process with such a purpose in mind.

Scientists talk like this all the time. So do philosophers. I heard Kwame Anthony Appiah on NPR's Talk of the Nation this afternoon, and he slipped into this kind of design talk when giving an evolutionary example.

We are exquisitely designed by, I believe, evolution, but I don't want to get into that argument, to be very sensitive to other people's responses to our behavior and to other people's interests. Little children, tiny children, will respond to pain in those around them by seeking to comfort them, often before they can barely speak. So we're exquisitely attuned to one another....

People complain that it's not science when theists draw the conclusion that such language actually implies. If design has occurred, then someone has intended some result. Such views won't even get the honor of being recognized as versions of the classic philosophical argument that appears in many introductory philosophy books. If it's a philsophical argument, then it can't be the religious dogma that many so people are so heavily invested in pretending it is, so there's no chance the anti-ID political movement will recognize these arguments for what they are.

But then people who have no interest whatsoever in theistic or design explanations will slip into design talk whenever they're trying to explain how some beneficial characteristic evolved. Despite all the effort trying to resist any true design in nature, design talk keeps appearing in evolutionary explanations. It's as if we're subconsciously inclined to find design in things even if we consciously strive to avoid doing so. Given the premises of naturalism, this kind of talk is hopelessly confused. Since I'm no naturalist, I'm happy to accept that there is indeed something that such design talk refers to -- divine purposes. But I don't think those who accept naturalistic explanations of the universe have the intellectual right to speak this way. You can't just help yourself to design talk in science if design is something fundamentally unscientific and undetectable by science.

I was reading an old entry from 2008central.net that I'd saved in my RSS reader until I had more time. It includes some of the Democratic presidential candidates' discussions of religion. I have a few comments on three of the candidates, but I'm going to treat them in separate posts, starting with John Edwards.

O’BRIEN: What do you say to all the people — and there are millions of people who go to church every Sunday and who are told very clearly by their pastors that, in fact, the Earth was created in six days, that it’s about creationism? Are those people wrong? Are their pastors wrong?

EDWARDS: No. First of all, I grew up in the church and I grew up as a Southern Baptist, was baptized in the Baptist Church when I was very young, a teenager at the time. And I was taught many of the same things. And I think it’s perfectly possible to make our faith, my faith belief system consistent with a recognition that there is real science out there and scientific evidence of evolution. I don’t think those things are inconsistent. I think a belief in God and a belief in Christ, in my case, is not in any way inconsistent with that.

Is that even coherent? I mean everything after the "No" is coherent, but given the question asked, and his initial answer, can he coherently say what he goes on to say? I'm having trouble imagining how unless Edwards is a relativist about religious truth such that these people are correct in their six-day creationism while he is correct in his acceptance of evolution as consistent with his faith.

One reason I worry that that's going on is his answer to the question about gay marriage. He goes on to say that he has a personal belief against gay marriage but doesn't think he could as president enforce his personal religious views. I'm sure that's how many Christians will view these statements, but I think it's a mistake.

One quarter of adult NYC dwellers have elevated mercury levels. I'd like to know the rate of autism incidence in NYC as compared with other places with lower rates of elevated mercury. Does anyone know how to find such numbers?

Geekpress linked to an interesting article on computer poker programs that are now becoming competitive with human poker champions. They're talking as if this is a level beyond Deep Blue for chess, and there's something to that. What's involved in beating a human poker champion is way beyond beating a human chess champion, at least when it comes to programming a computer. Still, there's something that seemed fairly problematic in how they're measuring the success of these computer poker programs, at least from how the article's presentation seemed to me to describe it. (I won't rule out the possibilities that unclarities in the article have disguised what they're doing.)

One crucial thing the article doesn't distinguish is very important for poker. It appears that some computer programs can play against some human players and play competitively against them. That's one measurement of how good a computer poker program is. But a more interesting measure would be to compare (a) how well the computer programs do against people with (b) how well the human players do against people. In other words, could the computer programs beat a novice like me as easily as the human champions do? Could they beat a champion as often as another champion could? Simply showing that they can beat champions almost as often as the champions beat them is something. But I'd be interested to see if they can handle human opponents as well as human players do. That seems to require a different play setup than just having all the humans play all the computer programs.

A while back, Stephen Colbert had biologist Ken Miller, who teaches at my alma mater (although I never took a class with him), on his show to talk about evolution and intelligent design. Miller is known for being a devout Catholic who supports the scientific consensus of contemporary evolutionary theory. It's a a strange interview. One of Miller's main points is that people who deny evolution can't explain why we need flu shots every year, since the flu virus evolves to the point that old vaccines won't cut it. This is, of course, a terrible straw man argument, because even the most vehement critics of evolution don't deny evolution within a species, what they call microevolution.

But one argument struck me as particularly strange. Miller seems to think waste is a problem for intelligent design, since God designed things that went extinct. Oops! Fossils show God's mistakes. Miller thinks he has a higher view. God set in motion a process that gave rise to everything on this planet, and it shows God's greatness that he used evolutionary processes. So he has a theological reason for favoring the non-ID model.

But wait a minute. Doesn't the theistic evolution model have the same problem? Aren't there all these things that resulted from the process that God initiated that got left behind? If God set in motion the processes that lead to evolution of more complex species, you still get species that result from that process that die out. You get waste. Did God intend that result? If so, then the same problem arises for Miller. Something God designed died out. If not, then we seem to have a denial of God's purposes in creation. Is this the idea common in deism that God sort of set things up but didn't concern himself with the details of how it turned out? That's not very Catholic of Miller, who claims to be a pious, orthodox Catholic. But those seem to be his only options. Either there are forms that were designed by God that no longer exist, or those forms were not designed by God and do not fall under his plan of providence.

So it turns out that this is really an argument against theism and a doctrine of providence, not an argument against intelligent design. This is just puzzling. I don't know Miller's views on providence, but it seems to me that his argument is misdirected either way it turns out, and it should apply as well to any theistic evolutionary view that holds to the theological positions of the Roman Catholic Church. It's really just a particular case of the problem of evil, and I don't really know his views on that issue either. But whatever else is true, this isn't a problem for ID any more than it is for theistic evolution.

Update: Check out the excellent comments on Ted Poston's Prosblogion post on this subject. I'm in full agreement with almost all of the comments to this point (7:42 EST Aug 1, 2007), and some of them are making some of the points I wanted to make in this post but in a much better way. There are also some considerations there that hadn't occurred to me at all but seem right.

[Cross-posted at Prosblogion]

At Prosblogion, Trent Dougherty links to an entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy by Michael Ruse called Creationism. The SEP is usually very good, and I have to say that Ruse is much more reasonable on these issues than many in the anti-ID movement. He understands the positions he's criticizing a little more accurately and usually represents them a little more fairly. Any philosopher knows a lot more philosophy than Richard Dawkins, but Ruse stands out as someone willing to discuss the philosophical issues as philosophy, while many in the debate are dismissing them as other things (usually as religion or as bad science).

But this piece reveals that in some ways he does display a number of symptoms that I find throughout the anti-ID movement. Trent calls the article deplorable, and I do wonder how this got published in the SEP. It's not as bad as anything you'd find in Daniel Dennett or Richard Dawkins, but it's actually worse in some ways than the Wikipedia entries on these issues, which I don't have a very high opinion of.

Devin Carpenter asks in a comment why Trent finds the piece deplorable, and I decided to type up my reasons, which quickly got long enough that I didn't want to leave it as a comment. So here are some of why I consider this to be a fairly bad Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy entry. This is only after a quick skim and then once through with a closer read, so I may have misunderstood him in some places (although a couple times I think he may be at fault if I did). But I'd be very surprised to have gotten him that wrong on all these issues. Some of these are more minor and may well just be pet peeves of mine, but I think a number are much more serious. I'm listing them in the order they occurred to me as I was reading through the article more carefully.

1. He claims that six-day creationists are enthusiastic about Intelligent Design, which is simply false if he's referring to the arguments of Dembski, Behe, and Johnson (which his later section on ID makes likely). Most creationists in the narrow sense do not support ID arguments of that sort, since they think such arguments concede too much to evolutionist and to old-earth creationism. The ID leaders want to include six-day creationists, but they've had a hard time winning them over.

From Hillary Clinton's statement on the Bush veto of the stem cell funding bill: 

You know, later today, apparently, the president will veto a bill passed by Congress to support stem cell research.

Now, this is research that...holds such promise for devastating diseases. Yesterday, I met with a group of children suffering from juvenile diabetes. I co-chair the Alzheimer's caucus in the Senate. I've worked on helping to boost funding for research to look for cures and a way to prevent so many devastating diseases. And we know that stem cell research holds the key to our understanding more about what we can do. So let me be very clear: When I am president, I will lift the ban on stem cell research.

This is just one example of how the President puts ideology before science, politics before the needs of our families, just one more example of how out of touch with reality he and his party have become. And it's just one more example as to why we're going to send them packing in January 2009, and return progressive leadership to the White House. 

No mention of the president's actual reasons for vetoing the bill. No mention that a large percentage of U.S. voters have strong moral objections to their tax dollars funding the deaths of human embryos. The way she tells the story, there are the people who want to help look for cures for diseases, and there are those who are just mean and prefer that sick people to get better.

Further, she gives a very clear implicature that there is a ban on stem cell research by talking about lifting it. But there is no such ban. Period. There is a ban on federal funding for such research, but no one has ever banned the research itself, at least in this country, and several states are now funding the research. So she misrepresents the position of the president and much of the opposing party, and then she says something about the current policy that's pretty much the moral equivalent of a lie.

Next, she makes it sound as if this is ideology and politics on one side and science and the needs of families on the other side. Yet there's no need to deny anything that scientific study has shown on the issue in order to argue against federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. There is information that each side of the debate downplays (e.g. the successes of adult stem cells, the potential for other methods of getting stem cells, and so on). Both sides want to tilt the evidence a little in their direction, but there's no way she can make the argument that her side is always on the side of science, while the other side is always against it. Neither case is based on science, in fact, since both views can admit the same scientific information. The real issue is about whether certain kinds of scientific research are immoral, and a lot of people do think this particular kind is thoroughly immoral, while others think there's absolutely nothing wrong with it.

I received a very interesting question via email from Patrick Chan:

According to the theory of evolution, why couldn't future man be materially different from present day or modern man, such that he is no longer distinguishable from modern man (by "materially," I include genetic and biochemical differences which may or may not manifest themselves physically)?  As far as I can tell, it's possible according to evolution.

And perhaps as a result of such differences, why couldn't future man differ markedly from modern man in other ways?  Maybe future man will have a different psychological makeup and emotional life, for instance, and thus be subject to and experience different temptations, sufferings, etc. than what modern man experiences.

What I'm getting at is that it's possible Christ himself might not share with future man what he shares with modern man.  It's possible Christ would no longer be "one of us" in the sense that he would no longer be able to share in future man's "humanity," assuming future man can at least still be considered part of the mammalian species homo sapien.  (Of course, if future man is so different that he can no longer be classified as a homo sapien, then that raises other questions.)  This would undercut Scripture (e.g. Heb. 2:14-18; 4:15-16).

In other words, if it's possible for man to evolve into something different than he is today -- whether it's only a slight difference or whether it's as jarringly dissimilar as depicted in a movie like 2001: A Space Odyssey (in which man is a different species) -- then what would that make Christ in his incarnation as a man?  On the evolutionary tree of life, modern man, and therefore Christ himself since he came as a modern man, could very well be to future man what an ape-man might be to us.  Evolutionarily speaking, Christ in his incarnation would be a different being than future man.  I'll not mince words: as far as I can tell, it's possible that the evolutionary equivalent of an ape-man might have died for your sins.

My response (addressed to him, since I first wrote it in an email response to him):

I can't remember where I found these fascinating musical tests. It was probably from one of Joe Carter's long posts on random things. One measures how fine-tuned your tone recognition is. Another is about remembering a rhythmic pattern and recognizing whether a second pattern is the same one, and a third does a similar thing for a short passage whose melody or harmony may or may not have changed.

It was last week sometime, and I didn't record my scores. I was definitely above average on the pitch discrimination test, but I don't think I could be a piano tuner without a tuning fork, because it doesn't measure perfect pitch, just relative pitch. I couldn't hope to tell you what note any pitch is without a piano in front of me. I did it outside on the back porch while the kids were vying for my attention, and I still got about average to a little above average on the rhythmic and harmonic/melodic patterns, so I'd like to think I'd do better when undistracted and in a quiet place. This is something of a good sign given how little time I've had for continuing my musical skills in terms of actually producing music of my own, although I think listening to progressive rock ought to help a little

As I've discussed before, Sam Brownback recently penned an editorial that The New York Times ran, clarifying his views on faith and reason, particularly with regard to evolution. I've seen several people discussing this response by evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, but nothing I've seen details just how far off the mark the Coyne piece is.

It contains several philosophical mistakes and demonstrates serious ignorance about the subject matter under discussion, which happens to be philosophy (not science), as I hope will become clear shortly. But, most disturbingly, it drastically misrepresents Brownback's view. This post consists of an almost-fisking of the piece. I do not quote the entire piece, but I've selected out quite a number of important excerpts. My not discussing something doesn't mean I agree with it. I'm simply focusing on what I do know, and I don't really know any biology, which though it's not the main subject does occupy an important part of his argument. I'm thus sticking to what I do have some expertise in, something I think Coyne ought to do in the future rather than doing bad philosophy while calling it science.

I'll start with one bit toward the end of the piece, because it illustrates the biggest misunderstanding Coyne relies on, and then I'll work through the piece in order.

According to Brownback, we should reject scientific findings if they conflict with our faith, but accept them if they're compatible. But the scientific evidence says that humans are big-brained, highly conscious apes that began evolving on the African savannah four million years ago. Are we supposed to reject this as "atheistic theology" (an oxymoron if there ever was one)?

This is a clear fallacy:

1. Brownback says we should reject scientific findings if they conflict with our faith
2. the scientific evidence says that humans are big-brained, highly conscious apes that began evolving on the African savannah four million years ago
3. Therefore, Brownback says we should reject the claim that humans are big-brained, highly conscious apes that began evolving on the African savannah four million years ago

I'm missing the crucial premise that it conflicts with the faith to hold that humans are big-brained, highly conscious apes that began evolving on the African savannah four million years ago. Since Brownback doesn't assert that claim, the argument doesn't apply. He does say that he believes microevolution is true, and he does say that he doesn't think macroevolution could be true in a way that requires a materialistic, deterministic metaphysic. What he doesn't say is that macroevolution without a materialistic, deterministic metaphysic is false or incompatible with his faith. He is perfectly silent on that issue. Only if he did say that would Coyne's argument even get going.

Jonathan Adler is belittling Sam Brownback's relatively nuanced (for a politician) position on evolution. The comment thread is getting pretty heated, almost entirely in a direction that seems to me to miss the most important factor in interpreting his position. I would go so far as to say that most of the commenters are immorally taking Brownback's position in the least charitable way possible.

Roughly speaking, the problem seems to be that Senator Brownback is using language that leaves the issue wide open, where what he says is consistent with anything from theistic evolution to six-day creationism. The charge is that he is using coded language that's supposed to tell six-day creationists he's with them, while also using coded language to tell theistic evolutionists that he's with them, or something like that anyway. The assumption is that he couldn't be genuinely conflicted on this issue in a way that's consistent with rationality. I want to suggest that the most plausible interpretation of his comments is not the political coded language one but that he really is conflicted in such a way and that it even results from rational conflictedness.

Given that many people do think the most reasonable interpretation of the first chapters of Genesis is that the world was really created in six days 10,000 years ago (note: I don't think this is the most reasonable interpretation of Genesis 1:1-2:3, given its poetic elements, but I can understand how an intelligent, rational person might think it is), I can understand why he might genuinely feel conflicted, resulting in the following views:

1. Whatever the Bible teaches is true.
2. The Bible's teaching can be interpreted in a way that's consistent with the consensus among contemporary scientists, but some interpretations are more reasonable than others.
3. Science isn't infallible and has often been very wrong, even when scientists are correct at the time to think their best information leads them to that view. Most of the time these are minor variations, but sometimes they are major overthrows.
4. The most plausible interpretation of the Bible conflicts with the contemporary consensus.

I can easily see why an intelligent, informed person who knows all the science and understands why the consensus holds what it does might still refrain from holding any belief whatsoever on whether speciation occurred in the way the consensus says it did. The key is to insist both that (a) our interpretation of the scripture might be wrong and (b) our science has at least some chance of being wrong, while insisting that (c) whatever the Bible does say is true (whether our interpretation is correct or not) and (d) whatever a perfect scientific study would result it will almost certainly be correct.

Only if you assume from the outset that divine revelation about such matters is impossible could you end up concluding that such a person is irrational.

Undercover Black Man has a nice post outlining the genetic advantages to race-mixing, something I've always thought should be obvious to anyone who knows anything about genetics. You don't even need to know about genetics. Just look at the hereditary problems in close-knit and inbred populations. The post details quite a few of those. It's a nice, inconvenient fact for those who think race-mixing is unnatural. Even aside from the difficulty such views face in identifying exactly which populations are the races that can't be mixed, it does seem as if nature prefers combinations of genes that are less closely-related than combinations that are too closely-related.

I do think, however, that it's worth acknowledging that some effects of combining the DNA of very distantly related people could be more harmful. If a trait requires gene coordination from both parents, and the coordination requires more closely-related DNA, then such a crossbreeding could lead to a loss of those kinds of traits, even if it's more likely to preserve traits one of the populations has lost (because those traits are usually simpler).

So it's not purely a matter of race-mixing being healthier and monoracial reproduction being less healthy. There are benefits and disadvantages either way. But the most common opposition to race-mixing in the U.S. context is the racist idea that white genes shouldn't be polluted with black genes, and blacks and whites in the U.S. at this point are much more closely related than most other interracial pairings, largely due to race-mixing in the past (ironically caused mostly by white slaveowners raping or seducing their slaves). Given that, I would expect these negative effects to be significantly reduced in black-white pairings than would have been true in the time of slavery.

So I do think the conclusion is correct. If anything, interracial relationships are at least in one respect more natural than same-race pairings.

[cross-posted at Prosblogion] Elliot Sober has a new paper, "Intelligent Design Theory and the Supernatural: The 'God or Extra-Terrestrials' Reply", in the latest issue of Faith and Philosophy (January 2007). I received my copy today, and I was amazed that this paper could get past the reviewers of a top philosophy of religion journal without serious modification, even from such an important philosopher of science as Sober.

Sober makes the following argument. Defenders of intelligent design often point out that ID arguments are not religion, and one support for this (a relatively less important one, in my view) is that the conclusion of ID arguments is silent on what the designer is like other than that the designer is intelligent and must have worked purposes into nature somehow. Sober's paper is a response to that argument, and his response is extremely strange. He argues that supernatural assumptions are implicit in the ID argument, and thus the ID defender is committed to a conclusion that there is some supernatural being.

Suppose that's all true. I'm not invested very seriously in whether that part of his argument is correct, since I happen to believe there is a supernatural being. I don't even care whether ID defenders are committed to the existence of a supernatural being, since I know no one who accepts ID who doesn't also accept a supernatural being. So I'll assume for the sake of argument that Sober is correct, and ID arguments do involve a commitment to the existence of some supernatural being. My question is how this helps Sober. His point in the paper is to show that ID arguments involve a religious conclusion. The only way he should be able to conclude that is if he thinks being implicitly committed to the existence of a supernatural being is somehow itself religious. Yet it isn't.

Lots of people think moral evaluation commits you to the existence of a supernatural being. They don't necessarily think that calling an action wrong is a religious practice. So it doesn't seem that being implicitly committed to the existence of a supernatural being is the same as practicing a religion. What's worse is that plenty of people accept theistic arguments on philosophical grounds without being religious practitioners. I personally know several people myself who do exactly that. Their theism is merely a philosophical view. It is not religious in any sense. It doesn't even affect their life. They are areligious. So how can implicitly being committed to the existence of a supernatural being amount to religion when even being explicitly committed to theism doesn't count as religion?

I suppose I should post something on Autism Awareness Month before the month is over. I was going to link to Sam's series on autism and the brain way back at the beginning of the month, but I thought the series wasn't finished, and then I forgot. She's had three posts on autism and the brain: part 1, part 2, part 3. She also posted on autism research and autism on Wikipedia. There's a wealth of information amidst all that.

I'm not sure how I missed this, but it's one of the most intelligent (not to mention one of the funniest) parodies I've ever seen of anything.

I've seen several reviews of Richard Dawkins' latest infantile rant book The God Delusion, most of them by his fellow atheists. Some of them have tried to say something positive but have gone on to distance themselves from some of his rhetoric, some of his arguments, and some of his views. Others have been more critical. Most of what I've seen hasn't been overwhelmingly positive. Even some of the more favorable ones register what seem to me the kind of criticism I find myself writing on first-year philosophy papers, not the sort of thing you should expect of a serious academic, even one so far outside his field as Dawkins is when it comes to religion.

For examples, see reviews by Jim Holt in the New York Times, philosopher Thomas Nagel in The New Republic (unfortunately subscription only), Marilynne Robinson in Harper's Magazine, Terry Eagleton in the London Review of Books, Kenan Malik in the Telegraph, and Gregg Easterbrook at Beliefnet. While I'm at it, there's also my post in response to one of his points and Brandon's post criticizing him on several other issues.

Add to those a new one from Shannon Love, which I very much enjoyed reading, enough to want to post several excerpts that I thought were very much worth highlighting. [hat tip: Mark Olson]

Scientists have been using embryos from destroyed human organisms to investigate treatments for Parkinson's disease. The hope was to get these undifferentiated cells to take on the characteristics of the cells in the brain so that damaged brain cells could be replaced by the stem cells. Except from explicitly social conservative news outlets, all the press this kind of research has been getting has been nothing but favorable. Hardly anyone in the mainstream news mentions the obstacles in getting embryonic stem cells to work in this way, as opposed to the successes already achieved in using adult stem cells. Even if there is more potential good that might be accomplished by embryonic stem cells, it strikes me as a little dishonest to report only that and to ignore that actual success of adult stem cells and the difficulties with embryonic stem cells that have yet to be overcome. So there is already reason to suspect dishonesty in the news media on hiding some facts related to this research.

Even so, I have nowhere seen any mention of actual harm that this technique might cause (apart from the harm caused to the embryos themselves, of course), even among socially conservatives. Yet apparently there's long been a worry among scientists that this kind of stem cell technique would cause a different effect once the cells were at work in the brain. Undifferentiated cells have a real danger. They do not have the instructions regular brain cells have, and they need to absorb those. The hope was that they would. But what happens when cells in a part of the body do things they're not supposed to do? They become tumors. There are now indications that this may very well happen if this research goes forward with human beings. According to the article, this is something "scientists have long feared". Why, then, has hardly anyone been reporting that this kind of problem might occur? I would have expected at least those who are more conservative on this issue to mention it now and then, but I've never heard it from anyone. Are the scientists themselves hiding it so as not to decrease even further their chances of getting funding?

[hat tip: Cold Hearted Truth]

Rey responds to the latest nutso theory connecting autism and some randomly-selected phenomenon that has increased during the time period autism has increased. This time it's television. Someone needs to write a serious-sounding article claiming that not being Amish causes autism, using reasoning exactly parallel to that found in this kind of argument. The numbers are there for that just as much as they're there for vaccines, television, and eating bread. I'm sure someone out there will see it as a moral imperative that we all become Amish immediately in order to protect our children. It's sad to see Al Mohler involved with perpetuating this kind of nonsense.

I think my first thought at a real demonstration of a correlation, even aside from the alternative explanations raised by Rey, was that the causation is almost certainly the other way around if a connection is genuine. Has it even occurred to them that autistic kids are going to be watching more TV than neurotypical kids? After all, they don't have the interest or ability to develop the kinds of relationships that most kids want to develop, and the kinds of activities most kids engage in will therefore be both difficult and unattractive to them. They appreciate the bright colors and musical elements of programming for young children, since they stimulate the senses very well. They take to things like Sesame Street that offer very repetitive number and letter learning. Why isn't it obvious to anyone who knows much about autism that kids who are already autistic are going to be watching more TV? Never mind that parents of autistic kids will generally have a harder time keeping them within boundaries in order to do housework or other things during the day and will thus consider TV a very nice way to help lower the need for overstimulation from getting into cupboards, emptying silverware onto the floor, coloring on walls, dumping bins of toys, and so on. All kids do some of that, but autistic kids seem to want to do it 24-7 unless they have a distraction. That distraction can't always be an adult, since even full-time parents can't devote 100% of their time to kids, never mind to more than one kid when each would need 100% attention to prevent disaster. The fact is that TV calms them down, and thus parents will be motivated to have them stimulated in that way rather than in truly dangerous ways like what they're naturally inclined to do without the understanding danger that other kids naturally develop much earlier.

This is the the twenty-second post in my Theories of Knowledge and Reality series. Follow the link for more on the series and for links to other entries as they appear. In the last post, I looked at the fine-tuning design argument for the existence of God, along with an initial look at the many-worlds conjecture as a response to the argument. This post will spend some more time comparing that conjecture with the designer explanation for the fine-tuning of constants in physics.

Is this objection decisive? It's an alternative explanation, and we need just one alternative explanation to show that the argument original designer explanation isn't the only one. So we have two explanations to consider. Which should we prefer? Which is more reasonable, theism or all these myriads of cosmoi? Both explanations do seem to explain the surprising fact about the constants of physics, and they seem to account for this fact equally well, but how do you weigh the simplicity of each theory? It's not as if both agree on the core that everyone agrees on, and then one goes beyond that to postulate all this excess baggage. Both scenarios contain something that in their theory about ultimate reality beyond what a naturalist might want to say.

Theism, even the minimal sort necessary if you accept this argument, involves a designer or creator, which certainly goes beyond naturalism. Simplicity might nudge us to discount theism in favor of the many-worlds conjecture, since those worlds all seem to be additional parts of nature -- the kind of thing a naturalist already believes in. There are just lots more of them than the one we originally believed in. However, the many-worlds conjecture may require going beyond naturalism as well. Why do all the possible cosmoi (i.e. all the possible sets of constants) get generated? Is there some mechanism that generates these different universes, maybe all at once in different universes or maybe one after the other? What would this mechanism be? It's certainly not something you can just read off physics. There's no explanation offered why there would be such a mechanism. So it's not clear if this response really fits the naturalistic picture either. The many universes would be more of what we already believe in (though many, many more things), but the mechanism to get many universes is beyond the core theory. Yet theism involves a wholly different kind of thing, a designer, though just one thing and not very, very many. A theory can be simpler in terms of how many things it requires, and a theory could be simpler in terms of what kinds of things it requires. We have two theories. Each one is more complex than the other but in a different way.

This is the the twenty-first post in my Theories of Knowledge and Reality series. Follow the link for more on the series and for links to other entries as they appear. In the last post, I presented two versions of the design argument for the existence of God, along with some standard responses. This post focuses in on a third version, the fine-tuning design argument.

The laws of physics contain some constants that govern how things in the universe behave. Physicists have no idea why these constants have the values they do, but they know that if they had been just slightly different then we couldn't exist. Stars couldn't form, never mind rational life. (Some might argue that rational life vastly different from anything we've seen might still be possible. That is hard to speculate about, but perhaps it's worth considering.)

Physicists all accept this fact about the laws, which leaves philosophers to figure out what to say. Some argue that, since the chances are so low of getting these exact constants, it's too much of a coincidence that the constants we happen to have are the ones that allow the possibility of rational life. This leads some to conclude that the universe must have been designed with the purpose of leading to at least the possibility of rational life.

This is the the twentieth post in my Theories of Knowledge and Reality series. Follow the link for more on the series and for links to other entries as they appear. In the last post, I finished discussing the cosmological argument for the existence of God. In this post, I'm moving on to the design argument for the existence of God.

[note: These design argument posts are based largely on discussions by Peter van Inwagen in his Metaphysics, 2nd ed. (2002) Westview Press and Gregory E. Ganssle, Thinking About God (2004) InterVarsity Press.]

The main idea behind the design argument is that something about nature is unexplainable unless a creator designed the universe for a specific purpose. Nature is hard to explain otherwise. As with finding a watch on a beach, it seems hard to conclude that it just occurred naturally on its own. It seems to be put together in such a way that calls out for an explanation.

Sometimes the argument is based on of the beauty of the world or the universe, and sometimes it picks out a specific fact. Can the fact that we find music beautiful be explained by science? Why do we happen to enjoy patterns of sound that just happen to be mathematically interesting? Some have looked at beauty in the world and wondered how anything can explain such wonder without appealing to a designer who wanted it to be beautiful. Others have questioned such arguments by saying the only reason we find it beautiful is because our preferences happen to match what's there.

The issue turns on what beauty is, what it is we perceive when we see beauty, if scientific theories can explain the nature of beauty, and many other issues. I'll focus on one particular fact that has led some to believe in a designer, but let's first look at the history of this general argument type when based on aother kinds of facts.

Was Steve Irwin a Christian
steve irwin christian
I've been getting searches like this up to several times an hour (but usually less) since Steve Irwin died, but nothing I said was relevant to this. Maybe those searches will get diverted to this post. I know nothing for sure about Steve Irwin's views on religion. He did, of course, accept current scientific understanding on the process of human origins, which will automatically disqualify him in the eyes of some people who think views on the means and time frame of creation count as the gospel (or, even worse, think evangelism consists of sending creationist tracts to celebrities). But of course plenty of people accept common descent who are genuine Christians.

He did believe in God, or at least he sometimes talked that way, saying, "But I have a gift. God put me on this planet with a mission. My mission is to educate people about conservation." But lots of people believe in God without being Christians, and lots of people speak of God's purpose metaphorically, mostly to suggest that they feel a purpose for their life. Someone in this thread remembers him saying he believed his mom was in heaven and looked forward to joining her, which suggests some sort of Christianlike view of heaven. I can't find any substantiation for him saying this, however. It says it's in the Larry King interview, but I didn't see anything even close to that there.

One piece of evidence against his being a Christian is that they had Buddhist nuns (his term; I don't know the proper term) bless their child in a sort of public baptismal ceremony. I doubt they would have done that in addition to a private Christian service, but it's possible. More likely is that this was all they did in that area, and it's probably not something serious Christians who accept and follow biblical teaching would have done, since this looks strikingly like the kind of pagan temple worship that the early Christians would have considered idolatry.

Update: Snopes.com finally tackles this issue (or at least the issue of the hoax discussed in the comments).

The dark camel-shaped things in this picture are not camels. Look more closely. The light-colored objects just below the dark shapes are the camels. This overhead shot was taken at dawn or dusk, when the shadows were fairly large in comparison to the camels. This is the sort of thing that humans would rarely have the occasion to see.

For more information, see Shadow Caravan at, of all places, snopes.com.

The top Vatican bioethicist has spoken out against the new stem cell method that seems to be able to produce embryonic stem cells without killing embryos. [hat tip: Mark Olson] One might expect pro-lifers might be cautious in case the facts are not as they have been presented. Still, this sort of criticism is a little surprising. Is this really the standard Catholic view? It seems to me to be based on very strange reasoning.

As far as the article reports, this is the reasoning. This method relies on in vitro fertilization, which the Roman Catholic Church opposes in general. I understand the argument that in vitro fertilization if immoral as it's often practiced, with far more embryos created than are implanted to be developed. A consistent pro-life view will oppose that practice. But opposing in vitro fertilization in principle? That just seems irrational. The explanation seems to be that in vitro fertilization necessarily replaces conjugal relations in a way that artificial insemination may or may not do so. So artificial insemination can be ok or wrong, depending on whether it replaces conjugal relations. But in vitro fertilization always replaces conjugal relations.

This argument makes absolutely no sense. How many people who engage in in vitro fertilization or artificial insemination do so to avoid having sex? The only people I can think of are single moms who have someone donate sperm without engaging in sex, but I would hope the Catholic church doesn't oppose unmarried people not having sex. The ordinary married couple who uses in vitro methods to conceive is not doing so to avoid sex. They're doing so because sex is insufficient to cause conception in their case, and they're hoping in vitro methods will succeed. That doesn't mean they've abstaining from sexual relations. People do abstain from sexual relations for reasons other than prayer if they're using natural family planning to avoid conception, and that does go against biblical teaching, but that isn't what goes on in the ordinary case of in vitro fertilization. This objection just doesn't make any sense.

Apparently Daredevil's echolocation powers aren't all that implausible for humans. It's not just possible. It's real. [ht: Eugene Volokh]

Joe Carter seems to have gotten a little weary of people who constantly accuse ID defenders of committing the No True Scotsman fallacy every time they try to point out a straw man argument. So he turns it against some of the ID opposition.

I do think this gets to a real inconsistency of labeling among a certain kind of ID opponent. It's the No True Scotsman fallacy when ID proponents want to call an anti-ID argument a straw man. That's supposed to stop debate about what most ID arguments actually involve and therefore allow the dysphemistic labeling the anti-ID crowd wants to use. But then it's not the No True Scotsman fallacy when someone offers a parochial and positivistic account of what can fall under the heading of scientific reasoning, tailor-made to rule out anything remotely like ID.

It's noteworthy that such definitions also rule out any other kinds of scientific reasoning that only logical positivism would count as not science (because it's metaphysics, a dirty word for positivists) but most scientists would easily call science. See here and here for more on that. I think that's an inconsistency in science about what counts as scientific reasoning. But the more poignant issue here is that those who insist that there's no true Christianity becaue of different conceptions of Christianity and no true intelligent design argument because there are different versions of ID will then insist that there are those who occupy the scientific profession but aren't true scientists. That's an inconsistency on the popular level of those who criticize ID proponents' defenses for doing something they themselves regularly do. That hadn't occurred to me until I read Joe's post, but I think he's right.

Some people argue that contemporary science can't be right about how old the earth or the universe is, because an omnipotent being wouldn't need to take that long to make a universe. Thus the young earth must be true. Others argue from the opposite end that intelligent design arguments are inconsistent with an omnipotent being, because they involve God inputting information over a long process. (See, for example, SteveF's July 25 comment at 5:47 pm in this comment thread on this post.) I don't think this sort of argument works in either case.

If the designer is God, then God should be able to do something over a longer time or a shorter time. Young earth creationists are right that God could have created everything instantly. But the argument undermines the young earth view as much as any other, unless the young earth view holds God to have created everything instantly. It doesn't hold that but takes the period of creation to be six days. Why would God need six whole days to create everything? God could have created instantly. If it's implausible for God to do something over thousands or millions of years (because God could do it in a shorter time), then it's implausible for God to do it in six days (because God could do it in a shorter time). The mere possibility that God could have done it over a shorter time does not mean that God would have done so. A divine being with omnipotence could choose to work over a very long time or a very short time, and neither should seem more or less likely without an understanding of the purposes such a being might have for working over a longer or shorter time.

The hypothesis that there is a designer, particularly if one of the possibilities is that the designer is omnipotent, does not make it more or less likely that the designer worked over a long or short time. The length of time is not evidence against God. What's interesting is that the reverse is not true. Length of time issues may count as evidence against naturalistic explanations, precisely because they do not involve beings who can do anything (and thus can work instantly or over a longer time).

David Heddle has a brief post that nonetheless deals with a variety of issues related to the possibility of life on Mars and how a Christian should think about that. I really like David's general approach to this sort of thing.

Great D.A. Carson quote:

When I was a boy of about nine or ten, my father called me over to listen to him reading an editorial or a letter to the editor (I cannot remember which) in The Montreal Star, one of the leading papers in eastern Canada at the time. The writer was inveighing against all those stupid Christians who believe the Bible is the Word of God, when it speaks so ignorantly of the sun "rising" in the east: any schoolboy knows that the sun does not rise, but that the earth rotates on its axis. My father asked me what I thought of the argument. I looked at him rather nonplused. He grinned, and calmly turned to the front page of the paper, and drew my attention to the line, "Sunrise: 6:36 am."

[The formatting and spelling may be affected by the process of scanning the article, as is often the case at this site, so I wouldn't assume he really misspelled 'nonplussed' or that he didn't italicize the name of the newspaper.]

The book review this comes from starts here. It's very long. The particular location of this quote is on this page.

Scientists have proposed a procedure that will prevent dust of certain shapes from emitting light, thus producing something like a Star Trek cloaking device. They haven't actually done it yet, but they've shown mathematically that this is theoretically possible. [Hat tip: TrekToday News]

Ed Brayton at Dispatches From the Culture Wars has been claiming that intelligent design is incompatible with the following sort of view:

God created the universe, having designed it from the outset to produce the kind of particular results God wanted, and there are signs of that creation, but it didn't involve intervention at a later time. Instead, it resulted from the natural laws God set up at the beginning that directed the universe toward the sort of thing that ID arguments are now concluding to be signs of God's design.

This was in response to my claim that ID arguments are consistent with this sort of view. The main thrust of his argument has been to affirm my claim that design arguments can result in such a view but to deny that the people who came up with the term 'intelligent design' wouldn't tolerate this. He says they consistently and repeatedly disallow this sort of view, saying that it wouldn't allow the kind of intelligent design arguments that they are giving. He says Howard Van Till holds exactly the view I was sketching, and they don't count Van Till among the ID people because of his holding this view. I think their statements about him are easily explained in terms of other things they disagree with him about, and Macht has done a good job explaining why in the comments on the post. But I think a positive case can be made that they deliberately do include the sort of view that Ed says Van Till holds. I decided to get out Mere Creation to see what William Dembski, one of the founders of the ID movement, had to say in his introduction to intelligent design arguments. What follows is an adaptation of a comment in the aforementioned discussion.

Some people have suggested (usually to avoid the conclusion of intelligent design arguments) that our universe is just one universe among many, and in fact there's a universe for every possible way things could have gone. Whole TV shows have been based on this claim. Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution discusses the ethical implications of the many-worlds thesis [hat tip: Philosophers' Carnival XXVIII] .

He argues that ethical questions would be irrelevant if this view is correct. No matter what you do, someone else just like you is doing each alternative possibility among the choices that were available to you. So if you can do the good thing or the bad thing, it doesn't matter which you pick, because your picking the bad one ensures that the good one will be done, and your picking the good one ensures that the bad one will be done. Either way the resulting multiverse is no different. Your action is simply irrelevant to what the multiverse will be like after your done. So ethics would be irrelevant. I disagree. This view doesn't have that consequence, and Tyler is just assuming something that I wouldn't grant.

My fellow Prosblogion contributor Patrick Taylor has posted some worthwhile thoughts on the California school that canceled a philosophy class on intelligent design. He's worried that this sort of reasoning would prevent good philosophy from being done. I've thought of the parallel here too. This is the sort of thing that regularly gets taught in philosophy classes, and the kind of philosophy that this includes should be a regular part of high school curricula. I think it's immoral that high schools can graduate students who have never heard of Plato, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, or Descartes, never mind engaged with some of their arguments. It ranks up there with not even giving Latin as an option to students and actually requiring them to take an actively-spoken foreign language (my main reason for boycotting my local high school, even if it meant not being able to run track, which I had really wanted to do, but tolerating immorality was worse than not running track). High school students ought to be required to take ethics and critical thinking, with an option to take a more comprehensive history of philosophy or topics in philosophy course. I don't expect this ever to happen, but this is a fallen world after all. People do immoral things.

Meanwhile, David Heddle points out a Derbyshire post that somehow is actually friendly to ID. What I found especially interesting in David's post is his response to a common objection against the fine-tuning ID argument. The objection is that the cosmological constants appear fine-tuned, but that's because some simply theory that unifies all physics explains those constants, a theory of the aesthetically pleasing sort that many scientists have been hoping will eventually be shown true. David points out that such a theory would actually support ID. It's true that a universe like that would explain why the cosmological constants are what they are, but it just pushes the question back. Why would the universe be such that an amazingly pretty physical theory is correct? It's a good thing I still haven't done my post on fine-tuning arguments in my Theories of Knowledge and Reality series, because now I can include that response.

In my last post on Intelligent Design, I argued that ID arguments are consistent with the standard evolutionary picture that most scientists accept, even if a number of its supporters disagree with that picture in terms of common descent. I wondered at the end why opponents of ID consistently misrepresent the ID argument, saying that I would leave that for a further post. I want to take that issue up now. There are two general possibilities. They understand what ID says and deliberately misrepresent it, or they simply don't understand that it's not saying what they present it as saying.

The principle of charity requires me to presume the second option. But why would smart scientists fail to see what seems to me to be so obvious? I have to think the main reason is that scientists aren't well-schooled in the metaphysical distinctions they assume regularly for their scientific work. I wonder how much of this is just ignorance of the metaphysical assumptions of science and the possible metaphysical positions consistent with our best science. I've certainly run across people who are profoundly ignorant on such matters, including some scientists whose work is widely respected. Some even assert that ID can't be science because it's philosophy, which is far closer to the truth than the ridiculous assertion that it's religion. But it's still at best misleading to make such a claim, because so much of science simply is philosophy, particularly metaphysics and epistemology. I think that's exactly the point that scientists don't seem to see.

I don't agree with all of Thomas Kuhn's conclusions, but one thing he demonstrated fairly clearly is that our metaphysical assumptions are part of our scientific theories, and the same is true of evolutionary theory. We arrived at much of our best science via philosophy, and much of our best science simply assumes metaphysical views that scientists tend to share. Some research that takes place in physics departments is almost pure philosophy, even though it usually takes its starting point from some empirical data, and many of these claims simply cannot be empirically verified or falsified. Consider:

Christian Carnival XCIX is up at Attention Span. The 99 theme is kind of fun. One more to the big 100, which will be returning to the Carnival's founder. I didn't get Agent 99, but at least I ended up with the second best of the categories, Interstate 99, which I'd never known about before. Current plans include extending into my own state. (They violated interstate naming conventions, though, by putting 99 west of 81. I'm not sure what they were thinking. It's immoral to break that sort of convention, particularly when people put such great work into organizing it in a way that you can usually predict what an interstate's number means.)

At the Banty Rooster, Global Warming is Really Global Cooling. [HT: Blogwatch]

Eugene Volokh has an op-ed in the L.A. Times about how easy it is to get a Nobel Peace Prize nomination. Previous nominees include Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and Castro. Now what I'm wondering is who counts as a professor, because there are some low-lifes that I might be able to nominate if all it takes is to teach at the college level.

Jollyblogger points out a beautiful Yale prank against Harvard.

Sam's put some more pictures online. Ethan and Isaiah were wrestling this week. For some reason Ethan was really frustrated that Isaiah kept not being where Ethan wanted him, so he kept pushing him and lying on top of him to prevent him from moving. Eventually Isaiah started enjoying it, thinking it was playful wrestling. Ethan continued in his frustration the whole time. It was really weird. It was as if the world would end if Isaiah got up. There's also one of Sophia watching the boys go off to school.

Click on the picture for the full-size version. They've got Robby Steinhardt's photo above the Phil Ehart blurb, but otherwise this is pretty funny. One of the people on the discussion list where I found this spoke of Phil looking more and more like Robby every day!

What's funniest to me about this isn't intentional. It's that the members who would be most likely to favor ID aren't even in the current lineup, which is the group the picture shows. What follows close behind is that Kansas actually does have lyrics that deal with intelligent design. Then there's the fact that Kerry Livgren now thinks of Dust in the Wind as expressing the main theme of Ecclesiastes. It's not as if that song is contrary to Christian teaching, except in a couple of details ("nothing lasts forever but the earth and sky?" as if either would last forever anyway).

What's a little disappointing is the insinuation that intelligent design is about religion and the suggestion that it has anything to do with opposition to gay marriage. I'd guess that Kerry Livgren does oppose gay marriage, and I know he encourages all to become Christians, but this isn't about Livgren's current views and how he'd adjust the song in light of them. It's about how Dust in the Wind could be adjusted to sound like the ID proponents. Those would have been more important to put in the last box with those who prefer Foreigner to progressive rock. It's also a little unfortunate that ID is being held up against evolution, given what I argued in my last post on the topic. Good humor is good humor, but it still needs to be evaluated for its philosophical presuppositions.

It's occurred to me that a common complaint against intelligent design is a huge mistake. In particular, it misrepresents the ID movement. That's no surprise to regular readers of this blog, who should have been explose to numerous misrepresentations of the ID position by now. This one isn't a stupid mistake, though. I can understand why people might make this mistake, but it's a mistake nonetheless and a philosophical one.

I've seen ID opponents make the complaint that ID requires special creation even if the people making ID arguments claim otherwise. By special creation here, I don't mean the creation of the universe to begin with. Any theist will believe in special creation in that sense. Special creation here means miraculous intervention to create certain biological elements that we don't have explanations for at this point. Immediately, I already see one problem with this. Intelligent design requires no such thing, because some intelligent design arguments have nothing to do with biology. Some are about fine-tuning of the cosmological constants. But even leaving that issue aside, I think this misunderstands those who endorse the biological ID arguments, including most notably Michael Behe, William Dembski, and Philip Johnson.

Christian Carnival XCV is at Eternal Revolution.

Mark Roberts has finished his 30-part series Are the New Testament Gospels Reliable? I mentioned it before, when he started it. I haven't gotten through the whole thing yet, but what I've read so far has been excellent. I highly recommend it.

Here's an interesting study on the differences between men and women's responses to humor. Not at all what I would have expected. [Hat tip: Orin Kerr]

Eugene Volokh takes on the suggestion that Judge Alito thinks private ownership of machine guns should be legal. The best part is where the same line of reasoning makes Justice O'Connor out to favor violence against women.

Finally, Sam's put up a host of pictures since the last time I pointed any out. There's the salamander in the driveway. Sophia meets spaghetti. It's been warm, so we've still got some excellent fall foliage. Isaiah's still dodging cameras. Ethan enjoys the weather. Finally, Sophia's beginning to look a lot like Ethan did at her age.

Sam has posted more pictures of the kids.

Christian Carnival XCII is up at World of Sven.

New evidence has been unearthed about the political context of Jefferson's infamous "wall of separation" language. [HT: SmartChristian]

There's a new article in Nature about two new techniques for deriving stem cells. These both sound pretty interesting. Some people are claiming that they get around the ethical objections. If they're successful and do get around the ethical objections, we might expect less pressure from those who want to destroy embryos for stem cell research. I doubt it, though. Alternative techniques in the past haven't stopped those who are single-minded in getting this one so far unsuccessful area of research to be federally funded. See Sun and Shield for discussion by someone who understands the science better than I do.

A little while back, Eugene Volokh had an extended disussion of the New York Civil Liberties Union's attack on military recruiting. Most of his post is great, but I think one element is especially worth highlighting. The general sort of approach he's criticizing has an "Any Stick is Worth Beating the Military With" sort of approach. Normally, they'll complain when affirmative action in its two main forms is not applied. The two main forms are lowering requirements for getting in and going out of your way to try to increase the representation of underrepresented groups by targeting those groups and appealing to them in specially designed ways. If someone isn't doing that, then they aren't pursuing diversity. Yet now they're complaining that military recruiters are targeting minority students, as if that's somehow bad.

Wired News has a fascinating article on face transplants. It contains an interesting statement. Some doctors have suggested that the novelty of the surgery and the lack of certainty on what risks even are make informed consent impossible. I commented on Jonathan Ichikawa's post about this, pointing this out, wondering what they might have meant by that, and his response struck me as equally unusual. He thinks this is an attempt to make a philosophical argument out of an ick factor. Is that really what's going on? What does this statement about informed consent amount to? I have some thoughts, but I really wanted to see what people think about this without my suggesting anything.

[UPDATE: Part of this post (the first paragraph) was missing before and has been added; we just switched to a new version of Movable Type and I had some trouble getting it to take my post the first time and lost a paragraph somehow.]

Instapundit has an interview which has some interesting plots at the end, showing the number of engineering bachelor's degrees granted in the U.S. versus China and other Asian countries. Check it out. China passed us sometime in the mid-1980's and the growth rate in number of degrees granted is much higher. The trend is similar for graduate school, and also for the natural sciences generally, not just engineering.

I've (sort of) blogged about the view that autism is basically an exaggeration of typically male strengths and weaknesses (and corresponding lack in typically female strengths and weaknesses) before. It isn't really new. But the major bloggers and news outlets seem to be just getting around it now, so I thought it would be good to give a few links for those who are interested.

Todd Zywicki at The Volokh Conspiracy links to a New York Times piece by Simon Baron-Cohen, one of the most prominent defenders of this thesis. There's an excellent critial discussion in the comments of Todd's post.

Ann Althouse says a little more about it than Todd Zywicki's post does, and the comments there are just as active. I haven't even finished reading them yet.

There's a link amidst the discussion to an interesting piece in Wired about the extremely high incidence of autism in Silicon Valley, land of the nerds and home of the geeks. I haven't finished reading that yet either. I'm only a little over halfway through.

Finally, Joanne Jacobs has some thoughts on the whole matter, most notably catching an incorrect and unflattering description of Lawrence Summers' statement in the Baron-Cohen piece. [I didn't catch this one until I saw Sam's post.] The editors should have pointed this out. I wonder if it's that they simply hadn't paid enough attention to what Summers really said in the first place and just accepted the deceptively simplistic account people were constantly giving of what he said or if they knew but just didn't care if someone misrepesented him. Either is pretty sad. I have to laugh at the first commenter on her post trying to connect this with gay marriage, as if two gay men are going to be able to produce a kid in the first place.

I've seen quite a few claims that Bill Frist has abandoned his pro-life principles by proposing federal funding for using stem cells from embryos that will be discarded anyway. See IntolerantElle's post and the links from there for examples. This post started as a comment on her post.

I think this argument goes too far. Frist isn't necessarily inconsistent on this. It's not clear at all that he's contradicting his pro-life stance. What he's proposing is that it's no more wrong for someone to kill these embryos by extracting stem cells than it is simply to throw them away. They will be destroyed. There's no way to prevent that given the current law that these embryos are the property of parents. He's suggesting that in destroying them the stem cells should be retained so that at least this immoral action can have some good consequences.

I'd been planning to post these links last week, but I have so much stuff in my file to blog that I must have missed these. Maybe I'd intended to say something about them, but I'm not going to do that.

First, he discussed scientific fundamentalism. Then he considers whether evolution is a threat to religious belief. Finally, he takes on the charge that evolution deniers are like Holocaust deniers. I agree with much of what he says in all three posts.

Isaiah got into the peanut butter this week.

The 140th Carnival of the Vanities is at Blog Business World. My Affirmative Action, Part X: Race as a Qualification is part of it.

Christian Carnival LXXII is at A Physicist's Perspective. My Baptism for the Dead is among the entries.

David Velleman looks at genetics and homosexuality. I agree with almost everything he says, with the only notable exception his insistence that there is no moral dimension to homosexuality.

David Velleman has a nice, balanced post up about ID and schools. I don't quite agree with everything, but he's close to being right on everything. My first comment makes my views clear enough, as if my post here didn't already do so. There is a little more in that comment than I said in the post, though, and this is more succinct, so I'm reproducing that comment here for posterity along with a second comment clarifying some elements of evolutionary theory that are philosophical arguments:

Prosthesis has put into words what I've been trying unsuccessfully to say for quite a while now. Intelligent Design is technically philosophy and not science, but it's no as simple as that. It's the most recent form of the teleological argument for the existence of God, in the tradition that began at least as far back as Aristotle, something like 2500 years ago. For him, of course, it was natural philosophy, which has become the science of today, so it's not as if it's outside the realm of what we now call science, but that argument has remained in philosophy as most other subject matters of Aristotle's natural philosophy have become known as science.

Intelligent Design is certainly not religion. That's evidenced by the people who support it who do not believe in any religion. Antony Flew is just the latest and most famous proponent of ID not to accept any religion as a result of it (or even many of the traditional attributes of God). Michael Denton was saying similar things in the 1980s. He's an atheist, and he thinks some sort of argument along the lines ID people give is correct against the standard neo-Darwinian picture (though he accepts large parts of it, as do most IDers). It's true that most ID people are Christians, but that doesn't mean it's religion, either in principle or even for those Christians who accept it. It's a philosophical argument that many Christians accept, and they accept it because they think it's a good argument, not because it occurs in the Bible.

Allthings2all has put together The Science and Christianity Showcase, an excellent collection of posts from Christian bloggers about the relation between science and Christianity, excluding anything on creation and evolution at least partly because a recent Apologetics Carnival dealt with that subject (but I get the sense it's also because all these other issues tend to get sidelined by creation/evolution whenever the topic of Christianity and science comes up). Since there was no expectation that submissions should be recent posts, I submitted my All Creation Groans from almost a year ago. Three posts struck me as worth highlighting:

Sun and Shield has a nice overview of the main themes throughout scripture on the use of our abilities to make things and to explore and learn about God's cration, thus providing a basic biblical theology of science and technology. As with anything good, people can use it as an instrumental bad, and he spends some time listing some ways that can happen, with examples of each from the biblical record.

Blogotional develops some of the same themes, focusing in on the value of science for the Christian as a way to explore what God has done.

A Physicist's Perspective also covers some of the same ground. One intriguing argument in his post is that what we do in science is something God commanded Adam to do before the fall. He also emphasizes the rationality of the world and the God who made it, which encourages us to use science as a rational means of understanding it.

wacky search of the day: ralph nader preterist

ridiculously exaggerated search of the day: 1000 reasons why premarital sex is bad

Both of those were actually yesterday, but that's when I put most of this post together.

Psychologists have a test that's generally agreed to show whether a child or an animal has self-consciousness. Someone will put a red dot on their forehead while they're asleep and then see what happens when they look in a mirror. If orangutans, say, can put their hand on their forehead when they see a red dot on the forehead of the image of the orangutan in the mirror, it's supposed to show that the orangutan is thinking, "Hey, that's me, and I've got a red dot on my forehead."

I've been thinking about this, and I'm not so sure. Doesn't it really just show that they expect a correlation between things in mirrors and things that we know mirrors reflect? I wonder about this as I see my kids learning to identify themselves in the mirror. They might easily first get the concept that the things in the mirror match up with the things outside the mirror, long before they start thinking "that's me in the mirror". So why are these tests supposed to tell us that orangutans, gorillas, and chimps have self-consciousness? Maybe they do, but I can't see how this test should show that.

Update: Chris says there are other experiments that do show this (see comment below). If so, my point still stands. You need to have a different experiment to rule out the possibility I presented.

Dory at Wittenberg Gate takes on old-earthers in one of the best presentations of the difficulties with old earth interpretations of Genesis that I've ever seen. I respect Dory greatly, and I think she's got one of the best Christian blogs out there. I have to disagree extremely strongly with her on this issue, though. It seems to me that her normally careful argumentation just isn't present in this post. She argues that the Bible seems to present death as a consequence of the fall, and the old-earth view seems to require death before the fall. I'm not 100% sure of either of those claims, but it's the hardest argument for the old-earth view to deal with. She also presents problems with two of the common views of making Genesis 1:1-2:3 fit a long time frame, but those two views don't seem to me to be the primary views Genesis scholars have. They view those strategies to be just as out of touch with the literary structure of the passage as the 24-hour day view is. Finally, she says an old-earth view threatens the foundations of the gospel, and it's here that I'm really worried about what she's saying, though it's consistent with what she says that she isn't accusing anyone of denying the gospel.

My list of things to blog about has gotten too long and contains a number of things that are too old for me to want to bother with extended comments, so here are some of them that I'm giving up on, along with some more recent ones that I've decided not to comment on but thought were worth a link.

Taking his cue from a TIME Magazine issue focusing on happiness, Mark Roberts tackles the issue from a Christian perspective in a series he apparently finished almost a week ago. I got through half of it and then decided to wait until he was done, and I just figured out that he's moved on to a new series. I've just read the rest of it, and I can declare that it's all worth reading. It would be too much to try to summarize, so I won't try.

I was toying whether to say something about the evolution stickers fiasco. I didn't get around to completing my decision on whether I would. Sam has now beaten me to it, and I think she says everything I wanted to say (and a little more).

I know it's bad blogging practice not to link to the background to what I've just mentioned. I'm too burned out dealing with someone who turns out to be a semi-troll and a lot more people than I expected who have completely misinterpreted my words and actions with regard to the World post.

Therefore, I'm not going to comment further on the evolution stuff or seek out the links to the background on that or link to the posts I've just referenced on my own blog (which won't take too much work to locate if you really care and don't already know). Sam links to the background on the evolution stuff, anyway, so when you read her post, which was the point of all this, you can get the background from there.

This is the first case like this that I've seen (not counting fictional cases such as in The Sixth Day). A woman lost her cat and decided to replace it with its clone. She found someone who would do it and now has her cat's clone. Hat tip: McConchie

What do I think of this? I hope she realizes that the clone will have a natural life span as long as her dead cat's natural life span would have been had it not died. Other than that issue, I'm not sure why this in itself should raise any serious ethical worries. When I first found this, I wanted to use it as an excuse to type up a thorough discussion of the moral issues raised in cloning, but I've got two reasons not to do it at the moment. First, I've got a long list of things to blog about and don't feel like doing a long post right now (this not feeling like doing it is independent of the next issue, which is just another reason not to feel like it). Second, I've got an injured finger at the moment and don't feel like typing the whole thing out in index finger mode. So I'm just going to issue a challenge: what is wrong with what this woman did, besides the one concern I raised? My claim is that there's nothing wrong with it, and I'm challenging anyone to give me an argument that I'm wrong. I can think of reasons not to do it, but I'm not sure they're moral reasons.

Apparently a debate is now going on about whether all the purported missing links between humans and apes (e.g. Lucy, Java Man, the Neanderthals, the recent New Zealand Hobbit people) are of other species at all. [Hat tip: A Physicist's Perspective] I've read that what we have of Neanderthals is consistent with arthritic homo sapiens, but I didn't know if that was a reliable source. I also know that many have questioned whether Australopithecus can play the role it does in standard models of human evolution. Well, now some people who are not in any sense creationists are claiming that not one of these transitional forms is what it's supposed to be. The genetic variation is well within the realm of considering them all part of the same species, just at various stages of development along what is roughly a continuum, but stages within the development of one species.

If this is right, it turns out to be completely consistent with even the most conservative of creationists, who insist that they do believe in the empirically observable aspects of evolutionary theory, i.e. microevolution. I'm not about to defend any view on most of the issues people argue about related to this, but I found it interesting that some people who have not in any way given up the standard evolutionary picture have now reverted to seeing all the purported transitional forms as well within the range of variation to count as homo sapiens. I don't know what bearing this will have on evolutionary theory. Presumably it favors Gould over Dawkins. What I'm worried about is if it's going to have a bearing on the role genetic variation plays in arguments about race. If it does, I'll have to rework some of the arguments I've been working on.

The head psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins Medical Center has argued against their former practice of surgery altering the sex organs both of those who identify themselves as transsexuals (who consider themselves trapped in the body of the opposite sex) and of genuinely biological intersexuals (who are biologically indeterminate in some sense between male and female). I call it a former practice because his research has led them no longer to do this kind of surgery, and I think they were one of the leaders in the field. They'd encouraged and even pushed people into having these surgeries for years, and now he thinks that was the worst thing they could have recommended. They've led the way among a growing group of hospitals no longer doing them. I was going to comment more on this one, but I've got too long a list of things I want to focus my blogging time on, and it's such an interesting article that I'll just let you read it yourself without trying to guide that process too much. I will say one thing more. What was most interesting to me (of the meta-questions anyway) was that absolutely none of this guy's reasoning is religious in any way or even related to the typical arguments you'll find among social conservatives, even though it's published in First Things. As far as his reasoning goes, the guy might be a politically liberal atheist.

Well, they finally did it. This is the kind of scifi that people have always found too fiction and not enough science, but it's left that realm entirely. Scientists have now grown a rat brain in a petri dish, starting just from some embryonic cells. Then they taught it how to fly a flight simulator. They plan to build computers with organic components. When John Searle said you couldn't get a machine that thinks without modeling it exactly on the causal structure of the human brain, I don't think this is what he had in mind. For some reason this strikes me as less creepy than growing rats' bodies without brains to harvest organs, but the moral implications of brains without bodies have got to be more serious.

A 37-year-old South Korean woman who had been paralyzed from the waist down for 19 years is now walking. How? They implanted stem cells into her spine, and they were able to take over for the no-longer-working cells that were failing to do their job. They'd previously tried by injecting stem cells into the spinal fluid, but it didn't work. This did.

So does this vindicate the Kerry-Edwards proposal to expand government funding for embryonic stem cell research, which California has already now done with their own state funding? Well, look at the fine print. It turns out this wasn't from embryonic stem cells at all. These are cord blood stem cells. The only people who will have moral objections to using those are Jehovah's Witnesses, who think taking something from someone else's blood into your own goes against the Torah command not to eat blood (I wonder if they eat kosher, because to be consistent they need to). This is actually an important discovery for the pro-life argument against needing embryonic stem cells for this kind of thing. There's still greater potential for embryonic cells if the overcome the biggest obstacle to using them at all, which there's been no progress on, but cord blood stem cells do in fact work for this sort of thing, so I don't know how embryonic stem cell advocates can see this as anything more than a mixed result for them.

Jay Greenberg has been compared to Mozart, Mendelssohn, and Saint-Saens. He's composed five symphonies. He composes as he goes about his life, and transfers it to musical notation when he gets to his computer. Sometimes he's even multi-tasking with multiple pieces of music at once. He's written pieces in less than an hour that major symphonies will perform. He's been at Juilliard for a couple years and expects to finish in a couple more. Oh, and he's 12.

I'd like to see someone who knows more than I do about global warming critique this revelation that one of the key pieces of evidence for global warming was rigged. Has anyone responded to this yet? Last I knew some of the conclusions that this evidence was supposed to refute seemed really plausible (e.g. that global warming has been slightly increased recently but has been on the increase for a long time and that there's little we can do about it). This evidence was supposed to refute that (though that was also based on evidence). Now the refutation seems suspect. Does anyone know more about this?

Joe Carter examines a number of myths about the dangers of dirty bombs and suitcase nukes (with some comments also about nuclear power plants at the end). I didn't know most of this stuff. His sources look to me to be about as reliable as you get. His conclusion: these tactics really are aimed at evoking paranoia and wouldn't really do anywhere near as much damage as you would think from the way people talk about it. It would be bad if a terrorist exploded a dirty bomb in the middle of Manhattan, but most people's attitudes toward it are far beyond what the threat really is. Someone a mile away would have a stronger radiation threat from getting an X-ray, but I think he's right that most people's fears stem from thinking the whole city would be uninhabitable with everyone anywhere near the city dying of cancer within a year.

Stephen Meyer, long known to those who follow the Intelligent Design issue, has published a short review of the ID arguments in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, and a lot of scientists are mad. I've tried to stay away from this general area too much, mostly because I don't know what I think about some key issues in the area. Still, I do have some thoughts on this, and I'll probably offend most everybody by the time I'm done, but I'm going to say what's on my mind anyway.

The scientific community seems to be scared. They're all upset that a peer-reviewed journal would publish a piece on Intelligent Design. I say it this way because that's what I think is going on. The statements quoted in the article don't seem to me to be the kind of statement you would make if you happen to think the paper that got published is merely not well-argued. They're the kind of statement you'd make if you think the paper that got published shouldn't have been published because you don't like the conclusion. That's not my main beef here, though.

One person quoted in the article calls ID "an evolved form of creationism that resulted from legal decisions in the 1980s ruling that creationism can't be taught in schools." This is complete ignorance. The term 'creationism' as it is normally used nowadays refers to a particular viewpoint that arose in the 20th century (or perhaps you could argue that it finds its initial stages in the late 19th), claiming in response to neo-Darwinian theories that science proves evolution to be fiction and instantaneous acts of God to be scientifically established fact. The argument form used in what they're now calling Intelligent Design goes back millenia, though, so this statement is just ignorant (or perhaps maliciously deceptive, but I'll be nice).

Right out of Star Trek IV. Now we can transport whales more easily.

Due to my work on tomorrow's Christian Carnival, I haven't had time to post anything today. Here's a book review I wrote on Amazon in November 2002. This book is currently out-of-print, but these academic books go in and out of print every few years, and I imagine used copies are much more available over the internet than it used to be. A good library with interlibrary loan connections with academic libraries should be able to get ahold of it fairly easily also.

Peter van Inwagen, God, Knowledge, and Mystery: Essays in Philosophical Theology

Peter van Inwagen is a first-class philosopher, widely respected as one of the best metaphysicians of our day. This book collects previously-published work in philosophy of religion. He is a sincere Christian thinker who began his philosophical career as a nonbeliever. The value, difficulty, and strengths and weaknesses in this book vary from paper to paper.

Scientists have now made a great leap in the progress toward zombies -- pulseless humans.

John Rabe has a great post giving the facts on stem cells and stem cell research, and as far as I know he's exactly right on each point. The most important point is that adult stem cell research has borne great fruit, and embryonic stem cells have only led to problematic developments when inserted into adult organisms. Ron Reagan says Republicans opposing embryonic stem cell research are scientifically ignorant, but he may more accurate if he directs that charge toward himself. The Democrats' decision to make this a key issue of the presidential campaign is a bad idea, since science is not on their side.

What I'd like to see is more information on placental stem cells, since those are usually just discarded and are adult stem cells, having the DNA of the mother. Our obstetrician, a pro-life Christian, told us there isn't any research showing it to be of much use, and he recommended discarding it, but I'd like to see the studies showing that. I haven't coming across any.

Update: Robert George argues for an even stronger conclusion. Ron Reagan is taking advantage of people suffering from Parkinson's Disease and other ailments by promising them a change in administrations is going to lead to cures for many such diseases. I didn't read his speech carefully, but what I saw doesn't contradict this. He also points out that Reagan chose a very careful way of phrasing the process of extracting stem cells that isn't technically false but makes it sound as if it doesn't kill a live embryo, which is nuts. It does, and most of the research people would do with a policy change would be using embryos created deliberately just to be killed for such research.

There's a new drug for African-American heart patients (found at Volokh). There's something right about this, and there's something a little dangerous. The drug had been tested and abandoned in the 80s due to little success among most people. At some point someone figured out that it had a better effect among black people, and studies to confirm this showed good results. What's most likely going on is that a genetic trait common among Americans of recent African descent (one suggestion has to do with nitric acid levels) allows this drug to be more successful with this particular kind of heart condition, just as some other kinds of medication are less successful in the same population. It doesn't seem related to the genes for pigmentation. Skin color may be a good guide to seeing whether someone has the relevant trait for the drug, but enough race mixing has gone on in the history of this country, and enough immigration of people who look enough like Americans of African descent but who are genetically very dissimilar, that prescribing such medicines according to racial identification is a very bad idea.

Here's some more stuff I've decided not to have longer posts on.

At Writing to Understand, Kris gives some reasons not to be so harsh with Fahrenheit 9/11. There really is something to be learned from it, even if you have to know a lot about the issues to be able to evaluate which bits are something to be learned and which are complete fabrications.

I knew video games were good for something.

Also from McConchie, a debunking of numerous claims about fetal stem cells. Destroying embryos doesn't seem to be worth it even if you ignore the fact that you're killing a human being.

Mark Liberman of Language Log has more on Bush's supposed disfluencies. This time an extremely respected linguist, George Lakoff, says Bush proved himself to be an excellent debater when running for governor. He describes him as eloquent, quick on his feet, and able to get out complicated sentences smoothly and without hesitation. Liberman considers a few theories as to why he seems to have become less that way during the 2000 presidential race and during his presidency. Interesting stuff.

New technology reveals much about fetal development, including certain behavior occurring much earlier than previously thought. See also Evangelical Outpost and La Shawn Barber
ht and thanks to Tim Challies for posting on this early enough for me to find it first.

Most of these posts consider the relevance of this issue to abortion. I don't think this will affect in any way the insistence of pro-choice philosophers to list a bunch of properties not yet true of a fetus and to define personhood by them, then saying that moral status only comes when you have those properties. Since the argument is circular, they can just change whatever properties they'll insist are required for personhood, and you'll still come out saying mentally handicapped people aren't persons. You'll just have to say that more of them are. Once you allow circular arguments, you allow people to get away with such moves.

Still, what some of these posts are suggesting is right. 'Murder' is a legal term, and the law as defined by judicial activism allows abortion, so I don't see how abortion can be murder at this point, but it is the killing of a living human being, biologically distinct from its mother even if it's biologically dependent on her (which I think is a moral reason to presume against abortion rather than for the right to abort). I don't see why defining personhood to exclude this kind of human being should lower our estimation of the horror of such a killing.

Crispus raises some thoughtful questions about stem-cell research. One issue (for another time) is whether it's wrong or ok to end the life of a human organism for the purpose of possibly helping other human organisms to avoid a debilitating disease. Crispus raises a different issue.

My question: if stem-cell research is the next big thing, then why isn't private industry all over it? The research and development dollars they plugged in would be more than made up by profits from medicinal cures. Could it be that it's too iffy an enterprise and they want a government guarantee?

I haven't thought about this aspect of the issue before. Is the lack of commercial interest a good sign of the low potential for research progress?

Meanwhile, in both the cagtegory of science news and the category of "What the Pork?", an Iranian woman has supposedly given birth to a frog after having picked up the embryo while swimming in a dirty pool. Thanks to Patriot Paradox for posting the link.

My list of favorite posts is getting fairly long, and I've decided to remove some of the earlier ones. I still want to have a link to them, so I'm linking to them in this post, and then I'll put this post in the list of favorite posts. That way the list will be shorter, but I'll be able to find them fairly easily without having to search the whole site.

New low for racist left looks at a poster making fun of National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice that I believe to be racist. I explain why in the post, and somehow some slack-jawed yokels found the post, completely ignored my reasoning and everything about me that a quick look around my site would reveal, and proceeded to call me a racist. It was probably the most commented-on entry in the history of my blog, and the comments are quite characteristic of the average response to the kind of point I was making, which is simply to ignore it and change the subject, to charge me with things I never said and don't believe, and to take everything I said in the most uncharitable way possible.

Pacifism links to my fairly comprehensive teaching notes on arguments for and against pacifism, including both philosophical and biblical arguments.

Personhood and Abortion summarizes some of my views on abortion, in response to some statements by Senator Sam Brownback (R, KS). Careful-thinking people realize that personhood is the central issue in the debate (not life or humanity), but personhood by itself itself doesn't decide the issue one way or the other, giving pro-life and pro-choice reasons for thinking that. I offer two considerations that should also come into play, one having to do with violence and the other from the fact that we view very early miscarriages as unfortunate but not as bad as losing a child at a later developmental stage.

Update: I've removed some of the posts originally in this entry and put them into a topical one on apologetics, because they belong there. This one's a little haphazard themewise.

Update 2: I've moved more into Christian Ethics Posts. This post is getting smaller and smaller.

Here's some more stuff I've been catching up on from the weekend away:

The universe has been expanding faster than the speed of light (via Volokh).

Poliblogger links to a story about three washed-up action hero actors playing three washed-up action hero actors who open up a private investigtor firm. The actors? William Shatner, Robert Wagner, and Lee Majors. I'd watch that.

King of Fools points out that John Kerry is now advocating unilateral engagement with North Korea. He's also got a good post on lust and objectification that picks up on themes I blogged about recently.

Bill Hobbs gives a mini-roundup of connections between Saddam and al Qaeda (link from One Hand Clapping).

Rebecca Writes gives some helpful reflections on the moral implications of Philippians 2:1-8, including just what it is about Jesus' giving of himself that Paul is telling the Philippians to imitate. This post got a mention on Blogs4God.

McConchie on Bioethics writes:

Remember the doctor that recommended that you eat your snot? Well now two epidemiologists are claiming that the more kids bathe in dirt, the less likely they are to eczema. Under their theory, humans have learned to live with certain bacteria over the past few million years and actually now need them. Without the bacteria to keep them occupied, the body's two types of immune system cells attack the body for want of an opponent. The researchers believe that this helps point out that moderhygienene may actually promote allergic diseases.

Actually, the study seemed to me to be saying that if you have cats, multiple kids, or a farm then you're less likely to have eczema, asthma, or other allergic reactions, but the conclusion Daniel draws isn't too much of a stretch from that. So bring on the dirt baths. I assume dirt eating is part of this.

Here's a surrogate mother case that doesn't raise all the usual ethical questions (not even those raised by other family members such as a sister as a surrogate mother).

I wonder if we can get the right further connections her to make someone his own grandpa.

From One Hand Clapping, who also comments on the woman who married herself (on which see my comments).

A new study gives an explanation for why women don't succeed as well as men in getting top positions in competitive situtions. Some postulate that it's mere sexism and that men aren't as willing to consider women for such jobs as they are to consider men. Some of that may well go on. However, there's one factor that should at least be part of the story. Women don't do as well in competitive situations as they might do without competition. This study shows an increase in men's performance when competition sets in. No such increase occurs with women. Competitive situations therefore produce a gender gap, from the mere fact that it's a competitive situation. The gender gap is even wider when women have to compete against men than when women and men are segregated by sex.

(I should say that this may also be relevant to wage differences as well as to who gets what jobs to begin with. Wages are often determined by competitive factors.)

We too often conclude that an inequality of outcome is due to an inequality of treatment. It isn't necessarily that way. Those who then read every action related to that situation as unequal treatment are going to create more problems while not solving whatever real problems are there.

Thanks to Fringe for the link.

Some have argued recently that there's no such thing as race. Anthony Appiah's In My Father's House and Color Conscious are probably the two most notable discussions. Scientists often take this view without realizing all the philosophical leaps in reasoning they've made to get to the view (see, for example, this article, registration required). Others think it's merely a social category (most philosophers who write on the topic, usually on the same basis as the scientists above but with more sensitivity to issues about human language and social catgegorizations. There are also two possible positions according to which it's a genuine biological category, one of which I think is easily refuted by the data. The other seems to me to be a legitimate view that hasn't been discussed by philosophers or scientists to my knowledge (though I think economist Thomas Sowell may have suggested such a view -- I'm not quite sure yet). Below are the arguments for developing and sorting out these various views.

Before you read this it might be helpful to look at my first two posts in this (sort of) series. First is a set of cases to test your intuitions on racial classification, with the followup giving the data from my students' answers to those same questions.

Scientists are experimenting with nanotechnology in goats. Don't get alarmed, though. They're been doing this sort of thing for far longer than we've had the term 'nanotechnology'. Here's more. The people at Language Log are calling it organic nanotechnology.

From McConchie on Bioethics: It's healthier to pick your nose and eat it than it is to refrain. At least, that's what an Austrian professor of pulmonary medicine says. Your finger is a more effective tool than a handkerchief, so you get more out. That much is common sense. What's surprising is his claim that eating it will build your immune system. I guess it's not that surprising if you know anything about the immune system, but it's surprising that an M.D.-Ph.D. is saying it. What's interesting to me is that he says eating the dry remains builds your immune system. What about the fluid stuff? Does it not build your immune system because of the form it takes, or does even he not want to suggest that because it's too gross? We already know that sucking it down your throat builds your immune system, so what would be unhealthy about eating it? I think the guy's just too much of a wimp to say it.

Back of the Envelope says the scientific community in Galileo's time did have reason to resist his claims but also that he was well-received within the Roman Catholic Church. This is the first I've heard of this. Does anyone who knows more about it have anything to say about it, either in support or in defense?

It's been clear to me for a long time that many people have used Galileo's case to assert that the Bible itself said what the Roman Catholic Church at the time was claiming it said, and I think that's demonstrably false. People have also tried to make the claim that Galileo was on the side of science against religion, which ignores his deeply-seated Christian convictions. So it doesn't surprise me that even more of the common claims about Galileo turn out to be false. It's just that these two are new to me.

I found a passage in Lucretius that anticipates Galileo's famous thought experiment about falling objects of different weight falling at the same speed:

And if by chance someone thinks that heavier atoms, in virtue of their more rapid motion straight through the void, could fall from above on the lighter atoms, and that in this way the blows which generate the productive motions could be produced, he has strayed very far from the true account. For everything which falls through water or light air must fall at a speed proportional to their weights, simply because the bulk of the water and the fine nature of the air can hardly delay each other equally, but yield more quickly to the heavier bodies being overwhelmed by them. But by contrast, at no time and in no place can the empty void resist any thing, but it must, as its nature demands, go on yielding to it. Therefore, everything must move at equal speed through the inactive void, though they are not given by equal weights. (On the Nature of Things 225, in Brad Inwood and L.P. Gerson, ed., Hellenistic Philosophy: Introductory Readings, p.64.

He's wrong on a number of details here, but it's amazing how close to the truth he is, even on some things Galileo didn't even get right. Lucretius lived in the first half of the first century before Christ. Galileo lived in the 17th century after Christ. There was something like 1650 years between them. Philosophers who say they don't need to bother reading the philosophers of history and just focus on contemporary stuff are opening themselves to missing something that's already been said on their topic, as Galileo did. Of course, ignoring philosophy in other traditions has the same problem, and I don't know much about African or Asian philosophy, but I don't really know where to begin. I've been looking for a good textbook looking at those traditions from an analytic perspective, but I don't know if anything like that exists.

Update: I posted this over at OrangePhilosophy, and it's started to get comments there.

The time has arrived once again when I have too many things to blog about and not enough time to do it, so before some of this stuff gets too old I'll at least link them and say something about them.

Discoshaman comments on the scientists on the verge of creating life in a laboratory to the effect that someone's going to start denying that it's happened on the grounds that only God can create life. Read the first comment, the one about the dirt. It's hilarious and exactly the right to say here.

This one's been old for a while, but I just found it. Philosopher Keith Burgess-Jackson has been a gradual convert to conservative thought over the course of his life. He wrote this before the big brouhaha over liberal professors in academia of the last few months, but it looks at why so many liberal thinkers think conservatives are stupid in a way that's neither insulting to liberals nor favorable to the position that conservatives tend to be stupid.

Speaking of philosophers discussing important issues, Jeremy Chong gives a near-formal deductive argument for the conclusion that soy milk is indeed milk. I would have argued on the same basis but in a very different way, focusing more on philosophy of language but really for the same reasons and based on the same intuitions.

Volokh: A 15-year-old girl is up for child pornography charges for taking pictures of herself and sending them to people through the internet. Get a load of what they're charging her with.

Also at Volokh, Jacob Levy, from my alma mater Brown, mentions two things of note in one post. First is his reference to Buddy Cianci, former mayor of Providence who was convicted of a felony and then later re-elected mayor for multiple terms while still not serving any terms. It's as if he's a cartoon character. What Jacob says about him is precious. Then he goes on to tell a great story of the new attorney general of RI calling Marvel Comics to get Stan Lee's permission to use a quote from the first appearance of Spiderman.

Yet again at Volokh: Anyone up for a vampire slaying? This one wasn't posted on April Fool's Day. At least the guy was already dead.

Last but not least, you have to see the latest two comments on my post from January about the racist Condoleeza Rice poster that had been circulating at the time. It would be ideal if you go and look at the family pictures on my old blog site first to appreciate the full humor of what these two guys (assuming they're two people -- I haven't checked the IPs yet) think they can get away with saying. Update: Sam weighs in. I like the MTV comment. It's too bad I didn't catch that. It's insulting enough to assume that I don't know my wife. To assume that I watch MTV may even be worse.

I've got a couple more, including another from Volokh, but I'll hold off on them in the hopes that I might be able to say a little more about them.

Evangelical Outpost has sparked an interesting discussion on whether the human organism is fully existent at conception or at a later time, including whether the soul is present at conception. Since it tied in nicely with some of what I've been working on possibly for my dissertation, I had to throw in some of my own thoughts on problems with the soul having existed since conception. I'm hoping someone has some nice responses to those problems, though, since it might help getting my stalled project back off the ground.

A Harvard study shows that what we dream about seems to be affected by what thoughts we try to suppress during our waking hours. If this is right, it disproves much folk wisdom about dreams revealing what we subconsciously want to think about (but won't admit it). Freud wouldn't be very happy with this. Dreams are about what we don't want to think about, so it may indicate greater moral resistance to those things.

I stumbled upon something refuting the ridiculous myth that we use only 10% of our brains, with even some discussion on how such a stupid idea ever got started. Of course it never seemed so stupid to me when I kept hearing people parrot it around with no basis for their claim other than that some other misinformed person who never checked on it had first told it to them.

I believe it was Ryle who, in defending his outright silly view that mental properties are merely properties of our physical bodies, i.e. our behavior, insisted that their must be some sort of motion that we do, even if undetectable, to correspond to our innermost thoughts. It's true that some people do this, but most people don't move their lips when thinking. This was rightly seen as special pleading.

NASA scientists have now shown that Ryle was right on one thing. When we're about to talk, some sort of behavior in our throat preceds our mouth's uttering of words. These motions can now be analyzed and given content. Computers can now tell what you're saying subvocally even if you don't move your lips or face.

Now this doesn't really rescue Ryle. His version of behaviorism is demonstrably false, which is shown by a number of cases:

1. The in-principle possible perfect actor spends an entire life acting out the behavior that accompanies certain mental states without ever having them.

2. The in-principle possible muscle relaxant that doctors believe to be a perfect pain-killer. They never see the effects of the pain caused by the operation, because every measurable muscle in the body is temporarily frozen somehow, preserving life and feeling. Then the drug's amnesiac properties kick in, and the person forgets all the pain caused by the operation, so no one ever finds out through behavior that there was any pain. Yet there was.

So Ryle was wrong that pain or other mental states can be viewed as simply behavior or dispositions to behave in certain ways. However, the irony is that that the most ridiculed element of his defense of such a ridiculous view has now at least partially been vindictated.

Joe at Evangelical Outpost had a post a while back with two tests for autism and autistic spectrum traits. One involves mind-reading by looking at someone's eyes, with the rest of the face occluded. [It's a little funny to call it a mind-reading test, given that these pictures are of people faking certain faces to look like they have certain emotions that they don't really have.] They tried to remove some of the subjective factors by trying to find common enough agreement on which emotions the eyes showed, but I doubt it's as objective as they'd like. Either way, it does test some differences between people with Asperger's Syndrome (AS) or high-functioning autism (HFA) and the average person (with differences between males and females.

The other is a personality test somehow labeled "the autism quotient test" that picks out ISTJ traits as autistic traits and then saying that the test reveals who has autistic traits. [Note: Asperger's is a high-functioning autistic spectrum condition with higher-functioning, though not necessarily completely normal, cognitive and language abilities, sometimes even better than normal, but with delays in social and communicative delays with obsessional, repetitive, and routine behaviors.]

On the mind-reading through eye-reading test, there were 36 questions. The average score among AS/HFA people was 21.9. The average male score was 26. The average female score was 26.4. My score was 24, right between the normal male score and the AS/HFA average, just slightly closer to the average male score. (I should say that I got all 20 questions right on the whole face emotion recognition test, but I couldn't find the statistics on how people in general do on that one.)

The AQ test had an average score of 16.4. 80% of AS/HFA people scored at least 32, though the average AS/HFA score was 34.4 on one study and 35.8 on another. I scored 28. I wonder how the male/female differences turn out among the normal score group. The only data I have are for a group of Oxford University students who scored a little better on the mind-reading test than the average person did. The male average among them was 19.5, the female average 16.6. Both averages are higher than the 16.4 overall average, so this select population doesn't set a baseline standard. Again, my score was between the average male score and the AS/HFA average, though this time a good deal closer to the AS/HFA side.

Now there's important new research suggesting that the autistic spectrum is just one side of the male-female spectrum in terms of a number of traits, with males tending to be better at systematizing intelligence and females tending to be better at empathizing intelligence. Autism is a disorder that's even more extreme in the male tendency toward systematizing with difficulty on the empathizing end. There's also a disorder that's the reverse (but it's extremely rare) called Williams syndrome. Given that, I seem to me more male than most men. In other words, I'm quite the studly dude. So take the tests at the link above and see how manly you are!

A couple weeks ago an article in The Economist made the claim that love is just a chemical addiction. That's not quite all that it went on to say, however. While this looks bad for true romantics, the conclusions those who read the whole article will find will show something much more in favor of some thoughts I've long had and that I think Christians should be excited to see scientific support for.

Prairie voles release oxytocin and vasopressin during sex. Scientists have discovered that blocking this release leads to promiscuity among voles, but otherwise they mate for life. These hormones have something to do with their monogamy. Montane voles, on the other hand, do not release these hormones during sex and do not mate for life. When artificially stimulated with these hormones on the occasion of sex, they still do not mate for life. They don't have receptors in their brains for these hormones. Other than that difference, these voles are pretty much genetically the same. That means monogamy in higher animals is not a result of more complex brains or higher-order thought processes. It's a result of the ability to receive these hormones and only that ability. (They even did genetic manipulation on these voles to give the montane voles the gene for the receptors, and that did the trick, whereas removing it from prairie voles removed their ability to form a monogamous bond).

That's the bad news for romantics. We already know that animals in general continue to eat, drink, and have sex because it feels good. These activities produce dopamine in the brain. What people have often thought is that such animal desires can be sublimated by higher emotions like romantic love or higher thought processes like rationally belief formation (e.g. knowledge that unprotected sex can lead to disease or unwanted pregnancy). This research finds a chemical basis for at least the stuff we have called romantic love. The vasopressin and oxytocin lead to an association between sex and a particular partner. For mice this association is with the smell of the mate. There's an olfactory "image" (so to speak -- think Daredevil) of the mouse's partner, and that image is associated with intense pleasure.

Humans also release oxytocin and vasopressin during sex. A study in the UK linked higher levels of these hormones in brains of students who said they were madly in love. There are similar hormonal differences involving friendship, however, and this involved a much larger area of the brain. Also, the hormones associated with what these students were calling love was focused on the part of the brain that we already know has to do with gut intuitions and narcotics. Other strong emotions involve different parts of the brain.

Scientists have discovered that feelings of eeriness and religious experiences can correlate with very sounds lower than we can hear. According to NPR today, a man working on a house alone saw what looked like a ghost. The next day he discovered an electric tool buzzing on its own. He investigated and found a fan operating at a very low frequency. When he turned it off, the tool stopped. Apparently this was also the reason for his ghost sighting. British scientists have investigated the effects of infrasound at musical performances. Parts of the music with infrasound notes correlated with experiences of "sorrow, coldness, anxiety and shivers down the spine". The NPR story described a different experiment. There was a strong correlation between those in an audience who near infrasound projectors and those who reported strange or spiritual sensations during the performance.

What do we conclude? Those who are quick to dismiss any reality to spiritual claims say: According to The Guardian's story, "natural sources of infrasound - wind, air conditioning systems and traffic for example - could possibly explain why there were persistent reports of hauntings in some buildings." That doesn't bother me. At atheists.about.com, however, we find a stronger stance. "It disproves that old idea that there are some things that science cannot and will not ever be able to explain, one of which is often the strange sensations people have in some circumstances. Religious feelings are not immune to careful, scientific investigation - we just need the right sorts of things to look for, first."

This is doubly fallacious. First off, you can't disprove the idea that there are some things science can't explain by showing that one such thing is now explained. There still may be lots of other things science can't explain, for all this argument has shown. Second, as one of the people interviewed on the NPR spot this afternoon pointed out, all this shows is a correlation. This gives us one occasion for religious experiences. It doesn't show that it's the cause. I can think of a number of possible scenarios for this. He suggested that maybe we're always unconsciously having religious experiences, and this just brings it into our conscious awareness. Another explanation would be that these infrasound effects bring us into a connection with spiritual realities that we're otherwise not aware of. A third possibility is that this is an effect that leads to a similar sensation to those caused by spiritual realities. One way or the other, the conclusion doesn't follow. It's a possible explanation for some religious experiences, as the Guardian story said, but it's a bit beyond the evidence to say much else for sure.

There's an excellent discussion going on right now at Josh Claybourn's blog on whether homosexuality is determined or made likely by genetics and whether that's even significant for moral issues. Unfortunately, the direct link keeps closing my browser, so I've just linked the main page, and you'll have to scroll down.

I generally don't like to link to things without having anything to say myself, but this is a great discussion, and I do chime in a little bit over there.

I haven't seen this [Update: the original article has been removed, but here is the content of that article] described so nicely before. It's been common knowledge among most philosophers of race that our American concept of race has no scientific basis. That doesn't mean there's no reality to race, but it's a social phenomenon, not a scientifically discoverable division within the species. The work on the human genome project has not only confirmed this but given hard numbers to back it up.

Two little bits as a sample:

"Gray wolves split into subspecies, scoring 0.7 on Wright's scale. Even Ozark mountain lizards living on ridges less than a mile apart differ from each other by an Fst score of 0.4. But human groups score only about 0.15 on the statistical scale. That's a worldwide total measuring all human variation. When scientists try to measure differences between only two groups of people, they usually find a lower score, on average about 0.08 -- only 8 percent of the genes examined have more than one allele. The most disparate human groups barely make the 0.25 mark, far below the diversity seen in lizards."

"For instance, the Pygmy people living in Zaire and the Central African Republic, and people from Melanesia, such as people from the island of Fiji, are among the darkest-skinned populations in the world. A racial classification based on skin color would likely group them as members of the same race quite distinct from fair-skinned Europeans. But genetic analysis reveals that both African Pygmies and people from Fiji are more closely related to Europeans than to each other."

Update: I should explain what's going on with the comments on this one. I was involved with a discussion on Kwanzaa at World Magazine's blog. Someone there co-opted the discussion toward some pet issues, basically arguing for a thesis something along the lines of what The Bell Curve is usually used to demonstrate -- that standardized test differences between racial groups are explainable only through genetic predispositions for certain levels of intelligence. (See the Thomas Sowell discussion I linked in the comments for a more balanced view of that book.)

Independently of that discussion, I found this article and thought it relevant to some of my own thoughts on race that I've been posting here, so I posted it on my blog. Then I decided that it would also be relevant to that discussion and posted it there. Instead of continuing the conversation there, the person who had been trolling there rudely decided to continue the discussion here, thus giving readers of my blog absolutely no sense of where this is coming from unless they'd already been following that discussion.

My policy on trolling is that I will address any real arguments that I think are worth discussing, even if the general tone of the message is trolling, as long as I haven't already addressed them. Any posts that are pure trolling will be deleted.

This came out two weeks ago, and it's huge news, I've been spending a lot of time in the internet lately, and this is the first I've heard of it. Scientists at Scripps Research Institute in California have found a way to turn differentiated adult cells into stem-cells using a newly discovered compound called reversine. The primary argument for scientific research on embryos, which many pro-life people believe are fully persons and therefore have the rights of persons, was to procure stem-cells for research without having to take cells from aborted fetuses. In the mind of the pro-life person, this solution wasn't much better. President Bush's mediating proposal was not to create any embryos for this purpose but to be able to use cells from embryos that had been created but didn't survive. Now there seems to be a new way to get these cells. Why do the major news outlets (and even the minor ones, from what I can tell) not consider this immensely important?