Pledge of Allegiance Blues documents the journey of Rev. Dr. Michael Newdow, the blues-singing California physician and his battle to protect the separation between church and state, a battle that took him all the way to the United States Supreme Court where he defended the landmark "under God" lawsuit. From the controversy over the Ten Commandments monument in the Alabama State Courthouse to a historical analysis about the intertwining of religion and government in American history, Pledge of Allegiance Blues is a smart and funny examination of the often tense relationship between church and state. With toe-tapping musical numbers by Newdow, a cast of characters including attorney Alan Dershowitz, publisher Larry Flynt, and radio talk-show host Sandy Rios, this critically acclaimed documentary provides a contemporary and provocative look at one man’s campaign to defend his constitutional rights.
“Both as a lesson in law and as an entertaining personality profile, Pledge of Allegiance Blues is highly recommended. Three and a half stars”
-Video Librarian
add comment The so-called “Woodstock of evolution” (not my term, and a pretty bad one for sure) will see a group of scientists, by now known as “the Altenberg 16” (because there are sixteen of us, and we’ll meet at theKonrad Lorenz Institute for theoretical biology in Altenberg, near Vienna) has been featured on blogs by a variety of nutcases, as well as the quintessential ID “think” tank, the Discovery Institute of Seattle. They have presented the workshop that I am organizing in collaboration with my colleague Gerd Müller, and the proceedings of which will be published next year by MIT Press, as an almost conspiratorial, quasi-secret cabala, brought to the light of day by the brave work of independent journalists and “scholars” bent on getting the truth out about evolution. Of course, nothing could be further from the (actual) truth.
The workshop is part of a regular series organized by the KLI (they do a couple of these a year), that has been going on for years now. Each workshop is limited to a small number of participants, both for logistical reasons (the Institute is small, and they have to budget the costs of paying for travel and lodging for all scientists involved) and because the idea is to get people to focus on discussing, rather than lecturing (hard to do with large groups). Articles and commentaries on the web have also made much of the fact that the meeting is “private,” meaning that the public and journalists are not invited. This is completely normal for small science workshops all over the world, and I was genuinely puzzled by the charge until I realized (it took me a while) that a sense of conspiracy increases the likelihood that people will read journalistic internet articles and ID sympathetic blogs. You’ve got to sell the product, even at the cost of, shall we say, bending, the reality.
So, what are the Altenberg 16 going to do in Altenberg next week? (We are so amused by the nickname that one of us has made buttons that say “I was one of the Altenberg 16. Look for merchandising links soon -- no, just kidding.) The agenda is to discuss the current status of evolutionary theory, with a particular emphasis on developments -- some of them under intense debate -- that have occurred since the last version of it has been in put in place back in the 1930s and ‘40s. See, current evolutionary theory is not “Darwinism,” pace creationists and IDers. Darwinism refers to the original ideas published by Chuck in The Origin of Species (look for many celebrations of it next year, its 150th anniversary), that organic diversity is due to a process of common descent largely influenced by natural selection. But scientific theories never stay the same for long, because scientists discover new facts about the natural world, and they consequently update their theories. No physicist today would refer to Newton’s Principia as thephysical theory of motion and gravity.
In the 1930s and ‘40s it became clear that one had to integrate the original Darwinism with the new disciplines of Mendelian and statistical genetics. Such integration occurred through a series of meetings where scientists discussed the status of evolutionary theory, and through the publication of a number of books by people like Theodosius Dobzhansky, Ernst Mayr, George Gaylor Simpson, George Ledyard Stebbins and others. The result was an updated theoretical framework known as the Modern Synthesis (MS). But of course evolutionary biology has further progressed during the last eight decades (unlike, one cannot help but notice, creationism). So for a few years now several evolutionary biologists have suggested that it may be time for another update, call it evolutionary theory 3.0 or, as many of us have begun to refer to it, the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES).
A number of authors, including Stephen Gould, Mary Jane West-Eberhard, Eva Jablonka, Stuart Kauffman, Stuart Newman, the above mentioned Gerd Müller, and myself, have published papers and books recently attempting to articulate what an EES might look like, and which elements of the MS will need to be retained, modified or discarded (just like the MS had retained, modified or discarded individual components of the original Darwinism). The goal of the Altenberg workshop is to get some of these people around the same table for three days and trade ideas about these sorts of questions (while also enjoying some excellent Austrian Riesling, of course).
What exactly is it that the MS does not incorporate and may require an Extended Synthesis? Ah, this brings us back to why creationists, IDers and others who have been writing about this over the past few months are either misunderstanding the issue or (surely in the case of the Discovery Institute) are deliberately distorting it to serve their inane agenda.
The basic idea is that there have been some interesting empirical discoveries, as well as the articulation of some new concepts, subsequently to the Modern Synthesis, that one needs to explicitly integrate with the standard ideas about natural selection, common descent, population genetics and statistical genetics (nowadays known as evolutionary quantitative genetics). Some of these empirical discoveries include (but are not limited to) the existence of molecular buffering systems (like the so-called “heat shock response”) that may act as “capacitors” (i.e., facilitators) of bursts of phenotypic evolution, and the increasing evidence of the role of epigenetic (i.e., non-genetic) inheritance systems (this has nothing to do with Lamarckism, by the way). Some of the new concepts that have arisen since the MS include (but again are not limited to) the idea of “evolvability” (that different lineages have different propensities to evolve novel structures or functions), complexity theory (which opens the possibility of natural sources of organic complexity other than natural selection), and “accommodation” (a developmental process that may facilitate the coordinated appearance of complex traits in short evolutionary periods).
Now, did you see anything in the above that suggests that evolution is “a theory in crisis”? Did I say anything about intelligent designers, or the rejection of Darwinism, or any of the other nonsense that has filled the various uninformed and sometimes downright ridiculous commentaries that have appeared on the web about the Altenberg meeting? Didn’t think so. If next week’s workshop succeeds, what we will achieve is taking one more step in an ongoing discussion among scientists about how our theories account for biological phenomena, and how the discovery of new phenomena is to be matched by the elaboration of new theoretical constructs. This is how science works, folks, not a sign of “crisis.”
I’ll tell you what does constitute a crisis, though: the fact that creationists have been on the retreat ever since the Scopes trial, having to invent increasingly vacuous versions of their attacks on science education in order to keep pestering the Courts of this country with their demands that religious nonsense be taught side by side with solid science. You want serious disagreement? How about several orders of magnitude difference in the estimate of the age of the earth among creationists: some of them still cling to the primitive idea that our planet is only a few thousand years old, their only “evidence” a circular argument from authority -- that’s two logical fallacies at once! (The Bible says so; how do you know the Bible is right? Because it’s the word of God; how do you know it’s the word of God? The Bible says so...) Other creationists, particularly many in the ID movement, concede that the science of geology and physics is a bit too well established to throw it out of the window, so they accept the figure of about four billion years for the age of the earth. Now, if any scientific theory were to make statements that varied by six (I repeat: six!) orders of magnitude about a basic aspect of reality, that would really mean that the theory in question is in deep trouble. C’mon, guys, fix your own house first, then start knocking at our door if you must.
Oh, by the way, here is the complete list of the Altenberg 16, together with the topics about which they will be talking at the workshop (in alphabetical order): John Beatty (University of British Columbia) on neutral evolution; Werner Callebaut (University of Hasselt) on the non-centrality of genes as causal factors in evolution; Sergey Gavrilets (University of Tennessee) on the idea of adaptive landscapes; Eva Jablonka (Tel Aviv University) on epigenetic inheritance systems; David Jablonski (University of Chicago) on macroevolution; Marc Kirschner (Harvard University) on systems biology; Alan Love (University of Minnesota) on the philosophy of evolutionary theory; Gerd Müller (KLI) and phenotypic innovation; Stuart Newman (New York Medical College) on complexity theory; John Odling-Smee (Oxford University) on niche construction theory in ecology; Massimo Pigliucci (Stony Brook University) on the role of phenotypic plasticity in macroevolution; Michael Purugganan (New York University) on evolutionary genomics; Eors Szathmary (Collegium of Budapest) on major evolutionary transitions; Gunter Wagner (Yale University) on the concept of evolvability; David Sloan Wilson (Binghamton University) on the idea of group selection; and Greg Wray (Duke University) on gene regulation networks. It ought to be almost as much fun as the just-finished European soccer tournament (which also took place in Austria)...
I recall reading somewhere that Keynes criticized Russell for saying that the problem with the world is that people are irrational and that the solution is that they should become rational. It seems a fair comment on Russell--but why is it a criticism? Because Russell's observation is a datum not an explanation: we want to know why people are irrational and how to improve their rationality. It's obvious what the problem is and also what the solution would be--but we need to know what causes irrationality and what we can do to fix it. Freud had a kind of theory of this but nowadays it looks pretty wacky. There seems to be a big theoretical gap here, urgently needing to be filled. (Of course, we won't recognize it if we start doubting that rationality is a robust matter.) I don't have a theory myself--human irrationality can seem the oddest and least adaptive trait of the species--but I do think we need to work on it. Why do people go around believing silly things and acting idiotically?
Read more from Colin McGinn here...
Kauffman’s latest book is entitled Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion. It is a view that is bound to fail on a variety of levels, but I think it is instructive to see why. Let’s start with the good news: Kauffman, unlike, say, authors like Paul Davies (author of questionably ambiguous stuff like Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our Universe Is Just Right for Life) or -- worse -- Frank Tipler (author of the downright nonsensical The Physics of Christianity) -- is pretty clear that there is no way to recover any classical version of god, not even the deist one. For Kauffman, for instance, morality emerged out of the biological and cultural evolution of humanity. Still, Kauffman seeks to “find common ground between science and religion so that we might collectively reinvent the sacred.”
Now why would any rational individual wish to propagate the whole idea of “the sacred” to begin with? For something to be sacred, according to the Merriam-Webster, means to be “dedicated or set apart for the service or worship of a deity,” or alternatively to be “worthy of religious veneration.” This is not what Kauffman means by the term, but the whole idea of “sacredness” seems to me to be the sort of baggage that humanity ought to do without by now.
At any rate, Kauffman wants to “use the God word, for my hope is to honorably steal its aura to authorize the sacredness of the creativity in nature.” Wow. First off, the concept of “honorably stealing” is something that is rather questionable, especially when what one is attempting to steal is nothing less than god’s aura. Second, nature is not creative, it just is. Creativity is something that conscious beings do, and to use the term in association with nature is misleading to say the least, and invites of course precisely the sort of quasi-mystical thinking that science is supposed to discourage. Third, there is nothing sacred about nature, either. Again, nature is what it is, and while Kauffman is tapping into the sense of awe shared by so many scientists when we approach the natural world, there is nothing to be worshipped, as worshipping is antithetical to understanding and appreciating, which is what science is about.
Kauffman’s reinvention of the sacred is nothing new, as what he is proposing is very much akin to non-religious Buddhism, or to what a number of other scientists, from Einstein to Sagan, have written about before. Such a project is bound to fail in a cultural environment dominated by the Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions, where people stubbornly refuse to give up the childish but apparently comforting idea of a personal god that actually cares about how they have sex and with whom. Thinking of god as the sacred in nature (including, one presumes, tsunamis, earthquakes, cancer, planetary impacts, black holes and dying stars) just isn’t going to cut it for most people. Way too esoteric, and very much unsatisfactory in terms of providing reward and punishment for people’s actions, and especially the promise of an afterlife.
Moreover, Kauffman’s project, like that of so many other scientists before him, smells terribly of being intellectually disingenuous. I don’t know if Kauffman is after the hefty Templeton Prize “for progress toward research or discoveries about spiritual realities” (whatever that means). Scientists like John Barrow (who wrote about the so-called “anthropic principle”), Freeman Dyson, Paul Davies and others had no trouble accepting the prize, despite the fact that it is based on a fundamental betrayal of the ideal of science as a rational inquiry into the natural world. Regardless, Kauffman is not doing science or humanity any favor by joining a questionable tradition of artificial “reconciliation” between science and religion.
Perhaps people will always need what Marx famously referred to as the opium of the masses, too bad for humanity. But scientists are supposed to hold themselves and the public to higher standards of rationality, and attempting to reinvent the sacred is clearly a step in the wrong direction. As Richard Feynman once aptly put it: “I do believe that there is a conflict between science and religion ... the spirit or attitude toward the facts is different in religion from what it is in science. The uncertainty that is necessary in order to appreciate nature is not easily correlated with the feeling of certainty in faith” (from: The Meaning of It All). Amen.
6 comments ( 56 views )
What’s wrong with that?, the naive reader may reasonably ask. Surely the main point of education is in fact to instill critical thinking skills into students, just like the bill says. Precisely, and since this is what every teacher in the country is already striving to do, do we need a law for it? It would be like passing a law directing all physicians to do their best to save people’s lives, or mechanics to repair cars. Duh. No, the new bill is the handiwork of the infamous Discovery Institute, the Seattle so-called Think Tank that has been pushing intelligent design creationism for more than a decade now (and who suffered a spectacular defeat two years ago in the Dover, PA case).
The new strategy is to cry out for “academic freedom,” which is then interpreted as the freedom to teach nonsense about the history of life on earth. Imagine if astrologers were to invoke academic freedom so that astronomy classes would include the preparation of horoscopes and the “critical” assessment of the Copernican theory. That’s just about what is going to happen in Louisiana, and probably in several other states, unless there is a successful legal challenge or grassroots movement like the one being currently attempted by the Louisiana Coalition for Science under the guidance of philosopher-activistBarbara Forrest.
One way to smell the rat here is to look at the specific language of the bill, which says in part that educators are encouraged to hold “an open and objective discussion of scientific theories being studied, including but not limited to evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning.” If you think this is not a (maliciously) intelligently designed list you are far too optimistic about human nature and the current Republican war against science. (Notice, too, that “human cloning” isn’t a theory, but a technological possibility with obvious ethical implications. But there is no point in being too subtle here.)
Despite the dismay at how easily such a gross manipulation of the concept of academic freedom can pass muster, or at how willfully and disingenuously a large number of politicians keep pandering to the minimum common denominators of the American public, there is some silver lining in this story. It comes from taking the relatively long view on the issue of the evolution wars. Less than a century ago, the battle in Dayton, TN was about prohibiting the teaching of evolution altogether, and the forces of obscurantism won. They have been on the retreat ever since, first having to accept the teaching of evolution in public schools as the default position, then having to invent a series of ever more esoteric and vague versions of their “ideas” to keep fighting on the legal front (equal time for creation “science,” disclaimers about evolution on textbooks, intelligent design admitting that god might not be the designer, and so on). Now they have been pushed so far into the corner that they can only resort to generic appeals to critical thinking and academic freedom, the very same concepts that are daily rejected by right wing religionists.
Want some real critical thinking? How about critically reading the Bible as just one of many “sacred” books written by perfectly human beings, the product of an ignorant and bigoted era? Or perhaps we should ask our students to critically think about the efficacy of “abstinence only” sexual programs that the current Administration keeps pushing on the basis of its misguided ide-theology? Or maybe critical thinking exercises in our classrooms should include a study of how it happened that the United States went to war on false premises, is wasting hundreds of thousands of lives (I’m counting the Iraqis here) and trillions of dollars, all in the name of greed and national pride? Now, that is a critical thinking curriculum I can get behind. Any chance it will pass in Louisiana?
2 comments ( 48 views )by Daniel Dennett
A few months ago, I was invited by The Guardian to debate Lord Robert Winston in London on the question:
Is religion the greatest threat to rationality and scientific progress?
The debate was supposed to be videotaped for later webcast, but their technical folks let them down, and even the audio recording was, I am told, botched, so the actual debate will have to live as best it can in the memories of the two or three hundred people in attendance. Not a particularly insightful occasion in any case, but my opening salvo made a few points that I think deserve a wider audience:
If religion isn't the greatest threat to rationality and scientific progress, what is? Perhaps alcohol, or television, or addictive video games. But although each of these scourges - mixed blessings, in fact - has the power to overwhelm our best judgment and cloud our critical faculties, religion has a feature of that none of them can boast: it doesn't just disable, it honours the disability. People are revered for their capacity to live in a dream world, to shield their minds from factual knowledge and make the major decisions of their lives by consulting voices in their heads that they call forth by rituals designed to intoxicate them.
It used to be the case that we tended to excuse drunk drivers when they crashed because they weren't entirely in control of their faculties at the time, but now we have wisely inverted that judgment, holding drunk drivers doubly culpable for putting themselves in that irresponsible position in the first place. It is high time we inverted the public attitude about religion as well, finding all socially destructive acts of religious passion shameful, not honourable, and holding those who abet them - the preachers and other apologists for religious zeal - as culpable as the bartenders and negligent hosts who usher dangerous drivers on to the highways. Our motto should be: Friends don't let friends steer their lives by religion.
Right now, Sayed Parwez Kambakhsh, a young student, resides on death row in Afghanistan, sentenced to execution for committing blasphemy. Imagine! We're living in the 21st century, and in "liberated" Afghanistan (not Taliban Afghanistan) blasphemy is still a capital crime. Most of the rest of the world is tongue-tied, unwilling to tell those bent on carrying out this barbaric sentence that they are simply wrong, and should not thus humiliate themselves and their traditions. Where are the peaceful demonstrations of protest? Are people unwilling to hurt the feelings of Muslims? We are quick to condemn other outrages, but religious passion, genuine or feigned, shields people from the moral judgments of their fellow human beings, judgments to which we should all alike be subject.
There is an unbalance in the framing of this resolution, and Robert Winston has the worst of it. He must try to allay a host of concerns, an unending task, while - as everyone knows all too well - in a single cataclysmic day my side could be proven by one fanatical act, not that anyone would be left to cheer my victory. Not just rationality and scientific progress, but just about everything else we hold dear could be laid waste by a single massively deluded "sacramental" act. True, you don't have to be religious to be crazy, but it helps. Indeed, if you are religious, you don't have to be crazy in the medically certifiable sense in order to do massively crazy things. And - this is the worst of it - religious faith can give people a sort of hyperbolic confidence, an utter unconcern about whether they might be making a mistake, that enables acts of inhumanity that would otherwise be unthinkable.
This imperviousness to reason is, I think, the property that we should most fear in religion. Other institutions or traditions may encourage a certain amount of irrationality - think of the wild abandon that is often appreciated in sports or art - but only religion demands it as a sacred duty. This might not matter if the activities that composed religion were somewhat insulated from the rest of the world the way they are in sports and art. Then we could treat religious allegiances the way we treat differences in taste: if you have a taste for kick boxing or heavy metal bands, that's your business. Knock yourself out, as we say, it's only a game. Not so with religion. Its arena includes not just the participants but all of life on the planet. Given that, it's troubling to note how avidly some people engage in deliberate make-believe in order to execute the prescribed duties.
The better is enemy of the best: religion may make many people better, but it is preventing them from being as good as they could be. If only we could transfer all that respect, loyalty and intense devotion from an imaginary being - God - to something real: the wonderful world of goodness we and our ancestors have made, and of which we are now the stewards.
5 comments ( 93 views )You see, as soon as California finally allowed gays to marry, and even went as far as extending the right to people who are not state residents (unlike Massachusetts, the only other state in the Union to allow gay marriages) a number of nuts from the religious right warned of dire consequences. According to the LA Times, “a smattering of protesters” at one ceremony were carrying signs like “Homo Sex Is Sin!” and warnings have been flying around the internet that God will punish the entire state of California for this unspeakable crime against Him (as usual, this raises the obvious question of how moral God really is for meeting out collective punishment to begin with, but that’s another story).
Well, so far nothing has happened to California, but the Midwest has been hit by some of the worst flooding since records have been kept. And we all remember how many fundamentalist preachers interpreted Katrina has God’s punishment against the Big Easy. So, logic demands that those same preachers put two and two together and accept that God has apparently changed His mind about gay marriage. Here is the reasoning, spelled out for those who might not have taken logic 101:
P1: If God doesn’t like X, then God sends natural disaster
P2: California has done X, and no disaster has ensued.
_______________________________
C: Therefore, God approves of X.
(P here stands for Premise, C for Conclusion.) This is known in logic as modus tollens, and it’s pretty hard to argue against. But of course I’m kidding, since I am actually assuming that religious zealots are interested at all (or familiar with) logic. A bad assumption if there ever was one.
More broadly, what is it about fundamentalists thinking that God is so darn concerned with their petty affairs? I mean, atheists are usually accused of arrogance for rejecting God, but listen to what one Rocky Twyman, from Washington DC, had to say recently as reported by theChicago Tribune, referring to the ongoing problem of high gas prices: “Our pockets are empty, but we're going to hold on to God!” And he means that literally. See, Mr. Twyman started a group called Pray at the Pump, which is bent on continuing to pray for lower gasoline prices “until God tells us to stop.” (How exactly such command would be issued is not specified in the interview.) Twyman’s group, in its astoundingly narrow minded view of the world, managed to (unwittingly, one hopes) insult the civil liberties movement by modifying one of their historical phrases: “We Shall Overcome, We'll have lower gas prices.”
Do I need to add that, as usual, nothing fails like prayer? When the movement started, gas prices were at an average of $3.53 per gallon. At the time Mr. Twyman was interviewed the price had gone up to $3.97. This has not deterred Mirrine Thorne of Northwest Washington, who according to the same article said “Nobody else is doing anything, God is going to do something.”
The point is that even if there is a God (and that makes just about as much sense as saying “if there is a Santa Clause...”), it is unbelievably self-centered and arrogant of some people to think that the Creator of the Universe (which is a big, big place to take care of) has nothing better to do than worry about gas prices or gay marriages. But of course that is much of the point of believing in God to begin with: if there is no Big Guy in the sky looking out for us, then we are really responsible for our own actions, and that’s one of the scariest thoughts that ever crossed the human mind.
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