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Prior to responding to my previous post, Scott makes a significant and entirely relevant digression in his 9th debate post. I’ll confirm and clarify a few of his points here:

I don’t believe that any of the above concerns are scientific questions, regardless of where we might stand. They are cultural concerns, and often politicized. The concerns as raised could be true, they could be false, but they would have no bearing on the question of whether or not TENS is the best model we have now, or likely to be the best model we have in the future.

Secondly, Vox has been very open about his lack of formal education in biology, particularly evolutionary biology, and much of his acknowledged sources are popularizations. (For all I know, two of the Dawkins books that Vox refers to could be The Selfish Gene (1976) or The Extended Phenotype (1982), which are deep, far-reaching books that, while accessible to laymen, can not really be said to be popularizations.)

I completely agree with the former statement. One of the books is indeed The Selfish Gene. However, it’s worth pointing out that I have the precisely the sort of formal school education in science, biology and evolutionary biology that evolutionary biologists such as Dr. PZ Myers and Dr. Richard Dawkins claim is so necessary in the public schools. My ignorance of evolution, TENs and Darwin is certainly deep in comparison with Scott’s professional knowledge, but is probably far exceeded by that of many of my science-fetishist critics.

This feeds my impression that Vox’s skepticism with respect to evolution is not so much with the discipline of evolutionary biology as practiced, but with the baggage that comes with books that are as much works of advocacy as they are expositions of science, especially those by Dawkins. In fact, I think that his beef is largely with Dawkins, especially Dawkins the popularizer of ‘evolution-as-another-nail-in-religion’s-coffin’, who first makes a distinctive appearance in The Blind Watchmaker (1986).

Absolutely. However, my distaste for evolutionary theory was not based on a reaction to Dawkins, or even atheism in general, in fact, my first encounter with serious Darwinist philosophy was in my formal education as an economist under some socialist professors. This is why my hard-core opposition to Darwinist materialism has never been rooted in my Christian faith, but rather in my economics background. I was a staunch anti-Darwinist before I was a Christian and long before I’d ever heard of Richard Dawkins due to my education in socialist economics.

In fact, based on my experiences as a teacher, I believe that the misconceptions attached to the theory in the popular culture are at least as much of a barrier to its acceptance as any prior theological commitments on the part of its audience.

I agree, and I think it does a real disservice to science for Darwinists to always assume that intellectual opposition to TENS and Darwinism is rooted in religion. This is a very parochial Anglo view; in continental Europe there appears to be a greater tendency to at least pay nominal attention to what the opposition is saying. However, I would say that it is not “misconceptions attached to the theory” that are a significant barrier to its acceptance as “misapplications of the theory”.

Besides, it’s not really the science that bothers him. Vox understands that scientific claims are always tentative, always subject to review/modification/rejection in the light of new findings. He clearly is not losing sleep at night because the silly biologists who can’t predict things the way they do in his field of economics don’t have a better model. No, what gets Vox exercised is the uses to which the ‘evolutionists’ he knows about put that model. And that usage is clearly atheism.

Atheism is only one of them. Socialism is another, eugenics is a third. I’m sure I could come up with more. Although it is pretty annoying when one criticizes a hopelessly unscientific tale of historic fiction for its complete lack of science, only to be told that you just don’t understand science.

Evolutionary biology might not ‘disprove’ God, but it cripples one of the better arguments that historically has been made for God’s existence in the past, that of teleology. It provided the conceptual framework and the data to justify Hume’s famous skepticism: no one who understands the history of this debate can be considered credible who does not acknowledge the devastating effect that Darwin’s thought has on teleology.

Yes, and this is where half of the strong Darwinist link with Marxism is forged. Marxism is dependent upon a materialist point of view, and Darwinism offers a platform for that.

I could care less about that myself because, as should now be clear, whenever Dawkins steps out of his evolutionary theorizing to argue toward God’s non-existence, he is no longer doing science.

YES! EXACTLY! This is why I refer to him in TIA as “Darwin’s Judas”. Dawkins is arguably doing more harm to Darwin and the public acceptance of evolution than anyone since Friedrich Engels.

It’s that word ‘believe’ that I object to. Properly speaking, I don’t ‘believe’ in evolution, either: that implies an affirmation of faith, but I don’t need faith to accept that evolution is a fact, or that natural selection is a fact, or that in individual cases natural selection has been observed to lead to evolution, etc…. The question that was put to the GOP hopefuls many weeks back was crude to the point of being misleading, but (sigh) politics is often not about making logical arguments that use language properly, right? It’s a shame that not one of them had the sophistication to point out the absurdity of the question, and in the process affirm that evolution is good science.

I don’t think Scott fully grasps that this is the way evolutionary skeptics are addressed and attacked 95 percent of the time. It’s unusual to speak with a scientist who makes measured claims, far more often one is in contact with either science fetishists or extremists like Dawkins and Myers. I don’t “believe” in evolution and I probably never will.

I think that what partially motivates Vox’s skepticism is his distaste for Dawkins and his disciples, what informs his actual argument is his understanding of theories. His ‘back-testing’ argument is an attempt to argue that, see, evolution can’t do some of the things I think a truly scientific theory ought to do, so, while it can do some things, I feel justified in being skeptical about those things that can’t be tested until I can see more confirmed predictions to a higher level of accuracy.

Pretty much, although I’d like to point out that I am no defender of those superior macroeconomic models, I have attacked them longer and more viciously than I’ve ever attacked evolution. The main difference is that economists, even econometricians, will readily admit that their models are piss-poor and badly need improvement before they can be seriously relied upon – the politicians, Larry Kudlow and the Federal Reserve notwithstanding. I have never heard an evolutionist admit the same.

I suspect that Vox and I are in substantive agreement that TENS is the only game in town, and that he is not actually urging anyone to reject TENS outright. Rather, he is skeptical about the applications of TENS to those things which are difficult or impossible to test, and deeply resents those who would employ such applications as personal weapons in the cultural wars. I sympathize, but I’m not here to defend such practicies, I’m here to defend TENS.

Yes, pretty much. I am still skeptical
about TENS for the reasons that we will continue to discuss, as I think I can convince Scott that the backtesting issue is a genuine problem, but TENS is the only serious game in town at the moment and I am in no way opposed to its continued refinement and application in the field of biology. The point that people seem to always miss is that I never have been.

HH doubts the ability of the average parent to handle the intellectual task of the average high school teacher:

I don’t think that in the vast majority of cases a homeschool parent has enough expertise in all the diverse subjects that a child (especially in HS levels and above) should know — when I look at my kids math, chemisty, physics, biology, computers, launguages etc I can’t imagine the average stay at home mom or dad being able to teach that to their homeschool kids.

That’s logical, but there’s just one problem. Teachers, on the average, are morons. (Don’t take it personally, Scott and Catkiller, you’re not to blame for your co-workers with double-digit IQs.) From my 2005 column, “Idiots at the Chalkboard“.

The immortal PJ O’Rourke once declared: “Anybody who doesn’t know what’s wrong with America’s educational system never screwed an el-ed major.” And while one has no doubt that he is correct, it turns out that there is more empirical evidence for the dismal state of teacher intelligence than Mr. O’Rourke’s sexual history or the fear and loathing with which the teachers’ unions regard competency testing.

In 2001, the National Center for Education Statistics reported the average SAT score for intended education majors to be 481 math and 483 verbal. Only those interested in vocational school, home economics and public affairs scored lower.

But while the SAT is considered to be a generally reliable intelligence test, the 2001 SAT is not the same SAT that many of us took prior to attending university. Those 2001 scores on the 1996 SAT, which was replaced this year by the New SAT 2005, are equivalent to pre-1996 SAT scores of 451 math and 403 verbal. In case any education majors are reading this, 451 plus 403 equals a cumulative score of 854.

Examining an SAT-to-IQ conversion chart calculated from Mensa entrance criteria, a combined 854 indicates that the average IQ of those pursuing an education major is 91, nine points lower than the average IQ of 100. In other words, those who can’t read teach whole language.

Teaching isn’t rocket science. Anyone of normal intelligence is perfectly capable of it, especially if one is dealing with five or fewer children. In fact, it’s nearly impossible to prevent a child from learning, as that is the natural instinct of the developing mind. The wonder of the modern American public school system is that it manages to do shut down that natural process.

And that’s to do it yourself:

In Sept. 2005, Dr. David Nabarro was appointed the first U.N. system influenza coordinator, a position which also places him as a senior policy adviser to the U.N. director-general…. In a Sept. 29, 2005, press conference at the U.N., Nabarro made clear that his job was to prepare for the H5N1 virus, known as the avian flu. Nabarro fueled the global fear that an epidemic was virtually inevitable.

In response to a question about the 1918-1919 flu pandemic that killed approximately 40 million people worldwide, Nabarro commented, “I am certain there will be another pandemic sometime.” Nabarro stressed at the press conference that he saw as inevitable a worldwide pandemic influenza coming soon that would kill millions.

He quantified the deaths he expected as follows: “I’m not, at the moment at liberty to give you a prediction on numbers, but I just want to stress, that, let’s say, the range of deaths could be anything from 5 to 150 million.”

It’s interesting to note that the recent “outbreak” of foot-and-mouth disease in Britain was caused by the laboratory that was “studying” it. I’m sure that makes everyone located near the laboratory that decided to keep the last remaining samples of the 1919 flu virus around for the purposes of “studying” it feel a lot safer.

Of course, once a properly prepared H5N1 virus escapes from the laboratory to wreak havoc on the world, it would be absolutely outrageous to blame the devastation upon the brave scientists who were innocently “studying” the virus in order to save Mankind from it before it cunningly broke out from the lab.

UPDATE – Look out, they’re practicing again:

What may be the largest pandemic planning exercise ever conducted in the U.S. is set to begin next month. The dry run will force financial services firms to operate with shrinking numbers of employees — on paper, at least. More than 1,800 organizations have signed up to participate in the three-week simulation, which is being sponsored by the U.S. Department of the Treasury and the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association.

You know, I can’t help but recall that the last nationwide federal training exercise to take place in September didn’t really go all that well.

The Yellow Bus

It was a fine September day
When my sweet princess came to say,
“Oh Daddy, could we please discuss
The purpose of that yellow bus?
I see the children get on board
While our house is always ignored.
It looks like fun, it looks so cool,
To ride upon it off to school!”

Her little face was serious,
And naturally curious
About this strange phenomenon
Her friends had all departed on,
With some misgiving then I knew
An explanation now was due.
I placed a hand under my chin
And wondered how I should begin.

Then I remembered my school days
Now dim in memory’s fading haze
The good times, and the bad times too,
When everything was bright and new.
And yet my main recollection
Was a sense of disaffection.
Endless boredom, a parody
Of learning, farce and tragedy!

“Do you know what they’ll learn today?”
She shook her head without delay.
“They first will learn the alphabet – “
“But Daddy, don’t they know it yet?”
She interrupted in surprise,
Amazement in those big brown eyes.
“Ten letters is the minimum,”
I said, “that’s where they’re starting from.”

She blinked and looked somewhat perturbed.
“So, what would I do?” next I heard.
“I know my letters, phonics too,
Today I read a book – no, two!
And yet, they’re gone for the whole day
Do they do nothing there but play?
That sounds so fun, can I go there?
I think that would be only fair!”

“They do play, my lovely flower,
But for just one single hour.
Then all the rest they sit in class
And wait as the long hours pass.
For no child can hope to move on
’til all is learned by everyone.”
“But Daddy, that’s ridiculous.
Surely, it could never be thus!”

It’s worse than that, (I thought it through),
As they teach things that are not true.
They will not let you learn of God
And instill logic badly flawed.
It’s not so much education
As naked indoctrination.
For little is more blindly cruel
Than sentencing a child to school.

Of course, these thoughts I did not share
As she stood innocently there.
“Their parents love your friends, I’m sure,
But Mommy and I love you more.
These next years will suffice to show
How freedom helps a mind to grow,
And you, my dear, will always be
A child of God and liberty.”

Did she fathom?
I cannot say.
She’ll tell me so
One day, I pray.

Now, I seem to recall that the whole point of fighting the Battle of Britain was to resist the Nazi occupation of England. I guess the brave boys of the Royal Air Force might as well not have bothered:

A pregnant woman has been told that her baby will be taken from her at birth because she is deemed capable of “emotional abuse”, even though psychiatrists treating her say there is no evidence to suggest that she will harm her child in any way. Social services’ recommendation that the baby should be taken from Fran Lyon, a 22-year-old charity worker who has five A-levels and a degree in neuroscience, was based in part on a letter from a paediatrician she has never met.
Hexham children’s services, part of Northumberland County Council, said the decision had been made because Miss Lyon was likely to suffer from Munchausen’s Syndrome by proxy, a condition unproven by science in which a mother will make up an illness in her child, or harm it, to draw attention to herself.

Under the plan, a doctor will hand the newborn to a social worker, provided there are no medical complications. Social services’ request for an emergency protection order – these are usually granted – will be heard in secret in the family court at Hexham magistrates on the same day.

From then on, anyone discussing the case, including Miss Lyon, will be deemed to be in contempt of the court.

Between the US domestic spy satellites, the omnipresent UK cameras, and the secret courts and galloping neo-fascism in both countries, it’s hard to know which country is worse. But in light of Gordon Brown’s treasonous refusal to hold a referendum on eliminating British national sovereignty and these pre-birth seizings by the state, I think the winner is Britain by a nose.

No doubt the Lizard Queen will see fit to rectify the situation by applying the whip once she slithers onto the Cherry Blossom Throne.

The state should not be permitted to claim any interest whatsoever in or for a child. Ever, no matter what the reason.

UPDATE – It’s no fairy tale of the Nanny State:

Last year, 6,700 children were registered for emotional abuse. They represent 21 per cent of all children placed on the Child Protection Register, compared with only 14 per cent a decade ago – a 50 per cent increase. Some 5,100 children were registered for physical abuse and 2,600 for sexual abuse. But while the numbers of children in these categories are falling, the number of those in the “emotional abuse” group, which covers children who have not been injured and have not complained, is growing steadily….

Father George Rutler on the benefits of kindergarten:

I urge you to keep your child out of kindergarten, because kindergarten will only lead to first grade and then the grim sequence of grade after grade begins and takes its inexorable toll on the mind born fertile but gradually numbed by the pedants who impose on the captive child the flotsam of their own infecundity.”

Kindergarten is a German word. Its literal translation is “garden of the children” but it really means “to make children into good Chermans”. Which is fine, assuming that you’re a Nazi.

Will the last heterosexual Republican politician please turn out the lights:

U.S. Sen. Larry Craig pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct this month after his arrest in a Minneapolis airport men’s room by an undercover officer who said Craig was sending signals that he wanted to have sex….

When Craig was arrested, police at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport were conducting a sting operation to investigate allegations of lewd conduct at the airport’s main terminal.

He pleaded guilty, but he didn’t do it… that’s a spectacularly shaky PR strategy. I have to admit, I anticipated enjoying the Republican Party’s continued self-destruction, but I had no idea that it would turn out to be this amusing. At this point, it looks as if Hillary’s landslide might exceed Reagan’s historic Mondale-slapping.

It seems the policy of substituting pragmatism for principle comes with a whole host of problems I’d never anticipated.

UPDATE – Apparently there have been rumors circulating about the Gay Old Party senator for some time now.

In his two-part response, Scott wisely and characteristically refrains from crowing over my “failure to provide another model, much less evidence for that model”, because a) this is a debate about a particular model, b) the absence of an alternative model is not indicative of the accuracy or even relevance of any model, and, c) he’s fundamentally nicer than I am. Some people may argue with (b) based on what they call “abductive reasoning” but that is a logical fallacy as it amounts to nothing more than a pragmatic stopgap. Although, as a sheerly pragmatic measure, I fully support the use of such “reasoning” when there’s nothing else to go on.

And although he appears to have backed away from some earlier concessions, Scott does appear to have begun to understand at least one aspect of my evolutionary skepticism when he writes:

There is always the possibility that forces or agents other than natural selection could’ve been involved in individual cases, and so if we are going to start inferring that the large-scale changes we see in the fossil record are the sum of countless individual acts of selection which are themselves impossible to verify, we can sympathize with Vox’s skepticism.

I don’t object to the use of inference. Where else are you going to start? I’m usually happy to begin looking into things with nothing more than a vague suspicion. There is nothing in the least bit objectionable to taking a theory that has some obvious flaws, shaking the bugs out and making use of it to attack some age-old mysteries. But the key word there is “begin”.

Ideally, what we would want is a method of independently confirming that the morphological changes we see in the fossil record are actually the result of changes in the genetic makeup of the population, and clear evidence that these changes support an inference of common descent between different species. Happily, with the emerging science of genomics, we can do just that with many large-scale events.

I’m not so sure that the last statement is true, but more on that later. My problem with this is that Scott is still focused on staring at the past, and I am not at all convinced that he has fully understood the scientific imperative of providing a replicable test for a future-focused prediction rather than digging up historical support for a particular thesis. Supporting an inference is nice, but it’s not replicable and in the end, it’s merely more backtesting. Based on backtested predictions, one could make a much stronger case for the Biblical model than for TENS at this point, the former accurately “predicted” the discovery of the nonexistent Assyrians and the Hittites after all.

In the previous post, I claimed that I was going to present a clear example of an independent test of morphological change being the result of evolution, and the sort of change that clearly supports an inference of common descent between two different species. The example I’ve chosen, the alleged descent with modification of modern chimpanzees and humans from a common ancestor, is just such an example.

Scott’s example is the work done by Dr. Ken Miller, who posits the rather bizarre notion that evolution is not only busy creating new species by natural selection, but also making testable predictions. This prediction – for which he shows no evidence of having been made prior to the test – is that “the common ancestor had 48 chromosomes (24 pairs) and humans carry a fused chromosome; or ancestor had 23 pairs and apes carry a split chromosome.”

Miller writes that the complete DNA sequence of the chimpanzee answers the question “where did we come from” because “Our second chromosome was produced by the head to head fusion of ape chromosomes 12 and 13, and the new primate and human data show the exact point at which those two chromosomes were pasted together.”

Now, this information certainly appears to support the inference, insofar as I understand genomics, which is not very far at all. But the first of the two important points that Miller and Scott appear to be glossing over is that this doesn’t prove a common ancestor, it merely indicates that the theory of a common ancestor is not disproved by the evidence. There is still no evidence that this “common ancestor” ever existed, it’s the genomic version of the “God of the gaps” argument.

The second point, of course, is that this is yet another example of the backtesting I have repeatedly protested. Unless and until geneticists can turn a chimpanzee into a human by pasting together chromosomes 12 and 13, there is not only room for skepticism, but an amount of skepticism is required given the problems cropping up with far more established theories like General Relativity.

I’m not going to address Scott’s previous post about the differences in time scale accounting for the greater margins of error seen in evolutionary science versus other scientific disciplines because it simply isn’t true. I’d be delighted to delve into demonstrating this at a later date, as it is much more familiar territory for me, but I think it’s an unnecessary digression because his subsequent response renders it largely irrelevant.

I’m not sure this is a meaningful question for me, for two reasons: first, because I don’t have a commitment one way or the other against any future model; second, because it’s the wrong way to conceptualize the matter, that things will either be TENS-based or not. Here’s what I would say: evolution and natural selection are both facts, and in particular cases a relationship between these two facts has been demonstrated, while in general cases it is inferred on the basis of multiple lines of evidence. Any future alternative to the present model will have to account for all the facts currently in our possession, and among those facts are evolution, and natural selection.

I think Scott is being a little too conservative here. When there is a fundamental problem with a theory, even a fairly small problem with a functional theory upon which good science has been based for decades, it seems to me that historically, a radically different replacement theory is nearly as likely as one that is merely a minor tweak. Those whose historical interests incline more to science than mine can surely provide examples either in support or in contradiction, but that’s my impression.

Despite our varying degrees of trust in TENS, I think we are nevertheless beginning to find some common ground. I’m particularly interested to discover where Scott is going with the following statement; no doubt many of you are too:

I think this observation has some bearing on some issues that Vox has raised in the past few posts as to how some ‘evolutionists’ have enlisted Darwin to ‘attack religious faith’, ridicule politicians who fail to say they ‘believe in evolution’, or attempt to suppress skepticism about TENS as unscientific.

It wouldn’t be fair to refrain from answering one of Scott’s direct questions, though. As an economist, I can safely predict that the commodity price of one ounce of gold one thousand years from now will be the equivalent of one respectable man’s suit or future equivalent. Unfortunately, I can’t predict the particular currency because USD in its present form will be defunct within 36 years.

Unsurprisingly, evolutionists are reacting strongly to my column today. They swear up and down that there is no connection whatsoever between evolution and Communism, despite the fact that every single major Communist not only subscribed to Darwinist evolution but considered Darwin to be second only to Hegel as a pre-Marxist socialist figure.

But in case my opinion, buttressed by that of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong is not enough to convince you, there’s plenty of more evidence to support my contention. This is but one petty example that came up when I was checking into what Dr. Wilkins informed us was a myth.

Present at Marx’s funeral was Edward Aveling, the one man who had met both Marx and Darwin. Aveling would, later, live with Marx’s daughter Eleanor, help translate Capital into English, and write expositions of Marxism and Darwinism. In 1897 Aveling would publish an article, “Charles Darwin and Karl Marx,” in which,
perhaps taking his cue from Engels, he would state that there was “absolutely no contradiction whatever” between Marxism and Darwinism, and “that socialism is indeed the logical outcome of evolution, and that its strongest scientific support is derived from the teachings of Darwin.”

The Contacts Between Karl Marx and Charles Darwin
Ralph Colp Jr.
Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 35, No. 2. (Apr. – Jun., 1974), pp. 329-338.

As Dr. Wilkins informed us earlier today, Edward Aveling is also the apparent source of the mistaken idea that Karl Marx wrote to Charles Darwin asking him if he would accept the dedication of Capital to him.

I was considering this topic for my next book, but John Lott has already done a fair amount of the work:

There’s been a puzzle that’s been around academics for decades about why government started to grow when it did. From the beginning of the country to the 1920s, the federal government had been about 2 to 3 percent of GNP. You’d have a war sometimes and it would go up. After the war was over, government would go back down to where had been previously. But it began to grow through the 20s and the 30s and 40s.

You see a phenomenon that’s true around the world, during about 50 years of time in which government began to grow. I’ve noticed from looking around at these countries that the government growth seemed to coincide with when women were given the right to vote in these places….

The effect is dramatic. If you look at 10 years prior to when a state gives women the right to vote, you find expenditures and revenues were flat. Once women were given the right to vote, the next year you see an increase in government expenditures. It keeps going up dramatically. In 10 years, government expenditures and revenue doubled in real terms. That growth follows closely with the percent of voters who were women.

I don’t know if Lott has actually looked at the European statistics, but it’s definitely also true there, even in the countries where women didn’t vote parties like the National Socialists into power at the first opportunity.

POSTER: WIR LIEBEN KINDER UND HASSEN DIE JUDENKRIMINELLER

Liesl: Oh, do you see Gertrude! Vee must wote for zis party, zey love zee children.

Gertrude: But how are zey on crime? I don’t feel so wery safe zese days.

Liesl: Zey hate it, you see? Und zat’s not all, zey vill even pay for the cost of zee children to go to zee schools!

Gertrude: Vunderbar! And zey have so wery handsome uniforms too! Do you sink zey vill let us vear zee pretty red armbands if vee wolunteer?

It’s no accident that women’s suffrage is the very first plank in the Manifesto of the Fascist Struggle.