Tag: mailvox

Mailvox: take another look

HR asks an unexpected question:

I am reading your book and find it fascinating. I really appreciate your laying out the several possible scenarios and the arguments pro and con as well as identifying their supporters. The chart on your blog of “Debt Outstanding 2004-2009” I find quite convincing for your position on the key question of inflation vs deflation. However I also find that the Fed Statistics (see page 9 of this link) seem to show quite different trends and support the opposite conclusion. What is the source for your chart?

I’m glad HR finds it worthwhile reading. My source for the sector debt is the Federal Reserve flow of funds account. Notice how the red line for Federal debt on the chart ends a little below the $8,000 billion line. If you look a little more carefully at the linked PDF, you’ll see that this corresponds rather neatly with the $7,805 billion reported in 2009-Q4 for the Federal Government. The reason for this is that the Federal Reserve flow of funds account is, in fact, the very Z1 report that HR cited.

In other words, you have to look at the bottom of the page, not the top, since those are the 1978 numbers. It’s a bit easier to see this in the online version, in which the years run from left to right.

Mailvox: a waste of time and effort

The Baseball Savant questions my time allocations:

Leaving aside the fact that we pretty much disagree about everything when it comes to Christianity, the one thing I have a problem with in reading your blog the last couple of years is your fight in atheism/religion. Admittedly I haven’t read “TIA”, but I think for this discussion I get the gist that you basically used the same logic that the unholy trinity provided to disprove atheism or at least show that it’s more unlikely than religious thought/belief. I might be oversimplifying it, but I think you get my point. My problem though is that you spend an enormous amount of time on this very topic. That I don’t understand. I would think even as an open theist we would have similar views on eternal perspective and the problem that I have is that your writing of TIA, although interesting, doesn’t further that cause too much.

I can certainly see the rationale behind it if you believe that you are the first domino to fall in that equation in that

ATHEIST –> READ TIA —-> DOUBT ATHEISM —–> DISREGARD ATHEISM —-> BELIEVE IN RELIGION —-> COME TO CHRIST

But the last part is very dicey. There are a million religions in the world, and it seems your argument is only that atheism is illogical. I agree with it. I guess I’m just wondering the end? Not that everything has to be done with eternal perspective in mind, but this is something that I think definitely coincides with that sort of thing because you are delving into religious matters. Does open theism teach that God is pleased if something comes to religion even if that religion is still pagan in nature and hell is the final destination for the person who converts to that religion from atheism?

If it’s all for intellectual masturbation then I get it, but you seem too bright to waste time on an endeavor such as this with no real cost/benefit analysis in the end.

Obviously you write for you. You’ve always said as much, but the time aspect is odd for me. What do you think?

First, I don’t spend anywhere nearly as much time on the subject as most people think. Because I read very fast and think a bit more quickly than the norm, it doesn’t take me very long to notice the flaws in an argument and use them to pick it apart. The only thing that occasionally takes an amount of time is doing the research to prove what I already have concluded to the satisfaction of others. Second, as always, I highly recommend reading the relevant material before commenting on it.

Because the Baseball Savant hasn’t read TIA, he isn’t aware that my ambitions for the book have always been modest. I not only think the last link in his chain is very dicey, I think the one preceding it is too. TIA is not a work of Christian apologetics nor is it even a theological work, the one speculative chapter notwithstanding, as it is nothing more than a work dedicated to destroying a collection of spurious, illogical, and demonstrably false arguments by a small group of well-known intellectual charlatans. Convincing the reader to disregard a specific form of atheism is the most that the book was ever even potentially going to achieve, and it’s quite clear that it has been very successful in that regard. The feeble and insubstantial protestations with which the Against the New Atheism slideshow has been met is testimony to the way in which even the most militant atheists have largely abandoned certain arguments they once believed to be powerfully effective.

Removing a bar to belief isn’t always going to lead to belief. I would even say that it usually isn’t. But, having seen so many well-meaning Christians struggle so ineffectively against unoriginal and outdated arguments that were fundamentally flawed, I thought it was worth the small effort it took to dismantle them in such a comprehensive manner that practically anyone who has read the book can now do the same with ease. I expect that I will continue to tear apart their future arguments since it costs me nothing and I find it more entertaining than sitting down and watching 151 hours of television per month like the average American. Needless to say, I will be providing a detailed critique of Sam Harris’s all-too-characteristically incoherent argument in favor of utilizing science to answer moral questions at some point in the future.

The truth is that I spend far more time on what could be characterized as even less important matters. I am currently designing five games, none of which are of any importance to the human race and only two of which will be potentially profitable to me. I am spending a great deal of time and money on a superior input device which will allow people to do useful, useless and even harmful things on a computer up to 50% faster. I am writing a sequel to a novel that probably didn’t sell more than 500 copies. I play board games and computer games, alone and with others. And I just finished reading a novel by Balzac that wasn’t particularly interesting and has taught me nothing useful.

The ironic thing about this email is the way it shows how people, even those who haven’t read the book, are still far more interested in discussing The Irrational Atheist than they are in discussing either of the two books I have published since. And this is despite the fact that we’re now in the midst of the very economic contraction that I describe in The Return of the Great Depression!

Time passes whether we spend it wisely or not. I have numerous regrets for opportunities and time I have wasted in the past, but writing TIA and discussing the related issues is not one of them.

Mailvox: Obama vs science education

Scott Hatfield of Monkey Trials writes about the standards of science education:

I invite you to read the state science standards for high school biology in California. You’ll find those on pages 51-56 of this PDF file. It’s true that evolution is in there, but there is absolutely no requirement to teach ‘scientific history.’ I admit that I give one lecture on Mendel and his experiments when I teach genetics, and one lecture on Darwin’s voyage of the Beagle and how that (and the thought of others, like Malthus) influenced his thought.

Other than that, the other 178-days of instruction are pretty much the concepts and facts that you can see on the standards, which are in fact voluminous. I can’t speak for PZ and Dawkins, but I assure you that I care very much about the fact that there is less time for experiments and far too much time spent prepping for the standardized tests which, under NCLB, are used by the states and the fed to rate schools.

By the way, if your looking for a way to improve science ed, then please join me in rejecting the OBAMA administration proposal to tie teacher evaluations more closely to testing. A rare offer for you and I to unite in a criticism of the present administration!

Again, check out what we actually have to teach. There’s a lot to cram in 180 days, and to do it, we typically are sacrificing labs, especially the highly-instructive but time-consuming ones that take weeks to complete.

I have no problem whatsoever condemning the Obama administration proposal. Teacher evaluations and education standards are not Constitutional concerns of the U.S. federal government and Obama has no business attempting to dictate such things. Now, I’m certainly not against the use of standards in evaluating teachers; one reason for the drive towards objective standards is that the political power of the teachers unions is completely out of hand in some states. Given that testing can be an over-blunt club, I’m curious to know how Scott would prefer to see teachers evaluated. And while I don’t understand how opposing a proposal for a change can improve the current situation, I am happy to oppose it nonetheless.

Obviously, a science teacher whose black, inner-city, public school students score an average 80th percentile is probably a much better teacher than one whose Chinese, suburban, private school students average 85th percentile. And it’s also clear that straightforward teaching to the test will tend to restrict a teacher’s ability to focus on whatever aspects of his subject he thinks is important. But I’m sure Scott also realizes that for every good science teacher who wants to push his students and expose them to actually learning how to utilize the scientific method, there are several who would spend the entire school day haranguing their students on anything from Marxism and patriarchal oppression to Genesis and Scientology if given the opportunity.

I don’t have an answer myself. But I’m curious to know what Scott’s recommendation would be. As for “science history”, that’s often what is taught in lieu of science. Whether one considers the cult of Adam Smith or the cult of Charles Darwin, even a moment of reflection should suffice to determine that the Great Men of Science theme is actually a historical theme, not a scientific one. An astronomer has absolutely no need to know if it was Pythagoras or Copernicus who thought the Sun orbited the Earth in order to calculate the orbit of an extrasolar planet just as a biologist has absolutely no need to know if it was Darwin or Paley who articulated evolution by natural selection when he is figuring out the utility of junk DNA.

Don’t get me wrong, I think scientific history is tremendously interesting and knowledge of economic history is actually quite valuable in understanding how and why the present orthodoxy went so badly awry. The more unsettled a science is, the more important the historical knowledge will be. Reading Joseph Schumpeter’s mammoth History of Economic Thought played a major role in my critical revisitation of Ricardian free trade, then Friedmanite monetarism. But repeating anecdotes about finches and shoemakers should never be confused with actually calculating debt/GDP ratios or collecting butterflies.

For the record, I no more object to teaching evolution than I do to teaching Keynesian macroeconomics or any other extant idea. In other words, I insist on them being taught and being taught accurately. It is only when you have fully and correctly understood a concept that you can truly grasp the intrinsic and/or potential flaws in it. For example, I found this requirement to be more than a little amusing: “8. Evolution is the result of genetic changes that occur in constantly changing environments. As a basis for understanding this concept: a. Students know how natural selection determines the differential survival of groups of organisms.” I should, of course, be very interested to know how they know that, given that even Richard Dawkins has now admitted that the science is still unsettled on whether Darwin was fundamentally wrong about the very core of his so-called “dangerous idea”. The logic is at least superficially sound, but is the science? After all, that is precisely what still remains to be determined.

But to be clear, it must be understood that while I am an outright Keynesian Denier, a Marxian Denier, and a Friedmanite Denier, I am but a mere Darwinian Skeptic.

Mailvox: Deflation vs inflation

JB inquires regarding the matter:

Congratulations, it looks like you’re right about deflation vs. inflation. I thought based on the historical example of other systems going belly up that inflation was always the final scenario. But your grand graphs of credit implosion are everything a rubbernecker could wish for in twisted limbs and crashed clunkers.

I’m still not clear on what’s going on, and I’d like to run a few questions by you. Credit contraction is ~ to GDP contraction, yes? So if deflation is keeping pace with reduction of goods and services, then prices should remain constant, right? Consumer goods are a subset of that. Are you predicting deflation from the consumer’s perspective, and if so, why? What I’m getting at is that even though the credit bubble’s magnitude dwarfs all other considerations, its implosion doesn’t logically necessitate consumer deflation, as far as I can understand. I guess your main reason there won’t be inflation, besides the impossible magnitude of the credit bubble, is that the Fed is private and won’t order the whirlybirds aloft. Why do you think a legal technicality like that is going to stop the Fed’s big brother, the US Federal Government? Given the trend, shouldn’t we be more surprised if any banks at all manage to remain private?

First of all, let me say that the question is far from settled. I understand the inflationary case and it is a perfectly reasonable one, albeit based on general principles that I do not believe apply in the specific case of the peculiar U.S. monetary system. I’m going to address the matter in more detail in a column and explain why I expect the debt-money supply to decrease to a certain, specific level at a minimum. However, the easiest way to achieve a basic understanding of the issue is to look at this chart which incorporates the latest Federal Reserve flow of funds account of total debt outstanding.

The red line amounts to the case for inflation. This is the Federal spending that the inflationistas assume can grow indefinitely and has, in fact, increased by $2 trillion since the third quarter of 2008. However, even this 35% increase in 18 months has not been sufficient to counterbalance the ongoing credit contraction in the household, financial, and state & local government sectors. Moreover, that Federal spending increase is now coming to an end even as the contraction in the financial sector doubles its speed and state & local spending hits the insolvency wall.

In answer to your questions, GDP contraction is not equal to debt contraction even though debt is a primary factor in sustaining GDP growth. Because GDP is disproportionately weighted towards government spending and because the G component of GDP is dependent solely upon the growth in government debt rather than overall debt, GDP can increase even in the face of overall debt contraction. But it cannot do so for long, as the chart above indicates. As far as the banks go, because they are insolvent by every meaningful accounting measure, they have already been quasi-nationalized because although their profits remain private, their losses are charged to the public.

Mailvox: the impact of nurture

M reports how science compares paternal behavioral patterns:

I thought you might enjoy this excerpt from the book NurtureShock:

“Dr. Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan did a study of parenting styles, and how they relate to aggressiveness and acting out at school. The fathers in her study fell into three camps–the Progressive Dads, the Traditional Dads, and the Disengaged Dads…. However, Schoppe-Sullivan was surprised to discover that the Progressive Dads had poorer marital quality and rated their family functioning lower than the fathers in couples who took on traditional roles…

[The Progressive Dads’] inconsistency and permissiveness led to a surprising result in Sullivan’s study: the children of Progressive Dads were aggressive and acted out in school nearly as much as the kids with fathers who were distant and disengaged.”

This doesn’t surprise me in the slightest and my own observations tend to bear out the research. It makes sense if you think about it, since it doesn’t really matter if the figure who is theoretically supposed to provide discipline is present or not if the discipline isn’t provided in a predictable manner. Of course, anything that can reasonably be described as “progressive” is usually a reliable indication that someone is in the process of unnecessarily screwing something up by attempting to improve it.

Mailvox: gammas and the church

JM wonders about the transformation of the church:

I am sure you’ve gotten quite a bit of mail on the while alpha, delta, sigma discussions, but I have some questions. Just as a delta can model alpha behavior, is it possible that our overly feminized society is creating betas and gammas from alphas (or sigmas)? Would a true alpha tell mom to go pound sand during sensitivity training?

How do you distinguish between socipathic behavior and alpha behavior OR a sigma’s attitudes toward the world and Asperger’s Syndrome? For instance, for all my life, my attitude as been mostly sigma-like, but recently, it’s been pointed out to me that my withdrawal and disinterest is a result of Asperger’s. It bothered me at first, but after thinking about it, I don’t care. I just wish I could make it work for me a little better.

And finally, I have seen gammas (and to a lesser extent omegas) attempt to behave as alphas in situations where there are few true alphas – church groups come to mind. I know many “pastors” who are slimly little, ass kissers who will do anything to get people to like them, but when someone asks them a question beyond their pay grade that challenges their authority, they go into a bitchy little approximation of an uber male. How would you categorize this or is this expected from gammas?

I would say that Western feminized societies are primarily turning betas into deltas and deltas into gammas. The imaginations of many commenters here notwithstanding, there are very few genuine alphas and sigmas about and they tend to be much less subject to social pressures than normal men. Game is threatening to the feminist agenda because it teaches Deltas and Gammas to surmount their assigned status in the social hierarchy by willful and synthetic means. A true alpha isn’t likely to be at for “sensitivity training” in the first place, so I think it would most likely be a Beta who would go, but resist. Alpha behavior is easily distinguished from sociopathic behavior because Alphas are successful, charismatic group animals. It’s the Sigmas and Omegas who are the sociopaths; the Sigmas are the charming ones and the Omegas are the creepy ones. The difference between the Aspie – who is almost always going to be a Gamma or Omega – and the Sigma is that the Aspie has fundamental difficulties with human relations whereas the Sigma makes friends and seduces women with ease. It’s not about introversion vs extroversion and a few people don’t seem to have grasped the point that Sigmas are almost always confused with Alphas, not Gammas or Omegas.

The most important thing to understand is that one’s role in the social structure is not defined by one’s internal motivations, but by the perception of others. One can alter this perception over time, but it’s the perceptions that are the ultimate metric, not the internal dialogue.

As for the pastoral behavior, what you are describing is textbook Gamma behavior. Gammas who find themselves in charge almost invariably behave like petty, micromanaging dictators; Gamma male behavior is very similar to normal female behavior in a lot of ways. It should be no surprise that as the feminization of the church proceeds, the only men who will be left in it will be Gammas since they are quite comfortable with all the bitchy, passive-aggressive political infighting and petty rule-mongering that is the hallmark of female-dominated institutions. Academia is another area that now tends to be overloaded with Gammas, as they are the only men who are not reluctant to submit to female domination. But as various Protestant denominations have been demonstrating in real time, the church that worships at the altar of sexual equality is not a church that will worship Jesus Christ for long.

Mailvox: splitting up

BNP appears to already know it can get messy:

I was wondering if you would ask your commentators, and say yourself, what an unmarried dad should do when he and his partner are splitting up acrimoniously? I am being as nice as possibly can be, but she is simply a woman on a hate mission. I wouldn’t care, but I love my son more than anything else in the world, and want to see him right. Indeed, I want joint custody. I’m not sure how to go about getting it though.

The first thing to do is to stay focused on your prime objective, which is to preserve the possibility of your relationship with your son. This absolutely does not mean acting servile towards his mother, but it does mean setting aside all of the anger and frustration you are probably feeling towards her. That relationship is dead, so don’t worry about it and don’t let her push your buttons. And while she does hold a lot of the cards, she doesn’t hold all of them. Money is always the big one, so make sure that you don’t play your only real card too soon and always make sure that whatever you give her is contingent upon her delivering her end of the bargain.

It’s probably best to preemptively lawyer up and get a consultation on what sort of rights and responsibilities you have in your state of residence. It’s unfortunate that the legal system will take advantage of your desire to do the right thing by your son, but that is the reality of the world we now live in.

Mailvox: “You are my Dawkins”

Samuel J. Scott reviews RGD:

The aver­age reader could prob­a­bly be for­given for pass­ing Vox Day’s “The Return of the Great Depres­sion” with­out giv­ing it a sec­ond thought. After all, the author is a weekly colum­nist for World­Net­Daily, a far-right, news web­site that is as biased as it is sen­sa­tion­al­is­tic.

But the reader would be miss­ing one of the poten­tially most-important eco­nomic reviews in recent times.

Con­trary to what some might have pre­dicted from a writer for WND, Day’s sec­ond non-fiction book — the first was his cri­tique of the so-called “New Athe­ism” of Richard Dawkins, Sam Har­ris, and Christo­pher Hitchens in “The Irra­tional Athe­ist” — is not a polemic in favor of end­ing the Fed­eral Reserve, return­ing to the gold stan­dard, or other such issues that dom­i­nate among fringe con­ser­v­a­tives and lib­er­tar­i­ans. Rather, it is largely a cold, ratio­nal, even-handed assess­ment of the eco­nomic his­tory of the past twenty years from the rise of Japan in the late 1980s to the finan­cial tur­moil of today.

Beware of spoilers! Chris Bechtloff posts reviews Summa Elvetica:

Could not put it down. This is one of the best fantasy books I have read in a while.

And finally, Mr. B.A.D. takes me to task for sticking to the literary formats:

To be blunt, you and your buddies are intellectual snobs. Which is fine if all you ever want to do with your great think tank is circle jerk each other about how much smarter you are than the dummies who are running the world.

However if you aspire to make the world a better place with your great minds, which is the only choice of use in a great mind that does not result in total waste, you ought to learn the value of the idiot. The key element of my favorite movie of all time, Conan the Barbarian, is that Will alone is the true power behind anything. Once you have the will of the mob, who are all idiots, you have the means to change the world. This is why Hitler’s number 2 guy was in charge of propaganda, this is why transformers 2 was a box office hit, this is why those red handed atheists found it easier to just kill people than change their minds, this is why Liberals pander to the poor and welfare crowd, and this is why you ought to format your great thoughts and books into something the idiot can enjoy/ comprehend: Documentaries with pretty colors, animations, zingy noises, and humor.

Now I’m no idiot on an all inclusive scale, but I am a far cry from you and your friends in mental capacity. I’ve never had an actual IQ test but…..I scored 136 on one of those Internet tests 8 years ago. I drank a lot back then, and have since enrolled in college. I bet I can squeak in the last few points on a real IQ test and qualify as a genius. I’ll wait till you stop laughing….

Now, my only point was that I am more intelligent than the average human, and I feel I was able to comprehend your books, but they certainly gave my brain a stretch. I am certainly not as sharp as you, and lack the ability to see through the multiple layers of BS spoon fed us by the media each day. In a way you can say that I am the Christian version of the atheists who take science and the unholy trinity as gospel truth, except you are my Dawkins. I do not have the capacity to see the big picture the way you do, nor the reasoning ability to weigh what is bullshit and what is not. On the grand scale I’d actually be on the same level as Dawkins intellectually, I can remember facts, and reason fairly well, but not as well as I think I can, and probably have huge gaps in my logic. Watch Dog of the big picture being your gift, you should use it in a manner that will benefit all, not just the intellectual elites that your blog caters to. If your books were at the far end of my ability, than the people I run across on a daily basis who are barely literate have no hope of grasping the vital truths that you are shining a light upon. So please, draft up some cartoon characters, saddle up with your power point, and put something together for a limited theatrical release with a broad DVD release. If the Lord was able to pass down his higher thoughts to us, than I’m sure you can figure a way to do something similar.

I am his what? Anyhow, I suppose the criticism is not entirely invalid. I have been looking into putting together some sort of bi-monthly YouTube deal with the intention of permitting those who prefer video to follow some of the economic matters I’m writing about. However, it’s important to keep in mind that some subjects can only be dumbed down so far. I mean, if someone genuinely cannot understand that 8.3% annual credit growth over the same time period as 3% annual GDP growth means that the increase in GDP is wholly dependent upon increasing credit, or grasp the significance of what it means when that 8.3% credit growth is replaced by a 6% contraction even when I point it out to him, then there’s really not a whole lot I can do even if I spell everything out with pretty pictures and monosyllabic words.

Of course, Mr. B.A.D. also has to keep in mind that I simply don’t care all that much about the rest of the world except for my desire to stay away from it. I tend to follow my intellectual interests as they happen to evolve; I’m certainly not attempting to save Man from himself.

And returning the subject to RGD, those who have read it should be amused by this inadvertant, but telling confession by Paul Krugman in today’s NYT column:

As you read the economic news, it will be important to remember, first of all, that blips — occasional good numbers, signifying nothing — are common even when the economy is, in fact, mired in a prolonged slump…. Such blips are often, in part, statistical illusions.

You don’t say…. In case you don’t understand the significance of what Krugman is saying here, it is a straightforward admission by a Neo-Keynesian Samuelsonite that macroeconomic statistics are insufficiently reliable for macroeconomic policy making. Which, of course, is the very point I was making in the chapter entitled “No One Knows Anything”.

Mailvox: Minds do change

It sometimes seems as if human minds are about as capable of changing as rocks; only high explosives and slow erosion over vast quantities of time are capable of effecting it. But, as this email from a longtime regular demonstrates, it does, on occasion, happen:

At risk of sounding all fawning and shit, I want to thank you, and the Ilk, for aiding in my political transformation. When I went to law school, then started frequenting your blog, I began to appreciate the ramifications of political ideology, particularly the dangers of expanded and intrusive federal government. The fact that you and yours have ALWAYS afforded me a deal of respect, even when I was toting the Democratic party line, speaks volumes about the character of not only yourself but the cabal at Vox Popoli. Even Nate and the dearly departed Bane treated me with respect, a rarity indeed. So, just let me extend my thanks for always being honorable in a time when the concept of honor has seemingly been forgotten.

He is welcome, of course. The reason I chose to share this email is that a common and completely false accusation is that this blog is some sort of echo chamber where disagreement and criticism are not permitted. The reality is that the readers, and to a lesser extent, regular commenters, here represent a wide variety of ideologies and very few of them entirely share my idiosyncratic political and religious beliefs. While the dominant intellectual strain is unsurprisingly libertarian and protestant Christian, there are no shortage of those who do not share either perspective and their opinions are no less regarded for being different. And as the emailer testifies, so long as one abides by the rules of the blog, even the most vehement critic will be treated exactly same as the most fawning sycophant. In fact, I probably pay far more attention to the critics than I do to those who have no criticism to offer; after all, the truly arrogant require no praise.

Mailvox: the materialist writes back

JS continues the discussion of his previous email:

Thank you for addressing my e-mail on your site. I appreciated your responses and the responses of those who commented on the post. I have to say that much of the naturalist community seems to hold on to what are obviously suppositions on their part. They believe that since their unproven explanation is the best natural one, it is the correct one. Up until very recently, I too tended to believe this, taking a similar approach. As I waxed about a bit in my last e-mail to you, what has chafed me recently about those in the secular web community is the absolute refusal to even allow a line of thinking that goes against their worldview. This growing intolerance is bothering me, as the secularist community seems to be increasingly more defensive and myopic. So, since this question will gain me only ridicule and exile in this community, I will ask you — what are some good books on the argument against TENS that an inquiring mind such as mine should endeavor to read?

I thought that TIA was one of the best refutations of neo-Atheist arguments I’ve ever read (they hate you on the secular boards btw, if I didn’t know any better, I would say you are made of straw). Here is to hoping that RGD finds continued success.

I’ve always felt that one is defined by one’s enemies as well as by one’s friends, so I am pleased to be hated by such a collection of contemptible intellects. Unfortunately, I really can’t recommend any good books that make a case against TENS because I have never read one on the subject. This is in part because I have very seldom heard any author making what I consider to be the substantive arguments against TENS, and in part because my interest in the subject is tertiary at best, I’ve only read pro-evolution books by the likes of Dawkins, Dennett, and Gould. My skepticism of TENS is largely endogenous, with a few bits and pieces that I’ve picked up on the Internet such as the revised Haldane’s Dilemma and the application of Chomsky to the tautology of natural selection.

But, I’d like to open this discussion up to suggestions from others, for books that people feel most effectively defend TENS as well as those that most effectively dissect it. I tend to prefer to read those books that most effectively defend their subjects, because then I can see how easy or difficult it is to pick apart that optimal defense. I’m presently in the process of reading Dawkins’s latest, and if it is truly the optimal defense of Neo-Darwinism that its more enthusiastic reviewers apparently believe it to be, I am increasingly inclined to believe it will not be very difficult to demonstrate that TENS is in serious trouble.

I have even discussed writing a book on the subject myself with my publisher, but I’m not convinced that it is necessary. My suspicion is that TENS will eventually implode with or without my assistance in the matter. While there are certainly scientific and atheistic interests who will cling to the Neo-Darwinism in the face of any contrary future evidence, they are neither as powerful nor as powerfully incentivized to hold to it as is the case with political and financial authorities and Neo-Keynesianism.