Wingnut Science

A couple of prime examples, courtesy of Ed Brayton. The first concerns that work of the devil, evolution -- or, as the wingnuts call it, "evolutionism":

He explained that Darwin accepted homology and morphology, believing common origins would be evident from similar body traits.

"The idea is that a man has a head, arms and legs and an ape has a head, arms and legs, so that shows similar ancestry and, therefore, a common lineage," Phillips said. "That was one of the fundamental bases of Darwinian thinking that came from the Galapagos."

However, he said even evolutionists don't believe that anymore because DNA has proven it's utterly false.

"We have eyeballs with retinas and rods and corneas, but so do giant squid - just like humans," he said. "Nobody thinks we came from the same common lineage. Creationists argue that it's because we have a common Designer, not a common evolutionary ancestry."

As Brayton observes, scientists don't believe in homology any more? That's a surprise, especially to scientists. And the evidence from biochemistry and genetics -- that is, DNA -- is overwhelmingly supportive of common ancestry.

My first thought on reading this one was that no one can be that ignorant. I'm still not convinced (although the example of head, arms and legs went a long way toward persuading me), but rather than assume mendacity, we'll be compassionate and assume stupidity -- after all, that's something they can't help, and deserving of our pity.

The second is the lie-fest around global warming, or, in the circumlocution du jour, "climate change." Brayton cites, among others, Nate Silver:

But let's be clear: Jones is talking to his colleagues about making a prettier picture out of his data, and not about manipulating the data itself. Again, I'm not trying to excuse what he did -- we make a lot of charts here and 538 and make every effort to ensure that they fairly and accurately reflect the underlying data (in addition to being aesthetically appealing.) I wish everybody would abide by that standard.

Still: I don't know how you get from some scientist having sexed up a graph in East Anglia ten years ago to The Final Nail In The Coffin of Anthropogenic Global Warming. Anyone who comes to that connection has more screws loose than the Space Shuttle Challenger. And yet that's literally what some of these bloggers are saying!

It seems, however, that Andrew Sullivan has located the modus operandi:

The key to these bloggers' mentality is simply to find some tiny thing and focus all attention on that in order to persuade people that the bigger reality is untrue or irrelevant. This is not an argument; it's a technique. It's a technique to persuade people not to examine all the evidence, since the source of the evidence - secular humanist scientists - are evil suspects and against God and in favor of making your gas bill higher.

You can't actually persuade people that way, of course. But you can fortify their resistance to examining all the evidence.

I would argue one point with Sullivan: you can persuade people that way, particularly those who want to be persuaded. Or maybe I should say, not "persuade" so much as "confirm." The creationists have been doing it for years -- that's the root of all the so-called "controversies" in evolution: niggling details that haven't yet been resolved to everyone's satisfaction that the creationists blow up into a disparity that "disproves" Darwin's theory. As if.

So this is what happens when you practice faith-based science -- your grip on reality gets weaker by the minute.

Update: If you want to see how that sort of thinking carries over into real life, read this post at Mahablog. Quoting Steven Benen on the "stolen" 2008 presidential election:

One in four Americans — and a majority of self-identified Republicans — believes this was made possible due to the secret, carefully-executed, coordinated national efforts of a community group that can’t recognize fake pimps?

'Nuff said?

De Facto Hiatus

I've been under the weather and it's catching up with me, so don't expect much for the next couple of days. (Now that I've said that, of course, I'll probably snap right back and start posting like a lunatic -- but don't count on it.)

However, since you're such a good audience, here's a little something:

Reviews in Brief: Hyouta Fujiyama's Sunflower

Somehow I've managed to avoid reviewing Hyouta Fujiyama's Sunflower here, even though for a long time I've thought it was her best to date (although at this point I find myself going back to Freefall Romance again and again). At any rate, this is a two-volume schoolboy romance from the same group, the Kinsei Cycle, and very well done.

Ryuhei Ohno is an impossibly cute middle-schooler who has a crush on his sometime substitute tutor, Kaname Aikawa. As might be expected, cute, shy (and huge!) Kaname-san has his own feelings toward someone else, the almost-as huge Furuya. Needless to say, this romance does not go Ryuhei's way. We next see him as a first-year high school student at the notorious Kinsei High, the academically excellent all-boys school where 90% of the student body is rumored to be gay or bi, where he meets classmate Kunihisa Imaizumi, who happens to sit in front of him in home room. Imaizumi is somewhat aghast when he learns of the school's reputation from Ryuhei -- he's from an outside school -- and doesn't want anything to do with it. The two boys are stand-outs -- Ryuhei placed first in the entrance exams, Imaizumi first in the exams for transfer students -- and are targeted by Noze, vice-president of the student council, to become his assistants. Ryuhei at first refuses, but is talked into it by Imaizumi. The problem is, Ryuhei diesn't really like Noze, and the friendly relationship between him and Imaizumi finally leads to an explosion, which is when Ryuhei realizes he's fallen for Imaizumi. In due course he confesses and is rebuffed by Imaizumi.

Fujiyama has allowed the developing relationship between Ryuhei and Imaizumi to unfold slowly and subtly, and it's a delight to watch. She uses the same device that she uses in Freefall Romance, in that Imaizumi rejects Ryuhei, but not very forcefully or convincingly. Ruyhei, being all eyes-on-the-prize determination, won't really take no for an answer, and ultimately forces Imaizumi to examine his own feelings of "friendship" to understand what he really feels.

The drawing is superb -- Fujiyama's style taken up a notch. She's done wonderful things with layouts, close-ups, and image fragments. You just stop sometimes because a particular image is so beautiful. Tones, shading, details are all beautifully handled.

There are two side-stories, the first at the end of volume one about Aikawa and Furuya, two lovable guys with a lot of charm. Aikawa is terribly insecure in his new relationship,and Furuya, once he figures out the problem, is all comfort and reassurance.

The other, at the end of volume two, is about Fumiaki Kozue, president of the student council, and Leiji Sumiyoshi, the president's assistant and Kozue's self-appointed bodyguard. The two are "sex buddies," as Kosue tells Imaizumi early on, but there's more to it than that. This ia a marvelous story, complex and multi-layered, and digs pretty deep into both young men's characters.

I'm not sure at this point if I'd still call this Fujiyama's best, but it's up there. From Juné.

Skeletons in the Closet

Via a good friend, this choice piece from Stephen Colbert:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
The Word - Skeletons in the Closet
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor U.S. Speedskating

"The End of Gay": A Preamble

This is one of those topics that I keep meaning to come back to, and I'm building up a store of links and articles, but I'm not quite ready to dig into it yet. However, this piece by Jennifer Vanasco does look at one of the aspects of assimilation that I've noted before:

Not even gay people can tell that Jenny is gay, and it makes her sad.
"While society has gradually grown more accustomed to the idea that gay people can be flamboyant or perfectly ordinary, we in the gay community don’t always recognize our more subtle brothers and sisters on the street. We assume heterosexuality. Even in our own neighborhoods and our own shops."

“How can you be part of a community if no one can see you?” she asks.

Humans are a tribal animal, and if you’re gay, the LGBTcommunity is your tribe. We want other gay people to recognize us, because it makes us feel less alone. It makes us feel like part of something.

Or, as I've put it, it was a lot easier to know who to ask for a date when gay bars catered to gay people.

There's also the identity question -- what Andrew Sullivan tends to lump with "identity politics," which is not the same thing at all, but Sullivan isn't really very good at fine points.

I am terribly obvious about being gay. I'm not a flamer, by any means, I'm just very open about seeing things from my point of view -- i.e., that of a gay man -- and refusing to adopt any protective coloration. In fact, one reason I'm so obvious is that I got tired of women coming on to me and men passing me by (except, for some reason, the occasional straight guy). (File under "Stereotypes, masculinity")

This is one reason I'm pretty much convinced that, in spite of all the wishful thinking of "mainstream" gays, gay culture is not going to wither and die. We need it. We need to come home every once in a while, we need it as a refuge for our young people who are trying to figure out who they are, and we need it as a reminder to the rest of the world that no, we're not just like they are, and that's part of our value. That's one reason I lose patience fairly rapidly with the nervous nellies who keep screaming about excessive behavior at Gay Pride parades because we'll turn the straight people off. Jeebus! It's our holiday, FTLOP, get over yourselves. Has it occurred to anyone that the major portion of the audience for these things is straight people who come to see the parade --and bring their kids? (At least, that's the way it is in Chicago. I've ridden floats past rows of Latinas with their children, all cheering wildly.)

At any rate, read Vanasco's piece. It's entertaining as well as being spot on.

Atypical Me

Interesting observation by Jonah Lehrer:

Just consider health care: the only way we're ever going to reduce medical costs is to restrict procedures that haven't passed evidence-based efficacy tests. Maybe that means 40 year old women don't get mammograms, or that we treat prostrate cancer less aggressively, or that we stop performing spinal fusion surgeries. Although there's solid evidence to question all of these medical options, such changes provoke intense debate. Why? Because our emotions don't understand statistics. Because when we have back pain we want an MRI. Because when it's our father with prostate cancer we want the most aggressive possible treatments. And so on.

The point is that there's often an indefatigable gap between the rigors of cost-benefit analyses and the emotional hunches that drive our decisions. We say we want to follow the evidence, but then the evidence rubs against a bias like loss aversion, and so we make an exception. We'll follow the evidence next time.

I suspect Lehrer's right on this, although you couldn't prove it by me. Having recently been through my own scenario -- in my case, prostate cancer -- I find that, looking back over the process of making a decision about how to proceed, I didn't do any of the above. First, I demanded -- and got -- a lot of information on what the indicators meant, the options for treatment, side-effects and consequences, and right down the line. (One session with a doctor lasted for well over an hour, and that was only one of several.) And then I based my decision on what I considered to be acceptable results.

Now, it may just be that I'm able to deal with my own illnesses more rationally than I can with anyone else's. I think if it had been my (hypothetical, unfortunately) boyfriend with prostate cancer, I would have been more or less in full "by any means necessary" mode. I think it's also partly due to the fact that the doctors I dealt with were very forthcoming with information, very sensible, and, perhaps, somewhat appreciative of the fact that I wanted to understand as completely as possible what was going on (which I suspect is not a reaction they meet very often). In fact, one of them told my I had a very good, positive attitude.

And I wonder, given that portion of my own history, how much of the response that Lehrer describes is due to doctors and other providers whose attitude is just the opposite.

Old News, Same Response

I tend to get a little more than fed up with the politically correct left from time to time, particularly when their comments reveal that they obviously don't get it. I just ran across this article at Pink News, a reaction to the reaction to that atrocious article about Stephen Gately's death by that homophobic bitch Jan Moir, which I commented on as part of this post.

This one is by someone named Adrian Tippets, and he is sooo lost.

But silencing viewpoints is more likely to breed homophobia than end it. How, other than by debate, does one challenge prejudice? When we deny the freedom to speak each time we hear something we don’t like, as Thomas Paine reminds us, everyone becomes a slave to their own opinions.

Freedom of speech is not just about the right to speak your mind. It is also the right to listen, to have opinions of all sides exposed to scrutiny. It has no value without the freedom to think differently. Moir gives expression to doubts that are lingering in the back of many people’s minds. For all we know, there may even be a grain of truth, somewhere among her bizarre utterances.

Can we see the obvious? No one "silenced" Jan Moir. She not only had her piece published in a newspaper with a circulation of some 2 million, she did a follow-up piece in which she played the victim card, as well as dodging the issue:

The point of my column – which I wonder how many of the people complaining have fully read – was to suggest that, in my honest opinion, his death raises many unanswered questions.

That's a flat lie. The point of her column was to cast aspersions on Stephen Gately and demean gay men as a group. I don't see any other possible interpretation. The "unanswered questions" are in her own head (and I shudder to think what it must be like in there). If she maintains that 33-year-old men don't just drop dead, well, she's wrong. I happen to have known someone of about that age who died of exactly the same causes. In his case it took longer, but it was beyond anything the doctors could do -- they simply could not drain his lungs fast enough. If he hadn't been in the hospital, he would have gone much more quickly. As for "intimacy with a stranger," that's certainly none of her business, and bringing it up is nothing more than a naked attempt to buy into the "unhealthy lifestyle" mantra so beloved of the professional homophobes. If open relationships or three-ways give her the willies, she shouldn't participate in them.

Now Tippets is trying to justify her, as you can see from the quote above. And if you read his commentary, it becomes painfully obvious that he has no idea what he's talking about. It's straw man followed by red herring followed by logical disconnects that don't even have names yet, used to argue positions that have nothing to do with this story at all.

Let me state it clearly: Jan Moir stated her opinion on something that was really none of her business to begin with. She did so offensively and quite obviously to damage as many people as possible with her insinuations. Now, of course, she can't deal with the criticism (have you noticed how that works) and is squawking about freedom of speech. And here's some airhead who, presumably, is to the left of Attila the Hun, trying to defend her from the legitimate consequences of that "free speech."

Got news for you Adrian, and Jan Moir as well -- nothing's free in this world. And whatever you do or say is going to come back and bite you in the ass.

The Federal Dilemma

A reader pushes back at Sullivan on his states' rights stance:

Yes, I have heard the whole "laboratories of democracy" spiel, but can you please explain why you and (other?) conservatives in this country are so enamoured with states' rights? Why is the "state" the political subdivision you think should be able to decide such things as gay marriage, abortion, segregation, etc., etc., etc.? Frankly, I have never understood why states rights have anything to do with complex political issues - particularly when it comes to issues, like civil rights, where there is a clear wrong answer and a clear right answer).

I happen to agree with this one wholeheartedly, at least the part about civil rights issues. We know from past experience -- especially the recent past -- that putting civil rights before the people of a state is going to get you mixed results, and that state legislators are even more negligent than Congress at tailoring laws to conform to Constitutional principles. (One need only look at laws passed in Missouri and Alabama mandating the teaching of creationism in public schools for a good take on that one. Local governments are even worse, as witness Kitzmiller -- the Dover school board case in which the pro-creationists admitted that creationism is not science.)


Sullivan responds:

Because these are areas of deep and principled disagreement and this is a vast and diverse country. Getting Massachusetts and Alabama to agree on a deep moral issue is almost impossible. And I remain a conservative who wants to see necessary change occur as far as possible with as broad a consensus as possible and who believes that decisions made closest to the ground are the least worst ways of avoiding massive errors or hideous unintended consequences. This means that injustice will remain longer than it should in an ideal world. But we live in a real world. And that distinction between theory and practice matters to an Oakeshottian like myself. But it also means that justice when it arrives is real, more durable and can more easily become part of the fabric of a society.

I won't remark on the irony of Sullivan's comment that "we live in a real world," except to note that the irony exists.

To me, this whole comment is wrong-headed. I think that Sullivan's reader is correct in that certain areas, such as civil rights, are national in scope and must be dealt with on a national level. The mere fact of the Fourteenth Amendment should make it plain that states cannot be relied on to come to correct conclusions in those areas.

The great example, of course, is racial discrimination. It was not the states, nor any single state, that provided an example for the others to follow. (Well, one can take the position, I guess, that some did -- but the problem is, the rest didn't necessarily follow.) Sullivan's reader is quite right -- this is not a matter of "good, better, best," but of moral and legal absolutes. (And one of the few examples I can think of in which morality [in its commonly accepted sense, at least] and legality occupy the same universe.) Yes, as we can see from the reaction in some quarters to the election of our first black president, racial prejudice is alive and kicking in this country -- but it's no longer legal and it has to be expressed in code, which I think undercuts Sullivan's argument quite effectively. The point is that legal racial discrimination was outlawed through the federal courts and the federal legislature, not by building consensus in the states. And I think my statement about speaking in code is vastly important here: to the country at large, it is no longer acceptable to express those prejudices openly -- those groups who do accept that are outliers and not groups that represent a majority or even something that the majority wants to be associated with. Attitudes will follow the law, even if it takes time. Sullivan is quite willing to spend the time before taking action -- why not after the fact? After all, one thing that people do need is an indicator of what's acceptable, and the law provides that. (The recent case of a private swim club in Pennsylvania, I believe, that barred minority children from the pool after agreeing to a visit should indicate just how thoroughly we as a nation have adopted a stance against racial discrimination -- the club has now gone bankrupt after the fallout from that incident.)

(Granted, race is a tricky one, simply because, as I'm firmly convinced, "we" and "them" is a basic human viewpoint, intimately tied up with not only group identity but personal identity, and race is a handy and, I think, fundamental, identifier. But for the issues under examination here, it serves admirably.)

As for Sullivan's reliance on "deep moral issues," let me state quite clearly that I don't believe that is an appropriate area for government involvement. I'm not going to discuss here those aspects of morality that we can call "secular" and that are the foundation of any workable society -- things like "thou shalt not kill the neighbors" and the like. Actually, now that I've written that, I will, because it's germane. In that aspect of morality, the government must be the final arbiter, and I don't think leaving it up to fifty more local governments is going to help matters. The government must remain neutral in those areas involving personal morality, however, and attempt to reach solutions when those areas become subject to the law (I'm thinking of things such as rape and child molestation, and yes, abortion and contraception) that are both pragmatic and that serve the needs of as many as possible.

One of those fundamental liberties that we cherish in this country is freedom of conscience, and that, I think, is where Sullivan has real problems. He falls into a trap that I've seen over and over again in these sorts of discussions, the assumption that there is one overriding moral code that everyone subscribes to and that applies across the board. This is patent nonsense -- if it were the case, we wouldn't be having these debates to begin with. The Christianist right says that human life begins at conception and that gays are "intrinsically disordered." The first is a matter of debate in this country, while the second is simply ridiculous. Yet these are both presented as fundamental moral questions requiring the action of legislatures and courts. In the terms in which they are presented, however, they are matters of personal morality, not civic morality (although I'll grant abortion does move into that realm) and that the government, in the eyes of "conservatives," must enforce this "universal" moral code -- which has its basis purely in religious doctrine. You'll pardon me if I'm not impressed, particularly with the idea that states are better equipped to deal with these issues than the feds. (In the case of gay civil rights, particularly, I haven't seen anywhere in the Bill of Rights that says "except for gays and lesbians," and believe me, I've looked. Antonin Scalia, please take note.)

What Sullivan fails to acknowledge is that, as in the codification of racial prejudice, it is the federal government that, to put it bluntly, lays down the law. Yes, the feds' actions are responsive to public opinion (unless it concerns the profits of major industries), but they are also based on constitutional considerations that states don't always adhere to, as noted above, and the grace of federal jurisdiction is that it is that one step farther removed from the people's will, which, let me remind you, is not the final arbiter here. (The idea that because a legislature passed a law it must be constitutional is ludicrous -- we know better.) One need only look at the history of civil rights issues in this country to realize that the states made a mess of things and the federal courts and Congress had to step in and fix it. Why don't we just cut out the middle man?

I think anyone looking at it objectively must admit that there are certain areas in which the states are not competent as authority, and civil rights is the major one. Yes, states are more likely to be responsive to constituents' opinions and attitudes, but that's not necessarily a good thing. On the abortion question, the debate is already at the federal level and has been for decades. On gay marriage, the feds have already interfered with states' rights -- on the wrong side -- and need to backtrack and get out of it, with the proviso that there is a fundamental right at issue here and ultimately the federal courts are going to have to decide it because the states can't do it.

Like the sovereignty of the people, it would appear that states' rights are subject to certain limitations as not only a theoretical matter but a practical one as well. Maybe conservatives should take that into consideration.

Science Fun

OK, is this cool, or what?



This is a juvenile coelecanth, the fish that was supposed to have been extinct for 80 million years.

Cute little devil, isn't it?

Married in Texas? Maybe Not.

I've seen this a couple of places. Here's the report from Pam's House Blend:

In 2005, the state of Texas overwhelmingly approved an amendment to the state Constitution that was added as Article I, Section 32. That section now reads:

Sec. 32. MARRIAGE.

(a) Marriage in this state shall consist only of the union of one man and one woman.

(b) This state or a political subdivision of this state may not create or recognize any legal status identical or similar to marriage.

From McClatchy's report:

...Radnofsky, who was a member of the powerhouse Vinson & Elkins law firm in Houston for 27 years until retiring in 2006, says the wording of Subsection B effectively "eliminates marriage in Texas," including common-law marriages.

It sounds weird, but when you read Subsection (b), it certainly looks as though it's now impossible to have your marriage recognized in Texas, no matter who you are.

I love it when idiots shoot themselves in the foot.

Sullivan on the Costs of Health-Care Reform

This is just a quickie, because I had one of those nights and I'm running late again -- or will be in a minute or two. (Pulled muscle or something in my side -- barely slept at all.)

At any rate, Andrew Sullivan makes a point in this post that I have to comment on.

I'd love a polity in which a real conservative told people that costs should be controlled first before anyone gets insurance extended to them. The idea is to make the prize conditional on the sacrifice.

This is Sullivan being theoretical again, as far as I can tell. What he doesn't acknowledge is that health care is in a crisis in this country, and in a crisis, you can't necessarily go by what you'd like to do, conservative or liberal. Nor does he acknowledge that every serious plan that's been offered actually reduces the national deficit.

It's about multi-tasking. Ever hear of "pay as you go"? The point is, we need to get coverage in place for the 47+ million people who don't have it. That's almost 12% of the people in this country, and that's an unacceptable figure.

And looking at that bit, it's pretty much unbearably smug. Oh, right -- this is Andrew Sullivan. This is someone who isn't going to be asked to make a sacrifice, and who already has his prize (one assumes -- I've never seen him write about the horrors of being uninsured).

You want to pay the bills for universal coverage? Tax the insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies on excess profits -- the money they're raking in by selling services that they don't provide and getting exclusive rights to drugs that we paid to develop. (As for the drug companies, they should be paying the government royalties, the way oil companies do for drilling rights -- except they should be paying fair royalities, unlike the oil companies.)

Later -- I have to get going.

Send a Coathanger, Revisited

In light of this post at AmericaBlog, I thought that the "Send a Coathanger" campaign that I mentioned in this post should be expanded further.

Send a coathanger to you local bishop.

The "Preach In" Against Gay-Inclusive Hate Crimes Laws

These people are ludicrous. Here's the report from Timothy Kincaid at BTB.

Yesterday a collection of the nation’s most obnoxious anti-gay activists showed up in Washington DC to have a showdown with the government. They were there to defy the new law criminalizing preaching against homosexuality and to be arrested for preaching the gospel. (Christian Post)

Conservative pastors rallied outside the Justice Department on Monday to test the limits of the newly expanded hate crimes law.

Calling the new law – which broadens the definition of federal hate crimes to include attacks based on sexual orientation and gender identity – a clear threat to religious liberty, the group sought to defend their freedom to proclaim biblical truths.

Of course there were no arrests and, from all reports, the police on duty were bored to distraction. Kincaid asks

But why are these anti-gay activists convinced, against all evidence to the contrary, that preaching against homosexuality is now illegal? How do we explain their irrational thinking and baseless paranoia?

This is not paranoia, this is posturing, pure and simple. Does anyone think that the likes of Rev. Rick Scarborough, Matt Barber, Harry Jackon and Janet Porter are going to put themselves in a position where there is the slightest possibility that they would actually spend time behind bars? They don't have that kind of courage -- let's face it, these are not people who are in serious competition with Mahatma Gandhi or Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. These are snake oil salesmen.

They're doing performance art for their base, who are not the kind of people who even know what the Bill of Rights says and doesn't say, and are certainly not going to question anything their authority figures of the moment might tell them.

You'd have to do some serious work to demonstrate that there is any thinking in this other than pure self-aggrandizement. As for paranoia, I'd bank that they're relying on the paranoia in their audience on this one.

Here's a report from Alvin McEwen at Pam's House Blend, with video.

Caught in the Backwash?

Lest anyone think that only the LSD Church is open to change, read this post from Jim Burroway at Box Turtle Bulletin. It seems the American bishops commissioned a study on the causes of the child-abuse scandal. Burroway summarizes:

It looks like the report’s authors are coming to the same conclusions I did when I tackled the question in our report, “Testing the Premise: Are Gays A Threat To Our Children?” I poured [sic] through the professional literature and found no connection between homosexuality and child molestation. The Catholic Bishops commissioned a $2 million study in response to the clerical sexual abuse scandals which came to the same conclusion.

If you'll remember, one of the authorities Burroway studied pointed out that there appeared to be an inverse correlation between homosexual orientation and likelihood to molest children.

What leads me to the conclusion that the Church is feeling some pain because of public reaction to its anti-gay stance is largely that I have little confidence in its willingness to open itself to fact, in spite of its history. (Of course, taking the full history into account, I'm not really willing to wait four hundred years for the Church to come around to the fact that I'm normal.) Pain seems a much more likely motivator here. The Mormons have the possibility of new revelations, so changing direction is a bit easier for them. The Catholic Church is a little more rigid about doctrine, by necessity. But the hierarchy has been backtracking for a bit now -- I remember hearing about this some while ago:

Last year, Pope Benedict XVI drew a distinction between homosexuality and pedophelia, saying “I would not speak at this moment about homosexuality, but pedophilia which is another thing."

This is the man who was the first to point at gays as the root of the child abuse in the Church. Of course, this shift hasn't changed any of the Church's limitations on gay priests, but the Church moves glacially when it moves at all.

But it appears that the hierarchy is going to lose one more prop for its anti-gay position. Wonder what we can expect after that?

In the Kingdom of the Blind. . .

. . . the one-eyed man still doesn't see very well.

Found this post by Marc Ambinder via Andrew Sullivan, whose sole comment, in a post titled "Palin: The Dumber Kind of Creationist," is "Ambers explains."

Ouch. "Ambers," as he is known in that collegial collection of the almost-profound who inhabit The Atlantic, manages to screw up from the first sentence. Time to parse.

Much more so than abortion, the issue of life's origins wedges itself between the scientifically literate elite and everyone else.

Frankly, the idea that the scientifically literate form an elite is scary. It also makes me wonder what happened to all that money we spend on education in this country? Oh, and given that this is a post about creationism and evolution, let me just point out that evolution, at least, does not deal with life's origins. Evolution starts with the statement "life exists" and takes it from there.

This is the Big Question, and it has implications for politics: what is humanity? What do we owe each other? From where do we derive our ethics? How do we solve irreconcilable value claims?

Can someone explain to me what any of these questions have to do with evolution? These are large philosophical and theological questions, and don't really have much to do with the ways in which life achieved the rich variety that we see around us. It doesn't seem to have occured to Ambinder that those are questions we answer for ourselves, and we don't really need to rely on evolution to do it for us. We can, if we want to, but we don't have to, and we're probably better off not making that connection.

Its acceptance in the years after Charles Darwin popularized the concept fundamentally established science as the foundational text of modernism. Most biological scientists don't believe in God. Those who do, like the new chair of the NIH, Francis S. Collins, are Christian Deists; they accept that "progress" in evolution seems random, but they believe that, somewhere beneath the quarks, the God spark is slowly directing this complicated process - or that God created the laws of the universe in such a way so as to lay favorable conditions for evolution. But they don't reject the evidence.

There's no basis for saying that most biological scientists don't believe in God. As one of Ambinder's commenters points out, there is a full range of belief among the scientific community, from the devout to the atheistic. You probably won't find a lot of Biblical literalists among biologists, but I doubt that you'll find them in any branch of knowledge that relies on curiosity and understanding the importance of evidence.

Evolution, the change over time of species by various unguided (but not always random) selection pressures, is as close to a fact of science as there is. It is as much of a historical fact as the Holocaust.

Two points here: natural selection, the driving mechanism of evolution, is a double-layered event. First comes meiosis, the process by which gametes divide, and in so doing, mix up the organism's genetic heritage. This is pretty random -- mistakes happen, sequences get duplicated or lost, genes get recombined. Once a new organism is created -- i.e., the egg is fertilized and development begins -- the selection criteria are not random at all. The requirements of the environment are the deciding factor in the survival of the individual. (And I might point out that this is a life-long requirement.) He's sort of right in saying that evolution is as close to a factof science as possible, but calling it a "historical fact" on the order of the Holocaust is pushing it, I think. The existence of the theory, and its acceptance, is certainly historical fact, but the theory itself cannot be, by definition. This is where we get into the phenomenon of sliding definitions. Biologists take evolution as a fact and will until the unlikely event that some piece of evidence disproves it -- and eventuality which becomes more and more remote. But to translate this into the common parlance as a fact is risky: it doesn't mean the same thing. (The parallel is the different meanings of "theory," which the creationists have so much fun manipulating.)

The American people are finicky about their creation/evolution debate. Even though a majority of Americans clearly believe at least a thin form of "intelligent design," about a majority staunchly opposes something called "creationism" -- even though it is, in the real world, indistinguishable from creationism in its animating principles and aims. What this means is that Americans accept the chronology of evolution without accepting the science of evolution. Disproving evolution to scientists would mean finding a rabbit fossil in the Burgess Shale. Disproving "intelligent design" to most Americans would mean disproving the existence of God.

Granted that he's talking about the popular perception here, I still have to object to the idea of "disproving" intelligent design. You can't -- that's why it's not science. (Well, that's only one of many reasons, but it's the one that's germane here.)

One thing that I find very interesting about this post is what Ambinder doesn't say. Granted, he's talking about Sarah Palin, who's an outlier, but nowhere does he point out that most mainstream Christian denominations -- starting with the Roman Catholic Church -- accept the theory of evolution as valid. One of the commenters even quotes Pope Benedict XVI:

"Currently, I see in Germany, but also in the United States, a somewhat fierce debate raging between so-called "creationism" and evolutionism, presented as though they were mutually exclusive alternatives: those who believe in the Creator would not be able to conceive of evolution, and those who instead support evolution would have to exclude God. This antithesis is absurd because, on the one hand, there are so many scientific proofs in favour of evolution which appears to be a reality we can see and which enriches our knowledge of life and being as such. But on the other, the doctrine of evolution does not answer every query, especially the great philosophical question: where does everything come from? And how did everything start which ultimately led to man? I believe this is of the utmost importance."

And yet Ambinder just blindly follows the idea that belief in evolution precludes belief in God, at least to the extent of accepting it as a valid view simply because it's held by a certain percentage of Americans. Sorry, but that doesn't make it true.

Fortunately, Ambinder's readers are on the ball, and several of him ripped him a new one for this piece. I'm reminded of a lesson I learned early on: if you don't know what you're talking about, keep quiet.