Now They Can Quit Pretending

The Discovery Institute does believe in eugenics after all.

Michael Medved claims that Americans are genetically superior to other human beings.

The radical notion that our national character stems from genetics as well as culture has always inspired angry controversy; many observers scoff at the whole idea of a unifying hereditary component in our multi-racial, multi-cultural society. Aside from the varied immigrants who now make up nearly 15% of the population, the forebears of today’s Americans journeyed to this continent from Asia, Africa, Latin America and every nation of Europe. Our stark differences in appearance, if nothing else, argue against the concept of common DNA connecting contemporary citizens of wildly divergent ancestry.

Gee, I guess different colors of paper also show that it can't all be made from trees. (I suppose that God made the nice colors - pink, blue, yellow - and Satan the colors that I like, like black, red, and hot pink.)

Nevertheless, two respected professors of psychiatry have recently come out with challenging books that contend that those who chose to settle this country in every generation possessed crucial common traits that they passed on to their descendents. In “American Mania,” Peter C. Whybrow of U.C.L.A. argues that even in grim epochs of starvation and persecution, only a small minority ever chooses to abandon its native land and to venture across forbidding oceans to pursue the elusive dream of a better life. The tiny percentage making that choice (perhaps only 2%, even in most periods of mass immigration) represents the very essence of a self-selecting group. Compared to the Irish or Germans or Italians or Chinese or Mexicans who remained behind in the “Old Country,” the newcomers to America would naturally display a propensity for risk-taking, for restlessness, for exuberance and self-confidence – traits readily passed down to subsequent generations. Whybrow explained to the New York Times Magazine that immigrants to the United States and their descendents seemed to possess a distinctive makeup of their “dopamine receptor system – the pathway in the brain that figures centrally in boldness and novelty seeking.”

John D. Gartner of Johns Hopkins University Medical School makes a similar case for an American-specific genotype in “The Hypomanic Edge”—celebrating the frenzied energy of American life that’s impressed every visitor since Tocqueville. The United States also benefited from our tradition of limited government, with only intermittent and ineffective efforts to suppress the competitive, entrepreneurial instincts of the populace. Professor Whybrow says: “Here you have the genes and the completely unrestricted marketplace. That’s what gives us our peculiar edge.” In other words, “anything goes capitalism” reflects and sustains the influence of immigrant genetics.

The idea of a distinctive, unifying, risk-taking American DNA might also help to explain our most persistent and painful racial divide – between the progeny of every immigrant nationality that chose to come here, and the one significant group that exercised no choice in making their journey to the U.S. Nothing in the horrific ordeal of African slaves, seized from their homes against their will, reflected a genetic predisposition to risk-taking, or any sort of self-selection based on personality traits. Among contemporary African-Americans, however, this very different historical background exerts a less decisive influence, because of vast waves of post-slavery black immigration. Some three million black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean arrived since 1980 alone and in big cities like New York, Boston and Miami close to half of the African-American population consists of immigrants, their children or grandchildren. The entrepreneurial energy of these newcomer communities indicates that their members display the same adventurous instincts associated with American DNA.

In other words, "Oh, we're not saying that white people are genetically superior to black people - we're just saying that white Americans are genetically superior to black Americans!" What a pig Medved is!

Naturally, PZ Myers takes down Medved's pseudo-genetics.

What utter nonsense! I've been to "command and control" Europe several times, and then had the shock of returning here. Europeans are lively - walking everywhere, meeting friends at the cafe instead of watching television, going out at night (without the kids, because they actually leave them with a babysitter or a nanny, whereas American parents drag their little darlings everywhere, even into bars and nightclubs, and then complain about the skimpy dress, raucous behavior, and unchurched language of child-free people like me who think that bars and nightclubs are for adults). I don't know how to put the difference more clearly than this photo:

And I wish this was an exaggeration.

As a consequence, Americans live shorter lives than West Europeans. Their children are more likely to die in infancy: the US ranks twenty-sixth among industrial nations in infant mortality, with a rate double that of Sweden, higher than Slovenia's, and only just ahead of Lithuania's—and this despite spending 15 percent of US gross domestic product on "health care" (much of it siphoned off in the administrative costs of for-profit private networks). Sweden, by contrast, devotes just 8 percent of its GDP to health. The picture in education is very similar. In the aggregate the United States spends much more on education than the nations of Western Europe; and it has by far the best research universities in the world. Yet a recent study suggests that for every dollar the US spends on education it gets worse results than any other industrial nation. American children consistently underperform their European peers in both literacy and numeracy.

Very well, you might conclude. Europeans are better—fairer—at distributing social goods. This is not news. But there can be no goods or services without wealth, and surely the one thing American capitalism is good at, and where leisure-bound, self-indulgent Europeans need to improve, is the dynamic generation of wealth. But this is by no means obvious today. Europeans work less: but when they do work they seem to put their time to better use. In 1970 GDP per hour in the EU was 35 percent below that of the US; today the gap is less than 7 percent and closing fast. Productivity per hour of work in Italy, Austria, and Denmark is similar to that of the United States; but the US is now distinctly outperformed in this key measure by Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, ...and France.

...Indeed, Europe is facing real problems. But they are not the ones that American free-market critics recount with such grim glee. Yes, the European Commission periodically makes an ass of itself, aspiring to regulate the size of condoms and the curvature of cucumbers. The much-vaunted Stability Pact to constrain national expenditure and debt has broken down in acrimony, though with no discernible damage to the euro it was designed to protect. And pensions and other social provisions will be seriously underfunded in decades to come unless Europeans have more children, welcome more immigrants, work a few more years before retiring, take somewhat less generous unemployment compensation, and make it easier for businesses to employ young people. But these are not deep structural failings of the European way of life: they are difficult policy choices with political consequences. None of them implies the dismantling of the welfare state.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't more and more Americans facing foreclosure on their homes and mountains of debt? Didn't we have another serious recession after eight years of another moron in the White House? Didn't we have a major Depression in the 1930s? So how many Americans, showing their natural grit and "risk taking" behavior, fled their country to seek adventure and fortune elsewhere? How many Americans even go abroad anymore? How many speak a second language, even?

Medved is just riffing on the tired old "How-come-it's-always-the-black-folk-who-win-all-the-racing-medals-at-the-Olympics" argument, conveniently forgetting that appearance doesn't indicate race. As a matter of fact, it's mostly black Americans who win those medals, not Africans, a fact resulting from a miriad of causes including mixed heritage with whites, Native Americans, and other ethnicities, nutrition, socio-economic status, individual talent, and personal choices. And that holds true for everyone.

That's why Americans, who used to be risk-takers, adventurers, and creative inventors, are now largely superstitious, fatalistic, consumerist couch-potatoes. (I don't think the Founding Fathers and Mothers would recognize us.) It's due to the choices we've made. And that doesn't have to be our future. Strict genetic determinism has never been the consequence of evolution. Strict genetic determinism is just a cartoon vision of those who don't know (again) what the hell they're talking about. (But then again, the concept of strict determinism, or "cause and effect," is what convinces many people that intelligent design is persuasive.)

Human beings belong to only one race. "Race" is a social construct. It's a relatively recent idea that has no genetic basis and is literally skin deep.

But it doesn't surprise me at all to find out how racist, provincial-minded, and hate-filled the Discovery Institute minions are. Their yawping about how Darwin "caused the Holocaust" is filled with more envy than alarm. Like most revisionists, what they truly want is to purify the nation - their way.

While crying "Censorship! Tyranny! I was expelled!" they seek to censor, to expel, and to impose their own tyranny - their way. What they are "rebelling" against is the perceived weaknesses, not the "tyranny" of the scientific community. They want an umbrella of certainty held above their whole lives, and science can't give anyone that.

"Freedom" and "academic inquiry" to them mean conformity and unquestioning obedience. They are guilty of those very crimes which they see in others, everywhere.

Rust Belt Philosophy also takes Medved to task for his unwarranted genetic generalizations.

UPDATED: Our President George W. Bush has funded with our tax a "study" (being that they're so sciency and all) on "human dignity," chaired by a crank named Leon Kass, who is the President's advisor and bioethics. In that capacity, Mr. Kass warns the President about grave dangers to our human "dignity," and in this capacity he is deeply troubled by the social adoption of "animal behavior" such as licking ice cream cones and eating hot dogs on the street:

Worst of all from this point of view are those more uncivilized forms of eating, like licking an ice cream cone - a catlike activity that has been made acceptable in informal America but that still offends those who know eating in public is offensive. ... Eating on the street - even when undertaken, say, because one is between appointments and has no other time to eat - displays [a] lack of self-control: It beckons enslavement to the belly. ... Lacking utensils for cutting and lifting to mouth, he will often be seen using his teeth for tearing off chewable portions, just like any animal. ... This doglike feeding, if one must engage in it, ought to be kept from public view, where, even if we feel no shame, others are compelled to witness our shameful behavior.

But he has no problem shaking his finger at "aging bachelors" and advocating that all women welp like bunnies in the backyard.

Call me catty, but I think the next round of "no new human-animal hybrids" is going to be something else. They just want to protect us! Keep repeating the word "Freedom!"

UPDATED: Ben Stein says, "Scotland is the most intelligent race in the world." And I thought Scotland was a country.

Evolution Didn't Just "Happen By Chance"

It's amazing how often a misconception gets repeated in the face of facts.

Ben Stein, hyperactively promoting his forthcoming (likely straight-to-DVD) film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, keeps harping that the theory of evolution states that species (he says "life," but he means species) arose by chance. Nothing could be further from the truth. (The origin of life is the study of abiogenesis, and that is the field of chemists.)

Mutations arise by chance, yes. But natural selection, the engine that powers evolution, is a series of causal events. The problem seems to be that there are multiple (in fact, seemingly endless) causes, rather than natural selection being a singular force. However, this should not that difficult to understand - an election, for example, or better yet, the marketplace is also a complex, decentralized interaction with multiple causal events.

Natural selection is not random.

Bay of Fundie has an excellent takedown of Ben Stein's talking points here. I must say that Stein himself is his own worst public relations for his own film, as he seems bound and determined to make an ass of himself even when writing about about subject he should know about, namely, the market.

I think it’s a fundamental (as opposed to fundamentalist) truth that conspiracies cause very few of the world’s events, whereas the old adage “The road to hell is paved with good intentions” continuously proves to be the case. Ironically, creationism itself is a good example of this.

Creationists like William Dembski, Jonathan Wells, Philip Johnson, et al. of the Discovery Institute devised a strategy, called the Wedge Strategy, to force creationist teachings into our public schools by undermining the public’s confidence in science. A conspiracy, yes? I think it qualifies as a conspiracy – which is why it’s gone so badly.

However, the American public largely prefers creationism over evolution anyway, and so the push to get creationism in the public schools is actually a decentralized, multi-causal, organic process. In other words, it is largely a grassroots effort – now bolstered by the Discover Institute. The result has been a disaster for creationism.

Ben Stein makes a “documentary” touting the teaching of intelligent design. The Discovery Institute applauds. Ben Stein goes on Bill O’Reilly’s The Factor and calls intelligent design “the idea that a deity created life.” The Discovery Institute gets pissed off and sends out a press release correcting Ben Stein.

(Shhhhh! They’re trying to keep that under wraps! Because, ahem, teaching creationism as science is unconstitutional, remember? So the Designer still could be space aliens, you know. *Wink*)

Oops.

The Dover, Pennsylvania school board votes to include a disclaimer about evolution to be read to students before science classes. The Discovery Institute applauds. The Dover, Pennsylvania school board votes to include a book about intelligent design, Of Pandas and People, in the school library. The Discovery Institute applauds. Pro-science parents, most of them devout Christians, sue the school board. The Discovery Institute applauds. William Dembski gets ready to testify on behalf of intelligent design in a trial that puts evolutionary scientists on the stand, as he’s always dreamed of doing. The Discovery Institute applauds.

It comes out in the press that one of the school board members, Bill Buckingham, had made a statement at a public meeting: “Two thousands years ago, someone died on a cross. Can’t anybody stand up for him?” Oops – intelligent design is only supposed to be about science. In fact, the Designer could be anyone – space aliens, a time-traveling biologist, etc., not just God – and certainly not just the Christian God! Big tent, gotta appeal to people of various faiths, etc.

Oops.

Bill Buckingham goes on camera and advocates the teaching of “creationism” alongside evolution in schools. Oops. The Discovery Institute gets pissed off and sends out a press release correcting Bill Buckingham. William Dembski walks away from testifying in the Dover courtroom, leaving these freelance creationists in Dover with only one expert witness.

Oops.

Bill Buckingham gets on the stand and has to answer for why, instead of one or two copies of the scientifically discredited Of Pandas and People for the school library, dozens have been purchased, apparently for their inclusion in the science classroom despite all that the school board has promised. Bill Buckingham says he doesn’t know anything about it. Then he says that maybe he does, but didn’t handle the money. The judge gets pissed off and takes over the cross-examining himself. Bill Buckingham admits that he took up a collection in church to buy 80 copies of Of Pandas and People. Judge Jones III, himself a devout Christian and a Bush appointee to the bench, is royally pissed off now.

Yipes.

And as we all know, Kitzmiller v. Dover, Pennsylvania School District is now history, with Judge Jones issuing a (sorry) damning ruling against the defendants, and intelligent design is now extinct in Dover science classes, and the school board responsible for these shenanigans (costing the taxpayers in Dover, Pennsylvania one million dollars in damages) was voted off the board.

So you see, evolution doesn't happen by chance, whereas it sure seems that real-life conspiracies, themselves the opposite of random events, mushroom out of control. It's a hard lesson that the fellows at the Discovery Institute have yet to learn.

You can read the Dover trial transcripts at Talk Origins.

(Shimmies to JanieBell and Kate and Atheist Experience and Bay of Fundie.)

For He's a Fundy Good Fellow

The Discovery Institute, still stinging from its smackdown at PBS, has decided to bring on Michael Medved as a senior fellow. Yes, that Michael Medved.

SEATTLE — Michael Medved, nationally syndicated talk radio host and bestselling author, has joined the Discovery Institute in the role of senior fellow. The position cements a longstanding friendship and recognizes a commonality of values and projects across a spectrum of issues.

“Michael Medved is an intellectual entrepreneur, a political and cultural polymath with great insights, judgment and wit. We are delighted to have this new relationship with him,” said Discovery Institute president Bruce Chapman.

The DI's self-serving courting of the religious right is coupled with its ongoing, inexplicable denial of global warming, its utopianist praise of the Iraq war, and its dubious flirtation with HIV denialism. Even a regular commenter at Uncommon Descent objected to the inclusion of Medved:

I must admit, I find this news scary. This website already seems to have married itself to the global warming issue. If the discovery institute marries itself to Americanism, and to American conservativism, all reasonable issues, it will dilute the primary message of the institute. I ask that you please avoid having the Discovery Institute become the American Conservative Institute. If it does, I fear that the cause of Intelligent Design will suffer.

Another one quips:

I think ID needs more Christians, like BA77 and Denyse O’Leary, not Sasquatch believers.

Well, at least there's finally some debate along with all the bannings at Uncommon Descent!

(Shimmies to Pandas Thumb)

It's Not Just Me

If I get passionate (alright, that's understating it quite a bit) about the issues of science, science education, and ideology, Pat again explains succinctly why these concerns are so important. This is about the continuation of our republic as a secular, religiously neutral, civil government without religious tests or compulsion.

The problem with this particular response to fundamentalist attacks on evolution is that it fails to grasp the fact that creationism is just one facet of a larger movement. The Discovery Institute, which presents itself to the public as an intelligent design advocacy group, is just one of the black pieces on the fundamentalist chess board -- science and scientists but opposing pawns.

The broad fundamentalist movement of which Discovery is a part is financed by Christian Reconstructionist Howard Ahmanson. The network of far right politicians, think tanks, and advocacy groups Ahmanson finances, work actively, if mostly under the radar, to replace America’s secular democracy with a Christian theocracy. It’s a movement former New York Times correspondent Chris Hedges calls American fascism.

In many respects, Ahmanson’s Christian fundamentalism is a mirror image of the Islamic fundamentalism we saw at work in Afghanistan under the Taliban. Islamic fundamentalists fight to impose Sharia law. Their Christian fundamentalist counterparts demand imposition of Mosaic Law. Both dream of exacting the cruel justice of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.

This has been in the works for a long, long time. I saw this coming when I was still young and I thought it had ended in late 1980s with the demise of "creation science" and the increasingly faint calls for the death penalty for gays, "rebellious" women and children, etc.

While the aims of Christian Reconstructionists may seem fantastic, they are nevertheless firmly held by adherents who work diligently to achieve them. Ahmanson has invested many millions from his large personal fortune to put these ideas into action.

One of those aims is the destruction of the religious neutrality required by diverse, secular, democratic societies like those found in the United States and Western Europe. Scientists, whether or not they’re conscious of it, are utterly dependent on this framework of religious neutrality to do their work. Serious science is inconceivable under fundamentalism in either of its Islamic or Christian incarnations.

There is no religious neutrality, no neutral law, no neutral education, and no neutral civil government, says Gary North the son-in-law of Ahmanson’s friend and mentor the Dominionist theologian Rousas Rushdoony.

So the next time I hear someone say, "Well, I'm a Christian and I'm not a fundamentalist," I'm going to ask that person "Well, I'm not a mail-order bride broker or a pedophile, either. Does that mean we should do nothing about these people? Given what the fundamentalists are actually trying to do to all of us, when does 'not being a fundamentalist' become complicity?"

(And to everyone who's worried about my hurt heart, let me tell you, I'm simply more honest and demonstrative and don't give a shit who I shock than the believers burying their hurt hearts deep inside because they think their religion mandates that they have to be joyful all the time.)

Shimmies to RedStateRabble.

More Bullying from the Discovery Institute

No wonder creationism outrages me. I see what it does to people. I saw it growing up from people like Duane Gish, and Henry Morris, and Dr. Norman Geisler, who famously claimed at the Little Rock "Creation Science" trial that UFOs came from the devil. And I see it today - and I see people getting taken in by it today. The level of paranoia and verbal abuse from its adherents is just unbelievable. I didn't know what was happening when I was younger but I see things clearly now. This is a political movement, based not upon an alternate view of "science" but upon an alternate view of domination.

As I have demonstrated in my post below, which took a lot of courage to write (and the conclusion of which came as a surprise to me), creationists employ bullying tactics and hyperbolic language out of their own desperate search for a faith not yet found, rather than a desire to give the world a happiness that they already have. They are sad, frightened, and angry people who project their sense of "meaninglessness" and lack of purpose onto others, scientists and professionals who have no idea what the creationists are talking about. ("Meaninglessness?")

My evidence for this is the further behavior of the members of the Discovery Institute, who, after having repeatedly lost their case in the courtrooms and the school boards of this nation, now resort to the creation of imaginary enemies, "Darwinist storm troopers" and eugenicists right out of Nazi Germany, in order to scare Americans (already weary of hearing from the Bush Administration about terrorists around every corner) into fighting an army of ghouls that does not even exist!

This is beyond belief. As RedStateRabble reveals in a series of excellent posts, it is the Christian Dominionists of the Discovery Institute who hold racist and eugenicist ideas and who aren't even above finding justifications for slavery.

You know, when the Jewish Anti-Defamation League denounces your equation of Charles Darwin with the Holocaust, that doesn't exactly help your argument.

So, who are these supposed "Darwinian storm troopers"? The same bleeding-heart liberals who don't even own guns? The godless vegetarian lesbians who work as substance abuse counselors? The legions of, according to Ann Coulter, left-wing librarians with their Dewey Decimal classification? Peace activists? The Hindus and Buddhists who, having no religious objections to evolution, come to America to work in the sciences, since so few Americans bother to learn about the subject, let alone choose it as a career? The gays? The Latinos? The doctors and nurses who got thrown in jail for treating AIDS patients in Libya? The people who are trying to do something about global warming? The monsters under your bed?

Don't ask questions. That's not patriotic. Don't bother the Discovery Institute with facts. First order of business, panic! The Empire strikes back! The storm troopers are invading the Millennium Falcon, and Dawin Vader is among them! Run, run, run for your lives!

Light-sabre lift to RedStateRabble and After the Bar Closes.

Discovery Institute Silences Student Dissent

The Seattle-based Discovery Institute called the cops to stop some Southern Methodist University students from distributing flyers against intelligent design at the Darwin vs. Design conference (or, as they termed it, the "indoctrination seminar") on their own campus:

We began handing out fliers and were receiving mixed reviews - until a tall, lanky, and toothy man jittered his way over to us and demanded to know who was handing out these fliers. We all took responsibility, and he began ripping the flyers out of our hands, saying that we could not distribute anything of the sort. I told him we paid to go to school here and that we were students who could walk anywhere on our campus, and that it just so happened that we walked into McFarlin, and it also just so happened that we had fliers to distribute.

He didn't take too kindly to that, and in two minutes' time, we had two police officers who all of a sudden had a real job to do watching us instead of sleeping the night away in the back. I'm sure if we had been distributing thank-you notes expressing our gratitude for the institute coming to our campus, he would've given us a warmer reception.

So much for wanting to "teach the controversy." But, obligingly from one of the Discovery Institute members himself, no one at the DI believes there's a controversy, either.

The night was wrapped up when, somehow, one of our flyers made it to the front of the stage, where the journalist asked the other men on stage about the quote regarding the institute's true purpose (see first quote mentioned above) being that it wants to replace modern science with "a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions."

To my shock, one of the men on stage said, "Yes that's true, and I don't see anything scandalous about that."

Nothing scandalous about trying to replace science with Christianity? Nothing scandalous about the fact that religion keeps being brought up during what is supposed to be a scientific conference? Clearly, the institute's dictionary must define the word "scandalous" differently from the dictionaries we own, because it sure appears to be pretty scandalous. And that sums up the night in question, after it ended with us being escorted out by the police.

Here's a link to another DI attempt to squash dissent, this time at the premier of the film Icons of Evolution.

After 45 minutes of quietly handing out flyers downstairs where people are entering for the presentation, Mr. Bruce Chapman [founder of DI] arrives. [Note: this is the Bruce Chapman that I mention in the column at left. - Kristine]

He is handed the flyers and is livid. He talks to himself saying, "This isn't science" and walks up the stairs. He then comes back down after going halfway up the stairs and says to Carl and Ken that he hopes they will be in attendance as he is going to talk about them.

5 minutes later, two campus security officers arrive and tell them that the folks upstairs putting on the presentation want us removed from the property. They are specifically told that they cannot hand out the flyers on school property but instead could do it out on the public sidewalk about 100 feet away. (The security folks were good-natured about it.) They left the flyers on a table across the hallway and went upstairs. Approximately125-150 flyers were handed out.

The next time you hear Discovery Institute members whining about not having freedom of speech, just remember that their idea of "speech" is to fillibuster the entire cosmos.

Shimmies as always to RedStateRabble and to David Leaf in the comments.

UPDATED: SMU posts a response.

The Other "Wedgie"

My friend and fellow activist Ken Avidor has a post up about that other Discovery Institute boondoggle by those pod people, "intelligent transportation."

(Shimmies to Ken in all his aspects)