Saturday 26 March 2022
Darwinism and the rise of the expertocracy.
Darwinism and Scientific Totalitarianism: John West’s Darwin Day in America
I have been reviewing Darwin Day in America: How Politics and Culture Have Been Dehumanized in the Name of Science, by Discovery Institute Vice President John West. See my post from yesterday, “Darwinism and the ‘So What?’ Question.”
In the following section of the book, Dr. West considers a subject near and dear to me as a surgical oncologist, and that is life and death. He covers abortion and pre-birth issues, but also euthanasia, various forms of assisted suicide, and every moment in between birth and death. In my work, I was surrounded by the possibility of death on a daily basis. In an ethical context, the prolongation of the dying process can be as evil as its acceleration. As a physician, I found it easy to identify those colleagues who had a low view of human life, with their callous disregard for the patient as a person. In the academic setting, the unnecessary prolongation of life in order to support the effectiveness of an experimental treatment plan, or perhaps in order to improve hospital statistics, or to increase federal reimbursements, was the norm and not the exception.
The Beginning of Life
It seems bewildering that there would be perplexity as to when human life begins. No one is uncertain about that in the breeding of a racehorse or in the gestation of an embryo belonging to an endangered species. So, what’s different about the human embryo? What is so difficult about recognizing the beginning of a human life, such that the pundits of this age have excused the slaughter of the unborn, and even of the born, as Dr. West documents? There is trouble only when an ideological fog inhibits the cerebral function of the Darwinist. If humans really are nothing more than the product of chance events in the primordial slime, then perhaps it doesn’t matter how we treat each other.
It’s odd that so many Darwinists demean humanity even as they aver that humans represent the pinnacle of evolution, given the “evolution” of speech, superior intelligence, ingenuity, and creativity. In a “nature rights” perspective, these are all to be trashed in order to spare the lower forms of evolution, whether animals or plants. Stranger is the fact that only humans are sentient and able to appreciate the lower forms of beings on our planet. Beauty does not exist in the mind of an endangered yellow-legged frog as he glances at a flower-covered meadow, or foliose lichen growing on the side of a tree that overlooks a majestic mountain scene.
The Law of the Jungle
The chapter on death is a difficult and troubling one. West presents and discusses the Shiavo and Cruzan cases. These are two exceptional cases, both of which were mismanaged (in my estimation), and neither of which should set a precedent for medical ethics. The main point that West tries to drive home is that the personal worth of the individuals, Shiavo and Cruzan, was devalued by those who thought that the termination of life was the most viable option for their care. Does this mean that virtually every effort must be extended in order to prolong life? I mentioned above that the prolongation of death can be as immoral as the prolongation of life. In addition, the patient’s quality of life becomes a confounding issue that muddies any discussion. Respect for life remains of utmost importance. However, in a world where the survival of the fittest selects out who shall live, the law of the jungle (West’s term) prevails. Financial, social, personal, and other concerns are judged to be more important than the life of the patient.
The Rise of Totalitarian Science
In his conclusion, West offers a succinct and well-written summary of his thesis, including a defense of the theory of intelligent design. It would have been the best chapter in his book had he not added a later addendum.
The afterword, on “Totalitarian Science,” published in 2015, shows John West as a prophet of things to come. We now see “science” wielded in defense of any sort of nonsense and untruth imaginable. In my years as a doctoral student in the cell biology laboratory, I heard many lectures on integrity in research. This was because the notable academies of science were finding evidence of a troubling trend toward fraud.
This was in the 1980s, and the situation is much worse today. It’s a perfect example of Darwinism in the performance of science. The publish or perish mentality among academics is simply another form of survival of the “fittest.” Before the Enlightenment, theology was known as the Queen of the Sciences. Rather than being in competition with science, theology was understood as the foundation for all science. Indeed, science did quite well as long as there was understood to be a theological basis for it. With theology stripped from its place at that foundation, we must not be surprised that the house of science is crumbling around us.
West wrote this afterword before the Covid crisis, in which the name of “science” has been tossed about as a support for any sort of government oppression. Meanwhile, the mega-media complex aggressively strips the population of free speech, all in the cause of defending the edicts of those who call themselves scientists. West was able to see all of this coming a few years before it happened. Yet prophets most often go without honor, and I don’t expect West to get the acclaim that he deserves. If he did, his book would be on the New York Times bestseller list.
Darwinism where the rubber meets the road.
Darwinism and the “So What?” Question: John West’s Darwin Day in America
Many books have been written about scientific problems with the theory of evolution. Neo-Darwinism, as the leading construct of evolutionary theory, has its fierce supporters as well as its opponents. Few topics have the capability of generating heated conversations and of turning friends into foes. Few people, though, ever ask the “So what?” question. How does Darwinist thinking affect the man on the street? Or is Darwinism simply a neutral scientific doctrine? How does Darwinism influence what we do once you or I wake up in the morning?
At first glance, it might seem that whether we believe in evolution as a purely material, unguided process should make no difference to values or morality. Yet, in his 2007 book Darwin Day in America: How Politics and Culture Have Been Dehumanized in the Name of Science, Discovery Institute’s John West looks at the question more deeply and shows otherwise. In a nearly encyclopedic manner, he documents the numerous impacts Darwinism has had in the public square. It has had a distinctively destructive effect on our society. Dr. West provides a plethora of examples in each chapter of how Darwinism has changed the courts, the schools, the medical establishment, the conduct of the scientific community, and, indeed, the man on the street.
A War of Worldviews
As the book shows, Darwinism is a Weltanschauung at war with the Judeo-Christian theistic system on which Western civilization and scientific inquiry are based. Many of Dr. West’s examples were unknown to me, and will be news to many other readers. In a skillful and scholarly fashion, he unearths the contest between faith and “science,” while providing references for any claims that he makes. The book is divided into sections, with each oriented around a specific theme. I’ll be as brief as possible in this two-part review.
I took a psychology class in college and wrote a book review and rebuttal to B. F. Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and Dignity. I got an “A” on that paper, and still have it in my files. This was back in the day when colleges (I attended the hyper-liberal Portland State University) still had free speech. Looking back on this paper recently, I noted that I had used what John West calls the “nothing buttery” argument, and could not remember where I picked up that phrase since I did not provide references in my paper. It was thus with great surprise that I noted the title of the first chapter of Darwin Day in America, “Nothing Buttery.” Thankfully, Dr. West referenced the book that is the source of the phrase, a book I had first read between high school and college. It is A Clockwork Image: A Christian Perspective on Science, by Donald MacKay.
Nothing buttery is when a “scientist” makes the preposterous (and impossible to prove) claim that the world is “nothing but” what we can detect and observe through science. Truly, it is science-of-the-gaps thinking which forces a pseudo-scientific explanation on the entirety of the world. So much of what we see and know is unprovable and so much more is simply unknowable, yet advocates of nothing buttery use science to fill in the gaps in our knowledge. Out of this nothing-buttery scientific materialism, there emerged the Darwinist Weltanschauung that is currently deconstructing our society. West, in a subsequent chapter, gives a brief and instructive summary of the rise of Darwinism as a picture of reality.
Crime and Punishment
In the next section of the book, he addresses the themes of crime and punishment. When Dostoevsky wrote his masterpiece Crime and Punishment, there was still a Christian Weltanschauung, and the novelist knew that his readership would comprehend the sense of guilt after committing murder. If written today, his book probably would not pass muster with critics, though Woody Allen’s 1989 film Crimes and Misdemeanors could still play on the residual Judeo-Christian worldview of 30-plus years ago. Through a number of examples, West shows how the Darwinian mindset removes responsibility for crime, or turns the criminal into nothing more than a victim of mental illness. Rather than punishment or restitution, rehabilitation becomes the recommended treatment. “Science” is claimed as the guiding beacon for the new management of criminal offenses. However, it strains the imagination to see how injustice and recidivism reflect a scientific approach.
On our journey through the dismal night of Darwinian conceptions, West turns next to wealth and poverty. This section covers big finance, eugenics (and though only indirectly mentioned, critical race theory), utopianism, advertising, architecture, and more. All have been heavily influence by a materialistic worldview deriving from Darwinism. West offers multiple examples, and I believe that he succeeds in his argument.
As Leaky as a Colander
The section on how Darwinism has affected education is fascinating. The establishment does NOT want you to know how campus free speech has been stifled, and this is especially true in the context of teaching students, or not teaching them, about the controversy that still exists about Darwinian theory. Though it is a theory as leaky as a colander, educators feel that to admit problems with the theory would be troubling to young people, who might then even dare consider intelligent design as an alternative. How horrid that would be! On the other hand, sex education and the new thinking on sex, including any sexual deviancy under the sun, is permissible, should we be in reality functional blobs generated by a few accidents in the primordial slime.
Next, “Darwinism and Scientific Totalitarianism.”
OOL science makes another sale?
Yale’s Steven Novella Falls for Origin-of-Life Hype
Earlier this week, I described how the University of Tokyo greatly overstated the research results of a team of their origin-of-life scientists. The exaggerated claims have been spreading across the Internet. For example, Yale neurologist Steven Novella repeated the same misinformation:
Researchers at the University of Tokyo published a study in Nature Communications in which they establish that an RNA system can spontaneously evolve complexity. …This RNA network had the critical components of evolutions — able to generate new information, greater complexity, and new variation. Further there was a differential survival of those molecules better able to function in the network in order to self-replicate. This is, in short, evolution. Give it a few billion years and you might have something interesting.
Promoting the Secular Creation Narrative
Novella is a prominent atheist who jumped at the chance to promote the secular creation narrative of life’s origin. In his blog post, he even included a figure from an article published in the journal Cell depicting the RNA world hypothesis. The diagram includes a long RNA chain folded into an enzyme-like structure (aka ribozyme) that can perform biologically relevant functions such as replicating RNA templates. The diagram depicts the journey of the ribozyme and neighboring peptides into modern cellular machinery.
However, Novella’s depiction of the experiment is completely inaccurate. The RNAs did not fold into ribozymes that replicated other RNAs or directly performed any other function. Instead, the investigators supplied all the cellular machinery to manufacture proteins. They also supplied the “host” RNA that encoded the information to generate proteins that replicated RNA templates. The “translation-coupled RNA replication (TcRR) system” did not generate anything truly novel or grow in biologically relevant complexity. The RNAs solely acquired mutations that altered the translated replicase’s efficiency and accuracy.
Predicting the Future
Novella suggests that the system could over billions of years produce “something interesting.” But one does not need to guess its fate if it were transported back in time to the early earth. The researchers in a 2013 Nature Communications article describe exactly where the system heads if left on its own:
Translation coupling increases the complexity of the replication scheme; therefore, the TcRR system becomes vulnerable to selfish or parasitic RNAs, which are continuously generated from genomic RNA by the deletion of the internal replicase-encoding region, while retaining the terminal region for replicase recognition. These small RNAs are selfish and parasitic in that they do not produce replicase but replicate rapidly because of their small size (typically 222 nucleotides), utilizing the already existing replicase, until genome replication is competitively inhibited (parasitic RNA replication in Fig. 1a).
The purported increase in complexity corresponds to the production of nonfunctional RNAs that provide no benefit to a developing cell. Instead, they eventually shut down host RNA replication. The researchers could only sustain replication by separating the host and parasitic RNAs into their own microscale compartments. The isolation required a highly sophisticated experimental protocol that would have had no parallel on the early earth. In an ancient environment, any RNA replication system would have quickly crashed, and the RNA and proteins would have irreversibly degraded into simpler molecules (here, here).
The Deep Irony
The irony of Novella’s pollyannish description of the research is that he is a host of The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe podcast. He described the purpose of the podcast as follows:
…we challenge the audience to pick out the fake science news item from the real science news item. …But we deal with the paranormal or conspiracy theories, or health fraud, consumer protection type of issues. And our goal is to give our listeners the tools to look at science in the news, science in society and have some way of navigating through all of the claims and all of the hype and basically have the tools to figure things out for themselves more than anything else.
If Novella had consistently applied his hype-detection tools to the press release from the University of Tokyo, he would have described the research in dramatically different terms.
True disciples of the true Christ and war.
1John3-11,12KJV"For this is the message that ye heard from the beginning, that we should love one another. 12Not as Cain, who was of that wicked one, and slew his brother. And wherefore slew he him? Because his own works were evil, and his brother's righteous."
The Lord JEHOVAH is not accepting any excuses for violating this clear prohibition including(but not limited to) "I was just following orders"
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