The deprivileging of man continues apace?

The Law Society in UK Endorses “Nature Rights” 

Wesley J. Smith 

The nature-rights movement continues to move from the fringe into decidedly establishment circles, with virtually no push back and a foolish, “It will never happen here,” shrugging of the collective shoulders. Now, the UK’s Law Society — the organization that represents solicitors, roughly equivalent to the ABA — has issued a report calling for the establishment of nature and non-human rights.

First, the report clearly attacks human exceptionalism — the backbone of Western liberty — and criticizes what it calls (can you believe it?) the “binary of the species hierarchy.” Yes, transgender ideology and other critical theories have entered the environmentalist sphere. (Notice the woke gibberishy writing style.) From, “Law in the Emerging Bio-Age“:

Some argue that in the current system human rights are not properly protected or balanced. If taxonomies like the species hierarchy are important in allocating rights, then we need to think about how bio body hackers who make extreme physical changes, biorobots, human-animal chimerae, and autonomous robots will be treated.

We already see that transgender people and people with different characteristics are ‘othered’ and the effect of negative societal responses to body changes clearly links to the ‘cute or repulsive’ binary of the species hierarchy. 

Just Another Species 

In other words, we should redefine our self-understanding as being just another species in the forest.

Never mind that only humans have moral obligations and can be called to account for failing to meet our responsibilities. Nature rights will cure the injustice of human exceptionalism (my emphasis): 

Rights for nonhumans communicates our dependence on and a greater role for nature in decision-making. 

Stop the quote! “Nature” and/or animals wouldn’t have a “greater role in decision-making.” Radical environmentalist or animal-rights ideologues would. Back to the quote: 

The process and execution of a nonhuman rights-based framework in international and local law may differ radically from a human rights-based approach. For example, if rights were granted to nonhumans or living systems, then questions of liability for damage to the environment, such as climate change or biodiversity loss, arise 

A Cornucopia for Lawyers 

In other words, granting rights to non-humans would be a cornucopia for lawyers since these laws allow anyone to bring lawsuits to enforce nature’s purported rights, which the Law Society well understands:

If rights were granted to nonhumans or living systems, then questions of liability for damage to the environment, such as climate change or biodiversity loss, arise in relation to the causal link between the damage and the person/entity causing it; attribution of liability; calculation of damages and so on. 

Lawsuits without end! (Oh joy, rapture!) Not to mention transactional legal and lobbying opportunities for the horde of lawyers pursing the rights of nature and non-humans: 

Beyond litigation against responsible parties, other concerns to consider are investor pressure, public procurement rules, financial, institution decisions, and reputation-focused campaigns by civil society 

The report also targets biotechnology and other areas of innovation for assault by nature-rights extremists. Its scope and breadth would severely limit cutting-edge science and industrial development.

When a venerable law society embraces non-human rights, it is time to pay attention. If people and lawmakers don’t take this threat to our collective economic well-being and personal freedom seriously, within a few years, we will be seeing serious public-policy impacts from this radical agenda throughout the West. 

What Would China Do? 

In this regard, let me ask a serious question: Is there any chance China would grant “rights” to nature when they have no regard for those of humans? The very notion is ludicrous. If this trend continues, we will be unilaterally snuffing our economies as China’s grows. To say the least, that would not bode well for the great civilizational contest developing between Western democracies and the evil tyrants of Beijing. 

 

Game over? Really? IV

 Theory in Crisis? Circling the Wagons 

Jonathan Wells 

Editor’s note: We are a delighted to present a series by biologist Jonathan Wells asking, “Is Darwinism a Theory in Crisis?” This is the fourth post in the series, which is adapted from the recent book, The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith. Find the full series here. 

Philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn compared scientific revolutions to political revolutions. Like a political revolution, a scientific revolution typically divides people “into competing camps or parties, one seeking to defend the old institutional constellation, the others seeking to institute some new ones.”1 The camp defending the old paradigm uses every means at its disposal, including all of its professional societies and publications, to resist the challenger. Since the mid 20th century, established paradigms have also controlled enormous funding from foundations and taxpayers, and thus jobs in educational and research institutions. With careers at stake, things can get ugly. 

And Things Have Gotten Ugly 

In the late 1990s, in Burlington, Washington, high school biology teacher Roger DeHart taught evolution as required. But he also shared with his students a few articles from mainstream science publications that questioned some aspects of neo-Darwinian theory. Militant Darwinists intimidated the local school board with threats of a lawsuit, so DeHart was reassigned to another subject and his biology class was turned over to a physical education instructor. In 2002, DeHart left his career as a public high school teacher and eventually moved with his wife and children to another country.2

In 2003, Dr. Nancy Bryson was head of the Division of Science and Mathematics at the Mississippi University for Women. After she presented an honors forum titled “Critical Thinking on Evolution,” a senior biology professor read to the audience a previously prepared statement calling her presentation “religion masquerading as science” and accusing her of being unqualified to talk about evolution. The next day, Dr. Bryson was informed that her contract as division head would not be renewed. She subsequently had to find work elsewhere.3

In 2004, biologist Caroline Crocker was a visiting professor at George Mason University. While covering a required section on evolution, she gave one lecture on evidentiary problems with Darwin’s theory and briefly mentioned the controversy over intelligent design. At the end of the lecture, she told students to “think about it for yourself.” For this reason, Crocker’s contract was not renewed.4 

OK, Then Don’t Think About It for Yourself 

In 2005, biology teacher Bryan Leonard was about to get his PhD in science education from Ohio State University. His dissertation, which was a quantitative study about how a group of students reacted to the critical analysis of evolution, had already been approved by his committee. At the last minute, however, three pro-Darwin professors (who admitted they had not read Leonard’s dissertation) lodged a complaint against him. The complaint alleged that he had engaged in unethical behavior by implying to students that there were weaknesses in neo-Darwinism. As a result, the university blocked Leonard’s PhD.5

David Coppedge began working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California in 1996. For nine years he served as the team lead system administrator for the ambitious Cassini mission to Saturn. Then he was reprimanded and demoted for privately giving DVDs about intelligent design to co-workers who requested them. In 2011, he was let go.6

Internationally renowned paleontologist Günter Bechly directed the 2009 Darwin Day exhibit at State Museum of Natural History in Stuttgart, Germany. The exhibit was strongly pro-Darwin, but it included a critique of intelligent design that featured some books by intelligent design advocates. After reading some of the pro-ID books, Bechly concluded that Darwinists had been misrepresenting intelligent design. He gradually changed his views and publicly declared his support for ID in 2015. After that, Bechly reported, the museum told him he was “no longer welcome, and that it would be appreciated if I would decide to quit.” He was eventually forced to resign.7 

Controlled by the Paradigm 

As Kuhn pointed out, mainstream scientific journals (like scientific societies) are also largely controlled by the dominant paradigm. For this reason, articles about intelligent design, or even articles on other subjects that have been written by known advocates of intelligent design, have rarely been published in mainstream journals.

Some years ago, I submitted an article on cell biology to a prominent scientific journal. The article did not mention intelligent design. After I made some recommended changes, my article passed peer review, and the editor emailed to tell me he wanted to publish it. He had just one final question: Was I “the Jonathan Wells of intelligent design fame?” (His words exactly.) I answered that I was. Afterward he sent the article to yet another reader, whose “review” didn’t really deal with its contents but sounded like an angry rant from a pro-Darwin blog. The editor then informed me he had decided not to publish my article.8

In this same scientific journal in 2020, biochemist Dave Speijer justified the prejudice against intelligent design. He recommended that Internet searches hosted by tech giants explicitly discriminate against intelligent design; if the tech giants resist, the government should “make them,” he wrote. In particular, Speijer recommended “mandatory color-coded banners warning of consistent factual errors or unscientific content, masquerading as science.”9 

Notes 

1)Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2d ed., 93.

2)Jonathan Wells, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2006), 143-144.

3)Jim Brown and Ed Vitagliano, “Professor Dumped over Evolution Beliefs,” Agape Press (March 11, 2003). http://www.arn.org/docs2/news/professordumped031203.htm (accessed August 22, 2020).

4)Wells, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism, 190-191.

5)"Outside Professors Derail Dissertation,” Free Science, https://freescience.today/story/bryan-leonard/ (accessed August 22, 2020).

6)"Demoted, Terminated,” Free Science, https://freescience.today/story/david-coppedge/ (accessed August 22, 2020).

7)"Marginalized, Shown the Door,” Free Science, https://freescience.today/story/gunter-bechly/ (accessed August 22, 2020).

8)Michael Egnor, “What Scientists Know,” Evolution News and Science Today (May 28, 2020). https://evolutionnews.org/2020/05/what-scientists-know/ (accessed August 22, 2020).

9)David Speijer, “Bad Faith Reasoning, Predictable Chaos, and the Truth,” BioEssays 42 (June 2020), 2000040

Darwinism and behavior another pressure point in the design debate.

 Birds Have a Remarkable Gift for Deceit 

Denyse O'Leary 

When Clinton Francis, a specialist in bird behavior, challenged student Wren Thompson to find out how many types of birds use deceit in their defences against predators of their nests, he hardly expected to find that the number she was able to discover was 285:

Mapping those behaviors onto the avian phylogenetic tree revealed that the trait spans from some of the most basal bird families, including pheasants and ducks, to more recently evolved taxa such as songbirds. “It’s pretty amazing,” Francis says, adding that he was surprised how “particular clades on the avian tree of life really just light up,” including blackbirds, warblers, and sparrows. The frequent and disjointed appearance of the behavior across the tree suggests it evolved independently several times, he adds.

ANDY CARSTENS, “AVIAN DECEPTION MORE WIDESPREAD THAN PREVIOUSLY THOUGHT” AT THE SCIENTIST (OCTOBER 3, 2022); THE PAPER IS OPEN ACCESS. 

Thinking About the Killdeer 

The bird that set them thinking was the killdeer, which pretends to be injured in order to distract a predator’s attention from the young in its ground nest: 

With humans, it has the opposite of its intended effect. Wise to the trick, we begin looking around, just out of interest, to see if we can spot the nest. But it apparently works well enough with the killdeer’s usual targets. 

To Deceive a Fellow Bird 

Birds have subtle ways of deceiving other birds as well: 

Filipe Cunha, a behavioral ecologist at Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands, happened upon a particularly unusual case of avian deception while studying Siberian jays (Perisoreus infaustus). “They’re definitely liars,” he says, explaining how the territorial birds fake an alarm call that’s typically reserved for alerting group members to the presence of predators such as sparrowhawks. Cunha determined that the jays deceive neighboring groups of Siberian jays to scare them into fleeing, after which the liars steal caches of scavenged meat that the tricked birds had hidden to survive the Arctic winter. He says that he hopes studying within-species dishonesty will shed light on how trust evolved in our own species.

ANDY CARSTENS, “AVIAN DECEPTION MORE WIDESPREAD THAN PREVIOUSLY THOUGHT” AT THE SCIENTIST (OCTOBER 3, 2022) THE PAPER IS OPEN ACCESS. 

It seems a bit ambitious to hope that the study of bird deception will show us how trust evolved in humans, considering that it’s not even clear how the birds learn to deceive. They must develop these tricks without applying abstract reasoning to the problems. That is, the killdeer wants to protect her nest but she is hardly a strategist planning a campaign. How then is the trait learned?

For that matter, how exactly did the jays learn to fake an alarm call — and then, like the killdeer, pass the trait on to their offspring as a neurological inheritance? There is much here we are in no position to understand at present.

Read the rest at Mind Matters News, published by Discovery Institute’s Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence.