More Rudyard Kipling style Just so stories from Darwinist.

 How Did Birds Get Their Wings? Bacteria May Provide a Clue to the Genomic Basis of Evolutionary Innovation, Say Evolutionists

Cornelius G Hunter 

That evolution occurred is known to be a fact but how evolution occurred is not known. In particular we are ignorant of how evolutionary innovations arose. Of course biological novelties and innovations arose from a series of random chance events, but it is less than reassuring that we cannot provide more detail. How exactly did the most complex designs spontaneously arise? What mechanisms overcame, over and over, the astronomical entropy barriers, by sheer luck of the draw? As Craig MacLean’s and Andreas Wagner’s, and coworker’s, new PLOS Genetics paper begins, “Novel traits play a key role in evolution, but their origins remain poorly understood.” Could it be that evolution is not actually a fact? No, not according to evolutionists. And this new paper claims to provide the basis for how the seemingly impossible became the mundane.

The paper begins by summarizing the many proposed genetic mechanisms for the evolution of biological innovations:

An evolutionary innovation is a new trait that allows organisms to exploit new ecological opportunities. Some popular examples of innovations include flight, flowers or tetrapod limbs [1,2]. Innovation has been proposed to arise through a wide variety of genetic mechanisms, including: domain shuffling [3], changes in regulation of gene expression [4], gene duplication and subsequent neofunctionalization [5,6], horizontal gene transfer [7,8] or gene fusion [9]. Although innovation is usually phenotypically conspicuous, the underlying genetic basis of innovation is often difficult to discern, because the genetic signature of evolutionary innovation erodes as populations and species diverge through time.

1. Mayr E. Animal Species and Evolution. Cambridge: MA: Harvard University Press; 1963.

2. Pigliucci M. What, if anything, is an evolutionary novelty? Philos Sci. 2008;75: 887–898. Available:http://philpapers.org/rec/PIGWIA

3. Patthy L. Genome evolution and the evolution of exon-shuffling—a review. Gene. 1999;238: 103–14. Available: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10570989 pmid:10570989

4. True JR, Carroll SB. Gene co-option in physiological and morphological evolution. Annu Rev Cell Dev Biol. 2002;18: 53–80. doi: 10.1146/annurev.cellbio.18.020402.140619. pmid:12142278

5. Zhang J. Evolution by gene duplication: An update. Trends Ecol Evol. 2003;18: 292–298. doi: 10.1016/S0169-5347(03)00033-8.

6. Bergthorsson U, Andersson DI, Roth JR. Ohno’s dilemma: evolution of new genes under continuous selection. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2007;104: 17004–9. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0707158104. pmid:17942681

7. Boucher Y, Douady CJ, Papke RT, Walsh DA, Boudreau MER, Nesbø CL, et al. Lateral gene transfer and the origins of prokaryotic groups. Annu Rev Genet. 2003;37: 283–328. doi: 10.1146/annurev.genet.37.050503.084247. pmid:14616063

8. Wiedenbeck J, Cohan FM. Origins of bacterial diversity through horizontal genetic transfer and adaptation to new ecological niches. FEMS Microbiol Rev. 2011;35: 957–976. doi: 10.1111/j.1574-6976.2011.00292.x. pmid:21711367

9. Thomson TM, Lozano JJ, Loukili N, Carrió R, Serras F, Cormand B, et al. Fusion of the human gene for the polyubiquitination coeffector UEV1 with Kua, a newly identified gene. Genome Res. 2000;10: 1743–56. pmid:11076860 doi: 10.1101/gr.gr-1405r 

The unspoken problem here is, as usual, serendipity. The various proposed genetic mechanisms for the evolution of biological innovations all suggest an amazing bit of fortuitous luck. For random chance events just happened to create these various complicated structures and mechanisms (such as horizontal gene transfer and protein domains their shuffling) which then produced new evolutionary breakthroughs.

Evolution didn’t know what was coming. Evolution did not plan this out, it did not realize that horizontal gene transfer would lead the way to new biological worlds. The evolution of horizontal gene transfer would require a long sequence of random mutations, many of which would not provide any fitness advantage. And when the construction project was completed, and the first horizontal gene transfer capability was possible, there would be no immediate advantage.

This is because there would have been no genes to transfer. The mechanism works only when it is present in more than one, neighboring, cells. One cell gives, and another cells receives. By definition the mechanism involves multiple cells.

But it doesn’t stop there. Even if the first horizontal gene transfer capability was able to spread across a population, and even if it did provide a fitness advantage to the fortunate citizens, there would not be even a hint of the enormous world of biological innovations that had just been opened.

In other words, what this evolutionary narrative entails is monumental serendipity. Biological structures and mechanisms (horizontal gene transfer in this case, but it is the same story with the other hypotheses listed above) are supposed to have evolved as a consequence of a local, proximate, fitness advantage: a bacteria could now have a gene it didn’t have before.

But it just so happened that the new structures and mechanisms would also, as a free bonus, be just what was needed to produce all manner of biological innovations, far beyond assisting a lowly bacteria increase its fecundity.

This is monumental serendipity.

Undaunted, the new paper finds that one of the other mechanisms, gene duplication and subsequent neofunctionalization, is a key enabler and pathway to biological innovations.

That conclusion resulted from what otherwise was a fine piece of research work. The experimenters exposed different populations of Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a dangerous infectious bacteria, to 95 new sources of its favorite food: carbon.

The bacteria had to adjust to the new flavors of carbon and they did so with various genetic modifications, including various genetic mutations. In the most challenging cases (where the new carbon sources were most difficult for the bacteria to adjust to), the bacteria often produced mutations in genes involved in transcription and metabolism. And these mutations often occurred in genes where there were multiple copies, so the mutations occurred in one copy while the other copy could continue in its normal duties.

The problem is, these genetic duplicates were preexisting in the P. aeruginosa genome. This is yet another instance of serendipity.

Why? Because preexisting duplicates are not common. Only about 10% of the genes have duplicates lying around, and fortunately, the genes needed for adaptation (involving transcription and metabolism) just happened to have such duplicates.

Now there were a few instances of de novo gene duplication. That is, once the experiment began, and after the P. aeruginosa populations were exposed to the challenging diets, a total of six genes underwent duplication events. But in each and every case, the duplication events occurred repeatedly and independently, in different populations (for each of the 95 different carbon sources, the experimenters ran four parallel trials with independent populations).

This result indicates directed gene duplication. This is because it is highly unlikely that random, chance, gene duplication events just happened hit on the same gene in different populations. Here is an example calculation.

Let’s assume that in the course of the experiment, which ran for 30 days and about 140 generations of P. aeruginosa, some genes may undergo duplication events by chance. Next assume there is a particular gene that needs to be duplicated and modified in order to for P. aeruginosa to adapt to the new food source. (Note that there may be several such genes, but as we shall see that will not affect the conclusion). Given that there are four separate, independent trials, what is the probability that the gene will be duplicated in two or more of those trials?

Let P_dup be the probability that any gene is duplicated in the course of the experiment. For our gene of interest, it may be duplicated in 0, 1, 2, 3, or all 4 of the trials. The binomial distribution describes the probability, P, of each of these outcomes. To answer our question (i.e., What is the probability that the gene will be duplicated in two or more of those trials?) we sum the binomial distribution’s value for N = 2, 3 and 4. In other words, we calculate P(2) + P(3) + P(4).

This will give us the probability of observing what was observed in the experiment (i.e., the duplication events occurred repeatedly and independently, in different populations, in all 6 cases where duplication events were observed).

Well for a reasonable value of P_dup, the probability that any gene is duplicated in the course of the experiment, such as 0.0001, the probability of observing multiple duplications events for any given food source (i.e., P(2) + P(3) + P(4)) is about 60 in one billion, or 6 times 10^-8. Even worse, the probability of observing this in all 6 cases where duplication events were observed is about 5 times 10^-44.

It isn’t going to happen.

Exceptionally high rates of gene duplication, in particular genomic regions of Salmonella typhimurium, in a high growth rate medium, were observed to be about 0.001 and even slightly above 0.01 in rare cases.

If we go all out and set P_dup to an unrealistically high 0.1, our results are still unlikely. The P(2) + P(3) + P(4)) is .05, and the probability of observing this in all 6 cases where duplication events were observed is about 2 times 10^-8.

In order to raise these probabilities to reasonable levels, such that what was observed in the experiment is actually likely to have occurred, we need to raise P_dup to much higher values. For example, for a P_dup of .67 (two-thirds probability), P(2) + P(3) + P(4)) is .89, and the probability of observing this in all 6 cases where duplication events were observed is about .5.

But even this doesn’t work. For if we were to imagine unrealistically high P_dup values of 0.1 or higher, then massive numbers of duplication events would have been observed in the experiments.

But they weren’t.

Once again, the science contradicts the theory. Our a priori assumption that evolution is a fact, and that the P. aeruginosa adaptations to the new food sources were driven by random mutations, did not work. The theory led to astronomically low probabilities of the observed results.

What the observed gene duplications are consistent with is directed gene duplications. Just as mutations have been found to be directed in cases of environmental challenges, it appears that gene duplications may also be directed.

The paper’s premise, that biological innovations such as flowers and wings are analogous to bacteria adapting to new nutrient sources, is fallacious. But setting that aside, the experimental results do not make sense on evolution’s mechanism of random mutations and natural selection. Instead, the results indicate directed adaptation.

Isaiah chapter 44 Legacy Standard Bible

 

Isaiah 44

“But now hear, O Jacob, My servant,

And Israel, whom I have chosen:

2 

Thus says Yahweh who made you

And formed you from the womb, who will help you,

‘Do not fear, O Jacob My servant,

And you Jeshurun whom I have chosen.

3 

For I will pour out water on the thirsty ground

And streams on the dry land;

I will pour out My Spirit on your seed

And My blessing on your offspring;

4 

And they will spring up among the grass

Like poplars by streams of water.’

5 

This one will say, ‘I am Yahweh’s’;

And this one will call on the name of Jacob;

And this one will write on his hand, ‘Belonging to Yahweh,’

And will name Israel’s name with honor.

6 

“Thus says Yahweh, the King of Israel and his Redeemer, Yahweh of hosts:

‘I am the first, and I am the last,

And there is no God besides Me.

7 

Who is like Me? Let him call out and declare it;

And let him tell it to Me in order,

From the time that I established the ancient people.

And let them declare to them the things that are to come

And the events that are going to take place.

8 

Do not be in dread and do not be afraid;

Have I not long since caused it to be heard to you and declared it?

And you are My witnesses.

Is there any God besides Me,

Or is there any other Rock?

I know of none.’”

9 

Those who form a graven image are all of them futile, and their desirable things are of no profit; even their own witnesses fail to see or know, so that they will be put to shame.

10 

Who has formed a god or cast a graven image to no profit?

11 

Behold, all his companions will be put to shame. The craftsmen themselves are mere men. Let them all assemble themselves, let them stand up, let them be in dread, let them together be put to shame.

12 

The man crafts iron into a cutting tool and does his work over the coals, forming it with hammers and working it with his powerful arm. He also gets hungry and has no power; he drinks no water and becomes weary.

13 

Another crafts wood, he extends a measuring line; he outlines it with a stylus. He makes it with planes and outlines it with a compass and makes it like the form of a man, like the glory of man, so that it may sit in a house.

14 

In order to cut cedars for himself, he takes a cypress or an oak and raises it for himself among the trees of the forest. He plants a fir, and the rain makes it grow.

15 

Then it becomes something for a man to burn, so he takes one of them and warms himself; he also kindles a fire to bake bread. He also works to produce a god and worships it; he makes it a graven image and falls down before it.

16 

Half of it he burns in the fire; over this half he eats meat as he roasts a roast and is satisfied. He also warms himself and says, “Aha! I am warm; I have seen the fire.”

17 

But the rest of it he makes into a god, his graven image. He falls down before it and worships; he also prays to it and says, “Deliver me, for you are my god.”

18 

They do not know, nor do they understand, for He has smeared over their eyes so that they cannot see and their hearts so that they will have no insight.

19 

No one causes this to return to his heart, nor is there knowledge or understanding to say, “I have burned half of it in the fire and also have baked bread over its coals. I roast meat and eat it. Then I make the rest of it into an abomination; I fall down before a block of wood!”

20 

He feeds on ashes; a deceived heart has turned him aside. And he cannot deliver his soul, and he cannot say, “Is there not a lie in my right hand?”

YAHWEH FORGIVES AND REDEEMS

21 

“Remember these things, O Jacob,

And Israel, for you are My servant;

I have formed you, you are My servant;

O Israel, you will not be forgotten by Me.

22 

I have wiped out your transgressions like a thick cloud

And your sins like a cloud.

Return to Me, for I have redeemed you.”

23 

Shout for joy, O heavens, for Yahweh has done it!

Make a loud shout, you lower parts of the earth;

Break forth into a shout of joy, you mountains,

O forest, and every tree in it;

For Yahweh has redeemed Jacob

And in Israel He shows forth His beautiful glory.

24 

Thus says Yahweh, your Redeemer, and the one who formed you from the womb,

“I, Yahweh, am the maker of all things,

Stretching out the heavens by Myself

And spreading out the earth all alone,

25 

Causing the omens of boasters to be annulled,

And making fools out of diviners,

Causing wise men to turn back,

And making foolishness out of their knowledge,

26 

Confirming the word of His servant⁠—

And the counsel of His messengers He will complete⁠—

And being the One who says of Jerusalem, ‘She shall be inhabited!’

And of the cities of Judah, ‘They shall be built.’

And I will raise up her waste places again.

27 

It is I who says to the depth of the sea, ‘Be dried up!’

And I will make your rivers dry.

28 

It is I who says of Cyrus, ‘He is My shepherd!

And all My good pleasure he will complete.’

And saying of Jerusalem, ‘She will be built,’

And of the temple, ‘Your foundation will be laid.’”

The highest tech of all

 Listen: Carbon Valley Trumps Silicon Valley

Evolution News

Got a smartphone? As complicated a machine as it is, it doesn’t compare to the incredible sophistication found in biology. On a classic episode of ID the Future, we hear from two contributors to the Crossway Anthology, Theistic Evolution: A Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Critique, molecular biologist Douglas Axe and philosopher of science Stephen Meyer. They explain how Carbon Valley trumps Silicon Valley, and shouts intelligent design. They compare some of today’s technological marvels to living technology, and show how even “simple cells” far exceed the best that Silicon Valley has to offer. As Meyer says: “Nobody doubts that natural selection and random mutation is a genuine biological process. What we do doubt is that those mechanisms have the power to generate fundamentally new forms of life.” Download the podcast or listen to it Here

Hired guns?

An architectural tour of the new Rome.

When the science is untrustworthy?

 Fossil Friday: The Gupta Scandal

Gunta Bechly 

This Fossil Friday features conodont microfossils from the Triassic of the Himalaya region in India (Goel 1977) to illustrate a veritable crime story. You may have heard of cases of fraud in paleontology such as the famous hoaxes of Piltdown Man and Archaeoraptor, but the greatest scientific fraud of the century is not so well known outside of professional paleontologist circles. It was Indian scientist Vishwa Jit Gupta, professor of geology at Panjab University, who played the “star role” in this biggest case of fraud in paleontology and maybe all of science ever (Lewin 1989).

A Dubious Accident

Gupta was India’s most celebrated paleontologist, with 455 scientific publications (including two Nature papers and five books), when the scandal started to come to light in 1989 (Talent 1989, Lewin 1989, Anderson 1991, Nature 1993), but it took nine years for the total truth and magnitude of the scandal to be revealed (Ruffell et al. 2012, Webster 2016). It turned out that over 30 years of research with 126 gullible co-authors, Gupta had falsified data, stolen fossils from colleagues and collections around the world, and then claimed to have found them in the Himalayas, often in made-up localities and layers. Gupta’s “fraudulent practices have involved most invertebrate phyla as well as the vertebrates and include fossils of Cambrian to Cenozoic age” (Webster et al. 1993). Gupta did not only commit scientific fraud on an unprecedented scale, but he even issued death threats with head money to whistleblowers including Australian geologist John Talent, one of whom one was actually killed in a dubious accident (Carleton 2005, Ruffell et al. 2012). After a final report in 1994 found Gupta guilty of all charges, “an article in the Indian weekly The World called for Gupta to be stripped of his PhD and DSc degrees, both of which had been demonstrated to be based upon fraudulent work. Strangely, though, when the Academic Senate of the Panjab University met to decide Gupta’s fate, only five out of the 55 senators voted for his dismissal. Gupta was allowed to keep his position within the university, to supervise research students and to retain his degrees” (Fossil Industry 2022).

Good to Remember

Gupta retired normally in 2002, with super-annuation benefits (Patnaik 2015), and none of his fraudulent publications has been retracted. Nor was he ever held legally accountable for his unbelievable misconduct. In 2013 a book was finally published in India about the case (Shah 2013). Nowadays, such a scandal would likely never have been uncovered at all, because political correctness would hardly allow anyone to accuse a scientist from a non-Western country of such outrageous behavior or even find that “India is also a leading nation in fraudulent scientific research” (Patnaik 2015). An obvious question that is also not allowed to be asked concerns the desolate state of a whole scientific discipline, where such a massive fraud could happen in the first place and stay unnoticed for decades. Good to remember when somebody tells you to just trust in science and to stop asking inconvenient questions.

References

Anderson I 1991. Himalayan scandal rocks Indian science. NewScientist Febr. 9, 1991. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg12917551-600-himalayan-scandal-rocks-indian-science/

Carleton S 2005. What happens to the Whistleblowers? ABC The Science Show Sept. 3, 2005. http://web.archive.org/web/20050911052826/http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ss/stories/s1451250.htm

Fossil Industry 2022. A famous case of Indian fossil fraud and theft. Fossil Hunters Dec. 21, 2022. https://www.fossilhunters.xyz/fossil-industry/a-famous-case-of-indian-fossil-fraud-and-theft.html

Goel RK 1977. Triassic Conodonts from Spiti (Himachal Pradesh), India. Journal of Paleontology 51(6), 1085–1101. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1303823

Lewin R 1989. The Case of “Misplaced” Fossils. Science 244(4902), 277–279. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.244.4902.277

Nature 1993. Palaeontology under a Himalayan shadow. Nature 366(6456), 616. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/366616a0

Patnaik PR 2015. Scientific Misconduct in India: Causes and Perpetuation. Science and Engineering Ethics 22(4), 1245–1249. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-015-9677-6

Ruffell A, Majury N & Brooks WE 2012. Geological fakes and frauds. Earth-Science Reviews 111(1-2), 224–231. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.earscirev.2011.12.001

Shah SK 2013. Himalayan Fossil Fraud – A View from the Galleries. Palaeontological Society of India Special Publication 4, University of Lucknow, 141 pp.

Talent JA 1989. The case of peripatetic fossils. Nature 338(6217), 613–615. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/338613a0

Webster GD 2016. An evaluation of the V. J. Gupta echinoderm papers, 1971–1989. Journal of Paleontology 65(6), 1006–1008. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S002233600003331X

Webster GD, Rexroad CB & Talent JA 1993. An Evaluation of the V. J. Gupta Conodont Papers. Journal of Paleontology 67(3), 486–493. https://www.jstor.org/stable

A pair of knights joust?

 Friendly Sparring, Verbal and Otherwise, on a Recent Episode of The Bryan Callen Show

Andrew McDiarmid 

Michael Shermer is one of comedian and podcaster Bryan Callen’s go-to science skeptics. So when Callen invited Dr. Stephen Meyer on his show recently, he knew he’d have a colorful back-and-forth on his hands if he also asked Shermer to join in. The result is the type of interaction we’re secretly craving more of these days — energetic conversation between people with differing views but who demonstrate respect for one another, for themselves, and for those who may be watching. 

“So afterwards, we’re going at it!” Shermer jokes with a chuckle early in the proceedings. And why not? In their younger years, Stephen trained as a boxer and Michael rode bikes professionally. After the verbal sparring, there may be a chance for these athletic scholars to settle things off-camera. 

One reason a Shermer/Meyer match-up makes sense is that both men demonstrate a healthy level of intellectual humility, an essential ingredient in any debate over important scientific ideas. “I’ll talk to anybody,” Shermer acknowledges, “because I’m curious to know, is it possible I’m wrong in this new idea?” Indeed, Shermer recently spent over two hours wrestling with Meyer’s arguments on his own Podcast discussing Return of the God Hypothesis.

Higher, Unmeasurable Truths

As Callen probes Shermer on whether higher, unmeasurable truths exist in life, Meyer helps to focus the conversation on the science: 

There are both observables and unobservables as we begin to think about the big questions. And the God question, I think, is a question of metaphysics, but it’s also a question of science. And even the most staunch atheists inadvertently reveal that they accept that as well. Richard Dawkins, for example, has said that the universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if at bottom there is no purpose, no design, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.

Dawkins’s way of framing the issue, says Meyer, implies that metaphysical hypotheses, whether materialism, theism, deism, or pantheism, can be tested, just as scientific hypotheses can be tested, by making observations about the properties of life in the universe.

A Conference in Wales

Not so fast, contests Shermer. “The idea that there’s one theory here, and then there’s the God hypothesis — no. There’s actually a dozen over here and we don’t know which one’s the right one.” Shermer reported on a conference he had recently attended in Wales where he watched Roger Penrose, Brian Greene, and others debate the Big Bang and the origin of the universe. “There is not agreement that there was a beginning called the Big Bang,” says Shermer. “There is no ‘A’ Beginning, it just keeps cycling through…”

“No, no, that’s not actually accurate,” interjects Meyer politely:

There is empirical evidence of a beginning. What Penrose does is postulate an infinite cycle of beginnings for which he has no evidence and has to posit something called a phantom field, which other physicists have rejected on the grounds that the phantom field has attributes that no other physical field ever postulated in physics has, namely mind-like characteristics. It can reduce entropy at just the right time in just the right way to allegedly produce another cycle of expansion, but there’s no evidence for an infinite cycle of beginnings. That’s a pure theoretical postulation.

“What’s More Magical?”

The sparring continues over fine-tuning, the origin of complexity, and why mind is a better candidate for a prime reality than matter alone. “Michael and I both agree that we both oppose magical thinking,” says Meyer. “But the question is what’s more magical?” Is it more magical to posit causal powers to brute inanimate matter that our observation shows isn’t capable of producing the effects in question, or to posit a mind, knowing that minds are real and knowing from our own observation what minds are capable of doing? 

Throughout their conversation both Meyer and Shermer reveal a fair bit of common ground, from effective political systems to their adherence to Bayesian logic. That means they also both agree that it’s not possible to be 100 percent positive about a given hypothesis. Which is why Meyer follows the same methods of reasoning that Charles Darwin and his 19th-century contemporaries used in their own work. Examine multiple competing hypotheses, test and evaluate their explanatory power, and make an inference to the best explanation. As Shermer puts it as he defines what truth is, “something confirmed to such a degree it would be reasonable to offer your provisional assent.”  

“I’m also a skeptic,” says Meyer, “but I’m a skeptic about the magical thinking that materialism now entails. I think Michael and I have a lot of commonality and epistemology but difference in judgment about where the rub is.”

Come for the sparring. Stay for the civility. Enjoy for yourself this friendly, thoughtful exchange on the God question!

It's bomb thrower David Berlinski again.

 Listen: In a New Book, David Berlinski Gives the Devil His Due

Evolution News

On a new episode of ID the Future, host Andrew McDiarmid rings up Science After Babel author David Berlinski in Paris to discuss the philosopher’s latest Book

. Berlinski is at his cultivated best as the two discuss everything from the biblical Tower of Babel as a metaphor for modern materialistic science, to his friendship with the brilliant and colorful French intellectual Marcel Schützenberger, a world-class mathematician who was self-taught and, as we learn here, came within a hair’s breadth of being swept up in the Chinese Revolution. Berlinski also reflects on the seminal 1966 Wistar  Symposium , which laid out some mathematical challenges to Darwinism, challenges that Berlinski says remain unanswered to this day. At the same time, Berlinski gives the devil — here Darwinism — its due. Download the¹ podcast or listen to it Here.

Will it be the noble savage or savage noble who saves civilization?

 The Barbarian Within: Darwinism and the Secular Script for Masculinity

Nancy Pearcy

Editor’s note: We are delighted to present a preview adapted from Nancy Pearcey’s forthcoming book The Toxic War on Masculinity. The book will be published on June 27, but you can pre-order now!

Civilization has degenerated into a “mawkish sentimentality,” complained a writer in 1888. “In Heaven’s name, leave us a saving touch of honest, old-fashioned barbarism!” 

How did barbarism come to be seen as a positive trait for men — “a saving touch,” a remedy for Victorian sentimentality?…

A new concept of masculinity took hold after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species (1859). His evolutionary theory inspired the idea that, at the core, men are animals — and that to recover their authentic masculinity, men need to reconnect with their inner beast. For example, Zane Grey said that in his Westerns he was trying to recapture the experience of our evolutionary ancestors. “Nature developed man according to the biological facts of evolution,” he wrote. “Something of the wild and primitive should forever remain instinctive in the human race.” 

Male writers began to claim that civilization was merely a thin veneer over our animal nature. A book titled Savage Survivals (1916) said, “Civilization is only a skin. The great core of human nature is barbaric.” A book titled The Caveman Within Us (1922) argued that the human organism has only “a slight coat of cultural whitewash, which may be called the veneer of civilization.” 

In fact, any man not primitive or barbarian enough risked being judged as a failure as a man. The most prominent psychologist of the age, G. Stanley Hall, remarked that “a teenage boy who is a perfect gentleman has something the matter with him.” 

In this chapter, we will investigate the application of Darwinism to human behavior, which is called Social Darwinism. How has it shaped the public discourse on masculinity right up to our own day? How has it contributed to the secular script for the “Real” Man.

The “Blessings” of War

In the nineteenth century, due to industrialization and urbanization, a new word entered the English language: overcivilized. People began to worry that city boys were becoming soft and emasculated. They were no longer the strapping young men produced by harsh pioneer days or rugged farm life. The three principal institutions that dominate early childhood socialization — family, religion, and education — were increasingly staffed and run by women. Men began to cast about for ways to retrieve a sense of robust manhood.

Social Darwinism came in handy in several ways. Take militarism: If life evolved through the struggle for survival, then applying that principle to nations suggests that the way to produce strong, vigorous manhood is through warfare. 

“War is a blessing for humanity,” wrote a German anthropologist, “since it offers the only means to measure the strengths of one nation to another and to grant the victory to the fittest. War is the highest and most majestic form of the struggle for existence.” A biologist agreed: 

According to Darwin’s theory, war has constantly been of the greatest importance for the general progress of the human race, in that the physically weaker, the less intelligent, the morally inferior or morally degenerate peoples must clear out and make room for the stronger and better developed. 

Theodore Roosevelt was a Social Darwinist and famously said in 1895, “The country needs a war.” He argued that the current generation of young men needed to test their mettle in battle: 

No triumph of peace is quite so great as the supreme triumphs of war. The courage of the soldier, the courage of the statesman who has to meet storms which can only be quelled by soldierly virtue — this stands higher than any qualities called out merely in times of peace. 

G. Stanley Hall even cast militarism as a “manly protest” against the influence of women: “War is, in a sense, the acme of what some now call the manly protest. In peace, women have invaded nearly all the occupations of man, but in war, male virtues come to the fore, for woman cannot go ‘over the top.’” War was depicted not as a necessary evil but as a positive strategy for restoring virile manhood. 

Your Inner Barbarian 

Social Darwinism was also used to support a sports and fitness craze that swept over the nation toward the end of the nineteenth century. As middle-class Americans left behind the rigorous life on the farm to become a nation of sedentary office workers, they began to turn to sports and exercise to rebuild their physical health. The first tennis court in the United States was built in 1876, the first basketball court in 1891. 

Sports were touted not only as a way to get physically fit but also as a way for boys to reconnect with their evolutionary origins. In 1866, the German biologist Ernst Haeckel, a devotee of Darwin, proposed a theory called recapitulation, claiming that each human embryo replays the entire history of evolution (from one-celled organism, to fish, to amphibian, to mammal, to human). Social Darwinists concluded that boys continue the process of evolution by “recapitulating” the history of the human race as they pass from childhood to adulthood. 

For example, William Forbush, a child development specialist, wrote a highly influential book titled The Boy Problem (1902) claiming that each boy repeats “the history of his own race-life from savagery unto civilization.” Joseph Lee, a social reformer who founded a movement to build playgrounds in cities, said play arose from an earlier stage of human evolution — from the “barbaric and predatory society to which the boy naturally belongs.” A pioneer in the Boy Scout movement said athletics were reminiscent “of the struggle for survival, of the hunt, of the chase, of war.” 

The idea was that even as boys grew up to become refined Victorian gentlemen, they should always retain a core of wildness and savagery. When Ernest Thompson Seton founded the Boy Scouts of America, he said that his goal was to rekindle in boys “the power of the savage.”

Haeckel’s theory of recapitulation was eventually discredited. (He had supported the theory with falsified sketches of embryos; already in his own day, he was accused of fraud.) Yet the idea that humans arose from animal origins and are barbarians at heart was becoming part of the socially constructed definition of manhood. 

Darwinian Stories 

Darwinism was used to bolster the philosophy of naturalism, the claim that nature is all that exists. Among writers, it inspired a new genre called literary naturalism. Novelists portrayed humans as evolved organisms, governed by the laws of natural selection and survival of the fittest. Émile Zola, a leading theorist of literary naturalism, said he wanted to portray characters as “human animals, nothing more.”

For example, Frank Norris wrote a short story (1893) about a bookish student named Lauth living in medieval France who gets caught up in a riot and ends up killing a man with a crossbow:

In an instant, a mighty flame of blood-lust thrilled up through Lauth’s body and mind. At the sight of blood shed by his own hands all the animal savagery latent in every human being woke within him — no more merciful scruples now. He could kill. In the twinkling of an eye the pale, highly cultivated scholar . . . sank back to the level of his savage Celtic ancestors. His eyes glittered . . . and his whole frame quivered with the eagerness and craving of a panther in sight of his prey.

Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (1895), often assigned in high school classes, is set during the Civil War. Early in the novel, the main character, Henry, flees from the field of battle. But later he “felt the daring spirit of a savage.” He redeems himself by fighting like a “barbarian, a beast,” a “war devil.” 

Jack London is best known for books like The Call of the Wild (1903). But what most people do not know is that, as a young man, London underwent what one historian calls “a conversion experience” to radical naturalism by reading books about evolution. He even memorized passages from Darwin’s books and could quote them by heart, the way Christians memorize Scripture. 

Though London wrote about dogs, he intended them as metaphors for humans. In The Call of the Wild, the main character is a dog named Buck, a house pet captured and sold to an Alaskan expedition where he is thrown into a Darwinian struggle for survival. In the Nordic cold, he quickly learns that men and dogs “were savages all of them, who knew no law but the law of the club and fang.” 

Eventually, the last tie to civilization is broken and Buck returns to a pre-civilized existence. A literary critic writes, “Ideal manliness thrives in Buck only because he becomes less and less human, more and more wild.”

Theodore Dreiser, author of American classics such as Sister Carrie, likewise underwent a naturalistic rite of passage by reading books about evolution. He wrote that Darwinism blew him “intellectually to bits,” destroying the last vestiges of his Catholic upbringing. He intended his novels to show that all human “ideals, struggles, deprivations, sorrows, and joys” were nothing but products of chemical reactions in the brain. He called them “chemic compulsions.” The literary naturalists used fiction to promote a Darwinian worldview that reduced humans to products of evolutionary forces. 

The Thin Veneer of Civilization 

The literary naturalists treated the wilderness as an arena where men could reaffirm their masculinity. As one historian explains, the wilderness was seen “as a source of virility, toughness, and savagery — qualities that defined fitness in Darwinian terms.”

Edgar Rice Burroughs set his immensely popular Tarzan series (1912) in the African jungle. Because of Tarzan’s wild upbringing, he avoids the debilitating forces of civilization, possessing the power and strength of primitive manhood. Even after mastering European customs and languages, he prefers to “strip off the thin veneer of civilization” (as Burroughs puts it) and dress in a loincloth of animal hide, eating raw meat that he has killed himself. In Tarzan of the Apes, he tells Jane, “I am still a wild beast at heart.” 

The message of the Tarzan books, says sociologist Michael Kimmel, is that “descending the evolutionary ladder is the only mechanism to retrieve manhood.”

This is a severely stunted, shrunken, truncated view of human nature. From the time of the classical Greeks and Romans, virtue had been defined as the restraint of the “lower” passions by the “higher” faculties of reason, spirit, and moral will. But Darwinism was taken to mean that humans had triumphed over the other species not by reason and moral restraint but by the fierce, fighting urges. In a stunning reversal, the animal passions and instincts were held up as the authentic self. 

The secular script for manhood was redefined as crude and combative, governed by the biological instincts for lust and power. 

Many of the literary naturalists created rollicking adventure stories that are great fun to read. One of our sons devoured the Tarzan books. But Christians should always read with their worldview antennae poised to pick up the story’s underlying message. A Darwinian worldview furthered secular ideas of what it means to be a man. 

The earlier ideal of the Christian gentleman had urged men to live up to the image of God implanted in them. By contrast, the Darwinian worldview urged men to live down to their presumed animal nature — to compete in the ruthless struggle for dominance and power. The “Real” Man was being defined in increasingly toxic term

s. 

Philosophy: the Yin to science's Yang?

Human not ape-man?

 Scientists Are Skeptical that Intelligence in Homo naledi “Erases Human Exceptionalism”

Casey Lusken

major science news story is making the rounds right now about how the hominid species Homo naledi may have had high intelligence, buried its dead, used fire, and even carved markings into a cave wall. All this is unexpected since Homo naledi’s brain size is not much different from that of a chimp. 

Given the extensive media attention (e.g., Wall Street Journal, Newspeak, ABC News, Associated Press , New York Times , to name a few), you might think this is some completely new proposal that just got published in a major scientific journal. That inference would be wrong. At least when it comes to burial of the dead and use of fire, these are old claims about Homo naledi that have been controversial for years but are now being reinvigorated based upon new evidence presented in a series of three preprint papers (Here, Here, and Here). The papers were uploaded at bioRxiv, which, of course, is a preprint server, not a scientific journal. Newsweek thus observes, “The papers are still in preprint, however, so they are yet to be published officially in a peer-reviewed journal.” The Associated Press Notes, “The research has not been peer-reviewed yet and some outside scientists think more evidence is needed to challenge what we know about how humans evolved their complex thinking.” 

             Someone must have a good PR team at work to generate such a large batch of news stories about mostly old claims based entirely upon preprints! Phys.org is even running a story about the project’s lead scientist, Lee Berger, heralding “South Africa’s Lee Berger, Palaeontology action hero”!

Scientists Are Skeptical

Peer-reviewed or not, and hyped or not, the data exists and it’s worth discussing. And apparently quite a few scientists are skeptical. The New York Times notes:

But a number of experts on ancient engravings and burials said that the evidence did not yet support these extraordinary conclusions about Homo naledi. The cave evidence found so far could have a range of other explanations, they said. The skeletons might have been merely left on the cave floor, for example. And the charcoal and engravings found in the cave might have been left by modern humans who entered long after Homo naledi became extinct.

“It seems that the narrative is more important than the facts,” said Maxime Aubert, an archaeologist at Griffith University in Australia.

An article at The Conversation authored by a quartet of four archaeologists, based in Australia, Kenya, Spain, and Germany, shows that some prominent scientists aren’t convinced. The article, titled “Major new research claims smaller-brained Homo naledi made rock art and buried the dead. But the evidence is lacking,” covers the three main claims: use of fire, burial of the dead, and the presence of cave art.

Let’s take a look at each of these.

Torching Fire Use by Homo naledi?

The skeptical quartet note that the investigators have not published any evidence that demonstrates Homo naledi used fire in the cave:

In public lectures and on social media they clarify they have found new evidence for hearths, including charcoal, ash, discoloured clay and burned animal bones. Yet none of the scientific research needed to confirm the use of fire has been carried out. Or if it has, it hasn’t been published.

Previously acquired radiocarbon dates obtained by the site investigators on the apparent hearth material provided very late dates that distanced the hearths from the remains of Homo naledi by several hundred thousand years.

These are pretty strong criticisms. The quartet says the investigators are making assertions that have simply not been backed up by evidence presented to the public. In that case, claims of Homo naledi’s fire use seem totally unestablished. 

Burying Claims of Burial of the Dead

As for burial of the dead, the skeptical quartet note that there are “rigorous criteria agreed upon by the scientific community for identifying intentional human burial.” But, they argue, the Homo naledi evidence does not meet this standard:

[I]s there actually evidence for funerary behaviour at Rising Star Cave? According to standards set by the palaeoanthropology community, the evidence presented so far indicates no.

They continue:

[N]ot one of the burials provides compelling evidence of a deliberately excavated pit. Indeed, the shallow cavities may not be dug pits at all, but natural depressions where the bodies accumulated and were later disturbed by trampling, or partial cave collapse.

The alleged burials also fail to meet another fundamental criteria for deliberate burials: anatomical alignment of the body and articulation of skeletal remains.

In a deliberate burial, the body is generally intact and any minimal displacement can be explained by decomposition. That’s because burial involves immediately covering the body with soil, which protects the anatomical integrity of the skeleton.

Rising Star Cave so far hasn’t produced evidence for anything other than the general spatial association of some skeletal elements. At most, it provides evidence for the in-situ decomposition of particular body parts, such as an ankle, and partial hand and foot articulations.

Moreover, confirming intentional burial in the past has required the presentation of human remains in an arrangement that can’t have been achieved by chance. However, the scattered distribution of the remains at Rising Star prevents reconstruction of their original positions.

Other claimed evidence for funerary behaviour is equally uncompelling. A stone artefact supposedly included in the burial as a “grave good” is said to have scratches and edge serrations from use. But this so-called artefact’s shape suggests it may be natural. It’s still encased in sediment and has only been studied through synchrotron X-ray.

But perhaps the biggest barrier to confirming the status of the findings is that so far none of the alleged burials have been fully excavated. It’s therefore impossible to assess the completeness of the bodies, their original position, and the limits of the purported pits.

The New York Times elaborates:

But María Martinón-Torres, the director of Spain’s National Research Center on Human Evolution, said that such speculations were premature based on the evidence presented so far. “Hypotheses need to be built on what we have, not what we guess,” she said.

Dr. Martinón-Torres considered funerary caching more likely than burials, pointing out that the oval depressions did not contain full skeletons in complete alignment. If Homo naledi brought the bodies into the cave and left them on the cave floor, the bones could have become separated as the bodies decomposed. “Still, I think the possibility of having funerary caching with this antiquity is already stunning,” she said.

“I’m highly optimistic that they have burials, but the jury is still out,” said Michael Petraglia, the director of the Australian Research Center for Human Evolution. Dr. Petraglia wanted to see more detailed analysis of the sediment and other kinds of evidence before judging whether the ovals were burials. “The problem is that they’re ahead of the science,” he said.

And Paul Pettitt, an archaeologist at Durham University in England, said it was possible that Homo naledi did not bring the bodies in, either for caching or burying. The bodies might have washed in. “I’m not convinced that the team have demonstrated that this was deliberate burial,” he said.

Likewise the UK’s Natural History Museum quotes a scientist who is not buying it:

Dr Silvia Bello is an expert on the evolution of human behaviour at the Museum, and was not involved in the study.

‘It sounds ridiculous because we’re used to burials, but they are not the easiest of things to define or recognise,’ explains Silvia. ‘If you have a body that is completely buried, when it decomposes the bone collapses in a certain way and in a certain order. So, this could give an indication that the body was buried whole, but it doesn’t necessarily tell you that it was a burial. The researchers call what they have found a “feature”, which I thought was very generic.’

‘There are two things at play. One is the burial, and one is the funerary behaviour: you can have a funerary behaviour without a burial.’

Science News also has a story quoting critics of claims that this new evidence establishes burial of the dead:

Some researchers consider the new evidence inadequate to confirm that H. naledi interred its own in cave graves. …

“I think that deliberate burial of the dead by Homo naledi is clear, although it is unlikely that the evidence so far presented will satisfy all scholars,” says archaeologist Michael Petraglia of Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, who is not part of Berger’s team.

One objection comes from paleoanthropologist María Martinón-Torres, director of the Spanish National Research Center on Human Evolution in Burgos. She suspects that disconnected skeletal parts described in the new papers accumulated either after bodies of the dead that had been placed in cave shafts later fell through or had been left at the back of underground caves. Trampling or other H. naledi activities in caves could eventually have produced fragmentary sets of fossils uncovered by Berger’s group, says Martinón-Torres, who along with Petraglia studied the oldest known H. sapiens burial in Africa.

It’s possible that periodic water seepage into the underground caves helped to move partial or complete H. naledi corpses down sloping cave floors until they came to rest in natural depressions that Berger’s team suggests are intentional burial sites, says archaeologist Paul Pettitt of Durham University in England.

Presumably, if other hominids entered the cave later, then they could also be responsible for the markings on the cave wall.

Is the Writing on the Wall?

As for the markings on the cave wall, these are clearly artificial — that much seems obvious. But it’s quite another task to demonstrate that they were produced by the species Homo naledi. The problem is that the markings are at this point totally undated and thus it’s difficult to say whether they were made by Homo naledi or some later species — perhaps even by humans — who entered the cave and scraped up the wall. This point is reiterated by multiple stories:

Science News notes: “[T]here is no way to determine whether H. naledi or perhaps later H. sapiens visitors to the underground caves — part of South Africa’s Rising Star Cave System, about 40 kilometers west of Johannesburg — created the undated engravings found by Berger’s group. … But the underground cave engravings remain undated. There is no way to know whether people reached the cave chambers within the past few thousand years and carved those wall patterns, Pettitt says.” 

In an Associated Press story, Rick Potts of the Smithsonian makes a similar point: “Scientists haven’t yet been able to identify how old the engravings are. So Potts said the current evidence can’t say for sure whether H. naledi was truly the one to create the symbols, or if some other creature — maybe even H. sapiens — made its way down there at some point.”

The New York Times likewise states: “As for the engravings and the fires, experts said it wasn’t clear that Homo naledi was responsible for them. It was possible they were the work of modern humans who came into the cave thousands of years later. ‘The whole thing is unconvincing, to say the least,’ said João Zilhão, an archaeologist at the University of Barcelona.”

The quartet of skeptical archaeologists writing at The Conversation also note: “The problem with the rock art at Rising Star Cave is that it’s undated. To imply any link with Homo naledi requires firm dates. This could be achieved through using dating techniques on associated residues or natural deposits covering the art, or by studying materials from excavated and dated archaeological layers that can be linked to the art (for instance, if they contain engraving tools or engraved rock fall fragments). …In the absence of dating, it’s simply spurious to claim the engravings were made by Homo naledi, rather than by another species (and potentially at a much later date).”

Incidentally, the cave markings look very similar to markings made by Neanderthals — whom we already know were highly intelligent. As John Hawks told the Wall Street Journal:

Similar ancient hashtags have been documented at a Neanderthal site in Gibraltar that is just tens of thousands of years old. “They are uncannily similar, and they are 8,000 kilometers apart, you know, it is just crazy,” Hawks said.

Neanderthal fossils aren’t known from southern Africa, but any similarly smart hominid (like Homo sapiens) could have made these marks.

“Erases the Idea of Human Exceptionalism”

The possibility that some later species made the cave markings is not even considered by many news outlets, including ABC News, which is completely credulous about claims that these markings were made by the precise individuals who “laid to rest” the bones that are found in the cave:

The researchers began to hypothesize that Homo naledi buried its dead during continued excavations in 2018 and in July 2022, those hunches were not only proven but amplified once Berger and his team found skeletal remains of Homo naledi and then carvings on the wall above them to mark those laid to rest there.

The symbols included triangles, squares and a sort-of “hashtag” sign, as in two cross-hatching equal signs, Berger said. However, it is unclear what these carvings meant, and researchers will be delving into whether there is a “random chance” that Homo naledi used the same symbols as humans or if they were obtained from some sort of shared ancestry.

Why do so many folks seem so eager to accept unsubstantiated claims about Homo naledi? ABC News spells out what the investigators want to accomplish with this research:

The finding was “striking” and “shocking” and erases the idea of human exceptionalism — that humans are different than animals and special due to their big brains. Homo naledi had brains about the size of a chimpanzee, and yet practiced ritual burials, a behavior previously assumed was only done by humans, Berger said.

They get points for candor, at least. The purpose of these stretched and unverified claims of high intelligence in a small-brained hominid is apparently to “erase the idea” that human beings are “special” and “exceptional.”

Keep in mind that Berger et al.’s previous claims about Homo naledi’s intelligence have been highly disputed and their initial claims that the species lived 2-3 million years ago turned out to be exaggerated by a factor of 10. Time will tell if these latest Homo naledi claims from Berger’s team stand up. I’m skeptical, to say the least.

Some more truth and reconciliation?

 To Restore Faith in Public Health, We Need Truth Commissions

Wesley J Smith 

Two blazing political controversies are destroying our trust in the integrity of medicine. One is, thankfully, mostly in the past — the COVID-19 pandemic emergency. The second is ongoing and growing increasingly bitter: How to best care for children who “feel” that they aren’t the sex they were born.

These are different debates, but they share certain commonalities. Both issues involve the suspicion that officially preferred policies are more ideological than scientific. Both involve intense efforts by the establishment institutions to squelch heterodox opinions. Both have seen the erosion of the scientific method through the suppression of dissenting points of view. Both controversies have become so mired in partisan politics and culture war argumentation that it’s difficult to separate the wheat of truth from the chaff of propaganda.

A Vexing Question

But how to reverse course and restore societal comity is a vexing question. How do we find accord in an atmosphere of intense factionalism when even the most basic facts can’t be agreed upon?

On the COVID front, a group of medical notables known as the Norfolk Group — which includes two co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, along with others — have issued a public call for the creation of a national commission to dispassionately investigate the nation’s response to the pandemic. Importantly, the Norfolk Group isn’t calling for a stacked deck inquiry that’s primarily about pointing fingers, but rather, an objective fact-finding process to learn what was done right during COVID, what was mistaken, and how to best prepare policies to deploy next time. Among the questions they want explored are:

“What could have been done to better protect older high-risk Americans, so that fewer of them died or were hospitalized due to COVID-19?”

“Why was there widespread questioning of infection-acquired immunity,” aka “natural immunity,” by government officials and some prominent scientists?

Why were schools closed despite early data showing that they weren’t “major sources of spread and early evidence that school closures would cause enormous collateral damage to the education and mental health of children”?

“Why was there an almost exclusive focus on COVID-19 to the detriment of recognizing and mitigating collateral damage on other aspects of public health,” such as cancer screening and treatment, diabetes, and mental health?

“How did certain drugs become heavily politicized?”

“Why did vaccine randomized trials not evaluate mortality, hospitalization, and transmission as primary endpoints?”

“Why was the United States slow to approve and roll out critical COVID-19 testing capacity?”

“Why was there an emphasis on community masking and mask mandates, which had weak or no data to support them?”

Were Mandates Ever Justified?

These are important questions worthy of public exploration. Nor do they represent a complete list of issues that should be explored. For example, here’s one I want to know: Since we know that vaccination doesn’t prevent COVID transmission, were mandates ever justified?

Organizing a formal inquiry into official responses to COVID will take heavy lifting. It will require lawmakers to create the panel and craft its parameters: Not easy in this age of partisan distrust. It should grant the committee subpoena power to ensure that recalcitrant witnesses can’t just refuse to cooperate. And then the President will have to sign off. It will also have to be created in such a way that fairness and transparency rather than score-settling are controlling.

As one of the Great Barrington Declaration authors and Norfolk Group member Dr. Jay Bhattacharya told me in a recent podcast interview for Humanize, “The only way you get trust back is asking these questions, answering them honestly, and just essentially saying mea culpa in areas where we need reform so that we don’t have this problem again.”

Heterodoxy Suppressed

The same approach could be deployed to explore the efficacy of “gender-affirming care” because trust in the orthodox one-size fits all, “go for it” policy currently pushed by the medical establishment, politicians, liberal journalists, on social media, and among heavyweight LGBT advocacy groups such as the Human Rights Campaign, hasn’t been earned. Indeed, just as we saw during the darkest days of COVID, heterodox views on how to best care for gender dysphoric children are being actively suppressed as argumentation against vaccine and mask mandates were during the pandemic. Worse, those expressing substantial concerns about transitioning adolescents are accused of “transphobic” bigotry and intentional harm-causing. That’s hardly a path to achieving consensus.

Moreover, the argument that “the science is settled” about the propriety of gender-affirming care is hard to believe when the mass numbers of young people — particularly girls — deciding they’re transgender, non-binary, or some other non-conforming gender identification is unprecedented. Moreover, public health officials in other countries are reviewing the same available data as U.S. medical experts and coming to opposite conclusions.

If we’re going to fully understand what’s going on — is this a case of moral panic, or people feeling more free in a less judgmental age to reveal their true selves? — and determine a trustworthy methodology for treating underage patients, an honest and dispassionate investigation is essential. Here are just a few of the questions such a public inquiry should pose:

Why do organizations such as the American Association of Pediatrics and World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) claim that it’s science denialism to oppose gender-affirming care when public health officials in the UK, Norway, Sweden, France, and Finland have concluded that scientific evidence doesn’t demonstrate that the benefits of medical affirmation are real or worth the attendant risks of physical and emotional harm?

Is the risk of suicide higher for children with gender dysphoria if they don’t receive social and medical affirmation, or is that an ideological scare tactic?

Why are so many young people who have previous histories of mental illness being diagnosed as trans?

Why provide body-altering medical affirmation to underaged patients when the data appears to indicate that transgender ideation in the young is often transitory?

How many transgender patients “de-transition,” i.e., return to identifying as their own sex?

Do the parents of children receiving gender-affirming care receive sufficient information to fully give their informed consent to transitioning their children?

To Earn Our Trust

Trust can’t be imposed. It must be earned. The formal investigation the Norfolk Group proposes around COVID and the less formal investigation that I’m suggesting about gender dysphoria in youth could achieve that end. But they will have to be scientifically, rather than ideologically, oriented. Their aim should be to learn, explore, debate, and share data, not dictate, punish, castigate, or exclude heterodox thought.

We’d better get to it. Another pandemic could threaten us at any time. Children’s bodies are daily being impacted in potentially catastrophic ways. Only dispassionate inquiries can forge a consensus that will allow us to find commonality in these contentious arenas of health policy conflict.