Sunday, 8 October 2017
Saturday, 7 October 2017
On Darwinists' plans to deprogram the next generation of its innate design recognition instinct.
Story Time: Psychologists Show How to "Suppress" Children's Intuition of Design in Nature
David Klinghoffer
I don't know whether this is outrageous, hilarious or simply very telling. Probably all three. The Wall Street Journal salutes the research of Boston University psychologist Deborah Kelemen. She has discovered that it's possible with Darwinian storytelling to suppress common sense in children of the kind that leads them to recognize artifacts of intelligent design in nature.
The Journal notes that quite apart from religious instruction, kids are primed to see life as reflecting "intentional design." It's intuitive. The corrective is to catch them at an early age and train them to see things in a Darwinian light.
By elementary-school age, children start to invoke an ultimate God-like designer to explain the complexity of the world around them -- even children brought up as atheists. Kids aged 6 to 10 have developed their own coherent "folk biological" theories. ...
Dr. Kelemen and her colleagues thought that they might be able to get young children to understand the mechanism of natural selection before the alternative intentional-design theory had become too entrenched. They gave 5- to 8-year-olds 10-page picture books that illustrated an example of natural selection. The "pilosas," for example, are fictional mammals who eat insects. Some of them had thick trunks, and some had thin ones. A sudden change in the climate drove the insects into narrow underground tunnels. The thin-trunked pilosas could still eat the insects, but the ones with thick trunks died. So the next generation all had thin trunks.
Before the children heard the story, the experimenters asked them to explain why a different group of fictional animals had a particular trait. Most of the children gave explanations based on intentional design. But after the children heard the story, they answered similar questions very differently: They had genuinely begun to understand evolution by natural selection. That understanding persisted when the experimenters went back three months later.
One picture book, of course, won't solve all the problems of science education. But these results do suggest that simple story books like these could be powerful intellectual tools. The secret may be to reach children with the right theory before the wrong one is too firmly in place.
There are a number of interesting points here. First, that the example of natural selection is fictional. The mammalian order Pilosa (anteaters and sloths) is real, but "pilosas" are not. Second, it is decidedly in the micro-evolutionary realm -- a kind of evolution that no one disputes, certainly not advocates of the theory of intelligent design. There's no reason to think that the "pilosas" are on their way to true speciation, of the kind that evolutionary theory is really challenged to account for, any more than Darwin's finches. The extrapolation from such a trivial thing into the origin of all species and all biological complexity by unguided natural processes is a cheat.
Most enlightening is that Dr. Kelemen and her colleagues would, to begin with, seek to talk children out of their intuitive response. Among ID researchers, the approach would be to test that intuition, objectively weighing the empirical evidence without preconceptions. Dr. Kelemen would "suppress" it: her own word!
If you look at the original research, reported in the journal Psychological Science, the language is revealing ("Young Children Can Be Taught Basic Natural Selection Using a Picture-Storybook Intervention"). From the Abstract:
In a novel approach, we explored 5- to 8-year-olds' capacities to learn a basic but theoretically coherent mechanistic explanation of adaptation through a custom storybook intervention. Experiment 1 showed that children understood the population-based logic of natural selection and also generalized it. Furthermore, learning endured 3 months later. Experiment 2 replicated these results and showed that children understood and applied an even more nuanced mechanistic causal explanation. The findings demonstrate that, contrary to conventional educational wisdom, basic natural selection is teachable in early childhood. Theory-driven interventions using picture storybooks with rich explanatory structure are beneficial. [Emphasis added.]
The initiative to program children is repeatedly referred to as "intervention," a term used in psychological counseling to refer to an attempt to thwart counterproductive, dangerous thoughts or behavior. The intuitive response of human beings, seeing design in nature, is implicitly compared to destructive patterns of abuse, alcoholism, drug addiction, and the like!
Given that bizarre premise, suppressing design thoughts becomes the preferred solution. It worked better with slightly older kids, as Kelemen and her colleagues are remarkably candid in saying:
Both age groups learned a great deal, but as might be expected given their enhanced linguistic and processing capacities, 7- to 8-year-olds showed especially robust abilities to suppress any emergent competing commonsense ideas and master task demands, such that they could abstract and transfer the mechanism to markedly different species.
More:
Repeated, spaced instruction on gradually scaled-up versions of the logic of natural selection could ultimately place students in a better position to suppress competing intuitive theoretical explanations.
"Suppressing common sense," "intervening" to throttle natural intuitions -- I could hardly have put it any more directly myself.
The defense of Darwinian theory already centered on an avoidance strategy, dodging a direct confrontation with genuinely challenging critiques, while dishonestly conflating scientific alternatives (intelligent design) with non-scientific ones (creationism) to confuse people. That wasn't good enough, evidently. Even adults raised from childhood to see the universe as void of purpose may have a lingering suspicion that natural selection alone can't explain the panoply of life around us.
It becomes necessary, then, to choke off the illness at its origin, somewhere in early childhood. The more obvious and responsible alternative of answering arguments for intelligent design is, of course, not thinkable.
David Klinghoffer
I don't know whether this is outrageous, hilarious or simply very telling. Probably all three. The Wall Street Journal salutes the research of Boston University psychologist Deborah Kelemen. She has discovered that it's possible with Darwinian storytelling to suppress common sense in children of the kind that leads them to recognize artifacts of intelligent design in nature.
The Journal notes that quite apart from religious instruction, kids are primed to see life as reflecting "intentional design." It's intuitive. The corrective is to catch them at an early age and train them to see things in a Darwinian light.
By elementary-school age, children start to invoke an ultimate God-like designer to explain the complexity of the world around them -- even children brought up as atheists. Kids aged 6 to 10 have developed their own coherent "folk biological" theories. ...
Dr. Kelemen and her colleagues thought that they might be able to get young children to understand the mechanism of natural selection before the alternative intentional-design theory had become too entrenched. They gave 5- to 8-year-olds 10-page picture books that illustrated an example of natural selection. The "pilosas," for example, are fictional mammals who eat insects. Some of them had thick trunks, and some had thin ones. A sudden change in the climate drove the insects into narrow underground tunnels. The thin-trunked pilosas could still eat the insects, but the ones with thick trunks died. So the next generation all had thin trunks.
Before the children heard the story, the experimenters asked them to explain why a different group of fictional animals had a particular trait. Most of the children gave explanations based on intentional design. But after the children heard the story, they answered similar questions very differently: They had genuinely begun to understand evolution by natural selection. That understanding persisted when the experimenters went back three months later.
One picture book, of course, won't solve all the problems of science education. But these results do suggest that simple story books like these could be powerful intellectual tools. The secret may be to reach children with the right theory before the wrong one is too firmly in place.
There are a number of interesting points here. First, that the example of natural selection is fictional. The mammalian order Pilosa (anteaters and sloths) is real, but "pilosas" are not. Second, it is decidedly in the micro-evolutionary realm -- a kind of evolution that no one disputes, certainly not advocates of the theory of intelligent design. There's no reason to think that the "pilosas" are on their way to true speciation, of the kind that evolutionary theory is really challenged to account for, any more than Darwin's finches. The extrapolation from such a trivial thing into the origin of all species and all biological complexity by unguided natural processes is a cheat.
Most enlightening is that Dr. Kelemen and her colleagues would, to begin with, seek to talk children out of their intuitive response. Among ID researchers, the approach would be to test that intuition, objectively weighing the empirical evidence without preconceptions. Dr. Kelemen would "suppress" it: her own word!
If you look at the original research, reported in the journal Psychological Science, the language is revealing ("Young Children Can Be Taught Basic Natural Selection Using a Picture-Storybook Intervention"). From the Abstract:
In a novel approach, we explored 5- to 8-year-olds' capacities to learn a basic but theoretically coherent mechanistic explanation of adaptation through a custom storybook intervention. Experiment 1 showed that children understood the population-based logic of natural selection and also generalized it. Furthermore, learning endured 3 months later. Experiment 2 replicated these results and showed that children understood and applied an even more nuanced mechanistic causal explanation. The findings demonstrate that, contrary to conventional educational wisdom, basic natural selection is teachable in early childhood. Theory-driven interventions using picture storybooks with rich explanatory structure are beneficial. [Emphasis added.]
The initiative to program children is repeatedly referred to as "intervention," a term used in psychological counseling to refer to an attempt to thwart counterproductive, dangerous thoughts or behavior. The intuitive response of human beings, seeing design in nature, is implicitly compared to destructive patterns of abuse, alcoholism, drug addiction, and the like!
Given that bizarre premise, suppressing design thoughts becomes the preferred solution. It worked better with slightly older kids, as Kelemen and her colleagues are remarkably candid in saying:
Both age groups learned a great deal, but as might be expected given their enhanced linguistic and processing capacities, 7- to 8-year-olds showed especially robust abilities to suppress any emergent competing commonsense ideas and master task demands, such that they could abstract and transfer the mechanism to markedly different species.
More:
Repeated, spaced instruction on gradually scaled-up versions of the logic of natural selection could ultimately place students in a better position to suppress competing intuitive theoretical explanations.
"Suppressing common sense," "intervening" to throttle natural intuitions -- I could hardly have put it any more directly myself.
The defense of Darwinian theory already centered on an avoidance strategy, dodging a direct confrontation with genuinely challenging critiques, while dishonestly conflating scientific alternatives (intelligent design) with non-scientific ones (creationism) to confuse people. That wasn't good enough, evidently. Even adults raised from childhood to see the universe as void of purpose may have a lingering suspicion that natural selection alone can't explain the panoply of life around us.
It becomes necessary, then, to choke off the illness at its origin, somewhere in early childhood. The more obvious and responsible alternative of answering arguments for intelligent design is, of course, not thinkable.
Darwinism;Where success is an orphan?
A Billion Genes and Not One Beneficial Mutation.
Evolution News & Views
Natural selection cannot invent things. That's a fact that Douglas Axe establishes clearly in his new book Undeniable. All improvements must come from random mutations. Think of all the progress from the first microbe to a human body. Every single instance of innovation -- large or small -- had to originate in what amounts to "blind search" for something good that natural selection could preserve at a moment in time and place. The inability of blind search to locate any benefit in a sufficiently large search space is a topic Dr. Axe discusses at length.
Evolutionists often speak in generalities about beneficial mutations. They may be rare, we are assured, but they happen. And when they do, "natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life" (Darwin, Origin of Species). All right, we have some data to look at. We can put a number to the frequency of beneficial mutations in a large sample. The number is zero.
Genome sequencing technology has progressed very rapidly in only the last few years. Nature just published results of the Exome Aggregation Consortium (ExAC), the largest survey of human genes to date. (An "exome" is the portion of the genome that codes for proteins.) The exomes from 60,706 individuals from a variety of ethnic groups have been collected and analyzed. If we multiply 60,000 people by the 20,000 genes in the human genome (the lowest estimate), we get a minimum of 1.2 billion genes that have been examined by ExAC for variants. That sounds like a pretty good sample size for scrutinizing some of those beneficial variations that Darwin said his law of natural selection could add up and preserve.
Large-scale reference data sets of human genetic variation are critical for the medical and functional interpretation of DNA sequence changes. Here we describe the aggregation and analysis of high-quality exome (protein-coding region) DNA sequence data for 60,706 individuals of diverse ancestries generated as part of the Exome Aggregation Consortium (ExAC). This catalogue of human genetic diversity contains an average of one variant every eight bases of the exome, and provides direct evidence for the presence of widespread mutational recurrence. We have used this catalogue to calculate objective metrics of pathogenicity for sequence variants, and to identify genes subject to strong selection against various classes of mutation; identifying 3,230 genes with near-complete depletion of predicted protein-truncating variants, with 72% of these genes having no currently established human disease phenotype. Finally, we demonstrate that these data can be used for the efficient filtering of candidate disease-causing variants, and for the discovery of human 'knockout' variants in protein-coding genes. [Emphasis added.]
Out of this high ratio of variants (one in eight basis shows variation, they said), there should be some proportion, even if small, that improves fitness. But we search the paper in vain for any mention of beneficial mutations. There's plenty of talk about disease. The authors only mention "neutral" variants twice. But there are no mentions of beneficial mutations. You can't find one instance of any of these words: benefit, beneficial, fitness, advantage (in terms of mutation), improvement, innovation, invention, or positive selection.
They mention all kinds of harmful effects from most variants: missense and nonsense variants, frameshift mutations, proteins that get truncated on translation, and a multitude of insertions and deletions. Quite a few are known to cause diseases. There are probably many more mutations that never survive to birth. As for natural selection, the authors do speak of "negative selection" and "purifying selection" weeding out the harmful mutations, but nowhere do they mention anything worthwhile that positive selection appears to be preserving.
Jay Shendure had participated in an earlier exome sequencing project on just 12 individuals. That was only seven years ago -- an indication of the rapidity of progress in sequencing technology. In Nature, he shares his thoughts on the significance of ExAC, which is 5,000 times larger than his team's effort was. He mentions "fitness." Watch for it!
More than half of the approximately 7.5 million variants found by ExAC are seen only once. But collectively, they occur at a remarkably high density -- at one out of every eight sites in the exome. For each gene, the authors contrasted the expected and observed numbers of variants that cause the production of truncated proteins, to search for regions containing lower-than-predicted levels of protein-truncating variants. This allowed them to identify several thousand genes that are highly sensitive to such variants -- that is, unable to function normally after loss of one copy of the gene, even if the other copy is intact. Most of these genes have not yet been associated with disease, but mutation probably leads to embryonic death or strongly affects fitness in some other way. These genes are also intolerant of variants in regulatory DNA sequences that markedly alter levels of RNA synthesis from the gene, and are more likely than other genes to be implicated in genome-wide association studies of common disease.
Does he know of any variant that "strongly effects fitness in some other way" than embryonic death? If so, he would have listed it. Instead, all both papers talk about are disease, death, and intolerance to change. The amount of variability is indeed quite high, and the people who donated their genes to the project were alive in spite of their variants. But they sure don't appear to be improving in any measurable way. Natural selection has plenty of bad variation to reject, but not much to add up and preserve.
Darwinians could argue that ExAC is not a large enough sample. We would need millions of exomes, or preferably whole genomes, to find the elusive beneficial mutations. That could be. As technology improves rapidly, perhaps we'll find out before long. However, Doug Axe shows why this is unlikely.
Axe discusses sample sizes. His lab experience with protein folds leads him to the empirically supported conclusion that the sequence space for proteins (and the genes that encode them) is so fantastically large that blind search is hopelessly inadequate to find the good variants. And since natural selection cannot invent things, that's all it has to work with. Remember, mutations are random. Finding good mutations is far less probable in a blind search than throwing a dart blindfolded from space and hitting a pre-specified target one millimeter in diameter. When the search space is "fantastically large," adding more darts won't help. You run into physical limits of time and energy cost.
For those who complain that Axe relies on intuition with his subtitle "How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed," rest assured that he does not (as he explains in a video here). The book is loaded with scientific evidence supporting design. He just shows that the "universal design intuition" common to humans from earliest childhood is scientifically correct in this case: when we see things that take knowledge to build, we know intuitively that someone had to have that knowledge. The news from ExAC provides additional empirical support for his contention that genes, proteins, and life are not fortuitous consequences of blind searches for good things. They look designed because they are designed.
Evolution News & Views
Natural selection cannot invent things. That's a fact that Douglas Axe establishes clearly in his new book Undeniable. All improvements must come from random mutations. Think of all the progress from the first microbe to a human body. Every single instance of innovation -- large or small -- had to originate in what amounts to "blind search" for something good that natural selection could preserve at a moment in time and place. The inability of blind search to locate any benefit in a sufficiently large search space is a topic Dr. Axe discusses at length.
Evolutionists often speak in generalities about beneficial mutations. They may be rare, we are assured, but they happen. And when they do, "natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life" (Darwin, Origin of Species). All right, we have some data to look at. We can put a number to the frequency of beneficial mutations in a large sample. The number is zero.
Genome sequencing technology has progressed very rapidly in only the last few years. Nature just published results of the Exome Aggregation Consortium (ExAC), the largest survey of human genes to date. (An "exome" is the portion of the genome that codes for proteins.) The exomes from 60,706 individuals from a variety of ethnic groups have been collected and analyzed. If we multiply 60,000 people by the 20,000 genes in the human genome (the lowest estimate), we get a minimum of 1.2 billion genes that have been examined by ExAC for variants. That sounds like a pretty good sample size for scrutinizing some of those beneficial variations that Darwin said his law of natural selection could add up and preserve.
Large-scale reference data sets of human genetic variation are critical for the medical and functional interpretation of DNA sequence changes. Here we describe the aggregation and analysis of high-quality exome (protein-coding region) DNA sequence data for 60,706 individuals of diverse ancestries generated as part of the Exome Aggregation Consortium (ExAC). This catalogue of human genetic diversity contains an average of one variant every eight bases of the exome, and provides direct evidence for the presence of widespread mutational recurrence. We have used this catalogue to calculate objective metrics of pathogenicity for sequence variants, and to identify genes subject to strong selection against various classes of mutation; identifying 3,230 genes with near-complete depletion of predicted protein-truncating variants, with 72% of these genes having no currently established human disease phenotype. Finally, we demonstrate that these data can be used for the efficient filtering of candidate disease-causing variants, and for the discovery of human 'knockout' variants in protein-coding genes. [Emphasis added.]
Out of this high ratio of variants (one in eight basis shows variation, they said), there should be some proportion, even if small, that improves fitness. But we search the paper in vain for any mention of beneficial mutations. There's plenty of talk about disease. The authors only mention "neutral" variants twice. But there are no mentions of beneficial mutations. You can't find one instance of any of these words: benefit, beneficial, fitness, advantage (in terms of mutation), improvement, innovation, invention, or positive selection.
They mention all kinds of harmful effects from most variants: missense and nonsense variants, frameshift mutations, proteins that get truncated on translation, and a multitude of insertions and deletions. Quite a few are known to cause diseases. There are probably many more mutations that never survive to birth. As for natural selection, the authors do speak of "negative selection" and "purifying selection" weeding out the harmful mutations, but nowhere do they mention anything worthwhile that positive selection appears to be preserving.
Jay Shendure had participated in an earlier exome sequencing project on just 12 individuals. That was only seven years ago -- an indication of the rapidity of progress in sequencing technology. In Nature, he shares his thoughts on the significance of ExAC, which is 5,000 times larger than his team's effort was. He mentions "fitness." Watch for it!
More than half of the approximately 7.5 million variants found by ExAC are seen only once. But collectively, they occur at a remarkably high density -- at one out of every eight sites in the exome. For each gene, the authors contrasted the expected and observed numbers of variants that cause the production of truncated proteins, to search for regions containing lower-than-predicted levels of protein-truncating variants. This allowed them to identify several thousand genes that are highly sensitive to such variants -- that is, unable to function normally after loss of one copy of the gene, even if the other copy is intact. Most of these genes have not yet been associated with disease, but mutation probably leads to embryonic death or strongly affects fitness in some other way. These genes are also intolerant of variants in regulatory DNA sequences that markedly alter levels of RNA synthesis from the gene, and are more likely than other genes to be implicated in genome-wide association studies of common disease.
Does he know of any variant that "strongly effects fitness in some other way" than embryonic death? If so, he would have listed it. Instead, all both papers talk about are disease, death, and intolerance to change. The amount of variability is indeed quite high, and the people who donated their genes to the project were alive in spite of their variants. But they sure don't appear to be improving in any measurable way. Natural selection has plenty of bad variation to reject, but not much to add up and preserve.
Darwinians could argue that ExAC is not a large enough sample. We would need millions of exomes, or preferably whole genomes, to find the elusive beneficial mutations. That could be. As technology improves rapidly, perhaps we'll find out before long. However, Doug Axe shows why this is unlikely.
Axe discusses sample sizes. His lab experience with protein folds leads him to the empirically supported conclusion that the sequence space for proteins (and the genes that encode them) is so fantastically large that blind search is hopelessly inadequate to find the good variants. And since natural selection cannot invent things, that's all it has to work with. Remember, mutations are random. Finding good mutations is far less probable in a blind search than throwing a dart blindfolded from space and hitting a pre-specified target one millimeter in diameter. When the search space is "fantastically large," adding more darts won't help. You run into physical limits of time and energy cost.
For those who complain that Axe relies on intuition with his subtitle "How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed," rest assured that he does not (as he explains in a video here). The book is loaded with scientific evidence supporting design. He just shows that the "universal design intuition" common to humans from earliest childhood is scientifically correct in this case: when we see things that take knowledge to build, we know intuitively that someone had to have that knowledge. The news from ExAC provides additional empirical support for his contention that genes, proteins, and life are not fortuitous consequences of blind searches for good things. They look designed because they are designed.
Is the grass really greener?
A new study from medical researchers at Harvard and Northwestern shows that 18- to 25-year-olds who smoke marijuana—even just recreationally!—had marked abnormalities in areas of their brains that regulate emotion and motivation
For those young people — and their parents — who think that smoking pot in moderation isn’t harmful, it’s time to think again.
A study released this week by researchers from Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine and Harvard Medical School has found that 18- to 25-year-olds who smoke marijuana only recreationally showed significant abnormalities in the brain.
“There is this general perspective out there that using marijuana recreationally is not a problem — that it is a safe drug,” says Anne Blood, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and the co-senior author of the study, which is being published in the Journal of Neuroscience. “We are seeing that this is not the case.”
The scientists say theirs is the first study to examine the relationship between casual use of marijuana in young people and pot’s effects on two parts of the brain that regulate emotion and motivation. As such, it is sure to challenge many people’s assumptions that smoking a joint or two on the weekends is no big deal.
It has certainly challenged mine. In a piece earlier this year, based on other research from Northwestern on the effects of heavy marijuana use, I suggested that young people should hold off on smoking pot as long as possible because their brains are still developing and the earlier the drug is taken up, the worse the effects. That remains good advice. Yet the truth is, I’ve not only been telling my own 16-year-old son to hold off, I’ve also been counseling him that should he ever decide to use pot, he should do so with temperance.
This “everything in moderation” mantra has always struck me as more realistic than preaching total abstinence. Baked into my message, meanwhile, has been the implicit belief that smoking a little weed on the weekends is no worse than having a few beers — a notion that many Americans apparently share.
A nationwide NBC/Wall Street Journal poll conducted last month found that only 8% of adults think that marijuana is the most harmful substance to a person’s overall health when lined up against tobacco, alcohol and sugar. In contrast, 49% of those surveyed rated tobacco as the most harmful on the list, while 24% mentioned alcohol. Notably, even sugar — at 15% — was considered more harmful than pot.
The new Northwestern-Harvard study punches a hole in this conventional wisdom. Through three different methods of neuroimaging analysis, the scientists examined the brains of 40 young adult students from Boston-area colleges: 20 who smoked marijuana casually — four times a week on average — and 20 who didn’t use pot at all.
Each group consisted of nine males and 11 females. The pot users underwent a psychiatric interview to confirm that they were not heavy or dependent marijuana users.
“We looked specifically at people who have no adverse impacts from marijuana — no problems with work, school, the law, relationships, no addiction issues,” says Hans Breiter, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Feinberg School and co–senior author of the study.
The scientists examined two key parts of the brain — the nucleus accumbens and the amygdala, which together help control whether people judge things to be rewarding or aversive and, in turn, whether they experience pleasure or pain from them. It is the development of these regions of the brain, Breiter says, that allows young people to expand their horizons, helping them appreciate and enjoy new foods, music, books and relationships.
“This is a part of the brain that you absolutely never ever want to touch,” Breiter asserts. “I don’t want to say that these are magical parts of the brain — they are all important. But these are fundamental in terms of what people find pleasurable in the world and assessing that against the bad things.”
Breiter and his colleagues found that among all 20 casual marijuana smokers in their study — even the seven who smoked just one joint per week — the nucleus accumbens and amygdala showed changes in density, volume and shape. The scientists also discovered that the more pot the young people smoked, the greater the abnormalities.
The researchers acknowledge that their sample size was small and their study preliminary. More work, they say, needs to be done to understand the relationship between the changes to the brain they found and their impact on the day-to-day lives of young people who smoke marijuana casually.
“The next important step is to investigate how structural abnormalities relate to functional outcomes,” says Jodi Gilman, an instructor at Harvard Medical School who collaborated on the study.
This is especially important, she and her colleagues add, in light of the growing push to legalize recreational marijuana use across America. “People think a little marijuana shouldn’t cause a problem if someone is doing O.K. with work or school,” Breiter says. “Our data directly says this is not so.”
"If you’re a cannabis user and you’re trying for a baby ... stop."
This advice comes from Dr. Allan Pacey, senior lecturer in andrology at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom and lead author of a new study that suggests using marijuana could increase a man's risk of fertility problems.
The study, published in the journal Human Reproduction, looked at how a man's lifestyle affects his sperm morphology: the size and shape of sperm. Researchers collected data from 1,970 men who provided semen as part of a fertility assessment.
All of the lifestyle information was self-reported, and researchers made no attempt to confirm accuracy. Of those men, 318 produced abnormal sperm, where less than 4% of it was the correct size and shape (as defined by the World Health Organization). The remaining men's sperm had a higher percentage at a "normal" size and shape.
"Cannabis smoking was more common in those men who had sperm morphology less than 4%," Pacey said. "Cannabis affects one of the processes involved in determining size and shape. And we also know that the way cannabis is metabolized is different in fertile and infertile men."
The study found that men who had less than 4% normal sperm were typically under 30 years old, had used marijuana within three months of giving their sample and were twice as likely to have provided their sample during the summer.
Any of those factors could have influenced sperm morphology, but Pacey said "the only thing we found that was a risk that a man can do something about was cannabis."
The researchers did not set out to study cannabis; they were simply collecting data about men’s lifestyles to identify risks to fertility. They looked at a number of possibilities, including cigarettes, alcohol, recreational drug use, employment history, BMI, medical history and the type of underwear the men wore. The researchers concluded that none of these were factors.
A third of all infertility cases are linked to the male partner, according to theAmerican Society for Reproductive Medicine (PDF). The society says marijuana is associated with impaired sperm function and should not be used by men trying to conceive.
Society President Rebecca Sokol says the study confirms previous studies that found a possible but not proven link between abnormal semen and sperm function and the use of cannabis. But she warns that the study does not have enough cases to draw definite conclusions.
"The take-home lesson of the article is that clinicians should counsel their patients on the possible relationships between lifestyle factors, abnormal semen parameters and fertility outcomes," Sokol said. "This should include a discussion that the data are often inconclusive, but the motto 'everything in moderation' is a wise approach for the couple who is planning a pregnancy."
Another paper on the health consequences of cannabis was published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine. Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and a team of the institute's researchers prepared a paper detailing the risks based on the strongest scientific evidence currently available. According to the paper, they wanted to dispel "the popular notion that marijuana is a harmless pleasure" and does not need to be regulated.
The paper details what the research shows are the adverse effects of recreational use, including the risks of addiction. Approximately 9% of those who try marijuana will become addicted; one in six of those who start as teenagers and 25% to 50% of those who smoke daily become addicted.
The researchers also wrote about the harmful effects of cannabis use on brain development, especially in kids and teenagers. Preliminary research shows that adolescents who are early-onset smokers are slower at tasks, have lower IQs later in life and have an increased incidence of psychotic disorders.
Other problems associated with marijuana use, according to the paper, include impaired short-term memory and motor coordination, altered judgment, effects on school performance, a higher risk of motor-vehicle accidents and higher risk of cancer and other health issues like heart disease and stroke.
"There is a widespread and growing perception among not only youth, but the public in general, that marijuana is a relatively harmless drug, and it has been difficult marshaling science to correct this perception," Volkov said. "The science of marijuana is far from settled, and this has allowed advocates of various positions to cherry-pick evidence to support their particular stance."
The review also lists some of the potential therapeutic benefits of cannabis. Conditions and symptoms that may be helped by marijuana treatment include glaucoma, chronic pain, multiple sclerosis, epilepsy, nausea, inflammation and AIDS-related anorexia and wasting syndrome, according to the report.
Volkow and her fellow researchers fear that as governments begin to modify marijuana policy toward legalization, recreational use will increase, as will a host of negative health problems.
However, Mason Tvert, communications director at the Marijuana Policy Project, says the report by the National Institute on Drug abuse researchers is not an objective review of current scientific evidence.
The Marijuana Policy Project has worked to reform marijuana policies and laws since 1995 at both the federal and state level. It lobbies for legislation that would replace marijuana prohibition in favor of legal regulation. It provided much of the staff and funding in the push to legalize and regulate marijuana for adults 21 and older in Colorado in 2012, and its goal is to pass, by 2017, at least 10 more laws that would regulate cannabis like alcohol.
"NIDA has long been criticized for prioritizing politics over science," Tvert said. "They fail to acknowledge any of the well-known research that refutes, and in some cases completely debunks, their conclusions. This more closely resembles a poorly written college essay ... than it does an objective, evidence-based journal article. Every objective study on marijuana has concluded that it poses far less harm than alcohol to the consumer and to society."
Out of retirement:It's the blind watchmaker again.
Return of the Blind Watchmaker
Evolution News & Views
Oh, the power of metaphor. Richard Dawkins's "blind watchmaker" is back, tinkering in his workshop to make timepieces of elegant craftsmanship. Xiaojing Gao and Michael Elowitz from Caltech begin a piece in the science journal Nature like this:
Living cells keep track of time with exquisite precision, despite using molecular components that are subject to unavoidable random fluctuations, known as noise. For example, natural circadian clocks can track the time of day, even in single-celled cyanobacteria. Such clocks have been selected over evolutionary timescales for their precision, and thus can be thought of as a literal embodiment of the biologist Richard Dawkins' 'blind watchmaker' -- his analogy for evolution's ability to produce systems with astonishing capabilities. However, evolution is not the only way to make a biological clock. The field of synthetic biology is based on designing artificial genetic circuits to implement new functions in living cells. Can a synthetic clock rival the precision of its naturally evolved counterparts? Potvin-Trottier et al. demonstrate on page 514 that even a relatively simple synthetic clock circuit can be astonishingly precise. [Emphasis added.]
Just how precise the synthetic clock is we shall see in a moment, but we need to draw some distinctions first. The passage above confuses two very, very different concepts: intentionally designed things and "naturally evolved" things. Gao and Elowitz personify "evolution" as a maker -- a watch maker -- an entity with ability ("evolution's ability") and goal-seeking behavior ("to produce systems"). And they say that natural circadian clocks are not just a virtual instance of this phantom personage; they are a "literal embodiment" of him (or her). They have ascribed personhood to the clocks!
For clarity, we need to understand that the natural designer in this picture is not just blind. The "blind watchmaker" is also deaf, dumb, unfeeling, un-tasting, non-smelling, unthinking, careless, senseless, and dead. A more accurate analogy we used previously is to picture dead athletes on a track needing to run the high hurdles -- mile-high hurdles at that. The gun fires! They're off! But they won't get over the first hurdle unless a volcano erupts or an asteroid hits to launch them randomly into the air. You get the picture; adding "evolutionary timescales" to allow for more volcanos and asteroid impacts isn't going to help.
One cannot emphasize enough the distinction between natural processes and intelligent processes. This is where Dawkins and so many other evolutionists go wrong. They look backward from the finish line, see the scores on the scoreboard, and assume Darwinian processes won the race. They go to the jewelry store and see watches of exquisite precision, and assume the blind watchmaker crafted them. What we need to do is take them back to the starting line and ask them, "Using only the tools in your materialistic philosophy, can you get to the finish line?"
In Illustra's new film Origin, Paul Nelson explains the limitations of scientific materialism. To be consistent, materialists need to adhere to their own rules.
When you come to the origin of life, the rules -- and this is not the science itself, this is the underlying philosophy -- the rules say to solve the problem you can use matter and energy and natural law, natural irregularities and chance processes -- but that exhausts your toolkit. What you're not allowed to use fundamentally by the rules -- so-called rules of science -- is mind or intelligence.
These rules apply not just at the origin of life. They apply throughout the evolutionary story. Natural selection doesn't add something to these rules. It, too, is blind, deaf, dumb, and dead. When Gao and Elowitz say that "Such clocks have been selected over evolutionary timescales for their precision," they sneak intelligence back into their workshop, looking back from the finished product and envisioning their phantom designer, the blind watchmaker, having done the designing work. They fall into the same conundrum that plagued Darwin: how do I use terms that avoid design? Darwin was fully aware of the implied intelligence in his phrase "natural selection." For subsequent editions of The Origin, he was influenced by his friends to substitute "survival of the fittest."
Staying consistent with scientific materialism is hard. But to maintain clarity in the Darwin vs design debate, we must insist our colleagues on the Darwinian side use only their own tools. The moment they sneak intelligence or mind into the picture, an umpire must call foul. One of Dr. Phillip Johnson's key roles in the ID movement was to play umpire, calling out Darwinians who merely assumed that natural processes were capable of creating things that look designed. "Darwinists know that the mutation-selection mechanism can produce wings, eyes and brains not because the mechanism can be observed to do anything of the kind," he said, "but because their guiding philosophy assures them that no other power is available to do the job" (Darwin on Trial, p. 115).
As Gao and Elowitz describe the clever molecular timepiece that Potvin-Trottier et al. built, we find goal-directing intelligence at work. Here we observe living, breathing, thinking watchmakers, living athletes at the starting line, ready to leap the hurdles.
The starting point for the authors' work is a synthetic oscillating genetic circuit called the repressilator, now 16 years old. The repressilator, along with a contemporaneous synthetic toggle switch, showed that new genetic circuits could be designed from modular genetic elements and their behaviour analysed in living cells. More specifically, it showed that a totally synthetic circuit could generate dynamic oscillations in protein expression, making bacterial cells 'blink' on and off through periodic synthesis of a fluorescent reporter protein.
It's clever work, no doubt about it. We see the biochemical engineers tinker with elements to achieve greater precision. At the end of the story, they proudly show off their molecular oscillator, built with genes in a bacterial plasmid.
All told, in the most precise of Potvin-Trottier and colleagues' circuits, the standard deviation in period length was reduced from 35% of the mean to around 14%, with strikingly uniform pulse shapes and amplitudes observed. This repressilator generates a pulse of fluorescent-protein expression just once every 14 generations. Assuming a cell-cycle time of 1 hour, it would take around 7.5 days, or 180 cell cycles, for a colony of cells to accumulate a standard deviation of half a period of drift. This extraordinary precision means that even a large population of cells can remain in sync.
Well, compared to living cells, which remain in sync forever and calibrate themselves to the diurnal cycle, seasonal cycles and annual cycles, perhaps they boast overmuch. But it's a start.
Evidently, precision does not necessarily demand circuit complexity and, in this case, even seems to benefit from minimalism.
Yet this minimalism required the concentrated effort of four biophysicists from Harvard and Cambridge. While the feedback loops employ a relatively simple "scissors-paper-rock" concept, each component is made of complex genes encoding specified information. Each response must trigger the appropriate follow-up action. The concentration of each gene product has to be calibrated. Additional components have to be inserted to buffer noise in the circuit. There's a whole lot of design going on here.
That we can now design cells to operate with remarkable precision in the face of noise suggests that synthetic biologists are starting to become pretty good watchmakers, after all.
That's precisely the point. At the end of Origin, Timothy Standish makes the proper inference with simplicity and clarity.
There is nothing magical about living things. I'm a scientist. I don't really believe in magic. I believe in mechanisms and causes that are sufficient to achieve the phenomena that I observe. Intelligence is sufficient. Intelligence is necessary. Therefore, intelligence is the conclusion that I come to.
We know of a cause that can design circuits of remarkable precision, robust to noisy environments. That cause is intelligence. Synthetic biologists have it. Watchmakers have it. But the toolkit of scientific materialism lacks this crucial element.
Evolution News & Views
Oh, the power of metaphor. Richard Dawkins's "blind watchmaker" is back, tinkering in his workshop to make timepieces of elegant craftsmanship. Xiaojing Gao and Michael Elowitz from Caltech begin a piece in the science journal Nature like this:
Living cells keep track of time with exquisite precision, despite using molecular components that are subject to unavoidable random fluctuations, known as noise. For example, natural circadian clocks can track the time of day, even in single-celled cyanobacteria. Such clocks have been selected over evolutionary timescales for their precision, and thus can be thought of as a literal embodiment of the biologist Richard Dawkins' 'blind watchmaker' -- his analogy for evolution's ability to produce systems with astonishing capabilities. However, evolution is not the only way to make a biological clock. The field of synthetic biology is based on designing artificial genetic circuits to implement new functions in living cells. Can a synthetic clock rival the precision of its naturally evolved counterparts? Potvin-Trottier et al. demonstrate on page 514 that even a relatively simple synthetic clock circuit can be astonishingly precise. [Emphasis added.]
Just how precise the synthetic clock is we shall see in a moment, but we need to draw some distinctions first. The passage above confuses two very, very different concepts: intentionally designed things and "naturally evolved" things. Gao and Elowitz personify "evolution" as a maker -- a watch maker -- an entity with ability ("evolution's ability") and goal-seeking behavior ("to produce systems"). And they say that natural circadian clocks are not just a virtual instance of this phantom personage; they are a "literal embodiment" of him (or her). They have ascribed personhood to the clocks!
For clarity, we need to understand that the natural designer in this picture is not just blind. The "blind watchmaker" is also deaf, dumb, unfeeling, un-tasting, non-smelling, unthinking, careless, senseless, and dead. A more accurate analogy we used previously is to picture dead athletes on a track needing to run the high hurdles -- mile-high hurdles at that. The gun fires! They're off! But they won't get over the first hurdle unless a volcano erupts or an asteroid hits to launch them randomly into the air. You get the picture; adding "evolutionary timescales" to allow for more volcanos and asteroid impacts isn't going to help.
One cannot emphasize enough the distinction between natural processes and intelligent processes. This is where Dawkins and so many other evolutionists go wrong. They look backward from the finish line, see the scores on the scoreboard, and assume Darwinian processes won the race. They go to the jewelry store and see watches of exquisite precision, and assume the blind watchmaker crafted them. What we need to do is take them back to the starting line and ask them, "Using only the tools in your materialistic philosophy, can you get to the finish line?"
In Illustra's new film Origin, Paul Nelson explains the limitations of scientific materialism. To be consistent, materialists need to adhere to their own rules.
When you come to the origin of life, the rules -- and this is not the science itself, this is the underlying philosophy -- the rules say to solve the problem you can use matter and energy and natural law, natural irregularities and chance processes -- but that exhausts your toolkit. What you're not allowed to use fundamentally by the rules -- so-called rules of science -- is mind or intelligence.
These rules apply not just at the origin of life. They apply throughout the evolutionary story. Natural selection doesn't add something to these rules. It, too, is blind, deaf, dumb, and dead. When Gao and Elowitz say that "Such clocks have been selected over evolutionary timescales for their precision," they sneak intelligence back into their workshop, looking back from the finished product and envisioning their phantom designer, the blind watchmaker, having done the designing work. They fall into the same conundrum that plagued Darwin: how do I use terms that avoid design? Darwin was fully aware of the implied intelligence in his phrase "natural selection." For subsequent editions of The Origin, he was influenced by his friends to substitute "survival of the fittest."
Staying consistent with scientific materialism is hard. But to maintain clarity in the Darwin vs design debate, we must insist our colleagues on the Darwinian side use only their own tools. The moment they sneak intelligence or mind into the picture, an umpire must call foul. One of Dr. Phillip Johnson's key roles in the ID movement was to play umpire, calling out Darwinians who merely assumed that natural processes were capable of creating things that look designed. "Darwinists know that the mutation-selection mechanism can produce wings, eyes and brains not because the mechanism can be observed to do anything of the kind," he said, "but because their guiding philosophy assures them that no other power is available to do the job" (Darwin on Trial, p. 115).
As Gao and Elowitz describe the clever molecular timepiece that Potvin-Trottier et al. built, we find goal-directing intelligence at work. Here we observe living, breathing, thinking watchmakers, living athletes at the starting line, ready to leap the hurdles.
The starting point for the authors' work is a synthetic oscillating genetic circuit called the repressilator, now 16 years old. The repressilator, along with a contemporaneous synthetic toggle switch, showed that new genetic circuits could be designed from modular genetic elements and their behaviour analysed in living cells. More specifically, it showed that a totally synthetic circuit could generate dynamic oscillations in protein expression, making bacterial cells 'blink' on and off through periodic synthesis of a fluorescent reporter protein.
It's clever work, no doubt about it. We see the biochemical engineers tinker with elements to achieve greater precision. At the end of the story, they proudly show off their molecular oscillator, built with genes in a bacterial plasmid.
All told, in the most precise of Potvin-Trottier and colleagues' circuits, the standard deviation in period length was reduced from 35% of the mean to around 14%, with strikingly uniform pulse shapes and amplitudes observed. This repressilator generates a pulse of fluorescent-protein expression just once every 14 generations. Assuming a cell-cycle time of 1 hour, it would take around 7.5 days, or 180 cell cycles, for a colony of cells to accumulate a standard deviation of half a period of drift. This extraordinary precision means that even a large population of cells can remain in sync.
Well, compared to living cells, which remain in sync forever and calibrate themselves to the diurnal cycle, seasonal cycles and annual cycles, perhaps they boast overmuch. But it's a start.
Evidently, precision does not necessarily demand circuit complexity and, in this case, even seems to benefit from minimalism.
Yet this minimalism required the concentrated effort of four biophysicists from Harvard and Cambridge. While the feedback loops employ a relatively simple "scissors-paper-rock" concept, each component is made of complex genes encoding specified information. Each response must trigger the appropriate follow-up action. The concentration of each gene product has to be calibrated. Additional components have to be inserted to buffer noise in the circuit. There's a whole lot of design going on here.
That we can now design cells to operate with remarkable precision in the face of noise suggests that synthetic biologists are starting to become pretty good watchmakers, after all.
That's precisely the point. At the end of Origin, Timothy Standish makes the proper inference with simplicity and clarity.
There is nothing magical about living things. I'm a scientist. I don't really believe in magic. I believe in mechanisms and causes that are sufficient to achieve the phenomena that I observe. Intelligence is sufficient. Intelligence is necessary. Therefore, intelligence is the conclusion that I come to.
We know of a cause that can design circuits of remarkable precision, robust to noisy environments. That cause is intelligence. Synthetic biologists have it. Watchmakers have it. But the toolkit of scientific materialism lacks this crucial element.
Mr. Berlinski on the scientific establishments aspirations to godhood.
The Scientific Embrace of Atheism
David Berlinski
David Berlinski
At sometime after the Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin first entered space, stories began to circulate that he had been given secret instructions by the Politburo. Have a look around, they told him. Suitably instructed, Gagarin looked around. When he returned without having seen the face of God, satisfaction in high circles was considerable.
The commissars having vacated the scene, it is the scientific community that has acquired their authority. Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Stephen Weinberg, Vic Stenger, Sam Harris, and most recently the mathematician John Paulos, have had a look around: They haven't seen a thing. No one could have seen less.
It is curious that so many scientists should have recently embraced atheism. The great physical scientists — Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Clerk Maxwell, Albert Einstein — were either men of religious commitment or religious sensibility.
The distinguished physicist Steven Weinberg has acknowledged that this is what the great scientists believed: But we know better, he has insisted, because we know more.
This prompts the obvious question: Just what have scientists learned that might persuade the rest of us that they know better? It is not, presumably, the chemistry of Boron salts that has done the heavy lifting.
There is quantum cosmology, I suppose, a discipline in which the mysteries of quantum mechanics are devoted to the question of how the universe arose or whether it arose at all. This is the subject made popular in Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time. It is an undertaking radiant in its incoherence. Given the account of creation offered in Genesis and the account offered in A Brief History of Time, I know of no sane man who would hesitate between the two.
And there is Darwin's theory of evolution. It has been Darwin, Richard Dawkins remarked, that has made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.
A much better case might be made in the other direction. It is atheism that makes it possible for a man to be an intellectually fulfilled Darwinist. In the documentary Expelled, one of those curious exercises in which some scientists, at least, say what they really think, Ben Stein interviews a number of Darwinian biologists eager to evade the evidence whenever possible or to ignore it when not. Rich in self-satisfaction, Dawkins appears at the film's end.
How did life on earth arise?
The question, Dawkins acknowledges, is very difficult.
Perhaps the seeds of life were sent here from outer space?
It could well be.
Or by a vastly superior intelligence?
Well, yes.
Questions and their answers follow one another, but in the end Stein says nothing. There is no absurdity Dawkins is not prepared to embrace so long as he can avoid a transcendental inference.
Beyond quantum cosmology and Darwinian biology — the halt and the lame — there is the solemn metaphysical aura of science itself. It is precisely the aura to which so many scientists reverently appeal. The philosopher John Searle has seen the aura. The "universe," he has written, "consists of matter, and systems defined by causal relations."
Does it indeed? If so, then God must be nothing more than another material object, a class that includes stars, starlets and solitons. If not, what reason do we have to suppose that God might not exist?
We have no reason whatsoever. If neither the sciences nor its aura have demonstrated any conclusion of interest about the existence of God, why then is atheism valued among scientists?
It takes no very refined analytic effort to determine why Soviet Commissars should have regarded themselves as atheists. They were unwilling to countenance a power higher than their own. Who knows what mischief Soviet citizens might have conceived had they imagined that the Politburo was not, after all, infallible?
By the same token, it requires no very great analytic effort to understand why the scientific community should find atheism so attractive a doctrine. At a time when otherwise sober individuals are inclined to believe that too much of science is too much like a racket, it is only sensible for scientists to suggest aggressively that no power exceeds their own.
David Berlinski is the author of the recently released The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions, as well as many books about mathematics and the sciences. A Ph.D. from Princeton University, he has taught at colleges and universities in the United States and France, and now lives in Paris.
Isaac Newton on the trinity.
Newton on the Nature of the Godhead
Whosover will be saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold the Catholic Faith. Which Faith except everyone do keep whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly. . . . The Father Uncreate, the Son Uncreate, and the Holy Ghost Uncreate. The Father Incomprehensible, the Son Incomprehensible, and the Holy Ghost Incomprehensible. The Father Eternal, the Son Eternal, and the Holy Ghost Eternal and yet they are not Three Eternals but One Eternal. As also there are not Three Uncreated, nor Three Incomprehensibles, but One Uncreated, and One Uncomprehensible. . . . So there is one Father, not three Fathers; one Son, not three Sons; one Holy Ghost, not three Holy Ghosts. And in this Trinity none is afore or after Other, None is greater or less than Another, but the whole Three Persons are Co-eternal together, and co-equal. So that in all things, as is aforesaid, the Unity in Trinity and the Trinity in Unity is to be worshipped. He therefore that will be saved, must thus think of the Trinity. [Charles G. Herbermann and others, eds., The Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: The Universal Knowledge Foundation, 1907), s.v. Athanasian Creed.]
For Newton this was simply not logical. He wrote, “Let them make good sense of it who are able; for my part, I can make none.” [Isaac Newton, Two Notable Corruptions of the Scriptures (part 1: ff. 1–41), ms. 361(4).]
Newton Rejects 1 John 5:7
Newton wrote a long article about the passage found in 1 John 5:7 in the King James Version, which indeed sounds a bit like the Athanasian Creed: “For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost; and these three are one” (1 John 5:7). Not satisfied with this passage, Newton went back and read the text of the Vulgate as well as the original Greek. He showed that the words “in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost; and these three are one” did not appear in the original Greek manuscripts. He wrote that the phrase “was neither in the ancient Versions nor in the Greek but was wholly unknown to the first churches, is most certain by an argument hinted above; namely that in all that vehement, universal, and lasting controversy about the Trinity in Jerome’s time, and both before and long enough after it, this text of the Three in Heaven was never thought of. It is now in everybody’s mouth and accounted the main text for the business [of supporting the Trinitarian dogma].” Newton concluded, based on early texts of the Bible, that 1 John 5:7 was a later addition. He also wrote, “That apostasy was to begin by corrupting the truth about the relation of the Son to the Father in putting them equal.” [Isaac Newton, Untitled Treatise on Revelation (section 1.4), Yahuda Ms. 1.4, 158r, Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem, ]
Scholars today agree that 1 John 5:7 is indeed spurious based on the same arguments that Newton used. The passage is not found in any early Greek manuscript, and it is not quoted by Greek Fathers, who, if they had known it, would certainly have used it in the Trinitarian controversies of the fourth century AD. [Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart: German Bible Society, 1994), 647–49.]
Just how did Newton apply his scientific approach in his religious studies? A prime example comes from his studies of the nature of God, which he based on the scriptures combined with the teachings of the early writers of the Christian church. Newton saw two major flaws in the Christian doctrine of the Trinity: it was unsupported from the scriptures and it was illogical. (White, Isaac Newton, 152.)Newton used scriptural passages to demonstrate that the Trinitarian doctrine was incorrect, and that the scriptures instead taught that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost are separate and distinct beings, three members of the Godhead. For example, the Son confessed that the Father was greater than him (Drafts on the history of the Church (Section 3), Yahuda Ms. 15.3, 47v., National Library of Israel, Jerusalem, )and called him his God. (Isaac Newton, Drafts on the history of the Church (Section 7), Yahuda Ms. 15.7, 154r, National Library of Israel, Jerusalem,) The Son also acknowledged the original prescience of all future things to be in the Father only. (Isaac Newton, Drafts on the history of the Church (Section 3), Yahuda Ms. 15.3, 66r.)Newton especially took exception to the Athanasian Creed, which was the first creed in which the equality of the three persons of the Trinity was explicitly stated. It is now generally accepted by scholars that Athanasius was not its author and that it most likely dates from the late fifth or even early sixth century AD—at least one hundred years after Athanasius. (Frederick W. Norris, “Athanasian Creed,” in Encyclopedia of Early Christianity, 2nd ed., ed. Everett Fergusen (New York: Garland, 1997); Michael O’Carroll, “Athanasian Creed,” in Trinitas (Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1987); Concordia Triglotta (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1921), 13.)The text of the Athanasian Creed follows:
Whosover will be saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold the Catholic Faith. Which Faith except everyone do keep whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly. . . . The Father Uncreate, the Son Uncreate, and the Holy Ghost Uncreate. The Father Incomprehensible, the Son Incomprehensible, and the Holy Ghost Incomprehensible. The Father Eternal, the Son Eternal, and the Holy Ghost Eternal and yet they are not Three Eternals but One Eternal. As also there are not Three Uncreated, nor Three Incomprehensibles, but One Uncreated, and One Uncomprehensible. . . . So there is one Father, not three Fathers; one Son, not three Sons; one Holy Ghost, not three Holy Ghosts. And in this Trinity none is afore or after Other, None is greater or less than Another, but the whole Three Persons are Co-eternal together, and co-equal. So that in all things, as is aforesaid, the Unity in Trinity and the Trinity in Unity is to be worshipped. He therefore that will be saved, must thus think of the Trinity. [Charles G. Herbermann and others, eds., The Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: The Universal Knowledge Foundation, 1907), s.v. Athanasian Creed.]
For Newton this was simply not logical. He wrote, “Let them make good sense of it who are able; for my part, I can make none.” [Isaac Newton, Two Notable Corruptions of the Scriptures (part 1: ff. 1–41), ms. 361(4).]
Newton Rejects 1 John 5:7
Newton wrote a long article about the passage found in 1 John 5:7 in the King James Version, which indeed sounds a bit like the Athanasian Creed: “For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost; and these three are one” (1 John 5:7). Not satisfied with this passage, Newton went back and read the text of the Vulgate as well as the original Greek. He showed that the words “in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost; and these three are one” did not appear in the original Greek manuscripts. He wrote that the phrase “was neither in the ancient Versions nor in the Greek but was wholly unknown to the first churches, is most certain by an argument hinted above; namely that in all that vehement, universal, and lasting controversy about the Trinity in Jerome’s time, and both before and long enough after it, this text of the Three in Heaven was never thought of. It is now in everybody’s mouth and accounted the main text for the business [of supporting the Trinitarian dogma].” Newton concluded, based on early texts of the Bible, that 1 John 5:7 was a later addition. He also wrote, “That apostasy was to begin by corrupting the truth about the relation of the Son to the Father in putting them equal.” [Isaac Newton, Untitled Treatise on Revelation (section 1.4), Yahuda Ms. 1.4, 158r, Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem, ]
Scholars today agree that 1 John 5:7 is indeed spurious based on the same arguments that Newton used. The passage is not found in any early Greek manuscript, and it is not quoted by Greek Fathers, who, if they had known it, would certainly have used it in the Trinitarian controversies of the fourth century AD. [Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart: German Bible Society, 1994), 647–49.]
On higher education IV
The disposable academic
Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time
ON THE evening before All Saints' Day in 1517, Martin Luther nailed 95 theses to the door of a church in Wittenberg. In those days a thesis was simply a position one wanted to argue. Luther, an Augustinian friar, asserted that Christians could not buy their way to heaven. Today a doctoral thesis is both an idea and an account of a period of original research. Writing one is the aim of the hundreds of thousands of students who embark on a doctorate of philosophy (PhD) every year.
In most countries a PhD is a basic requirement for a career in academia. It is an introduction to the world of independent research—a kind of intellectual masterpiece, created by an apprentice in close collaboration with a supervisor. The requirements to complete one vary enormously between countries, universities and even subjects. Some students will first have to spend two years working on a master's degree or diploma. Some will receive a stipend; others will pay their own way. Some PhDs involve only research, some require classes and examinations and some require the student to teach undergraduates. A thesis can be dozens of pages in mathematics, or many hundreds in history. As a result, newly minted PhDs can be as young as their early 20s or world-weary forty-somethings.
One thing many PhD students have in common is dissatisfaction. Some describe their work as “slave labour”. Seven-day weeks, ten-hour days, low pay and uncertain prospects are widespread. You know you are a graduate student, goes one quip, when your office is better decorated than your home and you have a favourite flavour of instant noodle. “It isn't graduate school itself that is discouraging,” says one student, who confesses to rather enjoying the hunt for free pizza. “What's discouraging is realising the end point has been yanked out of reach.”
Whining PhD students are nothing new, but there seem to be genuine problems with the system that produces research doctorates (the practical “professional doctorates” in fields such as law, business and medicine have a more obvious value). There is an oversupply of PhDs. Although a doctorate is designed as training for a job in academia, the number of PhD positions is unrelated to the number of job openings. Meanwhile, business leaders complain about shortages of high-level skills, suggesting PhDs are not teaching the right things. The fiercest critics compare research doctorates to Ponzi or pyramid schemes.
For most of history even a first degree at a university was the privilege of a rich few, and many academic staff did not hold doctorates. But as higher education expanded after the second world war, so did the expectation that lecturers would hold advanced degrees. American universities geared up first: by 1970 America was producing just under a third of the world's university students and half of its science and technology PhDs (at that time it had only 6% of the global population). Since then America's annual output of PhDs has doubled, to 64,000.
Other countries are catching up. Between 1998 and 2006 the number of doctorates handed out in all OECD countries grew by 40%, compared with 22% for America. PhD production sped up most dramatically in Mexico, Portugal, Italy and Slovakia. Even Japan, where the number of young people is shrinking, churned out about 46% more PhDs. Part of that growth reflects the expansion of university education outside America. Richard Freeman, a labour economist at Harvard University, says that by 2006 America was enrolling just 12% of the world's students.
But universities have discovered that PhD students are cheap, highly motivated and disposable labour. With more PhD students they can do more research, and in some countries more teaching, with less money. A graduate assistant at Yale might earn $20,000 a year for nine months of teaching. The average pay of full professors in America was $109,000 in 2009—higher than the average for judges and magistrates.
Indeed, the production of PhDs has far outstripped demand for university lecturers. In a recent book, Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, an academic and a journalist, report that America produced more than 100,000 doctoral degrees between 2005 and 2009. In the same period there were just 16,000 new professorships. Using PhD students to do much of the undergraduate teaching cuts the number of full-time jobs. Even in Canada, where the output of PhD graduates has grown relatively modestly, universities conferred 4,800 doctorate degrees in 2007 but hired just 2,616 new full-time professors. Only a few fast-developing countries, such as Brazil and China, now seem short of PhDs.
In research the story is similar. PhD students and contract staff known as “postdocs”, described by one student as “the ugly underbelly of academia”, do much of the research these days. There is a glut of postdocs too. Dr Freeman concluded from pre-2000 data that if American faculty jobs in the life sciences were increasing at 5% a year, just 20% of students would land one. In Canada 80% of postdocs earn $38,600 or less per year before tax—the average salary of a construction worker. The rise of the postdoc has created another obstacle on the way to an academic post. In some areas five years as a postdoc is now a prerequisite for landing a secure full-time job.
These armies of low-paid PhD researchers and postdocs boost universities', and therefore countries', research capacity. Yet that is not always a good thing. Brilliant, well-trained minds can go to waste when fashions change. The post-Sputnik era drove the rapid growth in PhD physicists that came to an abrupt halt as the Vietnam war drained the science budget. Brian Schwartz, a professor of physics at the City University of New York, says that in the 1970s as many as 5,000 physicists had to find jobs in other areas.
In America the rise of PhD teachers' unions reflects the breakdown of an implicit contract between universities and PhD students: crummy pay now for a good academic job later. Student teachers in public universities such as the University of Wisconsin-Madison formed unions as early as the 1960s, but the pace of unionisation has increased recently. Unions are now spreading to private universities; though Yale and Cornell, where university administrators and some faculty argue that PhD students who teach are not workers but apprentices, have resisted union drives. In 2002 New York University was the first private university to recognise a PhD teachers' union, but stopped negotiating with it three years later.
In some countries, such as Britain and America, poor pay and job prospects are reflected in the number of foreign-born PhD students. Dr Freeman estimates that in 1966 only 23% of science and engineering PhDs in America were awarded to students born outside the country. By 2006 that proportion had increased to 48%. Foreign students tend to tolerate poorer working conditions, and the supply of cheap, brilliant, foreign labour also keeps wages down.
A PhD may offer no financial benefit over a master's degree. It can even reduce earnings
Proponents of the PhD argue that it is worthwhile even if it does not lead to permanent academic employment. Not every student embarks on a PhD wanting a university career and many move successfully into private-sector jobs in, for instance, industrial research. That is true; but drop-out rates suggest that many students become dispirited. In America only 57% of doctoral students will have a PhD ten years after their first date of enrolment. In the humanities, where most students pay for their own PhDs, the figure is 49%. Worse still, whereas in other subject areas students tend to jump ship in the early years, in the humanities they cling like limpets before eventually falling off. And these students started out as the academic cream of the nation. Research at one American university found that those who finish are no cleverer than those who do not. Poor supervision, bad job prospects or lack of money cause them to run out of steam.
Even graduates who find work outside universities may not fare all that well. PhD courses are so specialised that university careers offices struggle to assist graduates looking for jobs, and supervisors tend to have little interest in students who are leaving academia. One OECD study shows that five years after receiving their degrees, more than 60% of PhDs in Slovakia and more than 45% in Belgium, the Czech Republic, Germany and Spain were still on temporary contracts. Many were postdocs. About one-third of Austria's PhD graduates take jobs unrelated to their degrees. In Germany 13% of all PhD graduates end up in lowly occupations. In the Netherlands the proportion is 21%.
PhD graduates do at least earn more than those with a bachelor's degree. A study in the Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management by Bernard Casey shows that British men with a bachelor's degree earn 14% more than those who could have gone to university but chose not to. The earnings premium for a PhD is 26%. But the premium for a master's degree, which can be accomplished in as little as one year, is almost as high, at 23%. In some subjects the premium for a PhD vanishes entirely. PhDs in maths and computing, social sciences and languages earn no more than those with master's degrees. The premium for a PhD is actually smaller than for a master's degree in engineering and technology, architecture and education. Only in medicine, other sciences, and business and financial studies is it high enough to be worthwhile. Over all subjects, a PhD commands only a 3% premium over a master's degree.
Dr Schwartz, the New York physicist, says the skills learned in the course of a PhD can be readily acquired through much shorter courses. Thirty years ago, he says, Wall Street firms realised that some physicists could work out differential equations and recruited them to become “quants”, analysts and traders. Today several short courses offer the advanced maths useful for finance. “A PhD physicist with one course on differential equations is not competitive,” says Dr Schwartz.
Many students say they are pursuing their subject out of love, and that education is an end in itself. Some give little thought to where the qualification might lead. In one study of British PhD graduates, about a third admitted that they were doing their doctorate partly to go on being a student, or put off job hunting. Nearly half of engineering students admitted to this. Scientists can easily get stipends, and therefore drift into doing a PhD. But there are penalties, as well as benefits, to staying at university. Workers with “surplus schooling”—more education than a job requires—are likely to be less satisfied, less productive and more likely to say they are going to leave their jobs.
The interests of universities and tenured academics are misaligned with those of PhD students
Academics tend to regard asking whether a PhD is worthwhile as analogous to wondering whether there is too much art or culture in the world. They believe that knowledge spills from universities into society, making it more productive and healthier. That may well be true; but doing a PhD may still be a bad choice for an individual.
The interests of academics and universities on the one hand and PhD students on the other are not well aligned. The more bright students stay at universities, the better it is for academics. Postgraduate students bring in grants and beef up their supervisors' publication records. Academics pick bright undergraduate students and groom them as potential graduate students. It isn't in their interests to turn the smart kids away, at least at the beginning. One female student spoke of being told of glowing opportunities at the outset, but after seven years of hard slog she was fobbed off with a joke about finding a rich husband.
Monica Harris, a professor of psychology at the University of Kentucky, is a rare exception. She believes that too many PhDs are being produced, and has stopped admitting them. But such unilateral academic birth control is rare. One Ivy-League president, asked recently about PhD oversupply, said that if the top universities cut back others will step in to offer them instead.
Many of the drawbacks of doing a PhD are well known. Your correspondent was aware of them over a decade ago while she slogged through a largely pointless PhD in theoretical ecology. As Europeans try to harmonise higher education, some institutions are pushing the more structured learning that comes with an American PhD.
The organisations that pay for research have realised that many PhDs find it tough to transfer their skills into the job market. Writing lab reports, giving academic presentations and conducting six-month literature reviews can be surprisingly unhelpful in a world where technical knowledge has to be assimilated quickly and presented simply to a wide audience. Some universities are now offering their PhD students training in soft skills such as communication and teamwork that may be useful in the labour market. In Britain a four-year NewRoutePhD claims to develop just such skills in graduates.
Measurements and incentives might be changed, too. Some university departments and academics regard numbers of PhD graduates as an indicator of success and compete to produce more. For the students, a measure of how quickly those students get a permanent job, and what they earn, would be more useful. Where penalties are levied on academics who allow PhDs to overrun, the number of students who complete rises abruptly, suggesting that students were previously allowed to fester.
Many of those who embark on a PhD are the smartest in their class and will have been the best at everything they have done. They will have amassed awards and prizes. As this year's new crop of graduate students bounce into their research, few will be willing to accept that the system they are entering could be designed for the benefit of others, that even hard work and brilliance may well not be enough to succeed, and that they would be better off doing something else. They might use their research skills to look harder at the lot of the disposable academic. Someone should write a thesis about that.
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