The fossil record v. Darwin once more.

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Digital currency: The future of money?

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Analog is back in the game?

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Darwinian occultism produces yet another Zombie.

Zombie Science: Miller-Urey Experiment Is Back from the Dead, Barely

David Coppedge

 

 

With the flasks, tubes, and sparks, the Miller-Urey experiment of 1953 was too good a propaganda visual to let die. This story of what biologist Jonathan Wells calls zombie science should have died the year it went viral, because Harold Urey and Stanley Miller, both well-informed biochemists, knew well that the formation of a few simple amino acids was a far, far cry from a living cell. 

They observed the tar of toxic byproducts that formed in the flask. By trapping out the products they wanted, they committed investigator interference. Scientifically speaking, the Miller experiment was a non-starter. Then later, when the atmosphere they used was called into question, the evolutionary icon was doubly dead. 

Now It’s Back

But only twitching on the table. Three geophysicists from the Technical University of Denmark, writing in Geophysical Research Letters, simulated the requirements to light sparks in the assumed prebiotic atmosphere. They used Miller’s original mixture and the revised mixture by Kasting (1993) that was more weakly reducing than Miller’s mixture of hydrogen, methane, and water vapor. The results were not encouraging. The possibility of spark generation is too doubtful to raise the Miller-Urey zombie to walking position.

In the 1950s Miller and Urey performed discharge experiments in a gas mixture resembling the atmosphere of Ancient Earth and showed that a significant amount of prebiotic material was produced, possibly laying the foundation for the further synthesis of the first biomolecules. We perform numerical computer simulations of electron avalanches in the gas mixture used by Miller and Urey as well as in a mixture suggested more recently for the composition of Ancient Earth’s atmosphere 3.8 Ga ago and study the conditions needed for the inception of filamentary discharges. We calculate electron and discharge properties and compare them with results for discharges on Modern Earth…. Our simulations show that discharges in the Miller-Urey mixture incept at lower fields than in Kasting’s mixture and partly on Modern Earth which implies that discharges in the atmosphere of Ancient Earth might have been more challenging to incept than previously thought. [Emphasis added.]

No sparks; no amino acids. No amino acids, no life. Perhaps some molecules would form from UV light or cosmic rays, but those energy sources lack the pizzazz of sparks. The textbook cartoons would be boring without those blue sparks in the flask. Everybody seems to have assumed that sparks in the flask were a good proxy for sparks in a prebiotic atmosphere. One should never assume such a key piece of the story without evidence. These authors believe it “might have been more challenging… than previously thought.”

What Did the Team Accomplish?

It’s not clear what the team accomplished if anything. They didn’t operate a Miller-type setup. They didn’t try instigating discharges in Miller’s strongly reducing atmosphere, nor in the weakly reducing atmosphere revised by Kasting in 1993 to be more plausible for the prebiotic Earth. That atmosphere eliminated the methane and hydrogen from the mix and relied primarily on nitrogen and carbon dioxide. Neither did they try getting sparks to start in a modern Earth atmosphere, although lightning is a common observation to us all. In fact, they admit that they don’t even know how lightning starts in our modern atmosphere.

Since it is known for Modern Earth that the large-scale electric fields in thunderstorms are in the order of 0.1E_k, hence seemingly too low for streamers and subsequently for lightning to occur, it is still an enigma how lightning can occur on Modern Earth (Dubinova et al., 2015; Gurevich & Karashtin, 2013). Thus, although the difference in the streamer inception electric field is rather small, it could potentially make a big difference on how efficiently streamers incept. Nonetheless, it is more difficult to incept streamers as precursors of lightning in the weakly reducing Kasting mixture than in the mixture used by Miller and Urey or in modern day air. On the contrary, in local environments, with a significant contribution of methane and ammonia, it might be easier to incept streamers, to observe discharges and maybe even create prebiotic molecules.

Might? Maybe? 

All they did was create a computer model of the requirements for streamer formation that might initiate the avalanche of electrons we call lightning. Once again, they say it was probably more challenging than thought: 

We provide a table summarizing the electric fields needed for discharge inception in these different atmospheres. Our simulations show that discharges in the Miller-Urey mixture incept at lower fields than in Kasting’s mixture and partly on Modern Earth which implies that discharges in the atmosphere of Ancient Earth might have been more challenging to incept than previously thought.

Without performing experiments, and without calibrating the conditions required for spark inception, their model is basically useless. So, what did their paper achieve? 

PR for Their Work

The only motivation that seems apparent was to get some PR for their work by tying it to the Miller-Urey experiment. In Icons of Evolution (2000), Jonathan Wells summarily executed the Miller-Urey experiment as having any relevance to the origin of life, but it didn’t stay dead. He slew it again in Zombie Science (2017). Now, again, the dead theory makes another appearance in the academic literature of the American Geophysical Union. It’s too popular to let go. Google search on “Miller-Urey” and scroll through dozens of illustrations. The focal point of them all is the spark in the flask.

Use of the wrong atmosphere is just one of an array of showstoppers that kill the Miller-Urey experiment. Others include chirality, probability, damaging cross-reactions, lack of most of the amino acid species that exist in life, and the lack of other requirements for life: a membrane, metabolism, and genetics. As if overkill were needed, this paper removes the assumption that sparks were available to get the celebrated “building blocks of life” in the first place. 

The Miller-Urey experiment is dead, dead, dead. Its promoters keep it walking with special effects, not science.

For more on problems with the Miller-Urey experiment, see also:

• Thaxton et al., The Mystery of Life’s Origin: The Continuing Controversy (2020)
• Intelligent Design in a Nutshell (2020), Chapter 2
• Meyer, Signature in the Cell (2009)
• Evolution News, “A New Flaw in the Miller-Urey Experiment, and a Few Old Ones” (2022)
• Documentary film, Origin: How Did Life on Earth Begin? by Illustra Media (2016)
• Video, Long Story Short: Origin of Life (2021)
  

 

Darwin:Prophet of the Alt-wrong?

Ties that Bind: The Alt-Right’s Connections to Social Darwinist Madison Grant and Eugenics

Gary Varner

 

In his new book Darwinian Racism: How Darwinism Influenced Hitler, Nazism, and White Nationalism, historian Richard Weikart devotes a chapter to explaining the continuing influence of Darwinian racism in American society today, including its connection to the “Alt-Right.” It’s a topic that we’ve covered before at Evolution News, but it deserves more attention. 

Unfortunately, in recent years the term Alt-Right has been misused as something of a catch-all for “conservatism.” That’s a slander. Most conservatives have nothing to do with the actual Alt-Right. In reality, the Alt-Right has an ideology of its own, a mix of both left-leaning and right-leaning elements. But their various positions are united by one belief: that the white race is genetically superior. And as Weikart points, they draw toxic inspiration from the claims of Darwinian biology.

Understanding the Alt-Right

In claiming that the white race is superior, Alt-Right articles and podcasts cite certain early 20th-century social Darwinists. Three of these thinkers are Madison Grant, Sir Francis Galton, and Lothrop Stoddard. The last of these three, perhaps a less familiar name, served as a director for Margaret Sanger’s Planned Parenthood. 

The ideas of the social Darwinists permeate the Alt-Right ideology. Some years ago Richard Spencer, an Alt-Right writer — most notably recognized for his role in the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” demonstration in 2017 — interviewed thinker and painter Jonathan Bowden on Spencer’s podcast Vanguard. The episode is titled “The E Word: Eugenics & Environmentalism, Madison Grant & Lothrop Stoddard.” During their interview, Spencer and Bowden not only detail the history of the eugenics movement, they defend it, even attempting to connect eugenics with both abortion and environmentalism, using Grant as their justification. They argue that if the Left could only embrace the notion that some men and women are genetically inferior, then they could deal with the environment effectively.

Academic Language and a Harsh Message

During the podcast, Bowden states: 

…if one eschews the politics of human rights in a grandstanding and universalist way and sees human identity and glory in very much an individual or localized manner then deep green and ecological ideas have a lot to say to all forms of conservativism that wish to preserve and restore as against that which is transitory and that which is to our end and which is purely and only concerned with human life to the detriment of the ecology without which mankind couldn’t subsist. 

These men have a habit of using academic language to mask their harsh message. What he’s basically saying is that if we’d just get rid of this troublesome notion of human rights, we could deal with overpopulation and save the environment. 

When it comes to abortion, both Bowden and Spencer consider it a backwards form of eugenics. As Spencer explains, “they [the elites] are in some ways pursuing negative eugenics in the sense that they are certainly much more willing to abort a child with Down syndrome or so on, and that, of course, can be discovered in the womb. In some ways, one could also suggest that eugenics is still living on.” 

Bowden adds:

I also think it’s important to realize that essentially what’s happened is that two concepts have been conflated into one another in order to summarily dispatch both. This is the idea of eugenics as against dysgenics. Dysgenics, which is, if you like, the negative side of eugenics whereby you act though as to prevent harm, but you also act as to, in some senses, prevent life through abortion or through selective contraceptive use or through sterilization. The proactive and yet sort of snip-oriented and negative side of eugenics is its really controversial feature. The wholesome side, the building people up, the tonics for the brave sort of side, is one which only the most… nihilistic and sordid Left-winger would be opposed to, because they find nauseous the idea of happy, athletic, intellectually precocious families beaming for the camera in an Osmonds-like way, you know.  

Both Bowden and Spencer blame the public’s rejection of eugenics on the move away from Galton’s understanding of Darwinism after the Second World War. Spencer says, “…you were talking about the academic side of this issue and the fact that so many of these researchers who were quite predisposed to Galton, Darwinism, eugenics that switched. Is that part of the so-called Boasian revolution in anthropology? What I mean by that is, of course, Franz Boas, who was a sworn enemy of Madison Grant.”

Bowden affirms Spencer’s suspicion and then adds a revealing statement about the motives behind this switch. He comments, “Yes, I do think it happened in a certain context though. I think that people who supported eugenics found that unless they found a different vocabulary for it their support couldn’t be sustained in polite society.”

Eugenics as a Worthy Practice

Regarding this switch, the two conclude their conversation when Spencer says, “When you had baby boomers and our generation, you were essentially having people who were influenced by Boasian anthropology. They did not think in terms of Galton and let’s call it classical Darwinism. Really those people lost the battle, and this is the reason why eugenics kind of vanished after the Second World War.”   

These two think eugenics was a worthy practice and they lament that it is no longer openly used. Spencer summarizes his thoughts on the subject:

What do you think about our unique ability to reclaim conservationism or naturalism and how, much like Grant, that should be a major cause for us, which is to keep the world green and beautiful and to fight things like the terrible overpopulation that you see in some kind of horrifying city like Mexico City or São Paulo? We want quality over quantity, and we want to live on a beautiful Earth. 

While venerating Galton and Stoddard, the conversation mostly centers on the legacy of Madison Grant, a New York lawyer who popularized the eugenics movement with his books, including The Passing of the Great Race and The Conquest of a Continent. Here are some samples of his thought:

• “…the intelligence and ability of a colored person are in pretty direct proportion to the amount of white blood he has, and…most of the positions of leadership, influence, and prominence in the Negro race are held not by real negroes but by Mulattoes, many of whom have very little Negro blood.” (The Conquest of a Continent)
• “Mistaken regard for what are believed to be divine laws and a sentimental belief in the sanctity of human life tend to prevent both the elimination of defective infants and the sterilization of such adults as are themselves of no value to the community. The laws of nature require the obliteration of the unfit and human life is valuable only when it is of use to the community or race.” (The Passing of the Great Race)
• “Where the environment is too soft and luxurious and no strife is required for survival, not only are weak strains and individuals allowed to survive and encouraged to breed but the strong types also grow fat mentally and physically.” (The Passing of the Great Race)

Clearly, Grant has been an influence on Spencer’s thinking. In that connection, Spencer has a book to recommend, historian Jonathan Spiro’s Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant: “He [Spiro] offers a very useful and rich biography of Grant, which has really influenced my interest in Grant, and one of his major themes is that if you tell someone that Grant is an early environmentalist that’ll usually bring a smile to their face, but if you tell someone he’s also an early eugenicist, that will usually inspire shock and horror. But as Spiro points out, there was no contradiction in Grant’s mind between saving the redwoods and saving the White race.”  

Confused Terms

It’s a strange thing to hear these individuals claim they are on the Right while simultaneously affirming abortion, an act considered a form of murder by many conservatives. The reason for this confusion of terms is that Spencer, Bowden, and others on the Alt-Right regard themselves as the Right in the same way Mussolini or Hitler might be considered on the “Right” today. That, however, ignores that Hitler’s platform was, after all, “national socialism.” Conservatism today is not only defined by social issues but by a belief in limited government, and there can be nothing more invasive than eugenics.

It’s important to understand what the Alt-Right believes. They are not just an extreme offshoot of either the Right or the Left. Instead, they have their own ideology based on antiquated ideas from the early 20th century, an ideology heavily influenced by eugenics, which was inspired in turn by — as Spencer puts it, not incorrectly — classical Darwinism.

How Darwinism's ministry of truth warps the origins debate.

Do Scientists Have Freedom to Question Darwinism?

John G. West

 

Editor’s note: This article is an excerpt from a chapter in the newly released book The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith: Exploring the Ultimate Questions About Life and the Cosmos.

The list of scientists, teachers, students, and others who have faced retaliation or discrimination for their public skepticism of Darwinism is long and growing. 

A Fortunate Darwin Critic

At San Francisco State University, tenured biology professor Dean Kenyon was removed from teaching introductory biology classes. Once an influential proponent of Darwinian evolution, Kenyon had come to doubt key parts of Darwin’s theory and expressed those doubts to students in class, including his belief that some biological features exhibited evidence of intelligent design. Kenyon was more fortunate than many academic critics of Darwin. After his plight was publicized by an article in the Wall Street Journal, the university was shamed into reinstating him.¹

Biology professor Caroline Crocker at George Mason University was “barred by her department from teaching both evolution and intelligent design” after committing the crime of mentioning intelligent design in a course on cell biology. “It’s an infringement of academic freedom,” she told the journal Nature.² Subsequently her contract was not renewed.³

Oregon community college instructor Kevin Haley was terminated after it became known that he criticized evolution in his freshman biology classes. Haley’s college refused to state why his contract was not renewed, but some of Haley’s colleagues were upset that students who took his biology class were starting to challenge evolution in their classes.⁴ Before the controversy over evolution, Haley had been regarded as an excellent teacher. Indeed, his former department chair had praised him in glowing terms, saying that students “perceive that he is interested in them. He generates curiosity and stimulates their thinking. Those are things that I think are not always there in a professor.”⁵

Discrimination and Bullying

Scientists outside of biology who express skepticism about Darwinism can also face discrimination and bullying. At Baylor University, mathematician William Dembski was fired as director of an academic center he had founded to explore the idea of intelligent design as an alternative to unguided Darwinian evolution. Eventually his faculty contract was not renewed as well, and he lost his job. Dembski, who holds doctorates from the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois at Chicago, had exemplary academic credentials and publications, but his research center had been strenuously opposed by Baylor’s biology faculty.⁶

Chemistry professor Nancy Bryson was removed from her post as head of the science and math division of Mississippi University for Women after she delivered a lecture to honors students about some of the scientific weaknesses of chemical and biological evolution. “I was harshly attacked by Darwinist colleagues,” she explained later. “…students at my college got the message very clearly, do not ask any questions about Darwinism.”⁷

Blacklisted for Openness

Sometimes scientists can find themselves blacklisted if they merely express openness or sympathy to a critical examination of Darwinism. Astronomer Martin Gaskell was a top applicant to become the head of an observatory at the University of Kentucky. In the words of one university faculty member there, “his qualifications…stand far above those of any other applicant.”⁸ But Gaskell was ultimately rejected for the job after the biology faculty waged an internal war against his hiring. Why did they want to prevent him from getting the job? First, Gaskell was perceived by other faculty to be “potentially evangelical.”⁹ Worse, although he identified himself as a supporter of evolution, in online notes for a science and faith talk, Gaskell respectfully discussed the views of intelligent design proponents and acknowledged that modern evolutionary theory had unresolved problems — just like any scientific theory. 

The Gaskell case illustrates how some Darwinian biologists are not content to stop dissent over their theory within their own field. They want to censor disagreement with Darwin in other scientific disciplines as well. Indeed, sometimes they try to silence other scientists from raising the issue of intelligent design outside of biology without any reference to evolution. Eric Hedin was an assistant professor of physics at Ball State University. Like Gaskell, he had a long list of peer-reviewed science publications.¹⁰ For many years, he taught an interdisciplinary honors class at Ball State called “The Boundaries of Science,” which explored the limits of science. 

During one small part of the course, Hedin discussed the debate over intelligent design in physics and cosmology — not biology.¹¹ Hedin’s course received positive student reviews.¹² However, atheist evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne at the University of Chicago and the Freedom from Religion Foundation filed complaints.¹³ Ball State then violated its own procedures and appointed an ad hoc committee stacked with avowed critics of intelligent design, including two who spoke at a previous Darwin Day conference organized by the Ball State Freethought Alliance,¹⁴ a group whose “original goal,” according to its president, was “belittling religion.”¹⁵ Hedin’s class was eventually cancelled by Ball State. In addition, the university president issued a campus speech code not only banning professors from covering intelligent design in science classes but also from expressing support for the concept in social science and humanities classes.¹⁶

Next, “Do Non-Scientists Have Freedom to Question Darwinism?”

Notes

1. Stephen Meyer, “Danger: Indoctrination, a Scopes Trial for the 90s,” The Wall Street Journal (December 6, 1993), https://www.discovery.org/a/93/(accessed November 24, 2020).
2. Geoff Brumfiel, “Intelligent design: Who has designs on your students’ minds?,” Nature 434 (April 28, 2005), 1062-1065.
3. See “Intelligent Design and Academic Freedom,” All Things Considered, National Public Radio (November 10, 2005).
4. See Gordon Gregory, “Biology instructor’s doctrine draws fire,” OregonLive.com (February 18, 2000); Gordon Gregory, “Creationist instructor likely will lose his job,” OregonLive.com (March 28, 2000); Julie Foster, “Biology professor forced out; Pointed to flaws in theory of evolution, encouraged critical thinking,” WorldNetDaily.com (April 14, 2000), https://web.archive.org/web/20010427122836/http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=17856 (accessed November 25, 2020).
5. Haley’s former department chair Bruce McClelland, quoted in Gregory, “Biology instructor’s doctrine draws fire.”
6. Fred Heeren, “The Lynching of Bill Dembski: Scientists say the jury is out—so let the hanging begin,” The American Spectator 33 (November 2000), 44-51.
7. Testimony of Nancy Bryson before the Texas State Board of Education, Transcript of the Public Hearing Before the Texas State Board of Education, September 10, 2003, Austin, Texas (Austin, TX: Chapman Court Reporting Service, 2003), 504-505.
8. Email from University of Kentucky physicist Thomas Troland, quoted in Casey Luskin, “E-mails in Gaskell Case Show That Darwin Skeptics Need Not Apply to the University of Kentucky,” Evolution News and Views (February 10, 2011), https://evolutionnews.org/2011/02/e-mails_in_gaskell_case_show_t/ (accessed November 24, 2020).
9. Casey Luskin, “Evidence of Discrimination Against Martin Gaskell Due to His Views on Evolution,” Evolution News and Views (December 15, 2010), https://evolutionnews.org/2010/12/evidence_of_discrimination_aga/ (accessed November 24, 2020).
10. “Refereed Publications [of Eric Hedin],” Ball State University, https://web.archive.org/web/20130526183917/http://cms.bsu.edu/-/media/WWW/DepartmentalContent/Physics/PDFs/Hedin/PublicationsHedin%20(3).pdf (accessed November 24, 2020).
11. John G. West, “Misrepresenting the Facts about Eric Hedin’s ‘Reading List’,” Evolution News and Views (July 11, 2013), https://evolutionnews.org/2013/07/misrepresenting/ (accessed November 24, 2020).
12. Joshua Youngkin, “What Does Eric Hedin Really Teach? Self-Professed Agnostic Speaks Out About ‘Boundaries of Science’ Seminar,” Evolution News and Views (August 2, 2013), https://evolutionnews.org/2013/08/what_does_eric/ (accessed November 24, 2020); Joshua Youngkin, “Hedin Witness #3: ‘This Course Made Me a Better Learner,’” Evolution News and Views (August 9, 2013), https://evolutionnews.org/2013/08/hedin_witness_3/ (accessed November 24, 2020); Joshua Youngkin, “Dr. Hedin’s Student Could Teach Ball State University a Thing or Two,” Evolution News and Views (July 16, 2013), https://evolutionnews.org/2013/07/what_happened_i/ (accessed November 24, 2020).
13. David Klinghoffer, “At Ball State University, Intimidation Campaign Against Physicist Gets Troubling Results,” Evolution News and Views (May 22, 2013), https://evolutionnews.org/2013/05/at_ball_state_u/ (accessed November 24, 2020).
14. John G. West, “Questions Raised About Impartiality of Panel Reviewing Ball State University Professor’s Course,” Evolution News and Views (June 25, 2013), https://evolutionnews.org/2013/06/review_panel_or/ (accessed November 24, 2020); Joshua Youngkin, “Indiana Professors Question Ball State University’s Disregard For Rules on Academic Freedom,” Evolution News and Views (August 25, 2013), https://evolutionnews.org/2013/08/indiana_profess/ (accessed November 24, 2020); John G. West, “Clarifying the Issues At Ball State: Some Questions and Answers,” Evolution News and Views (September 13, 2013), https://evolutionnews.org/2013/09/clarifying_the_/ (accessed November 24, 2020).
15.  “Atheist Rift!!,” BSU Freethought Alliance: The Official Blog of Ball State University Freethought Alliance (October 23, 2009), http://freethoughtbsu.blogspot.com/2009/10/atheist-rift.html (accessed November 24, 2020).
16. John G. West, “Ball State President’s Orwellian Attack on Academic Freedom,” Evolution News and Views (August 1, 2013), https://evolutionnews.org/2013/08/ball_state_pres/ (accessed November 24, 2020).

Rise (and fall?) of the atom.

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The truth has fallen.

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The dragon as merchant.

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Physics can rehabilitate OOL science?

Origin of Life Is Not Reducible to Physics

Evolution News @DiscoveryCSC

 

 

Yesterday, we critiqued a proposal by Eugene V. Koonin and three colleagues who presented an expanded theory of evolution as “multilevel learning.” (See, “Evolution Is Not Like Physics.”) The proposal commits the fallacy of equating the properties of biological “laws of evolution” with those of physics, and borders on vitalism, which undermines their goal of naturalizing evolution. The proposal was published in two papers in PNAS last month. This time, we look at the second paper that takes their proposal to the special case of the origin of life. Their attempt to incorporate thermodynamics into a highly negentropic process is sure to provoke interest.

From Vanchurin, Wolf, Koonin, and Katsnelson, “Thermodynamics of evolution and the origin of life”:

We employ the conceptual apparatus of thermodynamics to develop a phenomenological theory of evolution and of the origin of life that incorporates both equilibrium and nonequilibrium evolutionary processes within a mathematical framework of the theory of learning. The threefold correspondence is traced between the fundamental quantities of thermodynamics, the theory of learning, and the theory of evolution. Under this theory, major transitions in evolution, including the origin of life, represent specific types of physical phase transitions. [Emphasis added.]

How Can Nature Learn?

Perceptive readers will want to know how they deal with several well-known issues: (1) probability, (2) entropy increase, and (3) harmful byproducts. The authors have already presented their view of the universe as a “neural network” in which natural selection operates at multiple levels, not just in biology. The only neural networks that any human has observed coming into existence were designed by a mind. How, then, can physical nature learn things?

Under this perspective, all systems that evolve complexity, from atoms to molecules to organisms to galaxies, learn how to predict changes in their environment with increasing accuracy, and those that succeed in such prediction are selected for their stability, ability to persist and, in some cases, to propagate. During this dynamics, learning systems that evolve multiple levels of trainable variables that substantially differ in their rates of change outcompete those without such scale separation.

The vitalistic tendencies in this proposal become evident where they claim that nonliving entities are able to predict, train, and compete. They are further evident when the environment can select them according to specific criteria. How do Koonin and his colleagues know this happens? Just look around: there are atoms, stars, and brains that survived the competition by natural selection. Their existence confirms the theory. This is like the anthropic principle supporter who says, “If the universe weren’t this way, we wouldn’t be here to talk about it.”  

To deal with the entropy problem, the authors say that learning decreases entropy. They add a second variable Q to the entropy equation that allows them to overcome the problem. “Q is the learning/generalized force for the trainable/external variables q.”

In the context of evolution, the first term in Eq. 3.1 represents the stochastic aspects of the dynamics, whereas the second term represents adaptation (learning, work). If the state of the entire learning system is such that the learning dynamics is subdominant to the stochastic dynamics, then the total entropy will increase (as is the case in regular, closed physical systems, under the second law of thermodynamics), but if learning dominates, then entropy will decrease as is the case in learning systems, under the second law of learning: The total entropy of a thermodynamic system does not decrease and remains constant in the thermodynamic equilibrium, but the total entropy of a learning system does not increase and remains constant in the learning equilibrium.

Very clever; introduce a magic variable that allows the theory to avoid the consequences of the second law. Entropy increases overall (which must happen) but can stabilize or decrease locally in an evolving system, like a warm little pond.

The maximum entropy principle states that the probability distribution in a large ensemble of variables must be such that the Shannon (or Boltzmann) entropy is maximized subject to the relevant constraints. This principle is applicable to an extremely broad variety of processes, but as shown below is insufficient for an adequate description of learning and evolutionary dynamics and should be combined with the opposite principle of minimization of entropy due to the learning process, or the second law of learning (see Thermodynamics of Learning and ref. 17). Our presentation in this section could appear oversimplified, but we find this approach essential to formulate as explicitly and as generally as possible all the basic assumptions underlying thermodynamics of learning and evolution.

Special Pleading with Handwaving 

If this sounds like special pleading with handwaving, watch how they take a wrong turn prior to this by ascribing vitalistic properties to matter:

The crucial step in treating evolution as learning is the separation of variables into trainable and nontrainable ones. The trainable variables are subject to evolution by natural selection and, therefore, should be related, directly or indirectly, to the replication processes, whereas nontrainable variables initially characterize the environment, which determines the criteria of selection.

Assume a replication process. It’s like a can opener. It allows them to visualize endless things most beautiful emerging from the can if they had the opener. Theoretically, trainable variables q overcome the increasing entropy generated by the nontrainable variables x if the probability distribution p(x|q) favors q. “We postulate that a system under consideration obeys the maximum entropy principle but is also learning or evolving by minimizing the average loss function U(q),” they say. Natural selection, or learning, does that. Therefore, life can emerge naturally. 

Convinced? They derive their conclusions with some whiz-bang calculus, but clearly if a magic variable q is inserted, the derivation becomes unreliable even if the operations are sound. For instance, if you define q as “a miracle occurs,” then of course you can prove that life is an emergent property of matter. At that point, further sub-definitions of q into different categories of miracles fail to provide convincing models of reality. Watch them define learning as a decrease in entropy:

If the stochastic entropy production and the decrease in entropy due to learning cancel out each other, then the overall entropy of the system remains constant and the system is in the state of learning equilibrium… This second law, when applied to biological processes, specifies and formalizes Schrödinger’s idea of life as a “negentropic” phenomenon. Indeed, learning equilibrium is the fundamental stationary state of biological systems. It should be emphasized that the evolving systems we examine here are open within the context of classical thermodynamics, but they turn into closed systems that reach equilibrium when thermodynamics of learning is incorporated into the model.

Further handwaving is seen in their definition of “evolutionary temperature” as “stochasticity in the evolutionary process” and “evolutionary potential” as “a measure of adaptability.” Does anyone really want to proceed hearing them compare a population of organisms to an ideal gas?

The origin of life can be identified with a phase transition from an ideal gas of molecules that is often considered in the analysis of physical systems to an ideal gas of organisms that is discussed in the previous section.

A Cameo by Malthus

Reality left the station long ago. Malthus makes a cameo appearance: “Under the statistical description of evolution, Malthusian fitness is naturally defined as the negative exponent of the average loss function, establishing the direct connection between the processes of evolution and learning.” Learning solves every problem in evolution: even thermodynamics! Tweaking Dobzhansky, they say, “[n]othing in the world is comprehensible except in the light of learning.”

The key idea of our theoretical construction is the interplay between the entropy increase in the environment dictated by the second law of thermodynamics and the entropy decrease in evolving systems (such as organisms or populations) dictated by the second law of learning.

What is this “second law of learning”? It’s Vanchurin’s idea that variables can be defined as ones that “adjust their values to minimize entropy.” A miracle happens! Minds can do this; but matter? Sure. It’s bound to happen.

The origin of life scenario within the encompassing framework of the present evolution theory, even if formulated in most general terms, implies that emergence of complexity commensurate with life is a general trend in the evolution of complex systems. At face value, this conclusion might seem to be at odds with the magnitude of complexification involved in the origin of life [suffice it to consider the complexity of the translation system] and the uniqueness of this event, at least on Earth and probably, on a much greater cosmic scale.Nevertheless, the origin of life appears to be an expected outcome of learning subject to the relevant constraints, such as the presence of the required chemicals in sufficient concentrations. Such constraints would make life a rare phenomenon but likely far from unique on the scale of the universe. The universe is sometimes claimed to be fine-tuned for the existence of life. What we posit here is that the universe is self-tuned for life emergence.

We’re Here, Aren’t We?

Koonin’s colleagues never get around to solving the extreme improbabilities for getting the simplest building blocks of life by chance. They never discuss harmful cross-reactions, which are certain to occur due to known chemical laws. And they wave the entropy problem away by inserting magic variables that they define as systems that “adjust their values to minimize entropy.” These systems also magically possess memories! How do they know that? Well, neural networks have them, and life has them. Genes must have evolved to be the carriers of long-term memory. After all, we’re here, aren’t we?

Evidently, the analysis presented here and in the accompanying paper is only an outline of a theory of evolution as learning. The details and implications, including directly testable ones, remain to be worked out.

Indeed.

 

On mapping the boundaries of evolutions.

How Much Can Evolution Really Accomplish?

Eric H. Anderson

 

 

Editor’s note: In 2020, Michael Behe published A Mousetrap for Darwin, a collection of his essays and responses to critics. Professor of biochemistry Laurence Moran argued that Behe had misinterpreted evidence and had misunderstood the significance of chloroquine resistance. This is the first in a two-part response.

In 2007, biochemist Michael Behe had the temerity to ask a question — a question that should have been asked with repeated and urgent sincerity by all biologists since the ink from Darwin’s quill first dried on his manuscript: What can evolution actually accomplish?

The question is at once reasonable and utterly crucial to the evolutionary story. Yet, for the most part it has been ignored in the history of evolutionary thought. The deeply held assumption of nearly all evolutionists is that evolution can do everything. After all, we’re here aren’t we! So there is little point in even asking the question. To be sure, occasional lip service has been paid to this inquiry over the decades, but such efforts typically descend into a question-begging exercise that simply assumes evolution must have this great creative power. Again, we’re here, and so even if we don’t understand the precise mechanisms of evolution, even if we’re still trying to fill in the details, even if there is some as-yet-undiscovered evolutionary mechanism, evolution simply must have this great creative power.

Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould famously used this tactic, arguing that even if we don’t understand exactly how evolution works, we must still regard evolution as a fact, because, well, things have evolved. Phillip Johnson rightly called out Gould for this self-serving circular attempt to prop up evolution, with Johnson’s careful analysis revealing that Gould’s “fact” of evolution turned out to mean nothing more than the theory.

Unsatisfied with circular evolutionary arguments and lazy reasoning, Behe decided to pose his question to the real-world data. What does the actual evidence show about what evolution can do? Behe approached the problem from a number of angles, the most well-known being his analysis of the appearance of chloroquine resistance in the unicellular malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum.

Lots and Lots of Cells

In brief, Behe noted that the anti-malarial drug chloroquine had been far more successful against the parasite than many other drugs, with resistance to chloroquine arising only in one out of approximately 10^20 parasite cells, as estimated by immunologist Nicholas White, a well-known expert in malaria research. It’s hard for us to grasp such a number, but for comparison’s sake, astronomers estimate there are only between 10^11 and 10^12 stars in our Milky Way galaxy.

Although the molecular details of chloroquine resistance remained fuzzy at the time of Behe’s 2007 book, The Edge of Evolution, based on the malaria data then available Behe suggested that chloroquine resistance might well require two coordinated mutations. A single point mutation (as had been seen with some other drugs) or a series of individually beneficial mutations should have arisen much more frequently than White’s 10^20 estimate. The data, Behe noted, simply did not fit with such approaches, so a more parsimonious explanation was that two coordinated mutations were required.

Evolutionists, predictably, were upset. Jerry Coyne and Sean Carroll asserted that Behe had to be wrong, just on the principle of the thing. In essence, they argued that oh, yes, chloroquine resistance can too come about by a series of single beneficial step-by-step point mutations. That such a claim flatly contradicted the data was beside the point.

Not lost on careful observers was the irony that Behe had proposed that Plasmodium could in fact acquire two coordinated mutations via evolutionary means. Yet intent on maintaining the lore of “one small step at a time for evolution,” Coyne and Carroll eschewed Behe’s offer of two coordinated mutations. In a creative albeit bizarre kind of reverse-gamble, they wagered, “We’ll see your two mutations and raise it to one!”

Over the next several years, arguments went back and forth, and more ink was spilled by the debaters than by a clumsy apprentice at the print shop. Yet despite the nitpicking of definitions, the fights over math, and the repeated accusations that Behe must not understand how evolution really works, those of us who watched the battle of wits from the sidelines noticed that Behe’s basic question remained awkwardly unanswered by his critics: How much can evolution really accomplish?

Moran and the Luck of the Draw

One of the more engaged critics of Behe’s argument was Dr. Larry Moran, professor of biochemistry at the University of Toronto. Moran seems to be on board with the broader evolutionary narrative, but does not consider himself to be a Darwinist. Not long before Behe published The Edge of Evolution, Moran posted a detailed description of his views on his Sandwalk blog titled “Evolution by Accident.” Moran laid out the case for a non-Darwinian view of evolution, building on Jacques Monod’s argument that “pure chance…is at the very root of the stupendous edifice of evolution,” as well as Gould’s famous replay-the-tape-of-life analogy.

For the most part, I agree with Moran’s assessment of the randomness of evolution, my primary quibble being that Moran doesn’t go far enough in recognizing the role of chance in the evolutionary narrative, specifically in the case of so-called selective events. Upon careful analysis, Darwin’s selection mechanism also collapses to a largely chance-based affair, and so the effort to distance oneself from the shadow of Darwin by embracing random evolution is, to a large extent, a distinction without a difference. Yet that is a nuance and a discussion for another time, should I ever have the honor of the proverbial drink at the pub with Moran.

The key point for readers here is that armed with his chance-centered view of evolution, Moran dove into the debate with Behe over chloroquine resistance. The backs and forths between Moran and Behe (and by their supporters and detractors) throughout the summer of 2014 were too numerous to detail here. Then, following several years of relative peace (at least on this particular front), the battle began anew.

In part to silence the spurious accusation that he doesn’t respond to his critics, in November 2020 Behe published A Mousetrap for Darwin, a collection of his numerous rebuttals to critiques of his three prior books. Included in Mousetrap are several responses to Moran. Moran quickly penned a hurried response on his Sandwalk blog arguing, in essence, that Behe was both wrong about how chloroquine resistance came about and had misinterpreted the mechanisms of evolution.

Behe’s Misunderstanding or Misunderstanding Behe?

Significantly, Moran acknowledges the main thrust of Behe’s argument, noting that:

Behe has correctly indentified [sic] an extremely improbably evolution event; namely, the development of chloroquine resistance in the malaria parasite. This is an event that is close to the edge of evolution, meaning that more complex events of this type are beyond the edge of evolution and cannot occur naturally. [Emphasis added.]

This is a very important acknowledgement, and a reader of The Edge of Evolution might well say to Moran, “Welcome aboard!”

Instead, Moran’s main disagreement (coaxed along at various times by P. Z. Myers, Kenneth Miller, and company) seems to be that Behe has misunderstood how malaria resistance came about. Moran acknowledges that “none of us have a serious problem with this guesstimate [1 in 10^20 malaria-cell replications], but several of us have objected to the way Behe interprets it.”

Flashing back to 2007, we remember Behe had suggested that the simplest explanation for the extreme rarity of resistance to chloroquine was that at least two coordinated mutations were required. This was in stark contrast to the drug atovaquone, for example, which required but a single point mutation, and against which resistance arose faster than the average person could learn to pronounce “Plasmodium falciparum.”

Casey Luskin observed that much indignation was brought to bear by some of Behe’s critics for Behe’s use of the word “simultaneous,” but it was clear to any thoughtful reader of The Edge of Evolution that Behe had never claimed that the two mutations had to arise at the same moment in one fell swoop, such as in the exact same reproduction cycle. His point was simply that the two mutations needed to eventually be together at a particular point in time in a particular cell to confer the needed benefit, regardless of precisely when the mutations arose or which mutation came first. Unlike some of Behe’s critics, Moran, to his credit, granted Behe’s point about the mutations having to be together simultaneously to provide the needed benefit. Moran’s concern was more about the possible routes to chloroquine resistance.

What Guesses Were Reasonable?

It was not at all clear in 2007 — my understanding is that it is still not completely clear — exactly which mutational routes are available to Plasmodium in humans in the wild, nor all the other factors or nuances that might bear on the problem. Moran himself notes that “there are lots of complications and many unknown variables” and that we can “provide estimates” but “can’t give precise calculations.”

The best anyone could do while waiting for more definitive research in 2007 was to make an educated guess as to the exact pathway(s) to resistance. The question is, what guesses were reasonable in light of the malaria data?

Then in 2014, an important paper by Summers et al. shed additional light on the development of chloroquine resistance. Although limited to experiments involving frog oocytes in the lab, this research provided solid experimental evidence detailing the specific mutations involved. The researchers identified two initial routes to chloroquine resistance, with additional mutations leading to “the attainment of full transport activity.” Behe’s critics pounced on this as a possible chink in Behe’s argument, grasping onto the possibility that there might be various ways to achieve chloroquine resistance, including from combinations of more than two mutations.

Behe for his part correctly noted that, if anything, the new research supported his primary argument. Indeed, one of the key takeaways of Summers et al. is that chloroquine resistance is a multi-mutational event, with both of the identified routes to resistance requiring “a minimum of two mutations” to get started. Behe’s 2007 prediction that chloroquine resistance did not result from a series of individually beneficial mutations, but required a multi-mutational event, turned out to be correct. Yet critics still asserted that the key take-home lesson was elsewhere to be found.

In the second part of this response, we’ll examine the data and the implications of chloroquine resistance for the broader evolutionary story.

 

File under "well said" LXXIX

Matthew 19:24KJV"And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God." 

     Jesus of Nazareth.

Saving Darwin?

Will Earth BioGenome Project Vindicate Darwin?

Evolution News @DiscoveryCSC

 

Some scientists have a new pet project: sequence everything! They’ve given this idea a name: the Earth BioGenome Project (EGP). Specifically, the goal is to sequence every eukaryotic species that has been taxonomically designated. Mark Blaxter et al. explain in their perspective article in PNAS, “Why sequence all eukaryotes?” that a primary goal of the proposal is to understand evolution.

Life on Earth has evolved from initial simplicity to the astounding complexity we experience today. Bacteria and archaea have largely excelled in metabolic diversification, but eukaryotes additionally display abundant morphological innovation. How have these innovations come about and what constraints are there on the origins of novelty and the continuing maintenance of biodiversity on Earth? The history of life and the code for the working parts of cells and systems are written in the genome. The Earth BioGenome Project has proposed that the genomes of all extant, named eukaryotes — about 2 million species — should be sequenced to high quality to produce a digital library of life on Earth, beginning with strategic phylogenetic, ecological, and high-impact priorities.

The EBG would certainly provide job security for numerous lab workers, but will it really provide the wisdom needed to understand life and evolution? Blaxter and his 25 co-authors think it will. Coming from a Who’s Who of major scientific institutions and government labs from Sweden to China to America, they also claim it will have numerous other practical benefits. Advocates of a proposal like to toss in suggestions that their work might help cure cancer, aid farmers, or mitigate climate change, but clearly the priorities are to solve evolutionary questions. This is evident from the sixty mentions of the word evolution in the essay.

We suggest that many questions of evolutionary and ecological significance will only be addressable when whole-genome data representing divergences at all of the branchings in the tree of life or all species in natural ecosystems are available. We envisage that a genomic tree of life will foster understanding of the ongoing processes of speciation, adaptation, and organismal dependencies within entire ecosystems. These explorations will resolve long-standing problems in phylogenetics, evolution, ecology, conservation, agriculture, bioindustry, and medicine.

Is That Necessarily So? 

Consider a hypothetical proposal to find every fossil on earth. Would it solve evolutionary questions? In Darwin’s Dilemma, Paul Chien argued that enough fossils have been discovered to see the global patterns. One more scallop on the beach is not likely to change the picture, let alone millions of them. Some big data projects, however, can be very instructive, such as the ENCODE project and its spin-offs that found more function in noncoding DNA than expected.

Money for such massive projects can be an issue; remember the Superconducting Supercollider? The paper mentions private funding: “This research was funded in whole, or in part, by Wellcome Trust Grants 206194 and 218328.” The Wellcome Trust is a charitable foundation in the UK with a mission “to fund research to improve human and animal health.” Whether governments will toss in some dollars is not stated, but certainly private foundations can spend their money as they choose. No problem there. The work is certainly conceivable, and with big data projects, storage of the information is not a problem. The question is whether this is the highest and best use of time and equipment by biologists and geneticists. Let the proponents make their case. Their justifications can be summarized:

1. Discovering the Trees of Life
2. Defining the Origin of Eukaryotic Cells
3. Tracking Genomic Changes in Symbiosis
4. Decrypting Chromosome Evolution
5. Revealing the Deep Logic of Eukaryotic Gene Regulation
6. Probing the Diversity of Sexual Systems
7. Exploring Diversity in the Genomics of Speciation
8. Decoding the Genomics of Complex Traits
9. Understanding Ecosystem Function, Stasis, and Change
10. Building Genomics-Informed Conservation
11. Inventing New Tools and Resources
12. Preserve for Posterity the Diversity and History of the Planet’s Biology

Four of these (1, 2, 4, 7) are primarily evolutionary questions; several others (3, 6, 8, 9) overlap with evolution. Evolutionary questions are not necessarily useless pursuits; they might have design implications if the results do not support neo-Darwinism. 

Hidden Assumptions in the Proposal

There are some hidden assumptions in the proposal. One is that all genomes of a particular species are alike. That cannot be true because numerous subspecies inhabit differing environments. Will this require multiple samples from some species? Talk of “The Human Genome” glosses over the diversity of humans, requiring further investigation of haplotypes. Will that be an issue for Canis familiaris, the domestic dog that varies from mastiff to chihuahua? Additionally, will a genome from a male and a female be required to cover the sex chromosomes of each species? Another dubious assumption is that scientists know what a species is. This touches on a vexed philosophical question in taxonomy: whether the current taxonomical system carves nature at its joints. 

Another issue to ponder is whether a massive sequencing project at this scale is the only way to find out the answers to all 12 of the questions. If it is not, the EBG could be a huge boondoggle, a waste of time and money that could be better spent elsewhere. Could a well-chosen selection of genomes serve the purpose just as well? 

More than Big Data Is Needed

The authors welcome opinions about the project:

The big questions we have posed derive from our collective discussions, but we are aware — and indeed hope — that there will be additional major questions that others believe can be answered by sequencing and functionally annotating all eukaryotic genomes. We invite you to add questions to the roster, to widen the debate, and to, ultimately, fully realize the promise of biological understanding based on the complete genome sequence of all of Earth’s remarkable species.

Understanding requires more than big data. If the EBG project takes root, research teams will find themselves neck-deep in arbitrary decisions requiring wisdom to get meaningful results. In their concluding sales pitch, the others make it sound like evolutionary understanding will simply leap out of the data. That rarely happens. Data need interpretation by human beings exercising wisdom and discernment.

Notice the volume of verbiage about evolution, with a few crumbs of societal benefit added to the end like rosy frosting on the Darwin cake:

The genomes will be the core data from which the phylogeny of all life is inferred, including the complex reticulations that endosymbiosis, horizontal transfer, hybridization, and introgression have created. Complete genome assemblies enable a broader and more complete understanding of a species’ biology, contributing to a lessened risk of extinction. Within the unifying model of this phylogenetic network, the genomes and the genes they possess will enable understanding of regulatory networks and trait evolution, the dynamics of coevolutionbetween genes and between species, the impact of changing environments on species and populations, the mechanistic link between genotypes and phenotypes, and the drivers of genome–environment interactions. These analyses, in turn, will enable biologists to better characterize fundamental evolutionary processes, from the nucleotide to the genome level, identifying processes active under different chromosomal architectures and gene interaction networks. These dramatic advances in understanding of both the wide sweep and the local details of genomic and organismal evolution will enable the inference of ancestral genomes and their traits, which will be transformative for understanding how life evolved on Earth, predicting future evolution, and inspiring bioengineering of organisms with beneficial traits using technologies such as CRISPR and whole-genome synthesis. This foundational library of information will change the economic and social growth of the future, fostering sustainable agriculture and new bioeconomies, accessing an expanded medical pharmacopoeia, and promoting societal equity and diversity through the lens of a deeply valued biodiversity.

Let’s leave the value of this proposal as an open question for design advocates, who will likely have differing opinions about it. Would that some of the enthusiasm for such a massive undertaking, though, would be reserved for exploring the biological engineering so evident in life.

on liberty and the middle class.

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The American Communist party: a brief history.

 Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), also called Communist Party USA, left-wing political party in the United States that was, from its founding in 1919 until the latter part of the 1950s, one of the country’s most important leftist organizations. Its membership reached its peak of 85,000 in 1942, just as America entered World War II; the CPUSA had rallied enthusiastically in favour of a Soviet-American war effort against Nazi Germany.

In 1919, inspired by Russia’s October Revolution (1917), two U.S. communist parties emerged from the left wing of the Socialist Party of America (SPA): the Communist Party of America (CPA), composed of the SPA’s foreign-language federations and led by the sizeable and influential Russian Federation, and the Communist Labor Party of America (CLP), the predominantly English-language group. They were established legally but were soon forced underground. Although the two parties feuded and various factions broke away to establish competing communist groups, the Communist International encouraged the unification of those organizations. In 1922 the CPA merged with the United Communist Party (which had been established when the CLP joined a breakaway faction of the CPA) to create the legal and aboveground Workers Party of America (WPA). When the United Toilers of America, a group that adopted the same tactics as the WPA, combined with the latter organization, the party renamed itself the Workers (Communist) Party, finally settling on the name Communist Party of the United States of America in 1929.During the 1920s the CPUSA’s trade-union arm, the Trade Union Educational League, promoted industrial unionism vis-à-vis the craft union-oriented American Federation of Labor (AFL). When that strategy proved unsuccessful, the CPUSA upon orders from Moscow transformed the Trade Union Educational League into the Trade Union Unity League in 1929, which was dedicated to organizing largely unskilled immigrant, African American, and female workers into industrial unions. Although the Trade Union Unity League was not nearly as successful as the AFL, it did provide a training ground for CPUSA organizers when they became active in the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) unions.

During the early years of the Great Depression, the CPUSA emerged as committed militants within the unemployed movement. Later in the 1930s, with approximately 65,000 members and New Deal liberalism sweeping the country, the CPUSA became influential in many aspects of life in the United States. There were also untold numbers of “fellow travelers” who sympathized with the aims of the party though they never became members of it. At that time CPUSA members became national, regional, and community leaders in liberal, cultural, and student organizations. In addition, because of their roles as industrial union organizers during the mid-to-late 1930s, they became a major force in several important CIO unions by the early 1940s. In New York City, a stronghold of party support where communists actively engaged in housing struggles, CPUSA candidates were elected to the city council during its zenith.

After World War II, with the onset of the Cold War and the rise of anti-Soviet sentiment, the CPUSA increasingly came under attack. Deprived of significant influence in the labour movement when the CIO expelled 11 CPUSA-led unions in 1949 and 1950, the CPUSA suffered additional losses of power in many left-liberal organizations when it was subjected to McCarthyism in the early 1950s. In 1956 support for the Soviet invasion of Hungary and the revelation of Joseph Stalin’s crimes in Nikita Khrushchev’s “secret speech” at the 20th Soviet Party Congress led to mass defections from the CPUSA. Although communists held leadership positions in several anti-Vietnam War organizations during the 1960s and ’70s, they exerted little sway in the U.S. labour movement. While the party made many significant contributions to the radical movement, especially during the 1930s and ’40s, the CPUSA’s unswerving support for Stalin and the Soviet Union harmed the party not only in the eyes of broad segments of the population but among other liberal and left-wing activists as well.

Science's place in modern society:idol or instrument?

The Human Cost of Coercive Science

John G. West

 

Did lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic actually work? That’s the question a study recently released by a research center at Johns Hopkins University attempted to answer. 

Authored by three economists, the “meta-analysis” sought to evaluate the effectiveness of lockdowns to reduce deaths from COVID-19 deaths. The study defined a lockdown as any “compulsory, non-pharmaceutical intervention,” and it synthesized and analyzed results from two dozen other studies. The economists reached a startling conclusion: “lockdowns have had little to no effect on COVID-19 mortality.” To be more specific, “lockdowns in Europe and the United States only reduced COVID-19 mortality by 0.2% on average” and shelter-in-place orders in particular “were also ineffective, only reducing COVID-19 mortality by 2.9% on average.” 

Following “The Science”

This new study is far from the the final word on the effectiveness of lockdowns. Perhaps these economists are wrong. But at least they are beginning to ask the right questions. If we are serious about following “the science,” it makes sense to ask what the evidence actually shows about what works and what doesn’t.

But there is another question that needs to be asked as well: Even if lockdown policies were shown to have significantly reduced mortality, did their benefits outweigh their costs? 

To answer that question, we need to know not only the impact lockdowns had on COVID-19 mortality, but also their impact on crime rates, unemployment, education, child development, suicides, mental health, and deaths from other causes. We also need to consider the impact on intangible goods such as free speech and religious liberty. This is a point I tried to make in a talk I originally gave in May 2020, later posted on YouTube. It was also a central point of the 2020 book The Price of Panic by Discovery Senior Fellows Douglas Axe and Jay Richards along with William Briggs, one of the first major books to address COVID-19 public policies. 

Calculating the Costs

Unfortunately, we have just begun to scratch the surface of calculating the real costs of lockdowns and related measures. Which brings to me to the nightmare still being experienced by Melissa Henderson in Blairsville, Georgia.

Melissa is a single mom with five kids. To support her family, she needs to work. But when the lockdowns came in 2020, her daycare provider shut down. So she had to find another solution, and she asked her 14-year-old daughter Linley to babysit. One day Melissa’s four-year-old son went out to play with his neighbor friend. It took a few minutes for Linley to notice, because she was doing online schooling. By that time, the neighbor had called 911. 

To be clear, it is legal for youth as young as 13 to babysit in Georgia. That didn’t stop the police from arresting Melissa (handcuffs and all) and putting her in jail. Fortunately, her ex-husband bailed her out. Melissa was eventually charged with a crime that could send her to prison for a year. Her case has been dragging on now for nearly two years. The police and prosecutors seem like characters right out of Les Misérables. 

How Many Melissas?

Of course, the officials who imposed Georgia’s lockdown did not intend to deprive Melissa of her ability to support her family. Nor did they intend for her to be abusively prosecuted. But it happened nonetheless. 

How many other Melissas are there, people hurt in serious ways by the lockdown policies? I don’t know. What I do know is this: Until we have a full accounting of all the Melissas there are, we won’t really know how effective — or costly — the lockdowns were.

Lockdowns were imposed on society in the name of science, although the actual scientific basis of many of the measures employed was unclear at best. But there is nothing scientific in avoiding an honest discussion of their actual results.