John Derbyshire has a piece in the Spectator on Intelligent Design. It is part of “face-off” segment with someone named Stephen Meyer. He argues for Intelligent Design, while Derbyshire takes the science side. The first page has the intelligent design argument and then mid-way through the second page Derbyshire begins his dismantling of it. Meyer has been peddling intelligent design for a long time and his arguments are well known, so Derbyshire has the advantage of knowing the other side’s best moves.

John has been driven near mad by ID’ers over the years. He finds their circularly reasoning terribly frustrating. The thing with believers is you have to understand how they play the game. They make their assertions against reality and then demand you prove reality exists. Gay marriage is a great example. Confronted by skeptics they will demand you explain why your oppose it. In other words, they use rhetorical trickery to make their position the default and the status quo the radical alternative.

Derbyshire makes an error when he claims that Jews and Christians embrace occasionalism. This is the claim that God is unknowable and unpredictable. He can rearrange his creations anyway he likes, including the laws of science. That is not the Christian view of God. Some pseudo-Christian cults in America like Mormons and Evangelicals may have may have gone down this road, but that’s not standard Christian dogma. Jews embraced the Greek view of God’s creation, so they reject occasionalism

Islam, on the other hand, is a different thing entirely. For them, God is unknowable. You can follow God’s commands, but you can never know God and you can never know if you will be rewarded if you do follow his commands. The God of Islam is not a God making covenants with man and he may not be rational. He could suspend gravity tomorrow or change the speed of light. Nothing we do will impact the will of God nor is it possible understand the will of God.

It is one reason science came to a grinding halt where Islam took root. What’s the point of learning the laws of nature, if God can change them tomorrow? It’s not the only reason why Islam has stagnated. Invasion killed off a big slice of the Muslim intellectual elite, thus closing the golden age of Islam. Internal fights within Islam also cut off Islam from the world, especially Europe, just when the West was beginning to flourish. Still, the role of occasionalism is a big reason Islam remains doggedly anti-science.

Now, these intelligent design people may be embracing occasionalism in order to justify their theories about evolution. Again though, they are going against Christian tradition by doing it. Granted, the “real Christianity” is in bad shape and these new bespoke Christians may be the future, but they are still outside the Christian tradition. Given the inherent dishonestly of the intelligent design people, it is not a great leap to think they are perverting Christianity in order to con people into believing their nutty theories.

Conservatives have been programmed to reject anything that smacks of pessimism regarding America’s future. They continue to hold out hope that some combination of miracles will put the right people in charge of the state and they will set about reforming the nation. Then there are those who blithely say something along the lines of “we always muddle along somehow. We can make it through this.” It’s a weird combination of fatalism and optimism. They accept they will fail, but things will work out anyway.

The fact is, things can and will get much worse, perhaps catastrophically worse, if the current ruling elite is not reformed or replaced. This post min the NYTimes is a good example of just how rotten the ruling elite is now. Notice the use of the word stalemate when describing the current situation. While technically true, the fact is most Americans would be fin with ending all immigration. The only reason this is a topic is the Left wants to flood the nation with non-white immigrants. The stalemate is really an assault.

It is considered an inevitability that 30 million Mexican peasants will be granted citizenship, despite not going through the regular process. It is just a matter of getting passed this pesky “stalemate” business. It is also assumed that the number of legal immigrants will be increased to some number just below whatever the Left wants. In other words, to the people in charge, a stalemate is really just an interregnum or a pause in the steady march toward whatever the Left wants. They know they will eventually win. They are right.

I got the following from a reader and I thought it would make a good post. There’s a lot here, so it should probably be two post topics.

This comment would probably be better suited for an email, but alas, I can not find any good way to contact you. I find your views intriguing, brilliant, and sometimes insane.

What is curious to me is that you seem to have all the foundations of a free and empirically minded thinker but also possess some egregiously incorrect views. Further, in much of your writing you tout a freedom from group-think and the cultish mentality which most of humanity takes up over some particular dogma or another. For this reason, I rather enjoy and respect much of your work here.

I fancy myself a similar sort of thinker, and often blast people of all different sorts of ideologies in a manner not unlike your work in this blog. I find it strange that you and I can disagree on so much when we appear to be coming from the same sort of epistemological framework. I’d wager that you have a good deal more raw knowledge than me, both of the historic and political types, so I’m willing to be charitable to your views and try to learn from them.

With that concession, it’s hard to imagine how you have come to some of your beliefs. You appear to have a great faith in evolutionary psychology, especially as it pertains to gender roles. But I am highly skeptical of this very new field of science; very little of what I’ve read has been grounded in good empirical work.

Further, you are against Gay-marriage. Being charitable, I suspect you mean to say something like: marriage is state-recognized for the sole purpose of promoting fertility, which gay people necessarily cannot participate in, therefore, it does not make sense for gay marriage to be state recognized. Would I be correct in saying this? Or do you think gay couples should be deprived other rights which heterosexual couples enjoy, such as hospital visitation rights and adoption?

In general, I’d like you to expound on your view on evolutionary psychology, gender roles, and homosexuality. You are of course free to tell me to fuck off. But I’ve read 25 pages of this blog and feel unsatisfied with your exposition on these topics, so it’d be great if you could indulge me a bit.

As far as my views, I would never claim to have an organized and well thought out philosophy on anything. Frankly, I’m suspicious of anyone who does. The world, at least from the perspective of any one man, is a tiny clearing in the wood. Human intellectual history is the expansion and contraction of that bit of clearing. It is impossible for any one man to know all that is known. The sum of human knowledge is a tiny subset of what can be known. Therefore, any one man can only know a tiny bit of what can be known and, worse yet, is wholly ignorant about what he does not know.

Now, presented with the facts as described above, spending time building a grand unifying theory to explain what I know seems like a waste of time. If someone were to come forward and offer me a big fat sack of money to come up with a grand unifying theory of everything, then I’ll be glad to do it. That’s not happening so I don’t waste my time on inventing a new philosophy. I take in as much new knowledge as my genetic code permits and wedge it in with the other stuff. I’m like a hoarder or junk collector.

Now, to the evolutionary sciences. John Derbyshire said it best. Evolution is the best explanation for the fossil record. It is flexible enough to absorb new data. It can be adapted to include the new data without invalidating other data we know to be true. It allows science to further explore and catalog the fossil record and now the genetic record, as well as hunt for new information. Understanding our nature is the first step toward creating a new way of looking at human organization and Western politics.

Unlike John, I’d leave open the possibility that some new, better theory could come along and make evolution sound like witchcraft. The history of science, is the history of mistakes, but natural selection, genetic drift, sexual selection and gene mutation are unlikely to be replaced with a new idea. Still, you always have to leave open the possibility that what we think is certain is not more certain than the superstitions popular with our ancestors. We may be closer to the caveman than we like to think.

As to “gay marriage,” I’m neither for nor against it in the same way I’m neither for nor against Santa Claus or flying carpets. One cannot be opposed to something that does not exist and by definition, homosexual marriage is impossible. This is not just biological pedantry, but a fact of our cultural and moral history. To pretend that two men sharing rent and a bed is the same as your mother and father having and raising children is the nullification of human civilization. It is the claim that there is no truth, just argument.

Reality is that which does not go away when you stop believing in it. Biology and physics are two good examples. These nuts can believe they are sexless starseeds but biology does not bend to wishful thinking. Humans come in two sexes. This is a matter of genetics. New humans come from a human of each sex mating thus creating a new human that is the result of their marriage. Long before the legal and religious meanings, the biological meaning was plainly obvious to humans. It’s why gay marriage never existed.

This is something humans knew since the dawn of time. Marriage without reproduction is impossible. Two guys or three gals can certainly have sex. They can contract with one another over property ownership. They can play house. They cannot reproduce with one another to create new humans.  It is as irrational as insisting dogs and horses are the same species. They may have many things in common, but they cannot mate and produce off-spring, which by definition makes them of different species.  Yet, we have lunatics in our midst who rail against speciesism.

Now, every society has useful lies it tells itself to lubricate daily life. Americans tell themselves that all men are created equal. This is most certainly not true, but it helps grease the wheels. Pretending Bob and Bill are married is not going to unravel civilization, but, that’s not what this is about and the numbers make it clear. Homosexuals are not that interested in marriage. As the New York Times admits, “monogamy is not a central feature of gay couples.” No, the real goal here is the progressive assault on normalcy.

As far as homosexuals, biology and the role of the sexes, I don’t think you need stray too far from biology. Men and women are different in our primary, secondary and tertiary characteristics. Men have different reproductive strategies than women for obvious biological reasons. This naturally leads to a a whole list of secondary and tertiary traits that would evolve differently in support of reproductive and survival strategies. As the old paleocon saying goes, men will trade safety for sex and women will trade sex for safety.

How do homosexuals fit into this? That’s a mystery. No one really knows what causes homosexuality, but it does appear to be natural. Genetics has failed to find the “gay gene” and logic says such a gene would not exist. Homosexuals would reproduce at far lower rates and the trait would soon die out. There are some theories about conditions in the womb or perhaps a combination of genes that when exposed to certain conditions in the womb result in a gay child. No one knows, but gay exist and there is a cause.

The bottom line with homosexuals is that they have been a feature of human society since the dawn of time. In the West, homosexuality was politely ignored with fits of persecution from time to time. In America, homosexuals were expected to keep their sex lives private and the rest of us were expected to leave them alone. Despite claims to the contrary, there’s no evidence of wholesale, systematic persecution of homosexuals. The natural order her is benign neglect and agreeing to not talk about it.

To the surprise of no one, President Obama is not blaming white people for his low approval ratings. This was entirely predictable. No black politician in the last fifty years has passed on the opportunity to play the race card. The only thing remarkable here is that it took this long for Obama to start doing it. His use of the race card in his re-election bid was rather subtle. Of course, he no longer has to worry about getting white votes now, so he can let his freak flag fly, as the smart set is fond of saying.

As Theodore Dalrymple points out, politicians are mediocre people with ambition. They succeed because they have a ruthlessness that allows them to do horrible things to the other people in their way. That’s what democracy selects for, which is why every democracy is overrun with sociopaths and lunatics. Obama was able to rise to the top because he was useful to his backers and he was willing to say whatever had to be said in order to rise to the top. Like all politicians, he has no soul.

For Obama, it manifests a bit differently. Blacks in American politics operate under some different rules than whites. Obama was not getting anywhere if he walked around with a nappy afro and a pick sticking out of it. He was never going to get far with the Choom-gang look either. In fairness, a white guy is not getting far if he looks like Kid Rock and a Latino cannot look like Aaron Hernandez. But, blacks are raised to believe they must act white in order to succeed, so they rage against this forced adaptation.

Because all politicians are are special form of sociopath, they see anything less than unconditional love as an unconditional assault. That means when they fall in the polls, they want to rage against the voters. For whites, this usually means blaming their advisers or the media. For black politicians it means blaming that white avatar that always have hovering over them. For lame duck Obama, fading into obscurity, he is free to vent his rage against the people who made it possible for him be in the White House.

This story is getting the usual suspects very upset for all the usual reasons, but the really interesting part is the guy is called Hispanic. Most people think of Hispanics as the little brown guys riding the leaf blower. The guy in the picture looks like he could be auditioning for a show about World War II. Then again, our elites like their Hispanics the same way they like their black guys. That is superficially diverse, but otherwise white.

Barak Obama is the quintessential black guy because he looks black, but is otherwise a typical white guy from upper class white culture. In the case of Hispanics, the archetype is a Caucasian with three names and a Spanish accent. Juan Pablo fits the bill and that’s most likely why he was selected. It is a terribly shallow and fundamentally inhuman way to view people, but American elites are not too concerned about the feelings of the people.

The weirdness of left-wing identity politics is that it strips people of their identity in order to affirm the identity of liberal elites. They declared this guy non-white, despite the fact he was super-white. Put another way, he has to deny himself in order to properly actualize his full identity within the framework of multiculturalism. The whole thing is insane, of course, but nothing about multiculturalism makes any sense when you examine it.

Poor old Steve Sailer is about to go into overload over the latest big question on the Edge website. The question posed to scientists and pseudo-scientists is “What Scientific Idea is Ready for Retirement?” It is an interesting question for two reasons. One is some ideas in science hang around long after their validity is expired. Despite the philosophy of science stuff that tells us how science is supposed to work, bad ideas still creep in and stick around as truth. Vested interests defend invalid theories for all the familiar reasons.

Most of what makes up psychiatry, for example, is fairly worthless now that we have some understanding of genetics and brain chemistry. The idea that you can talk someone out of being depressed or schizophrenic is ridiculous, but we still have talk therapy. All over America, drug counselors try to talk people out of being addicts, even though it does not work and can never work. There’s money in the old bad idea, so the profession will not let go of it, no matter what’s happening in neuroscience.

The other reason this is a great question is it flushes out the fakers within our intelligentsia. All societies have an intellectual elite. In theory, our intellectual elite is based in reason, so they should always be ready to purge bad ideas. In reality, they are just as superstitious as prior elites, maybe more so. Dumb ideas that support the prevailing secular morality, for example, are protected, while good ideas that challenge it are rejected.

A good example is the second respondent in the list, Nina Jablonski, the Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at The Pennsylvania State University. Her idea to retire is race.

The mid-twentieth century witnessed the continued proliferation of scientific treatises on race. By the 1960s, however, two factors contributed to the demise of the concept of biological races. One of these was the increased rate of study of the physical and genetic diversity human groups all over the world by large numbers of scientists. The second factor was the increasing influence of the civil rights movement in the United States and elsewhere. Before long, influential scientists denounced studies of race and races because races themselves could not be scientifically defined. Where scientists looked for sharp boundaries between groups, none could be found.

Granted, anthropology is not science. At best, it is taxonomy. Anthropologists can add to the stock of human knowledge by cataloging, describing and recording human societies, past and present. It is useful to know the daily life of the typical Spartan, for example. That allows us to build a realistic model of Spartan life which can help explain their history as a people and their demise. This kind of information helps fill in the picture of history. It helps us understand why they lived and why they gave way to some other people.

Similarly, detailed descriptions of modern people are useful to real scientists teasing out genetic relationships between collective traits and specific genes. That said, this women should know that race is a real thing and an important aspect the human animal. But, she wishes it were not and would like everyone else to pretend it were not real. She is an example of why many fields are dismissed by the empirically minded. They tolerate and promote unserious people like Nina Jablonski.

The fact is, the modern word is in a race of sorts. One side of the intellectual elite is learning the true nature of human diversity, which increasing looks to be invalidating core beliefs of the ruling elite. The other side of the race is where proselytizers like Nina Jablonski come into the picture. She is trying eliminate any decent from the prevailing orthodoxy before science invalidates it. It’s nice to think that the truth will win out, but the way to bet is the inconvenient science is what eventually gets retired by these people.

Everyone agrees that America has moves steadily to the Left over the last century or so. America in the 1950’s was not that much more liberal than it was in the 1920’s, but it was clearly heading Left. Today’s America is much further Left than it was in the middle of the last century. In other words, the direction has remained the same, but the pace has quickened. As the nation’s rulers have dropped Christianity as their organizing morality, they have embraced the various fads on the Left as a secular religion.

It has not been a steadily increasing shift. It has been in fits and starts, with spasms of radicalism, followed by quiet periods. The period from the assassination of JFK through the Nixon administration was spasm that shifted the country way over to the left compared to the America of 1958. We are in the midst of one such spasm now, which can be dated to the 2000 election. That seemed to radicalize or maybe energize the radicals, who have been on the warpath ever since.

An example is in the comments of a post on Marginal Revolution. Tyler Cowen mentioned that Peter Schuck is “largely a Democrat.” That’s a subtle way of saying he is a liberal, but not crazy like most of them. He still retains the ability to criticize the actions of his ideological clan, if not his ethnic tribe. That seemed to upset some of the readers, who went into the full purity spiral. Here is a comment from someone calling himself Matt that captures the fevered mind of the modern leftists.

Schuck is “largely a Democrat” in the same way that Joe Liberman is “largely a Democrat”, which is to say, not really. He’s most famous for arguing that children of unauthorized immigrants born and raised in the US should not be US citizens. He’s not conservative compared to, say, the average state senate member from South Carolina, but he’s pretty far outside of the mainstream of the Democratic party.

Notice how Joe Lieberman, a liberal’s liberal for his entire Senate career is now “outside of the mainstream” for the modern Left.  Matt and his coreligionists are now so far Left that yesterday’s liberal is now a reactionary. Cults always need a Trotsky and Lieberman continues to fill that role for those radicalized in the Bush years. It’s not that his position are really outside the acceptable, it’s that Lieberman was willing to associate with the people the Left still considers the face of evil. It’s guilt by association.

That is a feature with all radicals. Because there is no limiting principle to things like anti-racism or opposition to war, they can always out radical the most radical guy, but adopting an even more extreme position. In this spasms of radicalism, the Left lurches further to the extreme, which drags the center with them. The professional Right, of course, chases after them, which only helps drag the center to the Left. When this spasms burns itself out, the new center will be far to the Left and conservatives will defend it as the new normal.

The abuse of science is so common, hardly anyone notices. It’s not the abuse of science itself, but more the appropriation of the language of science. This is always done as an effort to fool people into believing things that are not based in fact. People tend to trust science, so if you couch an idea in the language of science, they will tend to accept it, even if it is a little nutty. As a result, junk science turns up all over the place. The latest example is in this story about the NFL concussion settlement. 

The awards would vary based on an ex-player’s age and diagnosis. A younger retiree with Lou Gehrig’s disease would get $5 million, those with serious dementia cases would get $3 million, and an 80-year-old with early dementia would get $25,000. Retirees without symptoms would get baseline screening and follow-up care if needed.

The science supporting concussion is not strong. It has been known for a century, at least, that repeated blows to the head can be damaging to the brain. Boxers have been called “punchy” for at least a century. The degree of causality has never been established, as most boxers start out rather slow witted. There’s really no way to know if taking blows to the head cases dementia, using statistics, because you cannot have a control group that mirrors the experimental group. You need more than correlations.

The CTE hysteria of today is based entirely on the worst sort of observational science, along with endless media hype. That is, the people trying to ban football claim they see a higher incidence of brain related disease among football players than the general public. Well, there’s also a higher incidence of college diplomas and advanced degrees. That’s right, football players are awarded advanced degrees at higher rates than non-football players. No one is claiming football causes pursuit of college credentials.

That’s the difference between correlation and causation. Correlation can be a clue to causalities that are unknown. They can also be meaningless. While it seems reasonable that there are long term costs to playing a sporty that is as physically damaging as football, controlling for all of the environmental and genetic factors is impossible, at least with regards to this issue. Maybe people prone to dementia are also risk takers, and thus engage in high risk hobbies like playing football or boxing.

To now claim that ALS is caused by football is bordering on insanity. ALS is most certainly a genetic disorder. There’s some evidence of inheritance, but that’s only clear in about 10% of the cases. The nature of the disease, however, strongly suggests a genetic defect. There’s no evidence that environmental factors are the cause. It’s not just that it clouds the research into head trauma, but i pollutes the research into ALS. It’s a fraud on the public that can have real costs to real people in medical danger.

Like a lot of people in the bad thing community, I have recently discovered Ta-Nehisi Coates. This means I have not been reading the Atlantic for a long time. I used to be an avid reader, when it was the symbol of educated taste and I was a young guy trying to acquire educated tastes. I lost interest in it at some point, but I did return when Michael Kelly took over for a while. After his death they fell back into the old bad habits and I drifted away. There’s only so much blank Progressivism you can take.

Anyway, I discovered him when he was described as an important new public intellectual in a lefty publication. Looking at his blog, I saw some interesting stuff and read up on him a little bit. There was enough there to see the familiar markings. The Left will start with the idea of the ideal intellectual and then find some guy to dress up like the model and repeat the slogans and sing the songs popular with the Left. It’s like the Left has central casting where they find these guys to plays these roles on TV and their websites.

This bit from the Coates blog jumped out to me:

When I was young man, I studied history at Howard University. Much of my studies were focused on the black diaspora, and thus white racism. I wish I had understood that I was not, in fact, simply studying white racism, but the nature of power itself. I wish I had known that the rules that governed my world echoed out into the larger world. I wish I had known how unoriginal we really are.

Notice it is possible for someone to major in white racism. By the time you are a teenager, you have a pretty good idea how racism works, whether it is white-on-black, black-on-white or any combination that strikes your fancy. America is a big country. Whatever your race, we have someone who hates you for it. The other thing that jumps out here is the conflation of racism, however defined, and power. It is an interesting concept because it explains something of the black view or the Western world and is entirely insane.

people naturally are attracting to people who look like them and share their heritage and culture. This is obvious to anyone who has been outside. That means they are less likely to be a threat. Developed within the evolving social networks of humans over ten thousand years, it is not hard to see how distrust of the other is baked into the cake. It is a useful survival strategy and it is useful as a group survival strategy. This innate sense of trust among similar people is well known to anyone who has traveled.

Notice also that race is not real, but racism explains everything that makes people like Coates angry at the world. It’s a weird contradiction, but these are not people basing their claims in Aristotelian logic. This dualism about race is simply a way to claim they have a right to your stuff and to rule over you. On the one hand, you got yours through racism, which is bad, but blacks can never be racist, as they don’t have stuff. It’s pretty much just a tarted up statement from the black guy who robbed your house.

The term “hot-blooded” has fallen out of favor, as observations about anything outside the gray zone of multiculturalism are forbidden. It used to be a common way to describe people from the parts of the world near the equator. An Italian or Mexican could be described as hot-blooded, to mean emotional or passionate. It was not an insult, as people who were “hot-blooded” were also well meaning, just more emotional than the northern European type. Of course, this is strictly forbidden now, so no one says it.

Maybe there is something else about being hot-blooded. According to Gallup, the Filipinos are the happiest people on earth. Without studying it too closely, it really does look like being excitable tracks with general happiness. On the other end, the people from colder climates are the least happy. Singapore tops the list, but the usual suspects from the cold, Caucasian outposts fill out the top ten. The method for building the list probably falls far short of what most people would call empirical, but it is interesting.

Gallup went out and asked people a series of questions like “Did you feel well rested yesterday?” and “Did you smile and laugh a lot yesterday?” and tabulated the results into this least of most and least happiest nations. Presumably, the more you laugh and sleep, the more emotional you are according to Gallup. That makes sense. You never hear about great Russian comics or Swedish funny men. Of course, laughing is something contented people would do, so getting plenty of sleep makes sense, as well.

That said, the results do conform to what we tend to think about people. Filipinos do seem like happy little people. In fact, most people think of the southern latitudes as relaxed and happy places. It’s not just the weather that attracts whites from the north to places like the Caribbean. They go there to relax, because the culture is relaxed and the people seem happy. That said, Gallup was not going to headline their study “Swarthy People of the South Most Hot Blooded” as that would get them sent to the camps.

The question, of course, is what’s on the flip-side of this coin. People who are emotional are less rational. A great chess player or poker player is one who controls his passions and is clinical in his approach to the game. You really see this in poker these days. The winners are almost always men from STEM fields. They maintain a dispassionate engagement with the game and rely on their opponents to let their emotions get the better of them. In other words, the dispassionate are better at controlling their environment.

Then there is the link between emotion and time preference. A child has a high time preference and throws a fit when they don’t get what they want. To survive in the north means putting off today so you can food in the winter. People are happy and getting planet of sleep don’t have to worry if they put up enough supplies to last the winter or weather their hut is weather proofed. Perhaps the trade-off is you get happiness or you get a lot of civilization stuff done. That really does not sound like a great trade.