Portland State stands for evolution

Portland State scientists have a petition up that stands for the science of evolution. It is an interesting little signing statement:

As scientists, we feel strongly that categorizing Intelligent Design (“ID”) as science is both inappropriate and misleading. Local bookstores and libraries unintentionally exacerbate this misleading categorization when they shelve ID books and legitimate science texts in the same section . Our goal is to convince the U.S. Library of Congress to re-classify ID books into sections other than the science section.

Sometimes signing statements are dubious because they might just be group think - empty statements of solidarity around an ideal of some kind. The Portland State petition is rather specific though and backed up by thorough research, replication, revision, etc. I concur that the Library of Congress and bookstores shouldn't put books like Darwin's Black Box or Icons of Evolution into the biology sections because they represent something else - namely theological views on the science of evolution that are political ploys. (I myself like to move these books to the religious fiction section of bookstores.) Signing statements like this one are political responses to political attacks on science.

Just such a political attack came with the Disco' Tute put out its Scientists Who Dissent From Darwin statement. Now we have little chess games with numbers of scientists (whose discipline doesn't matter apparently). Disco' thought they were hot with 700. So the National Center for Science Education has their's, called Project Steve (all of its signers are named Steve) who all affirm, "Evolution is a vital, well-supported, unifying principle of the biological sciences, and the scientific evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of the idea that all living things share a common ancestry." They have over 900 signatures. All that would be empty if it weren't for the fact many of the Steves on the list have used the theory of evolution to generate testable predictions that help us to explain the natural mechanisms for the rise of life on Earth and its continued change over time. The Dissenters have no such luck. So as a matter of practicality, Project Steve is a redundancy to what biologists, biochemists, ecologists, paleontologists, and anthropologists simply do. Their deeds are already a petition recorded in thousands of experiments and millions of observations every year.

Portland State - one university - currently has 907 signers. I think the consensus is pretty clear. I like the signing statement. But more than that, I respect the good work that enlightens us about our place on the tree of life and about how "endless forms most beautiful" evolve.

Quotation of the day

In his chapter, "Religious rejections of the world and their directions," Max Weber wrote the following:

There is absolutely no 'unbroken' religion working as a vital force which is not compelled at some point to demand the credo non quod, sed quia abusrdum - 'the sacrifice of the intellect.'"

The leaps of faith that revelatory religion demands requires the sacrifice of reasoned evidence-based thinking for something else.

Is this why I'm so social?

My wife and friends sometimes make fun of me because I'm so gregarious. (Want to be my facebook friend? Hehe.) New research shows that genes might play a pretty heavy role in sociality.

"We find that how interconnected your friends are depends on your genes. Some people have four friends who know each other and some people have four friends who don't know each other. Whether Dick and Harry know each other depends on Tom's genes," Christakis said in a telephone interview...

"We found there appears to be a genetic tendency to introduce your friends to each other," Christakis said.

There could be good, evolutionary reasons for this. People in the middle of a social network could be privy to useful gossip, such as the location of food or good investment choices.

Cool. Hat tip to Brabo.

Where religious fundamentalism and religious liberalism meet

Some thinking by liberal or moderate believers can be as insensible as those of fundamentalists. While the social toxicity of their beliefs may be nearly nil, their beliefs can still be impervious to reason. It can be disheartening to find reason so hamstrung.

In a recent book on the evolution wars in the United States, Saving Darwin: How to be a Christian and Believe in Evolution Karl Giberson argues a stand that creationists and their ID progeny embody a form of culturally evolved nonsense. How right he is. But he fails to see the connection between his own special religious desires and wishes, his own allegedly lofty theological understandings (for a grand critique, read Jerry Coyne's recent review "Seeing is Believing" at The New Republic). He writes:

As a believer in God, I am convinced in advance that the world is not an accident and that, in some mysterious way, our existence is an "expected" result. No data would dispel it. Thus, I do not look at natural history as a source of data to determine whether or not the world has purpose. Rather, my approach is to anticipate that the facts of natural history will be compatible with the purpose and meaning I have encountered elsewhere. And my understanding of science does nothing to dissuade me from this conviction.

How is this different from creationists' beliefs?

It is and is not. I think it is pretty clear that beliefs like Giberson's lack the cancerous anti-science that Ken Ham's, Kent Hovind's, Duane Gish's, or Henry Morris's do. It is clear that Giberson accepts science's methods as valid for exploring and explaining the overwhelming majority of nature. The natural method of hypothesis testing works. We are evolved species that has come to be through deep time. His beliefs are devoid of the vicious anti-gay filth that so saturates many conservative believers' beliefs. In short, it seems that his God is more ineffable than the creationists' genocidal tyrant.

But his position of acceptance is essentially the same: his belief is a priori. The above-quoted paragraph begins with "As a believer in God, I am convinced in advance..." and nothing could possibly "dispel it." It is this intractable certainty in materially groundless beliefs that I cannot help but find offensive because they assume that the world has a purpose and that that purpose has been imbued into nature and that the purpose of nature has been to bring about human beings who are, we are to believe, made in God's image. There are so many problems with this belief that it is hard to begin in any one place.

Why must nature have a purpose other than its purpose of being itself? Whether someone believes in a special creation happened about 6,000 years ago in the Garden of Eden, as the result of some god(s) singing humans into existence, or through the special creation of the soul with the evolutionary emergence of humans on the African savanna over 100,000 years ago, divine purpose in nature becomes a problem. We envision any god or gods to behave with purpose because we behave with purpose and imbue our creations with purpose. Our cars are meant to be driven. Our flower gardens are meant to look beautiful to us. Our music is meant to be danced to, sung, and enjoyed. We are creatures of purpose and intention who have tremendous difficulty not identifying purpose everywhere. We almost can't help it. We infer or imagine that we are made in god's/s' image (more to the point we imagine god(s) in our own image) and therefore must find this purpose in all things.

We are plagued by questions like, "What is a tree for?" Because we are an I that experiences itself, we experience the tree as being, in some sense, for us. The experience of the tree is an experience mediated by our middle world brains. In some sense, the tree is within us. Its purpose is generated by us and for us. It is easy to see all of this. God created us for him and the world for us. Whatever purpose we want something to have can easily be seen as divinely sanctioned. This may be overly convenient, but the Genesis dominion story feeds an already self-involved notion. The purpose of everything out there must be for us. If God didn't give it to us, then we have no purpose. The tree is not for us.

The tree is for itself. It exists to make more trees. Its DNA drives it along in the economy of nature. That answer turned back on us is not satisfying as a purpose. We conscious humans have a bit of trouble believing that our purpose is to make more people. In the impersonal economy of nature that is our purpose. How chilling. How non-divine that seems. Humans are just another part of nature changing through time, an animal knowing something about itself in a universe silent about what it is supposed to do. Almost.

If you ever read Emile Durkheim, you might get a different idea though. Our religions are us telling us how great and important we are. The gods of our collective conscious give us meaning and purpose and we use all of that to infuse purpose into the universe. The purpose is our own individual and shared creation. That purpose does not come from gods. It comes from us.

Giberson has invested his time and effort into determining a purpose for himself that he has come to share with others. This He knows fully well that evolution is real and true. It is a fact of the world that life descends with modification. He also has imbued in it the truth such that it is meaningful in some way. He cannot deny it because to deny it is to divest himself of reason, something he also values. Therefore, he must find a way to keep them both. The only way to do this is to assume that his belief in the Christian God is true and not subject to scientific inquiry, giving it some other epistemological and ontological status. In his brain and action, he must put one off limits from the other out of convenience. This is, intellectual acrobatics, a personal sleight of hand that hides the tension by pretending it doesn't exist. It comes across as dishonest.

It is a weaker version of what creationists do. They both explain away what is inconvenient to their religious beliefs with "just-so" stories and apologetics. This is why the moderate has trouble pushing back against the fundamentalist, because in some way they have share the belief that God must exist. To be a moderate is to juggle reality and fantasy and be tugged between them at all times but it is not that much more soundly based in evidence than creationist beliefs. It may be the socially easiest path, but I think that it is a bit philosophically and intellectually lazy for a person as scientifically literate as Giberson is.

The Nature vs. Nurture debate? Update with new links.

The nature vs. nurture debate that pervades our society is a bit antiquated. I consider it a nurture via nature thing. Massimo Pigliucci considers it a nature via nurture thing. I'll post the first and last paragraphs of a blog of his at Secular Philosophy:

My professional field of study is gene-environment interactions, or what philosophers and social scientists call nature vs. nurture. That is why, whenever I’m asked if I believe there is such a thing as “human nature” my answer is yes and no. Yes, in the sense that the genetic makeup of the human species is distinct enough from that of other species to make us different in a variety of non-trivial respects (of which having developed blog technology is just one). No, because human beings are genetically contiguous with other primates (which means there are very few things that are truly uniquely human), and also because we know that genotypes can produce very different outcomes depending on what the environmental conditions are (a phenomenon known in biology as phenotypic plasticity).
...
The problem with trying to be a reasonable skeptic is that one easily makes enemies on both fronts of any debate: you acknowledge that genetics does set limits to human characteristics, and you get accused of being a genetic determinist and possibly encouraging eugenics. You grant that the environment plays a sometimes major role and you are ridiculed as an anti-scientific fuzzy thinker. Wake up, ladies and gentlemen on both fronts: the reality is both more complex and more fascinating than either caricature would allow. It is neither nature nor nurture, it is -- as the title of an unusually balanced book by Matt Ridley puts it -- nature via nurture.dolphinChickens and eggs anyone? He's got great points. Humans are contiguous in the stream of primate evolution and our environmental conditions switch things off and on in our genes some of which, I think we might find, led to a drift over time toward things like language and prediction. Our intelligence is an adaptive function that is almost surely combinatorial of different modules or functions like digital manipulation with our hands, language, prediction, and imagination via our mirror system. Messy it is and well beyond the simplicity of nature vs. nurture.

I am quite an ally of Pagliucci (in my own mind anyway) and so I am a bit hesitant to make much of any disagreement with him. I guess that the following thoughts, edited from a post I did last year, end up being a kind of loose commentary on what he's said, most of which relate to pre-21st century thinkers.

In his Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant argued that the human mind provides a foundation for intelligence by placing experiences into categories that it can apprehend and manipulate. Kant parsimoniously synthesized a view that states that intelligence is A) an innate property that is B) shaped by experience. This view has been corroborated by modern cognitive science and psychology. Additionally, it paves a middle road in the “nature vs. nurture” debate between René Descartes’ introspective rationalism and John Locke’s empiricism and also later contributors like John Stuart Mill and Francis Galton. Importantly, the Kantian view avoids some ethical traps that we should consider.

Kant’s categories make intuitive sense. Our brains differentiate and integrate sight, smell, scent, taste, and touch. We instinctively place that sensory information into categories: an object’s existence in time, its shape, its position in space, its unity, its distinction from other objects, its qualities like color or texture, and its/their quantity even if only understood in a relative capacity and not made numerate to high degrees. Human brains do not learn those senses or how to place experiences into categories – all are part of our brain’s architecture, operating to make sense of the external world. Finally, the brain’s ability to manipulate these categories connects to individual human biology and development, reaching their fully “cooked” status with the complete maturation of the frontal lobe in our early twenties. Without proper embryonic and childhood development, the hope of sentience might be compromised to some degree even going so far as to render a person totally unconscious of their condition such that they are not even definitionally a person by some criteria.

To show how Kant’s categories emerge from our neural architecture but are shaped by experience, consider the following sentence: “He is under the water.” “He” is a particular male organism. The verb “is” implies that he exists even though he can no longer be perceived by our senses though our memories trace him, our predictive intuitions suspect him to be moving in some way that follows from his actions while above the water, and that he will surface to breath because we are air-breathing mammals. We understand that he has object permanence. The preposition “under” tells the sentence’s reader or listener about what his position under the plane of the water is and that this "is" might mean some set of motions here or there we do not know. The definite article “the” indicates a particular body of water as opposed to “any” water or “some” water. Finally, “water” distinguishes a particular liquid and not some other substance like lava, sulfuric acid, or melted ice cream. These things we intuitively understand.

The sentence, “He is under the water,” could be said in any language, implying that categories operate in all human brains but that the means of communicating those categories vary according to individual people’s experiences. A child of sufficient cognitive development who can apprehend object permanence, even the proverbial child raised by wolves, can see a man totally submerge himself and understand that, “He is under the water,” and not have the words for it. Cats, eagles, and crocodiles understand “He is under the water” – they do fish after all – though they have no words for it. No one teaches the toddler human, the cat, the eagle, or the crocodile about the categories into which their brain sorts its sensory inputs. Even more impressively a crow, a macaque, or maybe the great apes, or a would be able to communicate some part of these ideas to us, with sufficient interaction with humans invested in sharing language with these creatures. I doubt that any of use can doubt that Jane Goodall can understand the subtle language of chimpanzees who are well able to communicate about their environments.

They are part of our biological computer and constitute a kind of intelligence that precedes any individual organism’s experience, but the ability to communicate the fact that “He is under the water” (using whatever language) or what actions to take based on those facts (should we get a lifeguard or believe he is bathing) are informed by experience and a developed contextual understanding that the basic categories cannot provide in and of themselves.

A human mind is not a tabula rasa or “blank slate.” John Locke correctly viewed experience as essential to intelligence and reasoning abilities, but he overstated the case when he said that one who watches babies “will have little reason to think him stored with plenty of ideas." Tests show that infants can distinguish between two objects or three, can select colors, and can differentiate between strangers’ and family members’ faces. Though simple, and not unlike the beasts Locke said could “abstract not", these abilities show that the mind is not merely some repository of experiences totally shaped by an external reality. Certainly, studies in primate intelligence show that even so-called beasts can abstract. Kant’s categories compensate for Locke’s poor showing.

It seems that the Kantian view reinforces René Descartes’ dualism, the belief that God gifted the mind as an immortal and immaterial object to the human body. In the sixth of his Meditations Concerning First Philosophy, Descartes stated:

[T]he body may be considered as a machine, so built and composed of bones, nerves, veins, and skin that even if there was no mind in it, it would not cease to move in all the ways that it does at present when it is under the direction of the will, nor consequently with the aid of the mind. (p. 139)

For Descartes, the body was a vehicle for the immaterial soul to gather its information. Somehow, sensory information was converted from material stuff to immaterial stuff for the mind to perceive. This allegedly occurs in the pineal gland creating what Daniel Dennett calls the “Cartesian Theater” (This creates an infinite regress of “Cartesian Theaters” because there might as well be another homunculus inside of the homunculus inside of me. We could be nested conscious Russian Matryoshka dolls.) We can imagine little wo/men driving bodies through material reality though somehow existing separate from it. Kant agreed with Descartes that the mind was immaterial, but his view is capacious enough to accommodate current scientific theories that the mind – what the brain does – contains innate knowledge.

Additionally, Kant’s view allows for John Stuart Mill’s associative psychology and some of Francis Galton’s views of intelligence as an inheritable trait. Mill’s laws of association by similarity, association by contiguity, and the law of association by intensity each extend the categories into relationships with one another that allow for the formation of simple ideas and “complex idea[s]." A “house” is complex because it unifies many objects in space and time – nails, screws, wood, wires, windows, etc. Kantian categories come into play: for a mind to understand a complex idea, we must presuppose its ability to apprehend and then integrate its parts. Mill, like Locke before him might have disparaged this kind of intelligence as barely more than instinct. However, the mind must be able to apprehend things to associate them in its “mental chemistry” and learn how to form associative networks.

Although Kant believed that minds were immaterial, his belief in their innate properties aligned with Francis Galton’s naturalist theories of intelligence. Galton, following Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, posited that an organism’s intelligence was a naturally selected inheritable trait. Intelligence, like any other phenotype, arose in humans as genetically varied and fit ancestors reproduced and passed on those traits. Modern biologists and geneticists have cast Galton’s eugenic hunches into the dustbin because they were simplistic and tragically used to further stratify societies and justify the Rassenhygiene of the Third Reich that led to the Final solution (Holt 2005). Nonetheless, though his ideas were simplistic, Galton’s notion that some considerable aspect of intelligence, at least its foundation, was due to inheritable biology can be seen as providing a biological groundwork for the brain’s creation of Kantian categories.

At the heart of this brief consideration lies a concern with both scientific accuracy and a utilitarian ethic. We must be very careful about how society and its institutions use science when we define a human attribute as power-laden as intelligence. Kant’s definition would have to be greatly perverted to institute dystopic policies. However, we should consider the ability of the categorical imperative to overstretch its bounds and consider its negative or inverse statement, to not act in a way that we would not visited upon us.

The specter of eugenics remains today – think of the torrent that ousted Lawrence Summers from Harvard or James Watson’s recent pronouncements on race and intelligence and the ensuing backlash. Our ethics and beliefs about how to serve people must be as important as the raw data we gather about them; even if, especially if, we tentatively find genetic differences in culturally valued abilities like intelligence that seem to pronounce this group in and this group out. As Peter Singer wrote in a recent article in Free Inquiry, “Human rights are not dependent on intelligence." Kant’s basic concept of intelligence as emerging from categories avoids this trap.

Atheist hell.

I think this about sums it up.

Facebook fun with creationists

The fun never stops on Facebook. Today, I found sites for the Institute for Creation Research, Answers in Genesis, and Ken Hovind. Go become fans or join the groups and leave them messages too.

The comments are brilliant! On Ken Hovind:

In Jail for spreading the word of GOD!! He gets put in jail for 10 - 15 years for a pinance of tax, look at wesley snipes hey had 4 million dollars owing and he only got 3 years!! NWO at work....

You can't have Wesley Snipes in a sentence and be taken seriously. And don't forget the New World Order guys! That cabal of governments working to get the anti-Christ to come! Ack! Run for cover. I thought these people want the anti-Christ to come so that they can have Jesus arrive like Superman out of the sky and subjugate the non-believers in a bloodbath to end all bloodbaths.

This demands a play of the Ministry song "N.W.O."

Drunk Australians can explain size in evolution

PZ Myers has a new essay up at Talk Reason that explains how size has increased over evolutionary time using drunk Australians:

Here's an analogy to get the right model into your head. Imagine a busy bar that closes at 2am, and sends all the drunks out the door to walk home. Since scienceblogs was so unfair to our Australian readership last night, let's imagine it is an Australian bar, and a million brain-blitzed Australian drunks spill out the door and start walking determinedly down the street. There are a few properties at play here. One is that this street happens to be paralleled on the right by a wall, so the drunks can't stagger too far in that direction. The other is that on the left is a wide-open sheep pasture which provides no obstacle to their progress that way. Another is that they are all initially aimed straight down the street, but because they are drunk, they stagger every once in a while and veer off a few degrees to the left or the right, entirely by chance.

You're hovering overhead in a helicopter. What do you think you will see?

Why use this analogy? Because creationists have lately abused a peer-reviewed article's* conclusions. The article finds:

These size steps coincide with, or slightly postdate, increases in the concentration of atmospheric oxygen, suggesting latent evolutionary potential was realized soon after environmental limitations were removed.

ID proponents(ists) love that little bit about "latent evolutionary potential" because they want to read it as "God-designed genome." Of course, as PZ explains, there is nothing in the article or anything in all of biology to support that life on Earth has come about through any such device as a front-loaded genome. If life were so front-loaded as the creationists suggest, I wonder why not get the whole thing over with and just make human beings right at the beginning and give us some totally unique system of genetic replication instead of having us share DNA with every other species? Why waste the time letting trillions upon trillions of organisms die to realize the "latent potential" of life by eventually arriving at the human? It's a very thoughtless argument.

As PZ concludes it:

All this is saying is that the limits of growth are properties of both organismal and environmental constraints, and that we can map those out by looking at the fossil record.

---
*Payne JL, Boyer AG, Brown JH, Finnegan S, Kowalewski M, Krause RA Jr, Lyons SK, McClain CR, McShea DW, Novack-Gottshall PM, Smith FA, Stempien JA, Wang SC (2009) Two-phase increase in the maximum size of life over 3.5 billion years reflects biological innovation and environmental opportunity. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 106(1):24-7.

What do your genes do with nature? What does nature do with your genes? Really. Who are you?

Stephen Pinker has written a really cool piece for The New York Times Magazine.

Today as the lessons of history have become clearer, the taboo is fading. Though the 20th century saw horrific genocides inspired by Nazi pseudoscience about genetics and race, it also saw horrific genocides inspired by Marxist pseudoscience about the malleability of human nature. The real threat to humanity comes from totalizing ideologies and the denial of human rights, rather than a curiosity about nature and nurture. Today it is the humane democracies of Scandinavia that are hotbeds of research in behavioral genetics, and two of the groups who were historically most victimized by racial pseudoscience — Jews and African-Americans — are among the most avid consumers of information about their genes.

He is going to have his genome sequenced. What will become of it? Read on.

Lower Slate Lake, Alaska - Proposed site for ecocide

I just read two stories (here and here) about a gold mine owned by Couer in Alaska that wants to dump all of its "fill" - a.k.a. toxic industrial waste from mining that's been given a conveniently sanitized name just for this purpose - in Lower Slate Lake which is populated by Dolly Varden char and sticklebacks. Couer was given a permit by that bastion of ethical land use the Army Corps of Engineers. So far, they have been prevented from doing this by environmental protection groups and now the case has gone to the Supreme Court. Why?

Because all of the fish would die. All of them.

Now Justices Roberts and Scalia seem to think this is no problem at all. See, there are populations of char living elsewhere in Alaska. Roberts asked, "There are millions of them somewhere else, right?" The thing that we might want to understand though Mr. Roberts, Esq. is that the fish in this habitat are a unique population that has evolved in this particular niche. This is kind of like saying, "There are thousands of cormorants elsewhere right?" before crashing the Exxon Valdez on the coast of Prince William Sound. That's the price of doing business right? You have to get rid of junk somewhere so why not there?

Scalia shows that he has the ecological ignorance that only an overeducated Jabba the Hut wannabe can have. He says, "Isn't it arguable that the best place for really toxic stuff is at the bottom of a lake so long as it stays there?" This guy doesn't understand anything about water tables and living systems at all. What? It's just going to sit there at the bottom as some kind of immobile mass for all eternity as if it's in a vacuum-sealed oubliette. No. It's in water. It will run out.

Clean Water for All notes, "Slate Creek flows from the lake about 2 miles into Berners Bay. The creek contains a variety of fish, including coho, pink and chum salmon, Dolly Varden char, and cutthroat trout." Worry not Scalia. It'll all just stay put on the bottom of the lake. How has anyone ever thought this guy was worth putting on the Supreme Court? He's a buffoon.

Coeur has a history of this kind of thing. In 1995 in New Zealand they apparently tried to pass off their toxic industrial sites in the Waitekuri Valley which was home to endangered frogs and kokakos (bird pictured below) as some sort of refuge. Coeur did all this under the newspeak organization named Wildlife Habitat Council which included Coeur itself. It is a 501(C) front for corporations (Anheuser-Busch Companies, Inc., DuPont Company, ExxonMobil, General Electric Company, Tenneco Oil Company and United States Steel Corporation) that seek to pilfer nature as cheaply and irresponsibly as possible all fronted with a slick website, a press room, and "helps large landowners, particularly corporations, manage their unused lands in an ecologically sensitive manner for the benefit of wildlife. More than 2 million acres in 48 states, Puerto Rico, and 16 other countries."

This, we must presume is to align with Coeur's own environmental and social responsibility mission. They say:

Our Environmental Policy:

The Company has a strong regard for environmental stewardship. We conduct our activities in such a manner as to protect the physical environment in which we operate. We comply with applicable enviromental and product safety laws and regulations and develop and implement a program to ensure compliance. We are both responsible and responsive to the concerns of stakeholders relating to the environment.

In carrying out our Environmetal Policy we:
• Adhere to environmentally sound practices for cyanide managment;
• Plan for and conduct reclamation which returns mined lands to productive land uses;
• Conduct mining activities to minimize their effects on climate change; and
• Manage mine waste safely and responsibly.

We develop, obtain, and disseminate pertinent information to our employees through on-going training programs to alert them to environmental, health and safety trends and concerns.

These are the newspeak versions of ecological sensitivity, responsible and safe mine waste disposal, and environmental stewardship when it comes to Lower Slate Lake in Alaska. In yesterday's Supreme Court hearing, Justice Souter said, "When you are destroying the entire living (bodies) of this lake, it seems to me that it's getting Orwellian to say there are rigorous environmental standards."

If the company HAS to mine for gold - and who says we have to do this - then they should HAVE to determine a feasible and environmentally sound waste disposal method BEFORE they mine. Instead, they've gotten a stamp of approval from the Army Corps of Engineers that certifies a local ecocide. It is not enough that there may be, as Roberts said, "millions of [chad] somewhere else right?" They are beings in their own right being killed for no reason other than human greed and negligence with no appreciable end that can be ethically justifiable.

My friend Aaron summed this up best by asking, "Where is Gov. Palin when the Alaska environment needs her? Or any other sensible politician?" Where? Shooting wolves from helicopters and getting exorcised of demons by a Kenyan minister of course.

Louisiana about to be hit by the nonsense hurricane

Last year, the Louisiana legislature passed SB 733 (see my posts here and here) which successfully opened the door to senseless lessons on evolution, global warming, human cloning, and . Lots of people, including the Louisiana Coalition for Science, Barbara Forrest, university and high school faculty from around the state, and the National Center for Science Education came out of the woodwork to decry the policy. How has it taken root?

The News Star reports that a Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education plans to pass some new garbage. Barbara Forrest has said that language was removed that stated "religious beliefs shall not be advanced under the guise of encouraging critical thinking." She continued that "the proposal would give BESE authority to determine which supplemental materials are prohibited in science classrooms, but only if challenged by a citizen. Forrest said the procedure for challenge is unclear and puts the burden on the complainant to challenge lessons after they have been taught." That's just great.

So the state legislature passed and Governor Jindal signed a so-called "academic freedom" policy that we all know is a stealth creationism bill. It calls for so-called critical thinking about evolution while leaving out the germ theory of disease or heliocentricity because evolution offends some people's notions about special creation. Thus threatened, and threatened therefore by the very nature of public knowledge and science, they have to pretend that their narrow religious viewpoints are science and belong in science class. But lacking any real scientific arguments, they use outmoded creationist arguments rebuffed decades ago.

But this won't stop creationists. They have a controversy to manufacture, press, replicate, and distribute as widely as possible and they will be well-protected by the new BESE policy. In case you wonder who has been behind designing this policy: it's that bastion of scientific knowledge, the Louisiana Family Forum, an affiliate of James Dobson's Focus on the Family.

Rep. Frank Hoffmann, R-West Monroe, a former Ouachita Parish assistant superintendent, introduced the "academic freedom" bill, modeled after the Ouachita Parish policy, in the House of Representatives in April.

"There's just one part that I'm still unhappy with," Hoffmann said.

He wants removed a statement that says "materials that teach creationism or intelligent design or that advance the religious belief that a supernatural being created humankind shall be prohibited for use in science class,' is unnecessary in the BESE policy because that is already stipulated in the law on which the policy is based.

See, the thing is, that language needs to be there, because without it, there won't be anything to stop creationism from getting into the curriculum. SB 733 is sufficiently vague enough that people will use it to justify creationist quackery. It has to be there.

Feel free to contact them a call, letter, or email by using the contact info below.

Heavy Metal Map of Names

This is just brilliant. Ritual Baphomet outline centered on a skull. What else is there in life? Not much I contend. All hail Doogie Horner the maker of this thing.


Hat tip to Kevin!

The collusion of church and state

Americans United for Separation of Church and State has responded to the newest press blast (pdf here) by the Bush White House about their lovely faith-based initiatives. In short, they are trash. Bush et al are still trying to spin these things as if they are much better than Christian platforms endorsed by the government in one of the grossest entanglements between church and state the U.S. has seen in years. Please.

"They call it a determined attack on need." This administration's negligent and corrosive policies placed more people in the United States and abroad in need than those before it. They have expanded the reach of the global economy that further displaces indigenous people and farmers from the rural subsistence lives to urban lives of defined poverty, industrial entanglement, and forced ghettoization. Their policies have further eroded and devastated nature. Whose "need" are we talking about?

If we twist "need" to mean the need of churches to line their pews so that they have a reason to continue to exist: then sure this is a determined attack on need that means it's a defensive strategy that feeds churches' needs to preach to those disenfranchised and emasculated by the modern state. The commercial American church needs the commercial American state to drive the commercial American economy each of which live to perpetuate helplessness and need as defined by people getting fat on the exploitation of invisible people.

If you read through the White House report, take note of the highlights. I can applaud things that work and I endorse pragmatism where and when it is pragmatic to be pragmatic. However, we have an agreed-upon framework in the Constitution for public funding of religious organizations that the FBCI totally violate. As Barry Lynn writes:

"The Bush initiative played crass politics with social service funding and jeopardized civil rights and civil liberties," said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, Americans United executive director. "All the PR spin in the world can't turn this monumental Bush failure into a success."

So when we see among the highlights that the FBCI have come together "to combat poverty, disease, and a host of other social ills," I'd like to know how this has happened. There is no general restructuring of cities by the government to help poor urban people in, I don't know...Compton, the Bronx, or Chester to receive conventionally defined modern health care. If medical care is a need, and these initiatives are supposed to help with those needs, then do it. They do not. I think that prevention and self-care are the best cure for ailments because they prevent ailments. Instead, we have organizations that thrive on the weak and disaffected - churches - being fed more government created weak and disaffected people through its corporate welfare, deregulation, anti-oversight policies that line the pockets and expand the housing prospects of industrialists and bankers.

It's a system that tells people not to have sex knowing fully well that they will, provides them with no incentives to learn about their own reproductive systems, will not model good ethical behavior for them, and instead ghettoizes them rurally or urbanly with no support and then blames them for their own woes. But don't worry, Jesus is there to help.

This is social Darwinism people. Evolutionists don't want this heaping pile of misery. We want prevention. Therefore, we are communists devoid of dignity. This is lunacy.

It's all collusion. As Kevin Phillips writes in American Theocracy, we have reached a point of "[r]eckless dependency on shrinking oil supplies, a milieu of radicalized (and much too influential) religion, and a reliance on borrowed money—debt, in its ballooning size and multiple domestic and international deficits—now constitute the three major perils to the United States of the twenty-first century." The faith-based initiatives are the government's way of ensuring that each part of this iron triangle - the President, the government's economy, and the Church - feeds the others: Woe. Waste. Want.

Barry Lynn says this slightly differently:

"President Bush should have gotten the Golden Globe," Lynn continued, "for playing a 'compassionate conservative' while doing precious little to actually help disadvantaged Americans.

Americans United has spearheaded opposition to the Bush faith-based plan from its inception. A wide array of religious, civil liberties and civil rights groups has joined forces to oppose central elements of the Bush plan.

Lynn said Americans should remember that the Bush administration failed to get its faith-based initiative through Congress because it endangered basic civil rights and civil liberties. It would have subjected Americans in need to unwelcome proselytism in publicly funded programs and allowed faith-based agencies to discriminate on religious grounds in hiring for government-funded jobs.

And Bush's own staff says it's a joke:

John DiIulio, former head of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, said political strategists controlled Bush domestic policy.

"What you've got," he told Esquire, "is everything and I mean everything being run by the political arm. It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis."

David Kuo, the number two staffer in the faith-based office, confessed in his book Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction that faith-based conferences were manipulated to help Republican candidates win votes.

This is state-sponsored proselytizing to cure woes it helps to create. It sponsors poverty through gentrification and industrial pollution and the undermining of American farmers and the steady dismantling of its public education system through policies like No Child Left Behind and its endorsement of creationist insanity. But anti-Constitutional initiatives are somehow a "determined attack on need." These things need to end.

2,000,000 every five minutes

This picture is now pretty famous.


That's two million plastic bottles. Every five minutes, we in the U.S. discard that many plastic bottles. Every hour we discard 2.5 million plastic water bottles. Just water bottles. 20% of them are recycled which incurs more energy waste and pollution. There is no excuse for this "convenience" any more.

"There's Probably No God" - Censorship?

The atheist bus advertisement campaign in Britain is receiving some negative returns. Apparently 48 people have complained about it, some of who say that "break guidelines on taste and decency."

Will the British censors come out and put the smack down? Are they going to stop all of the preachers from speaking on the reality of Jesus and eternal damnation that offends the sensibilities of reasonably compassionate people? Are they going to stop the imams from calling for Sharia law? Where would the end of such a policy be?

But one Stephen Green thinks that they should take down the adverts because he says they are a factual statement:

He said: "If you're going to put out what appears to be a factual statement then you have to be able to back it up. They've got to substantiate this proposition that in all probability, God doesn't exist."

More accurately, it's a statement of probability: "probably." It is not a statement of necessary fact. But are we to have British bureaucrats rule on the existence of God? What a laugh. The chief executive of the British Humanist Association said it best:

"I've sought advice from some of our key people here, but I'm afraid all I've got out of them so far is peals of laughter. I am sure that Stephen Green really does think there is a great deal of evidence for a God – though presumably only the one that he believes in – but I pity the ASA if they are going to be expected to rule on the probability of God's existence. However, if they do investigate we will be very happy to respond."

Can I get an Amen? Heh.

Oh...the Holy Water...err....Freshwater drama continues

This guy is the unsinkable rubber duck of the year. John Holy Water Freshwater has been up for more hearings. The Panda's Thumb has a post up. The skinny: He sucks and is an ass. He misleads kids and inculcates them into dogma. Just what we need in science class.

And just for a piece of miseducation:

Joe testified that Freshwater had put up a swathe of butcher paper on the wall for written comments about the evolution/creationism debates in class. That, he said, allowed the same sort of persecuting comments and gibes by other students to be written down on the paper when Joe wrote his position, in a sense concretizing the persecution.

Religious war comes to school folks.

Real synthetic life?

We'll see what happens with this, but I am currently a bit dumbfounded. New Scientist has reported that evolution from synthetic RNA has occurred in a lab:

Not content with achieving one hallmark of life in the lab, Joyce and Lincoln sought to evolve their molecule by natural selection. They did this by mutating sequences of the RNA building blocks, so that 288 possible ribozymes could be built by mixing and matching different pairs of shorter RNAs.

What came out bore an eerie resemblance to Darwin's theory of survival of the fittest: a few sequences proved winners, most losers. The victors emerged because they could replicate fastest while surrounded by competition, Joyce says.

"I wouldn't call these molecules alive," he cautions. For one, the molecules can evolve only to replicate better. Reproduction may be the strongest – perhaps only – biological urge, yet even simple organisms go about this by more complex means than breakneck division. Bacteria and humans have both evolved the ability to digest lactose, or milk sugar, to ensure their survival, for instance.

Now we'll hear how this was all "intelligently designed" and that it was "frontloaded." Well, if we were created in "His" image, we sure aren't that loving, just, fair, merciful, or prescient because the scientists didn't prevent a whole lot of unnecessary "deaths" in this instance. Paging David Hume.

"Friends of God"

Friends of God. Friends of a delusion.

There's a lot to say about a movie made by Alexandra Pelosi, the daughter of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and features her interactions with the likes of Jerry Falwell (remember Hitchens obituary interviews?), the forever odious disgraced former meth-smoking gay-prostitute-visiting hypocrite president of the American Association of Evangelicals turned washed-up insurance salesman Ted Haggard, and that beacon of the "Good News" with a pearly-toothed grin Joel Osteen. Come on. This must be great.

The movie opens up with a good old dose of the heartland with billboards and radio messages blaring the saving grace of Jesus.

"He's Ready!"
"We are in a war for the soul of America!"
"Don't Make Me Come Down There. - God"

Ugh. Pelosi's right. Evangelicals are an enormous force in the U.S., "a force of people who love God, who want to see...the love of Christ spread across the world," says Osteen. It is a great misfortune for the United States that the most economically and militarily powerful nation in the world has been hijacked by people who believe that Jesus will descend from heaven in their lifetime like a superhero and that there will be a spiritual war during which part-human, part-locust, part-lion creatures will tear sinners to bits. The American church is everywhere.

This movie has some great slime moments. Haggard's conversation with a couple of guys regarding evangelical sex lives will make your skin crawl. His propaganda drill, his "training camp for his battalion of spiritual warriors," is jaw-droppingly grotesque.

There are other bizarre moments:

A Christian Wrestling Federation. Way to promote turning the other cheek. Watching these people pretend to pummel the s#&@ out of one another.

The stand-up comics are strained and pathetic. They are more like jingoistic ultra-nationalists who say that they "believe in these ideas!" and bathe them in the blood of Jesus. "We want our country back. We'll fight for it." I'll fight this guy tooth and nail every day.

The family with 10 kids and the 11th on the way who want their kids to learn the principles of "truth, not error." (They are really cute though. Really cute.)

A car show for Christ? The Holy Land Experience will be familiar to anyone who saw Religulous. Frankly, it's nauseating. Biblical min-golf? A church of the future where you can go to a drive-thru window for some prayer. When the super-size of Wendy's isn't enough to satisfy, go for some prayer!

But of course, my favorite part is on evolution. I really wish I could find the billboard that says "Evolution is from the devil." Then, of course, we get the great Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis. Ham does a brilliant inculcation of a bunch of little kids and their deluded parents. One woman says, "Most Christians are viewed as ignorant because they believe in the Bible. Sometimes Christians feel like they are on the defensive because mainstream is so opposite and feeling like evolution is the broad-minded way to view things. When you look at the Bible and look at the evidence - scientific evidence - it makes sense it is just easy to explain to your childre children: the flood and the fossils that were found...it just makes more sense to me." This is what I find fascinating. A rather well-spoken woman, clearly a mom, who seems to lack little, has had her brain basically overridden by the myths of ancient people whose ability to explain the origin of the universe was limited to their interactions with themselves, nearby tribes, and the landscape of the pre-scientific Sinai peninsula.

If I were a bronze age goatherd, I'd be signed up for Genesis. It's a pretty neat story that explains about as much as being a pastoral person 3,000 years ago can get his mind around. But it explains nothing. That said, I don't think she's actually interested in explaining material reality. She wants community, purpose, and feeling. Religion's plenty good for that. It's just too bad that she has to dwell in, promulgate, and vote for the persistence and virulence of this sham. And so why not sign up with a man whose great gift is to delude children by singing a song called "Behemoth Was a Dinosaur" and declares that humans lived with dinosaurs. It's pathetic. And it's dangerous.

When Friends of God gets to Jerry Falwell, it will make your head spin. The voting business will get you going when Falwell, pretending to be separate from Liberty *scoff* University, endorses candidates. He wants his followers to go after the ACLU and get all of those kids to go out and fight for Judeo-Christian values. In a moment of great, and totally expected "Leper Messiah" moment, he says that he doesn't tell Liberty *scoff* University students who to vote for...even though he just told them who to vote for. And later, he tells his congregation to call their Senators to Yeah. That's dangerous.

There is a lot of stuff to be expected in this movie. Abortion. The treatment of gays and gay marriages which of course are nauseatingly hilarious coming from Ted Haggard's mouth. Euthanasia and Terry Schiavo. It's nuts.

One of Falwell's former ghostwriters is gay and he speaks up in the film. But, strangely, he still goes to Falwell's church as they "plot [his] overthrow." He wants to be around people who are sincere. They are sincere in their hatred which they call love, their enslavement which they call love, their ignorance which they call knowledge, and their delusion which they call truth and reality.

One of the things that comes up is that people are "spiritually hungry." This is true. People need meaning and American consumer culture does not provide it. We cannot shop our way to happiness. We can't eat our ways to happiness. I love science and philosophy but they are basically owned by experts. There is little in American culture that makes us happy because we are a consumer people (or pecuniary as John Dewey called it in Individualism Old & New from 1930) who has little sense of self. And what could cure it? It takes a good deal of work to learn about evolution, astronomy, physics, chemistry, or ecology. That takes effort and time that people who have to work and feed their kids and have grown up with religion don't have time for.

Few people are afforded the time and space to think about this as much as I am and most of you probably are. We are offered the comfort of our brains to figure out the issues that face us and the complexities of life because of their work. Quite honestly, they don't have the time, the energy, or the incentive to spend a lot of time learning. Yes, part of me thinks that lots of people are lazy thinkers and as a tenacious seeker of truth and pursuer of reality, when I hear creationists and fundies yammer on and on, I am driven pretty close to the edge by insipid and badly thought out arguments. But what do you expect from people whose lives are lived hoping for the consumerist American dream and a life free of toil and pain whose leaders since childhood have told them to "Look! Listen! Kneel! Pray!" before the almighty dollar and the almighty "Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name" and have done so to about the best of their abilities as often as they felt they could? It's easy to castigate people when you are afforded the time for it. Most people are average. And well, average is not very impressive.

But their leaders? Oh no friends. Don't think I'm going to let their leaders off the hook. And that's what I get from Friends of God. People who can know better because of their station, their resources, and their levels of education should do better instead of keeping people blinded, gagged, and shrouded by the outmoded dogma of bedouin people and their descendants. People who can easily understand more and claim responsibility for the actions of those who follow them cannot be let off the hook for deceit and theft.

Project-based learning

I basically hated high school. It was a bunch of silly fact-stuffing divorced from anything I was really interested in at all.

My few school satisfactions came from friends and projects that meant something to me/us. In 12th grade my friend Josh and I made a story-board cartoon about a young ninja avenging his master; I made a "horror" film about a teacher who stalks all the cute girls in his classes and takes them out (that was probably just an excuse for me to flirt with girls in my classes); we built rockets in a class I took on space flight; I took a reading course in which I got to read anything I wanted to and then write about what I read; I wrote poetry and short stories in creative writing classes. The bulk of that experiential learning happened at an alternative high school the strengths of which I won't blather about other than to say that doing makes school so much better.

Project-based learning has been around for a while, but high-stakes testing has battered it into a kind of ghetto. Maybe we can see that change? As EdWeek reports, in West Virginia of all places, students are doing more with "real-world" applications by engaging in projects that engage them in a broad range of skills that produce an outcome:

Groups of students hunch over laptop computers, each tuned to an Excel budget spreadsheet. They are surrounded by models and blueprints of their building, Horace Mann Middle School, here in downtown Charleston.

It is Donna Landin’s math laboratory, and the students are creating formal plans to renovate the front grounds of the school for its 70th anniversary.

In completing their project, the 6th, 7th, and 8th graders will draw on their math skills to calculate areas and revise their budgets. They will gather information about the school and about landscaping from business officials, relatives, school alumni, and online research—from all available sources, it seems, except Ms. Landin herself.

This is a far cry from the anti-fulfillment of filling in bubbles on test forms and receiving some numeric score. Of course, this kind of thing is happening all over the place but it faces the hurdle of the colossal pile of anti-public education act known as the No Child Left Behind Act. All people want to effectively do what they want to do: they want their talents and abilities to manifest in productive ways that mean something to them, their peers, and their communities. Tests cannot do that very well. Project-based learning does.

But this tactic requires teachers to become facilitators by getting out of the way. That can be a challenge. As one teacher notes in the article, “It’s a teacher’s nature to be in control. We’re taught we don’t want all these extraneous things taking away from our lessons.” But how great is it to be an aid walking alongside and showing by example, leading with questions, and learning oneself? It's a pretty awesome experience to collaborate with students as you are able to.

I really hope that we see more of this in schools. Accomplishment breeds sense of self and happiness. What is more important than that?

Council for Secular Humanism's online news!

My piece, "The year religion 'fought back'" has been graciously included in the Council for Secular Humanism's e-news this month. If you haven't read it before on my blog, go on over and check it out.

Tom Flynn has an item about the myth of the non-religious dominating Western culture (I guess it depends on what you mean by domination).

Nathan Bupp's piece on the inaugural meeting of the Jesus Project at the Center for Inquiry. All of the "members of the Project share a common commitment to the importance of applying scientific methodologies to the sources used to construct the Jesus tradition." As Louis Brandeis wrote, "Sunlight is the best disinfectant." The Jesus Project is just such a disinfectant to foolish belief.

Next there is a piece on some juicy religiously motivated madness from my favorite state - Texas - where "the Texas legislature is in the process of considering passing HB109 “relating to the issuance of ‘Choose Life’ license plates and the creation of the Choose Life account in the general revenue fund.” I can barely stand it. Sometimes, between this drivel and their creationist whackitude, I just wish they'd secede from the union.

And, there's a plug for a CSH humor contest and a Point of Inquiry broadcast with Paul Kurtz.

Check it out!

Metal Post! Metallica's "...And Justice For All."

What can I say about Metallica's ...And Justice For All? It has occupied hundreds of hours of play in my tape, CD, and MP3 players since it came out in 1988. I have probably listened to it more than any other single album except maybe Cynic's Focus and a couple of Mahler and Sibelius symphonies. Justice culminated Metallica's drive toward elaborate, technical, and socially conscious metal. It is on this last part that I will focus after a brief prelude about Metallica's roots and growth as a band.

Metallica's first three albums, Kill ‘Em All (1983), Ride The Lightning (1984) and Master of Puppets (1986) stated, solidified, and then epitomized American thrash metal. Kill 'Em All took the sound of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal (check out Diamond Head) and put an American face to it with tunes like "Whiplash" and "The Four Horsemen" (written by Megadeth founder and Metallica's original lead guitarist Dave Mustaine). It's a tour in speed and pentatonic guitar noodling that blew Americans out of the water. It was full-throttle beer-induced destruction that codified an unapologetic rejection of the status quo better than any American music had in twenty years except punk bands like the Ramones, Black Flag, Fear, and the Circle Jerks. Like those bands, Metallica rejected business as usual and embraced no-holds-barred speed. But unlike them, they longed for technical proficiency. Having conquered speed, they pursued musicality.

Their second album, Ride the Lightning extended the band's focus beyond pure thrash. The lyrics weren't just about speed, booze, "acting like a maniac," or goofy self-indulgent destruction. The music gets significantly more interesting by elaborating song structures, changing timbres by incorporating acoustic guitars, and developing the harmonic and melodic pallette. The musical substance begins to mirror the lyrics. More personally and socially conscious themes emerged as they took on nuclear destruction with "Fight Fire With Fire," capital punishment on "Ride the Lightning," the trial of war with "For Whom the Bell Tolls," and the inrospective nihilism with the suicide-themed "Fade to Black."

"Fade" caught them a lot of flack from parents who believed that the band was advocating suicide. I remember seeing Lars interviewed in '92 or '93 saying that he didn't understand the critique when he had received so many letters from kids saying that they felt understood, that sometimes "Life it seems to fade away, drifting further every day" and that they stood facing that feeling that "There is nothing more for me, need the end to set me free." But that Metallica had written it, had said it, had laid it down in art, made them feel understood and joined to someone. It actually saved them. And it makes sense. The somber b-minor acoustic guitar introduction with Hammett's solo invites the listener into depressing introspection. All of this sets up the coming lyrical meditation on suicide set over a simple chordal acoustic guitar part.

The third album, Master of Puppets, is probably regarded as their seminal album. It reached far and wide for lyrical topics from the brazen embrace of violence on the album's bookend songs, "Battery" and "Damage, Inc." both of which are spectacularly fast and set the groundwork for bands like Sepultura and many of the late-80s and early-90s death metal bands. They carried the critique of war farther with "Disposable Heroes," a scathing denunciation of TV evangelists and Elmer Gantry preachers with "Leper Messiah," their love of H.P. Lovecraft with "The Thing That Should Not Be," cocaine addiction with "Master of Puppets," and clinical insanity with "(Welcome home) Sanitarium." They reached new musical heights with the brilliantly arranged instrumental tune "Orion." Master is a paragon metal album in company with Black Sabbath's Paranoid or AC/DC's Back in Black. Sadly, while they were on tour in Europe, their bass player Cliff Burton was killed in bus accident on icy roads.

...And Justic For All
Kirk Hammett (lead guitars)
James Hetfield (guitars and vocals)
Jason Newsted (bass)
Lars Ullrich (drums)

This album captured mid- and late-80s American political paranoia more clearly than any album I know. It testifies to the intense sociopolitical pressure people felt during the Reagan era: the time of Star Wars, of the MX missle, the continued policies of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), of Gorbachev and Reagan shaking hands while they seemed to work to undo all of humanity by pursuing the end of humanity, limits on free speech, American involvement in clandestine wars, and the corrosion of the environment everywhere.

Each song on this album takes a shot at these themes. The opening track, "Blackened" blends the certainty of environmental degradation and fear of nuclear winter in what is arguably their most progressive song ever. Ulrich said, "It’s just about all the shit that’s going on in the world right now, and how the whole environment that we’re living in is slowly deteriorating into a shithole. This is not meant to be a huge environment statement or anything like that, it’s just a harsh look at what’s going on around us." I'll say. In a chapter titled "Metallica's 'Blackened' as the Sound of the Late Cold War" coming out in a book titled Sound Fabrics coming out in the next few weeks, I write, "'Blackened,' unlike many metal songs before it, broached this paranoia with artistic sensitivity. It expresses the contradiction felt by the American public." It is the contradiction of 80s Cold War America - we are the great nation of peace who was chronically preparing for war, the champions of great expansive spaces and rugged outdoor individualism who were complicit in the Bhopal gas explosion, the liberators of Europe who worked with dictators in Iran, Iraq, and all over Central America, where the freest people in the world with a secret police service on a par with the KGB, and where the allegedly least censored people on the planet set up the moralizing PMRC that attacked heavy metal and other politically or socially "dangerous" or "offensive" music in a "benign" attempt to "protect" people from having their assumptions questioned.

Many of the other tracks deal with the erosion of freedom. The title track decries the "justice" system in the United States as controlled by an unelected and monied invisible elite able to seize citizens with impunity:

Halls of justice painted green, money talking.
Power wolves beset your door, hear them stalking.
Soon you please their appetite, they devour.
Hammer of justice crushes you, overpower.

And that paranoia of individual choice subject to secret power, likely governmental in the Big Brother era of Reagan, continues on "Eye of the Beholder" and "Shortest Straw." "Eye" embraces a kind of libertarian freedom that believes in maximal choice and alternatives whose strengths come both the "plus and negatives." But this free space is probably an illusion.

Independence limited
Freedom of choice
Is made for you, my friend
Freedom of speech is words that they will bend
Freedom with their exception

I think there is an unintentional double entendre at work here. "Independence limited" is either the state of independence being limited or a corporation named Independence who buys and sells a commodity called independence. In either case, freedom is something limited by the whims of masters of freedom and independence who change words to mean what they wish them to mean and for which they will make exceptions my dear friend.

The police state paranoia gets its most blistering treatment in the aforementioned "Shortest Straw." The song makes it all very concrete. It is a world of modern-day witch hunts and paper chases where "The shortest straw has been pulled for you." The song's high speed, emphasis on the tritone (e and b-flat also featured heavily in "Blackened") in one of its central riffs, its pursuant drum beat, and the guitar solo's musical commentary on previously-used riffs bring about a total musical argument wherein we are surrounded: "Channels red, one word said, blacklisted, this vertigo makes [us] dead." Having read this, maybe you understand why I'm so suspicious of power.

There's much more to love on this album. "Harvester of Sorrow" and "Frayed Ends of Sanity" are generally overwrought pieces with cool parts.

However, the fourth track and the album's featured single, "One," was inspired by Dalton Trumbo's 1939 anti-war novel Johnny Got His Gun, a scathing critique of war whose main character loses his limbs, eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. He lives entirely within himself, haunted by memories, destroyed to fight for his country. Interestingly, Trumbo was found in contempt of Congress in 1950 and was blacklisted and imprisoned for Un-American activities and sentenced to 11 months in prison. The shortest straw had been pulled for him. If you take what I said earlier about "Fade to Black" you'll notice that the opening of "One" shares the same texture, timbre, and key. In "One," the protagonist longs for his death, and in the musical grammar and syntax of Metallica, we can know it right from the opening.

"To Live Is To Die" is a mammoth instrumental memorial to Cliff Burton with a short and cryptic poem written he wrote at its center:

When a Man Lies He Murders
Some Part of the World
These Are the Pale Deaths Which
Men Miscall Their Lives
All this I Cannot Bear
to Witness Any Longer
Cannot the Kingdom of Salvation
Take Me Home

Finally, the album's closer works as the opposite pillar to "Blackened." While both are super fast, "Dyers Eve" turns from public paranoia to familial paranoia. Hetfield grew up with a Christian fundamentalist mother whose religiosity was inescapably hypocritical. As he writes in "Dyers Eve," "Do as I say not as I do." And, it has perhaps the coolest Metallica solo ever.

Some people disparage Justice. The production lacks bass, the drums sound like they were recorded inside of and on top of tin cans. Some of the songs are too long. These are legitimate points. But the album bent thrash to the breaking point and brought a new level of sophistication to metal unmatched at the time. It is a carefully crafted vicious statue with a paranoid glare.

So now, it's time for videos! Enjoy one of the greatest live bands of all time!

"Blackened" (Can you believe that Hetfield is downpicking all of that? F***!)


"One"



"Dyer's Eve"

Saving the planet and the economy?

In the last issue of Mother Jones, Al Gore had a piece, "Can We Save the Planet and Rescue the Economy?" He sure seems to think so. It's strong and typical Gore piece about American ingenuity and techno fixes to slow, halt, or reverse CO2 emissions and maintain our energy consumption. He cites geothermal, solar, and wind power as those things that can save us. These are far better than the CO2 blooms of coal and petroleum we use now. But there are at least two things missing.

First, we need fewer people consuming less. It's a very simple calculation:

People + Consumption = Waste/Pollution

The heavily industrialized nations of the world simply have too many people using too much. Too much fuel. Too many fabricated materials. Eating too much while 850 million people starve. Manufacturing too much food on the soil of ecosystems like the Amazon river basin that evolved in climates inhospitable to corn or soybeans or to cattle herding. And all that for profit, not for sustenance and sustainability. It's all in the name of development and economic growth. Things can't grow forever. We need fewer people.

Second, it's not just energy sources that we need to change. We need to reduce. From the simple things to the big things. The pace of production and consumption must be pulled back.

Why isn't Gore broaching these topics? Because he's still a politician in a popularity contest. No doubt he has done more to bring about awareness and change regarding global warming. I just wish he'd do more.

Speaking of Nicholas Humphrey

Watch Richard Dawkins interview him.

Human reproduction - The work of the profligate waster

I love the Institute for Creative Creation Nonsense Research flagship publication, Acts & Facts. My wife sometimes thinks that I'm nuts for reading it. Yeah. It's a gift that keeps on giving. Kind of like herpes. But I digress.

This month's online version has a brilliant...err...utterly inane piece on human sperm by Dr. Randy Guliuzza. It's a nice little distillation of how nicely informative a piece of creationist literature can be and then how absolutely wrong its conclusions can be. After a fairly concise explanation of the basic genesis of sperm, their life in the testicles, and their perilous journey toward a woman's egg through potentially hostile vaginal territory with a wicked immune response to boot, the amazing fertilization process. Creationists and I can agree on at least one thing: that is one of the cooler sequences of events that occur in nature. The dance of the whole thing dazzles our little minds with its intricacy.

But of course Guliuzza comes to a Nobel-worthy conclusion:

Amazing? Actually, the detail could go far beyond this simple description. As seen, the level of coordinated interaction to get any viable offspring exceeds the cellular level, extends past the reproductive system, pulls in the neurologic, hormonal, and circulatory systems, and demands substances that are produced independently by the male to modify the actions of the female body or the materials made by her--and vice versa. Evolutionary literature is rife with speculative stories about the origination of these processes, but devoid of any real scientific evidence to explain them. The only viable explanation is that these processes were placed by the Lord Jesus in the first parents, Adam and Eve, fully functional right from the beginning.

Of course. Assume your conclusion and look for all evidence to affirm that conclusion. "This is complex and deeply fulfilling to me as a human being. Therefore, God did it." Right? Wrong. There are some pretty simple questions that he avoids and that shoot this argument to bits.

Why do so many of these coordinated interactions go to nothing and end up starved little blastocysts that never implant in the uterine wall? If life begins at conception, why does God let about half of all of these little pregnancies go to waste? Talk about a holocaust. God (no doubt working in mysterious ways) is the greatest abortionist of all time. Whether it's because he let us fall as the creationists would have us believe or some other logic, there is no sidestepping it.

Speaking of holocausts, what about all of those sperm? Those little chromosomal halves swimming by the million toward their deaths inside of a woman whose body doesn't care a lick about any of them. If we are lucky, one of them gets in there. And how many acts of intercourse end up with no pregnancies at all? Those sperm are just lambs for the slaughter I suppose. Don't half-lives count for something? Do those sperm have half-souls too? Hmmm.

And for all of the miraculous goings on with fertilization, let's consider the plight of people born with chromosomal abnormalities. Tay Sachs disease. Down's Syndrome. Cystic fibrosis. Look at the great and beautiful work of the creator, able to coordinate a stunning dance that creates a person much of whose life will be filled with confusion and misery and often (though not always for sure) utter dependence on others with no or little sense of self-efficacy or self-actualization.

How proud the creationists must be that "the Lord Jesus in the first parents, Adam and Eve, fully functional right from the beginning." And unable to control his creation, it spawned things that incur immense suffering and generate enormous waste. The more you read creationist publications, the more you realize that they blind themselves to the obvious with just-so stories and rationalizations. Sure, God is the greatest engineer, but the blundering pain in the universe is not his fault. Despoil us though he may through negligence or incompetence, we know that he must be all-powerful and all-good. Creationists just explain away the things that don't fit their preconceived notions. Pathetic really.

They are like abused wives who apologize for their husbands' bad behavior because they just know that, "Really. He loves me." There's a reason there's a field called "apologetics." Get God to do the explaining instead of making up excuses for him.

I'm sure someone is reading this and thinking, "Who are you to question God's doings?" There looking at the Book of Job and wondering where I was when God laid the foundation of the Earth or something bogus like that. I am a homo sapiens - a thinking man. As such, I have some questions, and I want to know why anyone thinks that anyone else should be worshipped for screwing things up. When the guys at Enron screwed up, we took them to court. I'd call Down's Syndrome a little worse than that. I want to know why, if there's a God, we should praise him for things that look like they were put together with biological string and duct tape?

I have answers that believers can't satisfactorily answer. So I question God. There is no forthcoming answers, just blathering faith spiels from people. With no answers from God, it's fair to assume he doesn't exist. Enough said.

Sexual reproduction in humans is enormously wasteful. Don't get me wrong: I love it. But it is hardly good evidence for brilliant design. It's a messy and haphazard process that suggests that we are a cobbled together species that evolved from a beautiful and wasteful evolutionary process working over eons.

The new Edge question

Edge.org, the self-titled Third Culture, has put up its respondents answers to the its annual question. This year is "What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?"

Some of my usual favorite people like Sam Harris and Michael Shermer have contributed this year with interesting responses. However, it is not the usual malcontents that I have found most interesting so far. Two answers have struck something with me. The first is physicist Marcelo Gleiser's "Mastering Death" and the second is by psychologist Nicholas Humphrey, titled "Human Nature Will Rebel." The first is a piece of misguided hope, which he recognizes, and the second relates to why I think that hope is misguided.

Gleiser begins by recognizing that no question about our own lives presses on us more than our impending deaths. If you are religious and believe in either an extradimensional or a reincarnated afterlife, your mortality presses upon you. And if you lack faith in the supernatural, perhaps you hope to find solace in your creations, whether they are your children or a poem, a picture, symphony, a book, or (and I am adding this) just the memories you instill in others of your actions. Somehow, we hope to transcend death. This fear of the abyss of eternal unconsciousness marks us and our behavior and Gleiser seems to hope that we can "master" our mortality.

We can achieve this in two ways, he thinks. The first, he poses as a question: "Could the right dose of sirtuin or something else be found to significantly slow down aging in humans?" This is much like the fountain of achieved through an engineered biochemical cocktail. The second is to create a sort of neural network that we could use to clone ourselves indefinitely, and "assuming such tremendous technological jump is even feasible, we could migrate to a new copy of ourselves when the current one gets old and rusty." He recognizes that there are massive social and ethical implications to these activities, not the least of which would be to question what a human being is, whether bodies should be treated as commodities, if this is "playing God," and so on.

I contend two things. First, human bodies and brains have evolved in such a way that their optimal performance occurs for a fairly brief time. Today, we have already extended the average life span quite far in the scientifically advanced societies and nations of the world. Our ability to manipulate ourselves and our environments and carry out systematic if messy social engineering projects have afforded us the ability to basically double our lifespans in the last couple of hundred years. In the "developed" nations we cheat death for quite a while by propping ourselves up with chemical and technical apparatuses into which we pour enormous material and monetary resources. Think about the amount of time the average person takes using any number of machines simply to maintain their health whether that be using a shower, a humidifier, washing machine, or an electric toothbrush or drinking supplements, taking vitamins, or taking heart or psychoactive medication. All of these things are designed to extend our lives and help us cheat death though not necessarily make us happier or more able to actually deal with our environments. They placate us by removing discomfort, disease, and death. They are wonderful veils. Gleiser's ideas extend these even further to utter folly.

Enter Humphrey. He imagines how the Romans would have responded to this question 2,000 years ago, concluding that their lives were much like ours despite the techno-marvels that surround us today. We, like them, have come to a place where we believe that we dominate nature though she has shaped us through deep time to become the animals that we are.

The one development that really could change everything would be a radical, genetically programmed, alteration of human nature. It hasn't happened in historical times, and I'd bet it won't be happening in the near future either. Cultural and technical innovations can certainly alter the trajectory of individual human lives. But, while human beings continue to reproduce by having sex and each new generation goes back to square one, then every baby begins life with a set of inherited dispositions and instincts that evolved in the technological dark ages.

I contend that that one development would have to greatly increase our patience as a species.

Imagine, if you will, that we were able to cheat death so to speak and extend ourselves through either or both of Gleiser's scenarios. Take it further, such that we humans, free to reproduce ourselves in these manners with our current dispositions, utter impatience, greed, rapacious appetites, short-term desires, ability to stay away from lives of necessity by modifying our environments with our technology, and so on. Humans gifted with lifespans well beyond our own may not become any more wise at all and seem likely to use more and more. Do we want 6 billion immortals consuming the way we do now? Even if we "green" our technologies, what kind of future is this? My bet is that it is hideous given the way we live now. I think the last time I looked, if everyone on Earth lived the way the average American does now, it would take four planet Earths to sustain living.

Is it good to try to extend those lifespans further, bending our evolved senescence further. I don't think that the planet can handle it. Humphrey writes, "The Latin poet Horace wrote: "You can drive out nature with a pitchfork, but she will always return." Let's dream, if we like, of revolution. But be prepared for more of the same." Gleiser notes as well, "Meanwhile, I take advice from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Perhaps there are things we are truly unprepared for." I envision a real dystopia. That might be really dangerous idea.

Though we fear death, it is part of us. In some sense, that it is, is good and ought to be for it is part of our meaning and a universal to all of our cultures. I think we can embrace it without becoming nihilists and realize that what is is what ought to be, and that we but waves on the ocean of time destined to die and become part of the universe in some other way.