The Curious Romance of Darwinism and Creationism — And Why Intelligent Design Must Be Silenced – Discovery Institute

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One of the many smart observations in Tom Bethell's new book, Darwin's House of Cards, pertains to the curious relationship of Darwinism and Creationism -- and how that bears on efforts to suppress investigation of the theory of intelligent design.

Darwinists seem to long for the good old days when their only opposition was from Biblical creationism. This is reflected in efforts to conflate ID with creationism, or to make the former a kind of forbidden science, off limits to discussion. As Bethell writes in his chapter on "Intelligent Design and Information Theory":

The longing, the romance -- perhaps "bromance"? -- makes sense, since for all that separates them, Darwinism and creationism have in common that they are both inferences from prior doctrines (respectively, materialism, or a particular way of reading the Bible). ID is different. Says Bethell, "Intelligent design is not a deduction from a philosophy but an inference from observed facts."

This is what's so enraging to Darwinists, and it goes some way to explaining why they lash out -- holding their own tongue, and punishing ID advocates and open-minded researchers for failing to hold theirs.

Bethell cites a telling lecture by University of Akron researcher Nita Sahai, "The Origins of Life: From Geochemistry to Biochemistry." (See the video by clicking on the image at the top.) You actually see her catch herself, as she's helped out by a colleague, first saying that her lab work simulating OOL requires "intelligent design" -- no, no, no, make that "careful selection."

Mr. Bethell also tells the story of the publication of The Privileged Planet. Arguably more interesting than the book itself, he says, is what happened to its astronomer co-author at the Iowa State University, denounced by

That monopoly was challenged on another campus, Baylor University, by mathematician William Dembski.

Not even discussed. That is about as telling a statement as there could be. ID, unlike creationism, challenges Darwinian evolution on its own turf. That is not acceptable. Creationism for the Darwinist is a welcome foil. On the other hand, ID, which practices science where Darwinism is ultimately an exercise in philosophy, must be silenced.

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The Curious Romance of Darwinism and Creationism -- And Why Intelligent Design Must Be Silenced - Discovery Institute

Biologist Ann Gauger: Apoptosis (Cell Death) Is an Enigma for Darwinism – Discovery Institute

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Sarah Chaffee and Discovery Institute biologist Ann Gauger have been conducting a multipart conversation about the cell (see here and here). In a new podcast episode of ID the Future, they now turn to the mystery of apoptosis -- cell death.

Download the episode by clicking here:

It's an enigma in the light of Darwinian theory, explains Dr. Gauger. In shaping and maintaining the organism, healthy cells may in effect commit suicide, self-sacrifice, for the good of other cells and for the good of the organism. So the evolutionary formula here would not be "survival" but "suicide" of the fittest.

Where is the Darwinian logic in that? But you see, evolution doesn't rule anything out, which is a big problem with the theory.

Image: Apoptosis, by Egelberg (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

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Biologist Ann Gauger: Apoptosis (Cell Death) Is an Enigma for Darwinism - Discovery Institute

Tom Bethell on Mind, Matter, and Self-Defeating Darwinism – Discovery Institute

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Over at The Stream, Tom Bethell, author of Darwin's House of Cards, clarifies why Darwinists don't talk so much about one straightforward inference from their own commitment to materialism.

If mind is just a special configuration of brain cells, then mind is nothing but matter. How can neurons "decide" to do one thing rather than another? Nerve cells can't make decisions. So, materialism repudiates free will.

The consistent materialist sees this, denies free will and dismisses consciousness as a delusion. "Our sense of self is a neuronal illusion," said Jerry Coyne, a fully paid-up materialist and author of Why Evolution Is True. Molecular biologist Francis Crick said the same thing. "Your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules," he wrote. Or as he put it more succinctly, "You're nothing but a pack of neurons."

How deeply do materialists believe this? Notice that many of them grow outraged at public intellectuals who reject Darwinian materialism. But why the outrage if beliefs, ambitions and will are "nothing but a pack of neurons." On that view the person skeptical of Darwinism can't help himself, so why get outraged at the poor fellow?

The materialists might concede that their outrage is irrational, a byproduct of evolution -- the fight-or-flight mechanism run amok. But that explanation opens a can of worms. If mind is a byproduct of an evolutionary process that maybe saddled us with various irrationalities, why trust human reason? Why trust it to lead us to the truth about biological origins?

In my decades as a journalist covering evolution and interviewing some of the world's leading evolutionary thinkers, I have found that materialists have no good answers to this question, or to many of the evidential challenges that have endured and grown since Darwin's time.

For me the conclusion is inescapable: Modern Darwinism is built on a foundation of sand -- a house of cards, threatened even by the outraged huffing and puffing of its defenders.

In short, there's no sense in placing faith in the kind of reasoning done by a brain that's a product of Darwinian processes.

Beyond this, as Bethell notes in the book, anyone with some common sense and self-knowledge must realize that denying free will is bunk. Our will, the freedom to make good or bad choices, is something we experience every waking moment. The assertion of materialism, which is the foundation of Darwinian theory, runs headlong into what we know about our own inner lives. It's self-defeating. So evolution's defenders naturally play all this down, while being unable to deny it.

I'm on Twitter. Follow me @d_klinghoffer.

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Tom Bethell on Mind, Matter, and Self-Defeating Darwinism - Discovery Institute

Darwin Americanus – Los Angeles Review of Books – lareviewofbooks

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FEBRUARY 5, 2017

SINCE THE SCOPES MONKEY TRIAL of 1925, Charles Darwin has gone to court at least 10 times. In 1987, the Supreme Court ruled against the teaching of creationism in public schools in Edwards v. Aguillard, and in 2005 federal courts ruled against intelligent design with Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover. In court, if not in the hearts of most Americans, Charles never loses.

But much of what is enthralling about Darwins life and work is lost when the public cheers or jeers in court. Complicated individuals become combatants. Sophisticated texts become ideological arenas. William Jennings Bryan versus Clarence Darrow, creation versus evolution, religion versus reason, the United States versus Modernity. Its all a rowdy tournament, noisy with cheerleaders. Last year, the ACLU celebrated the 10th anniversary of Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover with A Concert for Science and Reason featuring Canadian rapper Baba Brinkman at the Appalachian Brewing Company.

Darwins first American trial was far more interesting. On the Origin of Species quietly crossed the Atlantic as a single book, thistle-green and gilded with two golden pyramids. The author had mailed it to his Harvard colleague Asa Gray, the premier botanist of his age. Gray in turn lent the book to his cousin-in-law Charles Loring Brace, the father of modern foster care. Brace then passed the book among his transcendentalist friends in Concord, Massachusetts Amos Bronson Alcott, Franklin Sanborn, and Henry David Thoreau. These five men were among Darwins first American readers, and his book impacted each of them deeply and differently. Its American reception wasnt a trial at all, but a seed planted into varied brains and a shared historical atmosphere, sprouting into lovely and prickly varieties of colors and shapes.

This is the story Randall Fuller tells in The Book That Changed America: How Darwins Theory of Evolution Ignited a Nation. Fuller has long been attracted to the ways in which a single book, individual, or event affects a cluster of writers differently. His first book examined how critics from Van Wyck Brooks to Sacvan Bercovitch inherited Ralph Waldo Emerson, and his second book traced the divergent effects of the Civil War on writers of the era. Both were academic studies, making The Book That Changed America Fullers first trade book. But his methodology translates well for a broader audience as he dwells in the rich differences of individuality to produce complex and captivating characters, bound together in a shared story.

The common drama facing Gray, Brace, Thoreau, Alcott, and Sanborn did not solely reside between the covers of Darwins book, but lurked in the struggle with slavery that would soon explode into the Civil War. Grays copy of On the Origin of Species arrived in Boston Harbor in December 1859, mere weeks after John Brown was hanged in Virginia for his failed attempt to stage a slave insurrection at Harpers Ferry. All five of these men were against slavery many had met Brown and some had even funded his insurrection and all could not help but read Darwins new account of human origins with this conflict in mind. [M]any other Americans, Fuller notes, linked Darwins theories with the controversy over race and slavery then raging throughout the nation. By the end of On the Origin of Speciess first year in the United States, South Carolina would secede from the Union.

Darwin himself had inherited the intense abolitionist convictions of his family, solidified when he witnessed slavery firsthand in Brazil during the voyage of the Beagle. I thank God, I shall never again visit a slave-country, he reflected. But his theory also yielded ammunition for abolitionists. Given Darwins associations with social Darwinism, it might be surprising to discover that these American men found a powerful argument for human rights in On the Origin of Species. Before the book appeared, the still-emergent field of ethnology in the United States was dominated by the theory of polygenesis, the notion that the human races were separate species descended from different origins. This theory lent itself well to the racial hierarchies espoused by men like Louis Agassiz, the Swiss-born Harvard geologist who resisted Darwins theories for his entire life and felt disgust toward the African race.

By contrast, Darwin offered a viable argument for monogenesis, humanitys common origins. Natural selection challenged the polygenesists sense of races as separate, static, and hierarchical. Reviewers for the American popular press consistently understood Darwin as having provided a theory that showed that black and white people were related, Fuller explains, and antislavery newspapers praised the new book for its implicit attack on the popular ideas of Louis Agassiz and other ethnologists. Charles Loring Brace (the man who brought Grays copy of the Origin to the transcendentalists in Concord) wrote the first work of Darwinian ethnography, The Races of the Old World (1863), a book which aimed to disprove theories of black inferiority by presenting a definition of race as fluid. (Yet like many other antislavery Americans, Brace also believed that the black race could never be integrated into the United States. He reasoned that their race had long ago adapted to Africa, and that they had been too abruptly transplanted into the United States to ever thrive there.)

Brace devoured On the Origin of Species. He reportedly read the book 13 times. With the magic-mushroom quality of works that unlock a paradigm shift in a readers mind, it began to color and morph everything he saw. While a missionary to New York Citys swelling immigrant population, he deployed Darwin when he confronted the brutal poverty of its Five Points neighborhood. Natural selection confirmed his conclusion that impoverished environments like Five Points (or slavery) exerted a profound and harmful influence on their inhabitants moral development.

As Brace struggled to make sense of this mass suffering, he also turned to Darwin to redeem it. If morality was molded by nurture, perhaps it was also partially shaped by nature. Perhaps some individuals were born with more moral temperaments than others. Couldnt morality, then, also work according to natural selection? Inborn virtue, he reasoned, might be an adaptive advantage, one that would prevent humanitys long-term degeneration. Moral individuals would overtake the immoral, and with it, the environments that aggravated this immorality. Povertys sting could be eased with the balm of long-term progress.

Braces reading of Darwin was selective, contradictory, and potentially harmful. Undoubtedly he would have witnessed how brutality and ferocity could provide a far sharper edge in the slums than morality. And what of the growing class of capitalists who stood to make a profit from cheap immigrant labor? Hadnt morality proven here to be an adaptive disadvantage within the environment of capitalism? Further, long-term species-progress offered little respite to those currently trapped in a slum. In the face of intense suffering, Brace leaned on natural selection to provide more than it could: a law of progress, scientific confirmation of Gods providential hand. He needed a credible hope that poverty would eventually wash out of New York in what he took to be Darwins cleansing cosmos.

Franklin Sanborn, a latecomer to Thoreau and Alcotts transcendentalist Concord, found more than an abolitionist argument in Darwin. He seized upon a historical mood. Sanborns insatiable drive to be le premier provocateur sent him careening alternatively down ridiculous and revolutionary avenues. He once used his own sewage to fertilize his garden. (Neighbors complained of the stench; Sanborn complained of their parochialism.) But he was also one of the Secret Six who supplied John Brown with funds for weapons. The restless Sanborn was most taken with Darwins portrait of a world that evolved through incessant struggle, a landscape that seemed to describe perfectly the United Statess own political unrest. As the battle with slavery grew ever more volatile through the 1850s, Darwin gave Sanborn a reason to view the growing conflict with optimism. Sanborn in turn embraced Brown as a will that catalyzed moral progress through conflict.

Despite their good intentions, Brace and Sanborn were not good readers of Darwin. They made the common mistake of overstretching his theory in the realm of politics and culture. Natural selection was not a theory of progress, but simply of change. It offered an explanation for the emergence of increasingly complex organisms but gave no guarantee of increasingly civil, intelligent, or moral ones. Cultural values of this sort had little role in the theory unless as evolutionary biologists or pop psychologists will sometimes speculate these values could somehow aid survival.

But desire inevitably colors the uses to which science is put, and alongside many orthodox Christians, Brace and Sanborn embraced what they saw as Darwins proof for providence. Whether for social Darwinism or revolutionary abolitionism, Darwin provided an ordering principle for a society that seemed to grow more complex each year.

Asa Gray was a scientist, and he would make no such mistakes. When Darwin sent him the Origin, he was as careful with the green book as when describing, dissecting, analyzing, and categorizing his North American flora. He saw clearly the strict limits that the author had hedged around his theory. When Gray listened to his idealistic young cousin Brace gush about Darwin, he protested. When you unscientific people take up a scientific principle, he admonished, you are apt to make too much of it, to push it to conclusions beyond what is warranted by the facts. As New England thawed from winter into spring, Darwins book floated its way through a wider audience that read it as eagerly as Brace. Harpers, The North American Review, The New York Times, and many other journals reviewed the Origin. Many reviewers applied the theory to race, others celebrated what they saw as its proof for progress, while still others deemed it atheistical. None were written by scientists. In a three-part series for the newborn but popular Atlantic Monthly, Gray would set the record straight as Darwins American ambassador and a voice for science.

Grays articles for The Atlantic clarified Darwins theory for a popular audience with admirable precision and simplicity. They promoted an antiracist agenda by arguing unequivocally for humanitys monogenesis. But Gray wanted to do more. He wanted to suggest how the book seemed to bring the world to life, Fuller says, to make it pulse with meaning and significance. But the question for Gray, a devout Presbyterian, was the same one that gnawed at many Christians and idealists who saw nature as creation, the reflection of divine law: what kind of meaning could one draw from Darwins universe of aimless chance and amoral conflict? Gray admitted that Darwins theory made little room for the idealist vision of nature which had given his life so much meaning. Then Gray himself began to doubt. He wrote to Darwin. Might natural selection be Gods tool? Darwin was skeptical. Nature was too cruel to be the contrivance of a benevolent and omnipotent God.

Gray is Fullers second-best portrait, a man who worries that he has opened a Pandoras box out of motives at once noble, rational, and human. He wants to refute polygenesists racism, to honor good science, to head a great tradition of American botany. But it costs him. Once the Origin of Species gained admission inside a readers head, it began to compete with all sorts of dearly held convictions, Fuller writes in disturbing language, as if the theory was not a magic mushroom but a brain-burrowing parasite.

By his third article, Gray began to pull away from certain implications of the theory. He argued that natural selection left the issue of first causes (that is, God) where they were before. He emphasized that natural selection explained a how for human existence, not its why. Grays strategic hedging at times failed to meet his own standards for scientific inquiry, but the simple truth, Fuller concludes, was that he found it impossible to live in the world Darwin had imagined.

The famously ethereal transcendentalist Amos Bronson Alcott was, like Gray, a better reader of Darwin, and like Gray, it depressed him. He saw clearly the threat that Darwins universe posed to his own Platonic idealism. He was annoyed that so many friends once enlivened by idealism Emerson, Sanborn, and Thoreau foremost were so smitten with the theory. He felt that Darwin was but the latest and greatest instance of sciences proclivity for soul-souring empiricism, a vinegar that stripped nature and humanity of beauty and grandeur. Like all materialists, Darwin looked at existence through a telescope from the wrong end, missing the heavens for their gas and atoms. An idealist as much by temperament as metaphysics, Alcott set aside the book after reading it and went on his cheerful way. He preached the gospel of idealism long after the Civil War when, ironically, an audience seemed hungrier than ever for the meaning it offered in a postbellum, post-Darwin landscape.

Henry David Thoreau managed what the other four could not: he read Darwin both accurately and joyously. Besides perhaps Gray, no American read the Origin of Species with as much care and insight. After Thoreau first encountered Darwin in The Voyage of the Beagle in the early 1840s, he undertook his own voyage into Concord woods and filled thousands of pages with drawings and notes on its ecosystems, interspersed with transcendental meditations.

Fuller is best on Thoreau in part because he shades his portrait with its subjects own empirical delight in the heft and texture of experience. Consider how Fuller unfolds the pagan joy of the Concord notebooks: Thoreau admires the gossamer filaments that glisten in the sun when he tears apart a milkweed pod. He samples the bitter juice of unripe berries or amuses himself by measuring his strides as he slides across frozen rivers, Fuller describes. His interests branched apart, proliferated, carved new channels of thought. He delved into cartography and the magnetic variations of compasses. He studied geology, he continues, and

[b]y 1860, his third-story attic room had become a private natural history museum, stuffed with birds nests, arrowheads, and more than a thousand pressed plants. On shelves made from driftwood he had gathered at Cape Cod, he kept the skins of reptiles, assorted pelts, rocks and stones, lichens, moss, and the carcass of a Coopers hawk as well as its spotted bluish-white egg.

Fuller sketches Thoreau much as Thoreau sketched Concord.

But what kind of higher meaning could Thoreau draw from Darwins theory, if Gray had failed? It could never be one rooted wholly in idealist metaphysics, as Gray realized, a fact which sometimes bothered Thoreau. He often worried that his growing empiricism was the sign of an aging brain, cooling from the volcanic transcendentalism of his youth into the crusts of middle age. Until his final years, Thoreau oscillated uneasily between science and transcendentalism, materialism and idealism. He managed a tentative reconciliation by locating mystery and wonder within materialism [] a new kind of magic, a new source of awe.

Squeezing Darwins theory for each drop of awe it could provide, Thoreau accomplished what his mentor Emerson called creative reading, the process of growing an accurate interpretation into a transformative one. Darwin had his own visionary moments in which nature buzzed with lavish, marvelous fecundity. Thoreau amplified them, invigorating the material world with transcendental soul. We tend to think of Darwins theory as one of grim determinism, of pointless change and purposeless death, Fuller notes, but this misses Darwins deeper insight that lifes messy process, its extravagant creation and destruction, led to something worth celebrating. For Darwin as much as Thoreau, the emergence of human beings in all of their contradictions was cause for joy, and his depiction of life as a dynamic process of continual becoming was not far from what Emerson hit upon in extraordinary essays like Circles.

Fuller ends on Thoreaus young death from tuberculosis. Ironically, Darwins most creative reader would be the first to succumb to natures severity. Such an ending was saved from tragedy by Thoreaus pagan joy, firm until his final hours of peace and even mirth. When his aunt asked if he had made his peace with God, he replied: We never quarreled. When another asked if he was ready for the next world, his answer was even more characteristic: One world at a time.

Kenyon Gradert is a doctoral candidate in English at Washington University in St. Louis.

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Darwin Americanus - Los Angeles Review of Books - lareviewofbooks

Darwin Americanus – lareviewofbooks

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FEBRUARY 5, 2017

SINCE THE SCOPES MONKEY TRIAL of 1925, Charles Darwin has gone to court at least 10 times. In 1987, the Supreme Court ruled against the teaching of creationism in public schools in Edwards v. Aguillard, and in 2005 federal courts ruled against intelligent design with Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover. In court, if not in the hearts of most Americans, Charles never loses.

But much of what is enthralling about Darwins life and work is lost when the public cheers or jeers in court. Complicated individuals become combatants. Sophisticated texts become ideological arenas. William Jennings Bryan versus Clarence Darrow, creation versus evolution, religion versus reason, the United States versus Modernity. Its all a rowdy tournament, noisy with cheerleaders. Last year, the ACLU celebrated the 10th anniversary of Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover with A Concert for Science and Reason featuring Canadian rapper Baba Brinkman at the Appalachian Brewing Company.

Darwins first American trial was far more interesting. On the Origin of Species quietly crossed the Atlantic as a single book, thistle-green and gilded with two golden pyramids. The author had mailed it to his Harvard colleague Asa Gray, the premier botanist of his age. Gray in turn lent the book to his cousin-in-law Charles Loring Brace, the father of modern foster care. Brace then passed the book among his transcendentalist friends in Concord, Massachusetts Amos Bronson Alcott, Franklin Sanborn, and Henry David Thoreau. These five men were among Darwins first American readers, and his book impacted each of them deeply and differently. Its American reception wasnt a trial at all, but a seed planted into varied brains and a shared historical atmosphere, sprouting into lovely and prickly varieties of colors and shapes.

This is the story Randall Fuller tells in The Book That Changed America: How Darwins Theory of Evolution Ignited a Nation. Fuller has long been attracted to the ways in which a single book, individual, or event affects a cluster of writers differently. His first book examined how critics from Van Wyck Brooks to Sacvan Bercovitch inherited Ralph Waldo Emerson, and his second book traced the divergent effects of the Civil War on writers of the era. Both were academic studies, making The Book That Changed America Fullers first trade book. But his methodology translates well for a broader audience as he dwells in the rich differences of individuality to produce complex and captivating characters, bound together in a shared story.

The common drama facing Gray, Brace, Thoreau, Alcott, and Sanborn did not solely reside between the covers of Darwins book, but lurked in the struggle with slavery that would soon explode into the Civil War. Grays copy of On the Origin of Species arrived in Boston Harbor in December 1859, mere weeks after John Brown was hanged in Virginia for his failed attempt to stage a slave insurrection at Harpers Ferry. All five of these men were against slavery many had met Brown and some had even funded his insurrection and all could not help but read Darwins new account of human origins with this conflict in mind. [M]any other Americans, Fuller notes, linked Darwins theories with the controversy over race and slavery then raging throughout the nation. By the end of On the Origin of Speciess first year in the United States, South Carolina would secede from the Union.

Darwin himself had inherited the intense abolitionist convictions of his family, solidified when he witnessed slavery firsthand in Brazil during the voyage of the Beagle. I thank God, I shall never again visit a slave-country, he reflected. But his theory also yielded ammunition for abolitionists. Given Darwins associations with social Darwinism, it might be surprising to discover that these American men found a powerful argument for human rights in On the Origin of Species. Before the book appeared, the still-emergent field of ethnology in the United States was dominated by the theory of polygenesis, the notion that the human races were separate species descended from different origins. This theory lent itself well to the racial hierarchies espoused by men like Louis Agassiz, the Swiss-born Harvard geologist who resisted Darwins theories for his entire life and felt disgust toward the African race.

By contrast, Darwin offered a viable argument for monogenesis, humanitys common origins. Natural selection challenged the polygenesists sense of races as separate, static, and hierarchical. Reviewers for the American popular press consistently understood Darwin as having provided a theory that showed that black and white people were related, Fuller explains, and antislavery newspapers praised the new book for its implicit attack on the popular ideas of Louis Agassiz and other ethnologists. Charles Loring Brace (the man who brought Grays copy of the Origin to the transcendentalists in Concord) wrote the first work of Darwinian ethnography, The Races of the Old World (1863), a book which aimed to disprove theories of black inferiority by presenting a definition of race as fluid. (Yet like many other antislavery Americans, Brace also believed that the black race could never be integrated into the United States. He reasoned that their race had long ago adapted to Africa, and that they had been too abruptly transplanted into the United States to ever thrive there.)

Brace devoured On the Origin of Species. He reportedly read the book 13 times. With the magic-mushroom quality of works that unlock a paradigm shift in a readers mind, it began to color and morph everything he saw. While a missionary to New York Citys swelling immigrant population, he deployed Darwin when he confronted the brutal poverty of its Five Points neighborhood. Natural selection confirmed his conclusion that impoverished environments like Five Points (or slavery) exerted a profound and harmful influence on their inhabitants moral development.

As Brace struggled to make sense of this mass suffering, he also turned to Darwin to redeem it. If morality was molded by nurture, perhaps it was also partially shaped by nature. Perhaps some individuals were born with more moral temperaments than others. Couldnt morality, then, also work according to natural selection? Inborn virtue, he reasoned, might be an adaptive advantage, one that would prevent humanitys long-term degeneration. Moral individuals would overtake the immoral, and with it, the environments that aggravated this immorality. Povertys sting could be eased with the balm of long-term progress.

Braces reading of Darwin was selective, contradictory, and potentially harmful. Undoubtedly he would have witnessed how brutality and ferocity could provide a far sharper edge in the slums than morality. And what of the growing class of capitalists who stood to make a profit from cheap immigrant labor? Hadnt morality proven here to be an adaptive disadvantage within the environment of capitalism? Further, long-term species-progress offered little respite to those currently trapped in a slum. In the face of intense suffering, Brace leaned on natural selection to provide more than it could: a law of progress, scientific confirmation of Gods providential hand. He needed a credible hope that poverty would eventually wash out of New York in what he took to be Darwins cleansing cosmos.

Franklin Sanborn, a latecomer to Thoreau and Alcotts transcendentalist Concord, found more than an abolitionist argument in Darwin. He seized upon a historical mood. Sanborns insatiable drive to be le premier provocateur sent him careening alternatively down ridiculous and revolutionary avenues. He once used his own sewage to fertilize his garden. (Neighbors complained of the stench; Sanborn complained of their parochialism.) But he was also one of the Secret Six who supplied John Brown with funds for weapons. The restless Sanborn was most taken with Darwins portrait of a world that evolved through incessant struggle, a landscape that seemed to describe perfectly the United Statess own political unrest. As the battle with slavery grew ever more volatile through the 1850s, Darwin gave Sanborn a reason to view the growing conflict with optimism. Sanborn in turn embraced Brown as a will that catalyzed moral progress through conflict.

Despite their good intentions, Brace and Sanborn were not good readers of Darwin. They made the common mistake of overstretching his theory in the realm of politics and culture. Natural selection was not a theory of progress, but simply of change. It offered an explanation for the emergence of increasingly complex organisms but gave no guarantee of increasingly civil, intelligent, or moral ones. Cultural values of this sort had little role in the theory unless as evolutionary biologists or pop psychologists will sometimes speculate these values could somehow aid survival.

But desire inevitably colors the uses to which science is put, and alongside many orthodox Christians, Brace and Sanborn embraced what they saw as Darwins proof for providence. Whether for social Darwinism or revolutionary abolitionism, Darwin provided an ordering principle for a society that seemed to grow more complex each year.

Asa Gray was a scientist, and he would make no such mistakes. When Darwin sent him the Origin, he was as careful with the green book as when describing, dissecting, analyzing, and categorizing his North American flora. He saw clearly the strict limits that the author had hedged around his theory. When Gray listened to his idealistic young cousin Brace gush about Darwin, he protested. When you unscientific people take up a scientific principle, he admonished, you are apt to make too much of it, to push it to conclusions beyond what is warranted by the facts. As New England thawed from winter into spring, Darwins book floated its way through a wider audience that read it as eagerly as Brace. Harpers, The North American Review, The New York Times, and many other journals reviewed the Origin. Many reviewers applied the theory to race, others celebrated what they saw as its proof for progress, while still others deemed it atheistical. None were written by scientists. In a three-part series for the newborn but popular Atlantic Monthly, Gray would set the record straight as Darwins American ambassador and a voice for science.

Grays articles for The Atlantic clarified Darwins theory for a popular audience with admirable precision and simplicity. They promoted an antiracist agenda by arguing unequivocally for humanitys monogenesis. But Gray wanted to do more. He wanted to suggest how the book seemed to bring the world to life, Fuller says, to make it pulse with meaning and significance. But the question for Gray, a devout Presbyterian, was the same one that gnawed at many Christians and idealists who saw nature as creation, the reflection of divine law: what kind of meaning could one draw from Darwins universe of aimless chance and amoral conflict? Gray admitted that Darwins theory made little room for the idealist vision of nature which had given his life so much meaning. Then Gray himself began to doubt. He wrote to Darwin. Might natural selection be Gods tool? Darwin was skeptical. Nature was too cruel to be the contrivance of a benevolent and omnipotent God.

Gray is Fullers second-best portrait, a man who worries that he has opened a Pandoras box out of motives at once noble, rational, and human. He wants to refute polygenesists racism, to honor good science, to head a great tradition of American botany. But it costs him. Once the Origin of Species gained admission inside a readers head, it began to compete with all sorts of dearly held convictions, Fuller writes in disturbing language, as if the theory was not a magic mushroom but a brain-burrowing parasite.

By his third article, Gray began to pull away from certain implications of the theory. He argued that natural selection left the issue of first causes (that is, God) where they were before. He emphasized that natural selection explained a how for human existence, not its why. Grays strategic hedging at times failed to meet his own standards for scientific inquiry, but the simple truth, Fuller concludes, was that he found it impossible to live in the world Darwin had imagined.

The famously ethereal transcendentalist Amos Bronson Alcott was, like Gray, a better reader of Darwin, and like Gray, it depressed him. He saw clearly the threat that Darwins universe posed to his own Platonic idealism. He was annoyed that so many friends once enlivened by idealism Emerson, Sanborn, and Thoreau foremost were so smitten with the theory. He felt that Darwin was but the latest and greatest instance of sciences proclivity for soul-souring empiricism, a vinegar that stripped nature and humanity of beauty and grandeur. Like all materialists, Darwin looked at existence through a telescope from the wrong end, missing the heavens for their gas and atoms. An idealist as much by temperament as metaphysics, Alcott set aside the book after reading it and went on his cheerful way. He preached the gospel of idealism long after the Civil War when, ironically, an audience seemed hungrier than ever for the meaning it offered in a postbellum, post-Darwin landscape.

Henry David Thoreau managed what the other four could not: he read Darwin both accurately and joyously. Besides perhaps Gray, no American read the Origin of Species with as much care and insight. After Thoreau first encountered Darwin in The Voyage of the Beagle in the early 1840s, he undertook his own voyage into Concord woods and filled thousands of pages with drawings and notes on its ecosystems, interspersed with transcendental meditations.

Fuller is best on Thoreau in part because he shades his portrait with its subjects own empirical delight in the heft and texture of experience. Consider how Fuller unfolds the pagan joy of the Concord notebooks: Thoreau admires the gossamer filaments that glisten in the sun when he tears apart a milkweed pod. He samples the bitter juice of unripe berries or amuses himself by measuring his strides as he slides across frozen rivers, Fuller describes. His interests branched apart, proliferated, carved new channels of thought. He delved into cartography and the magnetic variations of compasses. He studied geology, he continues, and

[b]y 1860, his third-story attic room had become a private natural history museum, stuffed with birds nests, arrowheads, and more than a thousand pressed plants. On shelves made from driftwood he had gathered at Cape Cod, he kept the skins of reptiles, assorted pelts, rocks and stones, lichens, moss, and the carcass of a Coopers hawk as well as its spotted bluish-white egg.

Fuller sketches Thoreau much as Thoreau sketched Concord.

But what kind of higher meaning could Thoreau draw from Darwins theory, if Gray had failed? It could never be one rooted wholly in idealist metaphysics, as Gray realized, a fact which sometimes bothered Thoreau. He often worried that his growing empiricism was the sign of an aging brain, cooling from the volcanic transcendentalism of his youth into the crusts of middle age. Until his final years, Thoreau oscillated uneasily between science and transcendentalism, materialism and idealism. He managed a tentative reconciliation by locating mystery and wonder within materialism [] a new kind of magic, a new source of awe.

Squeezing Darwins theory for each drop of awe it could provide, Thoreau accomplished what his mentor Emerson called creative reading, the process of growing an accurate interpretation into a transformative one. Darwin had his own visionary moments in which nature buzzed with lavish, marvelous fecundity. Thoreau amplified them, invigorating the material world with transcendental soul. We tend to think of Darwins theory as one of grim determinism, of pointless change and purposeless death, Fuller notes, but this misses Darwins deeper insight that lifes messy process, its extravagant creation and destruction, led to something worth celebrating. For Darwin as much as Thoreau, the emergence of human beings in all of their contradictions was cause for joy, and his depiction of life as a dynamic process of continual becoming was not far from what Emerson hit upon in extraordinary essays like Circles.

Fuller ends on Thoreaus young death from tuberculosis. Ironically, Darwins most creative reader would be the first to succumb to natures severity. Such an ending was saved from tragedy by Thoreaus pagan joy, firm until his final hours of peace and even mirth. When his aunt asked if he had made his peace with God, he replied: We never quarreled. When another asked if he was ready for the next world, his answer was even more characteristic: One world at a time.

Kenyon Gradert is a doctoral candidate in English at Washington University in St. Louis.

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Tom Bethell’s Rebuke to Fellow Journalists: A Skeptical Look at Evolution Is Not Beyond Your Powers – Discovery Institute

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The popular media's attitude on evolution mixes several elements: loathing for the large part of the public that doubts the Darwinian narrative, preening at its own (presumed) superiority in grasping science, and a fawning reverence for evolutionary biologists. Added to this is an unwillingness to weigh the evidence for themselves, offering the excuse that the experts must know best, so why bother? Veteran journalist Tom Bethell's new book offers a marvelous implicit rebuke on each of these points, but on the last in particular.

In Darwin's House of Cards: A Journalist's Odyssey Through the Darwin Debates, he records his own investigation of the evidence, including interviews with lions of science and philosophy such as Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, Colin Patterson, and Karl Popper. Lo and behold, it's not beyond the intellectual reach of a reporter to get to the bottom of the controversy and to estimate the plausibility of Darwin's theory.

Not a religious apologist or a cheerleader for any competing view, but rather an old-fashioned skeptic, Bethell has been doubting Darwin since he was an undergraduate at Oxford University. I admit he's a longtime friendly acquaintance and a contributor to Evolution News, so I'm not unbiased. But others who, like me, have followed him for years agree in savoring his work.

That includes some eminent names. Novelist Tom Wolfe has called him "one of our most brilliant essayists," and Andrew Ferguson at The Weekly Standard, a great writer himself, says, "As a journalist, Tom Bethell is fearless. As a storyteller and stylist he is peerless. All his gifts are on generous display in this fascinating and admirable book."

He has been writing about Darwin (among many other subjects, of course) for forty-plus years, beginning with an article in Harper's in 1976. Wry, unfailingly clear, never technical, yet astonishingly well informed, he has produced what might be the Platonic ideal of an introduction to an often challenging and certainly controversial subject. He covers the waterfront, probing the strength of Darwinian thinking with reference to common descent, natural selection, extinction, homology, convergence, the fossil record, biogeography, cladistics, Lenski's long-term experiment with bacteria, and much more.

He concludes that while confidence in the pillars of Darwinism -- common descent and innovation through natural selection -- hit their high-water mark at the centenary celebration of the Origin of Species in 1959, the evidence has steadily and increasingly gone against the theory. The whole edifice rested on a 19th century faith in Progress, propped up by a dogmatic commitment to materialism. As the former falters, the structure is in danger of collapse.

With an apt metaphor, he sums up:

His humor is dry, subtle, his focus expansive, and his attitude utterly unapologetic. A unique feature of the book is its interviews. Philosopher of science Karl Popper, for example, spent time at the Hoover Institution at Stanford when Bethell was there and explained that despite reports, he never really recanted his rap on Darwinism ("...not a testable scientific theory," "There is hardly any possibility of testing a theory as feeble as this").

Bethell's own view of evolution is as a thoroughly unjustified extrapolation from meager evidence. He recalls touring the Natural History Museum in London with senior paleontologist Colin Patterson, who

Patterson told me that as far as he could see, nodes are always empty in diagrams of the tree of life.

The vaunted fossil record is a mystery in evolutionary terms, with almost all known phyla having sprung into existence in a "twinkling" of perhaps five or six million years. "How sudden is that? Compared with the reported three-billion year history of life on earth, the Cambrian explosion is the equivalent of one minute in a twenty-four-hour day."

As time goes by, evolution explains less and less. Conundrums abound, and seem increasingly invulnerable to being solved -- with any formula, that is, that excludes design. Experimentation shows that organisms "evolve" -- only to revert to a mean, a predictable "Reversion to the Average," as famed breeder Luther Burbank put it. Species "inhabit 'plateaus' of limited space upon which variants are free to roam," says Bethell. Artificial selection, beloved by Darwin, can "push" varieties around the plateau, nothing more.

Stasis and extinction, not transmutation, is observed. In a chapter on systematics, Bethell visits paleontologist Gareth Nelson at New York's American Museum of Natural History, a leading expert on anchovies. Nelson had a selection of the tiny fish preserved in alcohol and arrayed on his desk.

You can almost hear the sigh in the scientist's voice. I love this kind of quietly mordant writing.

Evolutionary science is in a depressed condition, despite all that the media do to put a bright face on the situation. They never tell you what biologists say behind closed doors, in their technical literature, or to a journalist with the temerity to ask difficult questions. A random individual on Twitter tweeted to me the other day, "Natural selection is the only theory that fits the facts. That's why it's a theory and not a long-discredited hypothesis like 'intelligent design.' Get out of your bubble."

The naivety is heartbreaking, foisted on us by the credulous, pampered media. In fact, Darwin's theory, of boundless novelty generated via stuff blindly swishing around together, fits few or none of the facts. Get out of your own bubble, friend. Picking up a copy of Tom Bethell's wonderful book (published by Discovery Institute Press, thank you very much) would be a fine start, an act of self-liberation and great read, as well.

I'm on Twitter. Follow me @d_klinghoffer.

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South High wins Volvo’s robotics tournament – Herald-Mail Media

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South Hagerstown High School students from the Green Machine and Rebellious Misfits teams and the Synobotz Z team from Carroll Educational Robotics in Westminster, Md, were named tournament champions at Volvo Group Trucks VEX Robotics Qualifier.

There were 37 teams and more than 200 students battling their bots at the recent event held at South High.

The Green Machine team included Kent Ha, Maryanne Kimani, James Stell, and Cameron Hahn. The Rebellious Misfits team was comprised of Katie Custer, Xianvieve Hulbert, Brennen Rosage, Alex Wright and Dorian Johnson. The Synobotz Z squad included Chris Scott, Nolan Hintze, William Hoke and Alyssa Magaha.

The action-packed day required middle and high school students to execute the VEX Robotics Competition game Starstruck, which is played by scoring colored stars and cubes in zones and by hanging the robot on a hanging bar.

As tournament champions, the teams qualified to compete in two upcoming events. The first is the Maryland State Championship scheduled to be held from March 3 to 4 at Sollers Point Technical High School in Dundalk, Md.

The teams seek to continue to advance to participate at the VEX Robotics World Championship, the culminating event of the season held in April with the top teams from across the U.S. and around the world who seek to become world champions.

The second is the CREATE U.S. Open Robotics Championship, scheduled to be held from April 4 to 8 in Council Bluffs, Iowa. The events are open and free for media, families and community members to attend.

To prepare for the competition, the teams worked together to design and build a robot using VEX EDR, that could quickly and efficiently solve specific obstacles and challenges that come with playing the VEX Robotics Competition Starstruck game.

The students apply what theyve learned about science, technology, engineering and math in order to build the semiautonomous machines.

An equally important set of skills is learned through the competition communication, project management, site management and the importance of composure, because students have to learn how to lose as much as they have to learn how to win.

South Highs Green Machine Robotics team earned the events top honor VEX Robotics Excellence Award.

Additional esteemed VEX awards were also presented.

Design Award IVM Bio-Quantum Clubs QH BioDragons team

Judges Award North Hagerstown High Schools Hubs team

Robot Skills Winner Carroll Educational Robotics Synobotz Z team

Dawn Reed, tech ed teacher at Smithsburg Middle, was recognized with VEX Robotics Volunteer of the Year award for her time and effort as adviser and coach to five teams from Smithsburg Middle and Senior High schools.

For more information, go to RoboticsEducation.org or RobotEvents.com.

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OHS robotics club dazzles McKinley students – Southernminn.com

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OWATONNA Once modest in size, the Owatonna High School robotics team has quickly grown into a force.

And as part of an effort to assure the squad remains in capable hands for many years to come, the current members have begun appealing to Owatonnas youth with robot demonstrations, like one held Thursday at McKinley Elementary.

I went to McKinley, and sitting there for a presentation like this when I was a kid would be really inspirational to me, said Braydon Kubat, a senior member of the robotics team. I feel like it will be for them, too.

Justin Kiel, principal at McKinley, said he believes this to be a great opportunity for McKinley students.

We are always looking for partnerships in the community to extend the learning beyond our classroom walls, Kiel said. This is a unique experience for students to see robotics in action.

And robotics clubs are growing exponentially, Kubat said. There are more than 6,000 worldwide, and Minnesota already has more high school robotics teams than high school hockey teams.

A handful of robotics team members discussed what goes into making a robot, as well as the competitions the team engages in. When they let the robots loose, students screamed in excitement when the machines picked up and fired orange balls.

This is a glimpse into whats out there, what they can do, Kubat said. One reason students attend a STEM school like McKinley is so they can do stuff like this.

Students see how robotics can integrate all content areas, Kiel said. Also, our students can see how thinking, questioning, and technology can come together to solve a problem.

In the robotics club, known as the Rebel Alliance, you can make a robot do what you want, which is cool, Kubat told the McKinley assembly. You get to learn a whole other language, too.

Students can sign up for the squad as freshmen, said Sam Bendorf, another member of the team.

We have a spot for each and every one of you, [and] well be waiting for you, Bendorf said.

The OHS team competes across the Midwest, and theyll head to Duluth at the beginning of March to tangle with more than 60 other squads, said Kubat, who is in his first year as a member of the Rebel Alliance.

You get to travel, build stuff with your hands and have fun while doing it, said Kubat.

In fact, the hands-on nature of the club is what attracted Kubat this year. Although hes on the business side of the squad, hes learned a great deal about building robots already.

The business team contends with financing, working with businesses to secure capital for the expensive extracurricular activity, he said. Fortunately, we have lots of community support.

The requirements for the competition change each year, and this year the theme is focused on Steamworks, he said. Teams have six weeks to build robots, which receive points for completing various tasks during the competition.

The rules, though they change each year, must always be followed. Consequently, the first few weeks after seeing the next years video and learning the parameters are devoted to designing and prototyping the robot, Bendorf said.

They begin by sketching plans on a white board, then put those plots physically onto the machines, Bendorf said. Later, they wire it, and the last two weeks are devoted to final design.

Students in the robotics club are eager to give back by teaching younger children, said Val Rose, the adviser for the club.

The STEM is what we want to build on, said Rose.

Reach reporter Ryan Anderson at 507-444-2376 or follow him onTwitter.com@randerson_ryan

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Toyota Industries Acquires Warehouse Robotics Developer – Wall Street Journal

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Wall Street Journal
Toyota Industries Acquires Warehouse Robotics Developer
Wall Street Journal
Toyota Industries Corp. is acquiring Bastian Solutions LLC, an Indianapolis-based warehouse automation and robotics developer, as the Japanese manufacturer looks to enter the U.S. logistics market. Toyota said it will pay $260 million for Bastian ...

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Toyota Industries Acquires Warehouse Robotics Developer - Wall Street Journal

Robotics Team Takes Home Trophy at Lego Competition – Patch.com

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Patch.com
Robotics Team Takes Home Trophy at Lego Competition
Patch.com
The HMX Roaring Robots sponsored and led by the STEM Alliance of Larchmont-Mamaroneck exemplified that spirit as the judges awarded them the top prize in the Core Values category at the Hudson Valley First Lego League robotics competition in ...

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Robotics Team Takes Home Trophy at Lego Competition - Patch.com

First Tech Challenge: High schools battle in robotics competition – The Journal News | LoHud.com

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Pace University professor Rick Kline talks about the FIRST Tech Regional Championship at Pace University, Feb. 5, 2017 in Pleasantville. Tania Savayan/lohud

John Jay High School students Elliot Lear, 16, right, Michael Fischetti, 17, and James Lucassen, 15, control the robot they built during the FIRST Tech Regional Championship at Pace University, Feb. 5, 2017 in Pleasantville. (Photo: Tania Savayan/The Journal News)Buy Photo

PLEASANTVILLE - Student Gregory Salguero sounded happySunday afternoon that his robotics team from Putnam Northern Westchester BOCES school was vying for the lead in the Hudson Valley NY FIRST Tech Challenge regional contest.

Salguero, of Mahopac, said his parents work in the engineering field and that he would be interesting in pursuing that field as well someday.

The team from Putnam Northern Westchester BOCES, which is in Yorktown Heights, goes by the moniker Dead Voltage.

One of the Putnam Northern Westchester BOCES coaches, Gerry Markel, said it gets a new group of students ever year. "They've got to be quick learners," he said.

Twenty-eight teams of students participated in the regional event held at Pace University. Each match features four robots; one team's robot teams up with another's, and they face off against another alliance of robots.

For a 30-second period, students must tell robots what to do solely by using coding; during two minutes after that, the teams may use controllers to commands their bots.

John Jay High School students James Lucassen, 15, left, Michael Fischetti, 17, and Elliot Lear, 16, control the robot they built during the FIRST Tech Regional Championship at Pace University, Feb. 5, 2017 in Pleasantville. (Photo: Tania Savayan/The Journal News)

Techno Chix Stefanie Gschwind, 14, of Chappaqua, left, Susanna Dummit, 16, of Chappaqua, Tara Venkatadri, 16, of Ardsley, Simran Arneja,14, of Monroe and Sophia Pao, 15, of Chappaqua with the robot they built for the FIRST Tech Regional Championship at Pace University, Feb. 5, 2017 in Pleasantville. The Techno Chix members are from the Girl Scouts Heart of Hudson in Pleasantville.(Photo: Tania Savayan/The Journal News)

Tasks in each match include picking up a ball, which include hurling balls into a kind of basket that is suspended above the robots. Another task has robots seek to touch a beacon, changing its color.

The winner of the regional competition moves on to a competition in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

Over at Peekskill High School's team table the Iron Devils student Aldaine Heaven said his becoming part of the team "started by just liking how machines work."

He said he plans to study in college something in the technology area, "programming, most likely."

Heaven said while the team was not vying for the top spots, at least as of mid-afternoon, that's OK. He said it's the fun that counts.

Carlo Vidrini, Peekskill High's coach and a co-coach of Putnam Northern Westchester BOCES, said "the robotics program encompasses so many aspect of engineering," from electrical to software.

In a technological age, the students who participate are getting exposure to the tools and thinking skills they need.

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Belding hosts largest robotics competition in history of event – Greenville Daily News

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More than a hundred students on 50 teams from schools across the state competed Saturday at the annual Belding High School Vex Robotics Tournament at Belding High School. Daily News/Cory Smith

BELDING All across the state of Michigan, robotics clubs are growing in popularity.

It has taken off so much so in recent years, according to Tom Daller, a Belding High School teacher, the competitions are starting to require an extra stage for competition. Instead of preliminary tournaments to decide which teams will go to state competitions, preliminary tournaments will be the deciding matches for regional competitions.

After regional competitions, qualifying teams will then move onto the state level and, if successful, they can get the chance to be invited to the worlds competition.

The popularity of robotics showed during Saturdays tournament at Redskin Arena at Belding High School. Fifty teams from across the state came together to compete in the mornings qualifying matches. Some of those lucky teams were able to move past the qualifying rounds into the main event the tournament to decide which teams would move on to compete at the state level.

There are 70 students involved with the robotics club both at the middle school level and the high school level, according to Daller. He said one of four Belding teams who made it to tournament play made it to the semifinals of the tournament. The rest fell to their opponents during the quarterfinals.

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In previous years, students have made it further into tournament play, but Daller said the club has grown in size more rapidly in recent years and more students are involved.

As a coach Ill make the sacrifice (of more quality time with individuals) to give more students an opportunity to be involved with this program, Daller said.

Daller said some of the students who competed Saturday have never built a robot before and there is a learning curve associated with that process.

There are some shining stars in the middle school teams, he said. And this way theyll have four years in high school (to be involved in robotics).

Not only were there more students participating than in previous years, but Daller said parents have been more involved this year than in previous years.

Its Dallers hope that other people from the community will continue to take an interest in the robotics competitions and the different areas of knowledge students need to utilize in order to be successful in tournaments like Saturdays.

Theres so much knowledge I think there are a lot of individuals out there that have the background in design and have that time to spend. We need to start looking to those people to pass on that knowledge to these kids, he said.

Despite the challenges students from Belding teams faced Saturday, they remain determined to figure out where they can improve and make the necessary changes.

For C.J. Bunce, a 16-year-old sophomore, one of the best parts about being involved in the robotics club is to be a part of a family.

Everybody here is a family, no matter where youre from. Everybody is friendly with each other, he said.

Bunce plays football and is involved in track, as well. He said the competition in those sports is much more fierce and people on other teams arent as willing to offer support or advice during a competition.

Bunce said he recently broke his hand, which left him unable to play football. In order to fill his time, he got more involved with robotics and has been interested in it ever since. He said his favorite part of the process is to build the robots while his least favorite part is programming the robot.

Luckily, Bunce said, other teammates offer their support and help him with the programming portion of the competition.

We all help each other out when someone needs help, even if were further behind, he said. We have to work together to get further.

A teammate of Bunces, Zach Brown, 16, another sophomore, said he also really enjoys building the robots. He said hes learned other valuable skills being part of the robotics club, including how to communicate effectively with teammates and total strangers.

I just think (building robots) is a useful skill to have, Brown said.

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Report: Nearshoring favors robotics, will require heavy capital investment – Supply Chain Dive

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Dive Brief:

The rise in automation is almost always linked to greater precision and reduced labor costs. Yet, the need for skill upgrades for existing employees facing automation upgrades must be factored in to the alleged savings to be gained.

Workers trained in robotics maintenance are still uncommon, particularly in the supply chain field. Although technology and manufacturing apprenticeships are making a comeback, the effort is still fresh, meaning that the total cost of automation, including training, is still high. A perceived value in automation continues, however, even when improved precision and safety are not required.

While the incorporation of robotics holds our fascination as humans, it is easy to overlook some of the challenges to employing robots. There's a high initial investment coupled with an ongoing cost for maintenance. As with any machine, breakdowns do happen, so the more important the task, the greater the need for more than one robot, not to mention redundancies necessary to ensure that workflow is not hindered.

One area where robotics may be slow to infiltrate is in customer-facing interaction. Consumers could easily dislike the experience of an all-robotic fast food chain, for example, in which case lost business would negate the salary savings. What is still most likely is that robots will serve best invisibly, such as in manufacturing.

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Report: Nearshoring favors robotics, will require heavy capital investment - Supply Chain Dive

Chatham Robotics Goes Undefeated and Moves On to State Championship – TAPinto.net

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WASHINGTON, NJ - Chatham High Schools first year robotics team, //Cougars, dominated the competition at the Northwest League Championship at the New Jersey FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) on Saturdayat Warren County Technical High School.

Competing against 20 other teams, //Cougars drove their robot in circles around the competition, easily dominating their way into the first place ranked team all day long. With their autonomous program running effortlessly all day, their robot was able to shoot multiple wiffle balls into a scoring zone and even capture the beacons using their optical distance and color sensors for their teams alliance. During the driver controlled period of the game, //Cougars robot and programming could not be touched.

//Cougars have been preparing for this day for months. Spending many hours a day in class, during lunch, and after school, the team works with their coach,Julianna Ryan, in the Advanced Robotics class at Chatham High School.

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Their hard work and dedication paid off. //Cougars advanced into the semifinals ranked No. 1. The team battled it out against a rival Chatham team, Fear The Gear, who were sitting in the fourth-place seat. //Cougars easily defeated their opponents and friends, ending the FTC season for Fear The Gear, while advancing themselves into the finals. In the finals, //Cougars once again easily defeated their competition, officially going undefeated for the day, winning an impressive ninestraight matches.

As the first place captain and winners, //Cougars secured an advancement slot onto the FTC New Jersey Garden State Rumble Championship on Feb.26.

If winning the competition wasnt enough, //Cougars also impressed the judges with the immense amount of community outreach, efforts into their business plan, and also their detailed engineering notebook. During the awards portion of the day,

//Cougars was nominated as a top contender for the Motivate Award, an award which celebrates //Cougars for being a team that exemplifies the essence of the FIRST Tech Challenge through team building, team spirit, and exhibited enthusiasm.

The team didnt stop there, they also brought home the Think Award, which is given to the team that best reflects the journey the team took as they experienced the engineering design process during their build season. The engineering section of their notebook should focus on their design, the underlying science and mathematics of the robot design and game strategies, the design, re-design, successes and those interesting moments when things arent going as planned. Through an extremely detailed log of events, sketches, and CAD drawings, //Cougar walked away with this award.

//Cougars hard work had clearly paid off. With trophies in hand and medals around their necks, most would be happy here. However, the hardworking students of CHS were eager to hear the nominees for the Inspire Award, the highest honor of the day. This award is only given to teams that were top contenders for all of the awards, highly functioning robots, and an inspiration to other teams. Although, the team had already secured a place at the State Championship, the Inspire Award winner and runner up also receive an invitation to the tournament. //Cougars took home the first runner up position for the Inspire Award.

//Cougars will now join their sister team, Chatham Cougars, who had already secured a bid to the State Championship at West Windsor Plainsboro High School North at the end of the month. The teams, both coached byRyan, will spend the next three weeks perfecting their robot and programming hoping to dominate the competition at the State Championship and earn a spot at the FTC Super Eastern Regional competition held at the University of Scranton in March.

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Meridian robotics team gears up for Idaho FRC Regional – KBOI-TV

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MERIDIAN, Idaho (KBOI)

A Meridian robotics team is putting the final touches on a robot before it competes against several others around the region.

Team 'Bullbots,' based out of Mountain View High School, worked nonstop Saturday building their robot for the Idaho FIRST Robotics Regional Competition.

The robot will be competing against others the weekend of March 30. The goal is to create a 120-pound robot that can hang game elements on pegs, climb a rope, and shoot balls into a goal.

"We just, like, all decided on an idea really fast and we've just been able to go and it worked out very well," said Tiffany Jensen, the Bullbots team mechanical lead. "Our robot is actually going to be really good."

This is Jensen's second year on team Bullbots. She's been climbing the ranks and now leads a team of mechanics.

There are only a handful of girls on the team, and Jensen hopes her leadership will encourage other females to join.

The FIRST Robotics Competition provides a hands on approach to learning science, technology, engineering and math. Students also learn programming and electric work.

"I learn a lot more here than I usually do in school honestly," said Egan Schafer, the Bullbots team programming lead.

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Local robotics students headed to World Championship tournament – KOLO

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Carson City, Nev. (KOLO) At Eagle Valley Middle School, six students are working to improve their LEGO robot. They're still not satisfied, even though it played a critical role in them winning the trophy at the Northern Nevada FIRST LEGO LEAGUE Championship last month.

"It was just an incredible feeling!" says Nevan McIlwee, 13. "To see all our hard work just paid off to get to that."

For this group, which calls itself the Jedi Engineers, winning that competition isn't enough. But it was a big deal. They beat out dozens of other teams at the competition at UNR. Teams were judged on their robots' ability to complete tasks and on their problem-solving skills.

Now, this group of seventh and eighth graders is gearing up for the World Championship Tournament in April in Houston, Texas. They will compete against more than a hundred other teams who are also champions in their own countries.

"It means a lot," says Kai Miller, 12, a Jedi Engineer. "I mean, we're going to see teams from all over the world. Teams from Europe, Africa, China, Russia, South America... It's really, really big for our community."

And while it was tough enough to qualify for this tournament, raising money is the new challenge.

"We are doing huge fundraising because it is going to be so expensive to go to World Festival," says Lisa Stocke-Koop, Eagle Valley STEM teacher and LEGO coach. "It's going to be over $20,000 before we're done."

That's because the students have also been invited to compete in an international tournament in England. Their teacher believes the kids are not just an inspiration for other students.

"These guys, they bring tears to my eyes," says Stocke-Koop. "When I look at what they've done and I look at how proud they are of their achievements... every one of these kids could change the world. And I am just so thrilled that I'm a part of their education."

The team has set up a gofundme account online to raise money for travel expenses. You can find it here: https://www.gofundme.com/lego-team-to-world-championship

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How to keep your children safe online as it’s revealed half of six-year-olds use the internet – Mirror.co.uk

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Six-year-old children are as digitally advanced today as 10-year-olds were three years ago and nearly half of them use the internet for general online browsing, new research reveals.

A worrying 44% of children aged six are using the internet alone in their bedrooms and 41% of them are using it at home without supervision.

They are using social media , streaming content, and even uploading their own videos to YouTube.

To mark Safer Internet Day, web safety group Internet Matters are urging parents to take action at an early age and keep their children safe online.

Alarmingly the number of parents saying they are always present to supervise their child aged six when they are online, using computer devices, has gone down in the last three years from 53% to 43%.

Mum-of-four Zoe Holland, 39, from Uckfield, East Sussex, has noticed the changes first hand as her children Morris, 12, Leon, 10, Daisy, six and Logan, one, have gravitated towards spending more time online.

She and husband Matt, 37, are constantly learning when it comes to monitoring their children on the internet.

She says: Daisy mostly uses my tablet so I manage the device that shes on and shell mostly use the tablet for going on cartoons on Netflix and games.

"But my older children are interested in making their own YouTube videos and have their own YouTube accounts.

"Theyre so technology savvy, were not always aware of what theyre up to. I can see them becoming more advanced at understanding the internet in the future.

It can be isolating for children if you dont let them have the smart phones that their friends at school have, theres a lot of peer pressure.

Zoe, who runs blog jugglingonrollerskates.com, reveals that she worries about what her kids can be exposed to online.

It terrifies me what they can just look up on Google, she says. I would hate them to come across something that is shocking.

"Weve made it a rule that theyre not allowed to delete their internet history so we have that awareness. But its a learning curve.

"We are looking in to accountability apps - where you monitor and control what the children use on the phone. For peace of mind and visibility we want to know whats going on. Its all about trust.

EastEnders actor Danny-Boy Hatchard, who plays Lee Carter in the BBC soap, thinks that internet safety should be taught in schools.

The star, working with Safer Internet Day, told the Mirror: Social media safety should be on the national curriculum.

Children need to be taught about these tools to educate them and make sure theyre in a safe environment when theyre online. Parents need to monitor their kids use closely.

Pyschologist Dr Linda Papadopoulos, author of Unfollow: Living Life On Your Own Terms, says: This research shows just how quickly young children are advancing in the digital world.

"It also serves as a stark reminder why parents need to be extra vigilant and arm their children with the tools to stay safe online.

As well as setting up the relevant parental controls, its important to make sure you set boundaries when it comes to how your children use the internet at home.

Today is Safer Internet Day. For more information, help and resources, go to http://www.saferinternet.org.uk .

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How to keep your children safe online as it's revealed half of six-year-olds use the internet - Mirror.co.uk

Hands on review: Zencastr podcast maker – The Sydney Morning Herald

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If you need to make a bunch of people sound like they're in the same room, even though they're spread far and wide, then Zencastr might be the service you're looking for.

Zencastr is primarily aimed at podcasters but it actually has much wider appeal when you consider all the situations where it's useful to have a high-quality recording of an online group conversation from business meetings, conference calls or panel discussions to school assignments or other situations where you need to interview someone.

When Skype doesn't cut it

Of course it's possible to have these conversations using VoIP services like Skype, and then record the conversation from your end, but the problem is that the people on the other end sound like they're on Skype even if they have decent microphones and plenty of bandwidth.

The alternative is for everyone to record their own voice locally and then upload their recording to you, so you can stitch those recordings together to make it sound like everyone is in the same room.

This is how many podcasts are recorded, including Vertical Hold which I co-host each week with fellow Australian tech journalist Alex Kidman. I'm in Melbourne, Alex is in Sydney and we have regular guests from across the country so we're rarely all in the same room when we record.

Each week we start a group Skype conversation but also each participant uses a decent externalmicrophone to record their own voice. I use a Blue Yeti mic mounted on a Rode PSA1 boom arm. The Yeti mic isplugged into my MacBook Pro and Irecord using Audacity audio editing software, while Skype uses the Mac's built-in mic so I can talk to everyone else.

We all wear headphones to ensure that you can't hear the other panellists in the background of our recordings, only our own voice, although that can be a challenge because most headphones and earbuds tend to leak a little sound.

Another challenge with this setup is that, even though Alex and I have cobbled together decent recording environments, we can't always rely on our guests to capture decent audio. After we've recorded a show we need to wait for our guests to upload their audio to the cloud, then we download that file, knock it into shape, combine it with our recordings and edit the show together.

Editing the show this way is fiddly and time-consuming; we need to get the multiple recordings in sync, adjust the volume levels to roughly match and then do our best to enhance each person's audio and remove unwanted background noise (which is part of the reason why the final edit has music playing softly in the background).

With this kind of arrangement there's always the risk that one participant will have some kind of technical disaster and we'll lose their audio, which is why I record the Skype audio from my end as an emergency backup using my Zoom H2 digital recorder.

Zencastr makes life easier

Zencastr is designed to take much of the pain out of this process by recording each person's audio and then automatically uploading it and stitching all the recordings together to spit out a polished final product.

Zencastr runs via a desktop web browser, there's no need to download and install software. Each participant only needs headphones and a microphone they can use the mic built into a notebook but you tend to get better audio with a headset or standalone mic connected to your computer via USB or the mic jack.

The Zencastr dashboard makes it easy for the host to invite guests and see which microphone their system is using which is handy if people accidentally select their notebook's built-in mic instead of the attached mic. The dashboard isn't a mixer, the hostcan mute panelists (or they can mute themselves to cough)but you can't adjust their levels or fade them in and out.

The host can also enable echo-cancelling, which ensures you can't hear yourself in the background of other people's recordings and vice versa, but this slightly impacts on the sound quality when people talk over each other. For the best audio quality it's best to disable echo-cancelling and do your best to curb the sound leaking from people's headphones/earbuds to eliminate echo.

Zencastr has its own built-in VoIP service, which is handy because Skype can be a pig, but Zencastr doesn't record that streaming audio it's only there so the participants can hear each other. Instead Zencastr records each person's audio on their computer, to get the best possible sound quality, and then uploads that recording to Dropbox after you've finished talking.

Fix it in post

You can do all this with a free Zencastr account and you've already made life mucheasier, leaving you with individual recordings in Dropbox ready to be edited, but Zencastr's real magic is its automated post-production feature. With one click it will grab those individualDropbox recordings, optimise everyone's levels, stitch together the recordings and mute people's audio when they're not talking to reduce unwanted background noise includingecho.

This automated post-production costs US$3 per hour on Zencastr's free Hobbyist service, but you're limited to eight hours of recording per month and you can only have three participants in a recording using 128 kbps MP3. Upgrading to the US$20 per month Pro service (with a 14-day trial) lets you have more than three participants and record an unlimited amount of audio in MP3 or WAV. It also includes 10 hours of automatic post-production per month.

In one take

The Zencastr Pro service also grants you access to a Live Editing Soundboard, which makes it easy for the host to drop in your podcast'sintro, transitions and other sound effects on the fly. You can even loop a sound effect, if you want to play music in the background.

This is useful if you're trying to record your podcast in one take, but it won't suit everyone. Zencastr doesn't include any editing tools, it simply spits out a mixed version of the entire recorded conversation, warts and all.

Most people will want to import Zencastr's final audio into editing software like Audacity so they can edit out bloopers and those short planning conversations you might have between segments. This means you can't have music in the background while you're recording or you'll hear the music jump at the edit points the musicneeds to be added last. If you're already doing a little post-production in Audacity then it might be just as easy to also drop in the intro, sound effects and background music using Audacity.

One downside of letting Zencastr do the initial mix is that when editing afterwards in Audacity you can't fade down one panelist which is sometimes useful if two people have started to speak at once and then one has backed off to let the other finish. As a result your conversation will sound a little more raw, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

The Live Editing Soundboard would also be useful if Zencastr supported live streaming, but it's not designed to do that. There are plenty of live podcast and vodcast streaming tools around, but Zencastr is aimed at people who want to add a bit of post-production polish to their product before releasing it.

Play it safe

Most podcasters have been stung bytechnical gremlins, so it's worth asking what protections are in place should disaster strike your recording session.

Because Zencastr is recording the audio locally rather than over the internet, it keeps recording everyone's voice if one participant's internet access temporarily drops out even if that participant is the host.

It might take you a while to reconnect, but once you do you can keep talking and there shouldn't be a break in anyone's recording. You'll want to edit out the "are you there?" section of the conversation later in Audacity, but the recordings will stay in sync and nothing should be lost. Alternatively you can stop the recording, which saves those segments, then start another recording and later stick the two together using Audacity.

While you're recording, each person's audio is stored in their browser's local storage so it's important to ensure that everyone has a bit of free space on their hard drive, especially if you're recording in WAV. Keep in mind that WAV files are much larger than MP3 so it takes much longer to upload the recordings. If bandwidth is limited you might elect to stick with MP3, although it's a shame that Zencastr only offers 128 kbps MP3 recordings even with a Pro account.

If your computer or browser crashes in the middle of recording, or you simply close the tab before it's finished uploading, the file is still stored in your browser's local storage. If you reopen the browser and go back to the same recording page you'll see a stored track marked in orange with an exclamation mark. Hover over this and it says Finalise, which lets you tidy up what's in the local storage and upload it to Dropbox without losing more than the last 30 seconds of audio.Zencastrtells me that it also does a regular backup to Dropbox while recording, although I haven't see this working.

Thefact Zencastr can cope with flaky internet, plus it keeps a backup in the browser's local storage, should be enough to protect you against most disasters. If you're paranoid like me you still might want to use a standalone digital recorder to capture the VoIP conversation coming through the headphones jack on your computer.

So what's the verdict?

It's not aone-click solution, but Zencastr might be a godsend if you're chasing decent audio yet don't have the time and/or expertise for professional post-production especially if you're regularly rotating guests who have varying technical skill andaudio capabilities. We've only just started experimenting with using Zencastr for our podcast, so far I've been impressed but it will take a while to win my trust.

To be a one-click solution, Zencastr would need built-in editing tools to let you cut out sections of audio in post-production as well drop in sound effects. Finally, it would need to support ID3 tags so you could added details to the metadata such as the episode name and number before exporting the audio file and uploading it to your podcast hosting service.

If you're looking for an all-one-one solution then you might consider Zencastr rival Cast, which works similar to Zencastr butincludes online editing and even hosting options. This simplicity might appeal to some people, but Cast doesn't match Zencastr when it comes to the quality of its post-production mixing.

While it's only part of the puzzle, Zencastr is still going to save you a lot of time and effort if you're regularly stitching together multiple recordings because you're not satisfied with the quality of Skype-based audio. If you're looking to lift your podcasting game, or produce any kind of slick online group audio recording, then a few bucks spent on Zencastr's post-production tools might be money well-spent.

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Hands on review: Zencastr podcast maker - The Sydney Morning Herald

Is America Prepared for Meme Warfare? – Motherboard

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Memes, as any alt-right Pepe sorcerer will tell you, are not just frivolous entertainment. They are magic, the stuff by which reality is made and manipulated. What's perhaps surprising is that this view is not so far off from one within the US defense establishment, where a growing body of research explores how memes can be used to win wars.

This recent election proved that memes, some of which have been funded by politically motivated millionaires and foreign governments, can be potent weapons, but they pose a particular challenge to a superpower like the United States.

Memes appear to function like the IEDs of information warfare. They are natural tools of an insurgency; great for blowing things up, but likely to sabotage the desired effects when handled by the larger actor in an asymmetric conflict. Just think back to the NYPD's hashtag boondoggle for an example of how quickly things can go wrong when big institutions try to control messaging on the internet. That doesn't mean research should be abandoned or memes disposed of altogether, but as the NYPD case and other examples show, the establishment isn't really built for meme warfare.

For a number of reasons, memetics are likely to become more important in the new White House.

To understand this issue, we first have to define what a meme is because that is a subject of some controversy and confusion in its own right. We tend to think of memes from their popular use on the internet as iterative single panel illustrations with catchy tag lines, Pepe and Lolcats being two well known known examples of that type. But in its scientific and military usage a meme refers to something far broader. In his 2006 essay Evolutionary Psychology, Memes and the Origin of War, the American transhumanist writer Keith Henson defined memes as "replicating information patterns: ways to do things, learned elements of culture, beliefs or ideas."

Memetics, the study of meme theory and application, is a kind of grab bag of concepts and disciplines. It's part biology and neuroscience, part evolutionary psychology, part old fashioned propaganda, and part marketing campaign driven by the same thinking that goes into figuring out what makes a banner ad clickable. Though memetics currently exists somewhere between science, science fiction, and social science, some enthusiasts present it as a kind of hidden code that can be used to reprogram not only individual behaviors but entire societies.

For a number of reasons, memetics are likely to become more important in the new White House. Jeff Giesea is a former employee of tech giant and Trump donor Peter Thiel, and an influential organizer within the alt right who was prominently featured in recent profiles on the movement and its ties to the Trump administration. Giesea is also the author of an article published in an official NATO strategic journal in late 2015just as the Trump campaign was really building steamentitled "It's Time to Embrace Memetic Warfare."

"It's time to drive towards a more expansive view of Strategic Communications on the social media battlefield," Giesea said in his essay on the power of memes. "It's time to adopt a more aggressive, proactive, and agile mindset and approach. It's time to embrace memetic warfare."

Giesea was far from the first to suggest this. Some forward thinkers within the US military were interested in how memes might be used in warfare years before the killing and digital resurrection of Harambe dominated popular culture. Public records indicate that the military's interest in memes picked up after 2001, spurred by the wars against jihadist terrorist groups and the parallel "War of ideas" with Islamist ideology.

Despite the government research and interest inside the military for applying memes to war, it seemed to be insurgent groups that used them most effectively.

"Memetics: A Growth Industry in US Military operations" was published in 2005 by Michael B. Prosser, then a Major and now a Lieutenant Colonel in the Marine Corps. Written as an assignment for the Marine Corps' School of Advanced Warfighting, Prosser's paper includes a disclaimer clarifying that it represents only his own views and not those of the military or US government. In it, he lays out a vision for both weaponizing and diffusing memes, defined as "units of cultural transmission" and "bits of cultural information transmitted and replicated throughout populations and/or societies" in order to "understand and defeat an enemy ideology and win over the masses of undecided noncombatants."

Prosser's paper includes a detailed proposal for the development of a "Meme Warfare Center." The center's function is to "advise the Commander on meme generation, transmission, coupled with a detailed analysis on enemy, friendly and noncombatant populations." Headed by a senior civilian or military leader known as a "Meme Management Officer" or "Meme and Information Integration Advisor," Prosser writes, "the MWC is designed to advise the commander and provide the most relevant meme combat options within the ideological and nonlinear battle space."

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A year after the Meme Warfare Center proposal was published, DARPA, the Pentagon agency that develops new military technology, commissioned a four-year study of memetics. The research was led by Dr. Robert Finkelstein, founder of the Robotic Technology Institute, and an academic with a background in physics and cybernetics.

Finkelstein's study of "Military Memetics" centered on a basic problem in the field, determining "whether memetics can be established as a science with the ability to explain and predict phenomena." It still had to be proved, in other words, that memes were actual components of reality and not just a nifty concept with great marketing.

Finkelstein's work tries to bring memetics closer to hard science by providing a "meme definition for Military Memetics," that is "information which propagates, has impact, and persists (Info-PIP)." Classifying memes according to this definition, and separating them out from all the ideas that don't count as memes, he offers metrics like "persistence" to measure their effectiveness.

Despite the government research and interest inside the military for applying memes to war, it seemed to be insurgent groups that used them most effectively. During the early stages of ISIS' war in Iraq and Syria, for instance, the group used memes to captivate an international audience and broadcast its message both to enemies and potential recruits.

One of the first public applications of the research into memetics and social media propaganda was the State Department's 2013 "Think Again Turn Away" initiative. The campaign's attempts to counteract ISIS social media propaganda did not turn out well. The program, according to director of the SITE Intelligence Group Rita Katz, was "not only ineffective, but also provides jihadists with a stage to voice their arguments." Similar to how ISIS supporters hijacked the government's platform, a year later activists used the NYPD's own hashtag to highlight police abuse.

"Look at their fancy memes compared to what we're not doing," said Sen. Cory Booker to other members of the Homeland Security Committee during a 2015 hearing on "Jihad 2.0." Booker's assessment has become increasingly common but some critics question whether focusing on a "meme gap" is an effective way to combat groups like ISIS.

"I've never seen a military program in that area that was effective," John Robb, a former Air Force pilot involved in special operations and author of Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization, told Motherboard. As he sees it, the US military will always be at a structural disadvantage when it comes to applying memetics in war because, "the most effective types of manipulation all yield disruption." According to Robb, "the broad manipulation of public sentiment is really not in [the military's] wheelhouse," and that is largely because, "all the power is in the hands of the people on the outside doing the disruption."

Meme wars seem to favor insurgencies because, by their nature, they weaken monopolies on narrative and empower challenges to centralized authority. A government could use memes to increase disorder within a system, but if the goal is to increase stability, it's the wrong tool for the job.

"Stuff like this is perennial," Robb said about the new interest in meme warfare. "Every couple of years a new program comes out, people spend money for a couple of years then it goes away. Then people forget about that failure and they do it again."

We've just witnessed a successful meme insurgency in America. Donald Trump's campaign was founded as an oppositional movementagainst the Republican establishment, Democrats, the media, and "political correctness." It used memes successfully precisely because, as an opposition, it benefited by increasing disorder. Every meme about "Sick Hillary," "cucks," or "draining the swamp" chipped away at the wall built around institutional authority.

Trump's win shocked the world, but if we all read alt-right power broker Jeff Giesea's paper about memetic warfare in 2015, we might have seen it coming.

"For many of us in the social media world, it seems obvious that more aggressive communication tactics and broader warfare through trolling and memes is a necessary, inexpensive, and easy way to help destroy the appeal and morale of our common enemies," he said.

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Is America Prepared for Meme Warfare? - Motherboard

The scientific controversy behind memes – Varsity Online

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Bethan Clark investigates the surprising academics behind memeticsm the field behind the humble internet meme

Memes currently dominate Facebook homepages and Twitter feeds. Indeed, even before their relatively recent rise to ubiquity, they had a home on niche sites for sharing image macros, early meme flagships, and other more popular platforms such as Tumblr. Recently, the rise of Memebridge has already prompted discussion on the pervasiveness and influence of memes on social media.

An interesting point is often overlooked however. There is an oft-omitted fact about the origin of internet memes: that they are not what the term was originally intended to mean. Tracing back the evolution of the term is a gateway to the surprisingly controversial field of science that inspired memes as we know them.

It was Richard Dawkins who coined the term meme, proposing to define it as the cultural version of a gene in his well-known book, The Selfish Gene. Understanding human cultural evolution as being comparable to the biological evolution of species, this makes the meme a unit of culture, just as the gene is a unit of genetic inheritance.

Like genes existing in individuals cells and being passed down through generations, memes reside in individuals and can replicate themselves. Memes are hosted in the mind and reproduce by jumping between individuals when one influences another to adopt a belief. What makes the meme such a useful idea is the framework it provides to describe cultural evolution.

In the academic world, as well as across our Facebook feeds, the meme war rages on

What counts as a meme? Almost anything, according to Dawkins. His examples include tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches and even the idea of God. The spin-off that we are more familiar with nowadays, internet memes, is clearly a rather more limited category.

The internet meme as a concept was first suggested by Mike Godwin in Wired in June 1993 and 20 years later, Dawkins made clear their distinction from his original. This distinction lies in their distribution, altered deliberately by human creativity as opposed to random mutation and selection processes.

However, the original version of the meme is still discussed in academia. It led to the creation of a whole field, that of memetics, where memes are used as an approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer. Extending the analogy with genes, if the three conditions of variation, replication, and differential fitness are met, then meme evolution willnaturally occur, and with it, cultural evolution.

Memetics is simply the study of this process, applied to culture: the analysis of the spread of ideas based on their success instead of the more traditional concern for their truth. However, it is a hotly-contested field, full of internal warring as well as external attacks.

Criticism of meme theory comes from many angles, ranging from quibbles about terminology to queries of theresearch status of the meme. Its been labelled a pseudoscience by critics, with the concept of a meme being called into question at every stage. At the level of terminology, semiotic theorists claim the meme is a simplified version of the semiotic concept of the sign, and evolutionary biology Ernst Mayr declared it an unnecessary synonym for concept.

The usefulness of memetics has also been criticised. Mary Midgley, an English moral philosopher, argued that as culture is pattern-like, a reductionist approach is limited. Its an interesting parallel to emerging criticism about internet memes, though many would reject this as taking them too seriously.

Memebridge: dank memes or dark feelings?

Not even the application of memes within the field itself is free from quarrelling. Some memeticists see memes as a useful philosophical perspective to guide inquiry, whereas others focus on developing an empirical grounding for the field to be respected.

Not everyone is convinced this is possible, however. Midgley has highlighted the reliance of memetics on producing knowledge through metaphors, something she asserts is a questionable research approach. The use of metaphor, in this case the analogy between cultural phenomena and genes, can overlook effects that do not fit neatly into the comparison.

Memeticists defend their position, pointing to the ability of metaphors to reveal insights that would otherwise have been missed, but its a debate that is unlikely to be decisively concluded any time soon. The mirror criticism of the reliance of internet memes on relatability, and the corresponding alienation of individuals who do not identify with the subject of the memes, is currently just as unresolved.

It seems the criticism and confusion in the field of memetics is unlikely to abate any time soon. In the academic world, as well as across our Facebook feeds, the meme war rages on

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The scientific controversy behind memes - Varsity Online