Category Archives: Darwinism

An Oklahoma farmer reads a newspaper. Courtesy of Library of Congress

By Dan FriedmanSeptember 18, 2022

In every generation, America struggles to explain itself as a nation. In The U.S. and the Holocaust, Ken Burns, Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein provide an insight into the horrors of the 20th century, how America related to them at the time and how it should relate to them now.

Over three episodes, lasting six hours, the team tells the story of a major economic power and developed country that believed in its manifest destiny to conquer and colonize a continent. Its ideology stretched to transporting and slaughtering those it deemed degenerate while segregating or subjugating those it deemed merely subservient. The genocide of the former and the socially engineered cull of the latter, the leaders believed, would be forgotten, overlooked or seen as necessary for progress as the state marched from one success to the next.

Early on in this extensive documentary, The U.S. and the Holocaust explains how American history inspired Hitler and the Nazi regime. The nascent Third Reich embraced and distilled American ideas of social Darwinism and eugenics, Western expansion, Native American genocide, Jim Crow segregation and American antisemitism. Though we generally understand the Allies to be the good guys of World War II, it took only a little distillation and redirection of ideas from America and Western Europe to motivate Germanys Eastward expansion, Jewish genocide, Slav enslavement and the creation of a Nazi-occupied Europe to parallel United States-occupied North America.

Those hoping for another documentary answering What did Americans know? and Did Roosevelt do enough to save the Jews? will be adequately satisfied. Though the subjects are not conclusively closed, the topics are deliberated from various points of view and addressed. Spoiler alert: They knew a lot, though it was hard to believe. The State Department was reprehensible, full of antisemites and small-minded racists; on the other hand, the War Refugee Board, belatedly set up and funded in January 1944 to carry out the official American policy of rescue and relief, was an agile, creative organization that saved tens of thousands of lives.

Occasionally ponderous and self-importantly explanatory in previous productions, the Ken Burns style is well suited to this self-evidently crucial topic. Though explained from many perspectives, the lens of Americas response keeps the Holocaust coverage relatively succinct. Though complex, American history, World War II and President Roosevelts legacy are all topics that the team has covered before. But Burns, Novick and Botstein see their remit as not only investigative and historical, but as vital, fresh and relevant.

The series title The U.S. and the Holocaust refers not just to 20th century United States, but, as Burns himself averred when I spoke to him for an interview, to us in 2022 America and the Holocaust. In todays America, ignorance of history and the world around us can combine with racism, intolerance and the belief in charismatic charlatans to leave us open to some repeat of last centurys errors.

For example, today there are more displaced people globally than citizens of England and Spain combined. But even this mass displacement and outrage at the events in Ukraine, Afghanistan and Central America can barely provoke emergency legislation in Congress, never mind reform U.S. refugee law. It is sobering to realize that our current situation is relatively enlightened in U.S. history, with a system of refugee support (however meager) in place and, even after President Trumps anti-immigrant regime, an average of over 70,000 immigrants arriving in the U.S. annually for the past 40 years.

By the end of the war, when the American population knew about the Holocaust and the horrors of Occupied Europe, only 5% thought that the U.S. should expand its immigration quotas from the extreme constraints of the interwar years. About a third of Americans thought that immigration should be reduced further than prewar national quotas that had excluded all Chinese, most Asians and all but a fraction of the murdered Jews of Europe.

In the brutal and bloody 20th century, tens of millions had to die for those invested in the states racist ideology to see the error of their ways. And, as the series shows, by no means have those lessons been fully learned by 2022s population. The final hour of the gripping production begins with a caution. There always has been and still is a dangerously large segment of the American population that believes that the so-called white race has a right to the American continent.

So, when Pearl Harbor finally forced the U.S. to take sides, that continent had to confront not only a formidable military opponent, but an ideology that was an ugly reflection of its own. American eugenics had taken its early ideas from Britain, but non-consensual sterilization targeting mostly Black and institutionalized people and mentally disabled women was law in 34 states. How could U.S. diplomats vilify German rules segregating Jews and gentiles when Jim Crow was still on the statute books? How could democracies question a sovereign nations right to transport out its Jewish undesirables, when as was made clear at the 1938 Evian Conference where 32 countries gathered to discuss helping and largely decided to withhold help none was prepared to take in Jews from German-occupied territories?

Of course, in order to explain the U.S. involvement in, and response to, the Holocaust, the series must explain the Holocaust. With a mixture of contemporary footage and current-day analysis, the series hits most of the main points of Hitlers rise. The importance of doing this cannot be understated for a country where a recent survey showed that nearly two-thirds of millennials and Gen Z dont know that over 6 million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, let alone that those numbers constituted roughly two thirds of European Jewry.

As John A. Tures, professor of political science at LaGrange College, pointed out in these pages, Most shockingly, a little over 10% of those between the ages of 18 and 40 believed that Jews were actually the perpetrators of the Holocaust.

Particularly compelling among the many interviewees is Daniel Mendelsohn, author of The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, an account of his investigations into exactly, specifically, what happened to the Polish side of his family during the Holocaust. In the documentary, a number of experts describe in either personal or historical terms what happened. Mendelsohn does both, explicitly noting the different layers of the Holocaust. As well as those millions gassed and burnt in the infamous gas chambers and crematoria, there was the Holocaust by bullets, ad hoc killings for example, villagers locked in burning barns and systematic cullings through deliberate starvation, overwork and exposure to disease and the elements.

In February 1939, the virulently antisemitic German American Bund held a 20,000-strong rally in Madison Square Garden. American Nazis like these continued to protest that Nazi values were not only compatible with American values but, as they hoped to show by saluting a massive poster of George Washington, a logical extension of those values. Today, it is at MAGA or white supremacist alt-right rallies where you will find American Nazi sympathizers. Just like the 1939 antisemitic Bundists, Robert Packer wearing a Camp Auschwitz sweatshirt conflated Nazi values with American values as he joined in the failed Jan. 6 insurrection in Washington.

Burns and his team are not interested in allocating blame, but rather in uncovering the multiple viewpoints that detail the relation between the United States and the Holocaust. American responses stretched beyond simple legislation or executive action in reaction to facts. The scale of the events and the contexts of both the war and American public isolationist sentiment meant that nothing was simple. Even reception of facts was fraught. When Felix Frankfurter, the Jewish Supreme Court justice, was presented with private testimony about Auschwitz he expressed disbelief at the messengers account. I am not saying that he is lying. I only said that I cannot believe him, and there is a difference.

In the aftermath of the racist Trump presidency, the Holocaust is a hot topic. Between states rushing to mandate (and fund) Holocaust education, Dana Bash and Wolf Blitzer both airing specials about their families Holocaust experience on CNN, the recently released novel by Santiago Amigorena and forthcoming book by Jonathan Freedland on the men who escaped from Auschwitz, there is a palpable realization that we forget human inhumanity at our cost. Ignorance is real and dangerous. Massive online platforms amplify hate and misinformation for profit. Facebook and Twitter have lax rules on antisemitism which they dont even enforce. As Sacha Baron Cohen, with whom I have worked on other projects, said at the ADL just a few years ago, Just think what Goebbels would have done with Facebook theyd have let Hitler buy ads.

The vulnerability of contemporary society to othering as a result of racist and political lies is clearly uppermost in the filmmakers minds. as their production comes to air. Burns emphasized when talking to the Forward: Theres a moment in the film where the great holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt says the time to stop a genocide is before it happens. I would add that the time to save a democracy is before its lost.

The three parts of The U.S. and the Holocaust will air on PBS from 8-10pm EST on September 18, 19, and 20.

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What did the U.S. know about the Holocaust and when did we know it? - Forward

The passing of Queen Elizabeth over the weekend saw an outpouring of grief in Britain and her also in Australia.

The Australian flags, including the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags, will be flown at half mast, federal parliament will cease sitting for 15 days and an official public holiday was announced following the news of her death at Balmoral.

Indigenous responses here to the news have not surprisingly included a rejection of the monarchy and its role.

For Indigenous people here and across the globe, the British empires history of colonialism, represented by the Crown, from Ireland, to Africa, to West Indies to North America and Australia was sadly based on lack of respect and founded in racial violence.

This was an era of Darwinism and belief in Europeans being a superior race of people.

While some countries succeeded in decolonizing, Ireland after decades of civil war being noteworthy, most did not.

In North America and New Zealand, treaties were negotiated by the British with Indigenous people, establishing formal relationships between the Crown and Indigenous people.

Its not clear why the British engagement with Australia took such a different turn Captain James Cook was given clear instructions from Britain to take possession only with the consent of the Indigenous people.

The Law of Nations established those colonizing nations were not to take lands without consent or agreement of Indigenous people.

Agreement or consent was evidenced through treaties, such as the Treaty of Waitangi which plays an important role in New Zealand today.

Lands could also be acquired through conquest or war. Land that was empty or belonging to no one could be claimed under the doctrine of Terra Nullius, and this legal fiction was adopted in Australia.

The International Court of Justice in the case of Western Sahara (1974) rejected outright the colonial misuse of the Terra Nullius doctrine in this manner, condemning it as unacceptable and racist.

Our High Court in the case of Mabo also rejected Terra Nullius as one of the darkest moments in our history.

The Mabo decision led to national native title legislation, but the Court refused to grapple with the question of Aboriginal sovereignty, which is still not resolved.

Accordingly, many Aboriginal people today maintain that we remain Sovereign people, not subjects of the British Crown.

Our sovereignty was never ceded and our ties to this land run deep with 60,000 years of connection to our lands or Boodjah we cannot be colonized.

As Britain, and even Australia, mourn the death of the Queen and the announcement of the King, we can reflect also on our history with the British Crown and relationships today.

Following news of the Queens death there have been calls for the Australian Republic, but PM Albanese rightly responded that Voice will come first.

After all, we have serious unfinished business to attend to.

The Uluru Statement from the Heart and process of Voice, Treaty and Truth seeks to resolve the unlawful acquisition of Australia by the British Crown in 1788.

The commitment to Voice and a referendum will ensure Aboriginal people will always hold a place in the Australian nation moving forward.

Constitutional recognition of Indigenous people is outstanding business, with commitment from Australian governments dating back more than two decades and flowing from the final report of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation.

The fundamental principle of self-determination means that Indigenous peoples views must be heard and respected on all matters affecting us.

Treaty making is now happening in the Northern Territory, Victoria and most recently Queensland with commitments also being made in South Australia by Kyam Maher, the first Indigenous elected Attorney.

Notwithstanding our commitment to Close the Gap, the West Australian government is failing to recognize Aboriginal peoples rights to self-determination, heritage and sacred sites, Aboriginal childrens safety and right to Indigenous identity and is clearly violating human rights that are well established through the UN system of treaty law.

Aboriginal incarceration, child removal and suicides are continuing to rise.

We need a Treaty at the national level to address human rights violations that are a blight on our nation and increase respect for the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Truth-telling is imperative to raising awareness, understanding, and promoting reconciliation in Australia.

Unfortunately, history has been whitewashed and the British history of slavery and its impact here is still unacknowledged.

But truth telling processes cannot take the place of substantive rights and measures to address systemic and structural discrimination today.

This week as Australia reflects on its continuing ties to Britain, we can also consider the nation building needed to address the past damage of British colonization and strengthen our country in a way that ensures in future respectful relations with First Nations people.

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What now for the British monarchy and its legacy for First Nations people? - National Indigenous Times

Photo: George Romanes, by Elliott & Fry, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The theory of natural selection was the co-discovery of two men, but by the mid 1860s one of its progenitors began to reject his own theory, scarcely more than a half decade after first announcing it to the world. Towards the end of his life Alfred Russel Wallace would resolve the conceptual confusion surrounding the curious half-and-half dualism which initially prompted him to claim that it was only mankindsmentalfaculties which had been designed, natural selection having fashioned our bodies. That improbable thesis was later to be replaced by his contention that the totality of (wo)man body and mind had arisen from what today would be called intelligent design, and, moreover, that the same applied to the whole sentient universe. This was indeed a root-and-branch apostasy from his prior convictions.

Why have people not registered this rejection of the theory by its co-author more strongly? Why is it Charles Darwins view which has persisted while Wallaces has been airbrushed out of history? Predictably, the quintessentially English subject of class has been invoked to answer this question. Sociologists of science often point to the fact that the progress of scientific ideas advances in part as a form of social process, and Darwin, unlike the impoverished and socially less well-placed Wallace, was fortunate to have an upper-middle-class support group to promulgate his ideas.

How convincing is this thesis as an explanation for Darwins greater success? I have argued elsewhere that the major role in the acceptance of Darwinism depended not so much on social factors but on the truly seismic changes in attitudes to religion experienced by all classes of society by the middle of the 19th century. But this does not mean that social factors played no part at all. How might those factors be characterized?

There are indications that Darwin over time gained something of the de facto status of a cult leader (in an unexceptionably benign sense). There cannot be many natural scientists who have inspired a follower to write a fulsome, 50-page poem in their memory, but after Darwins death in 1882 this is precisely what occurred. A younger acolyte, the naturalist George Romanes (pictured above), venerated Darwin so greatly this side idolatry seems the entirely appropriate phrase that he chose this form of laudation for a commemorative poem titled with lapidary simplicity, Charles Darwin: A Memorial Poem.1 There is ample evidence in Darwins voluminous correspondence with both indigenous and overseas scholars continued without interruption even when chronic illness kept him house-bound and in the pilgrimages to Down House he inspired from his old boys network of former college friends and tutors, that he had an enviable gift for friendship, even to the point of being able to inspire forms of fraternal love.

Only on the assumption of such personal magnetism can we understand such things as his limitlessly supportive inner circle meeting regularly to discuss matters of personal and professional interest with him. The severe-looking photographs of the bearded patriarch that have come down to us clearly give few hints of the sheer charisma he must have projected to inspire such admiration and affection. Romaness poem, which set off the high honour already accorded to Darwin in his burial in the north aisle of the nave of Westminster Abbey, near toSir Isaac Newton,might have suggested to some an aura close to sanctity or at the very least a symbolic assumption into a form of scientific empyrean.

To those acquainted with modern Britain, a place which frowns on nepotism and cronyism (at least officially), and which has opened itself up to meritocratic selection procedures and the importation of foreign talent, it is rather surprising that the same cast of characters keep popping up again and again in the drama of Darwins life.2Clergyman and botanist Professor John Stevens Henslow (1796-1861)3would regularly hold soires at his home, attended by Darwin and Darwins Cambridge tutors, William Whewell and Adam Sedgwick, the latter having been Darwins companion on a number of geological field trips when Darwin was younger and in better health. Henslows daughter was later to marry one of Darwins closest friends, the botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker. It was Henslow who recommended Darwin for theBeagleexpedition in the early 1830s and again Henslow who chaired the famous Oxford debate in 1860 where Bishop Wilberforce squared off against Darwins bulldog, Thomas Henry Huxley. Despite his reservations about Darwins ideas, Henslows avuncular relationship with Darwin bade him always do his best to protect Darwin from harsh criticism.4The same was the case with Adam Sedgwick. Sedgwick disagreed with Darwins ideas in theOriginso radically that, far more in sorrow than in anger, he once described Darwins ideas in a confidential letter to palaeontologist Richard Owen as being at one and the same time saddening and risible. For him, his erstwhile protg was a teacher of error instead of the apostle of truth.5Notwithstanding these reservations, he remained on commendably friendly terms with Darwin for the remainder of his life.

The recipient of this amount of indulgence from his friends clearly had every reason to feel secure in the knowledge that he commanded a supportive in-group whose loyalty he could depend on absolutely. So it was that in 1856, at a hush-hush meeting at Down House convened by Darwin, he took soundings with Hooker and Huxley as to how best to proceed with his heretofore secret ideas concerning evolution. Huxley, despite the fact that he had condemned ideas similar to those of Darwin when they had been presented in Robert ChamberssVestiges of the Natural History of Creation(1844), and that he wouldnever reconcile himself with Darwins special theory of natural selection, immediately volunteered to defend Darwins ideas, being more than willing to take Darwins corner against the high authority of Richard Owen. In the words of Iain McCalman, alluding to the fact that so many of Darwins intimates were part of an old sea-dog confraternity who had made voyages of scientific discovery of their own, Huxley had come aboard and joined Darwins fleet.6Huxley might have been, in Peter Bowlers phrase, a pseudo-Darwinian (that is, a believer in evolution but not natural selection), yet he would not hear a word said against Darwinism in any of its facets.

There is no getting away from the socially parochial aspect of English life at this time. The same names recur in the Darwin story simply because debate about matters of high import at the time were debated and largely decided by an upper crust of ex public7school boys and Oxbridge graduates. These persons would typically not even meet, let alone converse with members of lower social classes (except in trading transactions) because it was tacitly accepted that it was only the views of the social elite whichcounted.

Tomorrow, Why Darwin Eclipsed Wallace: Darwin Comes to America.

Link:

Why Darwin Eclipsed Wallace: Darwin and the English Class System - Discovery Institute

Photo: Vatican, by Luc Mercelis, via Flickr (cropped).

A new episode ofID the Futurebrings the first part of a friendly debate/discussion between Lehigh University biologist and intelligent design proponent Michael Behe and Catholic theologian Matthew Ramage. The discussion is led by Philosophy for the People podcast host Pat Flynn. Behe notes that he is a lifelong Catholic who accepted from childhood that, as he was taught in school, if God wanted to work through the secondary causes of Darwinian evolutionary mechanisms to generate the diversity of life, who were we to tell him he shouldnt or couldnt do it that way? Behe says that his skepticism toward neo-Darwinism arose many years later and stemmed purely from his scientific research.

Ramage, who specializes in the thought of Pope Benedict XVI, sees God as indispensable to creation but also embraces universal common descent and emphasizes Gods ability to work through secondary causation. Ramage asks Behe if he agrees with common descent. Behe explains why he finds the issue trivial and says the crucial issue is what Behe argued for inDarwins Black Box, namely that mindless Darwinian mechanisms lack the creative power to have generated lifes diversity, and that we have compelling positive reasons to conclude that the purposeful arrangement of parts, such as we find in mousetraps and molecular biological machines, is the work of intelligent design. Ramage urges Behe to spend more of his rhetorical energy distinguishing himself from creationists who reject evolution in toto. Behe again pushes back, saying he doesnt care two hoots for the issue of common descent, and that the important thing to focus on is how the science has turned against modern Darwinism and its emphasis on random changes and natural selection.

Behe acknowledges that Darwinian evolution nicely explains things like the emergence of wooly mammoths from elephants, or polar bears from grizzly bears, but he says these are examples of life filling various evolutionary niches via devolution. It doesnt get you the evolution of all living things through mindless evolutionary mechanisms. There are many other elements and nuances in this lively conversation between a Catholic scientist and a Catholic theologian. Download the podcast or listen to it here.

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Michael Behe Debates Evolution and Catholicism - Discovery Institute

Protests over George Floyds 2020 murder were the largest civil rights demonstrations in American history. The brutal footage of officer Derek Chauvins suffocating knee on George Floyds neck led many white Americans to, at least briefly, acknowledge the reality of structural racism in policing. In response, corporations questioned their diversity policies, defund the police became an activist rallying cry, and books on anti-racism became unexpected bestsellers. A narrative arose that America experienced a racial reckoning that challenged white racisms worst excesses.

Conservative media and think tanks, fearing a lost battle in the war of ideas over racism in American life, counter-mobilized. Morality plays need villains, and conservative activists conjured a caricature of critical race theorya forty-year-old academic frameworkas an ominous and pervasive evil. Conservative groups claimed their villain was everywherefrom the federal bureaucracy to elementary schoolsand fomented a moral panic over anti-racist education. Pundits credited Virginia Governor Greg Youngkins win to his scaring white parents into thinking their children might learn about the nations history of white supremacy. Conservative lawmakers have exploited the panic, attempting to remake the educational landscape with banning so-called divisive concepts that might make white kids uncomfortable. Propaganda victories are victories, nonetheless. And killing the messenger can destroy the message (if you cant beat them, ban them). Facts dont care about your feelings has become a conservative rallying cry. But critical race theorys merchants of doubt, by legislating against accurate teaching of Americas racial history, put their feelings over empirical facts.

But victories aside, propaganda exposes its proponents intellectual bankruptcy. Conservative caricatures of critical race theory are unrecognizable to scholars familiar with the idea. According to the Washington Post, Christopher Rufo, the principal architect of the anti-critical race theory of moral panic admitted his crusade distorted the meaning of critical race theory when he tweeted:

We have successfully frozen their brandcritical race theoryinto the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category. The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think critical race theory. We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.

Incoherence and confusion are virtues for opponents of anti-racist teaching. And Rufo and his fellow travelers are simply updating the misinformation campaigns targeting accepted scholarship that elements of the right have trafficked in for decades. Heedless of both the actual content of critical race theory and the human cost of their panic, conservatives turned to propaganda because the weight of empirical evidence undermines their ideological preferences.

In their classic book Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, the historians of science Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway outline a series of propaganda campaigns designed to undermine the scientific consensus on many of our most pressing collective problems. Conservative scientists, politicians, and think tanks sowed confusion over the link between cancer and smoking, acid rains environmental impact, and civilizational threats over global warming. Conspirators exploited the structure of scientific inquirywhich contains inherent uncertaintiesto cast doubt on settled facts. Conspirators also played the media, manipulating the false objectivity of both-sides framing to claim equal time for scientific consensus and quackery. The strategy of sowing confusion works not because anti-empirical claims are correct but because manufactured uncertainty is often enough to bring political action to a halt.

Anti-scientific campaigns, whether focused on acid rain or climate change, often relied upon a close-knit cabal of think tanks, funders, and individual scientists (who sometimes lacked subject area expertise). Corporate profits and individual livelihoods were at risk if facts about the harms of smoking or environmental crisis were acknowledged and regulated. For short-term financial or political gain, anti-science propagandists made progress on long-term collective problems difficult, if not impossible, to achieve. In the meantime, these propagandists profited as the harms from industries they were protecting were passed onto an unsuspecting and credulous public.

Critical race theorys merchants of doubt use strategies similar to those of previous anti-intellectual propaganda campaigns. And like these prior movements, the moral panic over critical race theory rests on a weak intellectual foundation.

No serious analyst doubts that American society is rife with racial inequality. Yes, there is debate among social scientists about the cause of racial inequality. But the consensus among honest scholars is that racial inequality is a long-standing, complex, intractable, and pressing social problem. The empirical evidence on structural racism and the inequality it produces is massive, overwhelming, and hard to contest. From unemployment to life expectancy, it is difficult to find a domain of American life where Black people arent worse off. Critical race theorists developed a flexible set of tenets that showed how often seemingly neutral social processes reproduce racial inequality. And these tenets were so useful theyve been adopted by scholars of education, public policy, and sociology. Critical race theorys main principlesthat race is a social construction and racial progress is fragile and easily overturnedhave substantial empirical support.

Intellectual weakness on race matters doesnt make the anti-critical race theory campaign any less dangerous. Desperation and ruthlessness born of knowing facts arent on their side may make the campaigns more treacherous. Accuracy isnt necessary to terrify teachers into changing lesson plans and avoiding basic truths about the American past (and present) or mangling lectures to make understanding difficult. Teachers are worried that clear explanations of slavery and Native American genocide may run afoul of the law and have received physical threats for vowing to teach the truth about American history.

Im hardly the first analyst to connect attacks on critical race theory and prior ignorance promoting campaigns. Several historians have shown the similarities between the Scopes Money Trialperhaps the paradigmatic case of anti-intellectual campaigns in U.S. historyand the moral panic surrounding critical race theory. Adam R. Shapiro notes that Darwinism had been around for about half a century, when it became the object of conservative ire. Shapiro claims that it wasnt Darwins theory, per se, that led to opposition. The scientific consensus around Darwinism was representative of larger cultural trends that worried conservatives. Evolution stood in for a broad swath of economic, cultural, and political changes. The backlash to critical race theory is driven by a similar set of fears of lost white prerogative amidst cultural and demographic change.

Historical connections between the Scopes Monkey Trial and the current moral panic arent simply analogies. Christopher Rufo, who has been credited with taking the moral panic mainstream, is a former employee of the anti-evolution Discovery Institute. Perhaps better described as an anti-think tank, the Discovery Institute promotes misinformation around evolutionary theory, arguing that in place of the scientific consensus, schools should teach the controversy. Of course, there is little controversy among biologists aside from what the Discovery Institute itself foments. Claiming there is a scientific controversy where none exists muddies the waters, allowing unscrupulous actors to push their political agenda. Conspiracy theories travel in packs, and the Discovery Institute also promotes climate change denial and raises questions about the legitimacy of the 2020 election.

Ideas from critical race theory can help explain moral panic. Moral panics are immoral exercises, designed to create group cohesion, target ideological or political enemies, and shape norms. Critical race theorists draw attention to structural racism to find solutions to racial inequality. Critical Race Theorists maintain that structural racism is a profitable political system for the systems beneficiaries. Finding solutions to climate change and tobacco addition threaten those who benefit from emissions and smoking. And finding solutions to racial inequality threatens those who benefit from structural racism. 2020s protests put these beneficiaries on notice, so its no surprise they responded to defend their interests. Banning teaching about racism is a justification of existing racial inequality and a prelude to producing more. Barring teaching about diversity distorts basic facts about American life and creates the idea that difference is strange or dangerous.

Legislators claim they want to stop divisive teaching and are worried about lessons that demonize white people. But what is more divisive than outlawing basic descriptive facts about American history? Critical race theory doesnt demonize white people. But by blocking teaching about Americas segregationists, eugenicists, and white citizen councilors, legislators may end up demonizing themselves. Dr. King warned about the dangers of this racial ignorance when he said, Whites, it must frankly be said, are not putting in a similar mass effort to reeducate themselves out of their racial ignorance. It is an aspect of their sense of superiority that the white people of America believe they have so little to learn.

Academic knowledge production depends upon good faith and verifiable fact. And when facts about structural racism make their way into the schools, they ban books and threaten teachers. It makes collective problems harder to solve.

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Critical Race Theory's Merchants of Doubt | Time - TIME

It is tempting to postulate technological determinism as the answer to this question: Why are extremism, irrationality, fear and censoriousness especially rampant where they should be next to nonexistent?

However, to blame social media for the anti-social behaviors that today characterize academia misses a larger, darker truth.

What is still referred to, reflexively and anachronistically, as higher education is supposedly run by and for persons who are products of, and devoted to, learning.

Today, this supposition is false.

The Chronicle of Higher Education, the reading of which is in equal measures fascinating and depressing, recently published Joseph M. Keegins bracing essay The Hysterical Style in the American Humanities: On the ideological posturing and moral nitpicking of the very online. Keegin, a philosophy student at Tulane University, argues that, confronted with the slow slide of academe into oblivion, scholars especially in humanities departments, which are losing undergraduates, prestige, jobs and funding desperately grasp for relevance. They seek it by becoming professors of academic Twitter.

They have, Keegin says, by and large subordinated their work as professional intellectuals and historians to the news cycle, yoking their reputations to the delirious churn of outrage media. Succumbing to Twitter-induced presentism, academics are captured by and shackled to Keegins terms social media, and they treat the past as not of interest either for its own sake or as a means of illuminating the complexity of the present. It is, rather, little more than a wellspring of justifications for liking and disliking things in the world today.

Keegin cites the cultural critic Katherine Dees hypothesis: What motivates someone to spend 10 hours a day on Twitter resembles what motivated people to camp out in front of theatres to see the next installment of Star Wars, or dress up in costume for the release of the latest Harry Potter book. Dee considers this a species of fandom. Keegin says, Whatever it is, it certainly isnt the fruit of serious reflection and study.

It is purely performative, done for the performers satisfaction of doing it. Although it is, superficially, all politics all the time, it actually lacks what gives real politics gravity: concern with patiently, incrementally achieved consequences.

Extremely online academics embrace a debased intellectual Darwinism: survival of the briefest.

So, they lean on status and credentials for authority. They resort, Keegin says, to prefacing an opinion with as a scholar of or as an expert in, perhaps putting Dr. or PhD in ones Twitter display name.

Keegin directs his readers attention to something worth watching, Mark Sinnetts 2022 commencement address at St. Johns College in Annapolis, whose splendidly eccentric curriculum emphasizes the great books, not excluding those by dead Europeans. A retired tutor at the school, a mathematician specializing in quantum mechanics and a Presbyterian minister with a theology doctorate from Cambridge University, Sinnett spoke without a text, as someone with a well-stocked mind can do. On YouTube, you can see him unpack St. Pauls statement that we are perplexed but not despairing.

For many Americans today, Sinnett said, perplexity means despair. So, various public personalities pronouncements consist of supposedly determinant, unrevisable knowledge. Sinnett told the diploma recipients that after youve forgotten the details of your studies here, I hope youll always remember how terribly difficult knowledge is, and how rare. Knowledge is a very small part of what any of us have at our disposal. People inundating us with spurious claims of knowledge feel free to condemn to perdition those who doubt their authority. Dogmatism even infects discourse about what is now suddenly termed the science, placed beyond debate by the definite article. But everyone, scientists included, is perplexed. Perplexity, Sinnett said, is what human existence is. and every persons perplexity is unique. Society needs joyous perplexity because we are joined in a great community of perplexity.

Sinnetts deeply civilized call to rejoice in lifes rich diversity of perplexities is discordant with the tenor of dogmatism in academe.

There, diversity is praised in the abstract but suppressed in fact.

In flight from perplexities of their own, and intolerant of those of others, many academics are not captured by Twitter; it is their safe space. Their febrile shallowness is not Twitter-induced; Twitter is a response to it. They are not shackled to social media; they cling to those platforms as shipwrecked sailors cling to flotsam.

Academe is increasingly populated by people who, having neither an inclination nor an aptitude for scholarship, have no business being there.

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Survival of the briefest | Strictly Opinion | richmondregister.com - Richmond Register

CA School District Considers Ban On Critical Race Theory

Students against the CRT ban make their views known while pro-ban speakers talk during the public comment portion of a meeting of the Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified School Board in Placentia on Wednesday, March 23, 2022 to consider banning the academic concept of critical race theory in the district. Some parents worry that language in a proposed CRT resolution could lead to the loss of Advanced Placement classes. Credit - Leonard Ortiz-MediaNews Group/Orange County Register/ Getty Images

Protests over George Floyds 2020 murder were the largest civil rights demonstrations in American history. The brutal footage of officer Derek Chauvins suffocating knee on George Floyds neck led many white Americans to, at least briefly, acknowledge the reality of structural racism in policing. In response, corporations questioned their diversity policies, defund the police became an activist rallying cry, and books on anti-racism became unexpected bestsellers. A narrative arose that America experienced a racial reckoning that challenged white racisms worst excesses.

Conservative media and think tanks, fearing a lost battle in the war of ideas over racism in American life, counter-mobilized. Morality plays need villains, and conservative activists conjured a caricature of critical race theorya forty-year-old academic frameworkas an ominous and pervasive evil. Conservative groups claimed their villain was everywherefrom the federal bureaucracy to elementary schoolsand fomented a moral panic over anti-racist education. Pundits credited Virginia Governor Greg Youngkins win to his scaring white parents into thinking their children might learn about the nations history of white supremacy. Conservative lawmakers have exploited the panic, attempting to remake the educational landscape with banning so-called divisive concepts that might make white kids uncomfortable. Propaganda victories are victories, nonetheless. And killing the messenger can destroy the message (if you cant beat them, ban them). Facts dont care about your feelings has become a conservative rallying cry. But critical race theorys merchants of doubt, by legislating against accurate teaching of Americas racial history, put their feelings over empirical facts.

But victories aside, propaganda exposes its proponents intellectual bankruptcy. Conservative caricatures of critical race theory are unrecognizable to scholars familiar with the idea. According to the Washington Post, Christopher Rufo, the principal architect of the anti-critical race theory of moral panic admitted his crusade distorted the meaning of critical race theory when he tweeted:

We have successfully frozen their brandcritical race theoryinto the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category. The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think critical race theory. We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.

Incoherence and confusion are virtues for opponents of anti-racist teaching. And Rufo and his fellow travelers are simply updating the misinformation campaigns targeting accepted scholarship that elements of the right have trafficked in for decades. Heedless of both the actual content of critical race theory and the human cost of their panic, conservatives turned to propaganda because the weight of empirical evidence undermines their ideological preferences.

In their classic book Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, the historians of science Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway outline a series of propaganda campaigns designed to undermine the scientific consensus on many of our most pressing collective problems. Conservative scientists, politicians, and think tanks sowed confusion over the link between cancer and smoking, acid rains environmental impact, and civilizational threats over global warming. Conspirators exploited the structure of scientific inquirywhich contains inherent uncertaintiesto cast doubt on settled facts. Conspirators also played the media, manipulating the false objectivity of both-sides framing to claim equal time for scientific consensus and quackery. The strategy of sowing confusion works not because anti-empirical claims are correct but because manufactured uncertainty is often enough to bring political action to a halt.

Anti-scientific campaigns, whether focused on acid rain or climate change, often relied upon a close-knit cabal of think tanks, funders, and individual scientists (who sometimes lacked subject area expertise). Corporate profits and individual livelihoods were at risk if facts about the harms of smoking or environmental crisis were acknowledged and regulated. For short-term financial or political gain, anti-science propagandists made progress on long-term collective problems difficult, if not impossible, to achieve. In the meantime, these propagandists profited as the harms from industries they were protecting were passed onto an unsuspecting and credulous public.

Critical race theorys merchants of doubt use strategies similar to those of previous anti-intellectual propaganda campaigns. And like these prior movements, the moral panic over critical race theory rests on a weak intellectual foundation.

No serious analyst doubts that American society is rife with racial inequality. Yes, there is debate among social scientists about the cause of racial inequality. But the consensus among honest scholars is that racial inequality is a long-standing, complex, intractable, and pressing social problem. The empirical evidence on structural racism and the inequality it produces is massive, overwhelming, and hard to contest. From unemployment to life expectancy, it is difficult to find a domain of American life where Black people arent worse off. Critical race theorists developed a flexible set of tenets that showed how often seemingly neutral social processes reproduce racial inequality. And these tenets were so useful theyve been adopted by scholars of education, public policy, and sociology. Critical race theorys main principlesthat race is a social construction and racial progress is fragile and easily overturnedhave substantial empirical support.

Intellectual weakness on race matters doesnt make the anti-critical race theory campaign any less dangerous. Desperation and ruthlessness born of knowing facts arent on their side may make the campaigns more treacherous. Accuracy isnt necessary to terrify teachers into changing lesson plans and avoiding basic truths about the American past (and present) or mangling lectures to make understanding difficult. Teachers are worried that clear explanations of slavery and Native American genocide may run afoul of the law and have received physical threats for vowing to teach the truth about American history.

Im hardly the first analyst to connect attacks on critical race theory and prior ignorance promoting campaigns. Several historians have shown the similarities between the Scopes Money Trialperhaps the paradigmatic case of anti-intellectual campaigns in U.S. historyand the moral panic surrounding critical race theory. Adam R. Shapiro notes that Darwinism had been around for about half a century, when it became the object of conservative ire. Shapiro claims that it wasnt Darwins theory, per se, that led to opposition. The scientific consensus around Darwinism was representative of larger cultural trends that worried conservatives. Evolution stood in for a broad swath of economic, cultural, and political changes. The backlash to critical race theory is driven by a similar set of fears of lost white prerogative amidst cultural and demographic change.

Historical connections between the Scopes Monkey Trial and the current moral panic arent simply analogies. Christopher Rufo, who has been credited with taking the moral panic mainstream, is a former employee of the anti-evolution Discovery Institute. Perhaps better described as an anti-think tank, the Discovery Institute promotes misinformation around evolutionary theory, arguing that in place of the scientific consensus, schools should teach the controversy. Of course, there is little controversy among biologists aside from what the Discovery Institute itself foments. Claiming there is a scientific controversy where none exists muddies the waters, allowing unscrupulous actors to push their political agenda. Conspiracy theories travel in packs, and the Discovery Institute also promotes climate change denial and raises questions about the legitimacy of the 2020 election.

Ideas from critical race theory can help explain moral panic. Moral panics are immoral exercises, designed to create group cohesion, target ideological or political enemies, and shape norms. Critical race theorists draw attention to structural racism to find solutions to racial inequality. Critical Race Theorists maintain that structural racism is a profitable political system for the systems beneficiaries. Finding solutions to climate change and tobacco addition threaten those who benefit from emissions and smoking. And finding solutions to racial inequality threatens those who benefit from structural racism. 2020s protests put these beneficiaries on notice, so its no surprise they responded to defend their interests. Banning teaching about racism is a justification of existing racial inequality and a prelude to producing more. Barring teaching about diversity distorts basic facts about American life and creates the idea that difference is strange or dangerous.

Legislators claim they want to stop divisive teaching and are worried about lessons that demonize white people. But what is more divisive than outlawing basic descriptive facts about American history? Critical race theory doesnt demonize white people. But by blocking teaching about Americas segregationists, eugenicists, and white citizen councilors, legislators may end up demonizing themselves. Dr. King warned about the dangers of this racial ignorance when he said, Whites, it must frankly be said, are not putting in a similar mass effort to reeducate themselves out of their racial ignorance. It is an aspect of their sense of superiority that the white people of America believe they have so little to learn.

Academic knowledge production depends upon good faith and verifiable fact. And when facts about structural racism make their way into the schools, they ban books and threaten teachers. It makes collective problems harder to solve.

See the rest here:

Critical Race Theorys Merchants of Doubt - Yahoo News

Our fascination with space is one that began when we started looking up at the sky. Curiosity has enabled us to seek the answers to questions about whether we are alone in the vast cosmos or if there is more that is waiting to be explored. This zeal to uncover the unknown can be seen in the billions of dollars and years of research poured into discovering and understanding what lies outside our blue planets boundary.

Experts, including technology investor and science philanthropist Yuri Milner, have several thoughts on aliens, our cosmic neighbors. These opinions are featured in his book, Eureka Manifesto, in which Yuri Milner argues that we should look beyond Earth for human civilizations mission.

Jill Tarter, a leading astronomer best known for her work on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, compared the investigations carried out since the Green Bank conference in 1961, at which experts came together to discuss the search for extraterrestrials. She likened these searches to dipping glass into the ocean and wondering why you dont catch a fish.

The universes vastness is nearly immeasurable, and although we may be looking in the right places, we may be looking with the wrong methods. There is no certainty that if extraterrestrial life existed, they could speak our language or that there would be any foundation for understanding. Silence in this search can also mean that humanity is alone in the vast expanse of the universe.

Another opinion is that other civilizations might be immensely older and more advanced in science and technology. From history, we can see that encounters between cultures with a considerable difference in technological advancement typically result badly for the less technological one. Hence, meeting another civilization can pose an extinction threat.

In Yuri Milners opinion, considering that the more advanced civilization would not be hostile does not help matters. Relying on aliens to pursue humanitys mission to explore and understand the universe may not be the wisest decision. Looking through the lens of Darwinism, no civilization or colony is safe from extinction. With the uncertainty of surviving in such a universe indefinitely, maximizing the use of our resources to intensify our effort toward understanding and expanding into space is the most plausible decision.

Besides pointing out the threats that human civilization faces from itself and outside our planet, Yuri Milner, in his manifesto, proposes that to combat these threats, we should spread out into space. This mission stays valid even if there is no extraterrestrial life. While science and technology will serve as humanitys spearhead in this journey, we can foster the mission by investing in space exploration, celebrating innovation, and advancing the ability of artificial intelligence to solve scientific problems.

As well as supporting the search for life through its Breakthrough Initiatives, Yuri Milners nonprofit Breakthrough Foundation champions the Breakthrough Prize, the worlds most significant scientific award, which celebrates researchers who have made stellar advances in fundamental physics, the life sciences, and mathematics. There is also the Breakthrough Junior Challenge for high school students that helps to foster enlightenment and education about the universe.

However, Yuri Milner is not alone on the quest to further humanitys place in the universe. The late theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg were on the Breakthrough Starshot Board. Another notable mention is Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and a leading visionary in humanity settling on Mars. The central theme remains that advancement in science and technology is necessary to sustain society and our expansion in the universe.

Read more from the original source:

Experts Share Opinions on Aliens and Humanity's Role in Space Exploration - The Future of Things

Photo: Asian black bear, by Joydeep, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons.

On a new episode ofID the Future, distinguished German paleontologist Gnter Bechly continues a discussion ofhis new argumentagainst modern evolutionary theory. According to Bechly, contemporary species pairs diverge hardly at all over millions of years, even when isolated from each other, and yet were supposed to believe that the evolutionary process built dramatically distinct body plans in similar time frames at various other times in the history of life. Why believe that? He suggests this pattern of relative stasis among species pairs strikes a significant and damaging blow to Darwinian theory.

In this Part 2 episode, Bechly and host Casey Luskin discuss mice/rat pairs, cattle and bison, horses and donkeys, Asian and African elephants, the Asian black bear and the South American spectacled bear, river hippos and West African pygmy hippos, the common dolphin and the bottle-nosed dolphin, and the one outlier in this pattern, chimpanzees and humans. If chimps and humans really did evolve from a common ancestor, why do they appear to be the lone exception to this pattern of modern species pairs differing in only trivial ways? Bechly notes that whatever ones explanation, there appears to be clear evidence here of human exceptionalism. He and Luskin go on to cast doubt on the idea that mindless evolutionary processes could have engineered the suite of changes necessary to convert an ape ancestor into upright walking, talking, technology-fashioning human beings.

What about Hawaiian silversword plants? They seem to have evolved into dramatically different body plans in the past few million years. Are these an exception to Bechlys claimed pattern of species pair stasis? After all, the differences among silverswords can be quite dramatic, with differences far more extensive than what we find between, say, Asian and African elephants or horse and donkey. Drawing ona second articleon the topic, he notes that some extant species of plants possess considerable phenotypic plasticity. They have the capacity to change quite dramatically and still breed with other very different varieties. This appears to be the case with silverswords. There is more to his argument. Tune in to hear Dr. Bechly respond to additional objections that Dr. Luskin raises. Download the podcast or listen to it here. Part 1 of their conversation ishere.

See the original post here:

Gnter Bechly: Species Pairs Wreck Darwinism - Discovery Institute

Image source: Seattle Municipal Archives, via Flickr (cropped).

An article inThe Guardianby science journalist Stephen Buryani represents something remarkable in the way the public processes the failures of evolutionary theory. In the past, those failures have been admitted by some biologistsbut always in settings (technical journals, conferences) where they thought nobody outside their professional circles was listening. Its like if a married couple were going through rough times in their relationship. Theyd discuss it between themselves, with close friends, maybe with a counselor. But for goodness sake they wouldnt put it on Facebook, where all marriages are blessed exclusively with good cheer and good fortune.

Well, the field of evolutionary biology has just done the equivalent of a massive Facebook dump, admitting that Jim and Sandy, who always seemed so happy, are in fact perilously perched on the rocks. In a very long article, top names in the field share with Buryani what intelligent design proponents already knew, but fewGuardianreaders guessed. The headline from the left-leaning British daily asks, Do we need a new theory of evolution? Answer in one word: yes. The article is full of scandalous admissions:

Strange as it sounds,scientists still do not know the answers to some of the most basic questions about how life on Earth evolved. Take eyes, for instance. Where do they come from, exactly? The usual explanation of how we got these stupendously complex organs rests upon the theory of natural selection.

This is the basic story of evolution, as recounted in countless textbooks and pop-science bestsellers. The problem, according to a growing number of scientists, is that it isabsurdly crude and misleading.

For one thing,it starts midway through the story, taking for granted the existence of light-sensitive cells, lenses and irises, without explaining where they came from in the first place. Nor does it adequately explain how such delicate and easily disrupted components meshed together to form a single organ.And it isnt just eyesthat the traditional theory struggles with. The first eye, the first wing, the first placenta. How they emerge. Explaining these is the foundational motivation of evolutionary biology, says Armin Moczek, a biologist at Indiana University. And yet, we still do not have a good answer.This classic idea of gradual change, one happy accident at a time, has so far fallen flat.

There are certain core evolutionary principles that no scientist seriously questions. Everyone agrees that natural selection plays a role, as does mutation and random chance. But how exactly these processes interact and whether other forces might also be at work has become the subject ofbitter dispute. If we cannot explain things with the tools we have right now, the Yale University biologist Gnter Wagner told me, we must find new ways of explaining.

[T]his is a battle of ideas over the fate of one of the grand theories that shaped the modern age. But it is also astruggle for professional recognition and status, about who gets to decide what is core and what is peripheral to the discipline. The issue at stake, says Arlin Stoltzfus, an evolutionary theorist at the IBBR research institute in Maryland, is who is going to write the grand narrative of biology. And underneath all this lurks another, deeper question:whether the idea of a grand story of biology is a fairytale we need to finally give up. [Emphasis added.]

Absurdly crude and misleading? A classic idea that has so far fallen flat? A fairytale we need to finally give up? Scientists locked in a desperate struggle for professional recognition and status? What about for the truth? This is how writers forEvolution Newshave characterized the troubles with Darwinian theory. But I didnt expect to see it inThe Guardian.

Buryani runs through a familiar narrative: the modern synthesis, the challenge from the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, the 2016 New Trends in Evolutionary Biologymeeting at the Royal Society (which was covered here extensively), how some evolutionists condemned the conference while other embraced its revisionist messaging, efforts to prop up unguided evolution with exotic ideas of plasticity, evolutionary development, epigenetics, cultural evolution, etc.

If youve ever owned an automobile toward the end of its life, the situation will be familiar: the multiple problems all at once, the multiple attempted fixes, the expense, the trouble, the worry about the car breaking dying at any inconvenient or dangerous moment (like in the middle of the freeway), all of which together signal that its time not to sell the car (who would want it?) but to have it towed off and donated to charity for a tax credit.

Buryani doesnt mention the intelligent design theorists in attendance at the Royal Society meeting Stephen Meyer, Gnter Bechly, Douglas Axes, Paul Nelson, and others. He doesnt mention the challenge from intelligent design at all. Thats okay. I didnt expect him to do so. Anyway, readers ofEvolution Newswill already be familiar with most everything Buryani reports.

He concludes with seemingly despairing statements from evolutionists along the lines of, Oh, we never needed a grand, coherent theory like that, after all.

Over the past decade the influential biochemist Ford Doolittle haspublished essaysrubbishing the idea that the life sciences need codification. We dont need no friggin new synthesis.We didnt even really need the old synthesis, he told me.

The computational biologist Eugene Koonin thinks people should get used to theories not fitting together. Unification is a mirage. In my viewthere is no can be no single theory of evolution, he told me.

I see. Evolutionists have, until now, been very, very reluctant to admit such things in the popular media. Always, the obligation was heeded to present an illusory picture of wedded bliss to the unwashed, which, if given some idea of the truth, would draw its own conclusions and maybe even take up with total heresies like intelligent design. Now that illusion of blessed domesticity has been cast aside in a most dramatic fashion.Read the rest of Buryanis article. Your eyebrows will go up numerous times.

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Donate Darwinism for a Tax Credit? Evolutionists Admit Their Field's Failures - Discovery Institute