Category Archives: Darwinism

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.

You may recall the gist from school biology lessons. If a creature with poor eyesight happens to produce offspring with slightly better eyesight, thanks to random mutations, then that tiny bit more vision gives them more chance of survival. The longer they survive, the more chance they have to reproduce and pass on the genes that equipped them with slightly better eyesight. Some of their offspring might, in turn, have better eyesight than their parents, making it likelier that they, too, will reproduce. And so on. Generation by generation, over unfathomably long periods of time, tiny advantages add up. Eventually, after a few hundred million years, you have creatures who can see as well as humans, or cats, or owls.

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 is absurdly crude and misleading.

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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 eyes that 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 of bitter 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.

In 2014, eight scientists took up this challenge, publishing an article in the leading journal Nature that asked Does evolutionary theory need a rethink? Their answer was: Yes, urgently. Each of the authors came from cutting-edge scientific subfields, from the study of the way organisms alter their environment in order to reduce the normal pressure of natural selection think of beavers building dams to new research showing that chemical modifications added to DNA during our lifetimes can be passed on to our offspring. The authors called for a new understanding of evolution that could make room for such discoveries. The name they gave this new framework was rather bland the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) but their proposals were, to many fellow scientists, incendiary.

In 2015, the Royal Society in London agreed to host New Trends in Evolution, a conference at which some of the articles authors would speak alongside a distinguished lineup of scientists. The aim was to discuss new interpretations, new questions, a whole new causal structure for biology, one of the organisers told me. But when the conference was announced, 23 fellows of the Royal Society, Britains oldest and most prestigious scientific organisation, wrote a letter of protest to its then president, the Nobel laureate Sir Paul Nurse. The fact that the society would hold a meeting that gave the public the idea that this stuff is mainstream is disgraceful, one of the signatories told me. Nurse was surprised by the reaction. They thought I was giving it too much credibility, he told me. But, he said: Theres no harm in discussing things.

Traditional evolutionary theorists were invited, but few showed up. Nick Barton, recipient of the 2008 Darwin-Wallace medal, evolutionary biologys highest honour, told me he decided not to go because it would add more fuel to the strange enterprise. The influential biologists Brian and Deborah Charlesworth of the University of Edinburgh told me they didnt attend because they found the premise irritating. The evolutionary theorist Jerry Coyne later wrote that the scientists behind the EES were playing revolutionaries to advance their own careers. One 2017 paper even suggested some of the theorists behind the EES were part of an increasing post-truth tendency within science. The personal attacks and insinuations against the scientists involved were shocking and ugly, said one scientist, who is nonetheless sceptical of the EES.

What accounts for the ferocity of this backlash? For one thing, this is a battle of ideas over the fate of one of the grand theories that shaped the modern age. But it is also a struggle 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.

Behind the current battle over evolution lies a broken dream. In the early 20th century, many biologists longed for a unifying theory that would enable their field to join physics and chemistry in the club of austere, mechanistic sciences that stripped the universe down to a set of elemental rules. Without such a theory, they feared that biology would remain a bundle of fractious sub-fields, from zoology to biochemistry, in which answering any question might require input and argument from scores of warring specialists.

From todays vantage point, it seems obvious that Darwins theory of evolution a simple, elegant theory that explains how one force, natural selection, came to shape the entire development of life on Earth would play the role of the great unifier. But at the turn of the 20th century, four decades after the publication of On the Origin of Species and two after his death, Darwins ideas were in decline. Scientific collections at the time carried titles such as The Death-bed of Darwinism. Scientists had not lost interest in evolution, but many found Darwins account of it unsatisfying. One major problem was that it lacked an explanation of heredity. Darwin had observed that, over time, living things seemed to change to better fit their environment. But he did not understand how these minute changes were passed from one generation to the next.

At the start of the 20th century, the rediscovery of the work of the 19th-century friar and father of genetics, Gregor Mendel, started to provide the answers. Scientists working in the new field of genetics discovered rules that governed the quirks of heredity. But rather than confirm Darwins theory, they complicated it. Reproduction appeared to remix genes the mysterious units that programme the physical traits we end up seeing in surprising ways. Think of the way a grandfathers red hair, absent in his son, might reappear in his granddaughter. How was natural selection meant to function when its tiny variations might not even reliably pass from parent to offspring every time?

Even more ominous for Darwinists was the emergence of the mutationists in the 1910s, a school of geneticists whose star exponent, Thomas Hunt Morgan, showed that by breeding millions of fruit flies and sometimes spiking their food with the radioactive element radium he could produce mutated traits, such as new eye colours or additional limbs. These were not the tiny random variations on which Darwins theory was built, but sudden, dramatic changes. And these mutations, it turned out, were heritable. The mutationists believed that they had identified lifes true creative force. Sure, natural selection helped to remove unsuitable changes, but it was simply a humdrum editor for the flamboyant poetry of mutation. Natura non facit saltum, Darwin had once written: Nature does not make jumps. The mutationists begged to differ.

These disputes over evolution had the weight of a theological schism. At stake were the forces governing all creation. For Darwinists especially, their theory was all-or-nothing. If another force, apart from natural selection, could also explain the differences we see between living things, Darwin wrote in On the Origin of Species, his whole theory of life would utterly break down. If the mutationists were right, instead of a single force governing all biological change, scientists would have to dig deep into the logic of mutation. Did it work differently on legs and lungs? Did mutations in frogs work differently to mutations in owls or elephants?

In 1920, the philosopher Joseph Henry Woodger wrote that biology suffered from fragmentation and cleavages that would be unknown in such a well-unified science as, for example, chemistry. The divergent groups often feuded, he noted, and it seemed to be getting worse. It began to seem inevitable that the life sciences would grow more and more fractured, and the possibility of a common language would slip away.

Just as it seemed that Darwinism might be buried, a curious collection of statisticians and animal breeders came along to revitalise it. In the 1920s and 30s, working separately but in loose correspondence, thinkers such as the British father of scientific statistics, Ronald Fisher, and the American livestock breeder Sewall Wright, proposed a revised theory of evolution that accounted for scientific advances since Darwins death but still promised to explain all of lifes mysteries with a few simple rules. In 1942, the English biologist Julian Huxley coined the name for this theory: the modern synthesis. Eighty years on, it still provides the basic framework for evolutionary biology as it is taught to millions of schoolchildren and undergraduates every year. Insofar as a biologist works in the tradition of the modern synthesis, they are considered mainstream; insofar as they reject it, they are considered marginal.

Despite the name, it was not actually a synthesis of two fields, but a vindication of one in light of the other. By building statistical models of animal populations that accounted for the laws of genetics and mutation, the modern synthesists showed that, over long periods of time, natural selection still functioned much as Darwin had predicted. It was still the boss. In the fullness of time, mutations were too rare to matter, and the rules of heredity didnt affect the overall power of natural selection. Through a gradual process, genes with advantages were preserved over time, while others that didnt confer advantages disappeared.

Rather than getting stuck into the messy world of individual organisms and their specific environments, proponents of the modern synthesis observed from the lofty perspective of population genetics. To them, the story of life was ultimately just the story of clusters of genes surviving or dying out over the grand sweep of evolutionary time.

The modern synthesis arrived at just the right time. Beyond its explanatory power, there were two further reasons more historical, or even sociological, than scientific why it took off. First, the mathematical rigour of the synthesis was impressive, and not seen before in biology. As the historian Betty Smocovitis points out, it brought the field closer to examplar sciences such as physics. At the same time, writes Smocovitis, it promised to unify the life sciences at a moment when the enlightenment project of scientific unification was all the rage. In 1946, the biologists Ernst Mayr and George Gaylord Simpson started the Society for the Study of Evolution, a professional organisation with its own journal, which Simpson said would bring together the sub-fields of biology on the common ground of evolutionary studies. This was all possible, he later reflected, because we seem at last to have a unified theory [] capable of facing all the classic problems of the history of life and of providing a causalistic solution of each.

This was a time when biology was ascending to its status as a major science. University departments were forming, funding was flowing in, and thousands of newly accredited scientists were making thrilling discoveries. In 1944, the Canadian-American biologist Oswald Avery and his colleagues had proved that DNA was the physical substance of genes and heredity, and in 1953 James Watson and Francis Crick leaning heavily on work from Rosalind Franklin and the American chemist Linus Pauling mapped its double-helical structure.

While information piled up at a rate that no scientist could fully digest, the steady thrum of the modern synthesis ran through it all. The theory dictated that, ultimately, genes built everything, and natural selection scrutinised every bit of life for advantage. Whether you were looking at algae blooming in a pond or peacock mating rituals, it could all be understood as natural selection doing its work on genes. The world of life could seem suddenly simple again.

By 1959, when the University of Chicago held a conference celebrating the centennial of the publication of On the Origin of Species, the modern synthesists were triumphant. The venues were packed and national newspaper reporters followed the proceedings. (Queen Elizabeth was invited, but sent her apologies.) Huxley crowed that this is one of the first public occasions on which it has been frankly faced that all aspects of reality are subject to evolution.

Yet soon enough, the modern synthesis would come under assault from scientists within the very departments that the theory had helped build.

From the start, there had always been dissenters. In 1959, the developmental biologist CH Waddington lamented that the modern synthesis had sidelined valuable theories in favour of drastic simplifications which are liable to lead us to a false picture of how the evolutionary process works. Privately, he complained that anyone working outside the new evolutionary party line that is, anyone who didnt embrace the modern synthesis was ostracised.

Then came a devastating series of new findings that called into question the theorys foundations. These discoveries, which began in the late 60s, came from molecular biologists. While the modern synthesists looked at life as if through a telescope, studying the development of huge populations over immense chunks of time, the molecular biologists looked through a microscope, focusing on individual molecules. And when they looked, they found that natural selection was not the all-powerful force that many had assumed it to be.

They found that the molecules in our cells and thus the sequences of the genes behind them were mutating at a very high rate. This was unexpected, but not necessarily a threat to mainstream evolutionary theory. According to the modern synthesis, even if mutations turned out to be common, natural selection would, over time, still be the primary cause of change, preserving the useful mutations and junking the useless ones. But that isnt what was happening. The genes were changing that is, evolving but natural selection wasnt playing a part. Some genetic changes were being preserved for no reason apart from pure chance. Natural selection seemed to be asleep at the wheel.

Evolutionary biologists were stunned. In 1973, David Attenborough presented a BBC documentary that included an interview with one of the leading modern synthesists, Theodosius Dobzhansky. He was visibly distraught at the non-Darwinian evolution that some scientists were now proposing. If this were so, evolution would have hardly any meaning, and would not be going anywhere in particular, he said. This is not simply a quibble among specialists. To a man looking for the meaning of his existence, evolution by natural selection makes sense. Where once Christians had complained that Darwins theory made life meaningless, now Darwinists levelled the same complaint at scientists who contradicted Darwin.

Other assaults on evolutionary orthodoxy followed. The influential palaeontologists Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge argued that the fossil record showed evolution often happened in short, concentrated bursts; it didnt have to be slow and gradual. Other biologists simply found that the modern synthesis had little relevance to their work. As the study of life increased in complexity, a theory based on which genes were selected in various environments started to seem beside the point. It didnt help answer questions such as how life emerged from the seas, or how complex organs, such as the placenta, developed. Using the lens of the modern synthesis to explain the latter, says the Yale developmental biologist Gnter Wagner, would be like using thermodynamics to explain how the brain works. (The laws of thermodynamics, which explain how energy is transferred, do apply to the brain, but they arent much help if you want to know how memories are formed or why we experience emotion.)

Just as feared, the field split. In the 70s, molecular biologists in many universities peeled off from biology departments to form their own separate departments and journals. Some in other sub-fields, such as palaeontology and developmental biology, drifted away as well. Yet the biggest field of all, mainstream evolutionary biology, continued much as before. The way the champions of the modern synthesis who by this point dominated university biology departments dealt with potentially destabilising new findings was by acknowledging that such processes happen sometimes (subtext: rarely), are useful to some specialists (subtext: obscure ones), but do not fundamentally alter the basic understanding of biology that descends from the modern synthesis (subtext: dont worry about it, we can continue as before). In short, new discoveries were often dismissed as little more than mildly diverting curiosities.

Today, the modern synthesis remains, mutatis mutandis, the core of modern evolutionary biology wrote the evolutionary theorist Douglas Futuyma in a 2017 paper defending the mainstream view. The current version of the theory allows some room for mutation and random chance, but still views evolution as the story of genes surviving in vast populations. Perhaps the biggest change from the theorys mid-century glory days is that its most ambitious claims that simply by understanding genes and natural selection, we can understand all life on earth have been dropped, or now come weighted with caveats and exceptions. This shift has occurred with little fanfare. The theorys ideas are still deeply embedded in the field, yet no formal reckoning with its failures or schisms has occurred. To its critics, the modern synthesis occupies a position akin to a president reneging on a campaign promise it failed to satisfy its entire coalition, but remains in office, hands on the levers of power, despite its diminished offer.

Brian and Deborah Charlesworth are considered by many to be high priests of the tradition that descends from the modern synthesis. They are eminent thinkers, who have written extensively on the place of new theories in evolutionary biology, and they dont believe any radical revision is needed. Some argue that they are too conservative, but they insist they are simply careful cautious about dismantling a tried-and-tested framework in favour of theories that lack evidence. They are interested in fundamental truths about evolution, not explaining every diverse result of the process.

Were not here to explain the elephants trunk, or the camels hump. If such explanations could even be possible, Brian Charlesworth told me. Instead, he said, evolutionary theory should be universal, focusing on the small number of factors that apply to how every living thing develops. Its easy to get hung up on you havent explained why a particular system works the way it does. But we dont need to know, Deborah told me. Its not that the exceptions are uninteresting; its just that they arent all that important.

Kevin Laland, the scientist who organised the contentious Royal Society conference, believes it is time for proponents of neglected evolutionary sub-fields to band together. Laland and his fellow proponents of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, the EES, call for a new way of thinking about evolution one that starts not by seeking the simplest explanation, or the universal one, but what combination of approaches offers the best explanation to biologys major questions. Ultimately, they want their sub-fields plasticity, evolutionary development, epigenetics, cultural evolution not just recognised, but formalised in the canon of biology.

There are some firebrands among this group. The geneticist Eva Jablonka has proclaimed herself a neo-Lamarckist, after Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, the 19th-century populariser of pre-Darwinian ideas of inheritance, who has often been seen as a punchline in the history of science. Meanwhile, the physiologist Denis Noble has called for a revolution against traditional evolutionary theory. But Laland, a lead author on many of the movements papers, insists that they simply want to expand the current definition of evolution. They are reformers, not revolutionaries.

The case for EES rests on a simple claim: in the past few decades, we have learned many remarkable things about the natural world and these things should be given space in biologys core theory. One of the most fascinating recent areas of research is known as plasticity, which has shown that some organisms have the potential to adapt more rapidly and more radically than was once thought. Descriptions of plasticity are startling, bringing to mind the kinds of wild transformations you might expect to find in comic books and science fiction movies.

Emily Standen is a scientist at the University of Ottawa, who studies Polypterus senegalus, AKA the Senegal bichir, a fish that not only has gills but also primitive lungs. Regular polypterus can breathe air at the surface, but they are much more content living underwater, she says. But when Standen took Polypterus that had spent their first few weeks of life in water, and subsequently raised them on land, their bodies began to change immediately. The bones in their fins elongated and became sharper, able to pull them along dry land with the help of wider joint sockets and larger muscles. Their necks softened. Their primordial lungs expanded and their other organs shifted to accommodate them. Their entire appearance transformed. They resembled the transition species you see in the fossil record, partway between sea and land, Standen told me. According to the traditional theory of evolution, this kind of change takes millions of years. But, says Armin Moczek, an extended synthesis proponent, the Senegal bichir is adapting to land in a single generation. He sounded almost proud of the fish.

Moczeks own area of expertise is dung beetles, another remarkably plastic species. With future climate change in mind, he and his colleagues tested the beetles response to different temperatures. Colder weather makes it harder for the beetles to take off. But the researchers found that they responded to these conditions by growing larger wings. The crucial thing about such observations, which challenge the traditional understanding of evolution, is that these sudden developments all come from the same underlying genes. The speciess genes arent being slowly honed, generation by generation. Rather, during its early development it has the potential to grow in a variety of ways, allowing it to survive in different situations.

We believe this is ubiquitous across species, says David Pfennig of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He works on spadefoot toads, amphibians the size of a Matchbox car. Spadefoots are normally omnivorous, but spadefoot tadpoles raised solely on meat grow larger teeth, more powerful jaws, and a hardy, more complex gut. Suddenly, they resemble a powerful carnivore, feeding on hardy crustaceans, and even other tadpoles.

Plasticity doesnt invalidate the idea of gradual change through selection of small changes, but it offers another evolutionary system with its own logic working in concert. To some researchers, it may even hold the answers to the vexed question of biological novelties: the first eye, the first wing. Plasticity is perhaps what sparks the rudimentary form of a novel trait, says Pfennig.

Plasticity is well accepted in developmental biology, and the pioneering theorist Mary Jane West-Eberhard began making the case that it was a core evolutionary force in the early 00s. And yet, to biologists in many other fields, it is virtually unknown. Undergraduates beginning their education are unlikely to hear anything about it, and it has still to make much mark in popular science writing.

Biology is full of theories like this. Other interests of the EES include extra-genetic inheritance, known as epigenetics. This is the idea that something say a psychological injury, or a disease experienced by a parent attaches small chemical molecules to their DNA that are repeated in their children. This has been shown to happen in some animals across multiple generations, and caused controversy when it was suggested as an explanation for intergenerational trauma in humans. Other EES proponents track the inheritance of things like culture as when groups of dolphins develop and then teach each other new hunting techniques or the communities of helpful microbes in animal guts or plant roots, which are tended to and passed on through generations like a tool. In both cases, researchers contend that these factors might impact evolution enough to warrant a more central role. Some of these ideas have become briefly fashionable, but remain disputed. Others have sat around for decades, offering their insights to a small audience of specialists and no one else. Just like at the turn of the 20th century, the field is split into hundreds of sub-fields, each barely aware of the rest.

To the EES group, this is a problem that urgently needs to be solved and the only solution is a more capacious unifying theory. These scientists are keen to expand their research and gather the data to disprove their doubters. But they are also aware that logging results in the literature may not be enough. Parts of the modern synthesis are deeply ingrained in the whole scientific community, in funding networks, positions, professorships, says Gerd B Mller, head of the Department of Theoretical Biology at the university of Vienna and a major backer of the EES. Its a whole industry.

The modern synthesis was such a seismic event that even its flatly wrong ideas took up to half a century to correct. The mutationists were so thoroughly buried that even after decades of proof that mutation was, in fact, a key part of evolution, their ideas were still regarded with suspicion. As recently as 1990, one of the most influential university evolution textbooks could claim that the role of new mutations is not of immediate significance something that very few scientists then, or now, actually believe. Wars of ideas are not won with ideas alone.

To release biology from the legacy of the modern synthesis, explains Massimo Pigliucci, a former professor of evolution at Stony Brook University in New York, you need a range of tactics to spark a reckoning: Persuasion, students taking up these ideas, funding, professorial positions. You need hearts as well as minds. During a Q&A with Pigliucci at a conference in 2017, one audience member commented that the disagreement between EES proponents and more conservative biologists sometimes looked more like a culture war than a scientific disagreement. According to one attender, Pigliucci basically said: Sure, its a culture war, and were going to win it, and half the room burst out cheering.

To some scientists, though, the battle between traditionalists and extended synthesists is futile. Not only is it impossible to make sense of modern biology, they say, it is unnecessary. Over the past decade the influential biochemist Ford Doolittle has published essays rubbishing 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.

What Doolittle and like-minded scientists want is more radical: the death of grand theories entirely. They see such unifying projects as a mid-century even modernist conceit, that have no place in the postmodern era of science. The idea that there could be a coherent theory of evolution is an artefact of how biology developed in the 20th century, probably useful at the time, says Doolittle. But not now. Doing right by Darwin isnt about venerating all his ideas, he says, but building on his insight that we can explain how present life forms came from past ones in radical new ways.

Doolittle and his allies, such as the computational biologist Arlin Stoltzfus, are descendants of the scientists who challenged the modern synthesis from the late 60s onwards by emphasising the importance of randomness and mutation. The current superstar of this view, known as neutral evolution, is Michael Lynch, a geneticist at the University of Arizona. Lynch is soft-spoken in conversation, but unusually pugnacious in what scientists call the literature. His books rail against scientists who accept the status quo and fail to appreciate the rigorous mathematics that undergirds his work. For the vast majority of biologists, evolution is nothing more than natural selection, he wrote in 2007. This blind acceptance [] has led to a lot of sloppy thinking, and is probably the primary reason why evolution is viewed as a soft science by much of society. (Lynch is also not a fan of the EES. If it were up to him, biology would be even more reductive than the modern synthesists imagined.)

What Lynch has shown, over the past two decades, is that many of the complex ways DNA is organised in our cells probably happened at random. Natural selection has shaped the living world, he argues, but so too has a sort of formless cosmic drifting that can, from time to time, assemble order from chaos. When I spoke to Lynch, he said he would continue to extend his work to as many fields of biology as possible looking at cells, organs, even whole organisms to prove that these random processes were universal.

As with so many of the arguments that divide evolutionary biologists today, this comes down to a matter of emphasis. More conservative biologists do not deny that random processes occur, but believe theyre much less important than Doolittle or Lynch think.

The computational biologist Eugene Koonin thinks people should get used to theories not fitting together. Unification is a mirage. In my view there is no can be no single theory of evolution, he told me. There cannot be a single theory of everything. Even physicists do not have a theory of everything.

This is true. Physicists agree that the theory of quantum mechanics applies to very tiny particles, and Einsteins theory of general relativity applies to larger ones. Yet the two theories appear incompatible. Late in life, Einstein hoped to find a way to unify them. He died unsuccessful. In the next few decades, other physicists took up the same task, but progress stalled, and many came to believe it might be impossible. If you ask a physicist today about whether we need a unifying theory, they would probably look at you with puzzlement. Whats the point, they might ask. The field works, the work continues.

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Do we need a new theory of evolution? - The Guardian

American exceptionalism can be a dreary thing, and no more so than each time a U.S. president promotes the countrys imperial credentials and continued prowess. But in matters of literacy, shared wealth, and health care, the U.S. has been outpaced by other states less inclined towards remorseless social Darwinism.

The overruling of Roe v. Wade by the U.S. Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Womens Health Organization has created a sense that those outside the U.S. will somehow draw inspiration from the example of the sacred fetus and the diminished autonomy of its carrier.

MSI Reproductive Choices, a group furnishing contraception, and safe abortion services in 37 countries, was palpably concerned. As a global abortion provider, we know that the impact of this decision will be also felt around the world, warned Sarah Shaw, Global Head of Advocacy at MSI Reproductive Choices. From the Global Gag Rule to U.S. funded anti-choice groups who harass women outside our clinics and lobby governments to restrict access, decisions made in the U.S. have an impact beyond its borders.

Banchiamlack Dessalegn, the organisations Africa Director, is also worried about the repercussions of U.S. judicial reasoning. Todays decision has the potential to harm women, not just in America but around the world, and undermine the efforts of countries across Africa to recognise a womans right to choose.

Beyond any discernible court legacy beyond national borders, the U.S. role in stifling abortion arguments globally is far from negligible. Republican administrations since Ronald Reagan have made a habit of enforcing the global gag rule, also known as the Mexico City policy, limiting U.S. aid regarding family planning services. Since 1973, Congress has tended to attach the ban to foreign aid spending bills where U.S. funding will go to foreign groups that perform abortions or motivate individuals to seek them.

In terms of situating the shift Dobbs entails, the U.S. finds itself keeping company with a small rear guard in the abortion wars. Since the 1990s, over 60 countries have taken the move of permitting or decriminalising abortion. A clutch of countries have bucked the trend, among them Poland, Malta, El Salvador, and Nicaragua.

In Europe, the U.S. example is likely to stir an anti-abortion frontline that has long been battered. Agenda Europe, a network of anti-abortion, pro-Christian, and far-right organisations comprising activists, commentators, and politicians, is one of its most active collectives. Since the early 2010s, its participants have sought to generate critical support for the standard slew of causes: pro-life, pro-family, and anti-LGBT rights. Their continued work has been significant enough to catch the interest of the European Parliamentary Forum on Population and Development (EPFPD).

On its own website, Agenda Europe seeks to correct egregious falsehoods about alleged extremism and militancy, objecting to the label of religious extremists attributed to them by the EPFPD. Members of Agenda Europe promote the dignity of every human person, the importance of the family, and religious freedom, as enshrined in all major human rights treaties. As Europeans, our members share the Christian Philosophical and Intellectual foundations of our continent.

The abortion battleground reached Europes centre stage in June 2021, when the European Parliament passed a nonbinding resolution urging EU countries to see any interference with access to contraception, fertility treatment maternity care, and abortion as human rights breaches. While 378 MEPs voted in favour, 255 voted against, with the centre-right European Peoples Party and the European Conservative and Reformists arguing, much along the lines used in Dobbs, that such policy should be left to individual EU states. But even in the final text, its original drafter, Croatian Socialist MEP Pedrag Fred Mati, took issue with the presence of a conscience clause that would permit doctors to withhold abortions on grounds of religion or conscience.

It was with a Christian Philosophical spirit that Poland imposed a near-complete ban on abortions which took effect in 2021. The state has also, in a rather creepy fashion, created a pregnancy registry which has been seen as a surveillance tool that can be used to track women should they order abortion pills or seek an abortion overseas.

For all this pessimism, the already hefty movement in favour of abortion rights is just as likely to assert itself in the wake of developments in the U.S. Milly Nanyombi Kaggwa, senior clinical advisor for Africa at Population Services International, points out with necessary perspective that abortion is only strictly prohibited in 5% of countries.

Groups such as MSI Reproductive Choices have also drawn a line in the sand of resistance. To anyone who wants to deny someones right to make decisions about what is right for their body and their future, our message is We are not going back. Dobbs, in short, may prove on the international stage to be more damp squib than firecracker.

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Overruling Roe v. Wade: The International Dimension - International Policy Digest

Image: Thomas Love Peacock, National Portrait Gallery, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Those of us who had once assumed that religious controversies in the Western world had been more or less consigned to the past have found many seemingly superannuated controversies alive and well in evolutionary studies. Darwins long shadow has certainly created a populous arena for crypto-theological arguments. Furthermore, these disputes are apt to assume a hard-edged binary form, often being not so much dispassionate debates about evidence as head-to-heads between supporters of theism and the opposing philosophy of (atheistic) materialism. Hence from time to time one hears the claim made that any and every objection to Darwinism must be fueled by some or other form of religious sentiment, either overtly or covertly.1This contention, however, is not supported by the evidence since scientific objections to Darwinism typically focus four-square on the lack of evidential foundation and explanatory force of evolutionary theory.

Hence already by the 1890stheeminent botanist F. W. Bateson, shortly thereafter to be instrumental in pioneering the new science of Mendelian genetics in Cambridge at the beginning of the 20th century, came out firmly against the Darwinian paradigm. Bateson pointed out that the vagueness of Darwins description of natural selection as occurring by insensible and imperceptible stages gave us no clue as to what the precise operative mechanism might consist in, or indeed if such a claimed mechanism truly existed at all. More than a century after Bateson that mechanism is no clearer, would-be explanations in biology now as before tending to be couched in Delphic terms of organisms having evolved from simpler systems without supplying any detailed descriptors of the operational modalities claimed to have occasioned such changes.2

Hence it is hardly surprising that in his recent attempt to pin down theprecisephenomenological status of natural selection, David Brown concluded that the term is more of a fuzzy imaginative construct than a phenomenon we might locate in the natural world itself.3The term lacks an adequately defined referent because such a referent has never been empirically locatable or observable in nature making the term something of a phantom without any empirically testable evidence for its existence. It certainly cannot be claimed to be amechanismor what the Victorians termed avera causa. Natural selection (rectepreservation)4is at bottom simply a statistical observation and analysis of accumulated biologicalfaits accomplis. It possesses no motive force or innovative/creative power. The term represents an imaginative attempt to provide an explanation of how naturecouldfunction but reveals no empirically defensible insight into how it actually does function.

The most trenchant opposition to Darwinian notions has come not so much from theists as from biologists, the literary and linguistic intelligentsia,5and from those professional logicians we term philosophers. This fact was made known to Darwinian advocate Richard Dawkins in no uncertain terms after the publication in 1976 of hisThe Selfish Genebrought forth the kind of philosophic vitriol which might have daunted a lesser man.6This must surely have alerted its author to the fact that that his principal opponents were academics and other professionals rather than those he had caricatured as unthinking backwoodsmen.

Reason, rather than that form of unreflecting faith known historically as fideism, has in point of fact played the major part in peoples thinking ever since written records began. Turning to the beginnings of ideas of creation and evolution, we find that mankinds earliest speculations about the world sprang from rational inference, not revealed faith.7The matter was one of dispassionate philosophical debate long before it became the ideological football it has become for many today. Indeed, both pagan and later Christian thinkers found themselves singing from a very similar hymn sheet. Major pre-Christian and medieval philosophers alike were unanimous that the universe must have had a first cause.

Aristotles ancient inference about the necessity for an unmoved mover was elaborated by Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century, and this had the effect of integrating first-cause inference into formal Christian theology. What is particularly significant is the fact that Aquinas registered a universal consensus on the grounds of logic alone that there must be a source and sustainer of all things. His point was that it wasnot necessary to be an adherent of the Judeo-Christian traditionto assent to the acceptance of a first cause.8

This eons-old majoritarian understanding was not surprisingly to become a bedrock of Western thought. In the philosophical writings of Lord Herbert of Cherbury in the 17th century, for instance, the logical necessity for an initiator of all things was a truth of first inscription,9that is, something self-evidently true because peoples everyday observations of effects requiring causes provided clear evidence for the operation of a universal law. Hence the thinking of pagan and Christian philosophers alike, building on peoples observations of the unchanging laws of causality, came together in a unanimous conjunction on this issue with the single exception of that small group of ancient philosophic outliers termed atomists who proposed that the world had come about by the chance collisions of atoms.

The idea that the superabundance of intricate creations we observe in the world around us could have come about by chance was disdained as an absurdity in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and even in the Enlightenment era save for David Humes flying a somewhat ambiguous kite for it towards the end of the 18th century.10It was only after the publication of theOrigin of Speciesin 1859 that the ideas of the ancient atomists were able to hitch a ride from Darwinism, since the idea of chance mutations followed by natural selection could be construed as being conformable with the wholly aleatory vision of atomism which speculated that the world arose from nothing more than a grand crucible of chance.11

As perverse as it might appear, the merging of these two lines of boundless speculation seems to have become mutually reinforcing, providing a rare historical example of two wrongs coming together to (purportedly) make a right. For after 1859 what had been widely regarded as the lunatic fringe of philosophy in the ancient world was brought in from the cold under the scientific shelter provided by Darwinism, whereupon the weightier philosophers of Antiquity became cold-shouldered. By dint of the rehabilitation of the atomists prompted by the Darwinian example, the ancient philosophical school that defied all accepted canons of logic and probability has today achieved the historically unprecedented status of orthodoxy and the once hallowed Aristotelian tradition been sidelined. This has taken place under the protective aegis of a burgeoning Darwinist creed no longer confined to explaining a restricted range of biological phenomena. For Darwinism has recently acquired more imperial ambitions and often now sails under the grandiose flag of universal Darwinism meaning a total method of explanation able to illuminate all the universes mysteries, cosmological as well as biological.

How should one react to this astounding revolution in many educated persons existential understanding of their world and themselves which has taken place in the last 160 years plus? The absolute philosophical reversal might in a wider historical context seem more than a little surreal. It is rather as if Biblical scholars, turning their backs on the carefully considered canon-formation of the New Testament established through innumerable peer reviews by early Christian councils in the Patristic era, should suddenly take it upon themselves to advance some of the more bonkers apocrypha to canonical status in preference to the four previously accredited Gospels.12

Some may find it difficult to resist the feeling that after 1859 the inmates must have somehow contrived to take over the asylum, abdicating eons-old reason in favor of empirically unattested guesswork. For theevidenceprompts us to develop a rather different explanatory narrative. The last half century or so of microbiological research has shown us that natures generative programs aredesignedin such subtly encoded biological imperatives as to remain almost entirely resistant to human fathoming. It is in fact instructive that the language of biology both before and after Darwin abounds in (involuntary) purpose-talk. This in itself gives the lie to the random processes postulated by atomism and Darwinism alike.13Such purpose-talk must represent, whatever its users may prefer to think, an involuntaryhomageto the logic of Aristotelian teleology.

Darwinisms unavailing attempts to gloss over huge and unfathomable complexities to the extent of denying that the mysteries of life were mysteries any longer serve only to show up more clearly the intractable nature of the problems they fail to solve. It is a pity that Darwins homeland no longer boasts a satirist of the caliber of Thomas Love Peacock to exploit this rich seam of comic absurdity. For Darwinism surely represents a far graver fallacy than those comically deranged but harmless crotchets (fashionable theories) cherished by the early 19th-century beau monde and so amusingly lampooned by Peacock, the independent-minded autodidact who spurned the opportunity to attend either Oxford or Cambridge University and who was unremittingly scathing about intellectual overreach and the overblown claims this frame of mind can give rise to.14It is in fact all too easy to nod in quiet assent with Peacock in his choice of the short stanza he chose as a preface to his first satirical novel of ideas,Headlong Hall(1816):

All philosophers, who find

Some favourite system to their mind

In every point to make it fit,

Will force all nature to submit.15

Almost two centuries later that quatrain has lost nothing of its force and relevance. In the attempt to explain the inexplicable, the scientific philosophers of our own day are frequently guilty of forcing nature to submit to explanations which appear Procrustean to a truly fantastical degree. I refer to such cosmological theories as the world having arisen unguided by anything but natural law (sanslaw-giver) or the notorious multiverse hypothesis. Similarly, natural selection as an autonomous force is quite simply not supported empirically, despite the fact that Darwinians have employed the concept as a virtually self-evident proposition something we are constantly leaned on to believe justmust be true. Against the unreflecting acceptance of this proposition, Phillip Johnson once concluded with considerable justice that chance assembly is just a naturalistic way of saying miracle a fiction pressed into service by scientists unwilling to face the possibility that beyond the natural world is a reality which transcends science.16

This whole disputational imbroglio would certainly provide fertile ground for a Peacockian satire or absurdist drama since any abdication of reason cannot but be disquieting and hence eminently worthy of problematizing in one or another literary genre. Perhaps that much abused and virtue-signaling term reason might best be served by heeding the sager scientists warnings against making claims which are simply unamenable to reason. If this means taking a modest step back to the status quo ante before 1859 and an acknowledgement that the world is a place of inscrutable mystery, so be it. Perhaps the beginning of wisdom would be to summon up the humility to acknowledge as a matter of simple logic that the biosphere could not have just evolved (aka developed by a form of entirelyunspecifiableautomatism). It must have been informed by some form of special dispensation. We cannot, alas, know what that dispensation might have been, and so it must remain a mystery to be placed alongside those other existential imponderables which we puzzle over as children but with maturity come to realize are unanswerable.

The stubborn reality remains that Darwinism provides no convincing answers to the problems it claims to solve because the existential questions it attempts to confront lie beyond the proper domain of empirical science and its strictly delimited methodological parameters. Ultimate questions will always be beyond the scope of empirical science as it is conventionally defined and I do not think it does any harm to admit this. It might in fact have been truer to Darwins lifelong anguish about the viability of his theory if he had applied the expression he used about the origin of life to its sequel and simply stated that thewholequestion of human creation/evolution was a work in progress and, as to definitive conclusions, these must remain in Darwins words ultra vires[beyond our powers] in the present state of our knowledge.

It has become something of a clich that the would-be omniscient tones of todays more militant materialists have made them particularly splendid recruiting-sergeants for religion. The fact that Darwins later adherents can bid us all pass on, job done, nothing to be seen here (when there is clearlyso muchstill to be discovered) only heightens my apprehension of what the early 20th-century German theologian Rudolf Otto termed the numinous dimension of reality. This referred to a reality which can be dimly sensed but not understood in precise terms a notion already well known to Middle English mystic writers such as the anonymous author ofThe Cloud of Unknowingor to the German Meister Eckhart who described his apprehensions of the divine as being wortelos (= ineffable, incommunicable in conceptual terms). There is surely a rich irony in the fact that Darwinism, when subjected to rationalist critique, reveals itself to be so completely unconvincing as to propel me, a heretofore lifelong secularist, in the direction of theistically oriented speculations on lifes ultimate realities.

More:

On Darwinism and the Abdication of Reason - Discovery Institute

Photo: "Professor Dave," via YouTube (screen shot, fair use).

Is Darwinism an obsolete term? Thats whatatheistYouTuber Dave Farina says in a recent videoattacking intelligent design.As I wrote previously, Farinas attacks on intelligent design do little more than recycle misinformation and stereotypes. This claim about Darwinism is a case in point. Farina alleges that the term Darwinism is no longer used by modern scientists, but only by creationists.

This is a common trope among anti-ID activists who do not work in the field of evolutionary biology. I had to debunk the same claim in my debate with Joshua Swamidass (Unbelievable?2021). Like Swamidass, Farina does not present any scientific evidence for this unsubstantiated assertion. Of course he does not, because he cannot, because it is factually incorrect.

As this nonsense is so often found in Internet forums discussing intelligent design, I here provide the peer-reviewed scientific evidence to put the point to rest once and for all.

MichaelRuse (1982)edited an anti-ID book titled Darwinism defended andRuse (2015)authored the entry Darwinism for an international encyclopedia, where he defined Darwinism [a]s the theory of evolution through natural selection. ErnstMayr (1984), co-founder of the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis, asked What Is Darwinism Today? Evolutionary biologist Stephen JayGould (1984)in his Tanner Lectures presented Challenges to Neo-Darwinism. Richard Dawkins, the famous atheist and popularizer of Darwins theory, did not at all think that Darwinism is obsolete but instead elevated it to the status of a general theory of everything that he named Universal Darwinism (Dawkins 1985). Some 18 years later Dawkins gave a whole lecture on Neo-Darwinism (Dawkins 2013). FranciscoAyala et al. (2002)debated Neodarwinism and infectious diseases transmission.Arber (2008)used computer modelling to explore the Molecular mechanisms driving Darwinian evolution.Deslile (2009)suggested a pluralistic proper foundation for neo-Darwinism. Evolutionist philosopher of biology DavidHull (2011)presented himself as Defining Darwinism in aspecial issueof a journal entirely devoted to this very question.Brooks (2011)asked in the same issue, How Darwinian is neo-Darwinism? andDepew (2011)pondered the future of Darwinism.Kampourakis & Gripiotis (2015)wrote inPerspectives in Scienceabout Darwinism in Context. DenisNobel (2015)wrote about Evolution beyond neo-Darwinism. Philosopher of science Jamie MiltonFreestone (2021)looked at Contemporary Darwinism as a worldview.Hancock et al. (2021)published a study in the prestigious journalEvolutionand concluded in the abstract, The Modern Synthesis (or Neo-Darwinism), , remains the foundation of evolutionary theory. Neo-Darwinism is alive and well. Even more recently,Brown & Hullender (2022)found that Neo-Darwinism must mutate to survive.

These are just a few examples of academic publications about (Neo-)Darwinism with that term in the title, which is not to mention the many studies that use the term in the text as a matter of course. An example from my own field of expertise is paleontologist DavidSepkoski (2012), who famously identified the five big mass extinction events, and who uses the term Darwinism all over the place in his bookRereading the Fossil Record.

Most of the above-mentioned scientists are renowned mainstream evolutionists, and none of them considers the term Darwinism as obsolete or no longer used in contemporary science. That totally debunks Farinas claim that only creationists use the term Darwinism but not real scientists. Even the uber-skeptical Wikipedia, which is dominated by a virtual Mafia of anti-ID activists who successfully conspired to erase my Wikipedia page (Benjakob 2017,Klinghoffer 2017), does not consider Neo-Darwinism to be an obsolete term. The prestigiousEncyclopedia Britannicaconcurs.

Farina apparently did not bother to do a minimum of fact-checking. This is embarrassing and appalling for somebody who claims to be a science educator.

However, there is still more misinformation being peddled by Farina. Next up I will tackle his critique of Casey Luskin and the fossil record relating to human evolution.

Link:

Fact-Checking Professor Dave on Darwinism | Evolution News

Republican leaders view social Darwinism as the leading method for developing a prosperous America. No government handouts, no government intervention. Leave the unfortunate majority to fend for themselves and let nature take its course. So long as the market represents their values.

Intervention now seems to be the winning strategy as conservative leaders strongarm corporations deviating from the path. Companies showing a semblance of support or sympathy for LGBTQ or pro-choice movements now find themselves in the crosshairs.

Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick calls for conservatives to boycott the American staple, Walt Disney, after the company voiced opposition to Floridas Dont Say Gay law, which bans any reference to homosexuality in classrooms up to the fourth grade.

Cut off the Disney Channel. Cancel your park trip or your cruise if one is planned. If you own Disney stock, sell it. Although I did not own many shares of individual Disney stock, I sold them today, Patrick said.

Texas state comptroller Glenn Hegar warns Texas may need to divest all Ben & Jerrys shares due to the companys unwillingness to do business in Israels occupied West Bank

Fort Worth-based American Airlines offered a brief statement in 2021, opposing the election integrity bill that made it harder to vote. Patrick slammed the company, saying Texans are fed up with corporations that dont share our values trying to dictate public policy. He continued, saying that if Mister American Airlines still wants preferential treatment from the Legislature, it cannot turn around and slap [lawmakers] in the face.

More importantly, legislators are taking legal action to influence the behavior of businesses.

Last year, Patrick backed a bill requiring state investment and pension funds to divest from any company transitioning financial support from fossil fuels to renewable energy.

State Representative Briscoe Cain said he would bar Citigroup from underwriting municipal bonds in the state unless it reversed a policy assisting Texas employees to get abortions.

The free market doesnt seem that free.

See the article here:

Texas Conservatives: Defenders Of Capitalism And The Free Market? Not So Much - Reform Austin

There are days when it's hard not to wonder just how much time is left on the clock for humanity.

Whether it's war, famine, another grim report about climate change or a pandemic that's killed 6 million people to date, life on this planet can start to feel precarious. Sometimes, it all feels like an action movie entering its final act.

But is it actually possible that nearly 8 billion humans could one day disappear? That the planet could continue to spin in peace without us?

"The end of the world is such a great concept for giving shape to history," says Anders Sandberg, senior research fellow with the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford. "We want to know how it ends. We want there to be a meaning or a tragedy or a comedy. Maybe a laugh track at the end of the universe."

It turns out, scientists, scholars, policy experts and more are studying this question, trying to decipher how humanity's end could come about, and whether there's anything that can be done to prevent it.

The fact that anyone at all is worried that humans could go extinct is relatively new, says Thomas Moynihan, author of the book X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinction.

There were fringe whispers in the 1700s. In the 1800s the Romantic poets picked up the idea. Mary Shelley's The Last Man was about a plague that just about killed off humanity. Few at the time were keen to read such an uplifting tale. The rise of Darwinism gave people some understanding that humans were part of a long-running chain of organisms. In 1924, Winston Churchill wrote the essay Shall We All Commit Suicide? about war's potential to destroy humans. But according to Moynihan, perhaps it wasn't until the detonation of the atomic bomb during World War II that people fully realized they might wipe themselves out.

Humans also eventually came to the realization that we might be the only ones out there exactly like us. Whatever we have, however flawed it is, could one day be lost entirely, not just from the planet, but from the universe.

"Once a species is gone, it's gone forever. Extinction is forever," Moynihan says, "We now understand the consequences of that."

There's more we can learn about where we're going as a species by looking into the past (even beyond all the pre-modern humans that are no longer with us), specifically, at the fossil record. In a 2020 article about human extinction in The Conversation, paleontologist Nick Longrich pointed out that 99.9% of all species that have ever lived on Earth are now extinct.

"Once a species is gone, it's gone forever. Extinction is forever."

Thomas Moynihan, author of X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinction

So, maybe our odds aren't great. Further, humans also have some key vulnerabilities that could make it hard to survive some large-scale catastrophe -- we're these large, warm blooded animals that need a lot of food; our generations are relatively long, and we're not the most prolific of breeders, Longrich writes.

Being human also has some advantages, though.

"We're a deeply strange species -- widespread, abundant, supremely adaptable -- which all suggest we'll stick around for a while," Longrich writes, noting that humans are just about everywhere. We can adapt our diets in ways other species can't, and we can learn, and change our behaviors.

Those who work in the field of existential risk are nudging people in the present day to do just that: learn from and change our behaviors.

The Future of Life Institute is a Boston-based outreach organization that focuses on how to avoid making big, species-ending mistakes with technology. FLI's advisory board is packed with plenty of names from institutions like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, and Cambridge University, plus Elon Musk, Morgan Freeman and Alan Alda, for good measure.

Over the phone, Senior Advisor for Government Affairs Jared Brown tells me about something called the Collingridge Dilemma. When a new technology is developed, we see the benefits. Fire, for example, was great at keeping us warm and keeping predators away. By the time a technology becomes ingrained in the way a society functions, we start to learn about the downsides -- like burning down villages. Or, you know, three square miles of Chicago in 1871. On the whole, though, we mostly take the good and the bad together. A lot of people die in car wrecks every year, but we still drive cars.

Some lessons you don't get to learn twice.

"That works up until the point where some of the dangers are potentially catastrophic or existential. And you don't get to learn a lesson twice," Brown says.

When FLI looks at its four main existential threats -- artificial intelligence, climate change, nuclear weapons and biotechnology -- tech sits at the core of all of those, even going back to the invention of the combustion engine.

That's why groups like FLI are trying to get the powers that be, like lawmakers, to build safeguards now before we need them.

It's not always easy to talk to people about a subject that's somehow big and scary but also abstract enough not to be an immediate concern. Could a rogue AI intended to maximize paper clip production one day decide that humans are slowing down the process and must be eliminated? Eh, maybe. But it's not going to happen next week.

"The natural instinct is, 'That's somebody else's problem'... [or] even, 'If I believe you, what the heck am I going to do about it?'" Brown says.

In an unsettling turn, the pandemic has brought a bit of recency bias into the equation, he says. Perhaps it feels less like alarmist hand-wringing to worry about an event that seemingly came out of nowhere and affected every person on the planet.

For FLI, the point isn't so much about watching a countdown to disaster.

He said they don't need to know the exact likelihood that something could happen in the next 30 years to know there's enough uncertainty about the risk that it should be dealt with.

Despite those four major risk areas, mercifully there's no guarantee that a disaster would take out every single person on the planet. It's a small comfort, but as Sandberg puts it, "You can totally imagine someone holed up in a Walmart with a can opener."

As long as whatever disaster, or confluence of disasters, that befalls us leaves behind at least a few survivors, there could be hope. How many humans it would take for humanity to pull through remains up for debate. Depending who you ask, it could be from a thousand on up. Those people would still have to survive whatever other challenges cropped up along the way.

Stainless steel preservation chambers inside Alcor's facility.

"We still don't really understand the resiliencies of our societies," Sandberg says.

As impossibly grim as humans' prospects may look, even some of those people who ponder existential risk every day don't think humans are entirely down and out. At least not yet.

One key difference between humans and every other living thing on the planet is that humans have the ability to change their opinions of the world and to course-correct, Moynihan says. But just because we can change our ways, doesn't mean we always do.

"I think the future could be better in ways that we can't even comprehend," he says, "But that doesn't mean that it will be. What's worth fighting for is that ability for us to revise ourselves, correct the errors of the past, and continue muddling through."

Sandberg, meanwhile, wears a stainless steel medal on a chain around his neck everywhere he goes. He thinks of it as a secular St. Christopher medal -- the patron saint of travelers. Instead of featuring the third-century saint, this medal has instructions on what to do with Sandberg's body if he dies.

Pump it full of heparin; freeze quickly.

Sandberg's head is set to be frozen by the Alcor Life Extension Foundation and, ideally, revived in some far-off era.

The decision to join Alcor was made, in part, out of curiosity about what the future will be like -- pending many, many questions, both practical and existential as to whether this experiment works -- and to some extent, a dash of faith in the future.

"I am an optimist," Sandberg says, "the future could be awesome. I think the world is actually really good. And it could be even better, much better, which means that we have a reason to try to safeguard the future."

Read the original:

Humans Could Go Extinct. Here's How and Who's Trying to Stop It - CNET

Image: Francis Galton, National Portrait Gallery, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

After the horrific Buffalo, NY, shooting of last weekend, replacement theory is suddenly on everyones lips. Unlike agitators in the media and politics,John West actually took the time to read the shooters manifestoto see what drove him. West found that the latters racism derived from online study of mainstream evolutionary theory. What the cynical manipulators dont tell you is that the Buffalo shooters evolutionary racism is not an outlier among recent mass killers. Arguments drawn from evolution have been prominent in the ideologies of many mass shooters in recent years. But recognizing this reality would do nothing to advance political agendas, so the partisans ignore it.

Now a new podcast by Hank Hanegraaff with historian Richard Weikart provides some very relevant historical background, drawing on Weikarts recent bookDarwinian Racism: How Darwinism Influenced Hitler, Nazism, and White Nationalism. The interview was conducted before the event in Buffalo unfolded, though Weikart and Hanegraaff discuss a similar crime, a 2019 shooting at theGilroy Garlic Festival, also fueled by the killers reading about evolution.

What I found particularly interesting is that Darwinism and eugenics, going back to the 19th century, were haunted by ideas of replacement. Darwin inThe Descent of Manpredicted, At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainlyexterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races (emphasis added). But replacement could work in the reverse direction: Francis Galton, Darwins cousin who first advanced the idea of eugenic theory, worried that people of what he regarded as inferior stock would swamp (Weikarts word) their betters by out-reproducing them. The question of who would replace or swamp whom has been a preoccupation of pseudo-scientific racists ever since.Listen to the excellent conversation here.

The rest is here:

Darwin, Galton, and Replacement Theory - Discovery Institute

Digital Darwinism and B-School Reset an event organised by UPES School of Business and Runway incubator will provide a platform to engage with industry leaders and deliberate on the radical shift in business landscape, the role of management education, the start-up ecosystem, and more

Byline: Ekta Kashyap

The number of start-ups spreading across the country is soaring. However, entrepreneurship is a tumultuous journey. And with already-established, well-known brands in the market, making a dent in the universe of start-ups becomes even more challenging.

But what if you got the formula of success straight from the experts themselves? How to navigate adverse conditions and come up with alternative revenue streams? How not to perish in a volatile, uncertain and changing world? How to flourish, irrespective of the odds, while building a better society and a sustainable business?

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Redefining how businesses work

Digital Darwinism and B-School Reset, an event organised by UPES School of Business and Runway incubator, will provide a platform to engage with industry leaders and deliberate on the radical shift in business landscape, the role of management education, the start-up ecosystem, and more. The event will take place on May 27 at India Habitat Centre, New Delhi. There will be a panel discussion on 'Decoding the New Normal' wherein industry experts will discuss the role of education in creating well-equipped professionals for tomorrow. The discussion will be followed by a Q&A.

It will be preceded by a start-up competition called Take Off wherein aspiring entrepreneurs will participate and pitch their business ideas. They will be mentored by industry veterans. Out of these chosen applicants, the winner will receive a cash prize of INR 2,50,000, while the runner-up will get a prize of INR 1,00,000. The last date for sending in entries is May 16, 2022. For details log on to https://www.runwayincubator.com/take-off

UPES, a multidisciplinary university, is focused on innovation, entrepreneurship, and digital preparedness of learners to meet the needs of the economy and the industry. Having embarked on a journey of being the University of Tomorrow, the university offers industry-aligned and specialised graduate and postgraduate programs through its eight schools: School of Engineering, School of Computer Science, School of Design, School of Law, School of Health Sciences and Technology, School of Modern Media, School of Liberal Studies, and School of Business.

UPES School of Business, with its focus on fostering digital transformation and an entrepreneurial mindset, has introduced new programs such as MBA in Start-Up and Entrepreneurship.

The MBA in Start-up & Entrepreneurship program inculcates new-age skills in the students, prepares them for the industry, and helps them start their venture through mentoring and networking opportunities with potential investors to raise funds.

School of Business is ranked among the top 50 institutions in Management by the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF). It prepares students to adapt to disruption and the rapidly-changing workplaces.

Disclaimer: Content Produced by UPES

The rest is here:

UPES takes the lead in rebooting business education and entrepreneurship - Times of India

MMA India has hosted the 11th edition of its marketing event, MMA Impact India 2022. As per a global study done by MMA, a 1% improvement in marketing capability fit is associated with a 2.5% increase in sales growth and 2.35% increase in market value. Based on this insight, MMA has developed a structured approach by creating a capability fit map for organisations to evolve into winning marketing organisations. Additionally, MMA unveiled three informative reports titled Brand Safety Reimagined: A Toolkit for the Modern Marketer, Modern Marketers Guide to Leveraging Data and Martech 2022, and Metrics that Matter, at the event.

The theme of impact this year of evolving into a winning marketing organisation is more inevitable today than ever before, Moneka Khurana, country head and board member, MMA India, said. We are in an era of digital darwinism where technology and consumers are evolving faster than businesses can naturally adapt. 52% of companies on the fortune 500 list have become obsolete in the past 20 years. Evolving is no longer an option, it is a necessity to succeed. At Impact this year, we have unveiled a framework that helps businesses evolve with the consumer, she added.

The Digital Marketer Brand Safety survey 2022 revealed that while knowledge of brand safety guidelines exists, the implementation is weak in India. The Modern Marketers Guide to Leveraging Data and Martech report highlights that most organisations have 25% to 75% data aggregated in a unified data mart. However, many organisations lack the clarity of how unified data can help in improving the connected customer experience.

For Amit Jain, MMA India board chair and managing director, LOral India, the interaction between consumers and brands has been evolving rapidly. Hence, the marketing function needs to be swift to cater to this evolution. Winning marketing organisations need to keep customer value and company value at the core of all their initiatives. To create a recall among consumers for your brand, storytelling is key. If you have a good story, there is no reason why a customer will not connect with your brand, he stated.

As per the company, the sessions focused on the tenets of engagement, experience and exchange, commonly referred to as the 3E formula to attract, and retain the consumer through marketing. This year, at Impact 2022, leaders and experts are having a constructive discourse on the aspects of the winning marketing organisation framework. It is a take on strategies to retool the marketing field, so that brands can innovate on their product plans, the company said in a release.

Read Also: Next Fifteen to acquire M&C Saatchi for $390 million

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Excerpt from:

The implementation of brand safety is weak in India: MMA Impact India 2022 - The Financial Express

Scholars today are cranking out multitudes of books exposing the racism in our society. Three prominent examples from 2021 published by academic presses are Anthea Butler,White Evangelical Racism, Randall Balmer,Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right, and J. Russell Hawkins,The Bible Told Them So: How Southern Evangelicals Fought to Preserve White Supremacy. One can hear a similar refrain on NPR: for example, in the July 2020 report, White Supremacist Ideas Have Historical Roots in U.S. Christianity or in many reports during 2021 warning about white supremacism inherent in Christian nationalism.

While it is salutary to examine and expose the religious roots of racism, one might get the mistaken impression from this discourse that todays white nationalists are direct heirs of the Ku Klux Klan, who did indeed (mis)use religion to promote their racist ideology.

What often seems neglected in this discussion is the history of scientific racism, which was in some ways more virulent than most religious forms of racism. This is not to say that historians have completely ignored scientific racism. Indeed, I have contributed to this scholarly discussion in some of my earlier works, as well as in my recently released book,Darwinian Racism: How Darwinism Influenced Hitler, Nazism, and White Nationalism.

However, it seems that the way scientific racism is presented differs substantially from the way religious racism is treated. Many scholarly works and NPR stories on religious racism assume that religion especially evangelical Christianity is still heavily tainted by racism. Indeed, an op-ed inScientific Americanin 2021, Denial of Evolution Is a Form of White Supremacy, overtly slammed creationists as white supremacists, completely ignoring the fact that Ken Ham, a leader among young-earth creationists, co-authored a book (with an African American), in which he vigorously opposes racism.

Most works on scientific racism admit that scientists erred in the past by promoting racist ideas, but then the historians celebrate the triumph of science, since later scientists overcame these misguided ideas. Of course, most scientists today just as most religious leaders today do reject racism. One of the outliers Nobel-Prize-winning biologist James Watson is often condemned by colleagues when he makes racist statements.

So, if the vast majority of scientists reject racism, one might conclude that scientific racism is no longer a problem. Maybe religious racism really is a more important target. However, this conclusion ignores the elephant in the room.

What elephant? Well, how about examining the white nationalist scene today to see what they actually believe? How do they justify their racist ideology? While researching my book,Darwinian Racism, I examined the websites and publications of many neo-Nazi, white nationalist, and alt-right individuals and organizations. What I discovered was that most white nationalists and white supremacists today embrace a social Darwinist version of scientific racism and vehemently oppose Christianity.

One of the most virulent pieces of social Darwinist racism I have ever read is the 1896 bookMight Is Rightby Ragnar Redbeard (a pseudonym), which is currently popular among white supremacists. Indeed, in 2019, shortly before a 19-year-old gunman at the Gilroy Garlic Festival killed three and wounded 17, he recommended on social media that people read Redbeards book.

Many white nationalist websites recommend this book, and some even sell it. The subtitle of Redbeards book isSurvival of the Fittest, and it is laced with Darwinian themes, such as the inescapable necessity of a struggle for existence between races. In addition to demeaning non-white races, Redbeards book also vociferously attacks Christianity.

Many white nationalists claim that Darwinism directly supports their ideology, because they think that races have evolved to different levels. They are convinced that races are pitted in a merciless struggle for existence. Their penchant for white supremacy is their bid to win the Darwinian struggle for existence.

Those doing battle against the religious roots of racism do often uncover vestiges of racism and this can be helpful. However, sometimes they seem to be letting the most flagrant proponents of racism off the hook. Could it be that they are uncomfortable recognizing that most white nationalists today are thoroughly secular and are inspired by Darwinism and science, rather than religion?

This article was originally published at Townhall.

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The Real Roots of Racism: Pseudo-Science - Discovery Institute