You Can't Have It Both Ways And None Of Us Is Obligated To Let You Have It Both Ways- A "Skeptic" Objects

THE IDEOLOGICAL GAME of "skepticism" as practiced by the so-called Committee for Skeptical Inquiry* and other such largely boys' clubs is supposedly done in the interest of upholding "science" as it is commonly claimed to exist by materialist-atheists who are true believes in scientism, rather ironically not only violates the foundations and methodologies of science, but makes science into one of those ideologically self-refuting entities due to their insistence of turning it into an ideological position instead of an open method of testing ideas, theories and claims.  

The scientism of the self-identified "skeptics" alone would do that because, as I'll never stop pointing out, scientism is a claim that cannot be tested with science and, so, cannot withstand logical analysis as a self-consistent idea.  Materialism and atheism fall into the same category of non-scientific ideas.   It's one of the richer ironies of the "enlightenment" that the biggest fattest champions of "science" are among its most basic non-practitioners of scientific method and thinking.  

The common lore of "skepticism," especially as that exists after the mid 1970s, itself imposes self-defeating ideas onto their conception of science.

One of the widest spread stands of would be "skepticism" that is easiest to refute has two aspects of self-defeat contained in it.  One of the biggest names in "skepticism" of that kind was and is the late but once very prominent "public scientist" the planetary scientist Carl Sagan who popularized the slogan that is often given as "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" before they are admitted into what is held to be true.  

But that claim is extremely anti-scientific.  What constitutes an "extraordinary" claim as opposed to an "ordinary" one?   How can such a claim be identified as such on any basis that controls against the prejudices and ideological rejection of the one making that designation?   I will state that I've never heard anyone recite that formula except as an expression of their ideological preference, that's how Sagan used it.   

As that slogan is used "extraordinary" means anything that is inconvenient or inconsistent with the ideology of the one using it and noting more.  Science regularly publishes papers and books that make some pretty unusual and, at times, contra-experiential claims.  Not only in such "sciences" as psychology (the history of psychology since at least Freud is full to the top of such claims) but modern physics and cosmology make all kinds of such claims, often on the slightest of evidence or none at all but "science" accepts those claims without any or much objection.  That can be seen in the claims of such untestable speculations as multiverse cosmology, any number of attempts to get round the Big Bang as the absolute beginning of our universe for clearly ideological reasons, and in such things as the "science" that Carl Sagan more or less founded, "exobiology" or the biology of extraterrestrial organisms, organisms of which there is no evidence at all and which organisms science has not and likely never will have to examine (that is unless those come by UFO, which would make other claims by Sagan and the CSICOPs vulnerable).   What are we to make of a science which is funded and credentialed WHEN THERE IS NO POSSIBILITY OF HAVING ANY EVIDENCE OF ITS SUBJECT AT ALL, making some pretty extraordinary claims of its own in the process.  Yet I don't know of any time that Sagan was asked to test his own such untestable science by his slogan, never mind many of those within "skepticism" who practiced such science.  Considering one of the foremost activities of "skeptics" has been to get science they didn't like defunded and shut down, their liking of and practice of science that is based on no evidence at all is rather noteworthy.  And also psychology, which I'll get to in a while.

It also calls into question the legitimacy of the ordinary methods of scientific testing, if those aren't sufficient to confirm some ideas, their ability to confirm any other idea is as insufficient.  Such a standard, if taken seriously,  would obliterate the most basic legitimacy of scientific method whenever those are applied.   You can't have two (or in practice more) standards in such a thing or you have no standard.

As such,  the slogan also forces us to look at something even more basically wrong with the claims and methods of organized "skeptics" especially in regard to actual science they don't like, the controlled, rigorous testing of what falls under "psychic abilities".   Considering how many of those in organized "skepticism" are credentialed and hired within one of the most lax of all the so-called sciences, psychology, such major figures of the past as Ray Hyman, James Alcock, Barry Beyerstein, Richard Kammann, , a "science" which typically practices the sloppiest and loosest and, quite frankly, most scientifically fraudulent of methodologies.  As compared to psychology and much other science which is fully accepted as official science, the parapsychologists run one of the tightest scientific operations there ever has been.   That is in no small part due to their knowledge that the materialist-atheists will always be there to find any flaw in their experimental methods and analyses of their data.  Over and over and over again they have faced that opposition, redesigned their experiments to answer their critics and, over and over again, come up with the positive results that the materialist-atheists hate so much.  And the response of their critics is to either lie about what they've done to create fraud or incompetence that isn't there or to, as in the case of those like Ray Hyman, come up with some unstated and unspecified objection that there MUST be something wrong because they don't like the results of the experiments when they reluctantly have to acknowledge the positive results.   That has been going on since the start of such experiments into "ESP" and much other such tested  phenomena.  No other part of scientific experimentation has ever faced the forces of ideological opposition that such scientists have faced and persistently continue to get positive results, often doing what hardly any conventional psychology does, a. reporting negative results and b. replicating experiments, sometimes over and over again.  Yet the "skeptics" pretend they haven't done that.   

The question is how can the "skeptics" claim to uphold the methods of science, rigorous observation, measurement and analysis as a superior means of discerning AND DETERMINING what is true and what isn't while they so baldly reject some of the most rigorous procedures in doing that kind of science just because they don't like the findings?   How have they been getting away with that for literally more than a century?   Either those methods are capable of finding the truth or they aren't. You can't claim they have universal power to discover the truth about things that can be subjected to those methods if you reject what those methods find, over and over again.  

When the methods of science were first being developed by such people as Francis Bacon, one of the things that they explicitly sought to avoid was the insertion of preference and self-interest into the procedures of science.   While there are several items in his Novum Organum that would fit here, this one is particularly relevant to such ideological skepticism, seeing how it largely traffics in public relations, show biz and has so many magicians and conjurers in its membership.

XLIV. Lastly, there are idols which have crept into men’s minds from the various dogmas of peculiar systems of philosophy, and also from the perverted rules of demonstration, and these we denominate idols of the theatre: for we regard all the systems of philosophy hitherto received or imagined, as so many plays brought out and performed, creating fictitious and theatrical worlds. Nor do we speak only of the present systems, or of the philosophy and sects of the ancients, since numerous other plays of a similar nature can be still composed and made to agree with each other, the causes of the most opposite errors being generally the same. Nor, again, do we allude merely to general systems, but also to many elements and axioms of sciences which have become inveterate by tradition, implicit credence, and neglect. We must, however, discuss each species of idols more fully and distinctly in order to guard the human understanding against them.

Particularly notice the sentence I underlined and the part about wanting to "guard the human understanding against them."

What the "skeptics" do, what some of the major figures in the public face of science do is exactly that, THEY INSERT THEIR IDEOLOGICAL PREFERENCES AND SELF-INTEREST DIRECTLY INTO THE CULTURE AND EVEN LITERATURE OF SCIENCE.   Some, such as the noted scientific fraudster, Marc Hauser, do their "science" to support their ideology, in his case his atheism, or at least there seems to be a high degree of coincidence between their personal ideology and the direction their "science" takes, especially in those sciences in which the least rigorous of methodologies and analyses reign, alleged science dealing with "behavior."   His fraud, successful for many years within science, was in that loosest of scientific fields, the interpretation of animal behavior.  I, personally, don't think any of that is scientific as they can't even get one animal to testify as to their motivations and thinking about it.  But, then, there's no possibility to verify any self-reporting in most of such "science" when it's People who can articulate something about that.  But such fully credentialed and privileged "science" has no such control of that, not such as the rigorous testing of psychic ability 0ften does.   You can tell if someone guessed the right card or closely approximated a remotely viewed image or, in some of the most impressive telepathic-precognitive experiments I know of, the experiments into what Dean Radin has called "presentiment" if they had the physical reaction to the telepathically received stimulus.  I doubt there's anything in conventional psychology that has that level of rigorous scientific verification, the kind of psychology that so many a card-carrying "skeptic" teaches to gullible students as reliable science.  That is until the entire cathedral of that particular school of psychology rots and tumbles down to be covered by the next fashion in such "science."  That's happened at least twice during my lifetime (Freudianism and behaviorism) with many a minor movement within the "science" rising and falling, as well.  

You can't have it both ways, your likes and dislikes either can or can't decide the truth or falseness of ideas that have verification through the regular methods of science.  If you decide they can, then science isn't the producer of objective truth you're claiming it is. The "skeptics" demand the right to do exactly that.  

You can't decide that scientific methods, followed as closely as its possible to follow them, can discern even the seemingly implausible truth in something going in the direction of objective verification when you like the results but refuse to acknowledge when those methods verify what you don't like.  Consider especially what the cosmologists and current physicists have demanded we believe in on the merely theoretical without any evidence, not to mention such currently popular ideologies as evolutionary psychology and myriad other such credentialed sciences  

You can't claim a privilege for inserting your preferred ideological or merely personal preferences into science and demand that everyone acknowledge the validity of the results because none of us is morally or intellectually obligated to go along with something like that anymore than we are when it's done in any other area of life.  

And admit when you do that you are establishing science as just another ideological preference, such as is a frequent atheist criticism of religions because any of us is justified to point out that's what you're doing.   I think science has been going down that road at an accelerating rate, which is too bad because legitimate science, honestly done, is extremely important.  When you consider how important climate change science, environmental science, epidemiological, medical and other such sciences are, it's a crime against humanity to do that.  

All of those anti-scientific ruses are what the "skeptics" from their slickest organized operations down to the blog comment rabble of the James Randi "Educational" Foundation, do all of those and more while suckering or coercing those in the media and academia to go along with it.  Science, as if science were a thing apart from those credentialed and accepted as being "science," is more prone to that ideological bullying and gulling than the general public is because the profession of science maintains that practice and the taboo on a whole Index of Prohibited Ideas.  And it wastes a lot of time doing that and, through putting out some of the most annoyingly smug and conceited jerks as the public face of science, Sagan, Randi, Degrasse Tyson, Shermer, . . . probably does more to discredit science than it does to interest People in it.  Their audience tend to be the conceited and ignorant and philosophically incompetent with college credentials.  

So, no, I have looked at organized "skeptics" and their antics and I'm impressed that they are not especially honest or especially interested in science, they are interested in maintaining a rigid adherence to their preferences.  Their atheism, foremost, their afterthoughts of materialism and scientism.  Those preferences are and never can be a legitimate thing within science, though the scientists, themselves, insert those into science.  If science has problems, a lot of it starts right there.  Not that I'm expecting they're going to do much about it.  Not during my lifetime.  Too many conceited bigots, especially among the guys of science.  Though some gals do it too.   You almost have to to get along in science.

* The "CSI" is the rebranding of the self-discredited CSICOP,  The "Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal:   self-discredited itself in their one and only "scientific investigation."  That was into the "Mars effect" a statistical study by the French investigators and bio-statisticians Michel and Francois Gauquelin in which they found that a randomly selected and statistically significant sample of French and Belgian athletic champions had a strongly statistically significant chance of having been born when the planet Mars was in two certain positions in relation to the Earth and the sun.   CSICOP was led into catastrophe by two of its prominent members who should have understood they proposed an incompetently framed challenge to the Gauquelins, the Harvard employed bio-statistician Marvin Zelin and the UCLA astronomer George Abell, at the urging of the central figure of CSICOP and organized "skepticism" the statistically and scientifically incompetent University of New York at Buffalo philosophy prof Paul Kurtz.  

A fairly good but somewhat biased description of the origin of the affair was given by Ricard Kammann, a former member of the "skeptics" group:

Michel and Francoise Gauquelin found that European sports champions were born in Mars sectors 1 and 4 at a rate of 22% instead of the 17% expected by chance. However, the definition of "chance" requires making assumptions, for example, about the times of day that people are born which are not truly random. While one can try to take all such factors into account to calculate a chance baseline, Marvin Zelen proposed a shortcut in 1976 by looking at the Mars sectors of ordinary people to see how often they are born in sectors 1 and 4. As a method of finding the right baseline, the Zelen challenge is a definitive test.

The first error by the skeptics occurs in the funny way Zelen designed this challenge. Quite logically he said that the control group should be born at the same times and places as the champions. He suggested using 100 or 200 of the original champions to locate the matched control group. Practically nobody noticed in the fine print of Zelen's statistical design that he planned to see if the Mars effect in these 100 or 200 champions was above the baseline effect in their birth mates.

The catch-22 is the small sample size Zelen suggested. If there really is a Mars effect of 22% above 17%, a sample of 100 champions is far too small to detect the effect reliably. The Gauquelins not only spotted the error, but presented Zelen with a mathematical proof of it. As far as I know, Zelen has never admitted the point.

Taking up a corrected version of the Zelen challenge, the Gauquelins deleted a part of their champions group because it would be too difficult to get their control data, and used as many of the remaining champions as they could. Since the local French birth records offices would not always supply the data, the champions group dwindled to 303, but through them, a large control group of 16,756 non-athletes was located. When Zelen analyzed the data, the control group baseline came in almost perfectly, at 16.4%, and the 303 champions incidentally came in with a Mars effect of 21.8%, both as Michel Gauquelin had predicted.

Even the observed Mars effect in the 303 champions subsample was significant at the .02 level. This says that if there really is no Mars effect, and we ran the experiment 100 times, always using 303 champions, we should only observe a value as high as 21.8% in a mere 2 experiments. By a scientific rule of thumb, the investigator is allowed to claim a real effect whenever the "chance probability" of the observed result falls below 5 in 100 experiments. (This arbitrary .05 threshold will appear over and over again here as the "litmus test of truth.")

I will note that much of the best of formal, controlled psychic research has reached or surpassed that "litmus test of truth."  Yet it is held by those who stand by that standard as invalid.  They certainly have had a hand in its arbitrariness.  

The CSICOPs were warned they had made an incompetently constructed challenge by Dennis Rawlins one of CSICOP's co-founders.  Rawlins, in this issue at least, was the honest astronomer but is a pretty unlikable and militant materialist-atheist devotee of scientism in the typical "skeptics" 12-year-old boy style. His specialty was in rather brilliantly analyzing historical issues related to astronomy and supporting himself as a more or less free-lance writer.  Rawlins' account of the botched procedures of Zelen, Kurtz and Abell and their and CSICOP's extraordinarily sleazy cover-up and denial of their mistakes was published in FATE magazine in 1981,  CSICOP's cover-up and sleazy behavior were carried out by a contemporary who's who of materialist-atheist-scientism and makes lively reading, even if the necessary understanding of the statistical issues involved takes some time to understand.  A couple of other analyses of the problem were done by Richard Kammann (a member of CSICOP who resigned once he realized that Rawlin's accusations were valid and that nothing was going to be done within CSICOP to set the record straight) and  Patrick Curry published in the now defunct more scholarly and openly inquiring journal of skepticism, Zetetic Scholar.  All three can be found online.  

I will point out that after the "sTARBABY" debacle, none of the statistically-scientifically incompetent champions of materialist-atheist-scientism, such as the big names in it, Paul Kurtz, James Randi, Phil Klass, etc.  seems to have ever gone back and learned much about statistics and the issues involved.  Considering that a knowledge of such stuff would be necessary before understanding the validity or invalidity of the scientific research they disliked and attacked and got shut down, it's remarkable that the scientists among their colleagues don't seem to have done much to correct those deficenies in their "skepticism."  It's remarkable that those big fat self-proclaimed campions of free scientific inquiry, such as those in CSICOP, have probably shut down more science than the Vatican court that tried Galileo did.  

Sort Of Confirmation Of An Idea

MICHAEL SEAN WINTERS has written a two-part book review of a book by Jason Blakely, the second part of which was posted after I made the point about the fact that the Communism and Marxism which the powers of the United States Government, the mass media and the popular culture rose up to oppose so strongly BUT WHICH WE HAVE NEVER BEEN ANY KIND OF DANGER OF GAINING POWER HERE was more than matched by our indigenous form of fascism, white supremacy which is a constant and powerful danger, having been fixed into the Constitution from its inception, made universal by the Supreme Court in Dred Scott, Plessy v Ferguson and in many other decisions and which has almost always been the dominant force in many, at times most of states and, so the Congress and often the presidency.   That thing which the Rehnquist and now Roberts Court is trying their best to revive so as to put its coalition with Big Money into permanent control of the country.   

An interesting point made in that second part of it is worth considering.  I will point out that what is called "liberalism" in the book and the review is that 18th century European "liberalism" and not the older tradition which was based on liberal provision of material support for the poor and destitute.   In its political form it might almost be summed up in the phrase "liberal democracy, " which I've criticized as a dangerous opponent of equality and, so the egalitarian democracy I hold is the only form of government that might withstand the tendencies of all other forms of government to turn into some variety and intensity of gangsterism.

This last point is especially relevant when Blakely turns to socialism which is both a reaction to classical liberalism and a vehicle for progressive politics, the kind of hybridization of ideologies that Blakely's cultural analysis explains and highlights. And, his approach is essential when he considers fascism. Unlike liberalism with Locke's Second Treatise, conservatism with Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, and socialism with Marx and Engels' Capital, fascism has no urtext to guide and shape the movement, making it even more likely to almost spontaneously adopt items from other, even opposing, ideological programs if it helps in the moment:

    "Fascism often befuddles contemporary people as it appears disguised and diluted by more familiar ideological traditions than those typical of the classical, twentieth-century fascisms of Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy. But the Western democracies have for some time been busy incubating their own homegrown fascist varietals. If these are less obvious than the original fascisms, it is only because the cultural fusions in which they participate have become head-spinning in their eclecticism."

And he correctly notes what is, in the United States, a key ingredient in fascism's appeal: "Fascist politics provides what appears to its followers as a potent antidote to a modern crisis of spiritual homelessness and nihilism." Fascism may critique rationalism and traffic in romantic ideas of blood and soil, but it is a mistake to think that it is irrational. It corresponds to a need other ideologies have failed to address.

I might disagree with the idea that fascism "corresponds to a need" though what need Winter and Blakley mean when that is said.    I would say that fascism pretends to address that but it's no deeper than any form of dishonest PR.  

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Tina Fitzpatrick - Marginalia

 Marginalia 

With Gary Murphy, Norma Sheahan, Roger Gregg and by Irene Kelleher. Marginalia directed by Aidan Stanley.

then you have not lived — or have denied the reality of your life

"whatever faith you emerge with at the end of your life is going to be not simply affected by that life but intimately dependent upon it, for faith in God is, in the deepest sense, faith in life — which means, of course, that even the staunchest life of faith is a life of great change. It follows that if you believe at 50 what you believed at 15, then you have not lived — or have denied the reality of your life."
 
Christian Wiman

I'VE POINTED OUT before that there are lots and lots of atheists who proudly declare they'd had it all figured out by the time they were fourteen, or twelve, or nine.   Or eight.  They had it all figured out that religion was all bunk and, it's pretty clear they've never changed their minds since.  I could add that their arguments about religion generally show that their thinking remains at about that age level if you engage with them on the issue.  Unfortunately, they're not the only ones who are cases of frozen development, there are lots of people within religion who never thought seriously enough about religion to question their beliefs to come to a more mature view of things.  

That quote at the top of this post comes from an article by Jonathan Merritt about a famous biblical scholar who I'm not very familiar with, Richard B. Hays, who wrote a book in 1996 which contained a  argument against LGBTQ relationships that, apparently, was much cited by those who wanted to discriminate against us.  I don't travel much in white evangelical circles so I'd never had "chapter 16" from that book pulled on me in arguments, oddly, I don't think I've ever had a Catholic care to get into it with me and any arguments I had on it were on grounds of would-be science and secular stereotyping.  But a lot of People do get into it with "evangelicals."  The article gives some of the angry, frightened responses from white evangelicals to the news that the man who provided them with their arguments has changed his mind in a forthcoming book he wrote with his son, also an eminent biblical scholar.  Some of them are blaming the son with leading the father into apostasy.

I was interested in that because another very respected bible scholar, the very Luke Timothy Johnson who I've cited a lot recently, said that he had been guilty of the sin of homophobia until some of his out of the closet students and his own Lesbian daughter had shown him what he believed about LGBTQ+ People was wrong. The accusation made by one evangelical conservative that Hayes had been led into apostasy by his son makes me think that it's not surprising that it would be younger People who did because the older generation, including mine, grew up with LGBTQ+ People being invisible and silent.   By the time the elder Hayes reached adulthood, he might have lived his life in a milieu in which LGBTQ+ People didn't figure much, just as some can live a life in which they don't have much direct contact with members of other targeted minority groups.  Their concepts of us were based, not on direct and open knowledge, but on lurid stereotypes and imaginations.  Their knowledge of the lives of gay people might be like someone basing their knowledge of straight Peoples' sex lives on what was presented in pornography.  Younger People  are more likely to have grown up knowing out of the closet LGBTQ+ People and knowing their lives showed the full range of relationships, from faithful, equal marriages to those who acted as bad as any straight immoralist.  Ranging from moral, responsible adults to self-indulgent perpetual 12-year-old boys to sadistic assholes and down to the likes of Lindsey Graham or Peter Thiele.

Johnson comes out of a Catholic background so there are differences in his own view of Scripture is bound to differ from that of someone with an evangelical orientation.  One that holds Scripture as important, even authoritative and at times to be taken literally but holding it loosely and not so tightly as to squeeze the life out of it.  The differences in quality and type of authority, perhaps, too.  I take Scripture as something to be considered and studied and thought about in coming to a variety of contingent conclusions as to how to live and think about things that can't be discovered through history or science or secular literature.  And that exercise can't possibly be done without thinking about it apart from our own, lived experience.  The Scriptures are full of People doing that, especially the literature of the Bible that Jesus cited the most, the Psalms and the Prophets.   That's especially true of a Christian whose understanding of Jesus the Christ is that Jesus is the Living Christ.  

Luke Timothy Johnson has pointed out that Scripture is merely one way of knowing the living Jesus and said one of the ways we learn about the living Jesus is in our life experience and, especially, in our interactions with other People, those close to us in our families and acquaintances and also in those who live lives on the social, economic and political margins, those without power.  There are certainly Biblical, especially Gospel and New Testament texts that support that idea, especially that the "Kingdom of God" is open to those on the sexual margins.  Jesus told the religious establishment, the "white evangelicals" or "good Catholics" of his time that prostitutes as well as tax collectors would enter into the Kingdom of God before they would.  He didn't say "reformed prostitutes" or even "reformed tax collectors" though in the case of Zacchaeus the tax collector who climbed a tree to see him, he said he'd stop stealing and give back what he'd stolen.   I could point out that in another Gospel Jesus didn't give the Samaritan woman a lecture on her less than faithful sex life before he offered her the "living water" which is certainly the same as an invitation to the Kingdom.  Paul might have had qualms about those who practiced same-sex sex, though it's pretty clear he had no idea about People who had an exclusively same-sex orientation, he figured they were out of control hetero-sexual libertines.  As the theologian Cheryl Anderson and Audre Lorde would say, he was thinking of everyone as a member of his expected authoritative default.   I think it's quite possible that two thousand years of hostility to LGBTQ+ People is based on the naivety of Paul in regard to sex and a misunderstanding of his use of that in his more general arguments in Romans and elsewhere, out of those are a few other clobber passages in the Bible which, as I've pointed out before, are as fraught with issues as the parts of the Bible dealing with slavery and other issues.  Johnson, a deep scholar of the Pauline literature, says that whenever Paul was up against the dominant mores of Mediterranean patriarchal culture, his radical egalitarianism went out the window.  He then made distinctions that he otherwise and eloquently rejected as being relevant to the Church he was helping to establish.

The Bible is not read today as it was written in societies in the very ancient and classical Eastern Mediterranean regions.  We can't reproduce the mind-sets of that time or the times and conditions lived under, we can't un-live the cultural accretions that are part of the world and lives we have lived and continue to live.  We can try to understand it on something closer to the writers own terms and thinking than a naive and dishonest "literal reading" of it will produce.  We can understand when churches doctrines and dogmas are an inheritance from the past that was, as well, conditioned by their own lives and understanding to judge if those are valid interpretations and valid ways to decide how to live.  And we can certainly grow in our understanding of it as we learn from living our lives, that is if we choose to learn anything from experience and, really, how can you exclude that and not be spiritually as well as intellectually dead.  But ignoring Scripture, a rich repository of the inspired writing of many People like us and unlike us in so many ways would be to give up one of the richest spiritual and literary and, for want of a better word, psychological resources there is. So that's not a productive option, either.  

The Six Fascists On The Court Are Trying To Turn This Into A Republican Presidential Fascism

THAT IS THE PLAIN reading of the hearing on Trumpian immunity.    The Court has to be stripped of its usurped powers and cut down to size by first imposing a term limit that will remove the RAT in that putrid building, Roberts, Alito and Thomas, and then the others as they have sat on that bench for a term.   Along with the absolute and strict ban on them and their spouses profiting off of anything to do with anything they did on the court.   

The Supreme Court, the Corrupt Court is the most corrupt branch of the government and it has been since they were ruling in favor of their own slave-holding.  

baleful effects on our general culture - A Footnote

LATE LAST night I remembered reading this in Rupert Sheldrake's book Science Set Free,  it also supports my use of Denis Noble's talk in discussing politics.

The belief that genes are the basis of almost all inheritance is not just an intellectual theory but has had enormous economic and political consequences.  It has resulted in the investment of hundreds of billions of dollars in genome and biotechnology projects.  If genes are the keys to life, then people want to own them and exploit them.  But if genes are grossly overrated, genomics will never live up to the high hopes it once engendered.  A few companies make useful products, but many make promises that never come true.

The gene-centered view of life has dominated science since the 1960s with baleful effects on our general culture.  Jeffrey Skilling, the CEO of Enron, a corporation noted for its greed and predatory behavior, said that his favorite book was The Selfish Gene, and the selfish-gene theory was a major part of Enron's corporate culture until the company collapsed in 2001.  Skilling, who is serving a long jail sentence, interpreted neo-Darwinism to mean that selfishness was ultimately good even for its victims, because it weeded out losers and forced survivors to become strong.

Genes are not individualistic and selfish, despite the rhetoric suggesting they are.  As parts of larger wholes, they work cooperatively in the development and functioning of organisms.  If they have any moral message for humans, it is that life depends on working together and not on ruthless competition.  

A broader understanding of heredity that includes genes, gene modifications and morphic resonance opens up many new questions, and helps free the life sciences from the tunnel vision of molecular biology.  It makes a big difference scientifically.  For a start, the word "hereditary" is no longer synonymous with "genetic."  Genes are part of heredity, not all of it. . . 

Which gives only one of so many possible examples of how neo-Darwinism has had a malignant effect on the general culture of the modern period, businessmen making use of it goes back into the gilded age robber barons,  John D. Rockefeller brought his understanding of natural selection into the infamous YMCA lecture he gave.

The growth of a large business is merely a survival of the fittest. … The American Beauty rose can be produced in the splendor and fragrance which bring cheer to its beholder only by sacrificing the early buds which grow up around it. This is not an evil tendency in business. It is merely the working-out of a law of nature and a law of God.

Anticipating the repetition of the common received lie that "survival of the fittest" isn't the same thing as natural selection, Darwin, himself said they were identical in the fifth edition of On the Origin of Species, something which I never seem to have to stop pointing out.*    But even if Darwin had not said that is irrelevant because what matters is how such people as Charles Sumner,  Rockefeller or Skillings reads Darwin, or how Galton, for that matter reads and uses his ideas and how anyone uses the ideas of neo-Darwinism as popularized by those such as O. E. Wilson and Richard Dawkins.  

Earlier in the same chapter Sheldrake said after a brief mention of John Stuart Mill's ideas about modifying the society to change "human nature" for the better:

On the other hand, Francis Galton, Charles Darwin's cousin, made a strong scientific case for the predominance of heredity which is often taken to support a more conservative philosophy.  In his book Hereditary Genius (1869), he argued that the prominence of Britian's most distinguished families depended more on nature than on nurture.  Galton was a pioneering advocate of eugenics, a word he coined.  He also realized that the question of nature and nurture could be studied with the help of identical twins.  He argued that identical twins had a similar hereditary constitution, while non-identical twins were no more similar than ordinary brothers and sisters.  And, sure enough, he found remarkable similarities between identical twins in a wide range of characteristics including the onset of disease and even time of death.

Some political philosophers used Galton's ideas on heredity to justify the British class system, and Galton himself proposed that the state should regulate the fertility of the population in such a way to favor the improvement of human nature through selective breeding.  The eugenics movement had a large following in the United States  and reached its apogee in Nazi Germany.  Not surprisingly, Nazi scientists were very interested in twins who were kept in special barracks.  Mengele told one of his colleagues, "It would be a sin, a crime . . . not to utilize the possibilities that Auschwitz had for twin research.  There would never be another chance like it."   

Sheldrake gives ample citations, as he always does even in his more popular writing such as Science Set Free,  If you haven't read the book, it's very interesting and provocative reading and you can check out his footnotes and citations.

I would fault him for missing several points that I made, that Darwin's theory of natural selection was the absolute inspiration and basis for Galton's eugenics, Galton said so in his Memoir in which he published Darwin's letter praising Hereditary Genius and we know that Darwin used Galton's eugenics writings to support his theory of natural selection in his later The Descent of Man (1871), rather an instance of circular reasoning, using an application of the theory in the theories support.  And, his point about the use of Galton's eugenics to support the British class system is a wider instance of circular reasoning because Darwin, himself, said that one of his greatest inspirations in inventing natural selection was his reading of Thomas Malthus on Population, in which Malthus props up the British class system and the laws that produced it and the extreme economic inequality that Darwin and Galton, as well as Malthus got the better end of the stick of that inequality.   As I recently pointed out you cannot possibly disassociate the British class system (and the self-interest of those who benefited from it)  from natural selection because its intellectual inspiration is utterly saturated with it, supports it and identifies its inequality with the way of "nature" when it is entirely man-made, artificial and the result of intentionally pursued self-interest.  The fact that the basis of that unholy trinity is based, not on natural conditions but the artifice of the English crown and aristocracy during the Tudor period and then expanded during the British period plays no small part in my complete skepticism in regard to the theory of natural selection, that and the fact that no instance of natural selection or even an artificial selection experiment has produced a new species in line with the entire stated motive of coming up with the theory to start with, to explain how the present diversity of life came about with myriads of "favored races" surviving as "unfavored" ones died out or, quite graphically in Darwinian fantasy as a result of a struggle for life or death.  

He could also, in line with what I added, have noted that through Galton's eugenics, Nazism was a direct consequence of a belief in Darwin's natural selection theory because what he abbreviated in a line I've shown in a long series of posts with citations, long passages given and often links to online publications of original documents.  

So, I'm hardly the only one who has noticed that this particular line of science has a strong dramatic and often extremely dangerous impact on politics and laws.   I could go on at length, but I already have, many times.  There's some difference between someone who knows the territory who accepts that evolution has happened and someone who is a "young earth creationist" who does or doesn't.  And there's a complete difference between anyone who is familiar with the primary literature and those who are too lazy or cowardly to look at it and admit what it says.

* I should point out that in looking for material for this post I ran into several online sources (here, for example) that repeat the lie that Darwin never intended his theory to be applied to the human species when his second major book on the topic, The Descent of Man had exactly that application as its theme and motivation.   I've come to believe that just about everything in that regard is either Darwinists who have never actually read what Darwin wrote or Darwinists who have read it and who are blatantly lying about it.  

The list goes on because no aspect of today's society can have escaped dogmas like

 "we are born selfish," "they, genes, have created us body and mind," . . .

DENIS NOBLE'S talk that I've been transcribing and commenting on ended very laudably with this:

Now I want to come to a final plea, back to the question of water. Because I want to finish this talk by returning to the unusual and amazing properties of water.  And you People in Iran will know only too well the importance of water.  You have sessions at this congress on the importance of water preservation.  And you might think this is a concern only in the traditionally arid areas of the world.  But I tell you it's much more serious than that.  My own country, England, illustrated in this image is also suffering a drought this year.  The whole of the Eastern part of my country is, at the moment, in a disastrous drought state.  You can see the ground is brown, not green.  So, even in England's "green and pleasant land" water is now a scarcity and the countryside is no longer green.  It is, therefore, urgent.  Young People everywhere in the world should plead with their rulers to save the world because life, as we've seen, cannot exist without water.  

So, I want to finish this talk with a wake-up call to the world everywhere, not only in Iran and my country, England, but everywhere in the world because the challenge is on a scale which human society has never faced before.  The climate change problem is a problem for a new generation, to create a world fit for the challenges of the 21st century.  They, that upcoming generation, they will face many looming signposts to warn them what went wrong.  The fires, the droughts, and the other problems.  So their generation will be the one that has to take responsibility for the way in which the Earth's ecosystems need rescuing.  Even for our own species, we humans, to survive.  Theirs will be a generation who can try to recover from the damage to society that results from reductionist models of physiology and evolution that have metaphorically shaped our ideas and models in fields as diverse as economics, sociology, philosophy, ethics, politics, , ,  The list goes on because no aspect of today's society can have escaped dogmas like "we are born selfish," "they, genes have created us body and mind," "it's in his DNA," and all the myriads of other tropes of related types that we now use almost without thinking.  Those future generations will also need to rewrite the textbooks, not only because they see the virtue of, "let us therefore teach our children"  to quote Richard Dawkins, but also because their politicians, economists, sociologists and philosophers will also need to find new strategies in collaboration with biologists and ecologists to lead them out of the gene-centric impasse.  It is, arguably, a challenge the scale of which human society has never faced before because the very future of life, of humans on this planet is at stake.  So I wish them all well.  

The chemistry of life begins and ends with water.

So thank you for your attention at this congress in Iran you can download all of the articles I've referred to free of charge from my website, www.denisnoble.com

Thank you very much and thank you for asking me, yet again, to talk to the Iranian Congress of Biology.

So, you can see that my diversions into politics as well as within biology aren't that far from the thinking of Denis Noble, but that's where I'll leave it for now.  I'm sure there will be more reasons to go into what he and his colleagues have said on these topics and their social, legal and political consequences.  

Harold Darke - O Brother Man

 

 

 

Boston Trinity Church Choir

 

O Brother man! fold to thy heart thy brother;
Where pity dwells, the peace of God is there;
To worship rightly is to love each other,
Each smile a hymn, each kindly deed a prayer.

Follow with reverent steps the great example
Of Him whose holy work was " doing good " ;
So shall the wide earth seem our Father's temple,
Each loving life a psalm of gratitude.

Then shall all shackles fall; the stormy clangor
Of wild war music o'er the earth shall cease;
Love shall tread out the baleful fire of anger,
And in its ashes plant the tree of peace!

 

John Greenleaf Whittier  

I resolved to post more music this year and I haven't been keeping it yet. 

given all of that, that kind of free action must surely be true

FOR THIS NEXT TO LAST post on Denis Noble's short lecture The Chemistry of Life Begins With Water, I'll comment just a little on his summary of why he believes that the actual, detailed molecular chemistry of life supports concepts of free will that the old-fashioned, cartoonish view of DNA and even cruder concepts of life and reproduction and evolution are used to actively refute in service to the ideology of materialist-atheist-scientism.  Not that I couldn't point out the relevance of many of his points to what I'm interested in, political, legal and social implications of this but I'll wait to do that seeing how I must have strained your tolerance for that in my last couple of posts.   Later, I might risk posting my transcript of his talk without my commentary some time in the future along with a link to the video in which you can compare what I've typed out to what he said and, don't forget, his, for once, extremely useful slides.    

Nerve cells are densely packed with ion channels in their membranes.  And those channels are also continuously jiggling around in a stochastic dance.  Nervous systems are almost designed to be harnessing chance. Just as the immune system can distinguish between the forms of DNA variation to enable it to latch on to a new virus or a new bacterium so our nervous systems can latch on to the neural mechanisms that satisfy the criterion of social choice.  This is not a new idea incidentally, it was originally formulated by Gerald Edelman who won the Noble prize in 1972 for his discovery of the structure of the immune system's immunoglobulin proteins.  He went on to suggest the same harnessing of chance could be operating in the nervous system. He even called it "neural Darwinism" in a book he published many years ago.

So, I've pursued this question together with my brother zoologist and philosopher Raymond Noble to ask the question, does that enable values to influence physiology?  The choice of what we should do.  And where, in those articles, I argue that conscious organisms have the ability to match up their behavioral routines with the constraints of social interactions.  Including, for example, the concepts of fairness and for many other values for which we all live our lives.  If that is so then we have a process by which natural stochasticity, chance can be harnessed, that is used to enable us to act with what philosophers call the only free will worth having.  But can conscious choice influence our biochemistry?  Can it control the genome that way?  

Passing up the temptation of the phrase "neural Darwinism" in line with my skepticism about the existence of natural selection, I'll point out that this series of posts really began back with my posting of Thomas Merton's short essay "What is Liberty?"  in which he defined the basic level of liberty, freedom as being the ability to choose what was good over what was evil.  Certainly, in my context of political, social and legal use of freedom as a good thing, opposed to the kind of libertarian freedom which, under "liberal democracy" holds that all kinds of evil actions and oppression and even killings are permissible as "liberty,"  that IS the most important question. 'Liberal democracy" as it is encoded in most political and legal systems facilitates individuals to harm others, other People, other animals, the environment we all depend on as "liberty."   Egalitarian democracy depends on our choosing to restrain our inner two-year-old brat to allow others to live a decent, safe life.  But even more than that is under attack from the ideological choices and decisions of many influential People presented to us by the publishing media and industry.   As I will never stop pointing out, the kind of denial of the possibility of free thought, "free will" that is all the rage among materialist-atheist-scientistic academics and babblers and scribblers is rightly seen as a basic and direct attack on democracy as much as anything the billionaires, especially those with political control of some of the largest and richest countries on Earth are financing, today.  

Considering the use of "twin studies" by those whose Darwinism turns to eugenics and scientific racism, concentrating on seemingly uncanny similarities in twins separated a birth, this use of more detailed studies of twins by Denis Noble is very welcome.  

Now I come to a very interesting study that physiologists have done over many years looking at identical twins.  Identical twins have nearly identical genomes.  There are small differences but they're very slight.  Now imagine that one of them is brought up in an environment that leads him to choose to train as an athlete and the other does not.  Not surprisingly, as shown in the photo here, the body builds are completely different.  And in an extensive study of such cases of identical twins, physiologists have been able to identify the control RNAs in the athletic ones that enable their muscle proteins to grow so much.  So, the decision to train as an athlete, provided that decision is implemented in practice, leads to precisely those changes at the molecular level that enable the athlete to succeed.

Now, what is impressive about this study is that it identifies the small RNA molecules that control the genome.  And, in fact, this is happening all the time.  Our decisions to do whatever we do are inevitably controlling our genomes because similar physiological processes must be involved.   There are armies of small RNAs, of control RNAs wait to do just this.  

Now, is this what we call free will?  What I have shown is the harnessing of stochasticity, the use of stochasticity or chance clearly enables a form of creativity in behavior that allows social constraints the ideas of value and judgement that go with them to influence the physiology of our bodies.  But why should we call this "free will?"   Doesn't it mean that,  after all, we are determined but just by social interaction processes rather than physical processes?   

Well, yes, that's true in a sense. But what surely would disturb us as a challenge to our ability to choose would be a demonstration that there we are always impelled to do what we do by purely physical processes.  "My Genes Made Me Do It" is even the title of a book.  

So, being physically compelled and socially influenced are very different forms of determination.  Being influenced, even feeling compelled by the social influences of shared values and judgements surely does not worry us in the same way.  We can even observe the same processes in other species.  Packs of dogs illustrated in my image here, and groups of monkeys have both been shown in careful studies to be capable of discriminating against the members of the pack who are not cooperating.  These distinctions, therefore, between the physical and the social influences are surely the basis for what many philosophers   refer to when they talk about the kind of free will worth having.

You see, as the person, Denis Noble, I'm not worried by the fact that my upbringing and my social interaction has greatly influenced my values and, therefore, my actions.  Why ever should I wish it to be otherwise?

So, social freedom is the form of freewill worth having.  Furthermore, influence by social factors does not imply compulsion.  Social factors and the reasons we may give for our actions are what philosophers call defeasible.  Meaning, that in retrospect we may give the reasons for what we do.  Legal processes in our law courts illustrate that process all the time.

The concept of defeasibility was developed as a legal concept as well as having a philosophical basis.  

Now, clarifying what kinds of free will are worth having is, indeed, a philosophical question.  But what I hope I have done is to outline a way in which physiological processes, dependent upon the stochastic properties of water and, in turn, the stochastic properties of all the molecules that are in and dissolved in or suspended in water can exist and enable that kind of free will to occur.  Indeed, I would go further.  Given what we know of the chemistry of life, of its dependence on these interesting properties of water and the ability of water to give us the variability that we need to make choices, given all of that, that kind of free action must surely be true.

All of this is certainly welcomed by an egalitarian democrat like me because it gives a physical mechanism by which we can exercise free thought, free choice and it should be welcomed by anyone who has any esteem for human thinking, human reasoning, the long and large academic heritage and, even in its frequently decadent and self-destructive forms current in academia today, it defeats the simplistic, cartoon of physical determinism that is the default ideology imposed by the social and intellectual coersion that has hegemonic control of academia, the media and, increasingly, the legal and political mainstream.  Even those hardest of hard core physical determinists, and almost all of them are some species of materialist-atheist-true believer in scientism, don't want the logical conclusions of their ideological holdings because, as I've pointed out, it can't but help undermine any esteem that their professional product is held in.  

I don't, however, think that what Denis Noble says goes far enough, though as a scientist he is properly keeping in bounds with what his profession can honestly say about any of this.  You might have noticed that in the beginning of this section of his talk, Denis Noble said, "Nervous systems are almost designed to be harnessing chance."   In that "almost" is the formal reticence of a scientist who knows his science cannot determine if even something so reasonably concluded to have been a product of design because the design would require a designer.  Whether that designer is in line with the traditional concept of God, the Creator or if it is the design of an individual, overseeing living mind that does what he attributes to the molecules and cells and systems of cells in the body, harnesses the physical properties of water and fats and other molecules to do things toward an end, witnessing such a process makes it intellectually allowable, maybe even respectable to conclude that someone is in control of it all just as someone would have to make the choice above even the social influences and coercions, in the end.  

Having been steeping myself in the late plays of Eugene O'Neill during this same time as I've been doing this series, plays in which addition to alcohol and opiates are at the center of the tragedies he presented, plays about his family members and himself, we aren't only given one set of social influences to choose among, we are not compelled to choose one or another even on that level.  And the choices we make are not determined by our environments, those are defeasible as well.  We can reject or accept what our families and communities present as a better choice.   Listening to Long Days Journey Into Night, I heard the excuses the mother gives for her remaining addicted to morphine and recognized every excuse that the alcoholics in my family gave for not giving up alcohol.  I have said here before that when my brother refused to try AA because he "rejected a higher power" I could tell him he had chosen a higher power in the form of the ethyl alcohol molecule, that was his higher power to which he had sacrificed his health, his mental health, his job, his family, his home and car and everything else.  It's a rather bitter joke to me that ideological atheists have adopted a cartoon picture of an atom as the equivalent of a cross or star of David or a crescent moon.  To me that choice says everything there is to know about the choice that they have made and why it is incompatible with life.  

Though it isn't directly relevant to my use of Denis Noble's lecture, I will try to get around to typing out the last five or so minutes in which he makes a highly moral and laudable choice to concentrate on the politics, laws and social aspects of the provision of clean water which is as much in danger as egalitarian democracy is under the various gangster legal regimes from the worst dictatorships to the less corrupt liberal democracies which allow millionaires and billionaires to buy "water rights" and deprive People of the very basis of life, itself.  I think it's telling about the limits of traditional biology that this is the first time I've heard or read an in-depth analysis of that fact, that our bodies are mostly water, the substance that all of my previous reading in biology and related sciences just considered as if it was there to fill up space while the larger, more complex molecules operated independent of it.  Such a basically simplistic and incompetent view of life has been what has dominated the culture of biological sciences in my experience.  For that alone, this is a landmark lecture in my understanding of science.   

Spring Cleanin' Getting Ready To Blog - With A Response

LOOKING AT yesterday's posts this morning, I notice that I'd accidentally posted a rough draft of the long post instead of something more like one I'd want to post.   I've gone through it and added some things that got deleted in the rough edit and fixed a couple of problems with verb agreement,  something that's bound to happen when you decide to change a single or plural subject around.    

Since materialism is a monistic ideology, holding that everything that exists is a product of material causation in line with what science claims about that, in responding to the real-life consequences of materialist-atheist-scientistic ideology I have every right to relate that to the very real political situation in which egalitarian democracy is thwarted and prevented and endangered, especially as those with academic credentials and a platform are undermining the very foundations of equality and democracy on behalf of that ideology,  denying the reality of the possibility of freedom of thought.   That seemingly academic polemical self-impeaching ideological struggle does have real life consequences, as can be seen in that ideology being held, either formally or loosely by some of the worst despots and mass murderers in history.   Having Robert Sopolsky out there promoting the belief that free thought is impossible as Trump, with the neo-Stalinist, Putin's and Xi's support, is trying to destroy democracy in the U.S., in Europe and elsewhere has to count as among the most irresponsible antics by an academic yet in  this century. 

And it's on the basis of old-fashioned, outmoded, refuted biological orthodoxy which started to crumble about eight decades ago. 

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Eugene O'Neill - Hughie

 Hughie

Jason Robards - Erie

Jack Dodson - Night Clerk 

Jason Robards was a great O'Neill actor,  Jack Dodson, the only thing I ever saw him in was as Howard Sprague on the Andy Griffiths Show.   I think this is the audio of the stage performance that was shown on Great Performances more than thirty years ago.   It works really well as an audio play because it's mostly the monologue of Erie with a little bit of interaction with Hughes, the night clerk who has a few short monologues himself. 

I've been binging on O'Neill and needed something a little more upbeat.  When he was writing his first plays, his father, the famous actor James O'Neill asked him if he were trying to get his audience to go home and commit suicide. 

The Honest Slogan Of The "Civil Liberties" Industry Isn't Never Again, It's Always Again. Part Two

I AM AN EGALITARIAN DEMOCRATIC ABSOLUTIST.   That is my political ideology and the politics I put my greatest hope in to produce a viable, decent life for everyone.  That is my political morality, a product of  the particular form of Christianity I hold with, informed by the history of my time and that of my parents and grandparents.   That is I am an absolutist in regard to the equality of People, I am not an egalitarian about all of the ideas that People may have, though any idea compatible with equality and democracy is rightly held as sound and safe to be expressed.  I don't hold with the current idiocy of the civil liberties industry and those they suckered that Nazis, Stalinists, Maoists, or any other holder of ideas that have produced genocides and mass causalities have any right to promote those ideas so as to give them another try.  Any preening civil libertarian or "First Amendment absolutist" who claims there is a right for Nazis to get another chance by promoting their ideas has to be considered someone who is fully prepared for that history to repeat itself.  Such a person is an idiot.  Such "civil libertarians" have no problem with giving our own, way too powerful, very successful, very oppressive and murderous forms of the same thing, white supremacy, male supremacy, etc. a continual chance to do the same thing that they have, in fact, done here throughout the entire time that the lauded First Amendment has been the supreme law of the land, are giving aid and comfort to the oppressors of Women, Black People, Native Americans, and many other groups who have been the targets of those dangerous ideologies.   That is not only insane, it is morally depraved.    Any oppressive, murderous, anti-egalitarian or anti-democratic ideology which has ever influenced enough people to hold sway either over a lynch mob or over an entire state or country is of proven dangerousness that it could do the same thing over again and can be expected to get that chance.

The unstated slogan of the current concept of "civil liberties," the hollowly hallowed ACLU and the corrupt Supreme Court, isn't Never Again, it is Always Again.  Marxism, Stalinism, Maoism, American style white supremacy, male supremacy,  neo-Nazism it is all to forever more be allowed the chance to do what it has proven to be capable of having done, despite the absolute proof of experience that it can take power and oppress, enslave and murder even scores of millions and enslave billions.   And that is done on the basis of nothing more than an abstraction that refuses to consider those lessons of hardest experience as mattering as compared to the seeming simplicity of choosing not to consider that part of it as determinative.   The easy slogan of First Amendment "even handedness" "objectivity" etc. is a false front to what it really means, that it is some kind of perverted virtue to allow any or all of those a chance for a redo into perpetuity.  It's so much easier to be egalitarian for ideological abstractions, it costs to be egalitarian when it comes to People in reality.  So much easier to disregard the consequences for People, that is other than the elites of the law faculties and courts and lawyers who are in the business of getting those with the most more.  

That that lawyerly nonsense didn't die in the first decade after the Nazis were overturned and their crimes exposed and even as our own form of that in white supremacy controlled not only a large number of states but held sway in the Congress only shows how much that daffy thinking was a product of privileged, elite white guys and gals who didn't have much of a prospect in ending up as the victims of it.  That idiocy is the most damning thing there is about post-WWII secular liberalism, liberal democracy.  That any of those whose families and groups had been the victims of Nazism or our home-grown fascism of white supremacy could have even entertained such talk without hooting it down and deriding it shows how powerful the slogans of the likes of the ACLU are to override the hardest of reality.  Ideas are not equal, a person's ideas are not living beings, they don't have rights.    THAT IS CERTAINLY TRUE OF IDEAS WHICH HAVE BEEN PUT INTO PRACTICE AND WHICH HAVE PROVEN THAT THEY, IN FACT, CAN ENSLAVE, OPPRESS AND GET MANY PEOPLE KILLED, MANY MILLIONS OF PEOPLE.  Some ideas are so dangerous to equality and rights their suppression is mandated by the protection of equality and democracy.  Democracy must hold that PEOPLE have a right to the blessings and a decent life that are made possible by democracy, a right as absolute as the right TO TELL THE TRUTH.  That is what even Nazis and white supremacists have a right to, personal equality and democracy even as they would like to destroy it WITH THEIR LIES.  All People have a right to the blessings that result from egalitarian democracy and the decent life which it has the potential to produce.  There is no right to destroy equality and democracy.  I have my doubts that those are possible without a high degree of economic leveling, certainly more than exists or is intended to exist under so-called "liberal democracy" but that's for another post.

Certainly not in the perverted system in the U.S. in which "contracts" real or created out of sheer imagination by the Supreme Court and lower courts, is a license for the more powerful, the richer is able to do all manner of immoral things on that basis.  Extreme personal wealth held by even a large number of billionaires and multi-millionaires may be as deadly to equality and, so, democracy as hate speech whipped up in the mass media with legal impunity, in the American context.  The billionaires and millionaires are the ones who fund the hate speech and lies which brought us to Republican-fascism and Trump.  

Another issue is the incredible idiocy of the lawyers, judges and "justices" who invented that "right to lie,"  handing the billionaires, millionaires and the mass media they own a carte blanche to propagandize against equality and democracy and, their base motive, against economic and environmental justice, taking every advantage of human character at its worst to undermine equality, democracy and any possibility of a decent life.  The depraved and corrupt Roberts Court is ready to sacrifice the entire biosphere to such Court invented law as they are the Voting Rights Act on behalf of Republican-fascist white supremacy. 

As I've pointed out several times in my discussion of the talk by Denis Noble I'm going through this week, I come at this from the point of view of how the recent popularization of the academic and pseudo-scientific denial of free thought, "free will" is a danger to the pursuit of and protection of egalitarian democracy which is under active attack here and around the world.  I don't think that attack and the weakening of democratic resolve in the so-called liberal democracies is unrelated to the academic and scientific attack on the very reason that democracy is better than authoritarian governments, that People are capable of freely thinking for themselves what decisions they should collectively make  instead of having those who will have a personal, vested interest in doing the decision making for them, whether it be King George III, Napoleon, Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin or Putin or Donald Trump.  If they can be convinced by a Richard Dawkins or a Robert Sopolsky that they don't have that freedom, why should they bother with democracy?  Why should they take risks to defend it?  That's especially true in the majority population which would not have the greatest risk from an authoritarian government, especially the affluent white, straight men who dominate in most academic fields and have enough control of it that they can cause others in academia to regulate their expressed thoughts through professional and peer pressure.  The anti-democratic effect that the ease with which one can be a member of the favored majority under a dictator or other oppressive system, the torpor that comes from even relative privilege has been too little considered as contributing to the undermining of the possibility of egalitarian democracy.  If you don't feel under any kind of moral obligation towards that, you can have a very easy life, that is until the consequences of that grow to unbearable levels, for you and your loved ones.  Those fall first and foremost on unprivileged populations.  The United States in 2024 show that those levels of intolerable consequences for the middle-class and affluent must reach far worse levels than they have, as can be seen in the babbling of the DC press corps, those in NYC and other places during this election season.   I've always held that professionalizing the media so that you had to have gone to an elite university or college to get an influential job in it was a huge mistake, such People almost never have enough at risk to care about equality and democracy.  Are there bigger boobs than most of those credentialed air-heads on the air or who have the few byline jobs left in ink on paper?  

I don't think that the second careers in aggressive atheism of some of those scientists involved in that effort, such as Dawkins and Jerry Coyne, is at all unrelated to their attack on free will and the inevitable degrading of a culture that can support democracy in its only potentially stable form, egalitarian democracy. The idea of free will, free thought is entirely incompatible with their basic ideology.  That attack among those within the scientific Darwinist community goes back to the start of it, best documented in the genocidal scientific racism of Thomas Huxley and the declaration by Darwin's closest European continental disciple, Ernst Haeckel who said that the theory of natural selection was overtly supportive of an aristocratic system and overtly opposed to democracy in a book which we know Darwin read and which he declared he agreed with completely.  Ironically the title of that book was "Freedom in Teaching and Science," which indicates what an interesting career the word "freedom" has had among those who deny the possibility or desirability of freedom on the basis of their materialist, atheist, scientistic ideological holdings as if those could constitute science.  That such people could ever get away with adopting the name "free-thinkers" has to count as one of the most dishonest efforts in dishonest labeling there has been.  It's not different in the processes that lead to that from those who use the label "Christian" when they refuse to put the Gospel into practice in their lives.  

Darwin, himself, understood the most basic implications of his theory, to which Haeckel attributed, with Darwin's knowledge, the triumph of materialist monism in the culture of science and beyond.  Darwin wondered why he should have any confidence in his own thinking if it was merely a different line of material development from the thinking of apes and other animals (Darwin had a naive, 19th century aristocratic materialists' concept of animal minds. He clearly barely thought most human minds were reliable.). He realized that if his own mind were the product of the material causation that he claimed was the thing which produced us body and mind, then his ideas, no doubt foremost in his thinking, his theory of natural selection, could never be of any known worthiness of being believed.  I will point out that both Darwin, in The Descent of Man and in letters he wrote and Ernst Haeckel in his History of Creation asserted there were positive effects of murder and genocide of those they deemed and named as being inferior for the survivors, FOR THOSE DOING THE MURDERING AND CARRYING OUT THE GENOCIDE.  That is the central idea of Nazism, it is where Nazism got that idea.  Though there were other materialists who came up with the same idea in other lines of materialist thinking.  I don't think that their materialism is at all unrelated to their willingness to consider murder and genocide in positive terms anymore than it did in Stalin's or Mao's or Pol Pot's or the Nazi's thinking.  In the case of the Nazis, steeped in the popular understanding of science in late 19th and early 20th century Germany, the theory of natural selection is the likely origin of their genocidal thinking.   One follows easily on the other as if it were a logical conclusion from the assumption.  But, as Darwin felt as a qualm about his own mind, the logical conclusion following on from materialsm must impeach all ideas that People have.  That was something that the demented Nietzsche faced but almost no other materialist is willing to do.  In Nietzsche's depraved genius, he realized that when any morality or even any aspect of "civilization" is made suspect by materialism, mere power and superior strength to dominate and crush was the only thing replacing it.  I believe he probably got that idea from earlier 19th century science in which forces cause things to happen, forces as imagined by all-too-human imagination simplifying cartoonishly what later science would discover was anything but so simple.  If you hold that is the basis of all reality then it's easy to come to that conclusion about human beings and their actions and choices singly or in societies.

If "free thought" is impossible then all forms of human judgement and thought are, as well, nothing but a result of physical causation, having no intrinsic truth value to it, no more than any mundane physical or chemical reaction can be held to have truth value.  Under materialism truth, itself, must be as delusional as they claim free will, free thought, etc. are illusions.   That would be true of the choice of moving a finger, as in some entirely dishonestly misrepresented experiments so beloved of materialst-athest polemicists, to believing either Jerry Coyne's claims or those of Denis Noble.  Or those of Richard Dawkins or Michael Behe.  There would be no truth involved, at all, except as an illusion of the brain.   Even a belief based, or so it would seem to the one believing either side of that current scientific debate, on the arrangement of chemicals in the brain would just be a more complex chemical reaction any "truth value" as illusory as a Coyne or Dawkins would claim "free will" would be under their materialist-monist system.   The entirety of science, mathematics, the pseudo-sciences of and flowing from psychology and sociology, would be no more significant than anything else coming out of the materially modeled "brain-only" mind.  Consciousness, itself, is denied by the worst of them, though most of those tend to be materialist-atheist philosophers though I've heard those credentialed as scientists babble that line, too.

As I've said materialism in the form of scientism is among the most decadent of all lines of academic or intellectual assertion because scientism can only be true if it's false, the claim of scientism not being vulnerable to scientific validation.  The self-contradictions of materialism are more varied and a more attenuated line of assertion and analysis but, in the end, it, as an intellectual structure, is no less self-defeating because it undermines any reason to be confident in any such product of intellection.

THAT REALITY IS REAL Post Script:   

Reading this through, again, I am sure someone, somewhere would point to this or that Sociobiologist or evo-psy guy or materialst-atheist devotee of scientism and claim that they were a liberal who voted for Democrats or Labour or this or that party deputed to be democratic, to which I would say that such a person is clearly engaged in double-speak because, as Haeckel pointed out in regard to a belief in natural selection, such an idea cannot sustain a belief in democracy.  I wouldn't be surprised at a member of a science faculty or even someone who has a job in academic philosophy would miss the problem between their professional and personal ideology for whatever nominally democratic political position they might hold as a lesser item of their passionate devotion.  Haeckel also pointed out that materialism is a rigidly monistic ideological position in which everything, everything that is demonstrably related to it or which exists without any possibility of that demonstration being made, is reducible to the physics and chemistry of material substances, though very little can, actually, have any demonstrable connection to the findings of physics and chemistry as important as what can be known that way sometimes is.  It is the ultimate joke of that ideology, scientism,  that it cannot ever be the product of the methods of science, it cannot be demonstrated with physics or even the most enormous equations of chemistry, that most anti-faith ideology is, itself, held only as a matter of faith.  That is when it's held onto through quite unsophisticated, non-intellectual and inevitably angry emotions.  Neither can the absolute basis of scientific method, the superiority of observation, measurement and logical analysis of those observations yields a superior level of knowledge or even, in fact, that telling the truth about that within science is better than lying about it.  Science, itself, depends on morality that scientism undermines.  
 
I have recently pointed out the problem of having an effective, viable "left" which relies on college teachers and students because (along with the puerility of so many of them) that cultural milieu is a virtual guarantee of such a "left" being counter-productive.  I think that they are among the population most indoctrinated and habituated to thinking in materialist-scientistic terms is among the greatest reasons that such a "left" is undependable - as can be seen in the backlash among them potentially aiding the Trumpian fascists in this years election  even after the hard lessons of the experience of his first term and his attempt to violently overthrow the duly elected President, Joe Biden.   Materialism, atheism and scientism taken together are an especially naive ideology among those considered as having the highest credentials and those who hold it don't tend to be especially mature in their analytical abilities.  Just as an example, neither atheism nor materialism are demonstrable with science, either.

I trust a left led by members of the Black Church who moved the United States to adopt the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts more than I do the mostly white, mostly middle-class to affluent members of university faculties who flirt with some species of socialism* or secular liberalism.  The Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, were reality that is real.  The white-affluent, university based "left" produced nothing, in comparison except the undermining of that progress and the exaggeration of what part they pretend they played in things.  I distrust anything coming out of such dolts as go to the Left Forum, that annual circus of futility founded by academics and maintained by them and college kiddies.  It was the product of elite prep-schools and universities on the Supreme Court and other Courts and millionaire-billionaire financed law firms who have been destroying that progress bought with the struggle and blood of so many deprived of access to that kind of credentialing.  I don't trust much of anything coming out of those elite universities, anymore.  

I distrust the "left" that staffs a lefty magazine such as In These Times, despite their romantic attachment to and ineffective promotion of organized labor.  They were part of throwing the 2016 election to Trump who are risking the same thing eight years later by trying to undermine Biden and Democrats.  And with that preening, incredibly short sighted stupidity, the strengthened Republican-fascist majority on the Supreme Court who are about to entirely destroy organized labor and the regulation on the federal level.   I not only reject that "left" I despise it and wish its demise with all my heart.  I suspect James Weinstein would deeply regret having founded it if he knew what it was doing so many years after his death.  That play-left has been doing that my entire life, over and over again.  They never, ever learn a damned thing.   Democrats and Socialist Democrats should dump them and mock them into an ineffective marginal non-entity.  

* The only socialism worth anything is the socialism that holds that workers are the rightful owners of the means of production and what species of that socialism which tries to put the economics of The Law and, most radical of all, the Gospel into effect.  Though I am certain there are other religious traditions which could do the same thing.  Such socialism is, first and foremost, egalitarian and democratic or it is a criminal parody of socialism.  Unfortunately, in the history of that label, from Nazism to Marxism such criminal, oppressive, mass-murdering parody has accounted for the majority of what that word is used for, nothing worthwhile can profitably go by that label anymore.    Fabianism is a similar case which is inevitably tied to the British class system, about which Marilynne Robinson wrote so well in her suppressed book Mother Country.  

If I had the time I'd try to research any possible critiques of the 19th century Christian socialists by non-Christians and atheists to see what they had to say against it.  I believe that a socialism that informed itself out of that tradition instead of out of Marx and his materialist colleagues may have succeeded in the United States and elsewhere.  It would have cut the legs out from under the Nazis, the "national socialists," just as a real adherence to the Gospel would doom the "Christian nationalists," who are trying rather well to destroy the flawed liberal democracy in the United States.   The idea of "nationalism" being involved with both of those manifestations of anti-equality and anti-democracy is certainly worth investigating and pondering and taking seriously.  The "Christianity" of "Christian nationalism" is an emblem of nationalist identity, it has nothing to do with the radical egalitarianism of the Gospel of Jesus, of Paul, James, etc.  Christianity wedded to nationalism forfeits its Christian identity as socialism has in its attachment to that and other categories of secularism.  Socialism as it should have been has been the victim of materialist-atheist-scientistic ideology, largely under the handling of academics and taken up by those with a dictatorial mindset. 
  

FOX Lies and Jesse Waters should be criminally liable for jury tampering and intimidation.    In a rational legal system they would be. 

Deport the Murdochs,  Deport Gavin McInnis.  Deport any of the Trumpzi criminals who came here from abroad. 

"that fact, alone, destroys the central assumption of selfish-gene theory" Part

STARTING WHERE this left off:

Replicating like a crystal is, therefore, totally inadequate to the task.  So, what happens?  What happens is simply marvelous.  Organisms ensure that, normally, that degree of DNA damage does not occur.  And how they do it is ingenious and only living systems can do it.  Each and every one of those errors is corrected by the living cell, itself, employing many DNA cutting and splicing proteins to do the job.  And the outcome is so accurate that it can reduce an actual, crystal-like error rate of one in ten to the four to one in ten to the ten. that is a one million fold change.  

And only a living cell, not DNA alone, can achieve this.  To use Richard Dawkin's language, "the replicator DNA" is not, therefore, separate from "its vehicle" the living organism.  And that fact, alone, destroys the central assumption of selfish-gene theory.

I will break in here to say that I don't understand one of those sentences but I won't insert what I think he probably meant without being able to look into it more.  What I think is obvious from what he said is that DNA, if it "self-replicated" like a crystal (as is imagined by the central dogma of molecular biology and every claim that built on it) would have an error rate that couldn't produce a viable organism but that DNA as it is really replicated by the cell has those errors of such non-biological reproduction corrected at an amazing rate and at an amazing speed BY THE LIVING CELLS. I will forego the argument that such a process cannot happen without intelligent choice being involved, though I think what follows makes that more obvious.  What I will point out in that regard is that the merely seeming simplicity of such things WAS THE MAJOR SELLING POINT OF CLAIMS OF ATHEISM THAT RESTED ON THAT NAIVE CONCEPTION OF THE BASIS OF LIFE, foremost in the so-simple-as-to-be-cartoonish presentation of first Darwinism and then neo-Darwinism.  And, I will point out, that anyone who thinks they sense that such a thing would require intelligence to carry out that operation, as it really is, has every right to think that.  Especially with what Denis Noble and his colleagues discovered, as he continued with.

Not only does the living cell perform this miracle, if you want to call it that, of the preservation of its DNA sequence, it can choose to regulate the error correcting process.  If the error [correction rate] is down-regulated the result could be many, many new DNA sequences from which the living organism can choose.  It can even choose which part of the genome to protect and which to change.

This was shown many, many years ago by a very famous Woman geneticist, Barbara McClintock.  Her experiments in the 1950s on the plant maize showed that this ability to change a genome when the plant, or the organism is under stress is universal.  Under stress  all organisms can, as it were, spin the wheel of chance in the hope of finding a solution to the problem of survival.  Bacteria can also do it, that was shown by the bio-chemist James Shapiro. In fact, all organisms can do it.  They use this ability to regulate degree of the correction of the genome to generate new sequences when they need to do so.

I call these processes the harnessing of stochasticity, control of stochasticity, control of chance. It is the control of chance enabling organisms to be creative.  The article was published in the journal Interface Focus in 2017 and has consequences in evolutionary biology and in the philosophy of choice in organisms.  A series of articles that I published in the last five years, they can be downloaded from the website as my slide shows.

That gives openness and flexibility to living organisms.  

Because it is dependent on naturally occurring stochasticity, it is very different from the openness and flexibility of solid state computers made of silicone and metal. Because we, the living organisms, are the natural miners of chance this enables us to be so creative in what we do.  Enable us to be creative?  Could that also happen in our nervous systems?  You bet it does!

Again, not only does it destroy the central assumption of Dawkins' theory, it overturns any such theory that depends on the belief in an all-powerful of DNA as a total determinant of physical bodies and of minds.  FAR MORE IMPORTANT THAN THAT for the continuation of life in the world and human history, it totally overturns huge parts of the basis of current and often extremely dangerous human culture and law and politics, the product of that double-edged sword, the "public understanding of science."  Much of that saturated in the naive and now overturned lore surrounding a cartoonish, iconic conception of what we imagine "DNA" to be and do.  DNA doesn't replicate itself, it can't even maintain its own integrity, which is accomplished by the enormously complex cellular structures and chemistry which are not created out of DNA.  

Remember that such important molecules as the fats that account for so much of so many of the cell's structures and chemistry are not coded for in DNA.  After I started learning such things that were known even quite a lot earlier during my lifetime, I was astounded at how much of the presentation of biology in my high school and university years seemed to entirely ignore such basic facts that all organisms that reproduce sexually inherit an entire egg cell with those structures along with the genetic material in the sperm cell.  What structures the sperm cell also contributes to the new organism, apart from DNA is, as well, worth considering because just about all presentations of such "public understanding of science" entirely ignores those facts.   Selfish-gene theory is only one of many such theories that are or have recently been current in science and in the college-credentialed "public understanding of science."  Including that dangerously believed in by those in the law and sitting as judges and "justices."  Everything from the homicidal "Darwinian economics" that was the pseudo-scientific basis of Covid-19 non-policy during the Trump regime and of the Swedish government to Neo-Nazism as seen in the screeds and scribblings of William L. Pierce are among the earliest adopters of that just as Nazi "race hygine" (eugenics)  and Lebensraum theory was based on earlier iterations of natural selection and similarly naive conceptions of biology.  

The fact that the cell chemistry that is independent of the DNA molecule is necessary to maintain the structural and functional integrity of the molecule does, really, overturn the entire line of neo-Darwinism, which includes the most extreme form that Dawkins and his colleagues have made the conventional view of evolutionary science since the 1970s, including his selfish-gene dogma.  An entire field which has representation in science departments of universities around the world and which has real and very bad consequences in the popular understanding of science, rests on a basic fallacy which science has known about since more decades than Dawkins and his colleagues have been active in public science.  That alone tells you there's something seriously wrong with the neo-Darwinian orthodoxy and with the integrity of science.  And why the lag time in changing thinking to keep up with new discoveries is so dangerous.  It's not only that progress in science is measured in the deaths of scientists and professors who refuse to adopt new findings overturning their conception of their science, the retaining by the general public of what they were sold as valid science in their youth and, especially through the mass media but which was overturned has a deeper and potentially more dangerous effect. 

 That PBS and the BBC have sold neo-Darwinism so hard, along with its distortions in the popular understanding of science - and Lord only knows what things like the cable channels and cabloid like internet "documentaries" have done with that - has a really dangerous political effect.  I doubt the high-up Nazis had any more developed an idea of what the university professors were telling them about natural selection than your typical non-specialist high school or college student has about such matters, today. But, as can be seen in the notes of the Wannsee Conference, in which Reinhardt Heydrich gave a natural-selection argument to advocate for murdering every Jew they could, such a "popular understanding of science" can easily be genocidal.  Lord protect us from the Republican-fascist conception of such things are, what the Stephen Millers' conception of science is, or the likes of the Peter Navarro's idea of scientific fact.  If you don't think such as those are capable of recapitulating what came out of the Wannsee Conference with other groups targeted for genocide, you are far less intelligent than you like to think you are.  Watch the movie Der Untergang and listen to what came out of the mouths of Hitler and Goebbels - based, as I have read, on the reports of those who were there in the bunker with him- for an easily accessed example of what can come of a smattering of science among the ignorant with power.   I'd love to know what Stalin's or Mao's or Pol Pot's conception of science was because I think it would explain a lot.

I had originally written this as a far longer piece but I don't want to load even more on the important ideas of Denis Noble than he might welcome so I will post most of that material in a second part to this post.