Should Scientists Be Forced To State Their Theology?

You would think that what is science, and what is religion, are two very different things. Facts are facts and faith is faith and, in my view, rarely do the two coincide. Nor should they. Gravity is true whether the scientist discussing it is a Jew, a Muslim, a rationalist, a Jehovah's Witness or a born-again revivalist.

But a Republican in New Hampshire wants to pass law requiring all scientists discussing evolution to reveal their political viewpoints and their personal beliefs about supernatural hocus-pocus and the like. Actually, the bill doesn't go quite that far. It only demands that a scientist state his religious views if he is an atheist.

The bill, introduced by Rep. Jerry Bergen says that it would:

"Require evolution to be taught in the public schools of this state as a theory, including the theorists' political and ideological viewpoints and their position on the concept of atheism."

That is pretty much the whole legislation.

There are a couple of things I immediately notice about this badly crafted piece of theocratic insanity. First, evolution is always taught as a theory. Apparently the legislator, like many fundamentalists, is unaware of what the term "theory" means in science. In science a theory is "a plausible or scientifically acceptable general principles or body of principles offered to explain phenomena." Science assumes that a theory is the best explanation for something that has not been disproved. In science the assumption is that all theories are potentially false, but that a theory is regarded as true if it the best explanation to stand up to scrutiny to date. In other words, there are lots of facts to back up the theory, and there is no good reason yet presented to dismiss it.

But the public tends to use theory very different. "I have a theory about 9/11," is not a statement of the best set of principles that explains 9/11. What most people mean, when they use "theory" is opinion. To them, every opinion is a theory. But in science every opinion is not a theory.

Now many of the less educated on the Religious Right tend to be confused between the two. They assume that if evolution is a "theory" then it is like an opinion, a statement of personal preferences. Thus the witch doctor who claims an illness is the result of a curse is put on par with a doctor who found the virus causing the problem. Hence, their creationist nonsense is put on par with the science of evolution.

What this Republican is doing is trying to force the schools to teach the idea that evolution is merely an opinion, that is using theory in the common, unscientific sense of the word.

But, while many see this bill as aimed at the scientists who explain evolution, it seems more broadly written than that. Broad legislation is almost always bad legislation. This law would demand the "theorist" to state his political and ideological views and whether or not he is an atheist. But who is the theorist? Is it the author of a science book? If so, how do they force scientists, most of whom will not be living in New Hampshire, to submit to a state mandated Inquisition regarding their beliefs?

Who will determine what the theorists really believes? Would theorists have to report all changes in their beliefs every time they change their mind? I just don't see how this bill could possibly be enforced against scientists.

But, I do see the bill as being broader than that. Wouldn't the theorist also include the teacher doing the theorizing in class? I think so. This would do something we haven't done in a long time—force every teacher to publicly reveal their beliefs on politics, ideology, and god. And what do you think will happen to the teachers who would be forced to reveal they are atheists? If you don't think the fundamentalist fanatics would demand a lynching then you are mistaken.

If a teacher voluntarily tells their students they are atheists the Religious Right routinely demands the teacher be fired. They march on school board meetings, petition, shriek loudly, wail shrilly, and whine about the mere presence of a non-fundamentalist is a violation of their religious freedom. So, atheist teachers who reveal their rational thoughts on the topic, are subject to all sorts of harassment from the fanatics. Now, they appear to want to force each atheist to out himself if he or she is to teach evolution. I'm sorry but this is an invitation to a witch burning.

Of course, none of this is relevant to whether the scientific theory in question is a valid one or not. Germ theory is the most plausible explanation regardless of the beliefs of the theorist. And, whether the Jesus-addled Republicans like it or not, evolution is the most plausible explanation for how life as we know it came to be. And no witch hunt for atheists is going to disprove the theory of evolution, and without that, it will still remain the most logical, scientific explanation.

Be it demons causing disease, or creationism, those are not scientific theories. They confuse opinion with theory.

More importantly, their faith statements can not be theories. The hallmark of a scientific theory is that it can be disproved. But their faith statements are outside science. The idea that there is a god somewhere is not something the scientist can disprove. This is why logic puts the burden of proof, not upon the denier, but upon the person making the affirmative assertion. If the creationist kooks want to replace evolutionary theory with faith-based assertions, they have first show why evolution is deficient and why their faith-based claims are a better explanation. They don't do that. Instead they want to pass laws to force people to publicly disclose their private beliefs.

By the way, if this law were to be enacted, ask yourself what kind of powers a government would need in order to enforce it. What you will realize is that this is not a law that "small government" people would enact. It is Big Brother at work.

The loss of a friend: Denis Dutton, RIP

Today started with a shock as I opened my web browser and quickly discovered the loss of a friend, Denis Dutton.

I well remember the first day I met Denis. A friend of mine, Michael, is an astronomer who frequently works at observatories around the world. While we met in the U.S. we next saw each other in Africa where he was working and where I was then living. And in-between we corresponded while he was working in Sri Lanka and hanging out with the likes of Arthur C. Clark.

I had promised Michael that I would visit him in Christchurch, which is where he made his home. So one week I flew to Christchurch to visit and stayed with Michael. We debated the issue of “over-population,” and were at complete opposites on the matter. Michael had drunk long and hard at the poisoned well of Paul Ehrlich and other such doomsday prophets. Michael was absolutely convinced that I was as wrong as I could be.

That day he suggested that we go to the University of Canterbury and drop in to see Denis, a friend of his. Denis was a widely esteemed philosopher and thinker. Michael was absolutely convinced that Denis would set me right, verify the disaster-in-waiting that Ehrlich breathlessly warned us about, and set me on the straight and narrow. I told Michael I had my doubts that would happen. By that I meant that in reading some of Dutton’s material in the past I suspected he would not necessarily agree with Michael. But Michael assured me that Denis would agree with him and reminded me that they had been friends for some time while I have never met Denis.

We made our way to the philosophy department and found the office of this esteemed man. Michael introduced me and then immediately sought verification that my thinking on population was completely wrong. Denis listened to Michael and then asked me what my conclusions were. I explained the basic assumptions I started with, what the evidence showed me, and what my conclusions were. Denis listened, nodded and then told Michael he was in full agreement with what I said. Michael was astounded and I suspect was now more willing to consider the arguments I made, now that someone with the stature of Prof. Dutton had signed on board.

We were then scheduled to have dinner with Dutton and his wife but something came up at the last minute and we had to cancel. The next time I ran into Denis was a dinner for Bjorn Lomborg. I well remember that day; it was October 7, 2003. It was one time I was a bit disappointed with Dennis. Californians were voting in a special recall election to fire Governor Gray Davis. Davis had been a disaster and voters wanted him gone. They voted to remove Davis from office and also voted into office his replacement, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Denis, who was a Californian himself, was thrilled to see Davis gone, as was I. Our big difference was that he was enthusiastic about Schwarzenegger and I had no such delusions.

Later Dutton and I spared in a series of debates, though it was hard debating as we were in fundamental agreement. He had written a column on capitalism, praising the economic system but arguing that it lacked the moral grandeur of competing philosophies. I, in turn, argued that it did not lack such moral grandeur at all. That two confirm “capitalists” were debating the virtues of a depoliticized economy drove the pro-socialist intellectuals crazy. They were quite livid about the whole debate. Of course they never screamed when two leftists would argue variations of Marx but this was just too much for them to endure.

One of these Lefties then wrote a rebuttal to both Dutton and myself and a friend of mine then responded to him. Another publication got into the act when a writer for that publication took on both Dutton and myself, disagreeing with us both rather strongly. And that publication printed a lengthy rebuttal from myself. At that point the Left intellectuals decided to beat a strategic retreat and figured they were better off keeping quiet. Thanks to the debate that Denis started the final toll were 3 to 2 for the advocates of depoliticized markets.

Denis was one of those people who I like instantly and with whom I found myself in virtual agreement. He taught the philosophy of art and philosophy of science: two topics that interest me greatly. He was a well-known skeptic, someone who disputed claims of the supernatural and deities, another area of agreement. His philosophy of science studies had made him skeptical of the modern environmental movement, another area of broad agreement. He was a great fan of evolutionary theory, as am I. And he was basically a libertarian in his political outlook, another area of agreement. (See his video below where he lectures on the Darwinian explanation of esthetics.)

His death came as a great shock because I didn’t know he was sick. Apparently neither did he until rather recently. Just this last semester he was still teaching at the university when he informed his students that it was discovered that he had cancer. From that point onward his decline was rapid indeed and he died Dec 28, 2010.

Dutton argued that art and beauty were things necessary for survival. He says that there is universality of esthetics that is cross-cultural and cross-generational. Because of this it is of “particular interest to Darwinian literary theorists.” The evolutionist would ask why something evolved as it did, what use did it fill. Dutton’s answer is one that resonates with my own views:

“The usefulness of the arts for survival is demonstrated by the universal human tendency to reconstruct reality in the imagination. The rehearsal of dangers and conflicts in fiction is a way of learning about the world without having to take actual risks. Those of our ancestors who derived pleasure from fictional ‘practice’ for real life gained an evolutionary edge. They were better prepared to deal with the world.”

I have long argued about the important of fiction in teaching moral values. I have, in fact, argued that humans get their perspectives about morality from the cultural myths that permeate all societies. I never got around to reading the book on esthetics and Darwin that Denis wrote. Now I will have to. Goodbye my friend.

Stone Age Minds: A conversation with evolutionary psychologists Leda Cos...

Some important insights regarding evolutionary psychology and markets. The discussion about socialism is particularly interesting.

New film attacks Darwin, evolution and Mencken.

The Religious Right is about to unleash a new drama, based loosely on the Scopes Trial. The purpose I suspect is to make Darwin and evolution look bad by weaving in a fictional story about eugenics and forced sterilization. Let us first cover the Scopes Trial.

Tennessee had passed an anti-evolution. The ACLU wanted to test the law and John T. Scopes, a teacher in Dayton, volunteered for the case. One of the great puffing baboons of that era, Williams Jennings Bryan, a man who was a socialist and a fundamentalist, rode into town like a tinhorn messiah to save the law. Clarence Darrow, a political ally of Bryan’s, but an opponent of his fundamentalism, defended Scopes.

The great libertarian writer, H.L. Mencken, came to Dayton to cover the story for the newspaper column that he wrote. A fantastic film was made of the story, Inherit the Wind, which also weaved in fictional characters but often used verbatim transcripts from the trial as script. The film, however, was clearly a dramatization of the story and not meant as history. Few people with a lick of sense take their history from such dramas. However, fundamentalists have hated the film since it first showed up on the movie screens their preachers forbade them to see. And it appears they are now getting even.

A new fictionalized account of the trial has been made. This version is written by Fred Foote, who also financed the film through a family-run foundation “which supports Christian-based artistic and educational endeavors. “

Foote says he wrote about “how the media gave the whole world the wrong story about the Scopes trial.” One paper says that Fundy Fred’s version of the story, Alleged, shows the “trial was actually a tool of the progressive elite of the time, to promote Darwinism for its own darker purpose.” The creationist web site answersingenesis says the film “reveals how the major media delivered a distorted view of the trial in an attempt to attack biblical Christianity.” Foote, shall we say, is a very right-wing character. He gave $2000 to the theocratically inclined Rick Santorum campaign. He also gave money to Keith Butler, a fundamentalist minister seeking the Republican nomination for Senator in Michigan, as well as to Rep. Dick Chrysler, one of the co-sponsors of the anti-gay “Defense of Marriage Act.”

Foote needs a villain, so he attacks the libertarian Mencken. “Mencken was the greatest reporter of the time, who almost singlehandedly shaped this story for public consumption. If he didn’t invent spin, he was an early master of the art. That became the core of my story: the kid who comes under his sway and how far he’ll go on that path if it conflicts with his own views of what’s right and wrong.”

Trailers for this film indicate that it is about dishonest bias in the media, with Mencken as the prime culprit. The fictional Charles Anderson comes under the evil influence of Mencken. As the film’s website portrays it, this is about how Anderson “is torn between his love for the more principled Rose, his fiancée, and the escalating moral compromises that he is asked to make as the eager protégé of H.L. Mencken.”

In addition to Rose and Charles, the script invents Abigail, the half-black, half-sister of Rose who is to be sterilized by the eugenicists who are the result of Darwinism, which the nasty, biased, dishonest Mencken supports. However, this could not have taken place in reality, at least not in Tennessee where Dayton is located. Many states had laws allowing forced sterilization, but Tennessee had no such law and no compulsory sterilizations were performed there.

Foote likes to talk about “truth” and getting at the facts, but he write a screenplay that intentionally distorts history. Foote says he decided “the best way to tell the real story is do another movie.” But, apparently the “real story” requires him to make false claims about Mencken in order to promote his own anti-Darwinian agenda.

Consider poor Mencken: he was a columnist and to say he was biased is like saying Billy Graham is theological. Mencken’s job was to write biased, one-sided takes on the issues of the day from his own libertarian viewpoint. He was not a historian. He was a columnist expressing personal opinions—opinions worth reading for the sheer amusement value alone. Of course he was biased, he was supposed to be.

From what Foote and his website say, the film portrays Mencken as pushing the fictional Anderson into making ethical compromises for the sake of Mencken’s progressive agenda. In reality there was no Anderson and Mencken did no such thing. But Mencken’s columns wounded fundamentalists and they have never forgiven him.

But Mencken was no eugenicist. His American Mercury magazine published one of the first major blasts on eugenics in an article by Raymond Pearl, entitled “The Biology of Superiority.” Conservative Jonah Goldberg notes that Clarence Darrow, the great defender in the Scopes trial, wrote “his anti-eugenics piece for HL Mencken’s American Mercury, hardly a journal that spoke authoritatively for elite progressive opinion…” The two major Darwinists in Foote’s film were both anti-eugenics with Mencken publishing articles attacking eugenics.

Melissa Hendricks wrote of Pearl’s article and Mencken in Johns Hopkins Magazine:

So when Pearl decided to expound the fallacies in eugenics, he turned to the Mercury. In 1924, he sent a letter to Mencken, proposing the critique. "It has seemed to me for a long time that there is a dreadful lot of bilge talked by the self-constituted leaders of the eugenics movement," he wrote. Mencken accepted the proposal, but first he would publish his own essay, "On Eugenics." In typical Mencken style, he uncloaked those who claimed to have inherited their superiority, informing his readers: "Beethoven was the grandson of a cook and the son of a drunkard, and Lincoln's forebears for many generations were nobodies.

Mencken was actually one of the first to ridicule the eugenics movement. He did so years before the Scopes Trial. His 1918 work Damn! A Book of Calumny ridiculed eugenicists for believing “that a physically healthy man is the best fitted to survive. This is true of rats and pediculae, but not of the higher animals… In these higher animals one looks for more subtle qualities chiefly of the spirit.” Edwin Black, who authored a major history of the eugenics movement, War Against the Weak, says that one major eugenicist, Harry Laughlin, was the subject of “a forty-seven-page lampoon written under the pseudonym Ezekiel Cheever, who in reality was either the irreverent Baltimore Sun commentator H.L. Mencken or one of his associates.”

The textbook used on evolution in the Tennessee schools did promote eugenics, but apparently Bryan didn’t find that disturbing. He never once pointed out the section on eugenics and never attacked it—just the teaching of evolution and how evolution leads to moral decay. The creationist Discovery Institute published a piece by conservative Benjamin Wiker, saying that that the text used in Tennessee was “offensively racist and blatantly eugenic” How offensive and blatant they were to Bryan we don’t know, but we know he either didn’t notice the remarks or, if he did, didn’t find them offensive.

This is not to say that people associated with the trial did not express sentiments akin to eugenics. But it wasn’t Scopes who did so, or Mencken or Darwin either. The guilty party was Bryan’s wife, Mary. Bryan’s biographer, Michael Kazin wrote that Mary called the “mountain people” who flocked to her husband “pathetic” and ridiculed how they dressed. Kazin writes: “The wife of America’s leading foe of Darwinism thought so little of the crowd, most of whom admired her husband, that she scribbled a phrase any eugenicist could applaud.” Mary Bryan wrote that ‘this mass of people… have no real part in American life” but “marry and intermarry until the stock is very much weakened.”

Bryan himself expressed sentiments not far from eugenics as well. He wrote that he was proud to be a “member of the greatest of all the races, the Caucasian race.” He called whites the “advanced race” and supported segregation and denying blacks the right to vote in areas where they lived in large numbers.

Certainly the idea that the Scopes Trial was a battle between Progressive elites with some dark agenda (eugenics) and good Christians is wrong. Bryan, not Mencken, was the progressive. Mencken, as Forbes.com noted “first rose to prominence as a Progressive Era dissenter.” Another writer says, “Mencken was a libertarian to the core. Nothing could be more absurd than the claim that he somehow resembled the ‘progressive’ liberals of today.”

While Mencken was an opponent of the progressive movement, the same can’t be said for Bryan, who was often the most prominent spokesman for the progressive agenda. Bryan and Darrow, another progressive, were old friends and allies who shared common political goals. They differed on the criminalization of teaching evolution. It is true that many of these progressives were racists and supported eugenics, but Bryan, not Mencken, was associated with progressivism.

Foote says his film is not a rebuttal to the classic 1960 film Inherit the Wind, with Spencer Tracy, Fredric March and Gene Kelly. That film was a fictionalized account of the Scopes Trial and not history. It invented dialogue, plot lines and created additional drama that actually didn’t exist —such as the relationship between Scopes and the daughter of a creationist minister. If Inherit the Wind could fictionalize, then why can’t Foote?

Obviously he can do it, but the question is whether he is being ethical. I think he isn’t. The major difference between the films is that Kramer’s was openly fictionalized while Foote pretends his is the “real story.” You won’t see a character named Clarence Darrow in the Kramer film. Neither will you see characters named Mencken, Bryan, or Scopes.

Foote’s fictionalized version, however, pretends to be the “real story,” not a dramatization based on a true story. Kramer’s 1960 film had the integrity to make its fictional elements clear, by given the characters fictional names. But the Foote screenplay is about Mencken, Darrow and Bryan.

The extent of hypocrisy in the Christian producers of Alleged can be seen in their using the film’s website to encourage readers to compare Kramer’s fictionalized account “with the facts of the actual Scopes trial.” But why? Kramer didn’t claim to give the “real story.” Where does the film site send people for the “truth” about the Scopes trial? Try a site called TheMonkeyTrial.com. And the registration contact for that site just happens to be Frederick C. Foote—the same Fred Foote who wrote this screenplay.

Mencken wrote his scathing accounts of the fundamentalist mind set and now some adherents of the faith he ridiculed are finally getting even through a time-honored method of Christian apologetics: faking history.

Evolution, progress and economics.

Matt Ridley, an Oxford-educated zoologist, turned to journalism in 1983 when he got a job as The Economist's science reporter. He soon became the magazines Washington correspondent and eventually served as its American editor.

Ridley has written several acclaimed books that combine clear explanations of complex biology with discussions of the sciences implications for human society. In the reason.tv interview, Ridley discusses some of the themes in The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature; The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation; Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters; and Nature via Nurture: Genes, Experience, & What Makes Us Human; as well as his forthcoming book which seeks to understand how and why human progress happens.

Paul Feine and Alex Manning interviewed Ridley in the Milton and Rose Friedman Reading Room at Chapman University in Orange, California. About 9 minutes.

Is Darwin to blame for communism?

Recently there was a debate on whether conservatives could embrace Darwin. In this debate, held at the American Enterprise Institute, George Gilder, now associated with the Discovery Institute, claimed that communism was “inspired by Darwinism.”

Mr. Gilder makes a very odd claim on several levels. We could start with the fact that the Communist Manifesto, by Freidrich Engles and Karl Marx was published in February of 1848. It has been considered the founding document of modern communism and Gilder would certainly be aware of this. On the other hand, the founding document of evolutionary thinking was Charles Darwin’s work, On the Origin of Species, which was published in 1859. I have heard many absurd claims made on behalf of Marx, usually by Marxists, but this is the first time I’ve seen one that implies he was psychic. No other explanation exists to justify the claim that Marxism was inspired by a book written several years after the publication of the Communist Manifesto.

It is possible, of course, that some people have formulated an economic theory based on Darwinian perspectives. For instance one major attempt to incorporate evolutionary thinking into social theory was from the advocate of laissez faire, Herbert Spencer. He was an advocate of private property, limited government, and individual liberty.

There is also the question regarding the origin of Darwin’s theory itself. Stephen Jay Gould, a prominent Darwinist, wrote that Darwin’s theory was not formulated by reading biology. Gould wrote:

I was particularly struck by the absence of deciding influence from his own field of biology. The immediate precipitators were a social scientist, an economist, and a statistician. If genius has any common denominator, I would propose breadth of interest and the ability to construct fruitful analogies between fields. In fact, I believe that the theory of natural selection should be viewed as an extended analogy--whether conscious or unconscious on Darwin's part I do not know--to the laissez faire economics of Adam Smith.

Gould stated that “the theory of natural selection is a creative transfer to biology of Adam Smith’s basic argument for a rational economy: the balance and order of nature does not arise from a higher, external (divine) control, or from the existence of laws operating directly upon the whole, but from struggle among individuals for their own benefits.”

An understanding of some of the main concepts of the Scottish Enlightenment, of which Smith was a key figure, makes the reasons for this connection clear. Central to the ideas of these early thinkers of modern classical liberalism was a concept known as spontaneous order. Before Adam Smith wrote his famous The Wealth of Nations, his fellow Scot, Adam Ferguson wrote An Essay on Civil Society, in which he used the theory of spontaneous order to explain the evolution of human society. “ He wrote: “Every step and every movement of the multitude, even in what are termed enlightened ages, are made with equal blindness to the future; and nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.”

Norman Barry describes the theory of “spontaneous order” this way:

What is important about the theory of spontaneous order is that the institutions and practices it investigates reveal well-structured social patterns, which appear to be a product of some omniscient designing mind yet which are in reality the spontaneous co-ordinated outcomes of the actions of, possibly, millions of individuals who had no intention of effecting such overall aggregate orders. The explanations of such social patterns have been, from Adam Smith onwards, commonly known as 'invisible hand' explanations since they refer to that process by which "man is led to promote an end which was no part of his intention." It is a major contention of the theory of spontaneous order that the aggregate structures it investigates are the outcomes of the actions of individuals. In this sense spontaneous order is firmly within the tradition of methodological individualism.

Laissez-faire advocate Herbert Spencer, who was never the “social Darwinist” that some Left-wing historians invented, described the spontaneous order of markets in one of his essays. He was lamenting the inability of socialists to see how order can arise naturally and their need for a central planner to direct economic progress.

The houses they live in, their furniture, clothes, fuel, food—all are brought into existence by the spontaneous efforts of citizens supplying one another’s wants. ...The roads, the railways, the trains, the telegraphs are products of combined exertions prompted by desires for profit and maintenance. The villages and towns they pass exhibit the accretions due to private actions. The districts devoted to one or other manufacture have been so devoted by men who were simply seeking incomes to live upon. The enormous distributing organization with its vast warehouses and retail shops lining the streets, carrying everywhere innumerable kinds of commodities has arisen without the planning of any one.

A classic book defending the natural order of economic freedom is Michael Rothschild’s Bionomics. Rothschild, in some ways, completes the circle. The spontaneous order of markets helped Darwin formulate his theory of a spontaneous natural order. And Rothschild then uses insights from this natural order to explain the processes of the economic spontaneous order.

Putting aside the details of genetic variation and natural selection, is it really possible that an unconscious, spontaneous phenomenon could have brought forth a natural world of such awesome diversity, beauty, and balance? We can see it. But it still boggles the mind. Oddly enough, the same sense of incredulity underlies the widespread mistrust of free markets. Anyone who thinks carefully about capitalism must ask, How could such a vast and complex system emerge without the benefit of some grand design? Somewhere, somebody must be in charge. How else could, simple, self-interested components coalesce into an immensely complicated, well-coordinated economy? The notion that no one is in control — that economic order spontaneously emerges from the chaotic interaction of millions of individuals and firms — is quite simply, hard to swallow.

The great advocate of classical liberalism, F.A. Hayek, found himself fighting the same ideas Darwin had to fight: the inability to conceive of a complex order evolving without the guiding hand of a master planner. In his essay Principles of a Liberal Social Order he wrote:

Much of the opposition to a system of freedom under general laws arises from the inability to conceive of an effective co-ordination of human activities without deliberate organization by a commanding intelligence. One of the achievements of economic theory has been to explain how such a mutual adjustment of the spontaneous activities of individuals is brought about by the market, provided that there is a known delimitation of the sphere of control of each individual.

Hayek says the socialist was incapable of seeing a complex economic order without “deliberate organization by a commanding intelligence”. And George Gilder is unable to see a complex natural order with the deliberate organization of “intelligent design”. So while Gilder may wish to pin communism on evolutionary thinking the reality is that his theory has some disturbing similarities to those who advocate central economic planning.

In addition Gilder has a problem in that communist theory has often been associated, not with Darwinian thinking at all, but with religion. The first great modern communist revolution was not the overthrow of the Czar by the Bolsheviks. It was the Taiping Rebellion led by Hong Xiuquan, an advocate of a rather unorthodox Christian theory. Hong, converted by a Baptist missionary, almost succeeded in taking over all of China. His Heavenly Kingdom instituted ruthless rule.

Hong created a theocratic kingdom where civil service exams no longer required examination on the text of Confucius but instead used the Bible. He abolished the concept of private property and instead argued that all land belonged to, and was distributed, by the state. He declared a society where “class” was abolished and women were equal but combined this with a moral campaign that would please the Moral Majoritarians.

Michael Billington, in The American Almanac, wrote: “The Taiping were much admired by Mao and the Chinese Communist Party, and, indeed, they closely resembled the communists in many ways. While successfully appealing to the disgust in the population over the moral decay and corruption which accompanied the opium epidemic, and British-led economic looting, those who joined were forced to submit to a total "communization'' of their possessions, their families, and themselves.”

Hong established his communist society, with some 20 million deaths, without any Darwinian influence. He found his influence in religion. Before Hong we have the communist dictatorship in Münster lead, by a Christian Anabaptist sect. As one Anabaptist web site notes: “Following the ‘conversion’ of the Mayor, Münster became -- with startling speed -- a stronghold of communist millenarians.” This was in 1534, long before Darwin was alive, and long before anyone was formulating any theory of evolution.

The millenarians of Münster confiscated all the wealth of the rich and established a common storehouse. Goods would be doled out by church deacons on the basis of need. Communal dinning-halls were established as all food for collectivized and rationed. The community abolished money, private homes were declared communal property. Labor was conscripted. And like communist regimes everywhere, those who resisted this rule were executed.

As I said not only was George Gilder wrong when he attributed communism to Darwinism. He was wrong on several levels.

Religion, evolution and sexuality.

Yesterday I argued that “Godless immorality” regarding sexuality has been the dominant paradigm in human history and that the brief reign of the Puritanical was an aberration. I think history supports that. The more controversial statement, I suspect, was when I said that the “Christian paradigm of sexuality is one that is at war with reality. It is contrary to the evolution of the human species and human sexuality itself.” That is important.

It is important because the hardwiring of sexuality is something that evolved. If you don’t accept the fact of evolution you can’t rationally deal with human sexuality. If you don’t believe in the facts of reality you can’t cope with them well. The net result is that fundamentalists, in particular, spend an inordinate amount of time hoping to change reality. They attribute everything to sin, weakness, Satan, demons and liberals (who in their mind are something akin to demons). What they can’t accept is that this is just how human beings are hardwired. It’s built into the species.

Knowing that makes it much easier to deal with. What the fundamentalist resorts to is attempting to terrify people about sex. God will punish you, you will get pregnant, you will contract an STD, you will die of AIDS, and oh, yes, God will punish you again. The US federal government now wastes massive amounts of cash in abstinence programs in state indoctrination centers (they call them schools) where they attempt to scare teens about sex.

Here is the bad news for them. Teens are terrified about sex. They always have been and always will be. Sex is something new, overpowering, frightening, compelling, shocking, painful, pleasurable. It’s damn scary. It’s scary for adults and even more so for teens. If fear were the only factor the world would be populated with billions of 40 year old virgins.

But sex is more complicated than that. Sexuality is hardwired into the species. Teens and adults may be terrified by sex but they have an incredible drive to engage in it. It certainly is hormonal but it is more than that. it is tied to every aspect of being human. It is not just physical it is also psychological. So it connects our physical body with our mental faculties. Yet sexuality evolved in humans long before the rational mind evolved. I would think that alone should clue us in. If sexuality evolved before the rational mind don’t expect sexual expression to always be rational.

There is a huge amount about sexuality we don’t understand. We certainly understand the physical nature of it. Millions of years of practice made that inevitable. What we don’t understand well are the more complex aspects. We don’t know what it is that causes individuals to see themselves as men or as women thus leading to some individuals who are transgendered. We don’t know why some individuals are attracted to only the opposite sex, some to only the same sex and some to both. In reality we are still only scratching the surface when it comes to understanding sex.

But we know sexuality is something that dominates large aspects of human existence. We see it in art so frequently because we see it in life so frequently. And in the church they keep learning that capping the volcano doesn’t stop the eruption. The regular and constant flow of sexual scandals within the church gives proof to that. But they can’t deal with the reality of sexuality if they can’t deal with the reality of human evolution. It is through the hows and whys of evolution that one begins to comprehend the complexity and inevitability of sexuality.

The Bush administration prefers to push abstinence. That is what their Evangelical base wants. Does it work? Well, if you look at the states with the highest percentage of fundamentalists in the population you find the highest teen pregnancy rates. Of the ten states with the highest teen pregnancy rate eight of them are in the Bible Belt: Mississippi, Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, Arkansas, Alabama, South Carolina, Tennessee and Louisiana. Compare that to the “liberal” states. Where Texas has a teen pregnancy rate of 101 Massachusetts is almost half that: 60. North Carolina is 95 while Vermont is 44.

Fundamentalists have invented one program after another to mold human sexuality into what they believe to be the right kind of sexuality. None have worked but they do give them the false comfort that it “might” work. The latest venture they are trying has a very surreal quality to it.

They are called “Purity Balls”. Prepubescent girls dress up as if going to the prom. But instead of a prom they go to a dance with their fathers who are dressed up in tuxedos. It’s like a prom except the date is Daddy. Then the father and daughter exchange vows where the father promises to protect his daughter’s virginity and the girl promises not to have sex until she is married. Then Daddy slips a “purity ring” on the daughter’s finger as if they are going steady. One father told the press: “The ball is the culmination of the relationship we have with God and with each other.” Apparently no such “Purity Ball” is done with boys and their mothers. And the hope is to integrate these “Purity Balls” with other abstinence programs which receive over $200 million in federal funding.

The reality is that teens who pledge abstinence do delay sex slightly but not significantly. And they don’t tend to wait until marriage though they do wait a little longer. That’s the up side. The down side is that abstinence programs use fear as their motivation and so they don’t want to talk about condoms and birth control. Fundamentalists don’t like anything which removes the danger from sexuality. They want sex to be deadly or harmful in order to keep teens scared. So while this may delay sexual intercoursem when it does take place, and it usually does before marriage, it does so without the use of birth control or protection against STDs. The abstaining teens thus still end up having sex just riskier sex.

It strikes me that getting a 10-year-old to pledge abstinence is not particularly difficult. But how sincere can such a pledge be if the child is not flushed with hormones compelling them toward the very thing they are shunning? But is this for the child? Or is this for the parent to give them a false comfort that their child will remain virginal? And what will happen when the hormones do hit? Will these kids be honest and upfront with their parents? Or will they hide their sexuality as much as they can?

The fundamentalists I knew actually hid their sexuality. They still had affairs, cheated, had sex before marriage, masturbated, etc. They just lied about it until they were caught, begged for forgiveness and confessed they were evil and then hoped they could avoid “the traps of the devil” in the future. And certainly many conservative Christian parents have confessed that when it comes to the sex lives of their adolescents they don’t want to know what is happening. They prefer to live with an illusion than face the facts.

One Christian web site admits that fundamentalist teens “are engaging in other sexual activities, including oral sex, at high rates.” They say that the rates of actual intercourse are lower but that Christian teens admit to high levels of sexual activity. I suspect, given the pressure put on them, that with Christian teens there is a tendency to lie and cover up activity that may exist. There is no incentive to admit sexual activity that doesn’t exist, at least not to adults. So these numbers are probably the bare minimum. But they found 29% of Christian high school males had oral sex and 26% of females. Seventy percent have fondled the breasts and genitals of a partner and half have been nude with someone in a sexual situation. They were even shocked to discover that 89% of the males masturbated and 71% of the females did. And this was only high schoola ged students not older teens in university.

Studies of Christian teens who take abstinence pledges show that half of them abandon the pledge within a couple of years. And the couple of years wait is no surprise given the age of the kids who are pledging. One longitudinal study has asked teens about abstinence pledges and the data is not what the advocates of the pledges would like. Again remember these teens have an incentive to lie, especially if they are under pressure to cap their sexuality. This survey found that 52% of the teens taking the pledge “recanted them within a year”. And since they come back and survey the teens over a period of seven years they also find how teens change their stories. By the end of the survey almost three quarters of the teens, who had previously said they took a virginity pledge, were now denying they ever took the pledge. And one out of three teens who had been sexually active when younger later claimed they were virgins.

Follow up surveys showed that 88% of teens who take an abstinence pledge have premarital sex. That is not much different than the population in general. In fact abstinence programs have failed so badly that some Christian ministries have started new programs to encourage “born-again virginity”. This is a pledge for teens who violated the previous pledge but who now say that they are going to stick to for real. One abstinence program says starting over is one “reason many students attend our program.”

The fact is that Christians don’t know how to deal with sexuality and are doing a poor job of it. Consider that the Right-wing Promise Keepers surveyed men who attended their religious cheer rallies. They found that half the men “in attendance were involved with pornography within one week of attending the event.” One week! What would the percentage be a year later? It is also claimed that 37% of fundamentalist ministers say they “struggle” with pornography and over half admitted to viewing it in the past year. And one out six women having an abortion describes herself as a born again Christian.

One evangelical minister admitted in Christianity Today “the statistics on premarital sex among evangelicals hardly distinguish us from all the other people on the face of the earth” and he says he got in trouble with his congregation when he said if Christians want to “uphold the ‘sanctity of marriage’” they should stay out of the courts and concentrate on their own homes. “I cited statistics on divorce rates among evangelical Christians that put us pretty much in a dead heat with society at large. I talked about the high incidence of spousal abuse within conservative churches. I spoke about the widespread estrangement that prevails among many church-going couples.” He says he was told to “stop meddling” and start “condemning what’s happening out there.”

Those of us who have practical experience in fundamentalist circles know that deception is ripe. It is a necessary strategy for survival. Very, very few fundamentalists actually manage to follow their own sexual moral codes, especially when young. (Abstinence gets easier the older you get as the number of willing partners decreases.) And it goes back to what one conservative Christian I know of said: “I don’t want to know what my kids do.”

It is not the substance that is important to them but the illusion. They want gays to go back in the closet more than anything else. If they do they can pretend they don’t exist. They want to return to the fake world they invented where a pregnant teen wasn’t really pregnant she just went away for the summer to visit a sick aunt. Affairs went on but no one talked about it or, at most, only whispered about it behind the backs of those involved. Volcanoes were erupting all over the place but you could pretend that it wasn't happening.

How can a fundamentalist grapple with the issues of human sexuality when sexuality is intimately connected to biology, and when biology is intrinsically involved with evolution, but the fundamentalist is theologically committed to denying evolution? You need to understand the hows and whys of the evolution of human sexuality in order to even begin understanding these issues. But if you deny the reality of evolution then you can’t. That is why I argue that the theological position is one that is fundamentally at war with reality.