I'LL BE A RING-TAILED BABOON

In the following paragraphs, Dawkins gets to the bottom of the "missing link" nonsense. Although in this example, he's talking about a continuous linkage of interbreeding species in space, he's making the point that evolution through time is exactly the same phenomena. No offspring of any parent is born so different that it could not breed with it's parent's generation, if such a thing were not taboo, but by incremental changes, eventually, each species reaches a point where it is so far removed from its origins that it would be unable to interbreed with it's ancestors if, indeed, it could go back in time and procreate. Further, usually so many species have disappeared in time, that the step by step changes in morphology, as exemplified by the morphing coloring of the herring gulls, cannot be clearly demarcated.

"In Britain the herring gull and the lesser black-backed gull are clearly distinct species. Anybody can tell the difference, most easily by the colour of the wing backs. Herring gulls have silver-gray wing backs, lesser black-backs, dark gray, almost black. More to the point, the birds themselves can tell the difference too, for they don't hybridize although they often meet and sometimes even breed alongside one another in mixed colonies. Zoologists therefore feel fully justified in giving them different names, Larus argentatus and Larus fuscus.

"But now here's the interesting observation, and the point of resemblance to the salamanders. If you follow the population of herring gulls westward to North America, then on around the world across Siberia and back to Europe again, you notice a curious fact. The 'herring gulls' as you move round the pole, gradually become less and less like herring gulls and more and more like lesser black-backed gulls until it turns out that our Western European lesser black-backed gulls actually are the other end of a ring-shaped continuum which started with herring gulls. At every stage around the ring, the birds are sufficiently similar to their immediate neighbors in the ring to interbreed with them. Until, that is, the ends of the continuum are reached, and the ring bites itself in the tail. The herring gull and the lesser black-backed gull in Europe never interbreed, although they are linked by a continuous series of interbreeding colleagues all the way round the other side of the world.

"Ring species like the salamanders and the gulls are only showing us in the spatial dimension something that must always happen in the time dimension. Suppose we humans, and the chimpanzees, were a ring species. It could have happened: a ring perhaps moving up one side of the Rift Valley, and down the other side, with two completely separate species coexisting at the southern end of the ring, but an unbroken continuum of interbreeding all the way up and back round the other side. If this were true, what would it do to our attitudes to other species? To apparent discontinuities generally?" —Richard Dawkins, THE ANCESTOR'S TALE, pp. 302-303


A GOOD MOVIE

I recently checked out from the Spokane library a movie called, "The Grand Voyage", a film about the Moslem community in Europe. It reveals very clearly but ambivalently the split between the father and the son in an immigrant population. A young son is required by filial obedience to take his father to Mecca for his hadj. The son has a French girlfriend, a non-Moslem. He has a cell phone by which he communicates to his girl while he drives his father all the way around the Mediterranean, about 2,000 miles. It's an epic adventure, full of technical and human problems and arguments between the generations. It's comic and tragic both. To get some idea of the troubles between them—one night while the son is sleeping, his father leaves the cell phone behind so that his son may no longer call his French girlfriend. Cruel stuff. Both men hurt one another and the father is particularly uncommunicative. In another incident, they have lost their money and the son claims he can no longer eat eggs which is all they can afford, so the father trades a camera for a goat, but before they can slaughter the goat, it escapes and leaves them groaning with hunger, despair and rage. The climax is haunting and satisfying though the father and son still are not reconciled as one would hope even though they more clearly understand one another. Powerful stuff.
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"A lie is an abomination unto the Lord and a very present help in time of trouble." —Adlai Stevenson [Looks like Bush and company have been reading Adlai's words.]

AN ILLUSION, JUST LIKE ALL MENTAL PHENOMENA

We don’t see what we think when we think we see it. Another proof that we have little control over what we become aware of nor when we become aware of it. CLICK HERE!


SIPPING VODKA

This came to me by way of the internet so don't blame me:

A new priest at his first mass was so nervous he could hardly speak. After mass he asked the monsignor how he had done.

The monsignor replied, "When I am worried about getting nervous On the pulpit, I put a glass of vodka next to the water glass. If I start to get nervous, I take a sip."

So next Sunday he took the monsignor's advice. At the beginning of the sermon, he got nervous and took a drink. He proceeded to talk up a storm. Upon his return to his office after the mass, he found the following note on the door:

1) Sip the vodka, don't gulp.

2) There are 10 commandments, not 12.

3) There are 12 disciples, not 10.

4) Jesus was consecrated, not constipated.

5) Jacob wagered his donkey, he did not bet his ass.

6) We do not refer to Jesus Christ as the late J.C.

7) The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are not referred to as Daddy, Junior and the spook.

8) David slew Goliath, he did not kick the shit out of him.

9) When David was hit by a rock and was knocked off his donkey, don't
say he was stoned off his ass.

10) We do not refer to the cross as the "Big T."

11) When Jesus broke the bread at the last supper he said, "take this and eat it for it is my body." He did not say " Eat me" .

12) The Virgin Mary is not called " Mary with the Cherry,.

13) The recommended grace before a meal is not: Rub-A-Dub-Dub thanks for the grub, Yeah God.

14) Next Sunday there will be a taffy pulling contest at ST.Peter's not a peter pulling contest at St. Taffy's.

THE JOHN WAYNE WALK

According to Bette Davis in BETTE DAVIS SPEAKS, John Wayne walked the way he did because he had one inch risers in his boots.


SPEAKING OF CHRISTMAS WARS

Xmas Eve my wife and I went down to see "Syriana" and before that we looked for a place to eat, but we wandered and wandered the streets of our little Bethlehem and could not find an inn which would allow us to rest and eat. Seems everyone was too busy escaping work to be there for our little band to find warmth and shelter. Why this war against us Buddhists and atheists on this holiday of brotherhood amongst the Xtians? Why are we shut out from the inns? But at last we did find one, Fugazzi's, on that cold night and ate well and went to see a movie and, there you go, Hollywood was also there for us when all the Xtians had shut their doors against us. Why are these Christians making war against those of us who don't share their holiday?

I think we should respect their holiday, though. We should end it as being a national holiday, leave them alone to celebrate their days, to say Merry Christmas to one another without our being forced to respond in a way which they find inappropriate. If there were no Christmas holiday, there would be no pressure for anyone to find a correct way to speak. Among themselves, they could speak as they please. No stores would be having sales or trying to entice us all to buy gifts. No stores would have policies about how to greet shoppers, and, as I say, among themselves in their churches and in their homes, they could speak and pray as they please and they wouldn't have to be bothered with the rest of us, nor try to police the language the rest of us speak to speak to them.

Let's support the Xtians on this one and end Xmas as a national holiday. That should also de-commercialize their holiday too, and that would also increase their pleasure because the rest of us would have nothing to say about their holiday.


THE BLUE STATES TAKE CARE OF THEIR OWN

This week (Oct. 10, 2005), US NEWS AND WORLD REPORT, a center/right publication, featured health care and in an interesting chart they listed an "Honor Roll" of the best commercial, medicare and medicaid health care plans around the country. When I looked at it closely, I noted that if the blue/red split means anything, it means that if you live in a Republican red state, you probably aren't being offered the best health care plans. Here are the states and regions with premium health care plans:

Massachusetts (several), Maine, New Hampshire, NY (many), Rhode Island (two), Connecticut (two), Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, Florida, Hawaii, Pennsylvania.

Where are the red states on the list? Where's the compassionate conservatism? Huh? You say, What?


MORE: WHERE GODS COME FROM

"Metaphors like those about celestial campfires or galactic backbones [early ideas about the stars and the Milky Way] were eventually replaced in most human cultures by another idea: The powerful beings in the sky were promoted to gods. They were given names and relatives, and special responsibilities for the cosmic services they were expected to perform. There was a god or goddess for every human concern. Gods ran Nature. Nothing could happen without their direct intervention. If they were happy, there was plenty of food, and humans were happy. But if something displeased the gods—and sometimes it took very little—the consequences were awesome: droughts, storms, wars, earthquakes, volcanoes, epidemics. The gods had to be propitiated, and a vast industry of priests and oracles arose to make the gods less angry. But because the gods were capricious, you could not be sure what they would do. Nature was a mystery. It was hard to understand the world." ( Sagan's COSMOS, p. 173)

Around 540 BCE Hippocrates wrote: "Men think epilepsy divine merely because they do not understand it. But if they called everything divine which they do not understand, why, there would no end of divine things." (COSMOS, p. 179)
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"He was a wise man who invented God," —Plato

"Plato is a bore." —Nietzsche

But what, then, are we to make of Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Man is a god in ruins."

"Religions change; beer and wine remain." —Hervey Allen

[Some of the above quotes are from Robert Byrne's THE 2548 BEST THINGS ANYBODY EVER SAID]

I THINK THIS IS A BIT HYPERBOLIC, BUT
THE LADY WHO WROTE IT IS NO DUMMY

“My point is not to psychoanalyze Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld. How they came to think as they do, and how things look to them are not actually very interesting. What is important is that average Americans come to comprehend how dangerous they are, and how destructive their plans are. Do they actually plan to disenfranchise everyone but their reliable base? Well, yes they do. Can they? If they have control of the electronic voting machines, they can. Do they actually plan for their associates and cronies to skim off vast quantities of the taxpayers’ money? Well, yes they do. Big Pharma, Big Oil, Big Ag, and the major war industries already are doing so, and they have taken plenty from the Indian tribes and foreigners, too Do they actually plan to let New Orleans, that blue spot in a red state, slip away? Looks like it. Do they actually plan to destroy the middle class? They are making good progress--poverty was up twelve percent last year, and the ‘booming economy’ is strangely low on job growth, at least for Americans. The catalogue of their ‘successes’, or, as average Americans might term it, their ‘failures’, is pretty long. Given the sympathy the Democrats afford them, we can stop them in only a few ways, it seems--by constantly bearing witness to their crimes, and prosecuting them if and when we can, by never underestimating the ruthlessness of their motives and the enormity of their goal, by being immune to their habitual public relations tools: fear, accusations of betrayal, false patriotism, appeals to populist and religious resentments, use of political red herrings like gay marriage. Most important, we must make every effort to oversee and guarantee the credibility of our elections.” For more of this essay, consult the Huffington Post.

[Bio from Huffington’s post also] “Jane Smiley is a novelist and essayist. Her novel A Thousand Acres won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1992, and her novel The All True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton won the 1999 Spur Award for Best Novel of the West. Her novel Horse Heaven was short-listed for the Orange Prize in 2002. She has contributed to a wide range of magazines, including The New Yorker, Elle, Outside, The New York Times Magazine, Harper's, The American Prospect, Practical Horseman, The Guardian Sport Monthly, Real Simple, and Playboy.”

By the way, they made a pretty good movie out of Smiley’s novel, A THOUSAND ACRES. Jason Robards was in it and Jessica Lange and, also, Jennifer Jason Leigh. It was about three daughters who had quite a bit of trouble with their old man, played by Robards. I can’t recall who played the third daughter.

C. S. LEWIS’S NIGHTMARE LIFE

You all now know who C. S. Lewis is. He’s the dead Christian whose children’s literature, just like his friend Tolkien, is being made into “The Chronicles of Narnia”, the Disney movie, and Disney is a fitting place for such fantasy to be produced. It’s going to be an interesting film because some very smart and creative people are turning Mr. Lewis’s work into film. Andrew Adamson (Shrek’s director) will make sure that there is a lot more action than the one page battle description Lewis’s book gives us and according to US NEWS’s report, the director has made sure that the “one dimensional” characters Lewis gave us will be puffed out into real people. They’ll become more “humanistic” to be exact.

That’s one of the lessons I took a long time learning in my own literary studies. Real people are not “one dimensional”, but you can’t expect a moralist to give you anything more than one dimensional characters because he always keeps his characters under control so that he can make them puppets for his moralizing. He makes them represent traits rather than complex human things. All moralistic fiction is false fiction. Other, more modern, writers will tell you that sometimes their characters run away with them and take over their own fictional lives. That’s why realistic fiction is richer and reveals deeper and more complex human beings than false, moralistic fiction.

There’s no doubt that C. S. Lewis is about as dysfunctional as a Christian can be and that’s giving him a lot of room to run in. I tried to read his MERE CHRISTIANITY a decade back and when I saw that it was just the usual reasonless reason that reason yields all of us when unguided by scientific methodology or skeptical distrust, I put it down without finishing. His major claim is that Jesus was either a mad man or he must be the son of some god or other. What kind of argument is that? It’s no argument at all and only a fool would base a belief on such an empty piece of sophistry as that, yet Christians are always trying to get atheists to read that book. So. . . ? What is it for you? As for me, I respond “madman”! Who hasn’t met, while volunteering in mental hospitals that poor deluded man or woman who thinks they are god, son of god, or the virgin Mary?

In the recent U.S. NEWS AND WORLD REPORT’s report on C. S. Lewis, we discover his deep disfunction:

[OPEN QUOTE] Complicating the story of this remarkable career is Lewis's highly unusual domestic life. As a 20-year-old demobilized war veteran, returned to Oxford's University College to finish his degree, Jack Lewis began living with a woman 25 years his senior, the mother [I’ve read that he called her ‘Mommy’]—married but separated—of a deceased war chum, Paddy Moore. Starting at least partly as a sexual liaison, Lewis's 30-year menage with the witty, domineering, and thoroughly anti religious Janie King Moore (called "Minto") evolved into something more closely resembling a curious mother-son relationship. In this case, as Lewis's friends all saw, the striking oddity was Minto's manner of treating Jack like a slightly addled household servant, subjecting him to a barrage of menial tasks that made his prodigious achievements—from an Oxford triple first degree in philosophy, classics, and English to some 50 books of criticism, apologetics, and fiction to tireless lecturing and broadcasting—seem all the more remarkable. . . .[CLOSE QUOTE]

As a major in the arts of literature, I can tell you we were many a fine fool who was scholar and writer in that field, so for all his honors, that doesn’t necessarily make Lewis anything more than an eccentric, “bookish” fellow (another “elitist”, ironically, of the kind the Bushites hate) who found sustenance in the empty and dying fields of the literary arts. I recall how badly it hurt me when I read somewhere while pursuing my own degrees in English and literature that all genius had fled the arts because the truest and most powerful poetry was in the scientific view of space and time. True, how true.

I can say that I have shared a feeling or two along the lines of Lewis’s feelings, but I worked through them and out of the dysfunction in which he remained stuck. For example, I do know what it is to feel that I know more about true taste than the next man. See below:

[OPEN QUOTE] Lewis, always a precocious reader, discovered that he was one of the rare students possessed of real aesthetic sense—"good taste," as he more simply put it. Arrival at that knowledge, he wrote, "involves a kind of Fall. The moment good taste knows itself, some of its goodness is lost. Even then, however, it is not necessary to take the further downward step of despising the 'philistines,' who do not share it. Unfortunately I took it." To separate oneself from run-of-the-mill humanity was, for Lewis, the beginning of self-idolatry, the real sin of pride. And such self-worship, he believed, was also the prevailing vice of the modern world. [CLOSE QUOTE] Page 49.

I also fall into a hatred for the American philistines which are the Bushes of the country. I’m sure Lewis, much like Rove whose intelligence Bush undermines when he calls him “Turd blossom”, would find himself enthralled to the Busher, a definite philistine. For me, the answer to my arrogance which Lewis correctly diagnosed for himself, was in telling myself that what I believe is only an opinion but an opinion which is well-informed and an opinion which should remain open to new evidence. Lewis, however, from the looks of it, could not surrender the “authoritarian voice” in his head which demanded that there be but one correct answer to his search. Thus his surrender to Christianity. That’s the “real intellectual pride” in his mental stance that Lewis could not see or surrender. He could not realize that scientific truths are relative and temporary. He could not truly surrender his pride of intellect that made him find an authoritarian unambiguous answer to his dilemma. Here’s more similarities below:

[OPEN QUOTE] Give some credit to the arguments of his devoutly Roman Catholic friend Tolkien as well as to the writings of G. K. Chesterton. But there was also his own intensive reading of medieval literature, which immersed him in a world view in which the foundation of knowledge and truth is faith in a transcendent spiritual reality. Add to this his attraction to the Platonic idea that all true knowledge is remembering and that the object of this remembering is the realm of the ideal forms behind the world of appearances. Even after he became a Christian, Lewis would insist that all religions share with Platonism an appreciation of higher, absolute truth—the Tao, he called it, using the Chinese word for the "way"—and that all equally reject the relativism embedded in so much modern ethical thought. [CLOSE QUOTE] Page 49.

For awhile, I accepted Platonism. That’s what Thomistic philosophy taught me at the University of Dayton, a Catholic university where I was an undergraduate. I also hunted for simple, one-dimensional answers to life’s problems, demanding answers that everyone must OBEY! The problem is that if one is just humanly honest, he discovers that nobody has the one answer that fits all situations. He finds out that to imagine only one answer makes one pushy and implacable. He finds he is arrogant to think that only one answer exists. One is eventually humbled and defeated by the search and surrenders and becomes human, weak and defeatable. You can see that Bush is no humanist. You can see where Bush is stuck in his arrogance.

Finally, here’s the key to Tolkien’s, Lewis’s, all Christianity’s incessant unhappiness through which they bring so much misery into the world for the rest of us few realists.

[OPEN QUOTE] Above all, though, it was probably Lewis's commitment to finding "joy"—a state he had fleetingly experienced at various times in his life, sometimes when coming upon powerful lines of poetry— that brought him the final distance to faith. To Lewis, joy was different from pleasure or happiness, being, in his words, "an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction." Pursuit of joy was the deep constant of his life up until 1929, when he realized that all his strivings were vain efforts to find its real source, which he had until then resisted with all of his intellectual and emotional resources. But then the man who wanted "to call my soul my own" could no longer: 'You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet." And the night he finally submitted, Lewis felt himself to be "the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England." [CLOSE QUOTE]

I know that feeling too. I felt it many a time when I came across a beautiful passage of writing, and I wanted to create things as beautiful as that passage or line of poetry I was reading. It was a painful, lovely, lonely sensation, a desirable longing for pain. It was, if you see it for what it is, a longing for mortification, for the normal Christian masochism of the fundamentalist. If you read that passage closely, you see that Lewis gave in to his wish for mortification and it made him “the most dejected . . . convert in all England”. You can clearly see the masochism in his relationship with the older woman who humiliated him in every way. You can see it in a man like Rove and his swallowing of crap from Bush. Now who would want to follow the Lewis fellow’s guidance? Too bad for him or for anyone who takes his Christian bait.

For me, that feeling was bound up in my self-defeating alcoholism. Once I got a full recovery from alcoholism, I no longer needed the Narnianistic masochism. Most fundamentalist Christians are still stuck in that masochism. They want to dump the whole American dream into their ego-centered vat of stink and suffering.

WHEN YOU SEE ME IN MY GENES, I’M REALLY QUITE SMALL

Okay, so this is common knowledge. Still, I like the clear way Dawkins tells his tales.

[Open quote.] If you think of the genome as a blueprint, you might expect a big, complicated animal like yourself to have more genes than a little mouse, with fewer cells and a less sophisticated brain. But, as I said, that isn't the way genes work. Even the recipe or instruction-book model can be misleading unless it is properly understood. My colleague Matt Ridley develops a different analogy which I find beautifully clear, in his book Nature via Nurture. Most of the genome that we sequence is not the book of instructions, or master computer program, for building a human or a mouse, although parts of it are. If it were, we might indeed expect our program to be larger than the mouse's. But most of the genome is more like the dictionary of words available for writing the book of instructions —or, we shall soon see, the set of subroutines that are called by the master program. As Ridley says, the list of words in David Copperfield is almost the same as the list of words in The Catcher in the Rye. Both draw upon the vocabulary of an educated native speaker of English. What is completely different about the two books is the order in which those words are strung together.

When a person is made, or when a mouse is made, both embryologies draw upon the same dictionary of genes: the normal vocabulary of mammal embryologies. The difference between a person and a mouse comes out of the different orders with which the genes, drawn from that shared mammalian vocabulary, are deployed, the different places in the body where this happens, and its timing. All this is under the control of particular genes whose business it is to turn other genes on, in complicated and exquisitely timed cascades. But such controlling genes constitute only a minority of the genes in the genome.

Don't misunderstand 'order' as meaning the order in which the genes are strung out along the chromosomes. With notable exceptions, which we shall meet in the Fruit Fly's Tale, the order of genes along a chromosome is as arbitrary as the order in which words are listed in a vocabulary —usually alphabetical but, especially in phrase books for foreign travel, sometimes an order of convenience: words useful in airports; words useful when visiting the doctor; words useful for shopping, and so on. The order in which genes are stored on chromosomes is unimportant. What matters is that the cellular machinery finds the right gene when it needs it, and it does this using methods that are becoming increasingly understood. In the Fruit Fly's Tale, we'll return to those few cases, very interesting ones, where the order of genes arranged on the chromosome is non-arbitrary in something like the foreign phrase-book sense. For now, the important point is that what distinguishes a mouse from a man is mostly not the genes themselves, nor the order in which they are stored in the chromosomal 'phrase-book', but the order in which they are turned on: the equivalent of Dickens or Salinger choosing words from the vocabulary of English and arranging them in sentences.

In one respect the analogy of words is misleading. Words are shorter than genes, and some writers have likened each gene to a sentence. But sentences aren't a good analogy, for a different reason. Different books are not put together by permuting a fixed repertoire of sentences. Most sentences are unique. Genes, like words but unlike sentences, are used over and over again in different contexts. A better analogy for a gene than either a word or a sentence is a toolbox subroutine in a computer.

The computer I happen to be familiar with is the Macintosh, and it is some years since I did any programming so I am certainly out of date with the details. Never mind—the principle remains, and it is true of other computers too. The Mac has a toolbox of routines stored in ROM (Read Only Memory) or in System files permanently loaded at startup time. There are thousands of these toolbox routines, each one doing a particular operation, which is likely to be needed, over and over again, in slightly different ways, in different programs. For example the toolbox routine called ObscureCursor hides the cursor from the screen until the next time the mouse is moved. Unseen to you, the ObscureCursor 'gene' is called every time you start typing and the mouse cursor vanishes. Toolbox routines lie behind the familiar features shared by all programs on the Mac (and their imitated equivalents on Windows machines): pulldown menus, scrollbars, shrinkable windows that you can drag around the screen with the mouse, and many others.

The reason all Mac programs have the same 'look and feel' (that very similarity famously became the subject of litigation) is precisely that all Mac programs, whether written by Apple, or by Microsoft, or by anybody else, call the same toolbox routines. If you are a programmer who wishes to move a whole region of the screen in some direction, say following a mouse drag, you would be wasting your time if you didn't invoke the ScrollRect toolbox routine. Or if you want to place a check mark by a pulldown menu item, you would be mad to write your own code to do it. Just write a call of CheckItem into your program, and the job is done for you. If you look at the text of a Mac program, whoever wrote it, in whatever programming language and for whatever purpose, the main thing you'll notice is that it consists largely of invocations of familiar, built-in toolbox routines. The same repertoire of routines is available to all programmers. Different programs string calls of these routines together in different combinations and sequences.

The genome, sitting in the nucleus of every cell, is the toolbox of DNA routines available for performing standard biochemical functions. The nucleus of a cell is like the ROM of a Mac. Different cells, for example liver cells, bone cells and muscle cells, string 'calls' of these routines together in different orders and combinations when performing particular cell functions including growing, dividing, or secreting hormones. Mouse bone cells are more similar to human bone cells than they are to mouse liver cells—they perform very similar operations and need to call the same repertoire of toolbox routines in order to do so. This is the kind of reason why all mammal genomes are approximately the same size as each other—they all need the same toolbox. [Close quote.] —THE ANCESTOR’S TALE, pp. 183-185

SPEAKING OF WAR

Who is turning Christmas into a war zone? Most of us in America are happy we can believe as we wish and pray or not pray as we wish without fear that the government will come knocking down our doors to ask us to take loyalty oaths to it's idea of god. Aint it great? So what's with these unelected Christians who run around like thought police trying to make everyone think and speak exactly as they want them to speak and think? Smacks an awfully lot of those unelected talibans in Afghanistan who ran around making everyone think and believe as they believed when chaos ruled there. These Christian folk are pretty scary people aren't they?


PROBLEMABILITY OF "NUCULAR" PROBLEM

Read to the end of this informative passage about statistical realities, pages 142-143 from THE ANCESTOR'S TALE, and you'll see more than one reason that I include it. The passage begins with a familiar but intriguing explanation of how the ancestors of some species evolved after those ancestors "probably" rafted from one continent to another or island to another in a long ago evolutionary past.

[Open quote.] This is a good moment to repeat that the improbability of a rafting event is very far from being a reason for doubting that it happened. This sounds surprising. Usually, in everyday life, massive improbability is a good reason for thinking that something won't happen. The point about intercontinental rafting of monkeys, or rodents or anything else, is that it only had to happen once, and the time available for it to happen, in order to have momentous consequences, is way outside what we can grasp intuitively. The odds against a floating mangrove bearing a pregnant female monkey and reaching landfall in any one year may be ten thousand to one against. That sounds tantamount to impossible by the lights of human experience. But given 10 million years it becomes almost inevitable. Once it happened, the rest was easy. The lucky female gave birth to a family, which eventually became a dynasty, which eventually branched to become all the species of New World monkeys. It only had to happen once: great things then grew from small beginnings.

In any case, accidental rafting is not nearly so rare as you might think. Small animals are often seen on flotsam. And the animals aren't always small. The green iguana is typically a metre long and can be up to two metres. I quote from a note to Nature by Ellen J. Censky and others:

"On 4 October 1995, at least 15 individuals of the green iguana, Iguana iguana, appeared on the eastern beaches of Anguilla in the Caribbean. This species did not previously occur on the island. They arrived on a mat of logs and uprooted trees, some of which were more than 30 feet long and had large root masses. Local fishermen say the mat was extensive and took two days to pile up on shore. They reported seeing iguanas on both the beach and on logs in the bay."

The iguanas were presumably roosting in trees on some other island, which were uprooted and sent to sea by a hurricane: either Luis, which had raged through the Eastern Caribbean on (5 September, or Marilyn, a fortnight later. Neither hurricane hit Anguilla. Censky and her colleagues subsequently caught or sighted green iguanas on Anguilla, and on an islet half a kilometre off shore. The population still survived on Anguilla in 1998 and included at least one reproductively active female. Iguanas and related lizards, by the way, are especially good at colonising islands, all over the world. Iguanas even occur on Fiji and Tonga, which are much more remote than the West Indian islands.

I can't resist remarking how chilling this kind of 'it only had to happen once' logic becomes when you apply it to contingencies nearer home. The principle of nuclear deterrence, and the only remotely defensible justification for possessing nuclear weapons, is that nobody will dare risk a first strike, for fear of massive retaliation. What are the odds against a mistaken missile launch: a dictator who goes mad; a computer system that malfunctions; an escalation of threats that gets out of hand? The present leader of the largest nuclear power in the world (I am writing in 2003) thinks the word is 'nucular' He has never given any reason to suggest that his wisdom or his intelligence outperforms his literacy. He has demonstrated a predilection for 'preemptive' first strikes. What are the odds against a terrible mistake, initiating Armageddon? A hundred to one against, within any one year? I would be more pessimistic. We came awfully close in 1963, and that was with an intelligent President. In any case, what might happen in Kashmir? Israel? Korea? Even if the odds per year are as low as one in a hundred, a century is a very short time, given the scale of the disaster we are talking about. It only has to happen once. [Close quote.]


SPEAKING OF ILLITERATE PRESIDENTS LIKE BUSH. . .

My current bedside going to sleep reading is BETTE DAVIS SPEAKS by Boze Hadleigh. My carry around in backpack sitting over coffee at Starbucks or Rocket reading book is THE FARFARERS by Farley Mowat. I love his name. This next quarter instead of algebra I'm going to take a philosophy course with Doctor Glen Cosby over at SCC called "Modern Philosophical Problems". The fliers posted on the wall over at the school have the word "god" on them. Should be fun. I wonder what comic book Bush is reading.


MODERN CHRISTIANS

Saw a Dove covered sign plastered on the window of some gas guzzler which read, CHRISTIANS UNITE. VOTE BUSH.

SICKLY AND SLOW

Sorry I missed Monday's entry but a cold came along and took me away to far realms of fever, chills and pain. At my age, some of these colds that come along really hammer me. I told my wife I can understand, if a mere cold can do this to me, how disease can kill, because the body is powerless in the grip of such things. Even cold medicines didn't help much to alleviate the symptoms of this monster cold.


OF GENES AND GENEALOGY

The sophisticated discrimination of observation demonstrated by Richard Dawkins in the following passage from my current reading is precisely why I enjoy reading science. Granted the subtlety of observation demonstrated by a truly masterful creative writer is also awesome, but scientific clarity gets us much closer to a grasp on the realities of the natural world. Now there I go, dismissing my own fields of study in English and Creative Writing when I truly know that emotional realities are quite adequately revealed by good creative writing in a way that no psychological text can do it, that is until the advent of evolutionary psychology.

I also note that I didn't write the page or pages down upon which these paragraphs appear, but they're from THE ANCESTOR'S TALE.

[Open quote.] And now, an important afterthought on evolutionary trees, drawing in lessons from Eve's Tale and the Neanderthal's Tale. We might call it the gibbon's decline and fall of the species tree. We normally assume that we can draw a single evolutionary tree for a set of species. But Eve's Tale told us that different parts of DNA (and thus different parts of an organism) can have different trees. I think this poses an inherent problem with the very idea of species trees. Species are composites of DNA from many different sources. As we saw in Eve's Tale and reiterated in the Neanderthal's Tale, each gene, in fact each DNA letter, takes its own path through history. Each piece of DNA, and each aspect of an organism, can have a different evolutionary tree.

An example of this comes up every day, but familiarity leads us to overlook its message. A Martian taxonomist shown only the genitals of a male human, a female human, and a male gibbon would have no hesitation in classifying the two males as more closely related to each other than either is to the female. Indeed, the gene determining maleness (called SRY has never been in a female body, at least since long before we and the gibbons diverged. Traditionally, morphologists plead a special case for sexual characteristics, to avoid 'nonsensical' classifications. But identical problems arise elsewhere. We saw it previously with ABO blood groups, in Eve's Tale. My B-group gene relates me more closely to a B-group chimpanzee than an A-group human. And it is not just sex genes or blood groups, but all genes and characteristics which are susceptible to this effect, under certain circumstances. The majority of both molecular and morphological characteristics show chimps as our closest relatives. But a sizeable minority show that gorillas are instead, or that chimps are most closely related to gorillas and both are equally close to humans.

This should not surprise us. Different genes are inherited through different routes. The population ancestral to all three species will have been diverse—each gene having many different lineages. It is quite possible for a gene in humans and gorillas to be descended from one lineage, while in chimps it is descended from a more distantly related one. A11 that is needed is for anciently diverged genetic lineages to continue through to the chimp-human split so humans can descend from one and chimps from another.

So we have to admit that a single tree is not the whole story. Species trees can be drawn, but they must be considered a simplified summary of a multitude of gene trees. I can imagine interpreting a species tree in two different ways. The first is the conventional genealogical interpretation. One species is the closest relative of another if, out of all the species considered, it shares the most recent common genealogical ancestor. The second is, I suspect, the way of the future. A species tree can be seen as depicting the relationships among a democratic majority of the genome. It represents the result of a 'majority vote' among gene trees.

The democratic idea—the genetic vote—is the one that I prefer. In this book, all relationships between species should be interpreted in this way. All the phylogenetic trees I present should be viewed in this spirit of genetic democracy, from the relationships between apes to the relationships between the animals, plants, fungi and bacteria. [Close quote.]

FACT: THE GODLY HOLD US BACK FROM HEALTH AND WEALTH

From the Spokesman (Sat. Nov. 26, page, E3): In general higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higer rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies. . . ." —Gregory S. Paul in Journal of Religion and Society, published at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska.

Hey, you guys, here’s the truth which Christians don’t want us to know about unless they’re moderate or liberal Christians. It's scholarly, well researched, and put out from a Christian college. The fundamentalists are going to have to retreat even further into unreality to deny these statistics. That retreat will make them even more dangerous to reasonable people and reasonable discussion. For the original source go here.

[OPEN QUOTE] ISSN: 1522-5658

Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies

A First Look

Gregory S. Paul
Baltimore, Maryland

Introduction

[1] Two centuries ago there was relatively little dispute over the existence of God, or the societally beneficial effect of popular belief in a creator. In the twentieth century extensive secularization occurred in western nations, the United States being the only significant exception (Bishop; Bruce; Gill et al.; Sommerville). If religion has receded in some western nations, what is the impact of this unprecedented transformation upon their populations? Theists often assert that popular belief in a creator is instrumental towards providing the moral, ethical and other foundations necessary for a healthy, cohesive society. Many also contend that widespread acceptance of evolution, and/or denial of a creator, is contrary to these goals. But a cross-national study verifying these claims has yet to be published. That radically differing worldviews can have measurable impact upon societal conditions is plausible according to a number of mainstream researchers (Bainbridge; Barro; Barro and McCleary; Beeghley; Groeneman and Tobin; Huntington; Inglehart and Baker; Putman; Stark and Bainbridge). Agreement with the hypothesis that belief in a creator is beneficial to societies is largely based on assumption, anecdotal accounts, and on studies of limited scope and quality restricted to one population (Benson et al.; Hummer et al.; Idler and Kasl; Stark and Bainbridge). A partial exception is given by Barro and McCleary, who correlated economic growth with rates of belief in the afterlife and church attendance in numerous nations (while Kasman and Reid [2004] commented that Europe does not appear to be suffering unduly from its secularization). It is surprising that a more systematic examination of the question has not been previously executed since the factors required to do so are in place. The twentieth century acted, for the first time in human history, as a vast Darwinian global societal experiment in which a wide variety of dramatically differing social-religious-political-economic systems competed with one another, with varying degrees of success. A quantitative cross-national analysis is feasible because a large body of survey and census data on rates of religiosity, secularization, and societal indicators has become available in the prosperous developed democracies including the United States.

[2] This study is a first, brief look at an important subject that has been almost entirely neglected by social scientists. The primary intent is to present basic correlations of the elemental data. Some conclusions that can be gleaned from the plots are outlined. This is not an attempt to present a definitive study that establishes cause versus effect between religiosity, secularism and societal health. It is hoped that these original correlations and results will spark future research and debate on the issue.

The Belief that Religiosity is Socially Beneficial

[3] As he helped initiate the American experiment Benjamin Franklin stated that “religion will be a powerful regulator of our actions, give us peace and tranquility within our minds, and render us benevolent, useful and beneficial to others” (Isaacson: 87-88). When the theory of biological evolution removed the need for a supernatural creator concerns immediately arose over the societal implications of widespread abandonment of faith (Desmond and Moore; Numbers). In 1880 the religious moralist Dostoyevsky penned the famous warning that “if God does not exist, then everything is permissible.” Even so, in Europe the issue has not been a driving focus of public and political dispute, especially since the world wars.

[4] Although its proponents often claim that anti-evolution creationism<1> is scientific, it has abjectly failed in the practical realms of mainstream science and hi-tech industry (Ayala et al.; Crews; Cziko; Dawkins, 1996, 1997; Dennett; Gould; Koza et al.; L. Lane; Miller; Paul and Cox; Shanks; Wise; Young and Edis). The continuing popularity of creationism in America indicates that it is in reality a theistic social-political movement partly driven by concerns over the societal consequences of disbelief in a creator (Forrest and Gross; Numbers). The person most responsible for politicizing the issue in America, evangelical Christian W. J. Bryan,<2> expressed relatively little interest in evolution until the horrors of WW I inspired him to blame the scientific revolution that invented chemical warfare and other modern ills for “preaching that man has a brute ancestry and eliminating the miraculous and the supernatural from the Bible” (Numbers: 178).

[5] In the United States many conservative theists consider evolutionary science a leading contributor to social dysfunction because it is amoral or worse, and because it inspires disbelief in a moral creator (Colson and Pearcey; Eve and Harrold; Johnson; Numbers; Pearcey; Schroeder). The original full title for the creationist Discovery Institute was the Discovery Institute for the Renewal of Science and Culture (a title still applied to a division), and the institute’s mission challenges “materialism on specifically scientific grounds” with the intent of reversing “some of materialism’s destructive cultural consequences.” The strategy for achieving these goals is the “wedge” strategy to insert intelligent design creationism into mainstream academe and subsequently destroy Darwinian science (Johnson; Forrest and Gross note this effort is far behind schedule). The Discovery Institute and the less conservative, even more lavishly funded pro-theistic Templeton Foundation fund research into the existence and positive societal influence of a creator (Harris et al.; Holden). In 2000 the Discovery Institute held a neocreationist seminar for members of Congress (Applegate). Politically and socially powerful conservatives have deliberately worked to elevate popular concerns over a field of scientific and industrial research to such a level that it qualifies as a major societal fear factor. The current House majority leader T. DeLay contends that high crime rates and tragedies like the Columbine assault will continue as long schools teach children “that they are nothing but glorified apes who have evolutionized [sic] out of some primordial soup of mud” (DeLay and Dawson). Today’s leaders of the world’s largest Christian denomination, the Catholic Church, share a dim view of the social impact of evolution. In his inauguration speech, Benedict XVI lauded the benefits of belief in a creator and contended, “we are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution.” A leading church cleric and theologian (Schonborn) proclaimed that “the overwhelming evidence for purpose and design” refutes the mindless creation of Darwinian natural selection (also Dean, Dean and Goodstein).

[6] Agreement with the hypothesis that popular religiosity is societally advantageous is not limited to those opposed to evolutionary science, or to conservatives. The basic thesis can be held by anyone who believes in a benign creator regardless of the proposed mode of creation, or the believer’s social-political worldview. In broad terms the hypothesis that popular religiosity is socially beneficial holds that high rates of belief in a creator, as well as worship, prayer and other aspects of religious practice, correlate with lowering rates of lethal violence, suicide, non-monogamous sexual activity, and abortion, as well as improved physical health. Such faith-based, virtuous “cultures of life” are supposedly attainable if people believe that God created them for a special purpose, and follow the strict moral dictates imposed by religion. At one end of the spectrum are those who consider creator belief helpful but not necessarily critical to individuals and societies. At the other end the most ardent advocates consider persons and people inherently unruly and ungovernable unless they are strictly obedient to the creator (as per Barna; Colson and Pearcey; Johnson; Pearcey; Schroeder). Barro labels societal advantages that are associated with religiosity “spiritual capital,” an extension of Putman’s concept of “social capital.” The corresponding view that western secular materialism leads to “cultures of death” is the official opinion of the Papacy, which claims, “the proabortion culture is especially strong precisely where the Church’s teaching on contraception is rejected” (John Paul II). In the United States popular support for the cultural and moral superiority of theism is so extensive that popular disbelief in God ranks as another major societal fear factor.

[7] The media (Stepp) gave favorable coverage to a report that children are hardwired towards, and benefit from, accepting the existence of a divine creator on an epidemiological and neuro-scientific basis (Benson et al.). Also covered widely was a Federal report that the economic growth of nations positively responds to high rates of belief in hell and heaven.<3> Faith-based charities and education are promoted by the Bush administration<4> and religious allies and lobbies as effective means of addressing various social problems (Aronson; Goodstein). The conservative Family Research Council proclaims, “believing that God is the author of life, liberty and the family, FRC promotes the Judeo-Christian worldview as the basis for a just, free and stable society.” Towards the liberal end of the political spectrum presidential candidate Al Gore supported teaching both creationism and evolution, his running mate Joe Leiberman asserted that belief in a creator is instrumental to “secure the moral future of our nation, and raise the quality of life for all our people,” and presidential candidate John Kerry emphasized his religious values in the latter part of his campaign.

[8] With surveys showing a strong majority from conservative to liberal believing that religion is beneficial for society and for individuals, many Americans agree that their church-going nation is an exceptional, God blessed, “shining city on the hill” that stands as an impressive example for an increasingly skeptical world. But in the other developed democracies religiosity continues to decline precipitously and avowed atheists often win high office, even as clergies warn about adverse societal consequences if a revival of creator belief does not occur (Reid, 2001).

Procedures and Primary Data Sources

[9] Levels of religious and nonreligious belief and practice, and indicators of societal health and dysfunction, have been most extensively and reliably surveyed in the prosperous developed democracies (Figures 1-9). Similar data is often lacking for second and third world nations, or is less reliable. The cultural and economic similarity of the developed democracies minimizes the variability of factors outside those being examined. The approximately 800 million mostly middle class adults and children act as a massive epidemiological experiment that allows hypotheses that faith in a creator or disbelief in evolution improves or degrades societal conditions to be tested on an international scale. The extent of this data makes it potentially superior to results based on much smaller sample sizes. Data is from the 1990s, most from the middle and latter half of the decade, or the early 2000s.

[10] Data sources for rates of religious belief and practice as well as acceptance of evolution are the 1993 Environment I (Bishop) and 1998 Religion II polls conducted by the International Social Survey Program (ISSP), a cross-national collaboration on social science surveys using standard methodologies that currently involves 38 nations. The last survey interviewed approximately 23,000 people in almost all (17) of the developed democracies; Portugal is also plotted as an example of a second world European democracy. Results for western and eastern Germany are combined following the regions’ populations. England is generally Great Britain excluding Northern Ireland; Holland is all of the Netherlands. The results largely agree with national surveys on the same subjects; for example, both ISSP and Gallup indicate that absolute plus less certain believers in a higher power are about 90% of the U.S. population. The plots include Bible literalism and frequency of prayer and service attendance, as well as absolute belief in a creator, in order to examine religiosity in terms of ardency, conservatism, and activities. Self-reported rates of religious attendance and practice may be significantly higher than actual rates (Marler and Hadaway), but the data is useful for relative comparisons, especially when it parallels results on religious belief. The high rates of church attendance reported for the Swiss appear anomalous compared to their modest levels of belief and prayer.

[11] Data on aspects of societal health and dysfunction are from a variety of well-documented sources including the UN Development Programme (2000). Homicide is the best indicator of societal violence because of the extremity of the act and its unique contribution to levels of societal fear, plus the relatively reliable nature of the data (Beeghley; Neapoletan). Youth suicide (WHO) was examined in order to avoid cultural issues related to age and terminal illness. Data on STDs, teen pregnancy and birth (Panchaud et al.; Singh and Darroch) were accepted only if the compilers concluded that they were not seriously underreported, except for the U.S. where under reporting does not exaggerate disparities with the other developed democracies because they would only close the gaps. Teen pregnancy was examined in a young age class in which marriage is infrequent. Abortion data (Panchaud et al.) was accepted only from those nations in which it is as approximately legal and available as in the U.S. In order to minimize age related factors, rates of dysfunction were plotted within youth cohorts when possible.

[12] Regression analyses were not executed because of the high variability of degree of correlation, because potential causal factors for rates of societal function are complex, and because it is not the purpose of this initial study to definitively demonstrate a causal link between religion and social conditions. Nor were multivariate analyses used because they risk manipulating the data to produce errant or desired results,<5> and because the fairly consistent characteristics of the sample automatically minimizes the need to correct for external multiple factors (see further discussion below). Therefore correlations of raw data are used for this initial examination.

Results

[13] Among the developed democracies absolute belief in God, attendance of religious services and Bible literalism vary over a dozenfold, atheists and agnostics five fold, prayer rates fourfold, and acceptance of evolution almost twofold. Japan, Scandinavia, and France are the most secular nations in the west, the United States is the only prosperous first world nation to retain rates of religiosity otherwise limited to the second and third worlds (Bishop; PEW). Prosperous democracies where religiosity is low (which excludes the U.S.) are referred to below as secular developed democracies.

[14] Correlations between popular acceptance of human evolution and belief in and worship of a creator and Bible literalism are negative (Figure 1). The least religious nation, Japan, exhibits the highest agreement with the scientific theory, the lowest level of acceptance is found in the most religious developed democracy, the U.S.

[15] A few hundred years ago rates of homicide were astronomical in Christian Europe and the American colonies (Beeghley; R. Lane). In all secular developed democracies a centuries long-term trend has seen homicide rates drop to historical lows (Figure 2). The especially low rates in the more Catholic European states are statistical noise due to yearly fluctuations incidental to this sample, and are not consistently present in other similar tabulations (Barcley and Tavares). Despite a significant decline from a recent peak in the 1980s (Rosenfeld), the U.S. is the only prosperous democracy that retains high homicide rates, making it a strong outlier in this regard (Beeghley; Doyle, 2000). Similarly, theistic Portugal also has rates of homicides well above the secular developed democracy norm. Mass student murders in schools are rare, and have subsided somewhat since the 1990s, but the U.S. has experienced many more (National School Safety Center) than all the secular developed democracies combined. Other prosperous democracies do not significantly exceed the U.S. in rates of nonviolent and in non-lethal violent crime (Beeghley; Farrington and Langan; Neapoletan), and are often lower in this regard. The United States exhibits typical rates of youth suicide (WHO), which show little if any correlation with theistic factors in the prosperous democracies (Figure 3). The positive correlation between pro-theistic factors and juvenile mortality is remarkable, especially regarding absolute belief, and even prayer (Figure 4). Life spans tend to decrease as rates of religiosity rise (Figure 5), especially as a function of absolute belief. Denmark is the only exception. Unlike questionable small-scale epidemiological studies by Harris et al. and Koenig and Larson, higher rates of religious affiliation, attendance, and prayer do not result in lower juvenile-adult mortality rates on a cross-national basis.<6>

[16] Although the late twentieth century STD epidemic has been curtailed in all prosperous democracies (Aral and Holmes; Panchaud et al.), rates of adolescent gonorrhea infection remain six to three hundred times higher in the U.S. than in less theistic, pro-evolution secular developed democracies (Figure 6). At all ages levels are higher in the U.S., albeit by less dramatic amounts. The U.S. also suffers from uniquely high adolescent and adult syphilis infection rates, which are starting to rise again as the microbe’s resistance increases (Figure 7). The two main curable STDs have been nearly eliminated in strongly secular Scandinavia. Increasing adolescent abortion rates show positive correlation with increasing belief and worship of a creator, and negative correlation with increasing non-theism and acceptance of evolution; again rates are uniquely high in the U.S. (Figure 8). Claims that secular cultures aggravate abortion rates (John Paul II) are therefore contradicted by the quantitative data. Early adolescent pregnancy and birth have dropped in the developed democracies (Abma et al.; Singh and Darroch), but rates are two to dozens of times higher in the U.S. where the decline has been more modest (Figure 9). Broad correlations between decreasing theism and increasing pregnancy and birth are present, with Austria and especially Ireland being partial exceptions. Darroch et al. found that age of first intercourse, number of sexual partners and similar issues among teens do not exhibit wide disparity or a consistent pattern among the prosperous democracies they sampled, including the U.S. A detailed comparison of sexual practices in France and the U.S. observed little difference except that the French tend - contrary to common impression - to be somewhat more conservative (Gagnon et al.).

Discussion

[17] The absence of exceptions to the negative correlation between absolute belief in a creator and acceptance of evolution, plus the lack of a significant religious revival in any developed democracy where evolution is popular, cast doubt on the thesis that societies can combine high rates of both religiosity and agreement with evolutionary science. Such an amalgamation may not be practical. By removing the need for a creator evolutionary science made belief optional. When deciding between supernatural and natural causes is a matter of opinion large numbers are likely to opt for the latter. Western nations are likely to return to the levels of popular religiosity common prior to the 1900s only in the improbable event that naturalistic evolution is scientifically overturned in favor of some form of creationist natural theology that scientifically verifies the existence of a creator. Conversely, evolution will probably not enjoy strong majority support in the U.S. until religiosity declines markedly.

[18] In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy, and abortion in the prosperous democracies (Figures 1-9). The most theistic prosperous democracy, the U.S., is exceptional, but not in the manner Franklin predicted. The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developed democracies, sometimes spectacularly so, and almost always scores poorly. The view of the U.S. as a “shining city on the hill” to the rest of the world is falsified when it comes to basic measures of societal health. Youth suicide is an exception to the general trend because there is not a significant relationship between it and religious or secular factors. No democracy is known to have combined strong religiosity and popular denial of evolution with high rates of societal health. Higher rates of non-theism and acceptance of human evolution usually correlate with lower rates of dysfunction, and the least theistic nations are usually the least dysfunctional. None of the strongly secularized, pro-evolution democracies is experiencing high levels of measurable dysfunction. In some cases the highly religious U.S. is an outlier in terms of societal dysfunction from less theistic but otherwise socially comparable secular developed democracies. In other cases, the correlations are strongly graded, sometimes outstandingly so.

[19] If the data showed that the U.S. enjoyed higher rates of societal health than the more secular, pro-evolution democracies, then the opinion that popular belief in a creator is strongly beneficial to national cultures would be supported. Although they are by no means utopias, the populations of secular democracies are clearly able to govern themselves and maintain societal cohesion. Indeed, the data examined in this study demonstrates that only the more secular, pro-evolution democracies have, for the first time in history, come closest to achieving practical “cultures of life” that feature low rates of lethal crime, juvenile-adult mortality, sex related dysfunction, and even abortion. The least theistic secular developed democracies such as Japan, France, and Scandinavia have been most successful in these regards. The non-religious, pro-evolution democracies contradict the dictum that a society cannot enjoy good conditions unless most citizens ardently believe in a moral creator. The widely held fear that a Godless citizenry must experience societal disaster is therefore refuted. Contradicting these conclusions requires demonstrating a positive link between theism and societal conditions in the first world with a similarly large body of data - a doubtful possibility in view of the observable trends.

Conclusion

[20] The United States’ deep social problems are all the more disturbing because the nation enjoys exceptional per capita wealth among the major western nations (Barro and McCleary; Kasman; PEW; UN Development Programme, 2000, 2004). Spending on health care is much higher as a portion of the GDP and per capita, by a factor of a third to two or more, than in any other developed democracy (UN Development Programme, 2000, 2004). The U.S. is therefore the least efficient western nation in terms of converting wealth into cultural and physical health. Understanding the reasons for this failure is urgent, and doing so requires considering the degree to which cause versus effect is responsible for the observed correlations between social conditions and religiosity versus secularism. It is therefore hoped that this initial look at a subject of pressing importance will inspire more extensive research on the subject. Pressing questions include the reasons, whether theistic or non-theistic, that the exceptionally wealthy U.S. is so inefficient that it is experiencing a much higher degree of societal distress than are less religious, less wealthy prosperous democracies. Conversely, how do the latter achieve superior societal health while having little in the way of the religious values or institutions? There is evidence that within the U.S. strong disparities in religious belief versus acceptance of evolution are correlated with similarly varying rates of societal dysfunction, the strongly theistic, anti-evolution south and mid-west having markedly worse homicide, mortality, STD, youth pregnancy, marital and related problems than the northeast where societal conditions, secularization, and acceptance of evolution approach European norms (Aral and Holmes; Beeghley, Doyle, 2002). It is the responsibility of the research community to address controversial issues and provide the information that the citizens of democracies need to chart their future courses.

Figures (return)

Indicators of societal dysfunction and health as functions of percentage rates of theistic and non-theistic belief and practice in 17 first world developed democracies and one second world democracy. ISSP questions asked: I know God really exists and I have no doubt about it = absolutely believe in God; 2-3 times a month + once a week or more = attend religious services at least several times a month; several times a week - several times a day = pray at least several times a week; the Bible is the actual word of God and it is to be taken literally, word for word = Bible literalists; human beings [have] developed from earlier species of animals = accept human evolution; I don’t know whether there is a God and I don’t believe there is a way to find out + I don’t believe in God = agnostics and other atheists.

[You’ll have to go to the original article to get the charts that go with these figures. Sorry.]

Figure 1
Figure 2
Figure 3
Figure 4
Figure 5
Figure 6
Figure 7
Figure 8
Figure 9

Legend

A = Australia
C = Canada
D = Denmark
E = Great Britain
F = France
G = Germany
H = Holland
I = Ireland
J = Japan
L = Switzerland
N = Norway
P = Portugal
R = Austria
S = Spain
T = Italy
U = United States
W = Sweden
Z = New Zealand

Bibliography [CLOSE QUOTE]

[An extensive bibliography was part of the original article, but I couldn't get it all to copy into this blogsite. Go to the original article for the bibliography. Geo]

ATHEISTS IN FOXHOLES AND OTHER THINGS FROM THE BRIGHTS NETWORK:

I’m putting this into the blog just to offer a change of pace. Sometimes I do branch out. The following three articles come from the Brights Network monthly communication to its members. The brights are a group of people who claim intellectual credentials. Some are atheists. Others are not. The third piece below is something we have discussed in our INLAND NORTHWEST FREETHOUGHT SOCIETY meetings. We want to be positive too and to figure out ways to do something other than be on the defensive. I do believe that encouraging classes in rational thinking and objective approaches to reality would help. I thought our essay contest which went nowhere was a step in the right direction, but to get actually no response for the effort, no matter how little the effort, was disappointing and one reason why I didn’t want to pursue it further. Anyhow, all three of the pieces below are cut and pasted straight from the internet:


THE "ATHEISTS IN FOXHOLES" RALLY (USA)

Co-Director Paul Geisert, a peacetime veteran with a service disability, attended an honor and recognition rally in Washington D.C. on Veterans Day. Invited to the event to represent The Brights' Net, he made two very short presentations and participated with the "Camp Quest Singers" as they sang very new and different wording (penned by Enthusiastic Bright Edwin Kagin) to familiar army, navy, and marine tunes.

The point of the rally was to refute the well-worn slur that "there are no atheists in foxholes" (or in danger zones, disasters, etc.). About two hundred veterans showed up to be acknowledged by representatives of most national freethought organizations. To read more about the event, go to:


THE DECEMBER DILEMMA (USA)

A month with various holidays in close proximity carries potential to heighten discord in any community, and school activities are often a fount of dispute in December. The antidote to such conflict involves schools' (1) abiding by the standard of legal neutrality in programs (no privileging of any religion over others, or of religion over nonreligion), (2) pursuing sound curriculum, and (3) clearly upholding a fundamental commitment to civic pluralism.

Parents and Teachers:
Cognizance of what is "okay or not okay" in tax-supported schools with respect to religious celebrations and school programs and activities can be helpful. For a general summary written for teachers regarding matters that fall within classrooms, follow the URL below. Then click on the topic "Holidays" in the left border. You may also be interested in clicking on "Subject Areas" regarding holiday music. The website is designed for professional educators, but parents will find useful information as well. See pertinent material at:



LOOKING ON THE BRIGHT SIDE OF LIFE

That was the title of Mynga's talk at the London Brights' Meetup. Her talk was aimed at those making their way in life as Brights and working to advance the three civic aims stated on the , home page at

Employing a contrast of two real and supernatural-free persons (both keen on being accepted in their societies), she characterized one as an "emitter" (pursuing life's journey in ways consistent with his sweeping world view) and the other as a person able to proceed only as a "reflector" of the culturally monotheistic society in which he/she lived. Mynga remarked on how unproductive was the "godless person" compared to the one who shone his own light. The one can consistently and constructively act within society day in and day out, individually if need be, while the other languishes at the margins of society, holding forth only in dissent and disapproval.

Surely one can expend time railing against the harm of religion and blind faith, but Mynga challenged those present to go further, to advance and pursue measures that "work on the Bright side." Her talk favored acting as contributors to augment a pluralistic society, pursuing concrete actions well-attuned to principles stated at the web site. She urged participation in varied ways to strengthen civil and secular institutions.

In education, she advocated tangible actions to secure sound programs above endless griping about irrationality. Brights can focus on ways to fortify programs and advance the skills and experiences that produce well-rounded and critical thinking citizens. Regarding rearing of youth, she encouraged parents to "emit" their encompassing world view as opposed to accepting and "reflecting" the society's narrow view of them as godless nonbelievers. Nurturing skepticism, critical analysis, inquisitiveness, and "out of left-field" thinking are all part of the "Bright side" picture.

FAREED ZAKARIA SAYS. . .

“... if Congress did not make permanent just one of its tax cuts, the repeal of estate taxes, it would generate 290 billion over the next decade. That itself pays for most of Katrina and Iraq.”

Also, he writes in the same essay, “The U.S. Congress is a national embarrassment, except that no one is embarrassed. There are a few men of conscience left, like John McCain, but McCain's pleas against pork seem to have absolutely no effect. They are beginning to have the feel of a quaint hobby, like collecting exotic stamps.

Today's Republicans believe in pork, but they don't believe in government. So we have the largest government in history but one that is weak and dysfunctional. Public spending is a cynical game of buying votes or campaign contributions, an utterly corrupt process run by lobbyists and special interests with no concern for the national interest. So we shovel out billions on "Homeland Security" to stave off nonexistent threats to Wisconsin, Wyoming and Montana while New York and Los Angeles remain unprotected. We mismanage crises with a crazy-quilt patchwork of federal, local and state authorities—and sing paeans to federalism to explain our incompetence. We denounce sensible leadership and pragmatism because they mean compromise and loss of ideological purity. Better to be right than to get Iraq right.” —Fareed Zakaria, NEWSWEEK, September 26, 2005, p. 38


SOMEONE SAID TODAY ABOUT THE FINE ART OF ROVE-LYING

Someone on Air America radio today said that Rove has raised lying to such a level that lying was never more honored in American history. Lying is a Republican art. So how come Bush’s base supports such lying?

I’ve said this at least three times. One more time won’t hurt anything. And this has a bit of a different twist. Bush supporters accept Republican lies because they can’t recognize lies when they encounter them. This is because in church communities, where Bush has his largest base, lying is a highly polished art form which is encouraged by the very atmosphere which fundamentalism and evangelism create. Within church communities, the need to put on a front is stronger than in most of middle-class America. We all lie all the time so I’m not being smug here, but I am pointing out that in the holier than thou atmosphere of hyper-religious communities, the need to lie is a polished art, and in order to be able to lie well, one must believe one’s own lies. In short, studies demonstrate that the very best liars believe their own lies, and where lying is a necessity, there, lying will become a finely honed art. Scary stuff, eh?
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"The only thing that saves us from the beaucracy is its inefficiency." —Eugene McCarthy (that fine old liberal from the days when America was a "respected" world leader)

"We have a crisis of leadership in this country. Where are the Washingtons, the Jeffersons, and the Jacksons? I'll tell you where they are—they're playing professional football and baseball." —author unknown

READ DEEPLY. YOU'RE A ROBOT. DON'T BE BLUE. SO AM I

The following passage is a complete section from Richard Dawkin's book, THE ANCESTOR'S TALE. So clear, so beautiful and, I believe, if read with care, a description of just how inhibited all animal freedoms are, specially the paragraph which relates the situation of beavers raised in a cage.

You know, I like to imagine I'm free, and I say that I started to get interested in all these matters when I picked up the book, CONSCIOUSNESS EXPLAINED by Daniel Dennett, as if I made a choice to pick that book up. Yet, what led me to that book. An accident? Or something else that had flown into my consciousness. Was it the book that I picked up in my 20s, called, THE ORIGINS OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND? Why did I pick that book up? What was in my head when I picked it up, what trigger? How had the synaptical pattern which caused me to pick up the book arrived in my head? Back, back, back the search goes to find the original synapse, or the formation of that connection, which led me to pick up the book. If nothing else, all the synaptical connections in my brain commence in pre-conscious experiences even as far back as to my experiences in my mother's womb.

This is a long one, more than 2,000 words, but fascinating unless you're a fundamentalist Christian and have all the answers anyway.

[Open quote.] THE BEAVER'S TALE

A 'PHENOTYPE' is that which is influenced by genes. That pretty much means everything about a body. But there is a subtlety of emphasis which flows from the word's etymology. "Phaino" is Greek for 'show', 'bring to light, 'make appear', 'exhibit', 'uncover', 'disclose', 'manifest' The phenotype is the external and visible manifestation of the hidden genotype. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as 'the sum total of the observable features of an individual, regarded as the consequence of the interaction of its genotype with its environment' but it precedes this definition by a subtler one: 'A type of organism distinguishable from others by observable features.'

Darwin saw natural selection as the survival and reproduction of certain types of organism at the expense of rival types of organism. 'Types' here doesn't mean groups or races or species. In the subtitle of The Origin of Species, the much misunderstood phrase 'preservation of favoured races' most emphatically does not mean races in the normal sense. Darwin was writing before genes were named or properly understood, but in modern terms what he meant by 'favoured races' was 'possessors of favoured genes'.

Selection drives evolution only to the extent that the alternative types owe their differences to genes: if the differences are not inherited, differential survival has no impact on future generations. For a Darwinian, phenotypes are the manifestations by which genes are judged by selection. When we say that a beaver's tail is flattened to serve as a paddle, we mean that genes whose phenotypic expression included a flattening of the tail survived by virtue of that phenotype. Individual beavers with the flat-tailed phenotype survived as a consequence of being better swimmers; the responsible genes survived inside them, and were passed on to new generations of flat-tailed beavers.

At the same time, genes that expressed themselves in huge, sharp incisor teeth capable of gnawing through wood also survived. Individual beavers are built by permutations of genes in the beaver gene pool. Genes have survived through generations of ancestral beavers because they have proved good at collaborating with other genes in the beaver gene pool, to produce phenotypes that flourish in the beaver way of life.

At the same time again, alternative cooperatives of genes are surviving in other gene pools, making bodies that survive by prosecuting other life trades: the tiger cooperative, the camel cooperative, the cockroach co-operative, the carrot cooperative. My first book, The Selfish Gene, Could equally have been called The Cooperative Gene without a word of the book itself needing to be changed. Indeed, this might have saved some misunderstanding (some of a book's most vocal critics are content to read the book by title only). Selfishness and cooperation are two sides of a Darwinian coin. Each gene promotes its own selfish welfare, by cooperating with the other genes in the sexually stirred gene pool which is that gene s environment, to build shared bodies.

But beaver genes have special phenotypes quite unlike those of tigers, camels or carrots. Beavers have lake phenotypes, caused by dam phenotypes. A lake is an extended phenotype. The extended phenotype is a special kind of phenotype, and it is the subject of the rest of this tale, which is a brief summary of my book of that title. It is interesting not only in its own right but because it helps us to understand how conventional phenotypes develop. It will turn out that there is no great difference of principle between an extended phenotype like a beaver lake, and a conventional phenotype like a flattened beaver tail.

How can it possibly be right to use the same word, phenotype, on the one hand for a tail of flesh, bone and blood, and on the other hand for a body of still water, stemmed in a valley by a dam? The answer is that both are manifestations of beaver genes; both have evolved to become better and better at preserving those genes; both are linked to the genes they express by a similar chain of embryological causal links. Let me explain.

The embryological processes by which beaver genes shape beaver tails are not known in detail, but we know the kind of thing that goes on. Genes in every cell of a beaver behave as if they 'know' what kind of cell they are in. Skin cells have the same genes as bone cells, but different genes are switched on in the two tissues. We saw this in the Mouse's Tale. Genes, in each of the different kinds of cells in a beaver's tail, behave as if they 'know' where they are. They cause their respective cells to interact with each other in such a way that the whole tail assumes its characteristically hairless flattened form. There are formidable difficulties in working out how they 'know' which part of the tail they are in, but we understand in principle how these difficulties are overcome; and the solutions, like the difficulties themselves, will be of the same general kind when we turn to the development of tiger feet, camel humps and carrot leaves.

They are also of the same general kind in the development of the neuronal and neurochemical mechanisms that drive behavior. Copulatory behavior in beavers is instinctive. A male beaver's brain orchestrates, via hormonal secretions into the blood, and via nerves controlling muscles tugging on artfully hinged bones, a symphony of movements. The result is precise coordination with a female, who herself is moving harmoniously in her own symphony of movements, equally carefully orchestrated to facilitate the union. You may be sure that such exquisite neuromuscular music has been honed and perfected by generations of natural selection. And that means selection of genes. In beaver gene pools, genes survived whose phenotypic effects on the brains, the nerves, the muscles, the glands, the bones, and the sense organs of generations of ancestral beavers improved the chances of those very genes passing through those very generations to arrive in the present.

Genes 'for' behaviour survive in the same kind of way as genes 'for' bones, and skin. Do you protest that there aren't 'really' any genes for behavior; only genes for the nerves and muscles that make the behavior? You are still wrecked among heathen dreams. Anatomical structures have no special status over behavioural ones, where 'direct' effects of genes are concerned. Genes are 'really' or 'directly' responsible only for proteins or other immediate biochemical effects. All other effects, whether on anatomical or behavioural phenotypes, are indirect. But the distinction between direct and indirect is vacuous. What matters in the Darwinian sense is that differences between genes are rendered as differences in phenotypes. It is only differences that natural selection cares about. And, in very much the same way, it is differences that geneticists care about.

Remember the 'subtler' definition of phenotype in the Oxford English Dictionary: 'A type of organism distinguishable from others by observable features'. The key word is distinguishable. A gene 'for' brown eyes is not a gene that directly codes the synthesis of a brown pigment. Well, it might happen to be, but that is not the point. The point about a gene 'for' brown eyes is that its possession makes a difference to eye colour when compared with some alternative version of the gene—an 'allele' The chains of causation that culminate in the difference between one phenotype and another, say between brown and blue eyes, are usually long and tortuous. The gene makes a protein which is different from the protein made by the alternative gene. The protein has an enzymatic effect on cellular chemistry, which affects X which affects Y which affects Z which affects . . . a long chain of intermediate causes which affects . . . the phenotype of interest. The allele makes the difference when its phenotype is compared with the corresponding phenotype, at the end of the correspondingly long chain of causation that proceeds from the alternative allele. Gene differences cause phenotypic differences. Gene changes cause phenotypic changes. In Darwinian evolution alleles are selected, vis a vis alternative alleles, by virtue of the differences in their effects on phenotypes.

The beaver's point is that this comparison between phenotypes can happen anywhere along the chain of causation. All intermediate links along the chain are true phenotypes, and any one of them could constitute the phenotypic effect by which a gene is selected: it only has to be 'visible' to natural selection, nobody cares whether it is visible to us. There is no such thing as the 'ultimate' link in the chain: no final definitive phenotype. Any consequence of a change in alleles, anywhere in the world, however indirect and however long the chain of causation, is fair game for natural selection, so long as it impinges on the survival of the responsible allele, relative to its rivals.

Now, let's look at the embryological chain of causation leading to dam-building in beavers. Dam building behaviour is a complicated stereotypy, built into the brain like a fine-tuned clockwork mechanism. Or, as if to follow the history of clocks into the electronic age, dam building is hard wired in the brain. I have seen a remarkable film of captive beavers imprisoned in a bare, unfurnished cage, with no water and no wood. The beavers enacted, 'in a vacuum' all the stereotyped movements normally seen in natural building behaviour when there is real wood and real water. They seem to be placing virtual wood into a virtual dam wall, pathetically trying to build a ghost wall with ghost sticks, all on the hard, dry, flat floor of their prison. One feels sorry for them: it is as if they are desperate to exercise their frustrated dam-building clockwork.

Only beavers have this kind of brain clockwork. Other species have clockwork for copulation, scratching and fighting, and so do beavers. But only beavers have brain clockwork for dam-building, and it must have evolved by slow degrees in ancestral beavers. It evolved because the lakes produced by dams are useful. It is not totally clear what they are useful for, but they must have been useful for the beavers who built them, not just any old beavers. The best guess seems to be that a lake provides a beaver with a safe place to build its lodge, out of reach for most predators, and a safe conduit for transporting food. Whatever the advantage it must be a substantial one, or beavers would not devote so much time and effort to building dams. Once again, note that natural selection is a predictive theory. The Darwinian can make the confident prediction that, if dams were a useless waste of time, rival beavers who refrained from building them would survive better and pass on genetic tendencies not to build. The fact that beavers are so anxious to build dams is very strong evidence that it benefited their ancestors to do so.

Like any other useful adaptation, the dam-building clockwork in the brain must have evolved by Darwinian selection of genes. There must have been genetic variations in the wiring of the brain which affected; dam-building. Those genetic variants that resulted in improved dams were more likely to survive in beaver gene pools. It is the same story as for all Darwinian adaptations. But which is the phenotype? At which link in the chain of causal links shall we say the genetic difference exerts its effect? The answer, to repeat it, is all links where a difference is seen. In the wiring diagram of the brain? Yes, almost certainly. In the cellular chemistry that, in embryonic development, leads to that wiring? Of course. But also behaviour—the symphony of muscular contractions that is behaviour—this too is a perfectly respectable phenotype. Differences in building behaviour are without doubt manifestations of differences in genes. And, by the same token, the consequences of that behaviour are also entirely allowable as phenotypes of genes. What consequences? Dams, of course. And lakes, for these are consequences of dams. Differences between lakes are influenced by differences between dams, just as differences between dams are influenced by differences between behaviour patterns, which in turn are consequences of differences between genes. We may say that the characteristics of a dam, or of a lake, are true phenotypic effects of genes, using exactly the logic we use to say that the characteristics of a tail are phenotypic effects of genes.

Conventionally, biologists see the phenotypic effects of a gene as confined within the skin of the individual bearing that gene. The Beaver's Tale shows that this is unnecessary. The phenotype of a gene, in the true sense of the word, may extend outside the skin of the individual. Birds' nests are extended phenotypes. Their shape and size, their complicated funnels and tubes where these exist, all are Darwinian adaptations, and so must have evolved by the differential survival of alternative genes. Genes for building behaviour? Yes. Genes for wiring up the brain so it is good at building nests of the right shape and size? Yes. Genes for nests of the right shape and size? Yes, by the same token, yes. Nests are made of grass or sticks or mud, not bird cells. But the point is irrelevant to the question of whether differences between nests are influenced by differences between genes. If they are, nests are proper phenotypes of genes. And nest differences surely must be influenced by gene differences, for how else could they have been improved by natural selection?

Artifacts like nests and dams (and lakes) are easily understood examples of extended phenotypes. There are others where the logic is a little more... well, extended. For example, parasite genes can be said to have phenotypic expression in the bodies of their hosts. This can be true even where as in the case of cuckoos, they don't live inside their hosts. And many examples of animal communication—as when a male canary sings to a female and her ovaries grow—can be rewritten in the language of the extended phenotype. But that would take us too far from the beaver, whose tale will conclude with one final observation. Under favourable conditions the lake of a beaver can span several miles, which may make it the largest phenotype of any gene in the world. [Close quote.]