Clark's Nutcracker.

I really don't have time to elaborate on this, but one thing you may not know about me is that I am kind of a fan of corvids, and this post about the Clark's Nutcracker's seed-gathering habits as related to the life of a reader... well, I liked it.

Two things from our newspapers of record.

1. John Wilson, editor of Books and Culture, has an editorial in the Wall Street Journal on faith and science:

   What is at stake in these disputes is not a choice between following biblical authority on the one hand or science on the other, as the matter is often misleadingly framed. Rather, we see rival theological commitments, rival understandings of how to read Genesis.

   I think this puts it nicely, though Wilson goes on to understate the consequences of adhering to reading Genesis as a literal description of the origins of the world. Young Earth Creationists have to explain how the scientific community gets things so wrong, and so it seems rather common to consider the scientific establishment as mendacious, incompetent, or ideologically biased to a terrifying degree. If the scientists are so bad at geology, how could they do any better on climatology? So while Young Earth Creationism is not essentially a "disdain for science," such disdain tends to follow.
2. In the New York Times, an essay on David Foster Wallace's prose style, and those on the internet who learned all the wrong lessons from it:

   I suppose it made sense, when blogging was new, that there was some confusion about voice. Was a blog more like writing or more like speech? Soon it became a contrived and shambling hybrid of the two. The “sort ofs” and “reallys” and “ums” and “you knows” that we use in conversation were codified as the central connectors in the blogger lexicon. We weren’t just mad, we were sort of enraged; no one was merely confused, but kind of totally mystified.
   
   [...]
   
   How we arrived at the notion that the postmodern era is the first ever to confront the tension between sincerity and irony despite millennia of evidence to the contrary is no mystery: every generation believes its insights are unprecedented, its struggles uniquely formidable, its solutions the balm for all that ails the world. Why so many of our critics are still, after all these years, making their arguments in this inherently self-undermining voice — still trying to ward off every possible rejoinder and pre-emptively rebut every possible criticism by mixing a weird rhetorical stew of equivocation, pessimism and Elysian prophecy — is another question entirely.

   That's a stew I like making more than eating. This is worth thinking about.

Leafsnap!

"Leafsnap" is the first thing I've ever seen that makes me want an iPhone. Seriously.

In the long run, though, it might be better for me to get handy with a field guide.

(Via Kottke.)

How not to sway someone toward climate change skepticism.

There's some good stuff in the new issue of First Things: Anthony Esolen and Alan Jacobs turn in solid essays, there's an overture toward dialogue with Muslim theologians, and George Weigel's essay about John Paul II might be interesting to people who haven't yet read Witness to Hope. But William Happer's attack on the global-warming consensus is . . . problematic. There are no fewer than five places where Happer compares his opponents to dictators or fictional authoritarians:

• "This damnatia memoriae of inconvenient facts was simply expunged from the 2001 IPCC report, much as Trotsky and Yezhov were removed from Stalin’s photographs by dark-room specialists in the later years of the dictator’s reign."
• "Global warming alarmists have something like Gadaffi’s initial air superiority over rag-tag opponents in Libya."
• "Skeptics’ motives are publicly impugned; denigrating names are used routinely in media reports and the blogosphere; and we now see attempts to use the same tactics that Big Brother applied to the skeptical hero, Winston Smith, in Orwell’s 1984."
• "We know from the Soviet experience that a society can find it easy to consider dissidents to be mentally deranged and act accordingly."
  
• "Not unlike functionaries of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth in 1984, with its motto 'Ignorance is Strength,' many members of the environmental news media dutifully and uncritically promote the party line of the climate crusade."

Granting for the sake of argument that Happer is completely right, what we'd have is a case of massive funding skewing research results and leading to bad policy, with some scientists being unable to publish their legitimate research. Nobody is being tortured, murdered, or sent to the gulag. Comparing the climate change movement to Stalinism, as Happer does, is almost actively offensive; it certainly trivializes the moral horrors of the twentieth century.

Sam Harris and the N.I.C.E.

I've been re-reading C.S. Lewis's science-fiction novel That Hideous Strength. The villains of the piece are members of a nebulous research group called the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments. The N.I.C.E. wants to use impartial science to rebuild Britain in a rationalized way, though its leaders admit to each other that the real point of all their work is that they get to be the ones running the experiments — a power grab in the name of instrumental reason.

I would have said that Lewis's take on the modern scientific project is overly pessimistic, that our scientists do not really think like that, and that in our society the democratic project has a salutary oversight of the scientific establishment. I would have said that, but just this morning I read a review of Sam Harris's books at The Nation which made me second-guess my position. (I've only read Letter to a Christian Nation, and the review is on point about that one, so I'm hoping the reviewer is right about the other two books.) The reviewer sums up Harris's political project, and it's chilling:

These high-minded questions conceal a frightening Olympian agenda. Harris is really a social engineer, with a thirst for power that sits uneasily alongside his allegedly disinterested pursuit of moral truth. We must use science, he says, to figure out why people do silly and harmful things in the name of morality, what kinds of things they should do instead and how to make them abandon their silly and harmful practices in order “to live better lives.” Harris’s engineering mission envelops human life as a whole. “Given recent developments in biology, we are now poised to consciously engineer our further evolution,” he writes. “Should we do this, and if so, in which ways? Only a scientific understanding of the possibilities of human well-being could guide us.” Harris counsels that those wary of the arrogance, and the potential dangers, of the desire to perfect the biological evolution of the species should observe the behavior of scientists at their professional meetings: “arrogance is about as common at a scientific conference as nudity.” Scientists, in Harris’s telling, are the saints of circumspection.

Harris would fit right in at the N.I.C.E. — as long as he stuck with Frost rather than Wither.

(I found the article via David Sessions at Patrol.)

Three about trees.

Still enjoying Colin Tudge's book The Tree: A Natural History of What Trees Are, How They Live, and Why They Matter. Three things I've learned:

1. When I went to New Zealand, I took a tour at the Christchurch Botanical Gardens. On that tour, the guide explained that many of New Zealand's native trees have distinct juvenile and adult phases. In other words, some trees there start out looking one way and then look totally different after they grew up. Tudge explains that these trees come from the family Proteaceae. (When I start a band, I think I'll call it “Proteaceae.” It's a sign of aging that this no longer seems like a serious plan.) Too bad there aren't any native Proteaceae species in North America. (Reference: pp. 156-7)
   
2. Tudge discusses a species he calls “plane trees,” explaining that in North America, plane trees are known as “sycamores” or “buttonwoods.” And he adds: “the ‘sycamore’ referred to in the Bible is a species of fig, in the genus Ficus.” This is good to know. I was always a little bit confused about how Zacchaeus climbed the sorts of gigantic, peely-barked trees I was familiar with, and was tempted to view that bit of the story as mytho-poetic. (Reference: p. 157)
   
3. Tree vengeance: “Limes [these, not these] put up with heavy pruning and thus are often butchered as street trees (though they get their own back by attracting aphids, which secrete gum, which in turn attracts fungi, and so coat the cars parked beneath with what seems like tacky soot)…” I like to think that if trees really were mad at us, they'd be tricky pranksters rather than The-Happening-style crazy murderers. (Reference: p. 212)
   

Subterranean apical buds.

“The great tactic of the grasses is to keep their growing tip, the apical bud, below the surface of the ground so that it is not destroyed by grazing animals—and, in fact, grasses, in contrast to all other plants, positively gain from being grazed and grow rank if they are left alone. To find a way of benefiting from the attentions of the predators that come to eat you is a trick indeed; and it explains why the world's grasslands, basically created by members of the single family Poaceae, are almost as extensive worldwide as the world's forests, which contain many thousands of species in scores of families.”

-Colin Tudge, The Tree: A Natural History of What Trees Are, How They Live, and Why They Matter. New York: Crown Publishers, 2006. (135)

Two from the League.

I've no idea if there is anyone who reads this blog and doesn't read the League of Ordinary Gentlemen, a group blog that is kind enough to let me post. But just in case there is such a person, I want to link to two of today's posts at the League:

• David Schaengold wrote a delightful little post about the Clinton marriage. He conjures up a not-entirely-impossible scenario in which the Clintons are “the secret representatives of genuine romance in our age.” It's a grand idea.
• Second, I dropped a link to this article in The Nation about the Templeton Foundation, which funds faith-and-science research. As a result of this article, I'm now deeply interested in how the Templeton Foundation engages with academia, and I hope to find out more.
  

“Can a Scientist Pray?”

If there were any easy way for me to get to New York City on a Thursday evening, I'd go see John Polkinghorne give a lecture called “Can a Scientist Pray?” at St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue, this Thursday at 6:30 pm. Hopefully the event will be well-attended despite my absence.

Information here.

Thermal belts.

Back in high school, I spent a lot of time listening to WNCW, an NPR station that was rebroadcast in Charlotte. WNCW’s studio was up in the mountains, in Spindale, North Carolina, on the campus of a college with a curious name: Isothermal Community College. I always wondered how a college would get such a science-y sounding name. Well, North Carolina Miscellany points to a page on Isothermal’s website that explains what thermal belts are. Farmers found that in certain regions they’d get phenomenal crop yields despite regional cold weather. Though scholars had trouble pinning down the exact boundaries of these locations, it was hard to deny that they existed. Thermal belts may have something to do with temperature inversions, which happen when a slope is warmer than the valley floor below it. Apparently, it’s one of those things that’s better understood in folk wisdom than in formal study. Anyways, read the whole thing.

Listen to the gatekeepers, but make up your own mind.

Will at Dispatches asks about discursive authority:

“Internet triumphalists tend to discount the value of cultural and scientific gatekeepers, and there’s some truth to their criticisms of filtering public discourse. But in a fragmented media environment, I’m genuinely disconcerted by the lack of visible authority figures. To add to the confusion, fringe individuals and institutions have become very adept at copying the aesthetics of mainstream organizations - witness the Discovery Institute’s glossy website, which lends an air of plausibility and scholarship to arguments that fall well outside the mainstream. To take a more extreme example, sophisticated Holocaust denialists are also very good at trotting out convincing facts and figures, styling themselves as legitimate historical revisionists rather than fringe cranks.

“So what do I do? How do I choose sides? I don’t have the scientific background to evaluate the Discovery Institute’s claims. I don’t have the time or resources to investigate the scope of Nazi genocide. In both cases, I defer to expert opinion, but now I’m less certain of my ability to distinguish between trustworthy figures and talented impostors. Instead of absolute deference to authority figures, I now rely on a vague sense of where the boundaries of acceptable discourse lie. So far, I’m not very happy with the results.”

I've believed for a while now that even though we protect freedom of speech, what we really want is moderated discourse. That's the only way that you can get anywhere. Mainstream science comprises an institution, the purpose of which is to systematically extend human knowledge of the natural world by moderating discourse between proponents of different hypotheses. As far as I can tell, the community of scientists is exemplary in its self-moderation of its internal discourse, almost always striking the right balance between giving a hearing to new ideas and deferring to established ones. It may make mistakes—it has in the past—but that is a peril of self-government. The balance doesn't always carry over to the outside world, where complex findings have to be reduced to blunt statements.

One suggestion for getting your bearings in any field: see if you can find a book by someone who is writing for sheer love of the subject rather than out of some desire to make an ideological point. Everybody's got an agenda, sure, but I think that a "disinterested" book can be a good way to get a decent impression of the state of the whole field. I can imagine that you could go wrong here, but it's probably a better place to start than the polemics. I'm thinking specifically of Richard Fortey's "Earth," which is the first and only full book about rocks that I've ever read. Fortey wrote it not out of any desire to prove the age of the earth, but to try to pass on his obvious joy in the history and practice of paleontology and geology. Could someone give a similarly “disinterested” account of creationism? It seems to me that creationism always has an axe to grind.

That a book is aloof from controversy doesn't guarantee that it is correct, but I think it's a start—it shows you where the gatekeepers are standing. As for challengers, I think one should give them an occasional hearing but not an equal platform. A “fair debate” for the Discovery Institute should be a panel of at least a dozen scientists, with laptops and reference materials, to the single DI rhetorician.

Want to challenge the gatekeepers? Let's slip back into MacIntyre-speak. You've either got to join the tradition and subvert it, or you've got to build an alternate tradition of discourse. In other words, you have to challenge the science from within the boundaries of an established discipline or you have to create a new discipline that earns its standing as a science. The latter option takes a significant amount of time. Despite some fitful attempts, creationists and Intelligent Design proponents haven't done this (and my guess is that they can't).

Pop Darwinism.

I want to try to pin down what rubs me the wrong way about pop-Darwinian behavior science. Not the real science, but the part where the scientists try to evaluate ethical choices using their evolutionary insights.

What has set me off is this piece from Tim Lockney, The Daily Tar Heel's “behavior columnist,” which asks what the evolutionary point of alcoholism might be. I shouldn't be too hard on him, because he's just a biology major trying to write a weekly column, but I have to wonder what he thinks the point of his argument is.

His thesis is that college students get terribly drunk and do stupid things on the weekend out a deep instinctual drive to impress potential mates. I'm not sure what part of Amotz Zahavi's handicap theory is “new” to Lockney, but that's the basis for his claim:

“Because I can drink so much without dying, far more than my peers, then I must be the most evolutionarily fit male to father your offspring. This theory goes deeper than sociological explanations (peer pressure, pleasurable tastes and feelings, lowering inhibitions, etc.) and concludes that our animal instincts to impress females enough to impregnate them drive our consumption.”

He concludes on an ambiguous note, claiming both that the ability to consume great quantities of alcohol was once a useful demonstration of sexual prowess, but also that alcohol consumption only demonstrates liver capacity, so “maybe the sociologists are right” (in which case the entire article is pointless).

My question: how does knowing the biological origins of our desires help us decide how whether to act on them? I don't see how this knowledge can do anything to help me order my own life, though I suppose it could help you if you were trying to control other people. From my subjective perspective, how can I know whether a particular desire is maladaptive? Trust the scientists? And even if it is maladaptive, what if I decide to do something with my life besides doing my utmost to ensure the continued existence of my own genetic material?

It seems to me that you can only call something maladaptive when you can study it through several generations of other organisms. As a decision-making individual, you have to evaluate your needs and desires on a “non-evolutionary” standard.

The recent New York Times science article, by Marlene Zuk on “paleofantasies,” which considered why we yearn for a time of ancient biological balance, was a better article, but my reaction comes along the same lines. Here's the opening:

“Maybe our woes arise because our Stone Age genes are thrust into Space Age life. That beer gut? It comes from eating too many processed carbohydrates; our bodies evolved to eat only unrefined foods, mainly meat, and we get out of kilter veering from our ancestral diet.

Food allergies and digestive woes? We, like other mammals, aren’t meant to consume dairy products after weaning. When politicians fall from grace after committing adultery, some commentator will always point out that such behavior has evolutionary roots: weren’t the best procreators alpha males with roving eyes?

In short, we have what the anthropologist Leslie Aiello called ‘paleofantasies.’ She was referring to stories about human evolution based on limited fossil evidence, but the term applies just as well to nostalgia for the very old days as a touchstone for the way life is supposed to be and why it sometimes feels so out of balance.”

Zuk's basic response is that there never was a perfect balance. Surely, ancient men had their woes as well, and the process of adaptation is continual. Genes for adult lactose tolerance, for example, appeared quite recently. So don't imagine that there was some time when man had a the perfect healthy diet.

What Zuk says seems reasonable to me, and I'm glad that I learned a little bit about lactose tolerance. But I still don't see how this information will play into any basic decisions I will make. So my descendents might someday be better adjusted to a modern diet. But even if they get a gene that lets them eat Snickers Bars like salads and still be fine, I don't have it. Again: I have to make my own decisions on non-evolutionary criteria.

The problem I have with pop-Darwinism, then, is that it takes a worthwhile field of human knowledge—the study of our genes and how they came to be—and tells us that understanding the origins of our desires is enough to make good decisions about them. But this understanding isn't enough.

Psychology and demonology.

Something always strikes me as a little bit off when I read articles on society-level psychology. See, for example, “happiness studies,” or levels of niceness. This is largely because that sort of thing seems to be completely inapplicable to the actual decisions I have to make. Say I have a bundle of research that tells me what makes most people happy: how in the world to I apply it? Straining for objectivity might work for policymakers, but it’s never rung true for me. (Perhaps some people find that clinical descriptions of their psychological situations give them a sense of control; if so, these people are clearly neurotic.) And, really, what could we find that hasn’t been somehow observed before? I mean, we couldn’t see cells before the microscope, but we’ve always had some kind of access to our own thoughts.

I can’t even think about this topic without recalling Reverend Darcourt’s drunken rant near the beginning of Robertson Davies’s novel What’s Bred in the Bone. Darcourt, a theologian and Anglican priest, has loosened up after an evening of wine and conversation with two dear friends, and he becomes voluble:

“Well, science is the theology of our time, and like the old theology it’s a muddle of conflicting assertions. What gripes my gut is that it has such a miserable vocabulary and such a pallid pack of images to offer to us—to the humble laity—for our edification and our faith. The old priest in his black robe gave us things that seemed to have concrete existence; you prayed to the Mother of God and somebody had given you an image that looked just right for the Mother of God. The new priest in his whitish lab-coat gives you nothing at all except a constantly changing vocabulary which he—because he usually doesn’t know any Greek—can’t pronounce, and you are expected to trust him implicitly because he knows what you are too dumb to comprehend. It’s the most overweening, pompous priesthood mankind has ever endured in all its recorded history, and its lack of symbol and metaphor and its zeal for abstraction drive mankind to a barren land of starved imagination. But you, Maria, speak the old language that strikes upon the heart. You talk about the Recording Angel and you talk about his lesser angels, and we both know exactly what you mean. You give comprehensible and attractive names to psychological facts, and God—another effectively named psychological fact—bless you for it.”

Now, I obviously can’t endorse the statement that God is an effectively named psychological fact, but it does give one something to think about. But I think I can go most of the way there with demons. Why should vain moderns mock Martin Luther for writing that he was tormented by demons? That’s exactly how clinical depression can feel. Calling it a demon gives you something to fight—and a way to disassociate your soul from its disease.

Is it all right to read the New Age movement as an attempt to re-name some of these “psychological facts” in an apprehensible way? Would New Age writers disagree with that characterization? More importantly, how do we deal with the dissonances of the metaphorical perspective? If you know your depression is not really a strange small fellow whispering in your ear, can you sustain the image? Or are you be better off viewing yourself as in the cold light of the laboratory?

C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien set for themselves the goal of reinvigorating the Christian imagination. They’ve certainly helped, although the section of any bookstore for “Christian literature”—that abomination!—makes it clear that we still have a ways to go. In the end, the task is to keep searching for “language that strikes upon the heart,” but to make sure that it strikes truly.

N.B.: I’m not against psychiatric medication. Not entirely, anyway.

“The Parable of the Flamingo”, or, “What's the point?”

Let's say that there are some people in your neighborhood who are extremely fixated on something that you find quite trivial. For example, it could be that they insist on sitting in the yard and staring at a pink flamingo they have placed there for hours on end. It doesn't really matter what they do; what matters is that you find it utterly incomprehensible. You tell all your friends about your ridiculous neighbors, and you have a good laugh about their flamingo shenanigans. Your neighbors sometimes overhear you, and get very angry.

One day, you tell them that you are thinking about stealing their favorite flamingo. They tell you that they are going to straight up flip out if you do so, because they love their flamingo deeply. Of course this only confirms what you already believe: that these neighbors are dangerously insane.

At this point, everyone else in the neighborhood sees what is going on. We know that you think the flamingo fixation is weird and stupid. We also know that your neighbors love the flamingo. We know that stealing the flamingo will make them extremely angry. The situation is all extremely clear to all parties involved.

So, why on earth would you steal the flamingo? What could you possibly think you are proving?

(Should I be so crass as to suggest that every angry or even curious visitor to your ad-ridden blog makes money for you?)

Deeper than Conservation

“Indeed, in many important respects environmentalism is deeply conservative. It takes no great feat of logic to show that conservation is conservative, of course, but the conservatism of the environmental movement runs far deeper than that. The movement seeks to preserve a given balance which we did not create, are not capable of fully understanding, and should not delude ourselves into imagining we can much improve—in other words, its attitude toward nature is much like the attitude of conservatism toward society.”

-Yuval Levin, “Science and the Left” in the Winter 2008 issue of The New Atlantis

Hmm. Hadn't thought of it that way before.

More on Mr. Pinker

My post was a little off-the-cuff. But smarter people have been blogging about Stephen Pinker's recent article on human dignity, and here's the rundown:

—the essays in question, which I have not read and cannot say much about.
—Yuval Levin's response to Pinker. He believes that Pinker misrepresents Leon Kass and the makeup of the Bioethics Council in general.
—Ross Douthat doesn't like Pinker's tone of voice, but doesn't say much about dignity vs. autonomy.
—Pinker doesn't understand what the Council means by “dignity,” nor does he understand the nature of fiction in general, according to Alan Jacobs.
—Someone has to sort the wheat from the chaff in Pinker's article, and it looks like Noah Millman is the man for the job.
—Helen from the Cigarette Smoking Blog makes an important but cryptic point about trans-humanism. Dignity seems to be something like an essence of humanity: improve humanity, sure, but don't try to make it something else.
—I really don't understand what James Poulos is talking about.
—But at least somebody out there is enthusiastic about the article.

The Stupidity of Pinker

All right, Steven Pinker is not stupid. But his article in this month's New Republic, “The Stupidity of Dignity,” displays an estimable ability to misinterpret his opponents' arguments. Pinker follows Ruth Macklin in claiming that “human dignity” is a superfluous concept; human autonomy and informed consent will do just fine, thank you very much. Now, there's an argument to be made here, and in part of his article he works it out. To hold that consent is the foundation of all ethical behavior is a position with quite a long pedigree. But Robert George and Richard John Neuhaus cannot be comfortably situated anywhere on the line of thought between Locke and Rawls, and for Pinker to deal seriously with their argument, he'd have to engage with the Aristotelian/Thomist conceptions of human goods. Here's an example of how he avoids doing this:

Almost every essayist concedes that the concept [of human dignity] remains slippery and ambiguous. In fact, it spawns outright contradictions at every turn. We read that slavery and degradation are morally wrong because they take someone's dignity away. But we also read that nothing you can do to a person, including enslaving or degrading him, can take his dignity away.

Perhaps the essayists do contradict themselves; I haven't read the specific book he's reviewing. But I've read enough of Neuhaus and George to know that Pinker is conflating the violation of someone's dignity with the removal of it. The analogy with human rights should be perfectly clear; somehow, Pinker doesn't see it.

At one point, Pinker even goes so far as to argue that human dignity can be harmful:

Every sashed and bemedaled despot reviewing his troops from a lofty platform seeks to command respect through ostentatious displays of dignity. Political and religious repressions are often rationalized as a defense of the dignity of a state, leader, or creed… Indeed, totalitarianism is often the imposition of a leader's conception of dignity on a population, such as the identical uniforms in Maoist China or the burqas of the Taliban.

I don't even know what to make of this passage. Conservative bioethicists aren't talking about the fundamental “dignity of a state, leader, or creed”; they are talking about the equal inherent dignity of all human beings. I know that dignity and self-esteem are used similarly in common parlance, but the conservatives are trying to get at something fundamental, not dress codes.

The basic idea of human dignity is that the principle of reciprocity (which Pinker has elsewhere acknowledged as a major and valid element of human moral reasoning, from the Golden Rule to the categorical imperative to the social contract) cannot be built on any particular accidental quality, such as rationality or capacity to make decisions, but must come from the essential feature of being human. Pinker seems to think that it consists in the ability not to be embarrassed or ashamed (“…every one of us voluntarily and repeatedly relinquishes dignity for other goods in life. Getting out of a small car is undignified…”). It may be that he can show how the concept of autonomy is broad enough to make the concept of dignity superfluous, but it would be best if he first worked a little bit harder to understand what sort of dignity he is discussing.