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TypePad is running horrendously slowly today. I've tried to upload photos three times and been timed out each time.

I'll post my Tuesday photo blogging when things improve.

CKR

Verlyn Klinkenborg Gets it Right on Intelligent Design

Grasping the Depth of Time as a First Step in Understanding Evolution

Verlyn Klinkenborg writes about his farm and naturalistic issues occasionally as an "editorial observer" for the New York Times. The Times is running a series on evolution and its claimed alternatives. The latest is pretty good, but read it quickly because those Times links rot pretty quickly.

Accepting the fact of evolution does not necessarily mean discarding a personal faith in God. But accepting intelligent design means discarding science. Much has been made of a 2004 poll showing that some 45 percent of Americans believe that the Earth - and humans with it - was created as described in the book of Genesis, and within the past 10,000 years. This isn't a triumph of faith. It's a failure of education.

The purpose of the campaign for intelligent design is to deepen that failure. To present the arguments of intelligent design as part of a debate over evolution is nonsense. From the scientific perspective, there is no debate. But even the illusion of a debate is a sorry victory for antievolutionists, a public relations victory based, as so many have been in recent years, on ignorance and obfuscation.

The essential, but often well-disguised, purpose of intelligent design, is to preserve the myth of a separate, divine creation for humans in the belief that only that can explain who we are. But there is a destructive hubris, a fearful arrogance, in that myth. It sets us apart from nature, except to dominate it. It misses both the grace and the moral depth of knowing that humans have only the same stake, the same right, in the Earth as every other creature that has ever lived here. There is a righteousness - a responsibility - in the deep, ancestral origins we share with all of life.

Plamegate – Miller and Bolton? Squaring the circle?

By PHK

This story is every bit as good as John Le Carre at his best. Who needs fiction or “reality-TV” when we have Plamegate?

Why did John Bolton visit Judith Miller in jail? If Ariana Huffington has it right, Bolton recently called on Ms. Miller at the Alexandria Detention Center where she is being held for refusing to reveal her Plamegate source or sources. But why would a report of this odd-couple sighting be largely ignored by the MSM or even much of the political blogosphere? Is it a case of mistaken identity? Is it because Huffington’s post cites a single source? Could the source be wrong? Or not? Ambassadorial visits to jails are not exactly every day occurrences.

I can't remember a single U.S Ambassador visiting a reporter in jail – or a jailed anyone else - even if the ambassador in question was like Bolton, a lawyer by trade. Yet this is what apparently happened recently in Virginia.

A Bolton-Miller “tete-a-tete” looks even stranger because Miller is being held in contempt in an investigation that leads high up into the White House. Why would Bolton want to add any more questions or questionable associations to his already questionable record? The diplomats I remember visiting jails were usually middle and junior grade Consular Officers assigned the unenviable task of checking up on the condition of American citizens held in jails abroad.

Top Ten Answers to the Question: What’s Wrong with Intelligent Design?

by CKR

10. It isn’t a scientific theory. A scientific theory allows the development of hypotheses that can be tested. In ten years, none of its proponents has proposed testable hypotheses.

9. More than 200 scientists named Steve or Stephanie disagree with it.

8. It is either hypocritical or incomplete. Design implies a designer, but intelligent design proponents refuse to identify this designer.

7. It is a variant of the “God of the gaps” argument. This argument finds God where science doesn’t have an explanation. As science advances, the God of the gaps diminishes.

6. It is incredibly arrogant. It assumes that we now know all we are going to know about living systems and how they evolved.

Able Danger, Judith Miller, and Bangladesh

Able Danger
Kevin Drum has been following Able Danger, which seems to have faded from the blogosphere and the MSM. Here's his latest post on the subject, but you can find lots more by scrolling back. Able Danger was supposedly the name of a secret data-mining project that turned up Mohammed Atta as a potential al-Qaeda terrorist. Republican Congressman Curt Weldon made a lot of it, because it happened in the Clinton administration. It now appears that all those stories are falling apart, which may account for the right blogosphere's silence.

Judith Miller
The Plame scandal has also receded from the news, although it is still smoldering in places. One of the best is emptywheel's series on What Judy Miller Did as an Embed. The link is to the last of five parts. It's a backstory of sorts to the Plame story, attempting to answer the question of why Miller is currently in jail. Given that Miller didn't write a story on Plame, and that she admits to having gotten material from Ahmed Chalabi for her erroneous stories on WMD in Iraq, it's easy to wonder whether she played a more substantive role in the Plame outing. Emptywheel doesn't come up with a definitive answer, but he (she?) pulls together lots of material on Miller's activities before the Plame outing with speculations about what part she might have played beyond news reporter. Now all we need to know is who forged the documents supposedly showing that Iraq was purchasing uranium from Niger.

Bombs in Bangladesh
Perhaps I should have put this first, because it's the most current story that isn't being covered. Bangladesh suffered well over 400 simultaneous bomb blasts in the last week. A reader blog at TPM Cafe has provided the best coverage I've seen so far. Another 120 bombs were recovered on the next day.

This is a story that's still in play, although googling doesn't turn up a lot.

Paul Wolfowitz, the president of the World Bank, told Bangladesh officials that they needed to clean up corruption but declined to comment on the bombings.

Yesterday there was a general strike protesting the government's inability to prevent the bombings that flared into more active protests, and two continuing bomb-makers were killed by the bomb they were making.

More than 400 is a lot of bombs. The message is that there are at least a hundred people in Bangladesh, working together, who want to make a strong statement. Nobody has claimed responsibility so far. You'd need people to make the bombs and then emplace them. Timers would allow the bombers to be somewhere else when the bombs go off, so one person could emplace several. But that also requires a certain amount of care and stealth. The makers could also be the emplacers, but you'd want to emplace the bombs within a couple of days to prevent their being discovered. That's how I estimate at least a hundred people involved.

Is This Any Way to Run a Business?

by CKR

The Republicans have long been known as the party of big business. In the 1950s, President Dwight D. Eisenhower picked businessmen for his cabinet. His Secretary of Defense, Charles E. Wilson, came to the post from the presidency of General Motors. He provided one of the most famous quotes of the decade, “What’s good for General Motors is good for the country.” What he actually said was “…for years I thought what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa.” But everyone got the message.

That was, of course, before the Bible Belt joined the Republican party. During the fifties and sixties, the Democrats were the party of the Southern fundamentalists. Lyndon Johnson observed that the Democratic Party’s leadership in passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would lose its majority in the South. When Barry Goldwater ran against Johnson later in 1964, the Dixiecrats were on his side.

The Republican Party continued as the party of big business, although as time went on, big business became much less personalized than it was in Wilson’s day, and its leaders and patrons became aware of the value of sending money to both political parties.

George W. Bush considers himself a businessman. The official White House web site biography lists his Harvard MBA degree, “a career in the energy business,” and a partnership that purchased the Texas Rangers baseball franchise. It then skips to his election as Texas governor in 1994. Reports of his successes in business are variable, but business and politics seem to be the only careers he has pursued.

You might think that a businessman would nurture the factors that have contributed to America’s successes in business.

Those missing ingredients . . .

By PHK

Years ago when I lived in Moscow and the city was the capital of the Soviet Union, I considered myself lucky when I found 85 percent of the ingredients for a recipe. By 1979 Moscow standards, I was spoiled. I had access to the U.S. Embassy commissary – albeit tiny and too often stocked with outdated canned goods, the Soviet “gastronome” filled mostly with booze, cigarettes and chocolates - for diplomats and others who could afford to buy hard currency coupons to shop there, a twice weekly delivery via train from Stockmanns - the Finnish department store that carried almost everything for a price, and the private Soviet farmers markets or rynoks located in various parts of the city where I first met fresh cilantro in summer and purchased a single small cucumber for ten dollars from the Caucasus around the Christmas holidays.

The missing 15 percent, however, is often as important as all the other ingredients put together. Without baking powder or soda, for example, the best tasting cake falls flat.

Missing baking powder is what I think of as I read the news reports – national and local – about the continuing failures of American public schools. In a nutshell, we’re told that American youth – particularly girls - are learning to read better and that boys outperform girls in science and math. We’re told that Anglos and Asians are better students than Blacks, Hispanos and Native Americans. Yes, I agree. Our schools need to improve in all those areas.

But it’s what those tests don’t measure that we also need to think about now, and hard.

In my view, the missing ingredients are the social sciences: history, geography, politics, government, international affairs, economics, psychology, sociology and anthropology. Maybe the latter can wait until college for all but the brightest, but history, geography and government need to be emphasized in the lower schools and taught by qualified teachers as separate subjects – to everyone.

Prone to Ethnic Enmity?

by CKR

Groups from the departments of psychology at New York and Harvard Universities reported in the 29 July Science that people more readily develop fear responses to members of another race than to their own. Although the experiments were an attempt at figuring out whether such responses result from “hardwiring” in the brain by evolution or from cultural learning, the authors were not able to separate out the two possible causes. However, their results do appear to show that exposure to members of other races decreases the fear response.

The authors argue that fear of snakes and spiders seems to be inborn, and they tried to determine if people react in similar ways to faces of people from other races.

The media haven’t made much of this study, which is probably a good thing. (News story; Harvard news release) John Hawks, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin, offers some criticism. I tend to wonder, along with him, whether fear of snakes and spiders is inborn. Here’s a spider from Novy Tobalchik on Kamchatka that does an admirable job of camouflage. (The spider is just about in the center of the photo, with eye-spots on her abdomen looking down and one leg stretched toward the upper right. Clicking to enlarge may help.) I may just be one of the individuals that was born with a subnormal fear response to creepie-crawlies.

I’ll add that this is a single study of about forty people in one part, and about eighty in the other. All were Americans, although about half were African-American and half were white, so there’s very little way to know about cultural effects.

I started out to write this post fired up about the significance of this research: we’ve got some inborn fear of strangers, but we can overcome it by learning more about them. It’s a nice narrative, but as I looked more closely at what the study offers, it’s less than promised. Knowing the basis of our responses to others is useful, and this study contributes a tiny piece to the overall picture.

Knowing other people makes you less afraid of them. My mother told me that.