But OH, so lovable!
Posted on 08/18/2005 5:17:34 PM PDT by curiosity
The appeal of "intelligent design" to the American right is obvious. For religious conservatives, the theory promises to uncover God's fingerprints on the building blocks of life. For conservative intellectuals in general, it offers hope that Darwinism will yet join Marxism and Freudianism in the dustbin of pseudoscience. And for politicians like George W. Bush, there's little to be lost in expressing a skepticism about evolution that's shared by millions.
In the long run, though, intelligent design will probably prove a political boon to liberals, and a poisoned chalice for conservatives. Like the evolution wars in the early part of the last century, the design debate offers liberals the opportunity to portray every scientific battle--today, stem-cell research, "therapeutic" cloning, and end-of-life issues; tomorrow, perhaps, large-scale genetic engineering--as a face-off between scientific rigor and religious fundamentalism. There's already a public perception, nurtured by the media and by scientists themselves, that conservatives oppose the "scientific" position on most bioethical issues. Once intelligent design runs out of steam, leaving its conservative defenders marooned in a dinner-theater version of Inherit the Wind, this liberal advantage is likely to swell considerably.
And intelligent design will run out of steam--a victim of its own grand ambitions. What began as a critique of Darwinian theory, pointing out aspects of biological life that modification-through-natural-selection has difficulty explaining, is now foolishly proposed as an alternative to Darwinism. On this front, intelligent design fails conspicuously--as even defenders like Rick Santorum are beginning to realize--because it can't offer a consistent, coherent, and testable story of how life developed. The "design inference" is a philosophical point, not a scientific theory: Even if the existence of a designer is a reasonable inference to draw from the complexity of, say, a bacterial flagellum, one would still need to explain how the flagellum moved from design to actuality.
And unless George W. Bush imposes intelligent design on American schools by fiat and orders the scientific establishment to recant its support for Darwin, intelligent design will eventually collapse--like other assaults on evolution that failed to offer an alternative--under the weight of its own overreaching.
If liberals play their cards right, this collapse could provide them with a powerful rhetorical bludgeon. Take the stem-cell debate, where the great questions are moral, not scientific--whether embryonic human life should be created and destroyed to prolong adult human life. Liberals might win that argument on the merits, but it's by no means a sure thing. The conservative embrace of intelligent design, however, reshapes the ideological battlefield. It helps liberals cast the debate as an argument about science, rather than morality, and paint their enemies as a collection of book-burning, Galileo-silencing fanatics.
This would be the liberal line of argument anyway, even without the controversy surrounding intelligent design. "The president is trapped between religion and science over stem cells," declared a Newsweek cover story last year; "Religion shouldn't undercut new science," the San Francisco Chronicle insisted; "Leadership in 'therapeutic cloning' has shifted abroad," the New York Times warned, because American scientists have been "hamstrung" by "religious opposition"--and so on and so forth. But liberalism's science-versus-religion rhetoric is only likely to grow more effective if conservatives continue to play into the stereotype by lining up to take potshots at Darwin.
Already, savvy liberal pundits are linking bioethics to the intelligent design debate. "In a world where Koreans are cloning dogs," Slate's Jacob Weisberg wrote last week, "can the U.S. afford--ethically or economically--to raise our children on fraudulent biology?" (Message: If you're for Darwin, you're automatically for unfettered cloning research.) Or again, this week's TNR makes the pretty-much-airtight "case against intelligent design"; last week, the magazine called opponents of embryo-destroying stem cell research "flat-earthers." The suggested parallel is obvious: "Science" is on the side of evolution and on the side of embryo-killing.
Maureen Dowd, in her inimitable way, summed up the liberal argument earlier this year:
Exploiting God for political ends has set off powerful, scary forces in America: a retreat on teaching evolution, most recently in Kansas; fights over sex education . . . a demonizing of gays; and a fear of stem cell research, which could lead to more of a "culture of life" than keeping one vegetative woman hooked up to a feeding tube.
Terri Schiavo, sex education, stem cell research--on any issue that remotely touches on science, a GOP that's obsessed with downing Darwin will be easily tagged as medieval, reactionary, theocratic. And this formula can be applied to every new bioethical dilemma that comes down the pike. Earlier this year, for instance, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) issued ethical guidelines for research cloning, which blessed the creation of human-animal "chimeras"--animals seeded with human cells. New York Times reporter Nicholas Wade, writing on the guidelines, declared that popular repugnance at the idea of such creatures is based on "the pre-Darwinian notion that species are fixed and penalties [for cross-breeding] are severe." In other words, if you're opposed to creating pig-men--carefully, of course, with safeguards in place (the NAS guidelines suggested that chimeric animals be forbidden from mating)--you're probably stuck back in the pre-Darwinian ooze with Bishop Wilberforce and William Jennings Bryan.
There's an odd reversal-of-roles at work here. In the past, it was often the right that tried to draw societal implications from Darwinism, and the left that stood against them. And for understandable reasons: When people draw political conclusions from Darwin's theory, they're nearly always inegalitarian conclusions. Hence social Darwinism, hence scientific racism, hence eugenics.
Which is why however useful intelligent design may be as a rhetorical ploy, liberals eager to claim the mantle of science in the bioethics battle should beware. The left often thinks of modern science as a child of liberalism, but if anything, the reverse is true. And what scientific thought helped to forge--the belief that all human beings are equal--scientific thought can undermine as well. Conservatives may be wrong about evolution, but they aren't necessarily wrong about the dangers of using Darwin, or the National Academy of Sciences, as a guide to political and moral order.
That's certainly an analogy to how I see the evidence. And I would hope you could keep it civil for those who have sincerely looked at the evidence and come to a different conclusion than you have.
You brought the mods on yourself by misrepresenting my position without even knowing my position.
Males seem to me to not be bathrub like. They are rather flat, then suddenly spike up (which creates certain societal tensions and issues), and then have a low slow slide lasting until they die, but rarely with luck hitting the abosulte zero baseline prior to their final exit from a natural rather than violent death.
Hmmm,...come to think about it,.., that's also one aspect of a possible intelligent design applicable to those who are gay.
double stanbdard placemarker
Nice post. Elegant. I like it.
There are several points worth noting:
(1) The notion of a 'natural lifespan' is arbitrary in modern society. What is truly 'natural' - in the sense of that which would take place out in the wilderness absent any technological intervention - is for most of us to be dead of parasitic diseases. It is certainly not for most of us to live into the 80s, or even to live long enough to die of heart disease, cancer, and other mainly degenerative conditions. Is it 'natural' to put a cold compress on someone's forehead but 'unnatural' to operate on his brain? Why, or why not?
(2) Tangential to that, it is most certainly 'natural' to the human species to develop and implement technology. It's what we do. It's what we are most suitably evolved to do. Just as a sparrow utilizes flight to extend its lifespan and improve the survival of its progeny, so we use technology to accomplish a similar task.
(3) There is little doubt that indefinite youth (for all practical purposes) is coming. Almost certainly just a matter of when, not if. The 'roadmap' from here to there is rather clear at this point; what is missing is the capability to enact it. Sure, the "when" might be several centuries off, but in the grand scheme of things that is trivial. In the personal scheme of things, that is everything.
(4) There is even less doubt that if and when that becomes actuality, that it will be adopted for all intents universally as swiftly as possible. Every human endeavor is in one sense or another designed with that end in mind: immortality. In time, for our progeny however removed that are born into such a world, it will probably seem perfectly 'natural' - or at least the rightful order of things.
(5) It won't be true immortality in any case. Estimates are that if you eliminate causes of death due to aging and disease the average lifespan would still be only about 800 years or so. That is due to accidents, homicides, suicides, etc. If you eliminate most causes of death that might be deemed psychological (in the presumption that we will also attain the ability to manipulate human psychology to that degree as to make suicide and homicide events of minimal incidence) then you are still looking at an average lifespan of around 1500 at best.
(6) If you beat those odds, there is still another inconvenience that follows, and it's unclear when precisely that would follow: your head can only fit so many neurons. Eventually they will all get imprinted. Without some kind of capacity extension, you will at the very least begin to lose memory of your earlier life. In time, you will remember nothing at all of your earliest centuries. And at the least it will be a progressive condition. It's entirely unclear what other effects this inevitable process might manifest. We can call it neural empathy.
(7) Every aspect of society is designed around the notions of mortality, demographic growth, the centrality of procreation, and the normative stages of life. This would obviously change in a dramatic (and I would say glorious) way in the event that even a century of additional longevity became standard, much less a millennium or more. The magnitude of the subsequent changes is probably a formidable, unnerving, and frightening prospect to many people. Oh well. Life is change. The prospect of industrial civilization is demonstrably a formidable, unnerving, and frightening prospect to aboriginal peoples. It suits us just fine.
(8) If what follows life is oblivion, then you are hardly doing your progeny a favor by 'getting out of their way' when consigning yourself to oblivion, because you are also condemning them to ultimate oblivion as well. So what if you have one or two children (i.e., replacement rate) instead of four? As if that many people in advanced societies have children above replacement rate anyhow.. If we use quantity of life as a proxy for quality, one child that lives 1000 years has beaten nine that live 100.
I am speaking here to the notion of legal or ethical prohibitions on the extension of life. In other words, to a prohibition that would by its nature apply to your progeny as much as to yourself.
(9) If what follows life is something other than oblivion, you will get there surely enough in any event, and once you do it won't likely matter in the grand scheme of things how long it took you to get there. A millennium is not even the twinkle of a quark by comparison to eternity. Well, assuming that what followed would be eternal, which is not guaranteed, but of course the less eternal that would be, the more value there would be to an extended life.. If it makes you feel better, you can think of it as that much more opportunity to repent and find salvation. You can also always kill yourself off.
(10) Inaction is an action. Failing to save life when you can is indirectly murder. If God does not will that it be so, it will not be so. If it is so, God must will that it be so. Our progeny however many generations removed will think this whole debate quaint and silly - if not barbarous and ignorant. If none of this ever comes to pass, there are worse ways to waste time than this idle banter. Well, the same could be said even if it all comes to pass.
Have I missed anything? =)
Thank you so much for your input.
I can't imagine anyone more talented than you sir to address all of this. In fact, I can't imagine anyone but you addressing any of this to my satisfaction at all. Maybe you can, maybe you can't. But if anyone can, you can. I watch and wait.
Your odds are, via my bullshit math, somewhat better than that. Well, not complete BS, but here goes ;)
Let's assume that we've eliminated all disease as a cause of death. Further assume we've cheated old age via a fountain of youth potion, such that death due to aging is no longer possible either. We are not, of course, immortal as a result - stepping in front of a bus will still do you in, in our brave new world. So we're left with death by some type of injury as the sole remaining cause of death for everyone - accident, suicide, or homicide.
Now, according to the fine folks at the National Safety Council ("You there, safen up!"), your odds of dying from accident or injury were 1 in 1755 in 2002. This means that you had about a 0.06% chance of dying due to misadventure in 2002, or a 99.94% chance of surviving the year - at least as far as injury is concerned. So to go forward, for the sake of convenience let's assume that this rate of 1 in 1755 continues to hold true for the next few millennia or so. Assume a fixed rate of death due to injury, in other words. This is likely to be a big source of BS here - there's no real reason to assume it'll remain the same, but what the hell.
Okay, relying on the false precision of my calculator here, your odds of survival for a given year are 1754/1755, or 0.999430199 (yeah, yeah - and I cut some off, too, but let's not have a significant digits argument here). Extrapolate those odds outward, and what you find is that you hit 50% odds at around 1216 years. In other words, you have a 50% chance of surviving to age 1216, given those odds of death due to injury.
Now, the problem is, that number doesn't really tell us all that much about you or any other given individual - your odds of surviving this year are the same as they were last year, and there's no bookkeeper up there keeping track of the odds steadily accumulating one way or the other for you specifically. But what it does tell us is something about the whole population. Basically, what we have is a fixed rate of attrition - decay, in effect - and what we can do is start thinking in terms of a half-life for the whole population, rather than an average lifespan. So given that fixed rate of decay, 1 in 1755 annually, our half-life as a population should be right around 1216 years.
Okay, the folks at CDC tell me that 4,091,063 live births occurred in 2003 (yeah, I'm mixing years - sue me). Let's assume we applied the magic elixir to them at birth, eliminating any possibility that they'll ever die of disease or "natural causes". Okay, well, we know that, statistically speaking, half of them will be dead by 1216 years of age, but what about the rest? Grinding our way through our half-life calculator, what we find is that after 1500 years, we're still left with about 42.5% of our original population of 4+ million babies. After 2000 years, we're left with about 32% of our original population. Not bad, eh? At 3000 years, we drop to about 18%, and at 5000 years, slightly less than 6% of our original population should still be hanging around, statistically speaking.
Now let's go for it. After 10,000 years, only about 0.33% of our original population will be left - somewhat less than 14,000 people out of the 4+ million we started with. After 15,000 years, we're down to 0.02% of the original population, or fewer than 800 people. After 20,000 years, we drop down to 0.001% of the original population, or fewer than 50 people.
What's it all mean? Well, our elixir would, based on the current rate of death by injury, make it possible to live for a very long time in a few cases. The vast majority of people wouldn't make it that far, but for a lucky few, they would have a lifespan that far exceeded what we currently know as the entire span of recorded human history, which is only about 5000 years so far if you go back to the early Sumerians. Something to ponder with your coffee in the morning ;)
That's an awfully high bar you've set! I doubt I'm the most talented to address all of this; there've been some very good books written on the subject (I can post a list if you'd like) and mine is ultimately just a 'layman' opinion. I might be the most committed (pun intended) but hardly the most talented.
In any case, I'll give it a shot, but I'll have to get back to you later. These questions obviously touch on several rather complex issues, and require a lengthy reply. I've written a good part of it, but it's a disorganized mess, and I'll have to finish and revise it. I'm guessing by tomorrow evening.
Excellent post! I'm keeping it for future reference. =)
Ingredients:2 eggs, lightly beaten
1 1/2 C. milk
1/4 C. packed brown sugar
2 C. flour
1 1/2 tsp. baking powder
1/4 tsp. salt
oil for deep-frying
confectioner's sugar - for dustingPreparation:
In a bowl, combine the eggs, milk, and brown sugar.
Combine flour, baking powder, and salt; beat into egg mixture until smooth.
In an electric skillet or deep-fat fryer, heat oil to 375 degrees.
Cover the bottom of a funnel spout with your finger; ladle 1/2 cup batter into funnel.
Holding the funnel several inches above the skillet, release finger and move the funnel in a spiral motion until all of the batter is released (scraping funnel with a rubber spatula if needed).
Fry for 2 minutes on each side or until golden brown.
Drain on paper towels.
Repeat with remaining batter.
Dust with confectioners' sugar; serve warm.
(Note that the batter can be poured from a liquid measuring cup instead of a funnel.)
Serving Size: 1
But OH, so lovable!
OOps!
I was sleeping!
Has an Evo been nasty again??
What'd I miss at 852 and 854??
Maybe not, but it appears that Ma has. (Mother Nature, that is.)
It sure seems to me, with all this Evolvin' goin' on, that She would have evoled Eternal Life, instead of all this death and sex and reproducin' and failin' and eggs and live births and.......
SO much simpler theory:
You ALIVE?
Keep at it!
By the way, I suppose the "death by accident" rate would increase from its present value, because if you knew you were immortal, you'd possibly take some more risks from time to time -- skydiving, bungee jumping, maybe even dueling, etc.
Oh?
This is a requirement from you??
HMmmm....... I had assumed, from reading your stuff.....
Oh, well; God made me do it; right?
Yeah, well, it sure seems to you wrong. The apparent reason that it seems to you wrong is because you seemingly cannot break out of your theistic mindset. If a Goddess existed, and was directing the course of life on earth, then it sure would make a lot of sense to make it eternal. But, in the absence of such a conductor, evolution merely requires that life procreate, and doesn't have any reason to evolve 'eternal' life.
Moreover, it would require a substantial degree of alteration in the fundamental architecture of terrestrial life, and there is no environmental pressure that would cause species to evolve in that direction. It could not happen by accident in a multicellular organism. You would basically require an organism that either perpetually grows or perpetually rejuvenates itself, and either case would demand an impressive degree of modification, and create significant problems in terms of viability (resource limitations would be one, and a static organism cannot adapt to a new environment).
These are problems that we can likely handle due to our higher intelligence; a trait which is absent in other organisms. Finally, if we attain eternal youth via technology, it will be because we evolved the capability to do so (something that's almost certainly already happened). Therefore, evolution will have produced what you say it hasn't. If you're confused, go back and reread my point #2 above.
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