Spend an Evening with Daniel Peterson

It's been a little while since I've checked in on the Mormon Stories podcast, and boy have I been missing out. Today I want to highlight a 4-part interview with Daniel C. Peterson. That works out to about 4.5 hours of discussion with one of the Church's chief (if not the chief) apologists. It's a wide-ranging and pretty frank discussion, and I thought it was just delightful. Here are a few of the gems that I picked out:

- He has an abiding interest in astronomy, cosmology, and geology. In fact, he originally intended to be a cosmologist.

- A desire that we teach our history better (i.e. warts and all), and that Sunday school in general be improved. In connection with this, Peterson tells some amusing stories about his time on the Sunday school manual-writing committee.

- While serving as a gospel doctrine teacher, he talked about the human side of prophets (e.g. Nephi probably was a really annoying younger brother). A contingent of the class complained to their bishop that he was teaching "secular humanism."

- Speaking of humanism, Peterson sees Mormonism as a kind of theistic humanism, and thinks that non-religious humanists have important things to say.

- His opinion that many prophecies, and their fulfillment, are often a reflection of God's power to bring things to pass in the way he chooses, rather than some kind of predestined future.

- A second-hand story that President Eyring remarked that most high priest groups have more doctrinal certainty than the First Presidency.

I want to dwell on one part of the interview for a moment, because I think it needs some challenging. In defense of Joseph Smith's use of folk-magic, Peterson pointed out that dowsing for water is still a wide-spread practice, and told of a personal experience where dowsing for water seemed to work. First I should note that although that line of defense might work well with religious critics, it makes things worse for someone of a scientific skepticism orientation. This is because dowsing appears to be a phenomenon that can be attributed to subconscious cues and muscle movements, and retrospective justification. In short, it appears to be a psychological illusion, similar to facilitated communication and Ouija boards.

I don't doubt Peterson's sincerity (and to be clear, he does not claim that dowsing does in fact work), nor am I in a position to judge his experience, but his story does raise some red flags. For example, he and others may have received subtle cues as to where the water pipe was. Did the dowsing rods cross at exactly the right spot, or was there an element of 'close enough,' that artificially inflates the number of hits? Further, Peterson discounts the guy for whom the dowsing failed, attributing the failure to his not holding it right. As convincing as the experience sounds, a lot of ordinary possibilities remain. So, I agree that Joseph's use of folk-magic is not, in and of itself, any more scandalous than dowsing, but let's be careful in comparing him to a practice that controlled tests have repeatedly shown to be illusory. (Actually, I'm open to the possibility that many of Joseph's magical experiences were honest illusions, but that's another discussion.)

Anyway, my overall impression of the discussion is that Daniel Peterson and I think a lot alike, and his view of Mormonism resonates with me in many ways. I don't say that as though he should be flattered or to inflate my own status. I simply mean that Peterson has impeccable LDS credentials, so when I agree with him about something that isn't the company line, so to speak, I think I'm in good company.

In the spirit of this blog, I want to finish with a couple of quotes that I really liked.

To the extent that there is an anti-scientific, anti-intellectual strain in CES [the Church Educational System], that's something that needs to be rooted out. This does not help us. And I know that there is a movement on in the Church right now with some people pushing certain geographical theories of the Book of Mormon, and a component of that is young-earth creationism, anti-evolutionism. This worries me enormously, because it can't be sustained.

And later:

We're not fundamentalist Protestants who happen to have an extra book, and maybe an extra wife.

...Mormonism itself is bigger than that. And I object to it when critics try to paint us as a narrow-minded little fundamentalist sect, and I really object to it when Mormons try to do it. And I don't like it from either side. That's why I object to some of this young-earth creationist stuff that I'm hearing recently. No, no, that's not us.

Preach it, brother!

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If I Had a Side Blog (#5)

I've got most of the week off, but haven't felt like doing much blogging. So here is some stuff to chew on for the time being.

1. Did Jesus have long hair?

2. Why energy journalism is so bad.

3. Do facts exist anymore? And can they be checked?

4. Although this is about Gingrich, it speaks to a larger issue: underappreciation of the importance of public health infrastructure.

5. We are apparently to the point where imaginary objects are security threats.

6. Kevin Drum about sums it up:

Climate change is the public policy problem from hell. If you were inventing a problem that would be virtually impossible to solve, you'd give it all the characteristics of climate change: it's largely invisibile, it's slow moving, it's expensive to fix, it requires global coordination, and its effects will be disproportionately borne by poor countries that nobody cares about.

7. I have some serious career envy.

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XMRV Paper Retracted

Earlier this month I highlighted the drama and controversy surrounding the claim that a virus (XMRV) was associated with chronic fatigue syndrome. The original paper has now been fully retracted by Science.

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Theology and Non-Mortal Biology

A new article in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought has attracted attention in the bloggernacle. The article, "Toward a Post-Heterosexual Mormon Theology," by Taylor G. Petrey, is a discussion of how LDS theology might one day incorporate homosexual relationships. However, even if homosexuality is not a topic that interests you, this article is still worth reading if you ever think about how mortal biology fits into the grand scheme of things. Two of the main topics treated are reproduction and gender. Let's look briefly at each one.

Reproduction

Petrey begins his discussion of reproduction by noting that we have competing notions of how spirits are created. Joseph Smith emphasized the eternal nature of intelligence (D&C 93:29–33), and it appears that notions of "spirit birth" came later, following his death [1].

The ambivalence on this point is a persistent tension in Mormon thought. That is, the doctrine of spiritual birth stands at odds with the doctrine of eternal intelligences, and to this day Mormonism has not resolved this tension. On the one hand, “spirit birth” is a divine reproduction that mirrors human reproduction, requiring a male and female partner; and on the other hand, “spirit birth” is a more metaphorical “organization” that bears little resemblance to reproduction as a result of sexual intercourse.

Sometimes it is emphasized that we are "literally" children of God. Adding in the word "literally," however, doesn't clear up the questions. A friend of mine had parents who divorced when he was young, and his mother re-married soon after. As far as my friend was concerned, the second man--what we would call his step-father--was his father, period. My friend wasn't LDS, but we could imagine that he was and that this reconstituted family was sealed together in the temple--an imaginary situation that reflects a common reality. Under these circumstances, was the second man literally my friend's father? What does that question even mean? The problem here is that fatherhood (and by implication, childhood) has several fascets to it, with a source of genetic information being only one of them. That's why we have to tack on words like 'biological', 'adopted', and 'step' when not all of the fascets are contained in a single relationship.

To say that I am a spirit child of God is to say something important. But like Petrey seems to, I have trouble connecting it too closely to mortal biology--as though spirit gametes fuse to form a spirit embryo containing spirit DNA from each parent, which then implants in a spirit womb and grows until one day it is ready to come out--with all of this somehow happening inside an immortal physical body. Here I see a connection to Petrey's discussion of sealing as building kinship. Whatever else may be involved (or not) in both my spiritual and physical creation, I see my relationship with God, along with my future potential and eternal destiny, as the defining feature of my existence--both past and future. I'm not wedded to any particular explanation of how that relationship came about. "I know that [God] loveth his children; nevertheless, I do not know the meaning of all things [1 Nephi 11:17]."

Petrey also notes that it seems strange that mortals pair to bring spirits into mortality, but that somehow it requires two immortal bodies to create spirits, which are two stages back in progression. In connection with this, I've noticed a similar puzzle: according to some commentators Adam and Eve were physically created by the union of two immortal bodies. This would seem to imply that immortal reproductive organs have a dual usage--creation of both physical bodies and spirits, depending on...well, who knows what?

Gender

The article devotes several pages to a discussion of gender. Although we are taught that gender is an eternal part of our identity, the word itself has a somewhat ambiguous meaning, and it isn't clear how it maps onto the premortal life. This is part of a larger problem hinted at above: The closer spirit form and creation is tied to mortal biology, the sillier it starts to sound in light of what we know about biology (especially genetics), and a sort of predestination seems needed to solve some of the consequent problems [2]. Further, Petrey notes:

The whole question of the relationship of the premortal spirit to the mortal body is at stake in the claim that “gender” belongs to both equally. If any of the particularities of one’s genetic and environmental circumstances may be said to not preexist with a particular spirit in a deterministic way, why then is sexual difference the exception? To assert that “gender” is more fundamental to one’s identity than these other contingent features begs the question: Of the many different features of human identity, why does sexual difference—whatever that may refer to—occupy a privileged place in the account of the eternal nature of the human being?

In other words, we know a lot about how genes determine hair color, skin color, and so on. Can any of these features be said to correspond to our premortal spirit, and if not, then why gender? And although it is easy to dismiss intersex individuals as exceptions to the rule (victims of "pranks of nature," to use the term of a couple of Church leaders), such an attitude papers over the multiple layers and plasticity of sexual development [3].

Petrey is not the first to notice these kinds of issues [4], but I think he has done a good job of explaining and expressing them. I don't expect any change in the way the Church approaches the issues discussed in the article, but at a minimum it serves as a good reminder that as clear as we think our doctrines are, they are embedded in a matrix of unnoticed assumptions and unanswered questions, some of which are probably the result of having a doctrinal structure that was mostly in place before the foundations of the sciences as we know them. And you never know--many people concluded that the priesthood ban didn't make sense, and that it had a dubious history, years before it was ended. Although its removal was a matter of revelation, it appears that scholarship helped to clear the path for the revelation [5]. I like to think that D&C 9:7-8 operates for both individuals and institutions, and that seems to be what Petrey is aiming for.

Notes:

1. Blake Ostler, "The Idea of Pre-existence in the Development of Mormon Thought"

2. Such explanations don't really explain anything, either. See The Spirit as a Homunculus.

3. See Duane Jeffery's article, "Intersexes in Humans," for a nice LDS-oriented discussion of this topic. It seems to have held up well since it's publication in 1979. See also Jeffrey Keller, "Is Sexual Gender Eternal?"

4. For example, see Kent Condie, "Premortal Spirits: Implications for Cloning, Abortion, Evolution, and Extinction."

5. Edward Kimball, Lengthen Your Stride: The Presidency of Spencer W. Kimball, p. 219-220.

On May 25, Mark E. Petersen called President Kimball's attention to an article that proposed the priesthood policy had begun with Brigham Young, not Joseph Smith, and he suggested that the President might wish to consider this factor.

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Real-Life Science Drama

I'm late on this, but I'm guessing most people haven't paid attention to it anyway, so it's just as well. And as you'll see at the end, it's a story that hasn't finished.

In 2009 a paper was published in Science that reported an association between chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) and a retrovirus called XMRV. Although it was premature at the time to say that XMRV caused CFS, once it was shown that XMRV was sensitive to anti-retroviral drugs used in HIV treatment, some patients started taking the drugs in an attempt to treat CFS, and patient advocacy groups rallied around the new CFS paradigm. Further, there was concern that XMRV might be in the blood supply, prompting the exclusion of donors with CFS.

However, there is mounting evidence that the claims of the original paper were not correct, with other groups repeatedly failing to confirm the results, the original group unable to reliably identify positive samples, and evidence that the virus itself is a laboratory product. Last May Science suggested that the original paper be retracted, but the authors refused. So the editor, Bruce Alberts, published an "expression of concern" which essentially said that Science no longer had confidence in the paper. Fast forward to September: the authors of the original study retracted several figures from the paper when they determined that the results were based on contaminated samples. A week later lead author Judy Mikovits was fired, apparently over a dispute about sharing of cell lines.

The XMRV history is mostly laid out in "False Positive", published in Science, but it's behind a paywall. However, the LA Times had a good story that covers much of the same material. It's fascinating to read as the evidence for the hypothesis is described, and then to watch the tide turn against what seemed like compelling findings. Mix in Mikovits digging her heels in--going so far as to claim conspiracy against her--and the hysterics of patient-advocacy groups (physically threatening scientists, in some cases), and you've got a real scientific drama.

But beyond the drama, this story helps to illuminate how science works. Philosopher Karl Popper famously argued that science works by falsification. It's not uncommon (at least in Internet discussions) to hear this view strictly applied--that it only takes a single experiment to falsify a theory. But this example shows that it isn't so simple. The impact of a single experiment depends on context, technology, and the state of the field. When contradictory results are obtained, it takes time to gain clarity. Right now it looks like the XMRV link to CFS is dead. However, Mikovits still believes that a link exists and that the difficulties in nailing it down can be attributed to the biology of the virus-host interaction. Is that ad hoc rationalization in an attempt to save a favored hypothesis, or is it perseverance in the face of a complex world that doesn't always give easy answers?

This, in turn, gives us an opportunity to think about Thomas Kuhn's notion of paradigms and what it means to know something based on collected knowledge. Going forward, the notion that XMRV or any other retrovirus causes CFS will be viewed with great skepticism by most scientists, and this collective judgment will dominate the field, while a few dedicated (intransigent?) researchers may soldier on. I don't think that CFS is prevalent enough to catch public attention like, say, vaccines have, but you never know. Will we hear complaints that the dominant view is held by closed-minded defenders of the status quo? Will the minority attempt to wrap themselves in the clothes of Galileo?

The latest is that Mikovits has been charged with two felonies in Nevada and is the subject of a civil suit from her former employer over the removal of laboratory notebooks and attempts to send materials to another lab.

It's been a roller-coaster ride so far, and it looks like the ride isn't over yet.

(In addition to links in the post, also see here.)

[Update, 12/22/11: The original paper has been fully retracted.]

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2012 Cosmophobia

December is upon us, so it's a good time to take a quick look at why some people think that the world may end a year from now. For several years there have been claims on the Internet that a planet--Nibiru or Planet X--will collide with Earth (or make a catastrophic near-miss) in December of 2012. This planet allegedly orbits the sun every 3600 years, and that the collision coincides with the end of the Mayan calendar is just a bonus.

NASA has some nice material on this, especially the "Ask an Astrobiologist" web-page. Whether you are concerned about this yourself, or are just interested in what types of things people get themselves worked up over, head on over and read the Q&A. The short version is that no such planet exists.

You'll also find these two videos.





To put an LDS twist on this, some people think Nibiru or Planet X could be implicated in this statement by Joseph Smith:

There will be wars and rumors of wars, signs in the heavens above and on the earth beneath, the sun turned into darkness and the moon to blood, earthquakes in divers places, the seas heaving beyond their bounds; then will appear one grand sign of the Son of Man in heaven. But what will the world do? They will say it is a planet, a comet, &c. But the Son of Man will come as the sign of the coming of the Son of Man, which will be as the light of the morning cometh out of the east [History of The Church, 5:336-37].

Whatever Joseph's statement means, I think it's pretty safe to say that it has nothing to do with Nibiru or Planet X...since no such planet exists.


And just for fun, I'll end with Robert Frost's poem, "Fire and Ice."

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

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Climategate 2

Two years ago, emails among climate scientists taken from the servers of the University of East Anglia were released to the world, which sparked a pseudo-scandal known as 'Climategate.' The emails, some taken severely out of context, were used to tar the whole field of research and create the impression that climate scientists are an insular group who break the law, falsify data, and suppress opposition in order to keep the global warming hoax alive so that [insert nefarious rationale]. In the intervening time, investigations have largely cleared the scientists swept up in the whirlwind, and the temperature record was recently re-affirmed by an independent analysis. Nevertheless, the storm of controversy had effects that can be seen to this day, with attempts to get all of Michael Mann's emails and files from the University of Virginia working their way through the courts, and commentators like Rush Limbaugh continuing to cite the emails as proof that global warming is a scam.

Now, in time for the holiday season, a new batch of emails has been released. However, like most sequels, Climategate 2 looks likely to be disappointing for those interested in stirring up controversy. The emails appear to be left-overs from the first batch released, and you can bet the scientists involved won't be caught flat-footed this time.

A quick digression: This business of trolling through emails looking for something salacious is understandable. After all, these are supposed to be the unguarded real thoughts of the people involved, and sometimes internal communications really do contain damning information (see: tobacco companies). But it's always struck me how this kind of storm could envelope any area of research. Every field has its contested concepts, its grandstanders, and its controversial figures. Scientific papers are not handed to us on tablets written by God, they are written by people who have to hash out the best way to tell the story--where to put the emphasis, what data to include, and how to contextualize it. In that respect it's a little bit like journalism or the law. (Hey, there's an idea. Imagine the stories we could get out of the internal communications of a decent sized law firm!) Probably nobody will ever care about my own work, but I sometimes imagine what kind of controversy could be spun out of my communications.

Hopefully we're all a little wiser this time. (But maybe not.)


More details:

The Guardian

BBC

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Evolution is an Eternal Principle

Over at NDBF, R. Gary pits evolution against the Millennium: "Evolution requires death and, beginning with the Millennium, there will be no death anywhere on earth." Ergo, evolution will cease. However, this isn't quite right and it gives us an opportunity to think about this a little more in depth.

You only need three conditions for evolution to occur:

1. Variation in traits
2. Heritability of the variation
3. Differential reproduction (i.e. varying degrees of success in passing on the traits)

Natural selection gets most of the attention when it comes to #3, hence the association of evolution with death. (Well, fossils contribute to that, too.) But besides the fact that there is more to natural selection than death, natural selection is only one mechanism of evolution. There are others like sexual selection, where the preference of males or females for certain traits leads to those traits becoming more common. Another one is genetic drift, where simply by random luck some genes become prevalent and others disappear.

Death or no death, when it comes to the Millennium, will variation in traits cease? Will reproduction of those traits cease? Will all traits be maintained in the population in the same proportions? Unless you can answer 'yes' to one of those questions, there will be evolution.

The hymn "If You Could Hie to Kolob" says, "There is no end to race." As long as there is variation, heritability of variation, and differential perpetuation of that variation, there will be no end to evolution.

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