Facts and Authority

The Crucible of Doubt, by Terryl and Fiona Givens, contains this quote from Austin Farrer that I liked and thought I would pass along:

Facts are not determined by authority. Authority can make law to be law; authority cannot make facts to be facts.

This would seem to be obvious, but you don't have to look too far to find facts disputed on the basis of authority (i.e. position within the Church). By virtue of their authority leaders of (and within) the Church are entitled to establish law, and I strive to obey the law. But when it comes to facts, authority is not a guarantee of accuracy.

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The Crucible of Doubt: Granting Permission to Believe

Modern science has taught us a lot about how our bodies work. To say it all boils down to chemistry may be an oversimplification, but there is a lot of truth in that statement. What does it mean then, when we feel love and affection for one another? Are our emotions and desires the work of chemicals that manipulate our subjective experience, and therefore not really real? These kinds of questions are sometimes posed by budding rationalists, who wonder what role such chemical reactions should play in their life. A common answer goes something like this: 'We are humans and we have no choice but to experience life as humans. Our emotions and feelings are real to us. Understand where they come from so that you don't make bad decisions based on them, but don't over-think them either. It is not a betrayal of reason and logic to be human. Enjoy life!'

Sometimes we need permission to just be ourselves. One of the messages I took away from The Crucible of Doubt: Reflections on the Quest for Faith, by Terryl and Fiona Givens, is that we should give ourselves permission to believe.

Coming into the first chapter, The Use and Abuse of Reason, I was a little skeptical that I would agree with what the authors would say. It is easy to say that there are ways of 'knowing' other than science and reason. Such statements usually strike me as a kind of epistemic jealousy. Artists and writers may have dreamed up things as strange as relativity and quantum mechanics, but they could never deliver the empirical reality. I was pleasantly surprised that the Givens did not seem to be trying to put science 'in its place' as much as put it in a human context.

The problem is not that science cannot give us direction with life’s most urgent questions. It is because, in actual practice, logical reasoning does not give us much guidance. We don’t really live our lives, in any meaningful way, according to the dictates of logic. And we certainly don’t embrace our most cherished beliefs, values, or opinions on the basis of reason alone—however much we may protest we do....

[A]s moral agents, immersed in a world of human relationships and human values, we most appropriately choose and judge and act as human beings whose desires and motivations and bases for action are deeper than and prior to logic.

I can get on board with that, since even certainty is a feeling.

The discussion in the first chapter connects to the last chapter, where the Givens take up the inevitability of belief and how we channel it. After describing three views of the cosmos (both theistic and atheistic), they write:

...we assemble the scattered pieces of evidence from science, from life experience, from intuition, and from reason into a tentative whole, trusting some sources of meaning and distrusting others. We cannot escape the burden of faith, within or outside the parameters of religious conviction.

So we can't help but believe in something, but what if that something turns out to be wrong? The Givens, in turn, ask if that is really such a horrible thing, and quote William James as follows:

He who says “Better to go without belief forever than believe a lie!” merely shows his own preponderant private horror of becoming a dupe. . . . This fear he slavishly obeys. . . . For my own part, I have also a horror of being duped; but I can believe that worse things than being duped may happen to a man in this world. . . . It is like a general informing his soldiers that it is better to keep out of battle forever than to risk a single wound. Not so are victories either over enemies or over nature gained. Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf.

This is all well and good, but there are elements of Church doctrine where we might suspect that we are indeed being duped. What then? The Givens answer:

Perhaps...one might focus on the message rather than the messenger. One might consider that the contingencies of history and culture and the human element will always constitute the garment in which God’s word and will are clothed. And one might refuse to allow our desire for the perfect to be the enemy of the present good. Finally, we might ask ourselves, with the early disciples, “to whom [else] shall we go?”

The worst risk such a life of faith entails is not that such a life might be wrong—but that it might be incomprehensible to those unprepared to take such a risk.

Perhaps you find yourself unable to abandon belief in certain core doctrines of Mormonism in spite of science and reason. As I read them, the message of these two chapters of The Crucible of Doubt is this: 'You are a human and will unavoidably believe things that go beyond science, and often make choices ignoring it. It is not a betrayal of rationality to believe. Embrace what you find beautiful, good, and compelling in Mormonism. Enjoy life!'

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Voting Your Conscience: Old LDS Edition

This week's U.S. election gives me an excuse to share some material from Church history I recently found.

In the April General Conference of 1907, with the Reed Smoot hearings finally over, a declaration written by the First Presidency under Joseph F. Smith was read to the congregation titled, "An Address: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to the World." The purpose of the declaration was to correct misunderstandings about the Church and assure people that even though Mormons believed in revelation to a prophet, they were simultaneously loyal citizens of their countries, and the United States in particular.

Following its reading, President Francis M. Lyman, president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, stated that the address was endorsed by the Council of the Twelve Apostles and moved that the address be adopted "as an expression of the principles and policy of the Church that we will advocate and sustain." After the motion was seconded by Elder John Henry Smith, the congregation was asked to signify approval by standing. Then those objecting were asked to do the same, of which the Conference report stated there were none. The declaration was included in the Conference report and printed in the May issue of the Church's magazine, Improvement Era.

The document makes for an interesting read because it reveals the public pressures felt by Church leaders at that time. One of the points addressed was the charge of 'arbitrary power' in the Church. After reciting well-known passages from D&C 121 about the righteous exercise of priesthood authority, the First Presidency wrote:

Nominations to Church office may be made by revelation; and the right of nomination is usually exercised by those holding high authority, but it is a law that no person is to be ordained to any office in the Church, where there is a regularly organized branch of the same, without the vote of its members. This law is operative as to all the officers of the Church, from the president down to the deacon. The ecclesiastical government itself exists by the will of the people; elections are frequent, and the members are at liberty to vote as they choose. True, the elective principle here operates by popular acceptance, rather than through popular selection, but it is none the less real. Where the foregoing facts exist as to any system, it is not and cannot be arbitrary.

The notion that the Saints could freely express their will with respect to ecclesiastical government was encouraged in a number of General Conferences in that first decade. For example, in the April conference of 1905 President Joseph F. Smith prefaced the sustaining vote with these words:

As this is the seventy-fifth anniversary of the day on which the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was organized, we will present the general authorities of the Church for your vote this afternoon, and I would like to say that it is expected that all the Latter-day Saints will exercise their right to vote for or against those whose names are submitted. We would like you to exercise perfect liberty and freedom in the expression of your own thought and faith and fidelity in the lifting of your hands.

Well, times change and as the Encyclopedia of Mormonism put it,

The principle of common consent has functioned in the Church since its inception, though the actual practices incorporating this principle have evolved significantly.

Most recently we were instructed that there are no elections in the Church and that we do not vote on Church leadership at any level, but rather sustain them. In practice there is probably little difference from over a century ago. I would guess that the sustaining vote of 1905 was about as routine as that of 2014 [1]. It seems clear, however, that Joseph F. Smith's portrayal of the sustaining vote as a non-arbitrary 'elective principle' is long gone.

Notes:

1. Almost. The April report states: "All the voting was unanimous with, two exceptions; and President Smith invited those who had so voted to state their grievances to the proper authorities, and they would be considered."

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Ebola: Fox News Preaches the Truth

Fox's Shep Smith put the smackdown on Ebola fear mongering in a brief but forceful statement.



Unfortunately, some of Shep's colleagues have been part of the problem. I don't do Facebook. But for those of you who do, may I suggest that this video is worth sharing? This is a video that ought to go viral (pun sort of intended, but also kind of hard to avoid).

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Priesthood Session Highlights: Dunning-Kruger and The Eyring Letter

Two items of relevance to this blog in last night's priesthood session of General Conference stood out to me. First, as President Uchtdorf described research showing that people with low skill tend to overrate their own performance, it became clear to me that he was describing the Dunning-Kruger effect. Pres. Uchtdorf didn't mention the corollary, that people with low skill also fail to recognize true competence in others. This bit of psychology is often invoked in online discussions when some ignoramus starts yammering on about things he clearly does not understand, and rejects correction. As Dunning and Kruger put it, in the abstract of one of their publications,

Successful negotiation of everyday life would seem to require people to possess insight about deficiencies in their intellectual and social skills. However, people tend to be blissfully unaware of their incompetence. This lack of awareness arises because poor performers are doubly cursed: Their lack of skill deprives them not only of the ability to produce correct responses, but also of the expertise necessary to surmise that they are not producing them. People base their perceptions of performance, in part, on their preconceived notions about their skills. Because these notions often do not correlate with objective performance, they can lead people to make judgments about their performance that have little to do with actual accomplishment.

I thought it was great that Pres. Uchtdorf injected this nerdy bit of psychology into Church discourse, and I will be interested to see if/how it is footnoted in the printed text. The overall talk was very good, and I expect that it will be widely used for fourth-Sunday lessons. Maybe we can think of other ways Dunning-Kruger is manifest amongst the Saints.

The second item of interest to me was President Eyring's reference to a letter his father sent to Church leaders about science and religion, and which his father asked his opinion on. Pres. Eyring previously told that story during an interview for a program BYUtv did on his father several years ago. (Alas, it appears to have disappeared from the BYUtv site.) In that program, Pres. Eyring told the story in the context of reaction to Pres. Joseph Fielding Smith's book, Man, His Origin and Destiny. It is therefore likely that Pres. Eyring was referring to Henry Eyring's most famous letter. The full text of that letter and the story behind it can be read here. (It is also possible that Pres. Eyring was remembering one of the other letters Henry Eyring wrote.)

At a minimum, Pres. Eyring's talk is a useful reference if you ever have occasion to tell someone about the letter. However, Pres. Eyring's talk is also a likely candidate for a fourth-Sunday lesson. Maybe you can help liven the discussion by providing the background on the famous letter he was probably alluding to.

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How Climate Change Skeptics Made Me Feel Better About Ebola

The bad news is that the Ebola outbreak is awful and is likely to get worse in western Africa. I'm feeling a little impish, so here are reasons not to worry based on the kinds of things global warming skeptics say.

1. Cases of Ebola are down in some villages, and in most of Africa and the rest of the world they remain at record lows.
2. Disease epidemiological models can be manipulated to get inflated results. They also can't take into account future medical advances.
3. Scientists who study Ebola are totally dependent on government funding. They have an incentive to make Ebola seem like a crisis.
4. The earth, and humans in particular, have experienced disease outbreaks before. They're still here, and they will adapt.
5. Resources sent to Africa are a drain on our economy.
6. The Ebola scare is an excuse to give the government and the United Nations control over people's lives.
7. Even if we do contain this outbreak, Ebola will pop up somewhere else.
8. It could be that other factors like poor nutrition are more to blame.
9. Intervention efforts may actually kill more people than would die if the epidemic was left to burn itself out.

See? Problem dismissed.

Obviously this is satire, but it's worth pointing out that most of the above statements are true. How can they be both true and wrong? The answer is: context.

On the other hand, maybe there really is reason to worry. Just for fun I did a search for Ebola conspiracy theories. Should I be surprised that the Tea Party was claiming that the outbreak is part of a plot to take away our freedoms (i.e. guns)? And for the sheer fun of sheer madness, watch this:




I like how he repeatedly said, "pathenogens".

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Abraham's Myths

This is mostly a note for myself, but I thought I would post it for anyone interested. I've been re-reading Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament, by Peter Enns. Although written for an evangelical audience, it applies almost equally well to Mormons. (I've mentioned the book before, and it is routinely recommended by Ben Spackman.) In reading chapter 2 I was struck by Enns's explanation for why Genesis resembles the older myths of other ancient cultures. Before proceeding it is important to know what Enns means by 'myth.'

Myth is an ancient, premodern, pre-scientific way of addressing questions of ultimate origins and meaning in the form of stories: Who are we? Where do we come from?

Enns thinks it all starts with Abraham. (The italics are original.)

It is important to remember where Abraham came from and where he was headed....The Mesopotamian world from which Abraham came was one whose own stories of origins had been expressed in mythic categories for a considerable length of time. Moreover, the land Abraham was going to enter, the land of the Canaanites, was likewise rich in its own myths....

As God entered into a relationship with Abraham, he "met" him where he was--an ancient Mesopotamian man who breathed the air of the ancient Near East. We must surely assume that Abraham, as such a man, shared the worldview of those whose world he shared and not a modern, scientific one. The reason the opening chapters of Genesis look so much like the literature of ancient Mesopotamia is that the worldview categories of the ancient Near East were ubiquitous and normative at the time. Of course, different cultures had different myths, but the point is that they all had them....

What makes Genesis different from its ancient Near Eastern counterparts is that it begins to make the point to Abraham and his seed that the God they are bound to, the God who called them into existence, is different from the gods around them....

We might think that such a scenario is unsatisfying because it gives too much ground to pagan myths. But we must bear in mind how very radical this notion would have been in the ancient world. For a second-millennium Semitic people...to say that the gods of Babylon were not worth worshiping but that the true god was the god of a nomad like Abraham--this was risky, ridiculous, and counterintuitive....

To put it differently, God adopted Abraham as the forefather of a new people, and in doing so he also adopted the mythic categories within which Abraham--and everyone else--thought. But God did not simply leave Abraham in his mythic world. Rather, God transformed the ancient myths so that Israel's story would come to focus on its God, the real one.

[T]he question is not the degree to which Genesis conforms to what we would think is a proper description of origins....The question that Genesis is prepared to answer is whether Yahweh, the God of Israel, is worthy of worship....Genesis makes its case in a way that ancient men and women would have readily understood--indeed the only way.

Although the Egyptians aren't mentioned, they also had a rich mythology. That Enns builds his argument around Abraham is of special LDS interest given our Book of Abraham. However, the argument is equally applicable to Moses. God's covenant people were surrounded by powerful polytheistic cultures and empires for hundreds to thousands of years. It makes sense that they needed myths of their own, and that those myths looked somewhat similar to those of their neighbors.

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Let's Be Frank About the Book of Mormon Introduction

Daniel Peterson spoke at the annual FAIR conference last month, and the transcript of his talk has been posted online. Peterson's talk was titled, "Some Reflections On That Letter To a CES Director," a reference to a document that has been circulating for a year or two that compiles together a lot of criticisms of the Church. Not surprisingly, the issue of DNA and the Book of Mormon was raised. After dismissing the relevance of genetics under the theory that the Book of Mormon peoples were a very small group mixing with a large established population, Peterson turned to the introduction of the Book of Mormon.

[Letter to a CES Director] “Why did the Church change the following section of the introduction page of the 2006 edition of the Book of Mormon shortly after the DNA results were released?” Quote: “The Lamanites were the principal ancestors of the American Indians” is changed to, “The Lamanites, and they are among the ancestors of the American Indians.”

Well, the implication is “because the DNA evidence undercut the Church’s position.” That’s not true. I happen to know the backstory, which has never been published. The backstory is, there were people who objected to that heading when it was done in the late 1970s/early 1980s. They were overruled by someone who was in a position of authority. But, they said the Book of Mormon never actually makes that claim. Don’t make the Book of Mormon claim things it doesn’t actually claim. We set ourselves up sometimes for problems when we claim things for the book, but that the book, when carefully read, does not claim for itself.

This is the kind of thing that drives believers-turned-critics crazy, and I can sympathize. I have a specific memory [1] of reading the introduction to the Book of Mormon as a missionary and coming across the passage in question. This was before DNA had become an issue, but it was still the case that virtually everyone outside the Church thought that American Indians came from Asia. I remember reading that line about the Lamanites being the "principal ancestors of the American Indians" and thinking that if the prophets and apostles were certain enough to put that in the introduction, then it must be the case.

I've obviously had to rethink that position and the assumptions behind it in subsequent years [2], but I have to admit that it irks me a little to see the wording simply attributed to someone in authority. It is hard to believe that the wording of the introduction was not read closely by the First Presidency and Twelve Apostles, and it is also hard to believe that the wording would have stood if any of them had reservations about it. I don't dispute Peterson's backstory, but it doesn't really solve the problem anyway. All it shows is that those who objected to the wording were not the ones in authority. That kind of makes the critique stronger.

It might be the case that former believers can be faulted for various failings, but taking seriously the Church's own introduction to the book that is the 'keystone of our religion' is not one of them. I think a better approach is simply to acknowledge that when the introduction was written (1981), Church leaders held the traditional LDS belief and assumption that the Lamanites were the main ancestors of the American Indians. However, it wasn't a crucial issue and so when strong evidence showed it to be in error, the wording was changed. What's the harm in a straightforward answer like that? (It's actually not that different from the Church's own explanation.)

Notes:

1. It is a memory I don't think I ever wrote down. As such, the standard disclaimers apply.

2. On a related note, I also remember one of my MTC teachers driving home the importance of using materials approved by the Church in teaching. Whether intended or not, one of the messages that came through to me was that you can have full confidence in materials published by the Church. Unfortunately, I have had to rethink that as well.

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Are We Too Stupid to NOT Believe in Free Will?

Over at his blog, Sic et Non, Daniel Peterson highlighted a Scientific American article from last June asking what happens if society stops believing in free will. The article is pay-walled but, according to Peterson's summary, experiments suggest that people become less judgmental and punitive. However, they are also more likely to act less like a Boy Scout.

Participants in scientific experiments who’ve just read a strongly anti-free-will passage seem to show a significantly greater tendency (50%!) than their fellow participants to cheat on academic tests. Other experiments showed a higher tendency to cruelty among readers of such passages, and decreased impulse control.

This gives me an excuse to think out loud: Maybe there are falsehoods that we need to generally believe because otherwise a significant number of morons would run us all off the rails. I'm reminded of an article at The Onion from a few years ago: U.S. Economy Grinds To Halt As Nation Realizes Money Just A Symbolic, Mutually Shared Illusion.

"It's just an illusion," a wide-eyed [Federal Reserve chairman Ben] Bernanke added as he removed bills from his wallet and slowly spread them out before him. "Just look at it: Meaningless pieces of paper with numbers printed on them. Worthless."

According to witnesses, Finance Committee members sat in thunderstruck silence for several moments until Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) finally shouted out, "Oh my God, he's right. It's all a mirage. All of it—the money, our whole economy—it's all a lie!"

Screams then filled the Senate Chamber as lawmakers and members of the press ran for the exits, leaving in their wake aisles littered with the remains of torn currency.

Yes, in a sense money is an illusion, but it's an illusion that works [1]. However, if enough people actually came to believe that dollars, for example, were worthless, life would suddenly be a lot harder. (Even for the gold hoarders, I think, but that's a topic for another day.)

So anyway, although I tend to think of humanity in a positive aspirational light, it is abundantly clear that there are a lot of menaces (and potential menaces) to society out there. And morons. (Let's face it, we're all morons in some way). I can imagine God considering what to tell humanity and thinking, "Well, I'm going to say X, Y, and Z, even though it's not strictly accurate, because if I give them more accurate information the humans will self-destruct [2]."

We are free to choose, the scriptures say. But maybe that's because if they said anything else, we'd all go to hell in a handbasket.


Notes:
1. For a neat example, check out this story about how fake money ended inflation in Brazil.

2. God does not lie. But in a way, anything less than the full accurate truth is misleading. However, the full accurate truth may be incomprehensible to mortals or dangerous to their well-being. And so we get accommodations (baby stories, as Brigham Young called one example) which begin to look like falsehoods in the light of better information. What is a truthful God to do? Also, see D&C 19:4-12.

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The Case for Junk DNA

Most of our DNA probably doesn't really do anything and could be dispensed with. Some may find that statement to be surprising, but there are good reasons to believe it. "The Case for Junk DNA," published a couple of months ago at PLoS Genetics, explains some of the history behind the idea of junk DNA as well as experimental and observational support. (A layman's explanation is provided by Carl Zimmer here.) The argument rests on a few basic facts:

1. Much of our (and other organisms') genome is made up of repetitive sequences, broken genes, bits and pieces of viruses and other self-replicating virus-like elements. A few may have secondarily taken on function in helping to regulate genes, or even create new genes, but attributing some kind of essential function to most of it would be like saying that the phrase "copy and paste me" peppered throughout Shakespeare's works serves a narrative function.

2. There is no correlation between genome size and organismal complexity. As illustrated by the image below, genome size can vary widely, even between closely related lineages. (Millions of bases shown on a log scale, with the star indicating humans.)

Let that sink in for a second. Salamanders have genomes that are over 10 times as large as ours. (Insert joke about the salamander's letters.)

3. If you assume that most of the genome is functional, then the mutation rate in humans (or other organisms) ought to be causing 'mutational meltdown' because our collective genomes are being hit with deleterious mutations faster than natural selection can remove them.

There is also experimental support, such as a 2004 experiment where a large section of a mouse's genome was deleted with no apparent effect.

When you put it all together, I think the evidence strongly suggests that much of our genome is expendable. T. Ryan Gregory, one of the authors, has blogged and published on this issue for a long time. If you think of a reason for why we need all that 'junk' DNA, Gregory asks that you submit it to 'the onion test,' which is simply:

...if most eukaryotic DNA is functional at the organism level, be it for gene regulation, protection against mutations, maintenance of chromosome structure, or any other such role, then why does an onion require five times more of it than a human?

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On the Origin of Hitler

About a month ago I was browsing through Science and noticed a review of a recent book by historian Peter Bowler. (The review requires a subscription, so instead I'll direct interested readers here for a roughly equivalent review.) His book, Darwin Deleted, imagines a world where Darwin did not exist, as a device for illuminating other ideas about evolution. Apparently he argues that if Darwin had not existed, evolution might not have been as contentious of an issue. This is because, while many religious people weren't particularly thrilled with the idea of evolution, it was natural selection as a mechanism that really got their dander up. It was just too materialistic--even for some scientists. In fact, during the early twentieth century natural selection took a back seat until the modern synthesis of the 1940s put it back in the center. As I understand it, Bowler imagines a world where evolution was accepted relatively peacefully, with natural selection being discovered later.

Bowler also argues that the atrocities of World War II would still have occurred without Darwin. This seems completely obvious to me, but a staple of anti-evolution propaganda is to blame Darwin for Hitler. In fact, just last week the Discovery Institute posted a video on YouTube doing just that. At first glance you can see why the argument appears convincing. Darwin said that evolution occurs by survival of the best adapted, so Hitler took Darwin's theory to the logical conclusion by attempting to eliminate the weak.

I can accept that some people just repeat this kind of thing because that's what they heard, but it's harder for me to believe that thinking people take such things seriously. It seems transparently nasty and dumb to me. For one thing, even if Darwin did serve as a source of Hitler's inspiration, that fact wouldn't have any logical consequence for the validity of Darwin's ideas about how nature works. (I bet the German artillery loved Newton's ideas too!) Moreover, we could hardly hold Darwin responsible for the deeds of a future sociopath. But what I find more annoying is that people who say this must ignore or forget known facts and social currents that existed independent of Darwin.

For example, animals were bred for desired traits for centuries and millennia before Darwin. Darwin himself drew on artificial selection--i.e. breeding--for his insight of natural selection. Consider the following quote:

… Experience has long since taught mankind the necessity of observing certain natural laws in the propagation of animals, or the stock will degenerate and finally become extinct. But strange to say, in regard to the human animal, these laws, except in certain particulars, are more or less disregarded in these latter times. The inevitable consequence is, the race is degenerating, new diseases are introduced, while effeminacy and barrenness are on the increase: and worse than all, this evil condition of the body has its effects upon the mind…

That was George Q. Cannon writing in 1857, three years before he was called as an Apostle and a year before Darwin published Origin of Species. You could just as easily say that Hitler was applying widely accepted principles of animal breeding to humans. It simply doesn't take a theory of species formation to decide that your race (however defined) is better than others, or to hate Jews, or to be nationalist, or to think the "weak" are a drain on society, and so on. The Nazis appropriated anything that seemed to lend support to their ideology. If Darwin's theory was one of those, then that's unfortunate but it's hardly Darwin's fault (he died in 1882, for heaven's sake) and means nothing for its validity as science.

One more thing: the idea that species progress was not Darwin's. Darwin understood that natural selection would result in adaptation to environmental circumstances, not the production of some kind of platonic ideal. Thus, to argue that elimination of the weak was necessary for human evolutionary progress would be a bastardization of Darwinian evolution. As I mentioned above, Darwinian evolution was eclipsed for a while by other ideas about evolution, some of which involved progress. (If blame is to be laid, I would bet those ideas had more influence.)

In their zeal to cast aspersions on evolution, anti-evolutionists also often go a step further and say that Darwin himself was a supporter of social Darwinism. To the extent that is true it is unfortunate although, again, it doesn't matter what Darwin thought with respect to the validity of his theory. But although he was a product of his time, Darwin was relatively progressive in some of his views (eloquently opposing slavery, for example) and it seems that detractors have a difficult time making their case without distorting his writings. For example, in The Descent of Man he wrote:

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world.

Oh, that's terrible! Except when you look at the context you see that the sentence is the first half of a hypothetical he uses to make a point about how extinction erases the gradations between species. And considering Europe's colonial enterprise Darwin's statement probably seemed like an unremarkable prediction [1]. It's rather uncharitable to rip that sentence out of context and present it as though Darwin hoped for the extinction of other races, as the DI video does, but that's the kind of garbage I've come to expect from them.

Social Darwinism and the eugenics movement, to say nothing of the Nazis, were wrong. If we pawn it all off on Darwin, however, then we miss important lessons about the naturalistic fallacy, the naive application of science, human rights, ethics, the golden rule, economics, and so on. When it comes to Hitler, Darwin is a distraction.


Notes:
1. Americans weren't innocent either. Manifest destiny, anyone?

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Blessed Are the Nerds

My Saturday web surfing alerted me to a small controversy over the role of nerds in American culture. National Review's July cover story was a piece by Charles C. W. Cooke attacking scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson and America's sanctimonious nerds. To the extent that the piece is a reminder that smart people can fall prey to their own biases and that data alone cannot drive decisions, I suppose it is a useful commentary. But I have to say that, to my eye, the whole piece drips of bitterness and projection.

One part insecure hipsterism, one part unwarranted condescension, the two defining characteristics of self-professed nerds are (a) the belief that one can discover all of the secrets of human experience through differential equations and (b) the unlovely tendency to presume themselves to be smarter than everybody else in the world. Prominent examples include MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry, Rachel Maddow, Steve Kornacki, and Chris Hayes; Vox’s Ezra Klein, Dylan Matthews, and Matt Yglesias; the sabermetrician Nate Silver; the economist Paul Krugman; the atheist Richard Dawkins; former vice president Al Gore; celebrity scientist Bill Nye; and, really, anybody who conforms to the Left’s social and moral precepts while wearing glasses and babbling about statistics.

No condescension here! You might also notice that all of the nerds mentioned come from the Left [1]. I guess that makes sense on the article's own terms because Cooke asserts that "First and foremost, then, “nerd” has become a political designation." That the word had been redefined to carry primarily political meaning was news to me, but since I only moderately identified with the term in the first place, I don't have much investment in the definition. Someone should inform high school students, though.

How smug are the nerds?

These are the people who insisted until they were blue in the face that George W. Bush was a “theocrat” eternally hostile toward “evidence,” and that, despite all information to the contrary, Attorney General Ashcroft had covered up the Spirit of Justice statue at the Department of Justice because he was a prude. These are the people who will explain to other human beings without any irony that they are part of the “reality-based community,” and who want you to know how aw-shucks excited they are to look through the new jobs numbers.

I can see how calling yourself "reality-based" might be off-putting. On the other hand, maybe it should be pointed out that the term was coined by a Bush aide (thought to be Karl Rove) as a term of derision.

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

Given the history, is it any wonder that "reality-based community" has been adopted by nerds as a term of honor?

Cooke's piece has come in for criticism, but I guess you would expect that from those jerk-nerds of the Left. Personally, I liked this bit from Andrew Leonard at Salon:

Cooke argues that leftists are embracing the nerd-designation because it says to the world what they are not: “… which is southern, politically conservative, culturally traditional, religious in some sense, patriotic, driven by principle rather than the pivot tables of Microsoft Excel, and in any way attached to the past.”

Oh NO! Cooke dares attack nerdish chart-love! That really stings. But you know what? It’s not the fault of liberal nerds that Ken Hamm’s Creation Museum, which claims that dinosaurs were wiped out in a flood 4300 years ago, is in the South. And for better or worse, it’s not the fault of liberal nerds that large swathes of Republican politicians in the South have lined up behind the breath-taking rejection of the scientific method that is symbolized by the Creation Museum.

I might also add that those are some gratuitous assertions on Cooke's part.

Cooke ridicules nerd identification as a fad adopted by posers.

“Ignorance,” a popular Tyson meme holds, “is a virus. Once it starts spreading, it can only be cured by reason. For the sake of humanity, we must be that cure.” This rather unspecific message is a call to arms, aimed at those who believe wholeheartedly they are included in the elect “we.” Thus do we see unexceptional liberal-arts students lecturing other people about things they don’t understand themselves and terming the dissenters “flat-earthers.” Thus do we see people who have never in their lives read a single academic paper clinging to the mantle of “science” as might Albert Einstein. Thus do we see residents of Brooklyn who are unable to tell you at what temperature water boils rolling their eyes at Bjørn Lomborg or Roger Pielke Jr. because he disagrees with Harry Reid on climate change.

This is interesting. My wife's education was in the liberal arts, so I guess she isn't allowed to assert the value of childhood vaccination to her stay-at-home-mom peers. But more interesting is that Cooke chose to pit Bjørn Lomborg or Roger Pielke Jr. against Harry Reid. Really? I think what Cooke meant to say was "rolling their eyes at Bjørn Lomborg or Roger Pielke Jr. because he disagrees with many climate scientists and economists, whose work has informed Harry Reid's views." You see, nerds would know that Lomborg and Pielke's reputations have very little to do with what Harry Reid thinks. (As an aside, Cooke seems to have taken Pielke's departure from Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight as a personal slight. In searching the web for information about Pielke, I found this note by Cooke lamenting the terrible vitriol of the Left. It's not the Left's fault Cooke apparently crushed on a guy that has gained a reputation for distortion.)

Cooke also calls out progressives for themselves believing some unscientific things:

Progressives not only believe all sorts of unscientific things — that Medicaid, the VA, and Head Start work; that school choice does not; that abortion carries with it few important medical questions; that GM crops make the world worse; that one can attribute every hurricane, wildfire, and heat wave to “climate change”; that it’s feasible that renewable energy will take over from fossil fuels anytime soon — but also do their level best to block investigation into any area that they consider too delicate.

First of all, I thought we were talking about nerds, not progressives in general. Second, just this last week Chris Mooney at that lefty magazine Mother Jones highlighted a video of Neil deGrasse Tyson--the man Cooke chose as his nerd symbol--telling anti-GMO folks to "chill out." Also, nerds would not simplistically attribute every hurricane, wildfire, or heat wave to climate change. Rather, they would bend over backwards to explain that climate change will statistically increase the frequency and severity. Unfortunately such efforts seem to be lost on Cooke and his non-nerds and, for their part, they like to use every snow storm or regional cold snap as an opportunity to remind everyone that Al Gore was wrong [2]. What is it with them and Al Gore?

Look, if conservatives like Cooke are losing out to the nerds, it's mostly their own fault. In the wake of the Great Recession and the election of Barack Obama, the Right has run to the fever swamps, leaving behind (or actively expelling) politicians and commentators who refuse to follow (i.e. "RINOs"). If you've lost the nerds, maybe that should tell you something.


Notes:
1. More or less.

2. I did a quick search to see if Cooke had ever done something like that. He had. Granted he was more nuanced in his commentary than most, but I took an interest in this claim: "The 1990 IPCC Report promised an increase in sea level of around 120 millimeters [or 12 cm] by 2014." A nerd might have a copy of the 1990 IPCC report and bother to look up what it said. Would it surprise you if the only justification I can find for Cooke's statement is an uncharitable reading of a graph? What the report actually says is, "Under the Business-as-Usual scenario, the best estimate is that, for the year 2030, global sea level would be 18cm higher than today. Given the stated range of uncertainty in the contributing factors, the rise could be as little as 8cm or as high as 29cm."

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What Is the Deal with the Ebola Outbreak?

This week I caught some of The Diane Rehm Show on NPR, which had a very interesting discussion about the current Ebola outbreak. (Audio and transcript here; also available as a free podcast on iTunes.) Panelists included Dr. Anthony Fauci and Laurie Garrett.

As a brief side note, Ebola helped launch me onto my career path in microbiology and immunology. During my senior year as an undergraduate I took a virology course that, along with some outside reading, led me to pursue microbiology in graduate school. Ebola was the exotic virus of the day. One of the books I (mostly) read as part of my extra-curricular reading was The Coming Plague by none other than Laurie Garrett. (For some reason I never did read The Hot Zone, though.)

Anyway, I thought that Garrett said some of the most interesting things in the discussion. For example, one surprising feature of the outbreak is that it is exacerbated by the resistance of the very people that need help. Why?

GARRETT
...first of all, these countries have an average adult illiteracy rate of 50 percent. Then you take in what's functional literacy versus the ability to read anything that actually tries to describe what a virus is, you're talking about a very small percentage of these populations.

And for most people, the germ theory of disease is not a real concept....

In the case of Ebola, we're really up against cultural beliefs that when a disease hits a given family, it's because your ancestors committed some sin against some other family and they have leveled evil spirits against you. It's a kind of sense of an endless set of circles of retribution and revenge for deeds committed by someone against someone else. Well, now add to it, they just came out of these heinous civil wars where indeed evil deeds were done on almost every single family by somebody during the course of the 1985 to 2003 outbreak of violence.

And so you have a situation where outsiders are trying to say to people, there's a virus. And this virus causes this disease. And we are outsiders dressed in space suits and we don't look like you and you should believe us. And meanwhile the average person doesn't even have a concept of what a virus is....

FAUCI
This is nothing new. It's not new to HIV, it's not new to Ebola. History is replete with examples of when there are major outbreaks and plagues. The fear, the terror that is stricken into people has people almost intuitively look to someone to blame, someone, some group, some class, some religion, some country. There always needs to be a reason for things. And if you don't understand, as Laurie was saying correctly, the subtleties of the germ theory of infection, then you're looking to blame people and blame nations and blame groups that have nothing to do with it. So you're absolutely correct, it's a very difficult situation.

This next part gets at something I have felt deeply for quite a while, which is the importance of public health to our prosperity and standard of living. I don't think people in first-world countries appreciate what they have, which is why things like the anti-vaccine movement, slashing of budgets for programs that undergird our medical knowledge and capabilities, or cultural forces that disparage or twist science make me angry.

GARRETT
Quick thing is the average per capita spending, according to the World Bank on health care per person in these countries is a high of $18 a year, a low of $7. So there's not a lot of health care delivery available if you're spending $7 per person per year on all health services combined. And as far as the question -- I'm very glad the caller brought this up -- from Ann Arbor. Thank you. Funding and WHO -- WHO is in severe budget crisis. Has been now for almost four years.

They've laid off 20 percent of total personnel of the institution. And their disease response capacity has seen its budget slashed. I know that the average listener imagines that there's this huge SWAT Team of health providers sitting in WHO Headquarters in Geneva. And at the snap of a finger the director general deploys them where needed. This is absolutely untrue. In fact, WHO goes around begging for people like Dr. Fischer to -- at the expense of somebody else, the U.S. government, for example -- to go in under the WHO flag where needed.

And our own CDC has seen our budget cut for international response capacity, pandemic response and surveillance. So actually we're less prepared today then we were perhaps 10 years ago, in terms of the budgetary constraints of the major responders.

For more on the virus and what kinds of conditions the doctors treating infected people labor under, listen to or read the whole thing.

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The Mayans and the Neanderthals

Last week I was reading a news article about a new study that determined that Tibetans inherited a gene that gives them high-altitude tolerance from ancient Denisovans. Denisovans, you may recall, are an extinct human species known primarily by their DNA, that are genetically closer to Neanderthals than us. That Denisovan DNA made it into modern humans is not anything new, but apparently this particular gene variant went extinct except for among Tibetans and some Chinese.

That's interesting in and of itself. However, at the end of the article I read this:

The discovery is the second case in which modern humans have acquired a trait from archaic humans, notes paleogeneticist Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, whose team discovered the Denisovan people. Earlier this year, another team showed that Mayans, in particular, have inherited a gene variant from Neandertals that increases the risk for diabetes.

Wait, what? How did Neanderthal DNA get into Mayans?

A paper published last February reported the results of researchers looking for genetic associations with type 2 diabetes in Mexicans and other Latin Americans. They looked at 9.2 million single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) from 3,848 Mexicans with type 2 diabetes, compared with a similar number of non-diabetics. The scientists found a chunk of the genome where a certain variant containing 5 particular mutations was associated with diabetes. When they looked at other populations, they found the following:

I have simplified their table a little bit. It shows the percent of samples that had the most common version of the gene compared with the version associated with diabetes. You can see that it is hardly found anywhere except among east Asians and Mexicans. Further, when they looked at samples with over 95% Native American DNA, they found the mutant version in about half.

So let's summarize what they found so far: A gene variant associated with type 2 diabetes that is commonly found among Native Americans can also be found among east Asians, but only rarely in Europeans and Africans. That makes sense since Native Americans are descended from east Asians. But what does that have to do with Neanderthals?

Well, in looking at the variant the scientists determine that it diverged from the European version about 800,000 years ago. Modern humans didn't even exist back then, and Africans don't have it, so how could these differences have arisen? It turns out that an unpublished Neanderthal genome has a nearly identical match. Thus, it appears that ancient Asians picked up the gene from Neanderthals. It was then carried into America, and for some reason it is now common among Native Americans.

I didn't find any reference to Mayans in the paper (although I didn't look in the supplementary material) so I'm not sure where that came from, but many Mayans probably did have this gene. Lest you think that Native Americans are special in their inheritance of Neanderthal DNA, the authors point out,

...whereas this particular Neanderthal-derived haplotype is common in the Americas, Latin Americans have the same proportion of Neanderthal ancestry genome-wide as other Eurasian populations (2%)

In other words, many of us have about the same amount of Neanderthal DNA [1], just different parts.

Notes:

1. Africans have little to no Neanderthal DNA because their ancestors remained in Africa and never met Neanderthals.

Source: SIGMA Type 2 Diabetes Consortium, Sequence variants in SLC16A11 are a common risk factor for type 2 diabetes in Mexico, Nature. 2014 Feb 6;506(7486):97-101

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Scientists: Bigfoot Still Missing

University of Oxford scientists have published--in a peer-reviewed journal--results of DNA tests for 'anomalous primates' (i.e. Bigfoot). They put out a call for people to send in hair samples and received 57. Actually, not all of the samples were hair, so after they discarded those and others from which DNA could not be extracted, they were left with 30 samples. They sequenced the mitochondrial DNA of the remaining samples and compared the sequences to those in databases. They found polar bear, horse, raccoon, porcupine, dog, and even one human. None of the results came back as not-quite-human. It wasn't a total waste of time though, because a couple of samples from the Himalayas came back as polar bear, suggesting a hybrid species of bears.

The authors conclude:

While it is important to bear in mind that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence and this survey cannot refute the existence of anomalous primates, neither has it found any evidence in support. Rather than persisting in the view that they have been ‘rejected by science’, advocates in the cryptozoology community have more work to do in order to produce convincing evidence for anomalous primates and now have the means to do so.

I think that's a diplomatic way of saying put up or shut up.

Notes:
Source: Sykes, Proc. R. Soc. B 22 August 2014 vol. 281 no. 1789

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Watch Your Inner Animal

Back in 2008 I read paleontologist Neil Shubin's book, Your Inner Fish. (Dave at Times and Seasons invited me to do a joint review of it.) Now PBS and Neil Shubin have teamed up to make a three-part documentary. It began airing in April and is now available online in its entirety.

The three parts are Your Inner--Fish, Reptile, and Primate. It is extremely well done, and Neil Shubin conveys an infectious enthusiasm. You really should watch the whole thing. But if you only watch one, then I think the Primate episode is the best.

For me, the most important issue raised by the series is the proper pronunciation of 'opossum.' All my life I have understood the 'o' to be silent, but now I see two experts in the video saying "uh-possum." On the other hand, according to the National Park Service, the 'o' is silent. Is this a regional thing, or what?

By the way, several years ago I put together a series of posts that I titled, What Separates Humans from the Animals? I was interested to see that a couple of the examples used in the documentary are covered in my series.

I don't want to hear any excuses about how you couldn't find the documentary, so here it is again: Your Inner Fish.

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Climate Science Versus the Ether

In my last post I highlighted the release of the National Climate Assessment (NCA) and stated that I would hardly have noticed it if it weren't for some of the reaction to it. It was brought to my attention that Bret Baier on Fox News hosted a panel discussion that included George Will, Charles Krauthammer, and Mara Liasson. Will and Krauthammer spent their portion of the time throwing doubt and contempt on climate science, while Liasson played it mostly down the middle.

To be honest, I found myself thinking that if this is what conservative thought-leaders have to say about climate science, then climate science is in a good place. I say this because I thought Will and Krauthammer's opposition was frankly pathetic. Krauthammer appealed to the weather and short-term variations as an excuse to dismiss climate science as legitimate (he should have consulted the report's FAQ). Then, somewhat self-contradictory, he said he would support reductions in carbon emissions if other countries would sign on. Will's argument was that his house in South Carolina hasn't been hit by a hurricane, and that climate scientists are socially induced to support mainstream climate science.

Jonathan Chait at The New Yorker did a nice job of responding to the panel, pointing out that Will was adopting an argument that applies to all of science. (All Science Is Wrong, Concludes Esteemed Fox News Panel.) I don't want to re-do the work done by Chait, so I will refer you to his column. However, I do want to comment on a few specifics. But before doing so, I want to provide a little historical framework.

A fair-minded public cannot weigh scientific evidence themselves, so they look to experts. However, when there is a dispute among experts, the public naturally has trouble coming to a conclusion. Many special interests have discovered that if they can find even a few experts to take their side, it helps to level the playing field in the public arena. This kind of confusion was perfected by the tobacco industry. As scientists increasingly found that tobacco caused cancer, the tobacco industry decided that the best way to defend themselves from the threat of legislation was to cast doubt on the science. One way that they did so was to appeal to scientists who did not think there was a link between tobacco and cancer. It didn't matter how much those scientists were in the minority; their mere existence served to strengthen the tobacco industry's side of the debate. What the tobacco industry understood was that a loud spokesperson for the extreme minority appears equally legitimate to a spokesperson for the majority in the eyes of the public. We see this same model employed for many issues, whether it be vaccination and autism, evolution vs creationism in public schools, or any other number of fringe controversies involving science. In each case, a few clear thinkers stand against the establishment, like David and Goliath.

It is a matter of historical record that some of the same people who fought on the side of the tobacco industry went on to take up opposition to climate science and were the early pioneering skeptics, presumably because of their ideological opposition to government regulation. So perhaps it is not coincidental that some of the same tactics have been used: always emphasizing the limitations of the science, and elevating the waning number of credentialed skeptics who disagree with the mainstream understanding of the science. Whatever the case, when Dr. So-and-so says that global warming is happening because of humans, but Dr. Other-guy says it is not, what conclusion should the public draw?

This is why, to certain extent, there is a proxy rhetorical battle. The word 'consensus' is often invoked by supporters of mainstream climate science. It is an attempt to put the debate in context for the general public. In response, skeptics of mainstream climate science accuse the mainstream of being unscientific for agreeing TOO much and thinking the science is 'settled.' It is a rhetorical battle over expertise.

With that as background, let's come back to the Fox News panel.

BAIER: So you don't buy that 97 percent of scientists who studied the issue --

WILL: Who measured it? Where did that figure come from? They pluck these things from the ether. I do not. The New Yorker magazine, which is impeccably upset about climate change, recently spoke about the report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as "the last word on climate change." Now, try that phrase, "the last word on microbiology, quantum mechanics, physics, chemistry." Since when does science come to the end? The New Yorker has discovered the end of this. Who else has?

You can see what Will has done here. First he implies that the consensus does not exist because the 97 percent number has been invented out of nothing. Actually, the number comes from a study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences where the authors did a literature search in order to quantify the size of the debate in the published literature. The authors reported:

Here, we use an extensive dataset of 1,372 climate researchers and their publication and citation data to show that (i) 97–98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field surveyed here support the tenets of ACC outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and (ii) the relative climate expertise and scientific prominence of the researchers unconvinced of ACC are substantially below that of the convinced researchers.

It may be that George Will has difficulty distinguishing science from the ether [1].

Having dismissed the 97 percent number, Will then sought to re-cast the meaning of consensus. Rather than a sign of experts converging on truth, Will asserts that agreement is actually a sign of closed sclerotic minds. Krauthammer joined in:

99 percent of physicists [were] convinced that space and time were fixed until Einstein working in a patent office wrote a paper in which he showed that they are not. I'm not impressed by numbers.

Put aside the fact that the kind of revolution that Einstein started is rare, and that his work did not so much invalidate Newtonian physics as incorporate it into something larger. Do you see the dilemma here? If climate scientists disagree, then we are told that we should await further research. But if scientists come to largely agree, then we are told it is a sign of scientific weakness.

My favorite part was toward the very end, when George Will was obviously caught a little off guard by Mara Liasson.

WILL: ...Again, there is a sociology of science, there is a sociology in all of this, and engaging the politics of this, we have to understand the enormous interests now invested in climate change.

LIASSON: On both sides.

WILL: Sure.

LIASSON: The fossil fuel industry has a big interest and you say environmentalists have an interest.

WILL: It pales in comparison to the money flowing from the federal government.

The transcript doesn't capture it, but in the video Will seemed to stammer a little before squeaking out that "sure." But he's a pro, so he recovered quickly by emphasizing the magnitude of the money from the federal government propping up climate science. Thus, according to Will, mainstream science is a product of a combination of financial dependence on the federal government and factors of socialization. For some reason it never seems to cross the minds of Will and Krauthammer that there just might be a powerful sociology in the conservative disbelief in climate science. In fact, their appearance on Fox News bad-mouthing climate science is itself one contributor to the sociological currents of conservatives. How many people came away from that segment thinking, "Well, if George Will and Charles Krauthammer don't buy it, then I don't either?"

Back to Will, does the interest of the fossil fuel industry pale in comparison to the federal government? A quick search turned up a GAO report showing that in 2012 the federal government spent about $2 billion on climate science, about $4 billion supporting technological research, and about $1 billion in aid to developing countries. $7 billion is a lot of money. For comparison, the NIH budget for 2012 was almost $31 billion. What about the fossil fuel industry? I'm not a business guy, so this kind of stuff isn't really my thing. But maybe this is an indicator: excluding divestments and tax-related sources of profit, Exxon Mobile made $8.4 billion in the fourth quarter of 2012. I'm not a mathematician, but if the U.S. federal government's total spending on climate-related science in 2012 was about equal to Exxon Mobile's profits in one quarter of the same year, I'm going to go with "George Will is full of hot air" on this one.

Will and Krauthammer's analysis makes for good cable TV. Their arguments have a veneer of truth (science is an imperfect and social activity, and we can't know exactly what the future will bring), and they articulate them with gravitas. This makes their skepticism emotionally appealing and helps the viewer to feel superior to the other side. But when you drill down into their assertions, it turns out that their wells of truth have run dry. Fans of Will and Krauthammer ought to demand better.

Notes:
1. Chait caught someone else trying to knock down the 97 percent claim. My favorite quote is at the end:

[Anthropogenic global warming is] not a topic of serious debate among the climate science field. It’s a topic of serious debate in American politics because one of the two major parties is controlled by a movement that resorts to bizarre, paranoid explanations for facts that complicate its ideological priors.

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Climate Change: Still Happening

Major life changes (good) have interfered with blogging for about the last six months. Things seem to be settling down, so I'm hopeful that I'll be able to pick up the pace of my occasional commentary here.

So, what's been going on lately? Well, the National Climate Assessment (NCA) was released earlier this month and a regular reader prodded me for some discussion. So I guess that's as good a place to start as any.

The 2014 NCA website is here. However, I think the website is a little difficult to navigate. If you just want to look at PDF copies you can go here.

Why does the NCA exist? Short answer: it's the law. Wikipedia offers the following:

The National Climate Assessment (NCA) is conducted under the auspices of the Global Change Research Act of 1990. The GCRA requires a report to the President and the Congress every four years that integrates, evaluates, and interprets the findings of the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP); analyzes the effects of global change on the natural environment, agriculture, energy production and use, land and water resources, transportation, human health and welfare, human social systems, and biological diversity; and analyzes current trends in global change, both human-induced and natural, and projects major trends for the subsequent 25 to 100 years

I should also note that the NCA involves many federal agencies and was reviewed by the National Academy of Sciences. So although it was released by the White House, it is not a partisan document.

The main messages of the NCA are not anything new. Basically, human activities have released, and continue to release, carbon dioxide and other gasses into the atmosphere. These gases trap heat and have begun to warm the planet. This warming is causing changes in climate, and a variety of changes are expected for the future. In general, these changes are expected to cause problems that will need to be dealt with. However, the poor, elderly, and children will be the most vulnerable.

As I said, this is pretty straightforward and is a reiteration of the scientific message we should all be familiar with by now. As such, there's not a whole lot to say about it. If you care at all about the topic, you should at least give it a perusal. You might even want to start with the frequently asked questions (FAQ), where you are most likely to encounter the talking points found in popular discourse.

Being a little absorbed in my life circumstances, I hardly noticed that the NCA had been released. It was the reaction to the NCA that caught my attention. That's the fun part and I'll come to that in my next post.

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Daniel Peterson Heading to NRO

Congratulations to Dr. Daniel Peterson for being picked up as a columnist at National Review Online. The Deseret News has the details:

After he was relieved of his editorial duties with the Maxwell Institute (formerly FARMS), many thought that Daniel Peterson's involvement with apologetics was on the decline. However, the Brigham Young University professor still has a lot to say. But the pugnacious polymath will be writing less about religious apologetics, and more about politics as he joins the conservative writers at National Review Online.

Commenting on his blog, Dr. Peterson wrote, "I am, frankly, enormously pleased with this arrangement." Then with irony he added, "This is additional evidence, as my various online critics have long predicted, of my long slide to irrelevancy."

So congratulations to Dr. Peterson. I have genuinely enjoyed his contributions to Mormon studies and apologetics. I'll miss his insights and perspective as he shifts focus to politics, but I wish him well.

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D&C 77 and the World's Week

The Church has released a new Doctrine and Covenants and Church History manual for seminary. The FairMormon blog has a rundown of some items of interest, mostly how the manual deals with sensitive historical topics. What caught my attention was item number seven:

Finally, in discussing section 77 of the Doctrine and Covenants, the manual straightforwardly says, “The 7,000 years [in vv. 6–7] refers to the time since the Fall of Adam and Eve. It is not referring to the actual age of the earth including the periods of creation” (p. 280).

The document that became D&C 77 was produced in March 1832 while Joseph Smith was studying the New Testament's Book of Revelation. It was added to the cannon in 1876, long after his death. The reference in the manual is to the following passage:

6 Q. What are we to understand by the book which John saw, which was sealed on the back with seven seals?
A. We are to understand that it contains the revealed will, mysteries, and the works of God; the hidden things of his economy concerning this earth during the seven thousand years of its continuance, or its temporal existence.
7 Q. What are we to understand by the seven seals with which it was sealed?
A. We are to understand that the first seal contains the things of the first thousand years, and the second also of the second thousand years, and so on until the seventh.

This is reinforced a few verses later:

12 Q. What are we to understand by the sounding of the trumpets, mentioned in the 8th chapter of Revelation?
A. We are to understand that as God made the world in six days, and on the seventh day he finished his work, and sanctified it, and also formed man out of the dust of the earth, even so, in the beginning of the seventh thousand years will the Lord God sanctify the earth, and complete the salvation of man, and judge all things, and shall redeem all things, except that which he hath not put into his power, when he shall have sealed all things, unto the end of all things; and the sounding of the trumpets of the seven angels are the preparing and finishing of his work, in the beginning of the seventh thousand years—the preparing of the way before the time of his coming.

This all reminded me of something I discovered a while ago. Commenting on these passages, President Joseph Fielding Smith wrote:

This revelation confirms the fact that the days of creation were celestial days, and this earth is passing through one week of temporal (mortal) existence, after which it will die and receive its resurrection [1]. [italics in original]

Interestingly, the manual appears to adopt President Smith's interpretation of the length of mortal existence, while rejecting his view on the days of creation. But of greater interest to me is that the belief that the earth is passing through a week of existence has a long history. You can find references to the world-week in the religious literature in Joseph's day and earlier. For example, Scottish preacher Thomas Boston (d. 1732) wrote,

Time has run from the beginning, and is running on in an uninterrupted course of addition of moments, hours, days, months, and years. About four thousand years of it passed before the birth of Christ; and now is begun the one thousand seven hundred and thirty-second year from that happy period. So there want not three hundred years now to complete the world's week of six thousand years; after which many have thought the eternal Sabbath would come.

But it turns out that we can go back much farther to the early Christian era. The Epistle of Barnabas, thought to be written by 135 A.D., contains the same interpretation.

15:3 ...And God made in six days the works of his hands, and finished them on the seventh day, and rested in it and sanctified it.

15:4 Consider, my children, what signify the words, He finished them in six days. They mean this: that in
six thousand years the Lord will make an end of all things, for a day is with him as a thousand years. And he himself beareth witness unto me, saying: Behold this day a day shall be as a thousand years. Therefore, my children, in six days, that is in six thousand years, shall all things be brought to an end.

15:5 And the words, He rested on the seventh day, signify this: After that his Son hath come, and hath caused to cease the time of the wicked one, and hath judged the ungodly, and changed the sun and the moon and the stars, then shall he rest well on the seventh day.

It is possible that in asserting that the seven seals cover the earth's temporal history, one thousand years each, Joseph was tapping into ideas current in his culture. But it's also clear that the world-week concept is ancient, and it's worth noting that the Epistle of Barnabas and the Book of Revelation are probably only separated by 50-80 years, at most. Inasmuch as D&C 77 is about the Book of Revelation, Joseph's interpretation seems on the mark, at least in that it accords with ideas about the earth's history and future that were present just after the New Testament period.

However, we're still left with an enormous conflict with science if we take this scripture to mean that mortality began 6,000 years ago. Now I am a fan of understanding scripture within its cultural context, so I have no reason to doubt that was Joseph's intent. However, there may be other options for us. Personally, I like an interpretation that was advanced by Sterling Talmage, geologist and son of Elder James E. Talmage (himself a defender of the geological record):

...D&C 77:6 very clearly means that the Book of the Seven Seals represented the totality of scripture, to be revealed in successive dispensations; that it contained the previously unknown things regarding the plan of salvation ("the hidden things of his economy"), which were to be shown during the current seven thousand years of earth time ("its continuance") with special reference to humankind in the affairs of the present life ("its temporal existence"). This passage, then, would seem to have no reference whatever to the earth as a physical entity but refer only to the hand-dealings of God with its inhabitants [2].

On this reading, a scripture in direct conflict with science essentially becomes a summary of revealed religion as we have it in our scriptures. What it means for the future remains to be seen.

Notes:
1. Joseph Fielding Smith, Man, His Origin and Destiny, p.465. See also Doctrines of Salvation vol. 1, p. 80.
2. Sterling Talmage, Can Science Be Faith-Promoting, p.176.

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The Church Teaches Evolution via the Book of Mormon

In what may be the most scientifically detailed explanation on LDS.org, the Church recently added a page that explains some of the basic principles of population genetics, and a few of the processes that result in changes in gene frequencies in a population (i.e. evolution). Book of Mormon and DNA Studies is another new addition to the Gospel Topics section that is meant to give a more detailed (and, ahem, accurate) answer on a controversial topic. (See also Race and the Priesthood, First Vision Accounts, and Book of Mormon Translation.)

Of course, the focus of this article is on the controversy over what lack of DNA support means for the Book of Mormon. Those familiar with the work of Michael Whiting and Ugo Perego (to which the LDS.org page provides links) will see their fingerprints in the new article. Personally, I'm pretty pleased with the result, especially coming from the Church website. As to the substance of the argument, I'm undecided whether the caveats in interpreting the state of the DNA evidence can really do the work required to make the Nephites/Lamanites genetically disappear. (I lean toward skepticism there unless it's paired with extensive intermixing from the beginning. But then we leave science and move into textual interpretation.) For now I think it's the only legitimate scientific way to argue for Book of Mormon historicity, or rather that historicity cannot be dis-proven.

But if we set the Book of Mormon aside for a moment, this article is essentially a primer on how evolution works: the creation of new alleles and their spread, as well as the loss of alleles from a population. Selection was left out of the discussion, (which is unfortunate because it might be relevant--a sensitive issue perhaps? [1]), but in a way it's just as well because natural selection usually gets all of the attention. Genetic drift, founder effect, etc, are random processes that can also play an important role.

So go study Book of Mormon and DNA Studies. As you begin to comprehend its message, you'll begin to understand how Neanderthal DNA is hanging around in many of us, and you'll begin to understand how two separate populations can begin to genetically diverge. And you'll be able to imagine how enough time and change can result in reproductive isolation, with gradual differences in form and behavior. You'll be on your way to understanding how evolution works. Thanks, LDS.org!

Notes:

1. Here's another subtle tip-toe: "Scientists theorize that in an era that predated Book of Mormon accounts, a relatively small group of people migrated from northeast Asia to the Americas by way of a land bridge that connected Siberia to Alaska." Yes, predating the Book of Mormon by about 10-15 thousand years. Some people might have difficulty squaring that with the Bible Chronology.

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Even as I Will

The Book of Moses comes from Joseph Smith's inspired revision of Genesis. After recounting the Creation and the fall of Adam and Eve, the story is interrupted with a statement directed at Joseph.

And these are the words which I spake unto my servant Moses, and they are true even as I will; and I have spoken them unto you. See thou show them unto no man, until I command you, except to them that believe. Amen. [Moses 4:32]

Although God told Joseph that the words are 'true', I have previously argued that the differences between the Book of Moses, the Book of Abraham, and the temple endowment suggest that no particular version of the Creation and Fall can be considered the gold standard. But what does it mean when God says, "they are true even as I will"? Is that just a rhetorical flourish, or is there additional meaning?

A couple of years ago, a commenter on one of my posts suggested that it means that the accounts are as true as God wants them to be, which is an interesting interpretation. I decided to see if the rest of the scriptures could shed light on the phrase. It turns out that, except for the verse above, the phrase 'even as I will' occurs exclusively in the Doctrine and Covenants. Below I quote all the additional verses, with the phrase highlighted.

Section 29:48

For it is given unto them even as I will, according to mine own pleasure, that great things may be required at the hand of their fathers.

Section 50:8

But the hypocrites shall be detected and shall be cut off, either in life or in death, even as I will; and wo unto them who are cut off from my church, for the same are overcome of the world.

Section 52:6

And inasmuch as they are not faithful, they shall be cut off, even as I will, as seemeth me good.

Section 55:6

And again, let my servant Joseph Coe also take his journey with them. The residue shall be made known hereafter, even as I will. Amen.

Section 71:1

BEHOLD, thus saith the Lord unto you my servants Joseph Smith, Jun., and Sidney Rigdon, that the time has verily come that it is necessary and expedient in me that you should open your mouths in proclaiming my gospel, the things of the kingdom, expounding the mysteries thereof out of the scriptures, according to that portion of Spirit and power which shall be given unto you, even as I will.

Section 104:20

Let my servant Sidney Rigdon have appointed unto him the place where he now resides, and the lot of the tannery for his stewardship, for his support while he is laboring in my vineyard, even as I will, when I shall command him.

In two instances, the phrase is accompanied by the clarification, "according to mine own pleasure" or "as seemeth me good," and the rest of the instances are in a context that seems to imply as much.

Looking back at the Book of Moses, I see two possible (though not mutually exclusive) interpretations: 1. The Book of Moses is a good enough representation of what God said to Moses. 2. What God said to Moses is a good enough representation of what really happened.

Either way it seems that my commenter was right--that the words are as true as God wants them to be.

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