The post title may be a little clickbaity, but the words aren't mine. Conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks published a column yesterday in which he wrote that on climate change,
the G.O.P. has come to resemble a Soviet dictatorship — a vast majority of Republican politicians can’t publicly say what they know about the truth of climate change because they’re afraid the thought police will knock on their door and drag them off to an AM radio interrogation. [1]
Comparisons to Hitler, the Nazis, Stalin, or other authoritarian regimes of history are a dime a dozen these days. Ordinarily we might expect the charge that Republicans are acting like Soviets to come from someone on the left wing of the U.S. political spectrum, but Brooks comes from the right and seems to be giving voice to a quiet minority (presumably) within his own party [2].
Brooks's column led New York Magazine's Jonathan Chait to muse about the GOP's orientation toward climate change, citing data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to rebut a Wall Street Journal columnist's recent assertions. Continuing, Chait wrote,
Of course, refuting climate-science skepticism with NOAA data runs into the problem that Republicans reject NOAA data. House Science Committee chairman Lamar Smith has used his power to accuse federal scientists of falsifying climate data. Smith has no evidence to support his charge, but the accusation is in keeping with the conservative belief that the theory of anthropogenic global warming is the product of a vast conspiracy among thousands of scientists worldwide to enrich themselves. (The chairman of the Senate’s environment committee is a fellow subscriber to this theory.) The theory is just as bonkers as the belief that the government faked the 9/11 attacks or the moon landings, with the main difference being that it informs a first-order public policy question and is also accepted doctrine within one of the two major American political parties.
The current spat between Smith and NOAA is where Brooks's comparison to the Soviets perhaps becomes most relevant. Soviet agriculture and biology were harmed for decades because the ideas of Trofim Lysenko became party doctrine. Thousands of mainstream Russian biologists were disposed of in one way or another and the Russian people suffered the consequences of such wrong-headed biology. It may seem absurd that a political organization would take a stand on the proper way to understand biology, but such is life in the political world, I guess.
This is not to say that the GOP treatment of government scientists in any way rises to that of the Soviets. Nevertheless, the Soviet experience does serve as a historical warning of the foolishness of political parties standing against the scientific mainstream. And it certainly must be demoralizing to many scientists to persistently be held in such contempt by roughly half of the legislative branch of government, and most of their potential executive heads.
It doesn't have to be this way. Just a couple of weeks ago The Atlantic did an article on conservative solutions to climate change. If Republicans would take the issue seriously, they might be able to build a legacy on this issue to be proud of.
Increasingly I have seen political commentators suggest that the GOP is becoming post-truth and post-policy [3]. I hope that they are wrong, but lately my hope finds little encouragement. However, as the saying goes, hope springs eternal.
Notes:
1. Maybe it's just me, but I get the feeling Brooks's statement is true for a number of issues.
2. Senator Lindsay Graham has been outspoken on this, but he seems to be alone among presidential candidates. And anyway he has almost no support in the polls.
3. Post-truth, meaning that party leaders tell blatant lies as a matter of course. Post-policy, meaning that the party has no meaningful policy solutions, but lives only by stoking resentment over current policies and advancing purely symbolic fights.
Recently I became aware that the evolutionary history of whales is based on fraudulent information. At least that seems to be the common belief of creationists. We might expect them to be resistant to the fossil and genetic evidence for whale evolution, but what makes it fraudulent?
Some Background
First we need to step back a few decades to get some historical perspective. Prior to 1979 very little was known about the early evolution of whales. Mammals evolved on land long before whales appeared in the fossil record. Therefore, since whales are mammals, you would expect whales to have their evolutionary roots in land mammals. However, there wasn't much fossil evidence to go on. That started to change when, working in Pakistan, paleontologist Philip Gingerich discovered the skull of a land mammal that was similar in form to a wolf. Gingerich noticed a couple of grape-sized bones of the middle ear that were only known to exist in cetaceans (whales, dolphins, etc). This strongly suggested that the newly discovered animal, Pakicetus, was a relative of whales. Over the next few decades, Gingerich and his former student, Hans Thewissen, discovered a number of other related fossils showing various degrees of adaptation to water, and each with the distinctive cetacean middle ear bones.
Scientists initially believed that whales were most closely related to a group of extinct mammals called Mesonychids, which are related to Artiodactyls (cattle, pigs, hippos, etc). However, most experts now believe that whales are more closely related to Artiodactyls based on two principle lines of evidence [1]. First, in the late 1990s a Japanese group found that whales and hippos share some common genetic markers (LINEs and SINEs) that are not shared by other Artiodactyls, suggesting that they share a common ancient ancestor that is not shared by other Artiodactyls or Mesonychids. Second, some of those fossils discovered by Gingerich and Thewissen turned out to have an ankle bone (double-pulley astragalus) that is a defining feature of Artiodactyls.
Let's pause for a moment to make this clear. We have fossils that have one feature diagnostic for cetaceans, and another feature diagnostic for Artiodactyls. Also, modern whales share some unique genetic markers with hippos (which are Artiodactyls). It's almost as if...whales....evolved from....a group of ancient Artiodactyls [2].
The Fraud
So where does the fraud come in? A creationist named Dr. Carl Werner (apparently a physician by training) interviewed some of the paleontologists that study cetacean evolution, especially Gingerich (2001) and Thewissen (2013). Werner produced an anti-evolution video series and published an accompanying book titled, Evolution: the Grand Experiment, with one chapter devoted to whales. For the 2014 third addition of his book, Werner produced a press release that breathlessly lays out the main charges, even though much of it pertains to information over a decade old. During his filmed interviews, Gingerich and Thewissen spilled the beans on how shaky the whale evolutionary scenario is. These amazing revelations included the following:
1. Although the tail of the ancient cetacean Rodhocetus has not been found, Gingerich initially speculated that it had a fluke at the end of it. Also, initially the limbs were not recovered so he speculated that Rodhocetus had flippers. Limbs were later recovered, leading Gingerich to doubt that they were flippers, and ultimately doubt that it had a tail fluke. However, various museums were still displaying drawings of Rodhocetus with flippers and a fluke. Somehow all of this disqualifies Rodhocetus as a transitional fossil and serves as evidence that evolutionary scientists freely spread misinformation.
2. When Thewissen discovered the skeleton of Ambulocetus, part of the upper jaw was missing, along with the nasal opening. The remaining lower jaw allowed him to judge how long the upper jaw would have been. However, the location of the nasal opening is not known. Thewissen's model placed the nasal opening a few inches back from the end of the snout. Since the actual location of the nasal opening isn't known, Thewissen's model is biased and misleading.
3. In discussing the middle ear of Ambulocetus, Thewissen acknowledged that a part called the sigmoid process, which was previously thought to be diagnostic for cetaceans, was 'questionable'. This admission revealed that there was no basis to consider Ambulocetus a cetacean. When combined with #2 above, it was clear that Ambulocetus as a transitional whale fossil was a figment of wishful thinking.
More to the Story
When I first came across these claims I did some Internet searching to see if there was any response. These charges were clearly popular because all kinds of creationist websites dominated my search results. Eventually I found an anonymous message board where one of the participants claimed to have contacted Dr. Thewissen and received a reply, which he posted. Thewissen confirmed that Werner did interview him.
He had me answer the same question a number of times. Usually journalists do this when the answer that a scientist gives is too technical, so usually the scientist rephrases the answer in a more simple way. When Werner shot in my lab, he would ask the same question multiple times, and I simplified my answers more and more each time he repeated a question. He then put my answers together in a creative way that makes it all look pretty silly....
The written piece that you sent me, I had never seen before. It does not discuss the critical piece of information that shows that Pakicetus and Ambulocetus are whales: the thick inner part of the tympanic bone of the ear, called the involucrum. It is not clear to me why this is not presented, as scientists agree that this is the most critical feature. Instead, the video focusses on another part of the tympanic bone, the outer part, which indeed is different in shape in different whales, and occurs in some whale relatives too (artiodactyls are the closest relatives to whales, no wonder that their ears have similarities). So, that feature needs to be qualified when it is explained. In a simple sound bite such as the ones that Dr. Werner presents, those qualifiers are not present and that causes that particular feature to look pretty inconclusive in the way it is presented there.
Since this comes from some unidentified person on a message board, you might be skeptical that it actually came from Thewissen, as you should be. However, the response also drew attention to a video that Thewissen made to help clarify the issues around Ambulocetus, though without direct reference to the creationists. Indeed, the YouTube video does exist! And it's worth watching.
Let's return to the issue of the sigmoid process and the involucrum for a moment. Werner's website quotes a 1998 publication by another whale expert (Zhe-Xi Luo) as follows.
"Other diagnostic characters, such as the sigmoid process as discussed below, are now open to question in the wake of the new fossil evidence from Pakicetus...[The] sigmoid process [in Pakicetus] is a simple plate [and is] equivocal, [since it is also] present in the artiodactyl Diacodexis...compromising its utility as a "dead ringer" apomorphy [unique trait] for cetaceans."
However, this editing leaves out an important preceding sentence from the original publication (a book, by the way, that was edited by Thewissen) (bolding added).
Cetaceans including pakicetids have only one unambiguous bullar synapomorphy that is absent in all noncetacean mammals--the involucrum, or the pachyosteosclerosis of the medial margin of the bulla. Other diagnostic characters, such as the sigmoid process, as discussed below, are now open to question in the wake of the new fossil evidence from Pakicetus and Ichthyolestes.
Luo's argument is rather technical, but the gist seems to be that the sigmoid process should not be considered a definitive sign that an ancient fossil is a cetacean. However, as stated by Luo, that still leaves the involucrum! I wonder if Werner missed that sentence.
Summary and Conclusion
So let's summarize the answers to the supposedly devastating admissions by Gingerich and Thewissen, numbered as above.
1. So far as I know, Gingerich never responded to Werner. Paleontologists often do not recover all of the bones of a fossil skeleton, so their reconstructions sometimes contain some guesswork based on other information. Carl Zimmer's book, At the Water's Edge, which profiled Gingerich's work, stated that most of the tail of Rodhocetus was missing, "preventing [Gingerich] from knowing whether it had grown flukes at its tip." Zimmer's book was published two or three years before Werner interviewed Gingerich, so Gingerich was hardly making a new admission to Werner. Werner's complaint has some justification as far as accuracy of reconstructions go. However, that does not negate the features that make Rodhocetus a cetacean that could function both on land and in water. Rodhocetus retains its place in the evolutionary transition of cetaceans from land to water.
2. Although Thewissen did not know exactly where the nasal opening of Ambulocetus was, its close relation to another fossil suggested that the opening had migrated a bit from the tip of the snout. The exact location of the opening is not important. When you look at the broad picture of cetacean evolution, you see the nasal opening migrate back from from the tip of the snout toward the eyes, where we know it in modern cetaceans as the blowhole.
3. The sigmoid process is a strong indicator of being a cetacean, but is apparently now considered not entirely definitive. However, the involucrum is considered definitive, and all of the fossils in question have an enlarged involucrum.
There are other issues I have not addressed, on both sides. Werner and other creationists have a few other criticisms that I haven't run down, some of which are rooted in a cartoon version of how evolution or science works. Similarly, there are other evidences derived from both living and ancient cetaceans that yield further evidence of, and insight into, cetacean evolution.
In conclusion, the notion that evolution, both in general and as applied to whales, has fallen like a house of cards remains a creationist fantasy. Nor is there any evidence of actual fraud; only some perhaps ill-advised artistic license. In this case, Werner has employed classic creationist tactics of selective quotation and ignoring important context. The evolutionary history of whales remains in good shape.
1. There are actually a number of other characteristics that support the relationship, but they are more subtle.
2. Either that, or God created whales on the fifth day of creation, some with a distinctive ankle bone they hardly used, if at all. And then, for some reason, He created a bunch of land Artiodactyls on the sixth day of creation with that same ankle bone, and in a few cases threw in the whale-like middle ear for good measure.
If you paid any attention to last week's Republican primary debate and the subsequent commentary, you'll know that there was some controversy over Dr. Ben Carson's answer to a question about his involvement with a dietary supplement company. From the transcript:
CARL: This is a company called Mannatech, a maker of nutritional supplements with which you had a ten-year relationship. They offered claims that they could cure autism, cancer. They paid $7 million to settle a deceptive marketing lawsuit in Texas, and yet your involvement continued. Why?
CARSON: Well, that's easy to answer. I didn't have an involvement with them. That's total propaganda. And this is what happens in our society. Total propaganda. I did a couple of speeches for them. I did speeches for other people. They were paid speeches. It is absolutely absurd to say that I had any kind of relationship with them.
Do I take the product? Yes, I think it's a good product.
CARL: To be fair, you were on the home page of their website with the logo over your shoulder.
CARSON: If somebody put me on their home page, they did it without my permission.
What Carson called 'total propaganda' turned out to be total truth, leading a writer at the conservative National Review to call Carson's answer "bald-faced lies." Further documentation of Carson's history with the company can be found here and here.
My interest here is in two statements he previously made about the product, separated by about 9 years.
The wonderful thing about a company like Mannatech is that they recognize that when God made us, He gave us the right fuel.
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God gave us [in plants] what we need to remain healthy. In today’s world our food chain is depleted of nutrients and our environment has helped destroy what God gave us.
Underlying much of advocacy for alternative health, anti-GMO, and anti-vaccination is the fallacious belief that 'natural' is better. Taking extracts of various plants is better than taking a drug, natural so-called organic foods are better than those that have been altered by genetic technology, and having an infectious disease somehow gives better immunity than a vaccine. Scientifically this is all baloney, at least in the broad strokes, but it sure has marketing appeal.
Carson's statements could be classified as a theological subset of the fallacious appeal to nature. I don't know whether he actually believes what he said, or whether this is religious rhetoric in the service of sales. It is certainly true that many useful drugs are derived from naturally occurring substances, but that doesn't seem to be Carson's point. Taken at face value, he seems to believe that edible plants in the natural world (created by God) contain the solutions to our health problems. Except, I guess, for the ones we already use.
This seems like a rather presentist belief to hold, by which I mean you have to ignore most of human history, during which life expectancy was pretty low compared to today. Many of our foods are the end products of artificial selection, and increased understanding and technology have allowed us to fortify common food items with a variety of dietary necessities (iodine in salt, vitamin D in milk, folic acid in flour, etc). As a result, dietary diseases like scurvy and rickets are practically unheard of in developed countries. To claim that our food is depleted of nutrients seems exactly backwards, except in the sense that many people choose to eat unhealthy foods.
In Carson's case, prostate cancer supposedly sparked his interest in Mannatech. I say supposedly because Carson has claimed that Mannatech's product alleviated his cancer symptoms. However, the documented timeline suggests that Carson had already had his prostate removed by the time he found Mannatech. At any rate, the notion of adding some exotic supplement to your diet as a way to prevent or treat cancer is the way of snake oil. Wrapping snake oil in praise for the providence of God still leaves you with snake oil.
This morning as I was doing my news-browsing rounds, I came across the big news that the WHO has officially declared red and processed meats as carcinogenic [1]. In my case the news was conveyed by the image and associated article on the left, as found on the home page of The Guardian. My first reaction was one of anger and skepticism. How on earth could meat rank with smoking as a cause of cancer? What eggheads came up with this idea? My second reaction was to cool my jets and to investigate a little. After all, the WHO is a pretty respectable organization, and if bacon causes cancer, my being angry about it will have zero bearing on reality. We use science to try to ferret out truths about the universe, after all, not just tell us what we want to hear.
The Guardian article went basically like this: WHO says meat causes cancer, the meat industry is furious, but industry scientists are just in denial. Well, no industry likes its products being called out as harmful (see: tobacco, fossil fuels, etc), so yeah, we wouldn't expect the meat industry to like this. (Disclosure: I am not a meat industry scientist, but my job is impacted by the meat industry.) However...
Vegetarians are probably breathing a sigh of relief today as headlines are warning us that processed and cured meats cause cancer. But the way this message has been framed in the media is extremely misleading.
Comparing meat to tobacco, as most news organisations who’ve chosen to report this have done, makes it seem like a bacon sandwich might be just as harmful as a cigarette. This is absolutely not the case.
Gee, what news organization was misleading?
The article goes on to explain that processed meat is in the same class as tobacco in terms of certainty of cancer causation, NOT risk of cancer. Understanding the difference is important for judging how concerned to be about this. The article includes this handy graphic.
It's important not to go overboard with this. For example, my wife's doctor has her on a low-carb diet, which means that red meat and processed meats make up a larger part of her diet. Freaking out about their cancer potential would be counter-productive because without them she is at much greater risk of developing diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
Presumably governments will issue consumption guidelines sometime in the future, and perhaps methods of meat preparation and cooking will be developed that minimize cancer risk. It seems that the bottom line for now is simply to eat red and processed meats moderately. You can have bacon; just don't go crazy with it.
Notes:
1. According to WHO, "Red meat refers to all mammalian muscle meat, including, beef, veal, pork, lamb, mutton,
horse, and goat....Processed meat refers to meat that has been transformed through salting, curing, fermentation, smoking, or other processes to enhance flavour or improve preservation."
The Church is introducing new 'cornerstone' religion courses for Church universities and Institutes of Religion. One of these courses is titled, Jesus Christ and the Everlasting Gospel, with a manual of the same name. The seventh lesson of the manual is titled, Jesus Christ—God’s Only Begotten Son in the Flesh. After laying some scriptural groundwork, students are encouraged to think of physical traits they inherited from their mother and father. They are then taught to think of Jesus, Mary, and God the Father in the same manner, with support from this passage in Jesus the Christ, written by Elder James E. Talmage.
That Child to be born of Mary was begotten of Elohim, the Eternal Father, not in violation of natural law but in accordance with a higher manifestation thereof; … In His nature would be combined the powers of Godhood with the capacity and possibilities of mortality; and this through the ordinary operation of the fundamental law of heredity, declared of God, demonstrated by science, and admitted by philosophy, that living beings shall propagate—after their kind. The Child Jesus was to inherit the physical, mental, and spiritual traits, tendencies, and powers that characterized His parents—one immortal and glorified—God, the other human—woman” (Jesus the Christ, 3rd ed. [1916], 81).
Terryl Givens has written that,
LDS biblical interpretation has tended more toward fundamentalist literalism than historically nuanced or figurative readings. This is largely a product of Mormonism’s origins in a time when Common Sense theology was dominant....Parley Pratt set the tone for Mormon scriptural exegesis with recurrent attacks on those who would “spiritualize” the Bible, rather than read in the plain, literal sense [1].
Reinforcing this literalism was the attempt of Parley and Orson Pratt, as well as John Widtsoe and James Talmage, to fit Joseph Smith's teachings into a theology "amenable to contemporary standards of scientific understanding [2]." Indeed, elsewhere in Jesus the Christ Elder Talmage explained that miracles are simply higher manifestations of natural law, not violations of it.
When Elder Talmage wrote his book a century ago, heredity was an observed phenomenon about which almost nothing was known. The passage above was a sensible thing for Elder Talmage to write for readers of the time, and its inclusion in the new manual speaks to its persuasive power today--when most people still only have a vague sense of the basis for heredity [3]. However, today the mechanism of heredity is well understood. So if we are to let science into the conversation, as Elder Talmage invites us to, then we need to talk about biological and genetic principles and details. Are these topics that can profitably be brought to bear on Jesus' divine sonship? It may seem vulgar to speak of such things in the context of the atonement, but that is the door the writers of the manual open by highlighting Elder Talmage's optimistic appeal to science and philosophy.
Using the lens of science a variety of questions could be raised. Instead, for now let's confine ourselves to this question: What possible relevance could genetics ("the ordinary operation of the fundamental law of heredity") have to the resurrection or any other of Jesus' abilities? The manual directs as follows (bolding in original):
As students respond, make sure they understand the following truth: As the Only Begotten Son of God in the flesh, Jesus Christ was able to perform the Atoning sacrifice, which required Him to endure more than a mortal person could, and thereby fulfill His role in the Father’s plan. In addition, because Jesus had power over death, He had the capacity to rise from the dead. Make sure students understand that if Jesus Christ had been born of two mortal parents, He could not have overcome death or endured the infinite pain and suffering of the Atonement. If He were born of two immortal parents, He would not have been subject to physical suffering and death.
On what basis should such assertions be made? Several scriptural prophets including Enoch, Moses, Elijah, John, and the three Nephites were each given a kind of "power over death" (D&C 7:2), without heredity playing any role. Lazarus was raised from the dead. Any number of miraculous interventions could have been used to prevent Jesus from dying before his mission was accomplished. Further, it is unclear what inherited property could cause a dead body to rise back to life, and since all people are promised the resurrection (Spencer W. Kimball, echoing Brigham Young, taught that it is an ordinance), I don't see why we would even need to posit one.
Remember that in a gospel context death is the separation of body and spirit, with resurrection being the reuniting of the two. Are we to believe that a physical property of Jesus' decaying body made it possible for his spirit to re-enter it? If the decision to initiate resurrection was made by his spirit, how can inheritance be relevant? You would think that the mere fact that Jesus was "God himself"--the premortal Jehovah, would be a sufficient explanation. (And simply as a matter of internal consistency, if, according to Church teachings, it was possible for Adam and Eve to change from immortality to mortality, why wouldn't it be possible for Jesus to do the same if both parents were immortal?)
The atonement and resurrection are incomprehensible, and fundamentally remain mysteries to us. Is anything gained in multiplying the mystery by asserting the necessity of unknown inherited factors? Is such detail clearly supported by the scriptures? And might we unwittingly put stumbling blocks in the paths of students by invoking the authority of science where it probably doesn't belong?
Let's be careful about claiming science in support of doctrine. Especially those doctrines we know very little about.
Notes:
1. Givens, Wrestling the Angel: The Foundations of Mormon Thought: Cosmos, God, Humanity, p. 18.
2. Givens, Wrestling the Angel: The Foundations of Mormon Thought: Cosmos, God, Humanity, p. 126.
3. I think most people know that heredity involves genes and DNA, but don't really know much more than that. I once had a conversation with a highly intelligent and educated friend in which he told me that he did not understand the difference between a gene and the genome. Based on his career path, there was no particular reason why he should have.
In memory of Elder Richard G. Scott, I thought I would share my only personal interaction with him.
While attending BYU as an undergraduate I got a job at the Missionary Training Center (MTC) helping to provide audio/visual support for the various programs. Each week there was a Tuesday evening devotional which was produced by our team. The speakers ranged from leadership within the MTC to members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. Usually the work was pretty straightforward: setting up equipment, doing the camera work, and so on. However, there were occasional special requests.
One week Elder Scott was the scheduled speaker and we got word he had some Powerpoint slides that he wanted us to project during his talk. Rather than send them ahead of time, Elder Scott was to personally deliver the file on a disk. At the appointed time I met him in the lobby to receive the disk. I asked him how he wanted to handle the presentation; did he want to advance the slides himself? He said no, he wanted us to take care of that and explained that he would tell us when it was time for the slides to be shown. He then showed me the signal he would use to indicate that the slide should be advanced. He held his right arm up in front of him, his elbow bent and palm down, then swung his hand out to the side--like a pianist running his fingers up the keyboard. I vaguely remember suggesting some alternatives, but that was the signal he wanted to use.
I dutifully took the disk to the control booth and loaded the file on the computer. Usually I liked to spend some time getting familiar with a speaker's presentation so that I could have a sense of what was in it and how it would flow. However, on this occasion I didn't have much of an opportunity to look it over. Elder Scott had arrived only a few minutes before the beginning of the devotional, and before long it was time to start the production.
The program progressed and eventually Elder Scott stood to speak. After some introductory remarks he got into the substance of his talk and eventually requested that we show the first slide. I was manning the computer in the control booth across the room, and brought the slide up to view. I soon discovered that, like most of us, Elder Scott made gestures with his arms and hands as he spoke, and it was not always clear whether he was giving his special signal or simply moving his arm while talking. This difficulty resulted in some bumps in the flow of the presentation. Even worse, as he continued his talk the slides were evidently not in the order he expected them, or perhaps some were missing. At a certain point he asked for the next slide, which I advanced to. But it wasn't the one he wanted. So I advanced to the one after that. After a few (eternal) moments of playing a game of bouncing around the slides, Elder Scott abandoned the slides altogether and we stopped showing them. I think it's a good bet that all the missionaries attending thought I was incompetent.
I didn't have an opportunity to speak with Elder Scott afterward, but what was I going to say anyway? That it was his fault I couldn't always discern his signal or that the slides weren't quite right? If memory serves, we later got word from our boss that someone up the chain wasn't happy with our performance that night. I explained what had happened and I think that was pretty much the end of the matter--at least as far as I was concerned.
I don't know if there's a moral to the story, it's just what happened [1]. Looking on the bright side, in a weird way I counted it a privilege to have looked foolish on behalf of an apostle (i.e. nobody was blaming him for the difficulty), and it turned the relatively routine experience into a story. But a smooth presentation would have been better.
During the last U.S. presidential election cycle, Michelle Bachmann was briefly seen as the Republican primary front-runner. Her downfall from that position was catalyzed when she claimed during a debate that the HPV vaccine could cause "mental retardation." Earlier this year a measles outbreak at Disneyland brought the issue of childhood vaccination to the public attention, resulting in California passing one of the strictest school vaccination laws in the country. Meanwhile, in the immediate aftermath of the measles outbreak, a variety of politicians, including some (then) potential Republican candidates, expressed less than solid support for vaccination.
Donald Trump has believed, since at least 2007, that childhood vaccinations cause autism. The issue was raised in the second Republican primary debate earlier this week.
Ben Carson gently and correctly noted that studies have not found any connection between autism and vaccines. Unfortunately, he and Rand Paul, the other physician in the debate, ultimately indulged Trump's idea of spreading vaccinations out. This led the New Yorker's Jon Chait to complain,
It is depressing that a presidential field with two doctors cannot even produce sensible views on medicine, let alone anything else. The party’s decades-long flight from empiricism and reason shows no sign of abating.
But in the Washington Post two graduate students of political science write that CNN should not have raised the question at all.
We fear that if party elites continue to polarize, the cues present in the press could begin to undermine the societal consensus on childhood vaccinations. Why are we reasonably sure this is the case? Because we have seen this movie before, with global warming....
We fear we may begin to witness a similar dynamic on vaccines. Republican elites are increasingly voicing skepticism of the medical science consensus. The media sees this as fitting a pre-established narrative that Republicans are hostile to science, and thus CNN asked the GOP field a question about vaccines in front of a record breaking national audience of 23 million people.
It would not be surprising if Democratic elites leap at this opportunity to solidify their own science-based credentials and make it a campaign issue, particularly if someone like Donald Trump wins the Republican nomination. These cues are then communicated to the public through the press, and we may be off to the polarization races.
I'm not sure what to make of this. On the one hand, the public ought to be informed that a leading contender for the U.S. presidency has crackpot views about vaccination. In normal times such views would bring a chorus of condemnation that would endanger presidential ambitions, as seen with Bachmann in the previous cycle. However, Donald Trump has shown himself to be impervious to shame. Apparently he cannot say anything ridiculous enough that would cause his supporters to abandon him, and attempts of the media--even Fox News(!)--to hold him accountable for his antics are, in the minds of supporters, more evidence that elitists are trying to manipulate the masses and keep a bold truth-teller from succeeding. Thus, whether they wanted to or not, Carson and Paul soft-peddled their criticism of Trump and ended up legitimizing his views.
I have a hard time seeing why CNN is responsible for that...other than the way the debate questions were constantly framed around Trump's views. If the media avoided this and other topics for fear of politicization, well wouldn't that just be interpreted as another manifestation of media elitism (i.e. that the simpletons of America are too dumb to risk discussing an issue in a political context)?
I do not think that vaccination will ever be as polarizing as climate change. Whereas addressing climate change is perceived by many as a threat to prosperity, vaccination is generally viewed as an enabler of prosperity. And whereas the consequences of error in judgment for climate change are delayed or almost imperceptibly gradual, the consequences for error in vaccination are more immediate and severe. However, vaccination is more sensitive to dissent; successful vaccination policies require a high degree of compliance.
Ultimately, if vaccination becomes a politicized issue Republicans will have nobody else to truly blame but themselves. If they and their outlets will give full support to vaccination, then by definition it won't be a political issue--at least between Republicans and Democrats. But if they voice skepticism, I don't think you can blame CNN for reporting it.
No one seems to care about the difference between observations (or 'facts') and inferences like creationist-types do. That's not to say that the distinction is unimportant or that scientists don't pay any attention to it, but creationists really care about it. That's because in order to make the world fit within their scriptural boundaries they have to discount large amounts of science from a variety of fields. However, they can't just dismiss science without looking like medieval relics, so they take upon themselves the task of separating 'true science' from 'false science' so that they can appear to be sophisticated lovers of science. One of the simplest ways to make that separation is to insist that the unacceptable parts of science are actually stacks of unreliable and/or un-provable inferences. Thus any statement about the ancient past or processes that occur over long periods of time can be met with the simple question: Were you there?
Before getting to my main point, I can't help but comment on how radically skeptical such people would be in general if they were more consistent in their pedantry, because inference is everywhere. Nor, I think, do they realize how many unobjectionable 'facts' are actually built on inference. Pick up any molecular biology journal, for example, and you will find lots of measurements. But those measurements are often done using indirect methods (because nobody can directly observe a molecule) [1], and the phenomena they measure are often correlates or indicators of broader phenomena. However, today's inferences become tomorrow's facts as they are demonstrated to be reliable and useful in advancing knowledge. As Stephen J. Gould put it, "In science, 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.'" Occasionally accepted facts are revised as their underpinnings are probed in more detail--often because of advancements in technology. It's just the nature of the beast. Or life in general, really.
That brings me to my main point. The National Center for Science Education (NCSE) advocates and provides support for teaching evolution and, more recently, climate science in schools. Their most recent Reports periodical has a fun article, Yes, We Were There, by a physicist (and Christian) named Antoine Bret. After setting up the 'Were you there?' issue, Bret describes several interlocking observations that show that the laws of physics have been constant for over 30,000 years--less than a drop in the bucket of the accepted age of the universe, but more than the Biblical age of the Earth.
The progression of his argument is as follows:
1. Stars have been measured to be 30,000 light years from Earth by the parallax method, which is based on trigonometry. Approximately 30,000 light years away is the limit of detection for this method, but he chose it because it is the most direct method in terms of observation.
2. We can measure the spectra emitted by the elements in those stars, which match those of the elements on Earth. The signature spectra are explained by quantum mechanics, in which the speed of light is a key component. This shows that the speed of light has not changed in the last 30,000 years. So unless you want to say that God created the universe with light already in transit (something hardcore creationists believe), these observations show that the universe is at least (!) 30,000 years old.
3. Various types of supernova beyond 30,000 light years away have been observed, and the nuclear decay of their elements tracked. The rates of radioactive decay match those on Earth.
Bret concludes:
Physicists do not hold that the laws of physics haven’t changed over the last 30000+ years because of a uniformitarian prejudice. They hold it because this is what they observe....for all practical purposes, “we were there” to see it.
I suspect that it might be more accurate to say that physicists had no reason to think that the law of physics had changed, but that these observations simply add direct support to their confidence.
So does this argument prove that the laws of physics haven't changed? I'm sure there are counter-arguments to be made. For example, I guess you could argue that the Earth was in a special bubble where the laws of physics were different from those of the stars. But where are the observations that would substantiate that?
Notes:
1. I'm thinking of things like western blots, ELISA, or especially flow cytometry. We run various controls to be confident in the results, but the end result is technically an inference. Similarly, blood cholesterol is measured via a series of chemical reactions that result in a color change, which is measured by light absorbance. Is your LDL number really a fact? You can see how this game can be played to the nth degree.
Last week the LDS journal Interpreter published a pro-evolution article, The Theory of Evolution is Compatible with Both Belief and Unbelief in a Supreme Being, by David M. Belnap. As I read the article I was waiting for the 'but' moment, but I was pleasantly surprised that it never really came. Belnap made no apologies for evolution, and even used some of his own research in constructing 3D models of viruses from 2D images to make a point that randomness, coupled with selection, and be constructive.
The article covers a lot of ground quickly, which limits its persuasive power, in my opinion. Anti-evolutionists will think he is making empty assertions. And I thought the weakest part of the essay was when he tried to show that the Genesis 1 account isn't that different from what we know from paleontology and geological history. That's not an exercise that I think is needed, because Genesis was written for a pre-scientific people. Nevertheless, I applaud his overall effort and Interpreter for publishing it.
P.S. Several days passed from when I read the article to when I looked at the comments after it. As you might expect, it was off to the races with doctrinaires and cranks sounding off. Wade into it if you wish, but I don't have time for trying to clean up that kind of garbage anymore.
Did you know that in the U.S. drugs for animals are regulated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which means that they must be shown to be safe and effective, and are manufactured under tightly controlled conditions?
Did you know that dietary supplements for people generally receive little-to-no scrutiny by FDA?
Last week's Sciencehad a nice story of one physician's David-and-Goliath fight against tainted supplements. It all began when Dr. Pieter Cohen noticed that patients taking the same weight loss supplement started getting sick. This started him on a quest of testing various supplements for extra substances (chemicals, hormones, etc) and his work is getting the FDA's attention.
To understand the regulatory issue, you need some background. The dietary supplement industry is practically a libertarian's dream:
THE MODERN SUPPLEMENT ERA began in 1994, when Congress passed the Dietary Supplement and Health Education Act, or DSHEA (pronounced duh-shay-uh). In the decades before, the supplements industry was overwhelmingly focused on vitamins and minerals. Much of the regulation centered on recommended daily allowances of products like vitamin C, iron, or calcium.
DSHEA established the first broad framework for regulating supplements. It also gave supplements a legal definition: as substances intended to “supplement the diet,” containing “dietary ingredients” such as herbs, botanicals, or vitamins.
At the same time, the law sharply curtailed FDA's power. Companies were not required to notify FDA provided the dietary ingredient had a history of use before the law was passed. For the first time, DSHEA allowed them to make claims on the label suggesting supplements affected the structure or function of the body—for example, by boosting the immune system or protecting prostate health. And DSHEA codified a loose arrangement: Under the law, as FDA notes on its website, “unlike drug products that must be proven safe and effective for their intended use before marketing, there are no provisions in the law for FDA to ‘approve’ dietary supplements … before they reach the consumer.” The agency can act only after a supplement is on the market and evidence shows it's unsafe.
The article is accompanied by a graphic that says that "prescription and illegal drugs are routinely found in supplements." It has two examples of supplements that are supposed to help with sexual enhancement. Any guesses what was found in them? Answer: Viagra. The article gave me a little more sympathy for athletes who claim that they didn't know their supplements contained a banned substance. They really may not have known!
FDA has a Q&A page about supplements. It's worth reading through the whole thing, but check out this gem:
Do manufacturers or distributors of dietary supplements have to tell FDA or consumers what evidence they have about their product's safety or what evidence they have to back up the claims they are making for them?
No, except for rules described above that govern "new dietary ingredients," there is no provision under any law or regulation that FDA enforces that requires a firm to disclose to FDA or consumers the information they have about the safety or purported benefits of their dietary supplement products. Likewise, there is no prohibition against them making this information available either to FDA or to their customers. It is up to each firm to set its own policy on disclosure of such information.
The next time you are in the pharmacy, have a look at all of the products with the disclaimer that their claims have not been evaluated by the FDA.
I'm going out on a limb here, but my sense is that straight-up vitamins and similar products are not the main problem (though they may indeed be a waste of money [1]). Rather, in my opinion products that are claimed to actually help some kind of performance (strength, sexual, weight loss, etc) are more likely to have some kind of drug or hormone to help produce the desired effect, or the illusion thereof. Most people who take a multivitamin or similar product are not going to notice any substantial difference in their health, nor will they care. But when it comes to, say, weight loss supplements, consumers will expect to see some progress. The balance of incentives and disincentives to play fast and loose with the truth and your safety are quite tilted toward the manufacturer.
The irony of course is that many consumers of dietary supplements are operating under the illusion that they are avoiding 'unnatural' substances, or that the law wouldn't let manufacturers put claims on the bottle that are not true. In reality, most consumers don't really know what they are consuming, and don't realize how little evidence manufacturers need behind their products.
You have been warned.
Notes:
1. Most people get all the nutrients they need from their diet. However, I fully accept that some dietary supplements may be helpful for some people.
There have been a couple of scientific advances on Native American origins this summer. First, DNA was finally isolated from the 9,000 year-old Kennewick man (KM) and it is clear that he is closely related to several current Native American tribes. Some had argued based on skull morphology that KM was more closely related to Australians and that his ancestry was outside of the East Asian/Siberian mainstream. However, the genetic evidence now puts him firmly within the Native American mainstream.
The second finding, reported by two separate groups a couple of weeks ago, is that some Amazonian tribes have a small DNA contribution from a common ancestor of indigenous Australians and Melanesians. This Boston Globe article is one of the better ones I have seen (and it has a nice accompanying graphic). It is very easy to get confused by the differing interpretations of the data. From what I have read, it boils down to this: Does the Australian DNA come from migrants who came into the New World around the same time as the East Asians/Siberians (>15,000 years ago), or later through the Aleutian Islands around 9,000 years ago? Some news articles use the terms ancient and recent without being clear about the associated dates, which can lead people to imagine evidence of trans-Pacific voyages. That is NOT what is proposed here.
At first glance this has nothing to do with the Book of Mormon. The Asian ancestry of Native Americans is nothing new, and the timing of the migrations inferred from the above studies occurred long before the Book of Mormon chronology. Defenders might even point out that the added complexity that has been discovered shows that we must remain open-minded about Native American genetics because surprises do happen. However, there may be subtle implications for the future of Book of Mormon apologetics, which rely heavily on the population genetics principles of founder effect, genetic bottlenecks, and genetic drift.
To make things easy, I'll break my point up into several bite-sized propositions:
1. Although the exact genetic signatures that the Jaredites/Lehites would have carried are unknown, each advance in characterizing the ancient origins of Native American genetics helps to establish the background from which Jaredite/Lehite markers would stand out. We may not know exactly what we are looking for, but we have an increasing ability to recognize markers that are unusual.
2. Mitochondrial DNA and Y chromosome types are particularly sensitive to genetic drift, etc.--a point made in the two papers describing the Australian connection. Originally most ancient genetic research focused on mtDNA and Y chromosomes because they were easier to deal with. However, the technological advances in recovering and sequencing autosomes (i.e. most of the genome) have greatly improved in the last decade.
3. Autosomal markers are more resistant to disappearing from populations. It's one thing for mtDNA or Y chromosomes (which are inherited by daughters and sons, respectively, as a block) to go missing; it's another for all traces of autosomes (which mix by recombination each generation) to disappear. As an example, scientists initially ruled out interbreeding between modern humans and Neanderthals based on mtDNA differences. However, once the Neanderthal genome was sequenced, it became clear that modern humans of ancient European decent got about 4% of their DNA from Neanderthals (which went extinct ~30-40,000 years ago).
4. The increased ability to recover and sequence DNA from ancient remains means it is probably only a matter of time before a variety of genomes dating from Book of Mormon times--and in the favored locations--are recovered. It is one thing to explain why modern Native Americans do not show any genetic relationship to the Middle East; it is another to explain why two thousand year-old Mesoamerican remains do not show any genetic relationship.
I am not suggesting that genetic studies are going to definitively disprove the Book of Mormon as an ancient American record. What I am suggesting is that, as the science around Native American origins progresses and the realm of plausibility contracts, the current arguments that Book of Mormon defenders advance with respect to Native American DNA will begin to wear thin. That is, unless a pre-Columbian Middle-Eastern genetic signal is discovered. But if that happens, we won't need the current arguments any more. So either way, we are marching toward their expiration date.
It seems like every time I visit my undergraduate alma mater another construction project has destroyed a building of significance to me. Most recently, the Widtsoe building (WIDB) was torn down in May/June after the new Life Sciences building was dedicated. As a microbiology major, I spent a lot of time in the WIDB (and waiting for the elevator). And since most of that time was in my junior and senior year, I also associate it with the vast career unknown that lay before me at the time.
Here's a fun memory: As part of a micro lab class we had to culture the aerobic and anaerobic bacteria in our own poop! When the time was right, I took the little cup I was given to a bathroom in the southwest corner of the sixth(?) floor and...ready, aim, fire. This was all kind of awkward, but really, would you rather culture your own poop or someone else's? I then nonchalantly (I like to think) walked over into the lab and swabbed my specimen onto agar plates. (Meanwhile, over in the Tanner building, students were learning how to make money.)
I recognize the need for the university to update facilities, but it would be nice if they could leave a few buildings more or less the same so that I can show my children and grandchildren the actual locations of my memories. 'I once cultured my own poop in a building that used to be right there' just doesn't have the same punch.
Here is a time-lapse video of the demolition of the WIDB.
I just returned from my summer vacation, part of which included a visit to Carthage Jail. When the sister missionary leading our tour told us that John Taylor's watch had stopped a bullet, I figured it was just one missionary repeating the traditional story. Later, in the bedroom where Joseph and Hyrum were killed, and John Taylor nearly-killed, we listened to an audio production that also told the traditional watch story. I realized that the issue of accuracy went beyond the missionary.
While John Taylor was recovering from his bullet wounds, received during the martyrdom of Joseph and Hyrum Smith, his family noticed a small hole cut in his pocket and damage to the face of the watch. He and his family came to believe that his watch had stopped a bullet, which not only saved him from another (perhaps fatal) wound but also prevented him from falling out of the window. The story has become a prominent part of the story of the martyrdom, and serves as a faith-promoting miracle in church history. It can be found in church publications as recent as the 2011 John Taylor manual. The problem is that it probably isn't true.
Historian Glen M. Leonard was the director of the Church History Museum for twenty six years. In his book, Nauvoo: A Place of Peace, a People of Promise (published by Deseret Book in 2002), Leonard wrote that after John Taylor was shot in the leg,
He collapsed on the wide sill, denting the back of his vest pocket watch. The force shattered the glass cover of the timepiece against his ribs and pushed the internal gear pins against the enamel face, popping out a small segment later mistakenly identified as a bullet hole.
The reason for the alternative story, simply put, is that the damage to the watch is not consistent with a bullet hitting it. Consider that Hyrum's watch was much more damaged by a bullet that had passed part-way through his body. Other leading historians, such as Richard Bushman in Rough Stone Rolling, have followed Leonard's lead [1].
This information has been known for over a decade, and was featured in a 2010 BYU Education Week presentation that was reported in a Deseret News article, so why hasn't it penetrated the presentation at Carthage Jail (to say nothing of the average saint, or even the 2011 manual)? It's possible that I'm being too nit-picky, but how would you feel if you spent your mission repeating the story every day, only to find out later that it was known to be mistaken since you were at least 3 years old?
I am happy to report a couple of signs of progress. First, the new Institute manual, Foundations of the Restoration, omits the watch entirely in its treatment of the martyrdom.
As the conflict at the doorway increased, John Taylor tried to escape the room through a window. As he attempted to leap out of the window, he was shot in the thigh from the doorway and was also shot by someone outside. He fell to the floor, and while attempting to get under the bed next to the window, he was severely wounded by three more shots.
Second, and more importantly, an article published last April in the history section of the Church's website, John Taylor's Miracle, is devoted to the damage of Taylor's pocket watch. Although it bends over backwards to retain the miraculous in his survival, it does a nice job of gently putting the traditional story to rest--or at least legitimizing the alternative.
So now you don't have to cite some historian nobody cares about [2] when challenged on the revision of the pocket watch story. Instead you can cite the Church's own website. Maybe someone should tell the missionaries at Carthage [3].
Notes:
1. The LDS history blog Juvenile Instructor has a nice summary of the issue, with great references that I am too lazy to reproduce here.
2. You know what I mean.
3. I didn't raise the issue when I was there because I was afraid I would sound like a jerk, and it wasn't until I returned home that I found the Church article. However, given the number of people who tour the jail, I find it hard to believe that nobody has ever called them on it.
When we think of the human genome, we generally have in mind the collection of genes that make us human. What most people don't realize is that a significant portion of their genome (at least 8%) actually comes from viruses, and these parts are called endogenous viral elements (EVEs). EVEs, and other genetic elements like them [1] (which all together make up around half (!) of the human genome), can help establish genetic relationships because they are like molecular fossils. In fact, the term 'paleovirology' has been coined to describe their study. A paper from 2010, aside from being interesting in its own right, has a great illustration that helps to convey this concept [2].
The left side is not very important for our purposes, but basically it shows various types of viruses and the pathways that can land their genetic material into a host genome. The box in the middle-bottom represents double-stranded DNA where the viral sequence has integrated into a host genome.
The right side of the figure represents what happens after that. When the virus integrates into a host genome, it doesn't instantly become part of the genome of the whole population. At first, only one individual in the population has the virus in its genome in a particular spot. However, when that individual has offspring it can pass on the viral element as if it was just another gene. Simply by chance (or perhaps due to selection) the new genetic variant containing the EVE can become more common in the population. (That exact scenario is currently happening in koalas.) Not every individual has it, just like not every human has color blindness, type A blood, blue eyes, or blond hair. Eventually, though, the variant may go extinct, or it may become fixed, which means that every member of the population has it. From that point on, all descendants will have the viral element in the same spot of the genome (unless it is secondarily deleted, which generally leaves a genetic scar).
So looking again at the right side, we can see a rabbit-like species that eventually gave rise to three daughter species. The population giving rise to species C branched off before the EVE invaded the genome, so it is clean (in that specific genetic location). When the EVE first invaded the host genome, it was passed along to descendants until it became fixed--present in all members of the species. So when species A and B branched off, both were marked by the EVE. If you knew nothing about how species A, B, and C were related to each other beforehand, the presence of the EVE in identical spots in the genome would tip you off. After all, the genome is a large place and the likelihood that two EVEs would independently end up in the exact same location are pretty small. This also works for populations within a species as well.
With improvements in technology over the last 10-15 years, scientists have been sequencing the genomes of all kinds of animals to see what is in them. It turns out that EVEs are all over the place. Scientists looking for the presence of one type of human EVE in other primates got results like what is shown below. In case it isn't obvious, the entry of each virus group is mapped onto the primate family tree, and it communicates much of the same information as the figure above, with humans and chimpanzees most closely related because they share the most EVEs [source].
Probably most of the EVEs are just genomic junk hanging around. Sometimes they can cause problems by disrupting a needed gene or its regulation (see: cancer). However, occasionally they can be helpful. For example, in mammalian evolution retroviruses have repeatedly, and independently, donated a gene that is used in placenta formation.
Their critical role in fetal development, their ability to reveal common ancestry, and the fact that they are an integral part of us--all of this makes EVE a fitting name.
Notes:
1. Things like transposons, LINEs, and SINEs (especially Alu elements).
2. Katzourakis A, Gifford RJ (2010) Endogenous Viral Elements in Animal Genomes. PLoS Genet 6(11): e1001191.
At By Common Consent, writer WVS shared an excerpt of Wilford Woodruff's journal, which captured a speculative explanation that Orson Pratt gave for the origin of God. After referring to the trial-and-error process that chemists often go through, Pratt said:
An eternity was filled as it were with particules of intelligences who had their agency, two of these particles in the process of time might have joined their interest together exchanged ideas & found by persueing this course that they gained double strength to what one particle of intelligence would have & afterwards were joined by other particles & continued untill they organized a combination or body though through a long process...
Pratt's process is that of an individual advancing in organization. But if you look at it from a slightly different angle and apply his process to populations, then you're not very far from 'the replicators' in Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene. (The 'replicators' chapter defies a concise summary quote, so you'll just need to click through and read it.)
This all reminds me of something that Terryl Givens recently wrote [1]:
Mormons ironically find an unlikely (and surely unwilling) ally in the arch-atheist Richard Dawkins. In his controversial critique of religion, he wrote that: “Any creative intelligence of sufficient complexity to design anything comes into existence only at the end product of an extended process of gradual evolution.” Elaborating this point, he said that
you have to have a gradual slow incremental process [to explain an eye or a brain] and by the very same token, God would have to have the same kind of explanation. … God indeed can’t have just happened. If there are Gods in the universe, they must be the end product of slow incremental processes. If there are beings in the universe that we would treat as Gods, … that we would worship … as gods, then they must have come about by an incremental process, gradually.
It's fun when the 'new atheism' sounds like the old Mormonism!
Notes:
1. Givens, Terryl L. (2014). Wrestling the Angel: The Foundations of Mormon Thought: Cosmos, God, Humanity (p. 216).
Lately I've been browsing through some of the newer manuals published by the Church. I've found some things that I like, and some things I dislike. And then there are other things that are just...interesting. Let's take the birth of Jesus, for example. In the old New Testament (Ha!) manual for Institute (1979), we find the following subheading in chapter 3: "Jesus Was Born in Bethlehem, April 6, 1 B.C." The manual then states:
After summarizing the opinions of various scholars in the matter of Christ’s birthday, Elder James E. Talmage compares their conclusions with modern revelation and then affirms: “We believe that Jesus Christ was born in Bethlehem of Judea, April 6, B.C. 1.” (Jesus the Christ, p. 104.) Of this President Harold B. Lee declared:
“This is the annual conference of the Church. April 6, 1973, is a particularly significant date because it commemorates not only the anniversary of the organization of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in this dispensation, but also the anniversary of the birth of the Savior, our Lord and Master, Jesus Christ. [Quoted D&C 20:1]” (CR, Apr. 1973, p. 4.)
To help drive the point home, the manual has a graphic showing the months of the years 1 B.C. and 1 A.D. (there is no year zero), with an arrow pointing to April accompanied by the words (in two lines), "April 6, 1 B.C." and "Birthday of the Lord."
That is pretty straightforward, and it is complemented by commentary in the Institute manual for the Doctrine and Covenants. The statement by President Lee was cited by Elder Bednar in his April 2014 General Conference talk in which he said that April 6 is known by revelation to be "the actual and accurate date of the Savior's birth."
Concerning the year in which Jesus Christ was born, “the Church has made no official declaration on the matter” (J. Reuben Clark Jr., Our Lord of the Gospels [1954], vi). The calendar currently used throughout most of the world was created many centuries after Jesus Christ lived, and experts disagree about how to use existing historical information to calculate the year of His birth. Elder Bruce R. McConkie wrote: “This is not a settled issue. Perhaps also it does not matter too much as long as we have an accepted framework of time within which to relate the actual events of [Christ’s] life” (The Mortal Messiah: From Bethlehem to Calvary, 4 vols. [1979–81], 1:350).
For some reason the manual went from a declarative statement of belief based on revelation, to a complete punt on the year and no mention of April 6 at all. And it's not like the J. Reuben Clark quote didn't exist when the first manual was printed, so why the change?
We can only speculate, but it might in part be because in 2010, BYU religion professor Jeffrey Chadwick published an article in BYU Studies [1] that pretty much demolished 1 B.C. as a viable option, and kicked out the supports from underneath the April 6 date as well [2]. Yes, Presidents Lee, Kimball, and Hinckley made comments in support of April 6, but so far as can be determined, they were relying on a tradition started by Elder James E. Talmage in Jesus the Christ [3]. Of course it's possible that Elder Talmage was just really lucky on the April 6 part and later Church presidents felt inspired that he was right, even if his reasons were wrong [4]. Whatever the case, it seems that the authors and editors steered clear of April 6, which allowed them to avoid taking a position that would contradict a fresh conference statement by a living Apostle on the one hand [5], or lend additional support to the date on the other.
I should clarify that I support the change that the manual made, although I wish they had given the history of the topic more discussion. And who knows? Maybe April 6 will make a comeback in another manual (though I doubt 1 B.C. will). When exactly Jesus was born has zero significance to any core element of the gospel. But it is the insignificance of the issue that allows us to think about how we relate to the manuals, and issues of revelation, tradition, authority, doctrine...and of course correlation.
Notes:
1. Don't ignore the endnotes, especially 9, 10, 11, 12, and 18. A summary of the article was published in the Deseret News. FAIR also has a nice treatment of the issue.
2. Elder Talmage's use of D&C 20:1 applies with equal force to both the year and the date. In his argument, both stand or fall together.
3. In fact if you look at the first passage you will find that President Lee quoted D&C 20:1--clearly following Elder Talmage's argument.
4. Scientists, too, sometimes accidentally hit on the right answer.
5. Elder Bednar spoke in April 2014, and the manual appears to have been approved the following November. If I have misinterpreted the approval date, then Elder Bednar's talk would have come after the manual approval.
I've been a little more active in my reading lately, but am unable to comment in detail on some of the pregnant passages I have found. So from time to time I will simply post quotations as food for thought. First up:
Often Christians focus on the need to be faithful to the past, to make sure that present belief matches that of previous generations. I support the sentiment in general, but we must be just as burdened to be faithful to the future, to ensure that we are doing all we can to deliver a viable faith to future generations.
When I bought The Evolution of Adam, by Peter Enns, I was afraid that I might be in for a tenuous attempt to read evolution into the Bible. What I found instead was an engaging discussion of the history and cultural background of the Old and New Testaments, in support of Enns's argument that Adam was probably not a historical person.
As fate would have it, I happened to be in the middle of the book during April General Conference, which made for an interesting juxtaposition. In the middle of a powerful talk on Jesus Christ and the Atonement that used two boys' harrowing experience on a cliff as a metaphor, Elder Jeffrey Holland turned for a moment to the importance of the fall of Adam and Eve.
In our increasingly secular society, it is as uncommon as it is unfashionable to speak of Adam and Eve or the Garden of Eden or of a “fortunate fall” into mortality. Nevertheless, the simple truth is that we cannot fully comprehend the Atonement and Resurrection of Christ and we will not adequately appreciate the unique purpose of His birth or His death...without understanding that there was an actual Adam and Eve who fell from an actual Eden, with all the consequences that fall carried with it.
Enns is by no means a secularist. He is a professor of Biblical studies who is clear and straightforward about his belief in Jesus Christ [1]. Nevertheless, as Enns sees the historical evidence, which he lays out in the first half of the book, Adam was probably a mythological character that the ancient Israelites used to orient and define their identity.
The second half of the book examines what this conclusion means for Paul's teachings. Briefly put, if I understand Enns correctly, Paul used Adam to show Jews and Gentiles that they were united in having a common problem that was solved by Jesus Christ. Since that common problem pre-dated Abraham and the law of Moses, and since Jesus had solved the problem, there was no need for Gentile Christians to convert to Judaism first and/or be circumcised. To put a finer point on it, Paul was explicating the origin of sin and death in a Biblically novel way [2] to solve a problem (i.e. refute the Judaizers). The fact that he used a scriptural figure that (according to Enns) probably did not exist is simply a reflection of the fact that Paul was a first-century Jew. (By comparison, there is no necessary reason to think that Job was a historical figure just because he is mentioned in D&C 121. Joseph had no reason to think otherwise, and Job was a fitting example to make the point.)
Noting that "It is commonly argued that, as goes the historicity of Adam, so goes the historicity of Christ," Enns's perspective can be summarized by these passages (italics in original):
Admitting the historical and scientific problems with Paul’s Adam does not mean in the least that the gospel message is therefore undermined. A literal Adam may not be the first man and cause of sin and death, as Paul understood it, but what remains of Paul’s theology are three core elements of the gospel:
The universal and self-evident problem of death
The universal and self-evident problem of sin
The historical event of the death and resurrection of Christ
These three remain; what is lost is Paul’s culturally assumed explanation for what a primordial man had to do with causing the reign of death and sin in the world. Paul’s understanding of Adam as the cause reflects his time and place [p.123].
So, even without attributing their cause to Adam, sin and death are with us, and we cannot free ourselves from them. They remain the foes vanquished by Christ’s death and resurrection. The fact that Paul draws an analogy between Adam and Christ, however, does not mean that we are required to consider them as characters of equal historical standing. Unlike Adam, Christ was not a primordial, prehistorical man known only through hundreds and hundreds of years of cultural transmission. The resurrection of Christ was a present reality for Paul, an event that had happened in Jerusalem about twenty-five years before he wrote Romans [p. 125].
For Enns (to use Elder Holland's metaphor), it doesn't really matter how the boys got into their predicament. What matters is the cold reality of their predicament and need for saving.
I fear that my highlighting Enns's argument that Adam was not a historical person will result in otherwise interested readers passing on Enns's book. That would be a mistake because even if you can't accept his conclusion, there is much to learn. For one thing, he admits that there are other possible interpretations, even if he does not favor them. Further, LDS readers ought to be more conversant with the cultural and historical background of the Bible, as understood by mainstream scholars. But there are also some gems that serve our own parochial interests. For example, LDS readers may find this statement striking:
The Protestant reading of Paul reflects medieval theological debates, not Paul or the Judaism of his time.
If I hadn't read this book, I would not have known that there is a movement among New Testament scholars called the New Perspective on Paul, which at first blush seems to reinterpret the New Testament discussion of grace and works in a way that undercuts Protestant critiques of Mormonism on these issues. LDS readers who must commonly address this issue with their Protestant acquaintances may want to give further consideration to the New Perspective. Similarly, Enns acknowledges that the doctrine of "original sin" is an Augustinian innovation that is not supported by scripture. And like others of his books, this book also cuts against the Protestant doctrine of scriptural inerrancy while maintaining reverence for the scriptures.
Of course Enns does not have extra-Biblical scripture to rekcon with. Adam and Eve appear in every additional LDS book of scripture, including Joseph F. Smith's vision described in D&C 138. Explaining them away as non-historical scriptural characters might be possible, but is orders of magnitude more difficult in an LDS context. Perhaps it is acceptable and sufficient to say that Adam is a combination of man, myth, and legend.
Enns does not pretend to have the final word and hopes for ongoing conversation. I hope that Elder Holland's talk does not end the conversation in LDS circles. Even taken on its own terms, the talk was more circumspect than one might have expected.
I do not know the details of what happened on this planet before that [the fall], but I do know these two were created under the divine hand of God, that for a time they lived alone in a paradisiacal setting where there was neither human death nor future family, and that through a sequence of choices they transgressed a commandment of God which required that they leave their garden setting but which allowed them to have children before facing physical death. [bolding added]
If that is the bare minimum of acceptable LDS doctrine on Adam and Eve, Elder Holland has still left a lot of space for exploration and discussion [3].
Several passages of scripture speak of "earthquakes in divers places" as a sign of the times. Matthew 24:7 is a fine example:
For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places.
Although earthquakes can be devastating, I'm not really sure what to make of that phrase because, like wars, earthquakes are always with us. I don't know if their frequency is common knowledge, but I have spoken with people who were surprised to learn that earthquakes happen everyday all around the world. Most earthquakes don't make the news because they don't cause damage or happen in uninhabited places (or simply aren't considered newsworthy), but they are there and seismologists track them.
One folk interpretation of this phrase that I have heard is that earthquakes will happen where they haven't before. I don't know whether such a place exists or not, but Oklahoma may be as good a candidate for this interpretation as any. It is certainly not an earthquake virgin, but check out the history of earthquakes of M3 or greater in Oklahoma since 1978.
For geologists, the reason for this surge in earthquakes is pretty clear: hydraulic fracturing (fracking). This month The New Yorker has an article, Weather Underground, that tells a sadly familiar story--the confidence of scientists, the concern of citizens, and the fecklessness of government. The problem is relatively straightforward.
Many of the larger earthquakes are caused by disposal wells, where the billions of barrels of brackish water brought up by drilling for oil and gas are pumped back into the ground. (Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking—in which chemically treated water is injected into the earth to fracture rocks in order to access oil and gas reserves—causes smaller earthquakes, almost always less than 3.0.) Disposal wells trigger earthquakes when they are dug too deep, near or into basement rock, or when the wells impinge on a fault line.
The solution is not to prohibit fracking, but to restrict disposal wells from being near basement rock or fault lines. But Oklahoma is built on the oil industry and state regulators and politicians have a sense of willful ignorance that is fitting for a state represented by Senator James Inhofe (who recently threw a snowball on the Senate floor as prop evidence against global warming).
In September, 2014, at the request of two state representatives, the Oklahoma legislature conducted an official interim study on induced seismicity. In subsequent hearings, more than five hours of testimony were presented to a committee of legislators. Holland, Dana Murphy, of the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, and Todd Halihan, the professor of geology at Oklahoma State University, all spoke about the link between disposal wells and earthquakes. Tim Baker, of the O.C.C., spoke about the link between drilling into basement rock and earthquakes.
After the hearings, Mark McBride, the committee chair, issued a press release. It denied “a correlation between the injection wells and seismic activity,” and quoted a legislator’s speculation that perhaps the quakes were caused by “the current drought.” None of the scientists who had been present were quoted.
They have no peer-reviewed science on their side, but that doesn't stop state officials from postulating natural causes or drought as the cause, and calling for more research.
The whole story is worth reading. Recently there have been some modest signs of progress; the state can't play dumb forever. Just long enough to perhaps be a sign of the times.
Last week Mormon Interpreter published a treatise by Duane Boyce titled Sustaining the Brethren. In making the point that the personal views of Apostles do not trump First Presidency statements, Boyce wrote that "Elder Boyd K. Packer once said that he knew by personal revelation that man did not evolve from animals..." This is, of course, a reference to Elder Packer's 1988 speech, The Law and the Light, which was published with a disclaimer that it represented his personal views only. In footnote #37 Boyce quotes Elder Packer as follows:
“I said I would give six reasons for my conviction [i.e., that ‘the theory that God used an evolutionary process to prepare a physical body for the spirit of man … is false’], and I have listed only five. The sixth is personal revelation” (emphasis in original).
Boyce quotes and paraphrases Elder Packer accurately, and yet it is incomplete. Here is more of what Elder Packer said about his personal revelation.
Do not mortgage your soul for unproved theories; ask, simply ask! I have asked, but not how man was created; I have asked if the scriptures are true [emphasis added].
In a sense, the speech is anti-climactic because just as we get to the ultimate reason for his conviction, it turns out that Elder Packer asked a different question than the one we were led to expect. Revelation that evolution is false vs revelation that the scriptures are true, is an important distinction in my book [1]. We would hardly expect God to reveal that the scriptures are NOT true, and yet if pressed even the most conservative saint will concede that some things in the scriptures not entirely accurate (or are figurative, or whatever).
There is no doubt that Elder Packer believes evolution to be false. However, I believe it is claiming too much to say that he knows by revelation that it is false--at least based on what he has shared publicly.
Incidentally, former BYU professor and Biology department dean Lester Allen once described his own (anti-climactic) revelation in response to a more direct question.
After some struggle, I decided to ask the Lord how the separate stories [evolution and creation] relate to each other. Even though I was surrounded by those superior to me scientifically, as well as spiritually, I was brash enough to hope the Lord would assist me in finding an answer. After personal preparation, I petitioned the Lord and asked, "What is the answer?" There came clearly into my mind the statement, "There is an answer." I didn't learn what the answer is, but it is reassuring to know that it all fits together.
Notes:
1. In fairness to Boyce, his footnote #38 cautions that different people can mean different things when talking about evolution, so caution is warranted in interpreting statements.
Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) is such a part of American culture that even those of us untouched by alcoholism [1] know some of the basic principles of the AA approach. In fact AA is popular enough that the Church has modeled its Addiction Recovery Program (ARP) after it, as stated in the ARP guide. So The Atlantic got my attention when I saw the title of a new article, The Irrationality of Alcoholics Anonymous, and I was a little surprised by what I read. Here are a few excerpts that, together, summarize the article.
The problem is that nothing about the 12-step approach draws on modern science: not the character building, not the tough love, not even the standard 28-day rehab stay.
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The 12 steps are so deeply ingrained in the United States that many people, including doctors and therapists, believe attending meetings, earning one’s sobriety chips, and never taking another sip of alcohol is the only way to get better. Hospitals, outpatient clinics, and rehab centers use the 12 steps as the basis for treatment. But although few people seem to realize it, there are alternatives, including prescription drugs and therapies that aim to help patients learn to drink in moderation. Unlike Alcoholics Anonymous, these methods are based on modern science and have been proved, in randomized, controlled studies, to work.
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Bill Wilson, AA’s founding father, was right when he insisted, 80 years ago, that alcohol dependence is an illness, not a moral failing. Why, then, do we so rarely treat it medically? It’s a question I’ve heard many times from researchers and clinicians. “Alcohol- and substance-use disorders are the realm of medicine,” McLellan says. “This is not the realm of priests.”
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Although AA claims a success rate of 75%, another estimate suggests it is closer to 5 - 8%.
We’ve grown so accustomed to testimonials from those who say AA saved their life that we take the program’s efficacy as an article of faith. Rarely do we hear from those for whom 12-step treatment doesn’t work. But think about it: How many celebrities can you name who bounced in and out of rehab without ever getting better? Why do we assume they failed the program, rather than that the program failed them?
In the October 1989 General Conference, Elder Boyd K. Packer said the following:
It is my conviction, and my constant prayer, that there will come through research, through inspiration to scientists if need be, the power to conquer narcotic addiction through the same means which cause it. I plead with all of you to earnestly pray that somewhere, somehow, the way will be discovered to erase addiction in the human body.
As discussed by the article, there are several medical drugs available that can help relieve the urge to drink--or to drink heavily--although they are not effective for everyone. Unfortunately, however, I am unable to find any encouragement in the Church's ARP guide for afflicted persons to seek medical treatment. That seems to me like an important omission. Tackling addiction issues using Gospel principles is great, but as Elder Dallin H. Oaks has reminded us,
Latter-day Saints believe in applying the best available scientific knowledge and techniques. We use nutrition, exercise, and other practices to preserve health, and we enlist the help of healing practitioners, such as physicians and surgeons, to restore health. The use of medical science is not at odds with our prayers of faith and our reliance on priesthood blessings.
I'm not qualified to render judgment on 12-step programs; they obviously do help some people. For its part, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) (part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH)) recommends social support, including joining AA or a similar program, as a part of recovery efforts.
I guess the bottom line is this: People with substance addictions should, by all means, join support groups like AA or the Church's ARP program. But chances for improvement are best if medical help is also sought. Chemistry caused the problem; it can also be part of the solution.
Notes:
1. Disclaimer: To my knowledge, nobody close to me has (or has had) a substance addiction, so I have little personal experience with these issues.
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