Book Review: The GenoType Diet

The GenoType Diet: Change Your Genetic Destiny to live the longest, fullest and healthiest life possible

By Catherine Whitney (Author), Peter J. Dr D'Adamo (Author)

[Review based on Kindle version]

From my Amazon review:

"... is it plausible in general that metabolic traits cluster along with personality traits, and that these clusters imply different health regimens? Of course it's possible. I'm strongly disposed from my own experience to think there are personality traits that lead us to construct particular rough kinds of niches, and it makes sense that these might have distinct metabolic patterns. But does the author get it right that eating Turkey vs. Chicken or Beef vs. Pork for a particular type really is a difference that makes a difference? That part needs more research."

The question this book raises in my mind is whether the author's GeneTypes significantly improve the guesses we make about the best nutrition for us as individuals, compared to just knowing our medical risk factors and knowing our rough somatotype.

This book takes off from the author's previous writings about how blood type can predict a cluster of traits that include individual response to nutrients, and modifies it into a 6 part theory of types. The 6 part model is given an evolutionary rationale and the author links metabolic differences, personality traits, and speculation about ecological niches where those traits and metabolic differences might be especially adaptive. The resulting categories are so clean and tell such a compelling sort of story that they seem to invite accusations of similarity to fortune telling. But if they're right, then this would a pretty cool system, wouldn't it? At least in theory.

• The Hunter: Tall, thin, and intense, with an overabundance of adrenaline and a fierce, nervous energy that winds down with age, the Hunter was originally the success story of the human species. Vulnerable to systemic burnout when overstressed, the Hunter’s modern challenge is to conserve energy for the long haul.

• The Gatherer: Full-figured, even when not overweight, the Gatherer struggles with body image in a culture where thin is “in.” An unsuccessful crash dieter with a host of metabolic challenges, the Gatherer becomes a glowing example of health when properly nourished.

• The Teacher: Strong, sinewy, and stable, with great chemical synchronicity and stamina, the Teacher is built for longevity—given the right diet and lifestyle. This is the genotype of balance, blessed with a tremendous capacity for growth and fulfillment.

• The Explorer: Muscular and adventurous, the Explorer is a biological problem solver, with an impressive ability to adapt to environmental changes, and a better than average capacity for gene repair. The Explorer’s vulnerability to hormonal imbalances and chemical sensitivities can be overcome with a balanced diet and lifestyle.

• The Warrior: Long, lean, and healthy in youth, the Warrior is subject to a bodily rebellion in midlife.With the optimal diet and lifestyle, the Warrior can overcome the quick-aging metabolic genes and experience a second, “silver,” age of health.

• The Nomad: A GenoType of extremes, with a great sensitivity to environmental conditions—especially changes in altitude and barometric pressure, the Nomad is vulnerable to neuromuscular and immune problems. Yet a well-conditioned Nomad has the enviable gift of controlling caloric intake and aging gracefully.

If the model is right, it is a pretty remarkable and perhaps revolutionary approach to making better guesses at how to improve our own nutrition based on our biochemical individuality. The evidence for its plausibility seems reasonable, but there is still little evidence validating the particular categories here.

Full review on Amazon here.

Review of "Big Brain" by Lynch and Granger - an education in brain evolution and development

Big Brains: The Origins and Future of Human Intelligence
by Gary Lynch and Richard Granger
Palgrave Macmillan, 2009

There is a lot of very clearly and cleverly presented original material on brains and their evolution and development in this book. It is one of those books that constantly makes you think and has enough depth to read several times fruitfully. I highly recommend it.

See my full review on Amazon here.

Book Review: "The Imprinted Brain" - A fascinating genetic theory of mental illness

Book Review: "The Imprinted Brain: How Genes Set the Balance of the Mind between Autism and Psychosis" by Christopher Badcock

Review by Todd I. Stark

A bold new theory of mental illness that could revolutionize our understanding, if it is right.

[See my reviews on Amazon.]

This is a deeply fascinating theory. I gave it lots of stars because of the importance of its ideas, even though it is not a great book in literary or stylistic terms.

The relatively uncommon collaboration of a sociologist (Badcock) and a biologist (Crespi) produced a compellingly simple and symmetric theory of the biology of the human mind which remains remarkably explanatory and coherent around just a few central ideas:

1. The "selfish gene." William Hamilton's insight that genes can sometimes serve their own reproductive ends as much as or more than those of the organism they build.

2. The "imprinted gene." Some genes may be inherited by either parent but only be expressed when inherited from one parent vs. the other.

3. The clinical observation that autism and psychosis are expressed in opposite versions of the same kinds of symptoms.

4. The theory that autistic symptoms represent an extreme of thinking in mechanical terms, and psychosis an extreme of thinking in mentalistic terms, with the two kinds of illness forming a single spectrum of disorders from autistic at one end to schizophrenic at the other.

This is not one of those relatively dull or unlikely theories about how schizophrenics might really be geniuses, or how mental illness might somehow be adaptive. The speculations of the imprinted brain theory go well beyond that sort of thing, making it distinctively broad and potentially testable. Although the book has a few philosophical turns in it, the technical journal articles by Badcock and Crespi make it clear this is a scientific theory that will live or die on empirical data, not primarily a philosophical idea.

The theory itself is half about how paternal imprinted genes serve their own reproductive ends by increasing growth and testosterone and by laterallizing the brain and helping to produce thinking that is optimized for dealing with inanimate things in particular ways. The other half of the theory is about how maternal genes serve their own reproductive ends by cutting back on growth, reducing testosterone, and fostering the development of a kind of thinking optimized for interpreting human intentions.

The theory explains the symptoms of autism as an "extreme male brain" which deals well with things but poorly with people. The symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia are seen as "cancers of the mind" resulting from an "extreme female brain," the extremely fertile creation of human intentions and minds around us from little basis. The idea that the autistic end of the spectrum may be an exaggeration of what we think of as stereotypical male cognitive processes has been suggested by many others since the autism was first identified, but the possibility of the other end of the spectrum being a symmetric case of mentalistic overdrive is a little more original. It also seems to be less well supported by the genetic data so far. But the possibility that a beautifully symmetric theory like this might possibly be validated is the kind of thing theorists get very excited over.

The author put a lot into this relatively small book and made it very readable. The style however is a bit lacking and sometimes can be dull and sometimes abrasive in contrast to the fascination of the content itself. I got the feeling at various points that the author couldn't help throwing in his own editorial comments about pet peeves that might be addressed by aspects of the theory, and I think this sometimes hurt the tone of the book. With such a powerful theory it is very tempting to wield it excessively just to see what it can do.

Overall, though, this book provides a reasonable balance between technical presentation and narrative exposition. It isn't a journal article, although it is based on material that has filled a number of journal articles, and it is not a breezy introduction with award winning science writing. It is a general readership account of a technical theory that has both deep scientific and broader cultural implications ... if it turns out to be right.

The book gives a solid introduction to the patterns of symptoms in various mental illnesses and the historical interpretations that help align each of them with their theory. They introduce just enough genetics so that you can understand why they feel "imprinted genes" help explain the complex idiosyncratic inheritance pattern seen in autism and schizophrenia. They discuss the spectrum of symptoms from several different angles so that you can see just how broadly explanatory this theory could potentially be. The authors briefly discuss some cultural implications of their theory for religion, feminism, science, and so on, a deep area that they only touch on very superficially.

The end of the book raises the interesting possibility that certain exceptional kinds of geniuses may be savants at both ends of the spectrum, extreme male and female brains at the same time, capable of both the overdeveloped mechanical cognition of autistic savants and the overdeveloped intentional sensitivity that the authors hypotheize may represent "psychotic savants."

The book is scattered with supporting quotes from erudite psychotics and high functioning autistics describing in their own words how they think and experience the world.

Reading this book I got a feeling that the theory *could* very well be right and that it seemed to make sense of a lot of otherwise very diverse and sometimes puzzling findings in genetics and psychiatry. I think it's entirely accurate to say that this theory has the potential to revolutionize our understanding of mental illness, especially its genetics, and provide a coherent framework where previously we had only scattered loosely related diagnostic categories and quibbles over them.

If I were to deliberately seek out a fault here, other than the sometimes annoying cultural jabs at religion and feminism, it is that the imprinted brain theory seems to explain too much while taking too much for granted. Explaining all of the dimensions of mental illness through an all-encompassing dimension of cognitive abilities seems to explain too much about thinking and not enough about motivation. Mechanistic thinking is not just thinking about things, it is a fascination, an absorption in things, and likewise for mentalistic thinking about people. The book never really talks about how the different cognitive subsystems relate to the motivation to use them, which seems to be just as important, especially in the case of savants, who provide a significant area of data for the theory. This is a topic that I've seen addressed in Crespi's journal articles, but was not really touched on in the book very much.

As far as validation of the overall theory, I think it will depend a lot on whether both both ends of the spectrum of disorders are found to be the genetic result of a common disease pathway resulting from many different variations of rare alleles or a particular conjunction of common ones. If either end depends on rare alleles, its evolutionary significance is much less likely. The beautiful symmetry of this theory depends very much on both ends of the disorder spectrum having evolutionary significance.

See also Badcock's Edge article:
"http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/badcock08/badcock08_index.html"

and the following books on some of the less well known speculative evolutionary genetic ideas underlying this theory:

Genes in Conflict: The Biology of Selfish Genetic Elements

Genomic Imprinting and Kinship (The Rutgers Series in Human Evolution, edited by Robert Trivers, Lee Cronk, Helen Fisher, and Lionel Tiger)

There is some good theoretical backgound to the evolution of reasoning and what we can learn about it from autism in:

Human Reasoning and Cognitive Science (Bradford Books)

Creative Science, Naturally

[I am posting this to preserve a copy of it as much as to share it. It is a book review originally published in Fall, 2003 Entelechy. ]

A review of Nature’s Magic: Synergy in Evolution and the Fate of Humankind written by Peter Corning
by Todd I. Stark

In Nature's Magic, Peter Corning offers us good news and bad news. The he good news is that chance, necessity, and natural selection aren't the only factors in our evolution. There is also a very real role for purpose (or more specifically, purposiveness.) The role of purposiveness has continued to increase over time.

The bad news is that our efforts to seek an underlying grand law or force that governs history may be fundamentally flawed. We may be more responsible for our own survival than we have so far been willing to recognize. The true teleonomy inherent in Corning's view gives us a creative (and destructive) role that is discounted in theories that rely on grand laws of history. Corning refers to the various people who have searched in vain for an inherent mathematical law of evolution as "Neo-Pythagoreans" after the cult surrounding the legendary mathematician. He counts various well-known contemporary complexity theorists like Stuart Kauffman and physicists like Steven Weinberg among them.

Corning doesn't see the world as necessarily a glorious self-maintaining Gaia, he sees it as a place where living things through their relations and interactions have come to have certain responsibility for their own fate. This becomes an awesome burden once we apply this view to humans, where we take on the role of the Sorcerer's Apprentice in Goethe's (and Disney's) tale. The apprentice knows just enough magic to get himself into serious trouble.

The starting point is Arthur Koestler's insight that "true innovation occurs when things are put together for the first time that had been separate." Peter Corning takes this insight to heart and explores its remarkable implications, applying this "astonishing capacity" to nature in general.

The essence of the argument is not that nature creates things that cannot be explained or things that cannot be understood, but that no grand laws of nature predict her fruits. In effect, evolution is grounded in nature's astonishing capacity to create beyond what we foresee at every juncture.

Corning's theory of complexity in evolution is based on synergy, by which he simply and elegantly means the myriad effects of combining things where the result doesn't resemble what we'd expect simply by adding them together: the whole is different than the sum of the parts.

Corning's "Holistic Darwinism" is a way of viewing variety and selection in nature which is at once is fully consistent with the neo-Darwinian synthesis and also provides theoretical bridges with the cybernetic theory of self-regulating systems and much of the body of scientific literature in social and political sciences. Holistic Darwinism shifts the focus in natural selection from selection itself as a causal force to where the variety comes from.

Corning leans heavily upon John Maynard Smith's concept of "synergistic selection." If unrelated individuals are often locked into a shared reproductive fate with others, as Corning suggests, then it is reasonable to assume that they will evolve strategies for cooperation, not for "altruism" per se but for their own interests.

This is an ambitious task for a single book, but at least the foundation is put down extremely well here, persuading us that nature continually yields variety that is neither predictable nor random, but fundamentally economic in its operation. In other words, Holistic Darwinism sees nature as a great marketplace where the functional outcomes of new innovations are continually shaped by the consequences of their costs and benefits.

If combined effects in nature are really different in general than we would expect from simply putting things together, there are some unexpected implications. For one thing, it implies that history matters. If things combine in new ways to produce new features in nature that are not simply an extension of the laws governing the parts, then those new features can potentially have meaningful functional outcomes that play a role in natural selection. This is the core of Corning's argument.

Corning boldly claims that Lamarck was right after all (in a sense). Not that giraffes can create new genes by stretching their necks, but that they can create new ecological niches through their behavior that can later be reinforced by natural selection because of the successful outcomes of those new behaviors.

In a nutshell: "synergy" is combined effects all around us in various forms, it plays a causal role in differential reproductive fitness in a highly context-specific way, and it provides a scientific alternative to overreaching grand laws of history.

Instead of theorizing a vague new force or seeking a new law to help explain how natural selection can lead to biological complexity, Peter Corning supplies a fresh way of looking at the whole puzzle of complexity. He does this by reversing the usual logic about cooperation in living things. Rather than living things somehow cooperating to produce new outcomes through some unexplained form of 'altruism,' Corning sees 'nature's magic' of synergies underlying cooperation.

Corning makes his case with a massive amount of data drawn from a wide variety of fields. With obviously decades worth of research behind Nature’s Magic, it covers a lot of ground and has links to a number of other theories in both economics and biology. Because it is so lucid and well-written, it ought to appeal to a wide range of readers, from academics interested in systems science, bioeconomics, and the philosophy of biology, to those without an academic background in biology who want to keep up with what will most likely be a significant part of the future of biological science.



Todd I. Stark is a computer consultant and freelance medical and science writer. He is also an obsessive reader and has written hundreds of book reviews for Amazon. His formal background is in computer science, electrical engineering, mathematics, and psychology at Drexel University. His academic interests include hypnosis and suggestibility research, social psychology, and most recently, evolutionary approaches to behavioral science. Todd briefly moderated the HBE-L list on Yahoo for discussions in evolutionary psychology.

Intelligent Design and The Meaning of Creation and Evolution

Intelligent Design: The Meaning of Creation and Evolution

We care very much about what other people believe and what sort of communities they participate in. It matters to us somewhat whether other people believe in fairies or demons or astrology. It matters to us much more what communities they belong to and the threat posed by well-organized opposing groups. That's why most scientists and educators are only bemused and vaguely threatened by horoscopes, but deeply concerned about intelligent design.

Intelligent design is the intellectual leading edge of a broader grassroots movement opposed to modern secularism in education in science. The core argument is that what most of us think of as deity ("intelligent designer") has been arbitrarily and wrongly rejected by the traditions of science, and as a result we have been subjected to an empty materialistic science that doesn't really explain what it is widely assumed to explain: particularly the diversity of life on earth.

The issue is very heated and takes place primarily over the battleground of education. Politicians are proposing legislation which forces schools to teach that evolutionary biology is relatively discredited as science compared to other sciences, and that intelligent design is on equal scientific grounds.

It is true that many of the ID proponents avoid saying that they are talking about deity when they talk about "intelligence." They sometimes say that "intelligence" could be an advanced extraterrestrial or a process in nature of some kind. Let's be clear on one very important point. Any such intelligence that could do what the ID proponents hypothesize about (create life and worlds through an act of planning without any evident means) would be indistinguishable from what we commonly call a god (whether it is the God imagined by Jews, Christians, and Muslims or not). Just as any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, any sufficiently advanced alien creator would be indistinguishable from God. We are indeed talking about "Creator" as well as "designer" when we discuss intelligent design.

That's why the prolific ID author Phillip Johnson argues against naturalism in science, and why ID theorist William Dembski argues that his "design inference" is "a bridge between science and theology." It is also why the word Creator is capitalized in many of the intelligent design legislations that are being proposed. And of course this is one of the big reasons why many people feel so threatened about intelligent design.

We have a long tradition in U.S. politics of keeping anything that resembles anyone's religion out of public matters, in order to avoid having big religious groups dominate minority religious groups. We also have a long tradition in modern science of rejecting the idea that natural phenomena should be explained in terms of planning. This rejection of teleological thinking in science is the intellectual issue at the forefront of the ID movement. They want to reverse it, to discredit the idea that adaptation is a sufficient explanation for form and function, and have natural phenomena explained presumably in terms of processes of Creation or "design" that is explicitly planned in some sense.

It isn't clear that the two underlying stories at stake, evolution and creation, are neccessarily as incompatible as our "culture war" politics and some of our intellectual traditions have often made them. The evolutionary story is about the appearance of form and function through natural processes over time and the creation story is about the meaningful emergence of new things. Evolution can certainly produce creation, or even Creation, and many theologians argue that way. Creation could also produce evolution, as the deists and some others have sometimes argued. Creation and evolution have existed in parallel for centuries, with evolution being taught as science and creation taught as religion.

Intelligent design is notably different from these views. The people involved in ID do not want to reconcile the evolution and creation stories, they consider the evolution story something to debunk, primarily because of its rejection of the possibility of what they see as an obvious fact, the intelligent design of life's diversity.

ID is clearly not theistic evolutionism. ID is explicitly opposed to something that is central to the evolutionary story. It is most specifically opposed to materialism, the view that matter is fundamental and that life consists of properties of matter. The evolutionary story in science is naturalistic, or relies explicitly on natural processes. Since the scientific tradition considers spirit or "intelligence" in some sense a property of nature rather than an independent substance or process, it does not allow for a separate "intelligence" to have planned and carried out a plan of creation.

Of course, there are various clever ways to try to reconcile the existence of a deity with an unplanned but meaningful evolutionary process, especially if we downplay the planning aspect and focus on the emergence of novel form and function. ID is a strategy of conflict, however, not one of reconcilliation. It is part of the so-called "culture war." When William Dembski says that his concept of Design Inference "bridges science and theology" his idea is surely not to find a place for God to hide in quantum physics. His focus is to show that adaptation cannot explain the diversity of life, that we must accept in science the existence of the sort of designer that (presumably by coincidence) many people already accept in their personal beliefs.

Dembski is part of a far larger intellectual community that considers it undesireable to deliberately and systematically keep God and secular education apart. He is a leading intellectual edge of an anti-secularist movement to oppose the separation of church and state and the sanctioning of state religion.

It isn't just change in species over time, or common origins that ID proponents oppose, although they are often disposed against those things. What unites ID as an intellectual community and is implicit in their very concept of "intelligence" is the fundamental distinction we tend to make between spirit and matter. You simply cannot be an ID proponent and yet agree that spirit is just some higher level property of matter. Spirit, or "intelligence" must be prior to and separate from matter in order to believe that it can be causally responsible for planning and creating physical things.

That's why evolutionary biology is a theory of "design," yet not a theory of "intelligent design." Naturalistic evolutionary theory is an explanation of the origin of form and function, but it does not allow for any sort of planning to have taken place. Why? Because of the tradition of materialism. Intelligence, in a materialistic theory, must be a result of matter, but a cause of it. The hypothetical design process in naturalistic evolution would have to reside within nature itself as some sort of algorithm, such as the one described by Dan Dennett in "Darwin's Dangerous Idea," or as a "telic process" of some sort, as in process theology.

So now it is more obvious what distinguishes intelligent design from Darwinian design, and why the issue matters to people. Darwinian design (apparently) starts with a lifeless universe of matter and tries to find some way of explaining how things that are important to us have arisen from that lifeless matter by means of algorithmic processes in nature. Intelligent design starts with spirit (the traditional theological term for "intelligence") and explains everything in terms of planned design. It's not hard to see why the ID story is compelling to those who are not heavily committed to the secular thinking traditions.

The challenge left to those of us who understand the great explanatory power and deep scientific and philosophical importance of the evolutionary story to offer an equally compelling vision. The very soul of the secular scientific tradition of the past several centuries is at stake if education is being altered at the grassroots level to discredit evolutionary biology, since it is the central explanatory schema in all of biological science. Our greatest obstacle is that the creation story is far more emotionally compelling than the evolution story during periods like this when there is great anxiety among us. Creation in religion offers a common vision of a knowing, caring God as opposed to the promise of an ever-changing world. Evolution in science offers real scientific insight into our natural origins, but always in the form of hypotheses. Fear leads us to choose certainties rather than hypotheses, to judge and act rather than to reflect and think.
What is at stake is the ability of our descendents to reflect and think and benefit from scientific insights into life.

It matters to us whether other people believe that we are not all the children of the same Creator. It should also matter to us whether we have the tools to understand the natural world. Intelligent design is a compelling story that offers us a non-secular alternative to science that is devoid of explanatory power. Knowing that there is an intelligent designer responsible for the world would not help us understand the natural world any better. Our commitment to evolutionary biology is as essential for our education as our commitment to physics, chemistry, mathematics, reading, and history.

======================================================

For those in doubt that it is the redefinition of science, essentially a cultural attack on science, that is at stake, the following makes the point clear. The Michigan Bill would force educators to teach that basic facts of natural history accepted by most educated people for centures regardless of their religion are essentially "unproven," that the species do not change over time but appear out of nowhere as in the literal story of Creation in scripture. If there is any doubt of the relationship of "intelligent design" and anti-secularism, this should

While talking about "intelligent design" as a supposedly alternate scientific theory to the theories of natural selection and common origins, the various state legislations regarding the subject generally capitalize the word Creator, as in Michigan House Bill #4946 introduced by Republican Ken Bradstreet. Along with the matching Senate Bill 5005, it proposes to modify the school code (1976 PA 451), by adding section 10:

a) In the science standards, all references to "evolution" and "how species change through time" shall be modified to indicate that this is an unproven theory by adding the phrase "All students will explain the competing theories of evolution and natural selection based on random mutation and the theory that life is the result of the purposeful, intelligent design of a Creator."
(b) In the science standards for middle and high school, all references to "evolution" and "natural selection" shall be modified to indicate that these are unproven theories by adding the phrase "Describe how life may be the result of the purposeful, intelligent design of a Creator."
(c) In the science standards for middle and high school, all references to "evolution" and "natural selection" shall be modified to indicate that these are unproven theories by adding the phrase "Explain the competing theories of evolution and natural selection based on random mutation and the theory that life is the result of the purposeful, intelligent design of a Creator."

Todd's posts on Panda'a Thumb

The Panda's Thumb is an anti-anti-Evolution site with some surprisingly civil and constructive discussions. http://www.pandasthumb.org/

Some recent posts of mine there:

(1) On Del Ratszch and his take on the design concept in science:
http://www.pandasthumb.org/pt-archives/000563.html

I think the key to appreciating the relationship between Del Ratszch and ID
is in his comment “We don’t yet have a good definition of science,” rather than
his comments on design.

His comments on design raise the reasonable
philosophical question of whether (and when) viewing something as designed helps
you understand it and theorize about it. Dan Dennett approaches a similar
question in The Intentional Stance, regarding whether it sometimes makes sense
to view something as having goals or intentions that don’t break down into other
causal models. He concludes that it does indeed.

In the case of viewing the universe as designed, of course we have a
long legacy of dispute. Humans have a demonstrated temptation to see
“agency” where it doesn’t in fact exist, but we also see it when it does make
sense to see it.

The question becomes whether the design inference contributes more than
the risk of misperceiving it, and most parties are right to point out that it
has not demonstrated any such thing yet, but could “in theory.”

So we return to what I consider Ratszch’s more critical claim, that we
have no adequate definition of science. That’s where the open
philosophical question of the value or danger of assuming “design” becomes
assumed to be solved, by being introduced into science as if it were established
canonical principles equivalent with evolutionary biology. Should we teach
people to gather data and ask questions based on the assumption that the
universe is designed, and biological differences are “gifts” from some sort of
‘telic’ or planned design process or entity. Or should this be the
province of people who are already educated as scientists and choose to spend
their time in this way.

That’s where I think we need to raise objection to Ratzsch’s
characterization, the point where we supposedly have no reliable way to
distinguish established science from frontier science, proto-science, or
“pseudo”-science. We do have a way of distinguishing them, and ironically
for the tradition of positivism, it is a social criteria. Scientists work
together in networks that share assumptions and ways of reasoning, so they can
work on the same questions and apply evidence to them in the same way.
Some of them are independent of each other, but we choose the most reliable and
well established over time and the best generalized principles for textbook
science.
We can agree somewhat with Feyerabend’s scientific anarchy
regarding what might possibly constitute potential science, without it making
any sense at all to introduce it as textbook science. As much as frontier
science and proto-science may be defensible in principle, we don’t teach them as
if they were basic. That’s where the *anti-secularist* element of
anti-evolutionism rears its ugly (imo) head, quite apart from the speculations
about “design inference.”

The “teach the controversy” concept is ridiculous at the grassroots
level that the antievolution political movement is trying to introduce it, even
if it makes sense to many people as a philosophical and theological
question. It is not a controversy of basic science, it is partly a
philosophical division and partly a political anti-secularist movement.

kind regards,
Todd

(2) On varying perceptions of the evidence for natural selection:

http://www.pandasthumb.org/pt-archives/000562.html

Charlie Wagner writes:

How come you folks spend *all* of your time
and effort asttempting to
debunk intelligent design and not one single erg
of energy or second of time
defending evolutionary theory? It would seem to
me that the best defense would
be to elucidate a comprehensive and
believable alternative to ID, something
which evolutionists have NEVER
done.

I have to agree strongly with some of the other posts. In my
experience, there is a small literature critical of intelligent design, but
it
is dwarfed by the literature of evolutionary biology, a significant
portion of
which is dedicated to exactly what Charlie is asking for.
He is reading
very selectively. Many authors who are critical of ID’s
anti-secularist
slant still make similar points to the ID theorists in other
ways, as ID authors
often point out.

In general, it occurs to
me that people who approach this topic either
find ubiquitous adaptationism
plausible or they don’t, based on how they’ve been
conditioned to see
it. They either read Origin of Species (if they bother
to read it) and
think, “wow, what a remarkable way of thinking about life’s
diversity,” or
they think it seems to have limited plausibility but to be a
little
suspicious. The folks that find it a bit suspect either become
critical of universal Darwinism and ubiquitous adaptationism like Gould, or
anti-evolutionist like Dembski. They differ widely on how much they
think
can be explained solely by “selection and mutation” and on what they
think the
missing piece or pieces might look like. They fill in the
blanks from
whatever they do happen to find plausible.

My own
impression is that the suspicion itself is healthy. The
reason that ID
is particularly threatening to many is probably more its
anti-secular aspect
than just its anti-adaptationist aspect. To me, we
should remain
suspicious of how much any grand theory of form and function can
explain,
but we should also use it to build and test hypotheses. Even if
“design” is plausibly useful to build testable hypotheses, adaptation has a
long
successful track record in fruitful hypothesis testing. To me,
asserting
that it does not simply demonstrates a failure to look very hard
for it, or an
unwllingness to accept anything as an adequate example of
successful
adaptationist explanation.
kind regards,
Todd

(3) On the relationship of political orientation and temperament:

http://www.pandasthumb.org/pt-archives/000572.html

The thought that politics and temperament are somehow related
apparently occurs to nearly every one of us at some point, and is not entirely
unfounded. However, at the very least, a great deal of evidence gathered
in political science shows the relationship between temperament and political
orientation to be extremely complex, and varying with various kinds of
circumstances, not the least of which is the varying composition of each of the
various historical parties. I’m not the first to notice with some irony
that in the U.S. for example the party of Lincoln is also the party of
Limbaugh.

Yet there are different ways that people think about the same
issues, ways that can be reasonably linked to ideological vantage points.
Different ways of defining such central abstractions as personhood, loyalty,
fairness, justice, and human nature.

It seems likely to me that these
are distinct traditions or styles of reasoning that are each coherent to their
practitioners, the people that interact with each other using the same kind of
reasoning. Political party leaders are people who rely paerticularly
heavily on the abstractions of one style of reasoning and are motivated to avoid
engaging different ones.

For most of us outside of politics, that is
usually not the case. We are less politically polarized because we are
less reliant on and immersed in a particular tradition of reasoning, although we
may still tend to think more from a particular tradition most of the time when
forced to make choices related to the relevant abstracts.

The
challenge for intellectuals seems to me not to be to pick a tradition of
political or moral reasoning and argue for it, but to recognize what each is
talking about and translate it into common terms as far as possible so that more
universal criteria of value can be applied to the reasoning. What it seems
to take is to enter into a particular way of reasoning by interacting with
people who reason in that way and picking up on the way they treat the various
important abstractions.

This is an activity that probably cannot take
place within the context of politics because political activism is neccessarily
ideological and neccessarily dependent upon garnering a broad base of support,
which requires a single coherent way of framing the “issues.”

We need
to keep reminding ourselves that polarized thinking within each tradition of
reasoning seems perfectly logical within each tradition, but is based on
different ways of defining abstractions and thus distorts understanding of the
underlying reality.

There need to be intellectuals and journalists who
can translate between the different ways of thinking and help us see what each
is saying, in order to make more intelligent choices between them rather than
being driven mostly by fear mongering or radical idealism.

That is, if
the ideal of intelligent civic responsibility is still worthwhile.

kind
regards,
Todd