sisu

Yale law professor prefers not to be confused with the facts

"There are very few who can think, but every man wants to have an opinion; and what remains but to take it ready-made from others, instead of forming opinions for himself?" we quoted Schopenhaer a few years back on "the informational 'cascades' of sheeplike belief formation that cause flat-earthers to crowd the cultural ether in every era," noting that "Al Gore's lie-laced Inconvenient Truth comes to mind." Above, the early morning light works its magic on the salt piles across the street.

I don’t know a single person who identifies with the Tea Party,” Yale law professor Dan Kahan admits, bemused by the results of his own study on "the relationship between science literacy and political ideology":

Tea party members know more science than non-Tea Partiers.

How could that be? Aren't Tea Partiers flat-earthers?:

"I fully expected…a modest negative correlation between identifying with the Tea Party and science comprehension,” Kahan wrote.

That's what comes of relying on the Tea-Party-demonizing Democrat Media Complex for information outside one's area of expertise:

“All my impressions come from watching cable tv — & I don’t watch Fox News very often — and reading the ‘paper’ (New York Times daily, plus a variety of politics-focused Internet sites like Huffington Post and POLITICO). I’m a little embarrassed, but mainly, I’m just glad that I no longer hold this particular mistaken view.”

We're glad, too, although the professor's lack of intellectual curiosity about the Tea Party in light of his new data is troubling, as are his reflexive acceptance and promulgation of the now seriously outdated AGW narrative:

While Kahan cautioned against thinking the results can be used to explain deep ideological fights over climate change and other politically relevant science…he said the results wouldn’t change his negative views of the Tea Party.

Don't confuse him with the facts!

Rick Perry: "Galileo got outvoted for a spell"

 

As a Palinista from day one, we're still  "undecided," but we loved this from Texas Governor Rick Perry (above) at last night's GOP primary debate: "Galileo got outvoted for a spell … Find out what the science truly is before you start putting the American economy in jeapordy." This morning irony-challenged MSNBC talking heads joked about whether Perry saw himself as Galileo, unaware that it is they themselves, our friends on the left side of the aisle, who are the Roman Inquisitors of our day.

"You yourself have said the party is in danger of becoming anti-science. Who on this stage is anti-science?" MSNBC whatshisname taunted flat-earther Jon Huntsman at last night's Republican primary debate. Darwinian libertarian that we are, we've been horrified for some time at the left's conflation of the science of evolution that we embrace with the mumbo-jumbo secular religion of anthropogenic global warming/climate change. We've been on the left's AGW case for two decades, at least, since Andrea Mitchell (God bless her now in her time of genuine sorrow) acknowledged her lack of objectivity way back when:

Clearly the networks have made the decision now, where you'd have to call it advocacy.

Now, when up-till-now AGW proseletizer Nature Journal of Science is finally acknowledging they got it wrong — Can you say cosmic rays and the sun? — our friends on the left side of the aisle continue to bury their heads in the sand. As we've said for a zillion blogyears, it's the importance of being noticed — aka tribalism — stupid.

Crossposted at Riehl World View.

"Most Harvard grads tend to believe in such things as evolution and global warming"

We think it is fair to assume that the Little Kitteh that came to dinner — above staring at things we don't see in the early morning light — is of above average intelligence and education in the school of hard knocks.

"I think it is fair to assume that most Harvard graduates are of above average intelligence and education and tend to believe in such things as evolution and global warming. It seems most Republicans do not," sniffs warmenist Edward G. Shufro, M.B.A. ’58 in a letter to the editor of the May-June issue of Harvard Magazine. Darwin's theory of evolution, yes. That's science. AGW? That's an article of faith. We were gratified to discover that Mr. Shufro — principle of a "targeted investment management" partnership co-founded by his father in 1938 — has generously supported, among other Democrat shining stars, three of our personal favorites, Joe Sestak (PA-7), Ed Markey (MA-7) and Carol Shea-Porter. Oh, and let us not forget Shufro's $2,300 gift to the Al Franken Recount Fund. Talk about above average intelligence.

Shufro's letter was only one of a number of spluttering tribal responses to an earlier letter from that rare thing, a Harvard alum who hadn't bought the narrative. Responding to an article in the previous edition of Harvard Mag that reported 90 percent or more of Harvard graduates in Congress are Democrats, Peter McKinney '56 had had this to say:

The development of independent and critical thinking in undergraduates should be a major goal of an education; otherwise the process is indoctrination. The statistics on the political affiliations of the incoming Congress suggest that this is not happening at Harvard College. Could this be a reflection of the ideological imbalance of the faculty?

Education or indoctrination? Thomas Sowell's words on the occasion of the railroaded resignation of Harvard President Lawrence Summers five years back come to mind:

His fatal flaws were honesty and a desire to do the right thing. That has ruined more than one academic career …

Even if every conclusion with which students are indoctrinated were true, unless those students develop their own ability to weigh opposing arguments, these conclusions will become obsolete as new issues arise in the years ahead. These "educated" people will have developed no ability to analyze opposing sides of issues.

Robert Stafford '86 exemplifies the type. Impervious to facts on the ground, he has holed himself up comfortably in his lamestream-media-facilitated anti-Palin Pauline Kael bubble, preferring not to be confused with the facts. His letter to the editor touches all the tribal hot spots, including class guilt:

In my grandfather’s GOP, a degree from an “elite” university was an asset: it was evidence that a politician was smart, or hard working, or, sadly, that he was at least from the right sort of family. In Sarah Palin’s GOP, “elite” is an insult. What’s more, in Palin’s faith-based GOP, candidates are all but required to espouse the view that the world is 6,000 years old, that the “theory” of evolution is false, and that anthropogenic climate change is a sinister liberal myth.

The poor guy has bought the media spin whole cloth. Joel Z. Eigerman '63, J.D. '67 seals the deal:

The second and greater fallacy is the assumption that because there are two major political tendencies in this country, properly educated people should divide roughly equally between them. This presumes that both are equally possessed of rational arguments, and this is unfortunately not true. Although the Republican Party, within living memory, disposed of leaders and ideas that could be called rational, for the last 30 years to be a Republican has increasingly meant to deny scientific truth, to subscribe to patent fantasies regarding our national history, recent or more distant, to espouse social and economic theories whose bankruptcy was demonstrated 80 years ago, to work for the enrichment of the few and the impoverishment of the many, and generally to substitute magical thinking for reason.

The poor fellow, like so many of our fellow Americans on the left side of the aisle, is projecting again. As we wrote in our post "Sissy Willis uses Darwin to utterly demolish Marxism":

"Sissy Willis uses Darwin to utterly demolish Marxism," twittered tahDeetz this afternoon. We'd sent her a link to one of our uber posts from way back in February of 2005, "Bloggers are 'cracking, popping, drilling and peeling their victims open." Take THAT, you leftists claiming to own Darwin even as your core collectivist beliefs fly in the face of the economic logic of nature and human nature that underlies Darwin's theory of natural selection.

Update: Lonely Conservative links:

If only we had all gone to Harvard …

Crossposted at Riehl World View and Liberty Pundits.

The opiate of the dopamine-dependent blogger

A link to "The Schneider Quote" was lying in wait in our Site Meter stats today. Clicking on over to something called "ClimateSight" (above), we were delighted to see that the true denialists who project their own denialism onto us climate skeptics continue to deny at will (see below).

Reading the entrails of the Site Meter stats is the opiate of the dopamine-dependent blogger, who can never get enough. Yes, you, Robert Stacy McCain. Mainly you're looking for the instant rush of an Instalanche or at least a Malkin-lanche or precious links from that happy few, that band of sisters and brothers that fought with us upon Saint Fiskin's day. But once in awhile there's an eye-opening outlier that confirms what you've known all along, at least since July of 1990.

Today's find was the deletion of our "[Inflammatory]" comments from a ClimateSite post on "The Schneider Quote," a shameless bit of self-revelatory global-warming — that's what "climate change" was called in those halcyon days of AGW "scientific consensus" — scripture first published in 1988:

On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. To do that we need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, means getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.

Rahm Emanuel would have been proud. We don't remember exactly what we said, but it was probably similar to the comments we left at one of Pharyngula's pro-Darwin, anti-Intelligent-Design posts last year, where the commenters were so unaccustomed to dissent that they mistook this Darwinian Libertarian for a "wingnut and creationist," as we blogged at the time:

"I just looked at Sissy Willis's blog. The person (I am still not clear what sex/gender the person is) does not seem to be sane," writes commenter Matt Penfold at PZ Myers's science blog Pharyngula in response to an admittedly provocative comment we had left there ourselves this afternoon. We are intrigued with Mr. Penfold's scientifically-challenged powers of research and analysis, not to mention his tenuous grasp of the language: "I also doubt they are calling themselves Sissy with any kind of ironic intent. Which also suggests their grasp of English is as bad as their understanding of climate change, or since they seem to consider the current Pope to be some kind of hero, their grasp of morality." They/themselves/their? Didn't you mean she or he, sir? Had Penfold delved a bit further, he might have been puzzled to learn that along with Pope Benedict XVI, Charles Darwin is one of our intellectual heroes. But then for him, the debate is over, the scientific consensus is in, and Sissy Willis is insane. Talk about parallel lives.

Update: "Oh, great! I'm an Insta-Sissy!" twitters crosspostee Dan Riehl. Our post is enjoying an instalanche not here but over at Riehl World View!

Crossposted at Riehl World View and Liberty Pundits.

EPA Cult of Death would "reap the profits of doom"

"We believe deeply that the denial of 'life's dark side in ourselves' is the key to what's wrong with the utopianist left world view," we wrote the first time we featured Max Ernst's 'L'Ange du Foyeur ou le Triomphe du Surréalisme' (1937. Oil on canvas. Private collection) back in April of 2004. The second time it accompanied our skeptical appreciation of NYT token conservative David Brooks's assertion in a column of that title, that "The darker view of human evolution is gaining clout." Third time, "the unthinkable. Self-described 'brain-dead liberal' playwright David Mamet has seen the light." Now individual revelations like Mamet's have cascaded into a tsunami of rediscovery of our nation's roots in the tragic view of human  nature.

"There are many vested interests hoping to reap the profits of doom," writes Shannon L. Goessling in a clear-eyed exposition of the stealth motives behind Obama's international progressivist Environmental Protection Agency ruling last April that carbon dioxide — the very stuff of life — is a dangerous pollutant that threatens the public and therefore must be regulated under the 1970 Clean Air Act. But the truly dangerous pollutant that threatens the public is the the soul-deadening pc propaganda of the decades-long Gramscian march through the institutions that has allowed these vulturous vested interests to get a seat at the head of the table of the body politic. More on that below, but first a few facts. As the WSJ reported in April:

This so-called "endangerment finding" sets the clock ticking on a vast array of taxes and regulation that EPA will have the power to impose across the economy, and all with little or no political debate. 

"The science is ultimately what should carry the day for public policy on climate change," declares Goessling, whose Southeastern Legal Foundation is taking 'em to court: 

There are many vested interests hoping to reap the profits of doom …

With huge vested interests pursuing a globalist agenda, it's been a Galileo-like effort to make the "skeptic" view known to the American people. Yet we are winning.

The best news is that the American people are beginning to wake up to the reality that they've been had, and they're mad as hell. Even as word of climate-science fraud and attempts to stifle skeptics began to break through the legacy media's "tribal filter on green news" last fall, a majority of our fellow citizens were telling pollsters they didn't see "global warming" as a crisis. Like the energizing spirit of the Tea Party movement itself, voters' growing recognition of Al Gore & Company's great con is "part of something bigger," as Glenn Reynolds wrote the other day in "Nashville Shows Tea Party Is America's Third Great Awakening," one of Instapundit's great distillations of what's "happening here."

Ron Futrell at Big Journalism puts it even more succinctly in a rollicking cogitation on the "Democrats and their activist old media … running in circles and working themselves into pretzels trying to define the 'Tea Party' movement":

It's the Constitution, stupid.

Exceptionalist America's brand of environmentalism used to be about individual initiative and stewardship of the earth in the trandscendentalist John Muir sense, most lyrically expressed in our all-time favorite quotation from Henry David Thoreau:

The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him.

Compare and contrast nature red in tooth and claw — that part of our own human nature the "why-can't-we'all-just-get-along" left can't abide — with the totalitarianesque Green-Police Utopia of what Jonah Goldberg calls "Audi's Gorewellian Super Bowl ad." Recognition of nature and human nature is life-affirming. Green fantasies of sacrificing human freedom in the name of "saving the planet" embody a cult of death.

Climategate: "I'm cold," Snowden wimpered, "I'm cold."

Our Thanksgiving wishbone drying out on the window sill  — with a little help from Photoshop's "paint daubs" filter — recalls Georgia O'Keeffe's "Pelvis with the Distance."

"The spirit gone, man is garbage," Joseph Heller's alter ego Yossarian thinks to himself as he watches Snowden's secret spill out all over him and the back of the plane in Heller's WWII satire Catch-22. While many — including ourselves — have used the house-of-cards analogy for Climategate, Snowden's secret rings more viscerally true. Yossarian had bandaged what he took to be a superficial wound on the radiogunner when he realized "Snowden was wounded inside his flak suit":

Yossarian ripped open the snaps of Snowden's flak suit and heard himself scream wildly as Snowden's insides slithered down to the floor in a soggy pile and just kept dripping out … 'I'm cold,' Snowden wimpered, 'I'm cold …'

A last ironic gasp for the big lie that was Anthropogenic Global Warming.

Climategate: Hiding in plain sight

"Like Barbara Boxer within her Senate Environment and Public Works Committee hearing on climate change this afternoon, Baby makes the rules," we captioned this majestic image of our late beloved boy back in March of 2007

As the Gramscian Anthropogenic Global Warming/Climate Change house of cards topples in the wake of the unprecedented scientific fraud of Climategate, we're delighted to republish yet another early-warning post signaling the alarm. As we wrote the other day, our own awareness goes back at least as far as July of 1990:

March 21, 2007. Two of our heroes in one day are fighting the good fight:

1. Senator James Inhofe — blogged here —  is not letting Barbara Boxer and Al [Big Sigh] Gore get away with grandstanding at today's "global-warming" hearings, as the Lord of Longwindedness tries to use up all of Inhofe's airtime by blowing hot air. 'Will watch the whole thing in reruns during the wee hours for the thrill of it all. Meanwhile, here's what  the Committee Chair had to say, to much snickering from the peanut gallery:

Elections have consequences, so I make the rules.

Touché. Inhofe parries:

When people don't want to talk about science in a debate format, they just say it's settled . . . My time is almost expired completely. Are you [Gaseous Gore] aware of that?

 

 

Here's the follow-up to our teaser post a couple of days back about Tuck's bolster project. He figured out how to do it through a combination of checking things out online, consulting with his upholstery man (the one who made the gorgeous cushion underneath the bolsters above) and a huge bunch of common sense. The biggest nut to crack was how to get a thread through the center of the foam cylinders to pull the buttons front and aft together. The solution was to slash through the fome with a serrated knife from our own kithcen. Ain't they beautiful?

2. "Czech Prime Minister Vaclav Klaus said on Wednesday that fighting global warming has turned into a 'religion' that replaced the ideology of communism and threatens to clip basic freedoms" — check out our own take on the divine Mr. Klaus here:

The right-wing president, a free-market champion, wrote to the U.S. Congress that adopting tough environmental policies to fight climate change would have destructive impact on national economies.

'Communism has been replaced by the threat of an ambitious environmentalism,' Klaus wrote in response to questions from the U.S. House of Representatives' Committee on Energy and Commerce.

The most beautiful boy in the world. Baby Cakes, being a pussycat, doesn't pose, of course, but sometimes our digital cam lucks out and catches him in the perfect moment as above in the countdown to supper.

Meanwhile, the hearing continues. Bernie Sanders [Socialist, VT] opines that Fellow Traveler Albert has given the new generation "the hope that it can become the new Greatest Generation," able to overcome dependency upon fossil fuel. Can you say inspiring? Tom Brokaw's Greatest Generation — the armed forces and their homefire burners stateside during WW II who defeated the fascist enemy overseas — gives way to Bernie Sanders's and Al Gore's Greatest Generation, who will exchange "carbon credits" to neutralize their "carbon footprint." It doesn't get any sweeter than VP Gore's response:

I think this generation is becoming involved in this as a moral issue.

What hath God wrought?

Update December 1, 2009: A third hero of the unGore Greatest Generation blipped onto our Twitter radar screen this morning, Australia's totally awesome new conservative party leader, Tony Abbott, "the first politician to reap the benefits of the world’s growing scepticism towards ManBearPig."

More good news from Andrew Bolt Down Under: "Finally, the Climategate scientists produce a real hockeystick."

Soylent Green revisited

"The Tribal Filter on Green News," Insight July 23, 1990. Update: Click here for larger, legible image.

It's been nearly twenty years we've been calling out the warmenists and their media allies, wondering when, already, the truth would finally out. Now it finally has, as Drudge headlines "Climategate: 'Greatest scandal in modern science,'" and mainstream outlets can no longer deny there's something rotten in the state of warmening "science." Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Inhoffe says the leaked correspondence suggests researchers "cooked the science to make this thing look as if the science was settled, when all the time of course we knew it was not," and now "Congress May Probe Leaked Global Warming E-Mails." In celebration of this day of cleaning out the Augean Stables, herewith we offer republication of one of our earliest blogposts on the subject, "Soylent Green." Note Palinophobe Andrea Mitchell's unabashed confession way back when (1990): "Clearly the networks have made the decision now, where you'd have to call it advocacy." Enjoy:

January 3, 2004. Blogging is nothing new.  Before the glory of the internet, we were madly clipping and underlining and annotating the margins of tree-based publications.  Take this snail blog post, "The Tribal Filter on Green News," by Woody West, having "The Last Word" in the July 23, 1990 issue of Insight:

Only lately have the pooh-bahs of the national press felt secure enough to admit publicly that they filter the news through their personal-tribal creed. As a result, of course, they often report as fact that which is both unsettled and disputed.

. . . At a conference on the environment in Washington earlier this year, reported by The Wall Street Journal's David Brooks, Charles Alexander harrumphed:

"As the science editor at Time I would freely admit that on this issue we have crossed the boundary from news reporting to advocacy." There was applause from the pressies in conclave assembled, after which Andrea Mitchell, an NBC correspondent, said that "clearly the networks have made the decision now, where you'd have to call it advocacy."

It gets even better:

An environmental reporter at The Boston Globe, Dianne Dumanoski, is quoted as saying, "There is no such thing as objective reporting . . . I've become even more crafty about finding the voices to say the things I think are true.  That's my subversive mission." Then spake Barbara Pyle, environmental editor of Cable News Network, which shows distressing signs of aping the older networks in cooking the news: "I do have an axe to grind. I want to be the little subversive person in television."

Pardon our French, but, plus ça change . . . Oh, and Andrea, there's a message for you from someone called Alan . . . and David Brooks, You're the man!  Clearly.

Update: "Somewhere, a tree is planted." The Anchoress links, and links and links.

[Thanks to susis for title]

"Why can't we get over our post-Marxist nostalgia?"

"That's just on the way, I suppose, to understanding the late quartets of Beethoven," says philosopher Denis Dutton about "the pleasure that people get from their dogs and cats." Image of Baby defending his turf from our October 2005 post "What immortal hand or eye?"

"These sorts of factors in the human personality cry out for a Darwinian explanation," says Arts & Letters Daily founder and editor, philosopher Denis Dutton in "A Talk With Denis Dutton" at Edge, making the case con brio for his theory that "aesthetics have a universal basis in human psychology, ultimately to be illuminated by the processes of evolution," as Steven Pinker explains in a jewel of an introduction. A few Dutton excerpts that caught our eye:

"It's not just art. Why do people have pets? — other species of animals — and devote inordinate amounts of time and love to them?" I mean, the standard answers have always been, well, they're surrogate children or something like that or they're filling a void in people's lives. No. There's something stronger there, the pleasure that people get from their dogs and cats and other animals that they have is deeper than that. To me that's very curious … Why do we like various cheeses? Why do we like the various foods we like? That's just on the way, I suppose, to understanding the late quartets of Beethoven. They move us deeply. They give us intense pleasure, and music is universal. These sorts of factors in the human personality cry out for a Darwinian explanation.

We are totally sympatico with Dutton's thesis and were delighted with his linking of our species' love of beasts and Beethoven as points on a spectrum. It called to mind our favorite Thoreau quotation:

The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him.

"Many people believe that this consilience between the arts, humanities and sciences represents the future of the humanities, revitalizing them with a progressive research agenda after the disillusionments of postmodernism," notes Pinker in his introduction. We're not sure what he means by "progressive," but given the pervasive moral relativism left in the wake of the Gramscian march through the institutions, we're skeptical of postmodernism's demise anytime soon. Nevertheless, Dutton on postmodernism's nemesis — universality — is music to our ears:

As a second comes universality. What we've had over the last forty years is an ideology in academic life that regards the arts as socially constructed and therefore unique to local cultures. I call it an ideology because it is not argued for, it is just presupposed in most aesthetic discourse. Allied with this position is the idea that we can seldom or perhaps never really understand the arts of other cultures; other cultures likewise can't understand our arts. Everybody's living in his or her own socially constructed, hermetically sealed, special cultural world.

But of course, a moment’s thought reveals that this can’t possibly be true. We know people in Brazil love Japanese prints, that Italian opera is enjoyed in China. Both Beethoven and Hollywood movies have swept the world. Think of it — the Vienna Conservatory has been saved by a combination of Japanese, Korean, and Chinese pianists …

Pleasure, universality, spontaneous development. We see them in the cross-cultural realities of music, the universality of storytelling, as well as things like food tastes, erotic interests, pet-keeping, sports interests, our fascination with puzzle solving, gossip — the list is indefinitely long. Charles Darwin has a lot more to say about how we evolved as inventive and expressive social animals with our remarkable personalities than has been given credit for. These aspects of evolution have deep implications for the origins and evolution of the arts.

 

"I love William Blake's 'The Tyger,'" we wrote in answer to the question "What is your favourite poem?" for our normblog profile back in October of 2005. "Dazzling imagery red in tooth and claw makes mincemeat of the peaceable kingdom paradigm," we added with relish. In photo Tiny, one of "our own in-house tygers …with fire burning bright in [her] eyes as [she and her brother] defended their turf from the intruder."

"Why can't we get over our post-Marxist nostalgia for economic or cultural determinism and accept human reality as it actually is?" asks Dutton, seemingly without irony. Doesn't he realize that generations of scholars have long since invested their intellectual capital in the left's utopian, blank-slate, noble-savage project that denies any such thing as human nature?

One more related thought. "Survival of the fittest usually makes one think of the biggest, strongest, or smartest individuals being the winners, but in a biological sense, evolutionary fitness refers to the ability to survive and reproduce in a particular environment," explains the PBS Evolution Library, making a point that people who aren't paying attention often miss:

Popular interpretations of "survival of the fittest" typically ignore the importance of both reproduction and cooperation. To survive but not pass on one's genes to the next generation is to be biologically unfit. And many organisms are the "fittest" because they cooperate with other organisms, rather than competing with them.

The same dynamics apply in the evolution of ideas. As we blogged a few years back in our post "Fear societies, heavy and lite":

Democratic Europe's go-along-to-get-along types in turn call to mind those members of academia who go along with politically correct groupthink they may not agree with in order to protect their careers. Call it "Fear Society Lite." Sharansky's "mechanics of tyranny that sustain such a society" are at work in those lofty intellectual bubbles just as surely as they were in the old Soviet Union and are today in the Arab tyrannies. A repressive society is a repressive society, wherever it may fall on a continuum of brutality and thought control. The crushing of dissent brutalizes the human spirit. Sharansky's optimism encourages the human spirit to soar.

"I cannot understand why there still is so much resistance among academics to such ideas," Dutton continues, puzzled at his peers' willful blindness to "human reality as it actually is":

If you want to be a one-dimensional determinist, go ahead and make it all "culture." My side of the argument isn't trying to make it all "nature," make it all genetics. Human life is lived in a middle position between our genetic determinants on the one hand and culture on the other. It's out of that that human freedom emerges. And artistic works, the plays of Shakespeare, the novels of Jane Austen, the works of Wagner and Beethoven, Rembrandt and Hokusai, are among the freest, most human acts ever accomplished. These creations are the ultimate expressions of freedom.

Like Thoreau's wildest, "The most alive is the freest. Not subdued to any man, its presence refreshes him."

Update: We were horrified to realize, as Charles Johnson wrote the other day, that "The Top 3 GOP Governors [are] All Creationists." We proudly stand with Johnson's band of "Some Anti-Creationism Bloggers" who share Randy Barnett's view that "A Republican candidate who is an avowed adherent to creationism will not be elected President of the United States":

Volokh Conspiracy: Defining "Creationism" down

Noblesse Oblige: Which Controversy? Discovery Institute vs Science

Daimnation!: Darwin’s next fight

The Atheist Conservative: If I saw an angel or if man was made of brass

Chicago Boyz [Hi, Mitch! 'Hope you and Winston are well.]: Happy 200th Birthday, Charles Darwin

Well That’s Just Dandy: I Don’t Know Why This Is So Hard To Understand

Kerplunk - Common sense from Down Under: The Discovery Institute’s willful destruction of Christian values

sisu: "Why can’t we get over our post-Marxist nostalgia?" [Plus, All Darwin All the Time]

An old friend and philosophy geek: Blog Here Now

More here

What hath Got wrought?

Update II: Noah had nothing over Steve at Modulator. Friday Ark  #232 now boarding.

Darwin vs "the prejudices and stereotypes of contemporary leftist academia"

"This preservation of favourable variations and the rejection of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection," wrote Charles Darwin in On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (full text available online here).

In honor of the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin on Feburary 12, 1809, a brief excerpt from our August 6, 2005 post, "There is grandeur in this view of life":

"The Preservation of Favoured Races." That phrase — the subtitle of Darwin's Origin of Species — is shocking to a 21st-century ear until you realize it doesn't mean what you may have thought it did. As the great naturalist explains in the text, he's referring not to any notions of racial superiority, but, rather, to the "preservation of favourable variations and the rejection of injurious variations" among all the species of animals and plants that have been fruitful and multiplied upon the earth. Darwin called this process of nonrandom elimination "natural selection," memorably dubbed by his contemporary, philosopher Herbert Spencer, "survival of the fittest."

Now back to the present. Do you ever wonder as we do why so many of our fellow Charles Darwin admirers on the left side of the aisle bought the farm on Al Gore's anthropogenic-climate-change myth?

1. Scientific enquiry wherever it may lead when it comes to natural selection vs

2. "the debate is over" when it comes to the fate of "the planet" and our species' responsibility?

We think it's a case of the perennial "Pauline Kael Bubble" phenomenon — as in "To trash Bush was to belong" — revealed in the parallel story of "a white, Catholic, leftist college student" who "dresses as a Muslim woman in small-town Alabama to examine prejudices against Muslims," only to discover "not the prejudices of the small-town, southern, white American but instead the prejudices and stereotypes of contemporary leftist academia," as Shannon Love of Chicago Boyz explains, quoting a CNN report:

"I expected people to say, 'What is this terrorist doing here? We don’t want your kind here,'" said Woldt, a 22-year-old blue-eyed Catholic, recalling her anticipation before stepping into a local barbecue joint. “I thought I wouldn’t even be served.”Instead, Woldt’s experiment in social anthropology opened her own eyes. Apart from the initial glances reserved for any outsider who might venture through a small-town restaurant’s doors, her experience was a pleasant one.

We've come to expect that sort of reflexive attribution of mindless cluelessness on our part from our friends on the left side of the aisle. How refreshing to see one of them finally "gets it." When will our Darwinian friends on the left side of the aisle see through their own blind spot when it comes to anthropogenic "climate change"?

If you want to put your Charles Darwin dollars where your mouth is, as we do, two things:

1. Order your Beagle Project gear from The Beagle Project Blog:

The new gear features a very special inscription, "Charles Darwin, H.M.S. Beagle", found (and scanned) by Randal Keynes on the inside front cover of a German translation of the New Testament that Darwin had with him during his voyage around the world on HMS Beagle, 1831-1836.

2. Add your voice to the tens of thousands wishing the great naturalist a happy 200th.

There is grandeur …

More cogitations on the "grandeur in this view of life" and cosmic-convergential shared birthday thoughts "From so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful."