Scientists discover why children are often selfish. Really.

Research in psychology, human behavior, and sociology has yielded many a fascinating and sometimes hotly-disputed theory over the decades. So you can almost be forgiven for thinking you’re being hoodwinked when you read stuff like the following, especially on sites with names like Science Daily:

A new study suggests that age-associated improvements in the ability to consider the preferences of others are linked with maturation of a brain region involved in self control.

You have to give top marks for obfuscation, at any rate. Translation: children tend to be selfish because they (specifically their brains) are immature. Wonders may never cease, but it occurred to me that this fact did not need scientific investigation, on account of its being (begging pardon) a no-brainer.

The findings, published by Cell Press in the March 8 issue of the journal Neuron, may help to explain why young children often struggle to control selfish impulses, even when they know better, and could impact educational strategies designed to promote successful social behavior.

The really funny part is that “Science”, having discovered this previously unknown link between immaturity and selfishness, also proposes a pseudo-scientific solution. I kid you not. (And I’m still not sure I’m not being had. Does The Onion by any chance have a section for scientific reportage?)

"Our findings represent a critical advance in our understanding of the development of social behavior with far-reaching implications for educational policy and highlight the importance of helping children act on what they already know," concludes Dr. Steinbeis. "Such interventions could set the foundation for increased altruism in the future."

In other words, improved educational programs, earlier and earlier “early childhood intervention”, and ramped-up social engineering, underwritten by (what else) government funding and supported by (who else) teachers’ unions and post-graduate university faculties, will eventually succeed in training children to practice selflessness and become morally upright citizens.

Good luck with that. I’m betting my money (what’s left after taxes) on the old-fashioned idea that if kids are raised to be noble and generous by equally noble and generous families, that just might work too, and maybe even better.

Oh, and I have just one more question to ask the behavioral researchers. Since the (physiologically) undeveloped pre-adolescent brain is to blame for selfishness and lack of self-control, what’s the excuse for self-centered folks over the age of ten?

Fonte

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Scientists and physicians declare:human life begins at conception

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A United States Senate Judiciary Subcommittee invited experts to testify on the question of when life begins. All of the quotes from the following experts come directly from the official government record of their testimony.¹

Dr. Alfred M. Bongioanni, professor of pediatrics and obstetrics at the University of Pennsylvania, stated:

“I have learned from my earliest medical education that human life begins at the time of conception.... I submit that human life is present throughout this entire sequence from conception to adulthood and that any interruption at any point throughout this time constitutes a termination of human life....

I am no more prepared to say that these early stages [of development in the womb] represent an incomplete human being than I would be to say that the child prior to the dramatic effects of puberty...is not a human being. This is human life at every stage.”

Dr. Jerome LeJeune, professor of genetics at the University of Descartes in Paris, was the discoverer of the chromosome pattern of Down syndrome. Dr. LeJeune testified to the Judiciary Subcommittee, “after fertilization has taken place a new human being has come into being.” He stated that this “is no longer a matter of taste or opinion,” and “not a metaphysical contention, it is plain experimental evidence.” He added, “Each individual has a very neat beginning, at conception.”

Professor Hymie Gordon, Mayo Clinic: “By all the criteria of modern molecular biology, life is present from the moment of conception.”

Professor Micheline Matthews-Roth, Harvard University Medical School: “It is incorrect to say that biological data cannot be decisive.... It is scientifically correct to say that an individual human life begins at conception.... Our laws, one function of which is to help preserve the lives of our people, should be based on accurate scientific data.”

Dr. Watson A. Bowes, University of Colorado Medical School: “The beginning of a single human life is from a biological point of view a simple and straightforward matter—the beginning is conception. This straightforward biological fact should not be distorted to serve sociological, political, or economic goals.”

A prominent physician points out that at these Senate hearings, “Pro-abortionists, though invited to do so, failed to produce even a single expert witness who would specifically testify that life begins at any point other than conception or implantation. Only one witness said no one can tell when life begins.”²

Many other prominent scientists and physicians have likewise affirmed with certainty that human life begins at conception:

Ashley Montague, a geneticist and professor at Harvard and Rutgers, is unsympathetic to the prolife cause. Nevertheless, he affirms unequivocally, “The basic fact is simple: life begins not at birth, but conception.”³

Dr. Bernard Nathanson, internationally known obstetrician and gynecologist, was a cofounder of what is now the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL). He owned and operated what was at the time the largest abortion clinic in the western hemisphere. He was directly involved in over sixty thousand abortions.

Dr. Nathanson’s study of developments in the science of fetology and his use of ultrasound to observe the unborn child in the womb led him to the conclusion that he had made a horrible mistake. Resigning from his lucrative position, Nathanson wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine that he was deeply troubled by his “increasing certainty that I had in fact presided over 60,000 deaths.”⁴

In his film, “The Silent Scream,” Nathanson later stated, “Modern technologies have convinced us that beyond question the unborn child is simply another human being, another member of the human community, indistinguishable in every way from any of us.” Dr. Nathanson wrote Aborting America to inform the public of the realities behind the abortion rights movement of which he had been a primary leader.⁵ At the time Dr. Nathanson was an atheist. His conclusions were not even remotely religious, but squarely based on the biological facts.

Dr. Landrum Shettles was for twenty-seven years attending obstetrician-gynecologist at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York. Shettles was a pioneer in sperm biology, fertility, and sterility. He is internationally famous for being the discoverer of male- and female-producing sperm. His intrauterine photographs of preborn children appear in over fifty medical textbooks. Dr. Shettles states,

I oppose abortion. I do so, first, because I accept what is biologically manifest—that human life commences at the time of conception—and, second, because I believe it is wrong to take innocent human life under any circumstances. My position is scientific, pragmatic, and humanitarian. ⁶

The First International Symposium on Abortion came to the following conclusion:

The changes occurring between implantation, a six-week embryo, a six-month fetus, a one-week-old child, or a mature adult are merely stages of development and maturation. The majority of our group could find no point in time between the union of sperm and egg, or at least the blastocyst stage, and the birth of the infant at which point we could say that this was not a human life.⁷

The Official Senate report on Senate Bill 158, the “Human Life Bill,” summarized the issue this way:

Physicians, biologists, and other scientists agree that conception marks the beginning of the life of a human being—a being that is alive and is a member of the human species. There is overwhelming agreement on this point in countless medical, biological, and scientific writings.⁸

Footnotes:

¹ Report, Subcommittee on Separation of Powers to Senate Judiciary Committee S-158, 97th Congress, 1st Session 1981.

²Landrum Shettles and David Rorvik, Rites of Life: The Scientific Evidence of Life Before Birth (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1983), 113.

³ Ashley Montague, Life Before Birth (New York: Signet Books, 1977), vi.

⁴Bernard N. Nathanson, “Deeper into Abortion,” New England Journal of Medicine 291 (1974): 1189Ð90.

⁵Bernard Nathanson, Aborting America (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1979).

⁶Shettles and Rorvik, Rites of Life, 103.

⁷John C. Willke, Abortion Questions and Answers (Cincinnati, OH: Hayes Publishing, 1988), 42.

⁸Report, Subcommittee on Separation of Powers to Senate Judiciary Committee S-158, 97th Congress, 1st Session 1981, 7.

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Scientists Dissent Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims

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More Than 1000 International Scientists Dissent Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims – Challenge UN IPCC & Gore

More than 1,000 dissenting scientists (updates previous 700 scientist report) from around the globe have now challenged man-made global warming claims made by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and former Vice President Al Gore.

This new 2010 321-page Climate Depot Special Report — updated from the 2007 groundbreaking U.S. Senate Report of over 400 scientists who voiced skepticism about the so-called global warming “consensus” — features the skeptical voices of over 1,000 international scientists, including many current and former UN IPCC scientists, who have now turned against the UN IPCC. This updated 2010 report includes a dramatic increase of over 300 additional (and growing) scientists and climate researchers since the last update in March 2009. This report’s release coincides with the 2010 UN global warming summit in being held in Cancun.

The more than 300 additional scientists added to this report since March 2009 (21 months ago), represents an average of nearly four skeptical scientists a week speaking out publicly. The well over 1,000 dissenting scientists are almost 20 times the number of UN scientists (52) who authored the media-hyped IPCC 2007 Summary for Policymakers.

The chorus of skeptical scientific voices grew louder in 2010 as the Climategate scandal — which involved the upper echelon of UN IPCC scientists — detonated upon on the international climate movement. “I view Climategate as science fraud, pure and simple,” said noted Princeton Physicist Dr. Robert Austin shortly after the scandal broke. Climategate prompted UN IPCC scientists to turn on each other. UN IPCC scientist Eduardo Zorita publicly declared that his Climategate colleagues Michael Mann and Phil Jones “should be barred from the IPCC process…They are not credible anymore.”

Zorita also noted how insular the IPCC science had become. “By writing these lines I will just probably achieve that a few of my future studies will, again, not see the light of publication,” Zorita wrote. A UN lead author Richard Tol grew disillusioned with the IPCC and lamented that it had been “captured” and demanded that “the Chair of IPCC and the Chairs of the IPCC Working Groups should be removed.”

Tol also publicly called for the “suspension” of IPCC Process in 2010 after being invited by the UN to participate as lead author again in the next IPCC Report. [Note: Zorita and Tol are not included in the count of dissenting scientists in this report.]

Other UN scientists were more blunt. A South African UN scientist declared the UN IPCC a “worthless carcass” and noted IPCC chair Pachauri is in “disgrace”. He also explained that the “fraudulent science continues to be exposed.” Alexander, a former member of the UN Scientific and Technical Committee on Natural Disasters harshly critiqued the UN. “‘I was subjected to vilification tactics at the time. I persisted. Now, at long last, my persistence has been rewarded…There is no believable evidence to support [the IPCC] claims. I rest my case!”

See: S. African UN Scientist Calls it! ‘Climate change – RIP: Cause of Death: No scientifically believable evidence…Deliberate manipulation to suit political objectives’ [Also see: New Report: UN Scientists Speak Out On Global Warming -- As Skeptics!] Geologist Dr. Don Easterbrook, a professor of geology at Western Washington University, summed up the scandal on December 3, 2010: “The corruption within the IPCC revealed by the Climategate scandal, the doctoring of data and the refusal to admit mistakes have so severely tainted the IPCC that it is no longer a credible agency.”

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Harvard Academic: Pope is Right about Condoms

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While major media characterize Pope Benedict XVI’s prescription for combating HIV infection as “unrealistic and ineffective” and unscientific, an authority on the disease has a different message: “More and more AIDS experts are coming to accept . . .” that “the Pope is correct.”

“We have found no consistent associations between condom use and lower HIV-infection rates, which, 25 years into the pandemic, we should be seeing if this intervention was working.” If not for this statement’s academic style, you might think it was rendered by a Pope or prelate. Yet its author is actually Edward C. Green, director of the AIDS Prevention Research Project at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, who was quoted by Kathryn Jean Lopez writing at National Review Online.

Such pronouncements may seem counterintuitive. With most people today having been weaned on Kinsey Institute inspired sex-education suppositions, they take as a given that there are no risky sexual behaviors, just risky ways of indulging them. Yet, in an example of the intersection between science and faith, Edward Green affirms the Pope’s recent assertion that condom use won’t solve Africa’s AIDS crisis. Writes Lopez:

‘The pope is correct,’ Green told National Review Online Wednesday . . . . He stresses that ‘condoms have been proven to not be effective at the ‘level of population.’’

‘There is,’ Green adds, ‘a consistent association shown by our best studies, including the U.S.-funded ‘Demographic Health Surveys,’ between greater availability and use of condoms and higher (not lower) HIV-infection rates. This may be due in part to a phenomenon known as risk compensation, meaning that when one uses a risk-reduction ‘technology’ such as condoms, one often loses the benefit (reduction in risk) by ‘compensating’ or taking greater chances than one would take without the risk-reduction technology.’

Additionally, Green said that empirical evidence shows the Pope was also correct in saying that the best solution to the African AIDS crisis is monogamy. In other words, the problem is promiscuity, not just how you manage your promiscuity. Ah, could this really mean that the church was right to be opposing the modern world’s “new ideas”? It much reminds me of G.K. Chesterton’s profound observation, “Nine out of ten of what we call new ideas are really just old mistakes.” Promiscuity is nothing new. The sexual revolution is misnamed – it should more properly be called the sexual regression.

Understanding that promiscuity is the problem places matters in perspective. To truly grasp the effects of advocating condoms as remedy, we have to consider that they’re an element of libertinism’s pseudo-intellectual philosophical arm, sex education, and understand the moral message sent by that arm.

Condoms aren’t billed as simply a method by which married couples may control births; sex education isn’t designed specifically to enlighten the betrothed. On the contrary, their main stated purpose is to combat the consequences of sex outside of marriage, things such as out-of-wedlock pregnancy and sexually-transmitted diseases.

This brings us to the message inherent in sex education. There’s no such thing as a value-neutral curriculum, and sex education is infused with the notion that sex is merely a matter of taste. Its apologists may bristle at this, saying that sex education says nothing about what you should do, only how you should do it. But this is the point. As Chesterton also observed, “It is the things we forget to teach that are learned best,” meaning that values are caught more than they’re taught. What is assumed is often more influential than what must be stated explicitly, and sex education speaks volumes about what we may do through those things that speak louder than words – actions.

To illustrate this, let’s analogize condom distribution. If there’s a problem with teenagers endangering themselves and others through street racing, the obvious solution is to discourage the behavior. Imagine, though, that we instead simply offered them options, saying, “Well, you could abstain. If you don’t, however, take this protective rubber shield and place it on your car; it reduces the risk of traffic-related fatalities.” Would we be surprised if the incidence of street racing and the deaths caused by it subsequently increased?

Nevertheless, libertines may say that condoms are wanting at the “level of population” only because people aren't using them consistently. If people were more educated in health, condoms would be more effective collectively. But that's always the catch, isn't it? I could just as easily say the problem is that people aren't adhering to God's plan for man's sexuality consistently. If people were more educated in morality, that plan would be more effective and we wouldn't have these problems in the first place. We're both saying the same thing, which is that our ideal isn't being applied ideally. But the question remains, what ideal is ideal?

Man has always found moral imperatives more compelling than health ones. People have died for moral principles but only hope that health ones will help them live longer. I would, for instance, have far more confidence that a man would quit smoking if he believed lighting up violated some transcendent moral law than if he simply believed it might add ten years to his life.

The point is that having a chaste society, a place wherein recognition of moral law, and strong social pressure and stigma keep sexuality within its proper context – not just in church one hour weekly but also at home, school and in entertainment 24/7 – has a track record of working on the population level. Dispassionate appeals to health concerns – of which condoms are a reflection – do not. (Note that the out-of-wedlock birthrate has gone from 5 percent to 40 in 50 years.)

Yet the libertines have a very compelling argument for rejecting the Pope’s proposition: free sex is fun.

Yes, and so is street racing.

At the end of the day, that’s what their argument boils down to: Christians must be wrong because they violate the pleasure principle.

It really has to make you wonder who the unscientific ones are after all.

Selwyn Duke is a columnist and public speaker whose work has been published widely online and in print, on both the local and national levels. He has been featured on the Rush Limbaugh Show, at WorldNetDaily.com, in American Conservative magazine, is a contributor to AmericanThinker.com and appears regularly as a guest on the award-winning, nationally-syndicated Michael Savage Show. Visit his Website.

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AN ATHEIST IS SOMEONE WHO BELIEVES THE SCIENTIFIC IMPOSSIBLITY, NOTHING CREATED EVERYTHING:

By Ray Comfort

1. "It is now becoming clear that everything can -- and probably did -- come from nothing." Robert A. J. Matthews, physicist, Ashton University, England

2. "Space and time both started at the Big Bang and therefore there was nothing before it." Cornell University "Ask an Astronomer."

3. "Some physicists believe our universe was created by colliding with another, but Kaku [a theoretical physicist at City University of New York] says it also may have sprung from nothing . . . " Scienceline.org

4. "Even if we don't have a precise idea of exactly what took place at the beginning, we can at least see that the origin of the universe from nothing need not be unlawful or unnatural or unscientific." Paul Davies, physicist, Arizona State University

5. "Assuming the universe came from nothing, it is empty to begin with . . . Only by the constant action of an agent outside the universe, such as God, could a state of nothingness be maintained. The fact that we have something is just what we would expect if there is no God." Victor J. Stenger, atheist, Prof. Physics, University of Hawaii. Author of, God: The Failed Hypothesis. How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist

6. "Few people are aware of the fact that many modern physicists claim that things -- perhaps even the entire universe -- can indeed arise from nothing via natural processes. Creation ex nihilo -- Without God (1997), Atheist, Mark I. Vuletic

7. "To understand these facts we have to turn to science. Where did they all come from, and how did they get so darned outrageous? Well, it all started with nothing." --"Fifty Outrageous Animal Facts,” Animal Planet

8. To the average person it might seem obvious that nothing can happen in nothing. But to a quantum physicist, nothing is, in fact, something." Discover Magazine “Physics & Math/Cosmology”

9. "It is rather fantastic to realize that the laws of physics can describe how everything was created in a random quantum fluctuation out of nothing, and how over the course of 15 billion years, matter could organize in such complex ways that we have human beings sitting here, talking, doing things intentionally." (Alan Harvey Guth theoretical physicist and cosmologist). Discover Magazine, April 1, 2002

10. Richard Dawkins: "The fact that life evolved out of nearly nothing, some 10 billion years AFTER THE UNIVERSE EVOLVED OUT OF LITERALLY NOTHING is a fact so staggering that I would be mad to attempt words to do it justice.""From tail to tale on the path of pilgrims in life", The Scotsman (April 9, 2005)

11. "Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing...Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. "Stephen Hawking: God did not create Universe." http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11161493

12. "To be fair, I actually think Ray won this round. He was challenged to show where atheists say 'everything comes from nothing', and he did ... There ARE atheists who say 'everything came from nothing', regardless of the details of the specific definitions in use." Whateverman (from WEARESMRT--atheist website).

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The Greatest Hoax On Earth -- Dr. Jonathan Sarfati

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Giving Thanks for Dr. Philip Skell

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This past Sunday, science lost a bold and courageous voice for objectivity with the passing of Dr. Philip Skell. A member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) since 1977, "Phil" was Emeritus Evan Pugh Professor at Pennsylvania State University, and his research included work on reactive intermediates in chemistry such as carbene molecules, free-atom reactions, and reactions of free carbonium ions. A 1997 article in the journal Pure and Applied Chemistry described some of Skell's significant scientific contributions as follows:

Another class of intermediates, containing divalent carbon atoms, were suggested by John Nef early in this century but his ideas were generally rejected. However, the concept was revived with vigor when Philip Skell showed that: CCl,, dichlorocarbone, was formed as a reaction intermediate. Carbene chemistry almost immediately became the subject of extensive physical organic research.

Penn State University describes Skell's research thusly:

Philip S. Skell, sometimes called "the father of carbene chemistry," is widely known for the "Skell Rule," which was first applied to carbenes, the "fleeting species" of carbon. The rule, which predicts the most probable pathway through which certain chemical compounds will be formed, found use throughout the pharmaceutical and chemical industries.

Later in his career, Phil became a skeptic of neo-Darwinian evolution. His main position was that Darwinism does not serve as the cornerstone of biological thought that many claim it does. In 2007, I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Skell and doing three interviews with him for Discovery Institute's ID the Future Podcast.

In the first interview, Skell explained that the NAS is an "exclusive club," and that the election of NAS scientists is a generally secret process; the reasons for electing scientists are not always disclosed even to those who are elected. He speculated, however, that it was his research on carbene that got him elected. In this podcast, he maintained that many NAS members have a "bias in favor of" evolution--a bias he shared until he read the writings of fellow chemist Michael Polanyi.

In the second podcast, Skell elaborated on how Polanyi's work influenced his own thinking. After reading Polanyi, Skell asked himself whether Darwinian evolution was truly vital to his own research developing antibiotic drugs. Skell then queried other bioscience researchers and learned that they too had made no reliance upon Darwinian evolution in their work. This led Skell to investigate the history of Nobel Prize awards, and he could not find a single one where Darwinian evolution had directly dictated the research that led to the award.

In a 2005 article published in The Scientist, Skell reported this survey of his peers--more than 70 scientists in fact--on whether Darwin's theory directed their research. According to Skell, "The responses were all the same: No." In an eloquent statement that has been referenced many times since, Skell recounted that in many areas of biological research "Darwin's theory had provided no discernible guidance, but was brought in, after the breakthroughs, as an interesting narrative gloss." He further elaborated:

[T]he modern form of Darwin's theory has been raised to its present high status because it's said to be the cornerstone of modern experimental biology. But is that correct? ... Darwinian evolution - whatever its other virtues - does not provide a fruitful heuristic in experimental biology. This becomes especially clear when we compare it with a heuristic framework such as the atomic model, which opens up structural chemistry and leads to advances in the synthesis of a multitude of new molecules of practical benefit. None of this demonstrates that Darwinism is false. It does, however, mean that the claim that it is the cornerstone of modern experimental biology will be met with quiet skepticism from a growing number of scientists in fields where theories actually do serve as cornerstones for tangible breakthroughs.

(Phil Skell, "Why Do We Invoke Darwin? Evolutionary theory contributes little to experimental biology," The Scientist Vol. 19(16):10 (August 29, 2005).)

The article generated some spirited rebuttals, leading to a vigorous response from Skell:

One letter mentions directed molecular evolution as a technique to discover antibodies, enzymes and drugs. Like comparative biology, this has certainly been fruitful, but it is not an application of Darwinian evolution -- it is the modern molecular equivalent of classical breeding. Long before Darwin, breeders used artificial selection to develop improved strains of crops and livestock. Darwin extrapolated this in an attempt to explain the origin of new species, but he did not invent the process of artificial selection itself.

Before dismissing Skell's position, the reader must understand that Skell should know whether Darwinian evolution provides guidance for producing antibiotics: some of own his early research helped pioneer the widespread use of antibiotics during World War II.

Thus Skell was a rare voice in the NAS who was willing to dissent from the majority neo-Darwinian viewpoint. In 2008 the NAS published a booklet, Science, Evolution, and Creationism, declaring that "[t]here is no scientific controversy about the basic facts of evolution," and asserting that evolution by natural selection is "so well established that no new evidence is likely to alter" it. Skell published a rebuttal to the NAS's booklet in the journal Politics and the Life Sciences, explaining that it did not speak for all NAS members, and that the NAS was guilty of "overselling of the theory of evolution." He continued:

The public should view with profound alarm the unnecessary and misguided reintroduction of speculative historical, philosophical, and religious ideas into the realms of experimental science, coming from various sources, including this current publication of the National Academy of Sciences. Are we perhaps setting the stage for a return to that earlier, worldview-bound, pre-modern type of science, only this time with the substitution of Scientism for the earlier worldviews?

(Philip Skell, "Review of National Academy of Sciences, Science, Evolution, and Creationism (Washington, D.C.: NAS Press, 2008)," Politics and the Life Sciences, Vol. 27(2);47-49 (October 9, 2008).)

Phil also got involved with defending objectivity and academic freedom in evolution-education. He encouraged a middle-of-the-road approach, avoiding extremes that would force religion or dumbed-down evolutionary dogmatism into the science classroom. Instead, in a 2005 letter to the South Carolina Education Oversight Committee, he recommended:

Both these extremes are mistaken. Evolution is an important theory and students need to know about it. But scientific journals now document many scientific problems and criticisms of evolutionary theory and students need to know about these as well.

As a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Skell had personal inside access to the thought and behavior patterns of many top scientists. This makes it all the more striking that his 2005 letter maintained that the claim that there are no scientific criticisms of neo-Darwinian evolution is a bluff promoted to the public. He wrote:

Many of the scientific criticisms of which I speak are well known by scientists in various disciplines, including the disciplines of chemistry and biochemistry, in which I have done my work. I have found that some of my scientific colleagues are very reluctant to acknowledge the existence of problems with evolutionary theory to the general public. They display an almost religious zeal for a strictly Darwinian view of biological origins.

In a third podcast interview, Dr. Skell offered advice to a hypothetical young scientist who was skeptical of Darwinian evolution. Here, he urged great caution:

The academic community is incredibly intolerant of anyone not paying loyalty to Darwinian ideas, and have no hesitation in railroading such an individual out of the community, having them fired, and making life generally miserable for such a person. So for a young person to let his professors know that he might be skeptical of Darwinism ... even such a mild disowning of the Darwinian point of view is considered so dangerous among many of the professional biologists that such a person is railroaded out of the profession. The best advice I can give them is until this climate changes ... that a young prospective scientist in the biosciences keep that entirely to themselves and make it something which is not known to the academic structure on which they depend both for their education for their degrees and for recommendation to positions in the future.

Dr. Skell further explained that that climate of academic freedom has "deteriorated" over the course of his career, and that although it is "not an easy matter to judge," he believed that it is "more dangerous today for anyone to be declared a Darwinian skeptic of whatever color than it has been in the past."

In keeping with his commitment to academic freedom, in 2005 Skell put his name as the first signer on an amicus brief submitted to the court during the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial stating "[i]t is crucial that advocates of new scientific theories be granted freedom of inquiry to question reigning scientific ideas if scientific progress is to be possible."

On this Thanksgiving, I personally am very thankful for having been given the opportunity to get to know Phil Skell a little over the past few years. He was a real gentleman, and had a great sense of humor, and a big smile. It's my understanding that he was quite athletic until just a couple years ago.

Dr. Skell will always have my most profound respect as someone who was willing to risk an impeccable scientific reputation for the sake of seeking scientific truth, vocally defending it whatever the personal cost. I have no doubt he will be missed by many.

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Top Scientist Resigns from Post – Admits Global Warming Is a Scam

Gateway Pundit

Top US scientist Hal Lewis resigned this week from his post at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
He admitted global warming climate change was nothing but a scam in his resignation letter.

The Telegraph reported:

The following is a letter to the American Physical Society released to the public by Professor Emiritus of physics Hal Lewis of the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Sent: Friday, 08 October 2010 17:19 Hal Lewis
From: Hal Lewis, University of California, Santa Barbara
To: Curtis G. Callan, Jr., Princeton University, President of the American Physical Society
6 October 2010

Dear Curt:

When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago).

Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence—it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists. As recently as thirty-five years ago, when I chaired the first APS study of a contentious social/scientific issue, The Reactor Safety Study, though there were zealots aplenty on the outside there was no hint of inordinate pressure on us as physicists. We were therefore able to produce what I believe was and is an honest appraisal of the situation at that time. We were further enabled by the presence of an oversight committee consisting of Pief Panofsky, Vicki Weisskopf, and Hans Bethe, all towering physicists beyond reproach. I was proud of what we did in a charged atmosphere. In the end the oversight committee, in its report to the APS President, noted the complete independence in which we did the job, and predicted that the report would be attacked from both sides. What greater tribute could there be?

How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d’être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.

It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.

So what has the APS, as an organization, done in the face of this challenge? It has accepted the corruption as the norm, and gone along with it…

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Conservatives have no problems with real science

In his latest attacks against the voices who refuse to worship Darwin, Charles "Darwinist Rage Boy" Johnson reveals his knowledge (or lackthere of) concerning the issue "darwin versus design". I got tired of having him spew the same mantra over and over again, so I decide to make a short post about some of the things he says.

but “intelligent design” creationism has absolutely no legitimacy as a scientific theory

Depends on how you define "scientific theory", Darwinist Rage Boy. If you define "science" as the enterprise which denies a priori any Inteligent Causation for the biosfere, then yes, ID is against "science". However, if by science you mean "knowledge", then ID is a much more robust scientific theory than the theory of evolution.

There isn’t a single peer-reviewed paper that supports it

Oh really? What about these, Darwin Boy? Or what about the article authored by Dr Stephen Meyer, which caused darwinists to go insane? It had peer review, as Dr Richard Sternberg says on his site, but even so, since it advocated ID, darwinists didn't like it one bit.

So what do you mean with "there isn't a single peer reviewd paper that suports it", when there are some around?

there are no reputable scientists who promote it

Who defines what makes a scientist "reputable" or not? The darwinists? Is Scott Minich a "reputable" scientist?

and the most famous (actually, the only) biologist identified with ID, Michael Behe

This is the kind of statement that makes Darwinist Rage Boy look childish.

So in all the world, the only biologist who advocates an Inteligent Cause behind the design in the living world is Michael Behe? What about Jonathan Wells, who has degrees in Biology too? Perhaps he is not a "reputable biologist", right Charlie?

To end, here is another precious gem

This is why so many people believe the GOP has a problem with science — because it does.

Who are those "people"? Liberals? It wouldn't be the same people who advocate global warming, abortion and embrionic steem cell research, would it?

The truth of the matter is that conservatives have no problems with science, but only with naturalism. Darwinist Rage Boy conflates the two as if those are one and the same.

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Religious Fundamentalist and NAS Member Says: Evolution is Oversold

Remember articles like this next Darwinist Rage Boy aka Charles Johnson tries to scam people into thinking that there's no scientific controversy about Darwin's mithology.

Original Article.

Commentary
The Dangers Of Overselling Evolution
Philip S. Skell 02.23.09,
1:47 PM ET

Last week, University of Chicago biologist Jerry Coyne criticized Forbes (See "Why Evolution Is True") for including views skeptical of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution in its forum on the 200th anniversary of his birth. As a member of the National Academy of Sciences, I beg to differ with Professor Coyne.

I don't think science has anything to fear from a free exchange of ideas between thoughtful proponents of different views. Moreover, there are a number of us in the scientific community who, while we appreciate Darwin's contributions, think that the rhetorical approach of scientists such as Coyne unnecessarily polarizes public discussions and­--even more seriously­--overstates both the evidence for Darwin's theory of historical biology and the benefits of Darwin's theory to the actual practice of experimental science.

Coyne seems to believe the major importance of biological science is its speculations about matters which cannot be observed, tested and verified, such as origin of life, speciation, the essences of our fossilized ancestors, the ultimate causes of their changes, etc.

Experimental biology has dramatically increased our understanding of the intricate workings within living organisms that account for their survival, showing how they continue to function despite the myriad assaults on them from their environments. These advances in knowledge are attributable to the development of new methodologies and instruments, unimaginable in the preceding centuries, applied to the investigation of living organisms. Crucial to all fruitful experiments in biology is their design, for which Darwin's and Wallace's principles apparently provide no guidance.

Contrary to the beliefs of Professor Coyne and some other defenders of Darwin, these advances are not due to studies of an organism's ancestors that are recovered from fossil deposits. Those rare artifacts--which have been preserved as fossils--are impressions in stones which, even when examined with the heroic efforts of paleontologists, cannot reveal the details that made these amazing living organisms function.

To conflate contemporary scientific studies of existing organisms with those of the paleontologists serves mainly to misguide the public and teachers of the young. An examination of the papers in the National Academy of Sciences' premiere journal, The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), as well as many other journals and the Nobel awards for biological discoveries, supports the crucial distinction I am making.

Examining the major advances in biological knowledge, one fails to find any real connection between biological history and the experimental designs that have produced today's cornucopia of knowledge of how the great variety of living organisms perform their functions. It is our knowledge of how these organisms actually operate, not speculations about how they may have arisen millions of years ago, that is essential to doctors, veterinarians, farmers and other practitioners of biological science.

It is widely accepted that the growth of science and technology in the West, which accounts for the remarkable advances we enjoy today in medicine, agriculture, travel, communications, etc., coincided with the separation, several centuries ago, of the experimental sciences from the dominance of the other important fields of philosophy, metaphysics, theology and history.

Yet many popularizers of Darwin's theory now claim that without the study of ancient biological history, our students will not be prepared to engage in the great variety of modern experimental activities expected of them. The public should view with profound alarm this unnecessary and misguided reintroduction of speculative historical, philosophical and religious ideas into the realms of experimental science.

It is more crucial to consider history in the fields of astrophysics and geology than in biology. For example, the electromagnetic radiations arriving at our detectors inform us of the ongoing events that occurred billions of years ago in distant parts of our universe that have been traveling for all this time to reach us. And the rock formations of concern to geologists have resided largely undisturbed since their formations.

But fossils fail to inform us of the nature of our ancient antecedents--because they have been transformed into stones that give us only a minuscule, often misleading impression of their former essences and thus are largely irrelevant to modern biology's experimentations with living organisms.

For instance, we cannot rely upon ruminations about the fossil record to lead us to a prediction of the evolution of the ambient flu virus so that we can prepare the vaccine today for next year's more virulent strain. That would be like depending upon our knowledge of ancient Hittite economics to understand 21st-century economics.

In 1942, Nobel Laureate Ernst Chain wrote that his discovery of penicillin (with Howard Florey and Alexander Fleming) and the development of bacterial resistance to that antibiotic owed nothing to Darwin's and Alfred Russel Wallace's evolutionary theories.

The same can be said about a variety of other 20th-century findings: the discovery of the structure of the double helix; the characterization of the ribosome; the mapping of genomes; research on medications and drug reactions; improvements in food production and sanitation; new surgeries; and other developments.

Additionally, I have queried biologists working in areas where one might have thought the Darwinian paradigm could guide research, such as the emergence of resistance to antibiotics and pesticides. Here, as elsewhere, I learned that evolutionary theory provides no guidance when it comes to choosing the experimental designs. Rather, after the breakthrough discoveries, it is brought in as a narrative gloss.

The essence of the theory of evolution is the hypothesis that historical diversity is the consequence of natural selection acting on variations. Regardless of the verity it holds for explaining biohistory, it offers no help to the experimenter--who is concerned, for example, with the goal of finding or synthesizing a new antibiotic, or how it can disable a disease-producing organism, what dosages are required and which individuals will not tolerate it. Studying biohistory is, at best, an entertaining distraction from the goals of a working biologist.

It is noteworthy that Darwin's and Wallace's theories of evolution have been enormously aggrandized since the 1850s. Through the writings of neo-Darwinian biologists, they have subsumed many of the biological experimental discoveries of the 20th century. This is so despite the fact that those discoveries were neither predicted nor heuristically guided by evolutionary theory.

The overselling of the theory of evolution, because of the incorporation of these later discoveries, may have done a grave disservice both to those two 19th-century scientists and to modern biology.

The difference between the advances of 20th-century chemical and biological knowledge and the contentious atmosphere that currently prevails in biology alone is worth noting.

Chemists have depended largely on geological sources, from which they have isolated the hundred or so elements on the periodic table and subsequently devised a great variety of schemes for synthesizing millions of new complex arrangements of these elements, giving to the public medicines, fertilizers, plastics, etc., of great utility.

Biologists, on the other hand, have recognized that the natural sources they study are living organisms, each of which is a unique individual, each of which consists of extraordinary complex molecular combinations in configurations that lead to coherent functioning and reproduction. There are no two identical genomes in the biocosm. Now, modern biologists conduct experimental studies that have begun to reveal details of how living organisms function and reproduce.

It is unseemly and scientifically unfruitful that a major focus in biology should have turned into a war--between those who hold that the history of those unique organisms is purely a matter of chance aggregation from the inorganic world and those who hold that the aggregation must have been designed for a purpose.

It is surely not a matter that must or can be settled within the provenance of experimental biology. Above all, declaiming orthodoxy to either of those propositions promotes incivility and draws energy and resources away from the real goal--advances in experimental biological science. These studies, if not derailed, indicate that further advances of great utility can be expected during the 21st century.

Philip S. Skell is emeritus Evan Pugh professor of chemistry at Penn State University and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

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P.Z. Myers: Americans Who Fund Scientific Research Are an "Ignorant Mob"

P.Z. Myers at Pharyngula has responded to my open letter to the Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology. In my letter, I strongly criticized the Darwinist organization’s endorsement of censorship and its disrespect for academic freedom. I reminded its members that they have a responsibility to the millions of taxpayers who fund their grants, and part of that responsibility entails a modicum of respect and a willingness to accept an open discussion of evolutionary theory in public schools.

Myers replies:

Now we see exposed the Discovery Institute's opinion of scientists: they are parasites, suckling at the public teat…and that we should be divorced from civic responsibilities altogether.

Scientists aren’t parasites. Experimental biologists, physicists, astronomers, chemists, and medical researchers are employees of the people who fund them, generally taxpayers. Most scientists do their work with humility and integrity. They understand, at least implicitly, that they have a responsibility to the public that pays their way. Few scientists engage in censorship, restriction of academic freedom, and boycotts. And they don’t consider such anti-science advocacy a ‘civic responsibility;’ they exercise civic responsibility by welcoming and even encouraging questions about their scientific theories. They respectfully engage those who disagree with their scientific viewpoints. They don’t censor and they don’t boycott, because boycotts and censorship are ideological tactics, not scientific discourse.

I reserve the appellation "parasites" for Darwinists, at least those Darwinists who oppose academic freedom and who sneer at most Americans for whom scientific explanations in nature need not be restricted to unintelligent causes. Many Darwinists — at least Darwinian fundamentalists like Myers — are atheist ideologues who despise the religious beliefs of ordinary Americans who pay their way. Darwinist ‘civic responsibility’ consists of denying other people the freedom to act in accordance with their own views of civic responsibility, which include the civic responsibility to establish educational policy for their own children in their own schools.

Darwinists make their living from ordinary people who they ridicule, censor, and boycott. In this respect they’re not scientists at all; they’re ideologues — atheist fundamentalists — who use science and public funding to advance their metaphysics.

Myers writes:

... What Egnor proposes here is nothing less than a naked threat to use the ignorance of the mob to attack science. [emphasis mine]

American taxpayers who fund scientific research are not "ignorant" and they're not a "mob."

The American public is Dr. Myers’ employer, and for many years it has patiently underwritten the Darwinist ideological crusade. Americans’ patience will run out someday, and they will decide to use their hard-earned tax money to employ ethical scientists who respect academic freedom and who advance real science, not atheist metaphysics.

Posted by Michael Egnor on March 5, 2009 10:55 AM

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Charles' Non-Controversial Theory Generates Controversy

The real world has the habbit of denying darwinian pipe dreams.

Darwinist Charles Johnson believes that there is no controversy "among real scientists" about "evolution".

Putting aside Charles' definition of "real scientist" (which in darwinian vocabulary means "he who believes in evolution") and putting aside whatever he means by "evolution" (which in darwinian mantra means "change" - hmm...where have I heard that before?), the truth of the matter is that there are qualified non-young earth creationist (YEC) scientists who look at Neo-Darwinism and say: No enough evidence to suport it's claims!

Perhaps PhD Skell doesn't know about science

National Academy Scientist Says Darwin's Theory of Evolution is Being Oversold

A robust debate about Darwinian evolution has been taking place over at Forbes.com recently. The venerable techonomy site published over 20 articles in honor of Darwin's birthday, four of which were from ID proponents.

As usual, having any articles skeptical of Darwinism is a bridge too far for some, namely Darwin defender Jerry Coyne who attacked not just the authors, but Forbes itself for the temerity to discuss such views publicly.

No less than a member of the National Academy has responded. Forbes.com has just posted a piece by Philip S. Skell, The Dangers Of Overselling Evolution.

Skell argues that ...

Darwinian evolution is being pushed as a theory of everything.

According to Skell it is being oversold to the public as the foundation of all modern scientific breakthroughs without any basis in reality.

Writes Skell:

To conflate contemporary scientific studies of existing organisms with those of the paleontologists serves mainly to misguide the public and teachers of the young. An examination of the papers in the National Academy of Sciences' premiere journal, The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), as well as many other journals and the Nobel awards for biological discoveries, supports the crucial distinction I am making.

Examining the major advances in biological knowledge, one fails to find any real connection between biological history and the experimental designs that have produced today's cornucopia of knowledge of how the great variety of living organisms perform their functions.

It is our knowledge of how these organisms actually operate, not speculations about how they may have arisen millions of years ago, that is essential to doctors, veterinarians, farmers and other practitioners of biological science.

It is widely accepted that the growth of science and technology in the West, which accounts for the remarkable advances we enjoy today in medicine, agriculture, travel, communications, etc., coincided with the separation, several centuries ago, of the experimental sciences from the dominance of the other important fields of philosophy, metaphysics, theology and history.

Yet many popularizers of Darwin's theory now claim that without the study of ancient biological history, our students will not be prepared to engage in the great variety of modern experimental activities expected of them.

The public should view with profound alarm this unnecessary and misguided reintroduction of speculative historical, philosophical and religious ideas into the realms of experimental science.

It is more crucial to consider history in the fields of astrophysics and geology than in biology. For example, the electromagnetic radiations arriving at our detectors inform us of the ongoing events that occurred billions of years ago in distant parts of our universe that have been traveling for all this time to reach us. And the rock formations of concern to geologists have resided largely undisturbed since their formations.

But fossils fail to inform us of the nature of our ancient antecedents--because they have been transformed into stones that give us only a minuscule, often misleading impression of their former essences and thus are largely irrelevant to modern biology's experimentations with living organisms.

For instance, we cannot rely upon ruminations about the fossil record to lead us to a prediction of the evolution of the ambient flu virus so that we can prepare the vaccine today for next year's more virulent strain.

That would be like depending upon our knowledge of ancient Hittite economics to understand 21st-century economics.

Read the entire essay here.

If you're interested in more about what Dr. Skell thinks about Darwinian evolution, and about how he came to be a Darwin skeptic you can listen to three short but informative interviews with him at ID The Future.

Interview with National Academy of Sciences Member Philip Skell, Part One
In this ID the Future podcast, Casey Luskin interviews Philip S. Skell, Emeritus Evan Pugh Professor at Pennsylvania State University and member of the National Academy of Sciences. Dr. Skell discusses his research, which has included work on reactive intermediates in chemistry, free-atom reactions, and reactions of free carbonium ions.

Interview with National Academy of Sciences Member Philip Skell, Part Two
On this episode of ID the Future, National Academy of Sciences member Phillip Skell shares his story of becoming a Darwin-skeptic with Casey Luskin, explaining how his experience in antibiotic research and the questions he posed to his colleagues inspired his 2005 article in The Scientist, “Why Do We Invoke Darwin?: Evolutionary theory contributes little to experimental biology.”

Interview with National Academy of Sciences Member Philip Skell, Part Three
On this episode of ID the Future, Casey Luskin interviews National Academy of Sciences member Phillip Skell on his advice for young scientists who may be Darwin-skeptics. Dr. Skell has been outspoken in his stand for academic freedom and against intolerance.

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Biologist says: "Teach Creationism in Science Classes"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2008/sep/11/michael.reiss.creationism

Science lessons should tackle creationism and intelligent design

Teachers need to accommodate the differing world views of students from Jewish, Christian or Muslim backgrounds – which means openly discussing creationism and intelligent design as alternatives to evolutionary theory

Photograph: Frank Baron

Link to this audio

What should science teachers do when faced with students who are creationists? Definitions of creationism vary, but about 10% of people in the UK believe that the Earth is only some 10,000 years old, that it came into existence as described in the early parts of the Bible or the Qur'an and that the most evolution has done is to split species into closely related species.

At the same time, the overwhelming majority of biologists consider evolution to be the central concept in biological sciences, providing a conceptual framework that unifies every aspect of the life sciences into a single coherent discipline. Equally, the overwhelming majority of scientists believe that the universe is of the order of about 13 to 14 billion years old.

Evolution and cosmology are understood by many to be a religious issue because they can be seen to contradict the accounts of origins of life and the universe described in the Jewish, Christian and Muslim Scriptures. The issue seems like an ongoing dispute that has science and religion battling to support the credibility of their explanations.

I feel that creationism is best seen by science teachers not as a misconception but as a world view. The implication of this is that the most a science teacher can normally hope to achieve is to ensure that students with creationist beliefs understand the scientific position. In the short term, this scientific world view is unlikely to supplant a creationist one.

So how might one teach evolution in science lessons, say to 14 to 16-year-olds? Many scientists, and some science educators, fear that consideration of creationism or intelligent design in a science classroom legitimises them.

For example, the excellent book Science, Evolution, and Creationism published by the US National Academy of Sciences and Institute of Medicine, asserts: "The ideas offered by intelligent design creationists are not the products of scientific reasoning. Discussing these ideas in science classes would not be appropriate given their lack of scientific support."

I agree with the first sentence but disagree with the second. Just because something lacks scientific support doesn't seem to me a sufficient reason to omit it from a science lesson. When I was taught physics at school, and taught it extremely well in my view, what I remember finding so exciting was that we could discuss almost anything providing we were prepared to defend our thinking in a way that admitted objective evidence and logical argument.

So when teaching evolution, there is much to be said for allowing students to raise any doubts they have (hardly a revolutionary idea in science teaching) and doing one's best to have a genuine discussion. The word 'genuine' doesn't mean that creationism or intelligent design deserve equal time.

However, in certain classes, depending on the comfort of the teacher in dealing with such issues and the make-up of the student body, it can be appropriate to deal with the issue. If questions or issues about creationism and intelligent design arise during science lessons they can be used to illustrate a number of aspects of how science works.

Having said that, I don't believe that such teaching is easy. Some students get very heated; others remain silent even if they disagree profoundly with what is said.

I do believe in taking seriously and respectfully the concerns of students who do not accept the theory of evolution, while still introducing them to it. While it is unlikely that this will help students who have a conflict between science and their religious beliefs to resolve the conflict, good science teaching can help students to manage it – and to learn more science.

Creationism can profitably be seen not as a simple misconception that careful science teaching can correct. Rather, a student who believes in creationism has a non-scientific way of seeing the world, and one very rarely changes one's world view as a result of a 50-minute lesson, however well taught.

Michael Reiss is professor of science education at the Institute of Education, University of London, and director of education at the Royal Society

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