THE EDGE OF EVOLUTION
The Search for the Limits of Darwinism.

By Michael J. Behe.

320 pp. Free Press. $28.

Dawkin’s New York Times review is a model exposé of what has been called “the breathtaking inanity” of so-called Intelligent Design. I’m not generally prone to reproducing in their entirety pieces of writing from newspapers, but this gem should be more widely read.

I had expected to be as irritated by Michael Behe’s second book as by his first. I had not expected to feel sorry for him. The first — “Darwin’s Black Box” (1996), which purported to make the scientific case for “intelligent design” — was enlivened by a spark of conviction, however misguided. The second is the book of a man who has given up. Trapped along a false path of his own rather unintelligent design, Behe has left himself no escape. Poster boy of creationists everywhere, he has cut himself adrift from the world of real science. And real science, in the shape of his own department of biological sciences at Lehigh University, has publicly disowned him, via a remarkable disclaimer on its Web site: “While we respect Prof. Behe’s right to express his views, they are his alone and are in no way endorsed by the department. It is our collective position that intelligent design has no basis in science, has not been tested experimentally and should not be regarded as scientific.” As the Chicago geneticist Jerry Coyne wrote recently, in a devastating review of Behe’s work in The New Republic, it would be hard to find a precedent.

For a while, Behe built a nice little career on being a maverick. His colleagues might have disowned him, but they didn’t receive flattering invitations to speak all over the country and to write for The New York Times. Behe’s name, and not theirs, crackled triumphantly around the memosphere. But things went wrong, especially at the famous 2005 trial where Judge John E. Jones III immortally summed up as “breathtaking inanity” the effort to introduce intelligent design into the school curriculum in Dover, Pa. After his humiliation in court, Behe — the star witness for the creationist side — might have wished to re-establish his scientific credentials and start over. Unfortunately, he had dug himself in too deep. He had to soldier on. “The Edge of Evolution” is the messy result, and it doesn’t make for attractive reading.

We now hear less about “irreducible complexity,” with good reason. In “Darwin’s Black Box,” Behe simply asserted without justification that particular biological structures (like the bacterial flagellum, the tiny propeller by which bacteria swim) needed all their parts to be in place before they would work, and therefore could not have evolved incrementally. This style of argument remains as unconvincing as when Darwin himself anticipated it. It commits the logical error of arguing by default. Two rival theories, A and B, are set up. Theory A explains loads of facts and is supported by mountains of evidence. Theory B has no supporting evidence, nor is any attempt made to find any. Now a single little fact is discovered, which A allegedly can’t explain. Without even asking whether B can explain it, the default conclusion is fallaciously drawn: B must be correct. Incidentally, further research usually reveals that A can explain the phenomenon after all: thus the biologist Kenneth R. Miller (a believing Christian who testified for the other side in the Dover trial) beautifully showed how the bacterial flagellar motor could evolve via known functional intermediates.

Behe correctly dissects the Darwinian theory into three parts: descent with modification, natural selection and mutation. Descent with modification gives him no problems, nor does natural selection. They are “trivial” and “modest” notions, respectively. Do his creationist fans know that Behe accepts as “trivial” the fact that we are African apes, cousins of monkeys, descended from fish?

The crucial passage in “The Edge of Evolution” is this: “By far the most critical aspect of Darwin’s multifaceted theory is the role of random mutation. Almost all of what is novel and important in Darwinian thought is concentrated in this third concept.”

What a bizarre thing to say! Leave aside the history: unacquainted with genetics, Darwin set no store by randomness. New variants might arise at random, or they might be acquired characteristics induced by food, for all Darwin knew. Far more important for Darwin was the nonrandom process whereby some survived but others perished. Natural selection is arguably the most momentous idea ever to occur to a human mind, because it — alone as far as we know — explains the elegant illusion of design that pervades the living kingdoms and explains, in passing, us. Whatever else it is, natural selection is not a “modest” idea, nor is descent with modification.

But let’s follow Behe down his solitary garden path and see where his overrating of random mutation leads him. He thinks there are not enough mutations to allow the full range of evolution we observe. There is an “edge,” beyond which God must step in to help. Selection of random mutation may explain the malarial parasite’s resistance to chloroquine, but only because such micro-organisms have huge populations and short life cycles. A fortiori, for Behe, evolution of large, complex creatures with smaller populations and longer generations will fail, starved of mutational raw materials.

If mutation, rather than selection, really limited evolutionary change, this should be true for artificial no less than natural selection. Domestic breeding relies upon exactly the same pool of mutational variation as natural selection. Now, if you sought an experimental test of Behe’s theory, what would you do? You’d take a wild species, say a wolf that hunts caribou by long pursuit, and apply selection experimentally to see if you could breed, say, a dogged little wolf that chivies rabbits underground: let’s call it a Jack Russell terrier. Or how about an adorable, fluffy pet wolf called, for the sake of argument, a Pekingese? Or a heavyset, thick-coated wolf, strong enough to carry a cask of brandy, that thrives in Alpine passes and might be named after one of them, the St. Bernard? Behe has to predict that you’d wait till hell freezes over, but the necessary mutations would not be forthcoming. Your wolves would stubbornly remain unchanged. Dogs are a mathematical impossibility.

Don’t evade the point by protesting that dog breeding is a form of intelligent design. It is (kind of), but Behe, having lost the argument over irreducible complexity, is now in his desperation making a completely different claim: that mutations are too rare to permit significant evolutionary change anyway. From Newfies to Yorkies, from Weimaraners to water spaniels, from Dalmatians to dachshunds, as I incredulously close this book I seem to hear mocking barks and deep, baying howls of derision from 500 breeds of dogs — every one descended from a timber wolf within a time frame so short as to seem, by geological standards, instantaneous.

If correct, Behe’s calculations would at a stroke confound generations of mathematical geneticists, who have repeatedly shown that evolutionary rates are not limited by mutation. Single-handedly, Behe is taking on Ronald Fisher, Sewall Wright, J. B. S. Haldane, Theodosius Dobzhansky, Richard Lewontin, John Maynard Smith and hundreds of their talented co-workers and intellectual descendants. Notwithstanding the inconvenient existence of dogs, cabbages and pouter pigeons, the entire corpus of mathematical genetics, from 1930 to today, is flat wrong. Michael Behe, the disowned biochemist of Lehigh University, is the only one who has done his sums right. You think?

The best way to find out is for Behe to submit a mathematical paper to The Journal of Theoretical Biology, say, or The American Naturalist, whose editors would send it to qualified referees. They might liken Behe’s error to the belief that you can’t win a game of cards unless you have a perfect hand. But, not to second-guess the referees, my point is that Behe, as is normal at the grotesquely ill-named Discovery Institute (a tax-free charity, would you believe?), where he is a senior fellow, has bypassed the peer-review procedure altogether, gone over the heads of the scientists he once aspired to number among his peers, and appealed directly to a public that — as he and his publisher know — is not qualified to rumble him.

Richard Dawkins holds the Charles Simonyi chair for the public understanding of science at Oxford. His most recent book is “The God Delusion.”

The New York Times reports on the adoption of Mindfulness-Based Education in schools to help children learn to pay attention and to handle their emotions.

“I was losing at baseball and I was about to throw a bat,” one student reported to his classmates the day after learning the technique. “The mindfulness really helped.”

Mindfulness-Based Education was featured in (my meditation teaching site) Wildmind’s first meditation news podcast, in which we interviewed Dr. Amy Salzman, who was also quoted in the Times article. A point she made in our interview was taken up by Philippe R. Goldin, a researcher at Stanford: “Parents and teachers tell kids 100 times a day to pay attention. But we never teach them how.”

Institutions like the psychology department at Stanford University and the Mindfulness Awareness Research Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, are trying to measure the effects as schools across the US train students in mindfulness.

Although mindfulness comes from a Buddhist context, it is not primarily a religious practice and involves focused attention, often centered on the breath, and awareness of the emotions combined with the cultivation of compassion. Because of its secular nature mindfulness has so far avoided the kinds of controversy in which Transcendental Meditation has become mired. Late last year plans to start a TM club in a California school were shelved after an outcry from parents.

Dr. Saltzman, co-director of the mindfulness study at Stanford, said the initial findings showed increased control of attention and “less negative internal chatter — what one girl described as ‘the gossip inside my head: I’m stupid, I’m fat or I’m going to fail math,’ ” Dr. Saltzman said.

According to the article a recent study of teenagers by Kaiser Permanente in San Jose, California, found that meditation techniques helped improve mood disorders, depression, and self-harming behaviors like anorexia and bulimia.

The Times article has a healthy skepticism about the notion of mindfulness as the answer to all of life’s problems, with a statements such as mindfulness is “not a magic bullet” being quoted from Diana Winston, director of mindfulness education at the U.C.L.A. Mindful Awareness Research Center, and a second grade teacher observing that “some students tapped pencils and drummed on desks instead of closing their eyes.”

Nevertheless, mindfulness in education is an idea whose time has surely come. Children today are massively overstimulated and living under greater levels of stress than their parents’ or grandparents’ generations. Tools for handling the stress of modern life as a child or teenager are urgently needed.

I’d been watching its progress from Shanghai, via Anchorage, across the continental US and to my doorstep. It had seemed like a long, long wait, but there it was yesterday morning — at last, my new Mac.

As always Apple’s packaging was beautifully presented. The computer was in a slim matt-black box adorned with a side-view of an unbelievably slender laptop, and even the styrofoam packing was sculpted: reminiscent of Islamic tile mosaics.

And I couldn’t believe how slim the notebook actually was. It made my two-year-old 12″ Powerbook look lumpen in comparison. It has a 200GB hard drive, a 2.2GHz Intel processor, 2GB of RAM, and a 15″ wide-format LCD display.

I restrained myself from starting the new machine up right away because I was waiting for a new firewire cable — which I’d ordered separately — to arrive later that day. The cable allows for easy transfer of all my files and applications from one computer to the other, and I’d heard it was better to do this while starting the computer for the first time.

The cable didn’t arrive until about 4:00 PM. I hooked up the two computers and restarted the old machine while holding down the T key, which made it go into firewire mode — basically a blank screen with a dancing firewire icon. I hit a button on the new machine and it started to suck the data across. It took around 90 minutes to make the transfer. Astonishingly, the new machine was now a clone of the old one. The only application I had to tweak was Hidden Sync (it synchronizes the Mac with my Lifedrive) and all I had to do there was to type in the old activation code. Apart from that the transition was completely seamless. Everything was copied across — all of my settings, my bookmarks, my files, my emails — everything. I can’t tell you how much easier this move was than the last time I bought a PC, after which I literally spent days transferring information from one computer to another, downloading programs that I’d bought on the internet, finding old installation discs, tracking down installation codes, and reconfiguring all the settings on programs to get them working the way I wanted.

Both computers are running OS X (Tiger) and because I’d cloned the old applications I wasn’t expecting anything new. But in the box was a thin and very beautifully designed remote control. It seemed a bit excessive for a laptop, I thought, but when I tried it out I was delighted. The remote brought up a rotating diplay of four icons — for iTunes, iPhoto, the DVD player, and iMovie (which plays videos stored on the hard drive, including videos I’ve downloaded from the iTunes store). The animation of the icons is delightful. They rotate with a gentle swooshing sound, and it’s the kind of feature where you play with the menu just because it’s such fun. The menus are purposefully large so that they can be read across a room, making the remote control very useful for presentations or even just playing music while you’re sprawled on the couch. What a great feature!

I’m still getting used to the slightly larger keyboard and keep hitting the caps lock key instead of the “A” key, but that’s not the computer’s fault.

Next up is to download Parallels, which will allow me to run Windows 2000 in a window, meaning that you can run both Operating Systems at the same time without having to reboot. This will allow me to replace the Windows desktop computer that I use in the office. I’ll be replacing two computers with this new one and selling the others, and the old machines should pay for at least half of the new Mac. I understand that Parallels does a similar trick to OS X of “sucking” the data and applications from the old PC to the new Mac. I’m downloading the software and can’t wait to try it. can’t wait to try it!

Back in the late 1980’s I devoured a noble work edited (and written in part by) by Donald MacKinnon, “Objections to Christian Belief,” which contained essays on moral, psychological, historical, and intellectual arguments against Christianity. The four authors were not rampant atheists, but rather were lecturers in divinity at the University of Cambridge, and their purpose was to present in an honest way what they saw as valid, and yet unanswered, arguments against Christianity. I greatly admired the integrity of the authors and the way in which they looked directly into the challenges against their faith.

I recall being particularly struck by a point in MacKinnon’s essay on moral objections to Christianity, which was along the lines that Christianity can encourage dishonesty amongst its believers. For example, in stating as facts such things as “Christ’s mother was a virgin” and “Christ rose from the dead” — i.e. assertions that cannot be verified — Christians in effect practice falsehoods.

This is something that has preoccupied me over the years, and this preoccupation looms large at the moment, especially since I now live in the largely Christian United States, and even more especially because of the many ways in which the fundamentalist wing of Christianity here distorts the truth in seeking to expand its powers.

For example I’ve written twice now about the new “Creation Museum,” or as I prefer to call it, “The Museum of Lies.” The Creation Museum project is based on the preposterous notion that a collection of mythical writings by Bronze Age nomads provides a more accurate guide to the physical world in which we live than the observations, experimentation, and verified theoretical models built up by generations of scientists.

Now some Christians are no doubt simply ill-educated on questions of geology, biology, and cosmology. After all, many Christians know little even about their own faith. Only 40 percent of Americans can name more than four of the Ten Commandments, and a scant half can cite any of the four authors of the Gospels, according to a 2005 article in Harpers. Even more astonishingly, twelve percent believe Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife. I’d imagine that I, Buddhist as I am, know more about Christianity than many American Christians. And if they don’t know much about their own religion beliefs, how can they be expected to know much about fields of inquiry that contradict those beliefs.

Yet it’s inconceivable that all of these fundamentalists actually believe in the logical contortions to which they subject scientific fact. Do those who put the Creation Museum together really do believe that, say, that the Grand Canyon was formed in a matter of days or that dinosaurs coexisted with humans and that, moreover, they were vegetarian (the big pointy teeth were for cracking coconuts, apparently)? I think not. They know the truth and desperately scrabble for any half-way logical-sounding notion that will undermine the truth and prevent the faithful from beginning to ask questions that could result in them abandoning Christianity altogether.

An even more recent example of Christian untruthfulness than last week’s opening of the Museum of Lies example of Christian dissimulation was an article, “Evolution and dissent,” in the Boston Globe this week, in which David K. DeWolf, a professor of law at Gonzaga Law School in Spokane, Washington, and a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute in Seattle (home of “Creationism redux,” or “Intelligent Design”) presents some lawyerly distortions of the truth. I almost admire DeWolf’s skill in lying. He’s really good at it.

One of DeWolf’s techniques is to suggest bias where there is none. For example, in response to various presidential candidates being asked if they believe in evolution, DeWolf says:

As several commentators have pointed out, these are trick questions, because “evolution” was never defined. Do I believe that the Corvette has evolved over the years? Yes, I do. Do I think that it evolved by random mutation and natural selection? No, I don’t.

It’s hardly a “trick question” to ask someone if they believe in evolution. A trick question is designed, well, to trick someone, for example by suggesting that two alternatives offered are the only alternatives (”Do you believe that God created the earth, or do you believe that life is meaningless?”). I think it’s a safe assumption that those who have questioned our potential presidents on their views are not interested in knowing if the candidates believe that the design of a motor vehicle has changed over the years — they are clearly asking whether they believe that species have evolved in a process of Darwinian evolution. DeWolf knows this, of course.

DeWolf goes on:

At the New Hampshire debate, Wolf Blitzer asked Arizona Senator John McCain a follow-up question: “Do you believe creationism should be taught alongside evolution in the nation’s schools?” This too is a trick question, because no serious advocate wants to teach “creationism.”

That’s a lie. Many people have in fact — and do in fact — seriously advocate that creationism be taught in schools. It is only court cases, in which the separation of church and state has been affirmed, that has prevented creationism from being taught in United States schools in states such as Kansas and Arkansas. The latter state, for example, passed Act 590 in 1981, which mandated that in all public schools, creation science must be given “balanced treatment.”

DeWolf knows this better than I do. So why does he lie and say that “no serious advocate” wishes to teach creationism in schools? The reason is strategic. The effort to intrude creationism in schools has failed in the courts. It’s dead — for now. So the creationists have repackaged their products. As a result of courts having banned creationism from schools Christians have reformulated creationism and tried to present it in a pseudo-scientific form — Intelligent Design — which DeWolf himself advocates. In the court-case in Dover, Pennsylvania, last year, it emerged that creationism textbooks had simply been republished with the word “creationism” replaced with the phrase “Intelligent Design.” The judge, incidentally, accused several school board members of lying to conceal their true motive, which he said was to promote Christianity.

Similarly, DeWolf lies in order to sound more reasonable. He doesn’t support the teaching of creationism in schools, heavens no! Well, not until the time is right. I suspect he just wants to get a foot in the door until enough fundamentalists are in the US Supreme Court that the constitution can be overcome and Christianity can be taught openly. In the meantime, ID will have to suffice because Creationism has failed.

A standard technique of creationists/ID advocates that DeWolf employs is to suggest controversy where there is none:

There is increasing skepticism among thoughtful scientists of a central claim of neo-Darwinism, namely that complex living systems can be generated from mindless processes like random mutation and natural selection.

Stated as is, this sentence is of course true — but it is also highly misleading and intentionally so. It is therefore no less a lie than an out-and-out untruth. Leaving that “thoughtful” aside there may be increasing skepticism among some scientists about evolution — but such skepticism is found among a small minority of scientists, the vast majority of whom are Christians (and therefore not predisposed to accept facts that challenge their beliefs), and the majority of whom, moreover, are not involved in the field of biology. Without these qualifications the sentence is in fact misleading — intentionally so. DeWolf wants to create the impression that there is serious doubt in the scientific community about the fact of evolution, when that is not the case.

…the question that Wolf Blitzer should have asked would be along these lines: “Do you think that the topic of Darwinian evolution should be taught objectively in our public schools, with evidence for and against the theory?”

Of course there is no substantive evidence against the theory of evolution. Here DeWolf means “do you think Intelligent Design should be taught alongside (he dare not yet hope for an “instead of” — that’s for another day) evolution?” It sounds more respectable to suggest that Intelligent Design contains “evidence” against evolution. But Intelligent Design supplies no such evidence. It simply says “we don’t understand everything, so let’s stop trying to understand it and say that it was the hand of God.” ID advocates have produced not a shred of evidence that the current forms of life are the result of intelligent design. It’s not even a theory, not even a hypothesis. There aren’t even any observations that are mildly suggestive of intelligent design.

Some candidates would undoubtedly answer “No,” asserting that there “is no debate” over evolution and that teaching “both sides” of a non controversy does a disservice to students.

But we have heard that rhetoric elsewhere. For example, Al Gore has famously said that the debate is over regarding global warming. Even assuming that human beings cause global warming, scientists vigorously debate how significant the human contribution is and how beneficial remedial measures would be. “The debate is over” really means, “My mind is made up. Don’t confuse me with the facts.”

This is the most astonishing non sequitur. Because Al Gore is confident that the weight of scientific evidence for human-induced global warming is overwhelmingly persuasive, the argument that ID does not provide a reasoned critique of evolution is to be discarded. I think I speak for all of us when I say, “Huh?”

Suggesting that global warming is controversial (when it is the opinion of the vast majority of scientists that it is indeed a fact) is the same trick that DeWolf plays when he suggests that Evolution is controversial.

He goes on to suggest that there is a political conspiracy against ID advocates. This is another popular technique: suggest that the ideas are unpopular not because they are unsupported by the facts but because their opponents have too much investment in the status quo. (Admittedly, of course, this does happen at times).

You might think that a public high school is a poor venue for controversies in science. But even in higher education political and ideological agendas are threatening academic freedom. For example, Guillermo Gonzalez, a talented astronomer at Iowa State University, was recently denied tenure. Gonzalez has published 68 scientific papers, more than three times the number normally expected for tenure in his department. His college textbook on astronomy was published by Cambridge University Press. His work has been featured in top scientific journals, including a cover story in Scientific American.

But in 2004 Gonzalez co authored a book, “The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos is Designed for Discovery,” which made the case for attributing the life-sustaining features of our planet to something other than random chance. This was too much for some colleagues at ISU. A petition was circulated by a religious studies professor and signed by 120 colleagues, affirming their rejection of “all attempts to represent intelligent design as a scientific endeavor.”

I do in fact think that high schools are not the best place for controversies in science — although I believe that because I think it’s hard enough to get high school students to learn science without complicating things and not because I think there is any genuine controversy about the fact of evolution.

I haven’t read Gonzalez’s book, but I took a look at its Amazon page and was appalled by what I saw:

“By assessing the elements that compose our planet, they argue, we can tell that it was designed for multicellular organic life. The presence of carbon, oxygen and water in the right proportions makes it possible for organic life to exist; and this combination of minerals and chemical elements exists only on Earth.”

This — although admittedly just an extract from the blurb — is the most dreadful nonsense. The proportions of oxygen and other gases, to take just one example, have changed enormously over the eons. At first, 4.5 billion years ago there was no free oxygen on earth, and oxygen was a poison to living beings. Oxygen didn’t appear in the atmosphere until the evolution of plants, and life had to adapt to oxygen’s presence. Life and our atmosphere have co-evolved. Life is perfectly suited to our atmosphere because it’s evolved to suit that atmosphere. In fact some life cannot survive oxygen. Were bogs intelligently designed so that anaerobic bacteria could live there, or did some bacteria evolved to thrive in oxygen-free conditions? You choose.

As for Gonzalez’s denial of tenure, the Chronicle of Higher Education noted that Gonzalez had no major grants during his seven years at ISU, had published no significant research during that time and had only one graduate student finish a dissertation. That’s a pretty poor record, and in fact the president of Iowa State University recorded that he “specifically considered refereed publications, [Gonzalez's] level of success in attracting research funding and grants, the amount of telescope observing time he had been granted, the number of graduate students he had supervised, and most importantly, the overall evidence of future career promise in the field of astronomy” and that Gonzalez “simply did not show the trajectory of excellence that we expect in a candidate seeking tenure in physics and astronomy — one of our strongest academic programs.”

So much for “ideological agendas … threatening academic freedom”! Gonzales simply disn’t do what’s required to earn tenure. DeWolf knows this too, but he’s not interested in the truth.

DeWolf tries to present himself as a defender of academic neutrality against the forces of “political correctness” in science:

Some may have the illusion that science is devoid of politics. But whether we debate the efficacy of a pharmaceutical drug, the risks of electromagnetic radiation, or the potential benefit of embryonic stem cells, financial and ideological agendas are not easily set aside. As bad as political correctness may be in the humanities and social sciences, we should be particularly alarmed by a threat to the right to dissent from the “mainstream” when it comes to scientific knowledge, often a critical component of our public policy.

And yet somehow DeWolf thinks it’s acceptable that Christian-inspired pseudoscience be taught in our high schools. His motivation is entirely political.

Dewolf tries to position himself as a defender of academic freedom, when in actual fact he wants the freedom to have an academically meaningless subject (ID) taught in schools.

Those with the courage to challenge reigning orthodoxies ought to be able to follow the scientific evidence where it leads. Some may study the scientific evidence for Darwinian evolution and conclude that there is no God. Some may study the evidence for intelligent design and conclude that atheism is irrational. Some may reach the conclusion that Darwinian evolution and religious faith are perfectly compatible. The question of how best to explain the appearance of design in the universe should be fair game; scientists, teachers, and students should have the right to reach the answer that each finds most satisfying.

Challenging reigning orthodoxies is indeed a noble and courageous pursuit. Galileo, for example, observed that the moons of Jupiter revolved around that planet, and realized that the reigning orthodoxy that the planets were embedded in crystal spheres was false. Copernicus observed the heavens and realized that the model of a heliocentric universe fitted his observations better than the geocentric orthodoxy. Darwin made countless observations before theorizing that the orthodoxy of species being fixed and immutable was false. In all these cases observations were made that collided with the reigning orthodoxy. On the basis of those observations, hypotheses were formed. Those hypotheses were tested and attained the status of theories (models of natural phenomena, with predictive power, and capable of being tested through experiment or otherwise falsified through empirical observation).

By contrast, ID starts with the idea that the universe was designed by god, although trying to appear scientific, they pretend that they haven’t yet established who the designer is. ID starts not with observation, but with ideas, and ignores any data that suggest that evolution was not in fact directed. It’s a dishonest project run by dishonest people.

They are also, like DeWolf, often very intelligent people, and capable of using words in ways that are calculated to mislead. Beware the clever liar — the one who can lie without actually lying.

Where’s Buddhism in all this? Actually, it’s everywhere. As a practicing Buddhist I have a concern for the truth. The kind of deception that DeWolf practices is abhorrent to me, which is why I write about it. I’m of Donald MacKinnon’s school of thought, that when there are reasonable arguments against a religious belief those arguments should be honestly addressed.

Buddhism is not a religion of faith. It’s a religion of practice. There is no need in Buddhism for a creation myth, because what we’re concerned about is the here and now — how to live our lives with authenticity. This is something that is apparently foreign to DeWolf and other supporters of so-called Intelligent Design.

But I’ll give the last word to a wise man: “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” Amen to that.

I got this email from Apple yesterday, helping to keep up my excitement about the impending iPhone. I’d really like to get an iPhone for a few reasons, the first being that it’s a very, very cool little device and I’m filled with technolust, and the second being that it would allow me to get rid of my LifeDrive, my cellphone, and my iPod and replace them with one device. I like technology but I’m not so keen on having bulging pockets on my trousers.

I don’t particularly mind the price tag of $500 since I can sell my existing devices to offset the cost (and actually it would be a business expense) although I’m less keen on having to make large monthly payments to AT&T for service. I’m not really a huge phone user! (On the other hand the iPhone is so much more than a phone that that doesn’t seem to be a major consideration).

So for now I’m working on being mindful of my technolust, realizing that I do have a choice about whether to buy this thing or not, and waiting to for a more thoughtful response than “I want one now!” to emerge.

Practicing mindfulness is probably not what Apple have in mind as part of “waiting for iPhone,” but there you have it.

iPhone arrives on June 29. iPhone features an amazing mobile phone, is the best iPod we’ve ever created, and puts the Internet in your pocket with desktop-class email, web browsing, searching, and maps. And iPhone makes it all easy to use with its revolutionary multi-touch user interface. iPhone syncs with your PC or Mac just like an iPod, so organizing your content now will help you start calling, texting, emailing, surfing, listening, and watching even faster when you get your iPhone. Here are a few suggestions to help you get ready:

Making a call with iPhone is as simple as tapping a name. You won’t need to re-enter all your contacts because iPhone syncs with the address book you already use on your computer—Address Book or Entourage on a Mac, or Outlook or Outlook Express on a PC. If you keep your contacts on the web using Yahoo! Address Book, iPhone can sync with them, too. To get ready for iPhone, organize your contacts in one of these applications and make sure they’re up to date with the latest phone numbers and email addresses. If you don’t have contacts on your computer, don’t worry. You can still enter them directly into iPhone.

Using its built-in calendar, iPhone lets you check your appointments with the flick of a finger. iPhone uses iTunes to sync with the calendar application you already use on your computer—iCal or Entourage on the Mac, or Outlook on a PC—just like it does with your contacts. If you don’t already use one of these applications to manage your appointments, now is a great time to start, so you’ll be ready to sync when your iPhone arrives. If you choose not to use a calendar program, that’s OK. You’ll be able to enter appointments directly into the iPhone calendar.

iPhone is the first phone to come with a desktop-class email application. So now your phone can display rich HTML email with graphics and photos alongside the text. iPhone will even fetch your latest email every time you open the application and automatically retrieve your email on a set schedule, just like a computer does. iPhone works with the most popular email systems—including Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, AOL, and .Mac Mail. If you’re not already using one of these services, now would be a great time to get an account. iTunes will make email setup on iPhone a breeze by automatically syncing the settings from email accounts stored in Mail on a Mac or Outlook on a PC. Don’t worry if you’re not on one of these email services; iPhone also works with almost any industry-standard POP3 and IMAP email system.

iPhone has a 2-megapixel camera and a gorgeous 3.5-inch display, so it’s a great way to enjoy and show off your digital photos. iPhone uses iTunes to sync your photos from iPhoto on a Mac or Adobe Photoshop Elements, Adobe Photoshop Album, or any picture folder on a PC. You can carry thousands of photos on iPhone, but you can start by creating an album or two with 50 to 100 of your favorite photos, so that when you first sync your iPhone, you’ll be ready to quickly show off some of your best shots.

iPhone is the best iPod ever. Its beautiful, 3.5-inch widescreen display allows you to easily enjoy the music, TV shows, and movies you have in your iTunes library. If you already use iTunes, you can start getting ready for iPhone by creating a playlist of a few hundred of your favorite songs. If you don’t have iTunes, now is a good time to download it and start a music and video library. That way, when you sync your iPhone with iTunes, you’ll be able to take your favorite music, as well as a few of your TV shows and movies, with you wherever you go.

To set up your iPhone, you’ll need an account with Apple’s iTunes Store. If you already have an iTunes account, make sure you know your account name and password. If you don’t have an account, you should set one up now to save time later. To set up an account, launch iTunes, select the iTunes Store, and click the Sign In button in the upper right corner of iTunes. Sign in and you’re ready to go.

Last year I wrote about the case of Genarlow Wilson, a boy who at 17 years of age was sentenced to ten years in prison for having consensual oral sex with a younger girl. The 15-year-old girl initiated a sex act with Genarlow, who was then convicted of “aggravated child molestation.” Now Genarlow acted inappropriately, but his ten year sentence and the fact that he would be branded as a child molester for the rest of his life seemed completely disproportionate. Had Genarlow had full sex with the girl it would have been considered a lesser offense!

After Wilson’s conviction and sentence, the Georgia legislature changed the statute realizing it was unfair, and consensual oral sex between teens is now a misdemeanor rather than a felony. However Genarlow was convicted under the old law, and faced the prospect of being in prison for something that was no longer considered a serious crime.

The update is that on Monday a judge ordered Wilson’s release. There are still hurdles because the Attorney General for the state of Georgia is insisting on an appeal.

For more sex-crime absurdity, check out this story about an eight-year-old boy in Utah who was dared by his 14-year-old babysitter to touch her breasts. The outcome? The boy gets charged with lewd conduct! The charges were later dropped, but it’s unconscionable that a child as young as that be held responsible for a sex crime under such circumstances.

I cannot feel proud of the glow of schadenfreude I felt when I read the headline, “Creation Museum’s ‘Adam’ shared sexual exploits online,” although my delight was heartfelt. The story is that Eric Linden, who plays Adam in a multimedia presentation at the new Creation Museum, owns a pornographic website called “Bedroom Acrobat.” And so it came to pass that Adam was cast out of the museum while the owners investigated.

According to blogger Media Czech at Blue Grass Roots, a field trip revealed that the museum offers the following sage advice to visitors: “Don’t think, just listen and believe.” Czech describes the our as “two hours of pure laughter.” I guess you have to laugh or you’ll cry.

Meanwhile, over at Ars Technica, Jonathan M. Gitlin reports on a similar field-trip to the “museum.” Gitlin covers much the same route as Media Czech — I guess it’s not that big a museum despite its 60,000 square feet — but goes into less detail about the numerous absurdities involved in taking the bible as literal truth. Towards the end of his article Giflin reports that the founder of the museum, Australian Ken Ham, is being investigated by a former Chief Magistrate in his home country for deceptive conduct and other wrongdoings in relation to the Australian church organization he was once affiliated with. Ham is being sued by the Australian evangelical organization he helped to set up. The Brisbane-based Creation Ministries International has filed a lawsuit in Queensland’s Supreme Court against Mr Ham and his Kentucky-based Answers in Genesis ministry seeking damages and accusing him of deceptive conduct in his dealings with the Australian organization.

Ooh, more schadenfreude!

Even some Christians are concerned the the Museum of Lies makes Christians who don’t believe in evolution look stupid, as evidenced by this article by Michael Patrick Leahy, who also complains that the media tends to oversimplify the issues when discussing the intersection of religion and science.

And lastly, Defcon says “Thou Shalt Not Lie” and an unnamed scientist speaks up against the distortions perpetrated by the “museum” and in support of the pursuit of truth that science represents.

Another talking point has raised its ugly head: that the imprisonment of Lewis “Scooter” Libby for perjury is an injustice because there was no underlying crime.

The problem with the talking points that US political parties (and especially the Republicans) issue for the convenience of those who speak on their behalf is that they are rarely logical or even truthful. They do of course help provide a united front for the party and help shape public opinion — how many times have you heard someone say that we had to invade Iraq because fighting them over there is better than fighting them over here?

Talking points are repeated ad nauseam until they are accepted by a sufficient number of people as factual. So we can expect to hear the Scooter-as-Martyr mantra being repeated in much the same words by politicians, op-ed contributors, newspaper editorials, and in letters to the editor — over and over again. As is intended with talking points many people will accept the statement without thinking about it. It doesn’t matter if it’s a lie, as long as it’s a convenient lie — that is a lie that backs up an existing political affiliation.

The Libby-as-martyr line of argument is of course completely fallacious. Libby did lie, under oath, during an investigation of what may have been — and almost certainly was — a major crime, namely the public blowing of Valerie Plame’s cover as a CIA operative. True, no one has been convicted of this crime, but Libby’s lies and obstruction helped ensure that that was the case.

So what’s the underlying logic of this conservative talking point? That it’s OK to lie if you’re successful in obstructing justice? That if you lie enough to stop a conviction from taking place then you’ve won?

Or let’s assume for a moment that no crime was committed. Is the assumption then that lying under oath in an investigation is acceptable? That trying to prevent an investigator establishing that no crime was committed is alright?

The ironic thing is that talking points themselves are based on the assumption that it is alright to lie, that bending or breaking the truth is an acceptable tactic if it helps the party. And thus we end up with a society where the populace simply does not know the truth (believing that Iraq was behind the 9/11 attacks) and, worse, becomes incapable of even questioning whether the information they are being fed is truthful before deciding to agree with it.

And the bigger picture is that we end up with a society based on lies. Thousands of young Americans (and tens of thousands of Iraqis) have died to defend the lie that Saddam was behind 9/11. America obstructs action of global warming and risks global calamity because of the lies that say it’s “junk science” or that there’s “uncertainty.” The cost of basing a society on lies is a world that is immeasurably more dangerous. It doesn’t matter how much a man driving towards a cliff reassures his passengers that they are safe, they are headed for disaster nonetheless.

As well as the sign for “milk,” Maia now knows the one for “change.” So when she starts to get a bit squirmy and whiny she can now let me know whether she wants to be changed or whether she wants milk (that one works for when she wants to sleep as well, because she generally nods off to an ounce or two of formula).

She can’t actually make any of the signs yet, but she does respond to them with big smiles and excited, waving arms, so it’s easy to work out what she wants. The only time this doesn’t work is if she’s very hungry and gets herself into a state. When she’s crying she just doesn’t respond to the signs. It’s like she’s saying “Stop the stupid hand-gestures and get me some milk, dammit!” (She picked up the bad language from me).

I can’t tell you how much easier this makes taking care of her. There’s much less guesswork involved, and once she can actually make the signs herself it’s going to get easier still.

She’s showing signs of understanding “mommy” and “daddy” and since she’s teething we now have an opportunity to work on “pain.”

And in terms of vocal communication, Shrijnana and Maia came back from a walk today and I heard a loud “Hi!” I thought for a split second that it was Shrijnana speaking to me, but it was Maia. She managed a few sounds afterwards that sounded like she might be trying to say “hi” again, but I’m still left wondering if it was just a fluke.

The quality of her vocalizations is definitely changing, however. They’re sounding more word-like, somehow. I can’t put my finger on it.

For more on Buddhist parenthood, you might want to check out my wife’s new blog, Conscious Mom.

I spent a fair bit of time yesterday and this morning working on an article at Wildmind on celebrity Buddhists. I thought it was going to be a lighthearted little piece, and in fact I did write it in a rather flippant style, but I was surprised by how moved I was at reading these celebrities’ stories.

Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese pro-democracy advocate and prisoner of conscience, made the list, as did Tina Turner (who gained the strength to leave her abusive marriage through meditation). And I was impressed by what people had to say about the number one celebrity Buddhist, although I’m not going to tell you who that was, so you’ll have to read the article.

Wildmind Buddhist Meditation » Top 10 celebrity Buddhists

The method I used was simple. Using Google I found anyone I could who was described as a celebrity Buddhist. I did background research to make sure that only self-described Buddhists stayed on the list. And I searched for the remaining names (in quotes) and noted how many results there were for each; the more results there were, the higher the name ranked.

I was surprised by the results. Some were people I didn’t know were Buddhists. Some people that were described as Buddhists on many websites actually aren’t. And I was also surprised at who was at the top of the list!

Go check it out, and please give it a Digg while you’re at it.

Conservative writer Andrew Sullivan has an interesting piece in The Atlantic, comparing the Bush regime’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” with the “Verschärfte Vernehmung” (”enhanced interrogation techniques” — yes, it’s the same term) of Hitler’s regime.

Both Bush and the Nazis approved exactly the same torture methods, which include “stress positions,” hypothermia, sleep deprivation, and semi-starvation. The US administration of course denies that these amount to torture, hence the euphemism “enhanced interrogation.” The administration’s assertion is that for interrogation to become torture it has to involve pain that, in the words of a “Justice” Department memo (really that name is now so Orwellian) “must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.”

Sullivan points out that the Nazis did not abide by the limits originally set for them and that “Once you start torturing, it has a life of its own.” This is the case with US torture techniques as well. Inmates in Iraq and Afghanistan have died at the hands of their captors, some having been beaten to death.

A notable example was the mistreatment and death of a 22-year-old Afghan taxi driver called Dilawar, who was assaulted by four army interrogators. The interrogators subjected Dilawar to “kicks to the groin and leg, shoving or slamming him into walls/table, forcing the detainee to maintain painful, contorted body positions during interview and forcing water into his mouth until he could not breathe,” according to an army report. Mr Dilawar’s legs were beaten so badly that they were reduced to pulp. He died of “blunt force trauma to the lower extremities complicating coronary artery disease,” but had he survived his legs would have required amputation. More details of Dilawar’s mistreatment can be found in this New York Times article.

According to the Times, “Most of the interrogators had believed Mr. Dilawar was an innocent man who simply drove his taxi past the American base at the wrong time.”

Torture has a life of its own.

Sullivan points out that cases of Nazi torture involving the same “enhanced interrogation” torture techniques used by the US were prosecuted as war crimes after the end of World War II.

He’s careful to point out that he’s not “accusing the Bush administration of being Hitler,” and says, “There is no comparison between the political system in Germany in 1937 and the U.S. in 2007.”

Rather, Sullivan concludes, “The interrogation methods approved and defended by this president are not new. Many have been used in the past. The very phrase used by the president to describe torture-that-isn’t-somehow-torture - “enhanced interrogation techniques” - is a term originally coined by the Nazis. The techniques are indistinguishable. The methods were clearly understood in 1948 as war-crimes. The punishment for them was death.”

We must remember that these acts have been perpetrated under the rule of a man who aimed to bring “decency” to the White House. Isn’t it time to impeach Bush?

I found a link to this AP gem lurking at the foot of an NYT editorial today. Scary!

The Smithsonian Institution toned down an exhibition on Arctic climate change, fearing that it would anger Congress and the Bush administration, a former museum administrator said. The official text of the exhibition was rewritten to minimize and add uncertainty about the relationship between global warming and people, said the former official, Robert Sullivan, who was associate director in charge of exhibitions at the National Museum of Natural History. Officials omitted scientists’ interpretations of some research and let visitors draw their own conclusions from the data, Mr. Sullivan said. In addition, graphs were altered “to show that global warming could go either way,” he said. Museum officials denied that political concerns had influenced the exhibition, saying the changes were made to increase objectivity.