Nothing But Words

For a while now I’ve been meaning to post a rant about Creationism (now masquerading under the 21st century marketing term “Intelligent Design”). But it turns out someone else just wrote a good one: The Pseudoscience of Intelligent Design. It stands apart from other commentaries I’ve seen in that it’s both comprehensive and concise, covering both the scientific and political sides of the issue in a relatively small number of words.

But I’m sure you’re not surprised that I have a few things to add:

• The article’s rebuttal of the “Fine-Tuned Universe” argument, while I agree with it, is presented in a mathematical form that I found more distracting than compelling. I would state more simply that the Fine-Tuned Universe argument is the result of a narrow vision: to say that the universe is fine-tuned for supporting life assumes that life can only happen in the way that we know it. Were the rules of the universe fine-tuned just for us, or did we evolve to suit the physical laws of this universe? Arguing the former is to continue in the long tradition of hubris brought on by “we were created in God’s image” thinking. That is, the kind of thinking that placed the Sun in orbit around the Earth, and the Earth at the center of the universe. The kind of thinking that assumes all of this is just for us. To even begin to persuade me to this way of thinking, you’d have to run hundreds of thousands of simulations, showing what the universe would be like under a variety of combinations of different physical laws, and demonstrate that none of them would be able to support any life of any kind. But even if you were to try this, the attempt would be confounded by the fact that our understanding of life is limited to one set of physical laws, operating on one planet, in one tiny little corner of the universe.
• To see a real, substantial debate on the merits of Intelligent Design, read Intelligent Design? A special report from Natural History magazine. The magazine invited three of the top proponents of ID to take their best shots, followed by three rebuttals. The end result is a huge embarrassment for the ID folks.
• The power of the ID movement is greater than you probably think. Its impact goes beyond just a couple school boards in Kansas and Pennsylvania. It’s created a chilling effect on the teaching of evolution in schools across the country. “Teaching guides and textbooks may meet the approval of biologists, but superintendents or principals discourage teachers from discussing it. Or teachers themselves avoid the topic, fearing protests from fundamentalists in their communities” (Evolution Takes a Back Seat in U.S. Classes). And in today’s Christian Science Monitor is a report of a survey indicating 31% of science teachers feel pressure to include “creationism, intelligent design, or other nonscientific alternatives to evolution in their science classroom.” Interestingly, they report this pressure comes from students as much as parents: “critics of Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection are equipping families with books, DVDs…The Seattle-based Discovery Institute distributes a DVD, ‘Icons of Evolution,’ that encourages viewers to doubt Darwinian theory.” Teachers in the article describe being challenged at every turn by students who’ve watched the DVD at home. In and of itself, it’s a good thing to debate the merits of a scientific theory. But it’s not a good thing when the debate is simply the leading edge of a movement to replace a scientific theory with non-scientific beliefs. That is, the vast majority of ID arguments are about debunking evolution – in terms of scientific theory, ID offers little to take the place of evolution. The goal of ID is to create a vacuum into which Creationism can step as the only acceptable explanation for the existence of man. As the article concludes: “‘In some ways I think civilization is at stake because it’s about how we view our world,’ Nimz [a teacher] says. The Salem Witch Trials of 1692, for example, were possible, she says, because evidence wasn’t necessary to guide a course of action. ‘When there’s no empirical evidence, some very serious things can happen,’ she says. ‘If we can’t look around at what is really there and try to put something logical and intelligent together from that without our fears getting in the way, then I think that we’re doomed’” (Now evolving in biology classes: a testier climate).
• On a personal note, what got me thinking about all this recently has been watching Maria suffer through her pregnancy. If the design is intelligent, why do so many women suffer so needlessly? Evolution provides a better explanation. A phrase commonly misapplied to evolution is “survival of the fittest.” But the phrase “survival of the fit” is more accurate – biological competition isn’t about being the best, all the time – it’s about being just good enough, most of the time. It’s the result of trial and error design – I’ll coin the term “dumb design” for it, although that’s not exactly a winning label. Human reproduction, with all its imperfections and pitfalls, fits that model a lot more closely than the notion of some perfect, elegant, intentional design.
• I’ll close with some humor: the very funny Scientific American April Fools’ Day editorial: Okay, We Give Up and the spoof Fellowship Baptist Creation Science Fair 2001. My favorite entry is “Women Were Designed For Homemaking.”

Update: The Washington Post just published a good overview of the hearings currently being held by the Kansas State Board of Education, on whether to introduce Intelligent Design into the state-approved science curriculum: Teachers, Scientists Vow to Fight Challenge to Evolution.

My jaw dropped when I read this AP story about Bush’s trip on Tuesday to Parkersburg, West Virginia:

President Bush on Tuesday turned a government file cabinet in the hills of West Virginia into his Exhibit A for why Social Security needs urgent change. To dramatize Social Security’s future solvency problem, the president peered into the four-drawer ivory cabinet inside the Bureau of Public Debt office here along the Ohio River. In the second drawer was a white three-ring binder filled with pieces of paper providing physical evidence of $1.7 trillion in Treasury bonds that back Social Security benefits. “Imagine,” Bush said in a speech a short time later at West Virginia University at Parkersburg. “The retirement security for future generations is sitting in a filing cabinet…It’s time to strengthen and modernize Social Security for future generations with growing assets that you can control, that you call your own – assets that the government can’t take away.”

This Knight-Ridder article has another Bush quote from the same event: “”There is no trust fund, just IOUs that I saw firsthand, that future generations will pay.”

The key thing to keep in mind here is that the Social Security trust fund consists of special issue Treasury bonds. Here’s what the Investment FAQ has to say about Treasury bonds: “Treasury bills, notes, and bonds are the standard for safety. By definition, everything is relative to Treasuries; there is no safer investment in the U.S. They are backed by the ‘Full Faith and Credit’ of the United States.” And the Social Security Administration has this to say about Social Security’s special-issue bonds: “…the investments held by the trust funds are backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. Government…The special-issue securities are, therefore, just as safe as U.S. Savings Bonds or other financial instruments of the federal government.” Even during the Great Depression, the US honored its Treasury bond obligations. But as far as the President is concerned, they’re “just IOUs” that the government might not honor.

For a while now Bush has been suggesting that you can’t rely on the Social Security trust fund, but until now he was never willing to clearly say why. But now he’s said it: he thinks (or, at least, he wants you to think) that at some point in the future the US just might stop honoring these Treasury bonds. That is, the government might just walk away from at least some of its debt obligations. And all of the $7.8 trillion federal debt is in the form of Treasury bonds. You don’t want to mess with the market’s confidence in Treasury bonds.

A more charitable interpretation of Bush’s comments is that, instead of simply denying Treasury bond obligations, the federal government would make a more narrowly targeted move: severely slash or eliminate Social Security payments to retirees. That is, the government would essentially reclaim the Treasury bonds in the trust fund and not make the promised payments to retirees who spent their working lives paying into the system. This way they’d avoid a technical default on the bonds since retirees do not directly own them. But I would argue that’s a distinction without much of a difference: if investors see the government reneging on the bond payout that was promised to those who paid into Social Security, seeds of doubt would be sown about the US’ commitment to honor its other debt obligations. It would be seen as an Enron-style accounting gimmick, causing the “Full Faith and Credit” of the United States to come into question. And international finance is all about confidence. Defaulting on our debt – or even just concern in the marketplace that we might – would lead to a massive devaluation of the dollar. The ironic end result of it all would be not only worthless Social Security Treasury bonds, but worthless dollars in private retirement accounts as well.

For a US President to talk like this pretty much represents the apex of fiscal and political irresponsibility. The logical conclusion of Bush’s “just IOUs” comment is that we might someday join the ranks of other nations that have defaulted on their debt obligations in recent decades: Argentina, Ecuador, Pakistan, Russia, Ukraine, and Uruguay. The only reason his speech didn’t garner more attention and send shockwaves through the international markets is because everyone in those markets is smart enough to know it was just a political stunt. Think about what that says about Bush’s standing in the world community when it comes to the discussion of fiscal matters.

I knew the Japanese had been making a lot of progress with industrial robots and toy/pet robots, but I didn’t realize just how far they had come with humanoid robots until I saw the Humanoids with Attitude article in the Washington Post (registration required). The article describes the receptionist robot Saya (that’s her picture on your right) dealing with someone insulting her:

“You’re so stupid!” said the professor, Hiroshi Kobayashi, towering over her desk. “Eh?” she responded, her face wrinkling into a scowl. “I tell you, I am not stupid!” Truth is, Saya isn’t even human. But in a country where robots are changing the way people live, work, play and even love, that doesn’t stop Saya the cyber-receptionist from defending herself from men who are out of line. With voice recognition technology allowing 700 verbal responses and an almost infinite number of facial expressions from joy to despair, surprise to rage, Saya may not be biological — but she is nobody’s fool.

The article also points out the differences between the US and Japanese approaches to R&D in robotics and AI:

In the quest for artificial intelligence, the United States is perhaps just as advanced as Japan. But analysts stress that the focus in the United States has been largely on military applications. By contrast, the Japanese government, academic institutions and major corporations are investing billions of dollars on consumer robots aimed at altering everyday life, leading to an earlier dawn of what many here call the “age of the robot.”

I’m fascinated by the cultural factors that influence where different countries choose to focus their technological research efforts. For example, in the US, we’ve taken a no-holds-barred approach to the genetic manipulation of fruits, vegetables, grains, and livestock, even though we don’t yet know what the long-term repercussions might be. In contrast, the Europeans have been very cautious in this area. And while the US has put a straitjacket on research involving human fetal stem cells, the Europeans haven’t. While there are plenty of Americans who would prefer a more European approach to these issues, I think these differences are indicative of some real cultural distinctions, mainly derived from differing perspectives on Christianity and man’s place in the world.

Getting back to robotics, the Washington Post article explains: “Rather than the monstrous Terminators of American movies, robots here [in Japan] are instead seen as gentle, even idealistic creatures.” While many Americans would have a hard time accepting a robot like Saya, the Japanese don’t have a problem with it. The article also points out the economic motivation behind Japan’s focus on robotics: “Confronting a major depopulation problem due to a record low birthrate and its status as the nation with the longest lifespan on Earth, Japanese are fretting about who will staff the factory floors of the world’s second-largest economy in the years ahead.” What the article fails to mention is that the US and much of Europe don’t have to worry too much about declining birthrates because they allow immigration. But allowing mass immigration is not a politically viable option in Japan: the Japanese would prefer to see their future workforce dominated by robots than by non-Japanese.

Setting aside the thorny issue of immigration for a moment, the Japanese predicament arguably would be an ideal situation if the rest of the world were in the same boat. If the global human population were declining, and robots could replace people in the workforce at roughly the same rate, prosperity would be maintained and the negative environmental effects of human population pressures on the globe would be reduced (so long as the human population stabilized at some point – we wouldn’t want to disappear altogether!).

But the Japanese situation is the exception, not the rule. In most of the rest of the world – including the US – the human population is growing due to either high birthrates or immigration, and all those folks need jobs. What will be interesting to see, 10 or 15 years down the road, is what will happen in the US with humanoid robots. As they become commonplace in Japan, competitive pressures will force the US to react. Whatever cultural resistance the US may have to the widespread presence of robots will give way, as robots will save companies a lot of money: robots do not require salaries, vacation time, or health benefits. Will cultural discomfort or an altruistic drive to maintain human employment keep the robots out? I doubt it. Unfortunately, I think Marshall Brain’s Robotic Nation provides an accurate prediction of what will happen. I scribbled some thoughts along these lines in a post last year, More Robot Stories – continue reading there if you want my prognosis.

It was bloggers on the right that exposed the fake Bush National Guard memos cited on 60 Minutes. Now it’s the bloggers on the left who’ve uncovered all kinds of wacky stuff about Jeff Gannon. Rep. Slaughter summarized the situation in a letter she sent to President Bush earlier today:

According to several credible reports, “Mr. Gannon” has been repeatedly credentialed as a member of the White House press corps by your office and has been regularly called upon in White House press briefings by your Press Secretary Scott McClellan, despite the fact evidence shows that “Mr. Gannon” is a Republican political operative, uses a false name, has phony or questionable journalistic credentials, is known for plagiarizing much of the “news” he reports, and according to several web reports, may have ties to the promotion of the prostitution of military personnel.

It was the revelations of plagiarism a few weeks ago that started the focus of attention on Gannon (he was copying entire paragraphs from GOP press releases directly into his news stories). It looks like a lot of the footwork since then has happened at AMERICAblog. I’ve only scrolled through some of the entries, but it appears the dual identity aspect of the story started when when one of Jim Guckert’s old college fraternity brothers noticed him in the White House press room. Further investigation by bloggers confirmed that family-values maven Jeff Gannon was really Jim Guckert (and you can go to AMERICAblog to see the underwear-only photo Jim Guckert chose to use for his public AOL profile). The records revealed that the company owning JeffGannon.com also owns sites such as HotMilitaryStud.com and MilitaryEscorts.com (apparently it’s not been established yet that the owner in question is actually Jim Guckert, but his address and the company’s address are the same).

This story is of particular interest to me because it’s starting to look like he was the one who outed CIA agent Valerie Plame (I wrote about this previously, here and here). As summarized at Daily Kos:

White House-credentialed fake news reporter “Jeff Gannon” from fake news agency “Talon News” was cited by the Washington Post as having the only access to an internal CIA memo that named Joseph Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, as a covert CIA agent. Gannon, in a question posed to Wilson in an October 2003 interview, referred to the memo (to which no other news outlet had access, according to the Post). Gannon subsequently has been subpoenaed by the federal grand jury looking into the Plame outing.

Why would a guy like this be given access to internal CIA memos? If the history of the press’ relationship with Bush is any guide, this story won’t get a huge amount of mainstream media attention. We’ll see. AMERICABlog put it best:

Just imagine if some guy with alleged ties to male prostitution were given unprecedented access to the White House, and given a White House press pass that didn’t even have his real name on it, in order to throw fake softball questions at the press briefings to help make the president look good. Now imagine that president were named Bill Clinton. Now imagine what would happen next?

If you’re not someone who closely follows politics, Bush’s State of the Union probably came across as a combination of sweeping vision and common-sense proposals. But if you compare the speech closely to reality, the gap between the two is startling. I’ll limit myself to two issues (if you want more, see the Center for American Progress blog entries on the speech – they covered everything).

The Federal deficit: since before the 2004 election campaign began, Bush has been promising to cut the deficit in half by the end of his second term. This is representative of a standard White House tactic: keep saying the same thing consistently and repeatedly, regardless of reality, and you’ll eventually get enough people to believe it. Bush can only make this projection by excluding: 1. the ongoing expenses in Iraq and Afghanistan, 2. his own proposal to make his tax cuts permanent, and 3. the transition costs of enacting his Social Security plan. Add those up and the deficit explodes.

I’ve noticed that when I make arguments like this, my Republican friends emphatically respond that Bush is not a liar. In this case, they would argue that the future costs of the war on terror aren’t known, and legislation regarding the tax cuts and Social Security may or may not pass, so it’s perfectly reasonable for the Bush administration to make its budget projections strictly on known revenue and expenses. That’s nonsense. This was a State of the Union speech, which is about what Bush wants to achieve. He’s quite clearly saying he plans to cut the deficit in half, stay militarily engaged in Iraq and Afghanistan, make a staggeringly expensive transition to a different Social Security program, and make permanent (and even further expand) his tax cuts for the wealthy. If any other politician proposed all these things in a single speech he’d be laughed off the stage. Yet Bush is taken seriously as someone who will get the federal government’s financial house in order. I’m still trying to figure that one out.

Social Security: the left-leaning blogs have been all over this (Josh Marshall has blogged about nothing else for weeks), so I’ll just make a few points:

1. To get folks in crisis mode, Bush said in his speech that Social Security will go bankrupt in future decades if we don’t take drastic action soon. As I’ve mentioned before, both sides of this debate are guilty of phony accounting. The real crisis is not a Social Security crisis, it’s a deficit spending crisis. All the money in the so-called trust fund has been drained away over the past few decades to cover general federal spending. This borrowing has been happening through both Democratic and Republican administrations, so both sides are evading the real issue and are instead having a debate about the “trust fund” as if there was actual money sitting in it.

2. What came as a surprise even to me is that plain old Social Security benefits may very well give you more retirement money than an intelligently invested private plan. Check out this excellent Christian Science Monitor article: One man’s retirement math: Social Security wins

3. Up until this speech, I was thinking along the lines of Kevin Drum, who suggested that maybe all Bush is really after is instituting tax-free savings accounts. That is, by over-reaching for plan Y, it becomes easier for everyone to agree on a more modest plan X, when X is all he was really after in the first place (whereas otherwise just getting to X would have been a fight). But last night Bush really spelled out his plan and indicated that he’ll go to the mat for it. With the Democrats united against it, and a number of Republicans already falling off the bandwagon, I think Bush is going to get his first major legislative defeat. I’m guessing he thinks he can repeat the arm-twisting that worked for getting the prescription drug bill passed, but as a President already sailing towards lame-duck status, and the popularity of this proposal in doubt, he doesn’t have the same kind of leverage this time.

Update: I just read Ed Kilgore’s take on this, and he essentially agrees with Kevin Drum: “Going all the way back to Texas, Bush’s M.O. has been extremely consistent: push your proposals again and again and again without compromising at all, until the moment when defeat is imminent, and then either cut a deal or switch to something else, with never a hint that anything has changed. So what if the Republican chairmen of the House Committee and Subcommittee with jurisdiction over Social Security have called Bush’s proposal DOA? Admitting that before the White House is ready for Plan B, whatever it is, would be like, well, admitting Mistakes Were Made In Iraq.”

Watching events unfold in these days leading up to the elections in Iraq, I thought of political scientist Samuel Huntington, a Harvard professor who is “an old-fashioned Democrat…a dying breed: someone who combines liberal ideals with a deeply conservative understanding of history and foreign policy.” (Robert Kaplan, 11/19/01). In my political science days I read his book Political Order in Changing Societies, which influenced my understanding of democratization like no other. The book is now over 35 years old, but it’s as relevant as ever. In it, Huntington uses a series of case studies to explain why transitions to democracy are so difficult to pull off successfully.

One of his points is that you can’t equate democracy with elections: “The problem,” Huntington wrote, “is not to hold elections but to create organizations.” By that he meant functional organizations of government and civil society. Even if Iraq gets through its elections without major bloodshed, the biggest challenges are still to come.

A question that often turns up on comparative politics tests is “What societal conditions are necessary for democracy to succeed?” The opening sentence of Political Order in Changing Societies nails the most important aspect of the answer:

The most important political distinction among countries concerns not their form of government but their degree of government. The differences between democracy and dictatorship are less than the differences between those countries whose politics embodies consensus, community, legitimacy, organization, effectiveness, [and] stability, and those countries whose politics is deficient in these qualities.

Starting from this perspective, it becomes a lot easier to understand why a country like Japan – with little history of democracy – was able to successfully transition to it after World War II. Despite the devastion wrought by the war, the nation’s long-established sense of community and respect for civil institutions and authority remained. It also becomes easier to understand why a country like Iraq – which quite clearly lacks such qualities – will face overwhelming challenges in trying to rapidly create a functioning democracy.

I picked Japan as the counter-example because, like Iraq, its transition to democracy was brought at the point of a US gun. While the US has commited far fewer resources to post-war Iraq than it did to post-war Japan, and planned for the occupation far more poorly, what’s just as striking is the contrast between the two countries in regard to the qualities Huntington listed.

Politically, the Bush administration currently faces a true dilemma in Iraq. On the one hand, holding elections before violence is quelled and civil institutions are functioning is putting the cart before the horse. In modern times, countries which have made at least semi-successful transitions to democracy have either had a pre-existing familiarity with it (such as Estonia after the Cold War) or had a popular “benevolent dictator” who focused his energies on creating governmental institutions that inherited his legitimacy when he left the scene (such as Ataturk in Turkey).

On the other hand, installing a strongman (no matter how benevolent), after having just removed one, is not a viable political option for Bush. Add to that the administration’s pre-war predictions of an easy rebuilding process, and the media-driven requirement for Bush to demonstrate rapid progess in Iraq, and you end up with “…an aggressive White House communications strategy…to frame the risky Iraqi election – a critical test of [Bush's] assertion that the country is on the path to stability – in the best possible light. The goal, a Bush advisor said, was not only to lower expectations but to avoid any definition of success.” (New York Times, 1/27/05).

Bush’s domestic political need for a quick Iraqi transition to democracy has little overlap with what Iraq really needs: massive, long-term, disciplined, focused investment in the development of its economy and civil institutions (the consequence of Powell’s “Pottery Barn rule”). Without first meeting Iraq’s most basic needs for a functioning society, a democratic transition is an incredibly shaky proposition. Hence the self-contradicting goal of raising hopes while lowering expectations in Bush’s communication strategy.

Unfortunately, the Bush administration’s myopic decisions to date have narrowed the range of available strategies to paradoxical choices. Maintaining a US military presence in Iraq fans the flames of terrorism, and the resulting violence debilitates the democratic process. But without the US propping up the democratic process and dispersing concentrated elements of unrest (as in Fallujah), civil war becomes a very real possibility.

Saddam Hussein’s destruction of his country’s civil society, followed by his sudden removal and our bungling of the occupation, has left Iraq devoid of the political qualities Huntington listed as precursors to any well functioning and respected government, democratic or otherwise. They are not qualities that are quickly or easily replaced.