Keeping it in perspective


The promotion of critical thinking can seem an uphill struggle, but at least we don’t get torn limb from limb for trying.

As skeptics, we fight to uphold certain freedoms: freedom of enquiry, freedom of speech, academic freedom. The battles are worth waging to enjoy the blessings these principles bring, including knowledge and understanding, and because the alternative is darkness.

Skeptics skirmish in public debates, across the kitchen table, and in the workplace. While I think every academic should be a skeptic, I work alongside lecturers who oppose our organisation and who are hostile to science. Some of them believe in Creationism, homeopathy, or the Book of Mormon as a divinely inspired history of ancient America. Such lecturers exasperate me. University managers who do not appreciate academic freedom irk me. Being a skeptic can be tiring and frustrating.

Still, we need to keep our battles in perspective. In parts of the world, debating a university speech code is the farthest thing from the concerns of millions of people. For example, the girls and women of Afghanistan would be overjoyed to have any education at all. Five years after being ousted by the United States, the Taliban still control large parts of Afghanistan. They invoke societal codes in the name of custom and religion as justification for denying women their rights, including the right to an education.

The director of education at Ghazni, Fatima Mustaq, says she has received death threats for refusing to send girls home from school. The threats are also against her husband and their eight children. During the Taliban’s rule, she and her sister secretly taught girls at their home. “They found out and raided us. We managed to persuade them that we were only teaching the Koran. But they spied and found out we were teaching algebra. So they came and beat us. Can you imagine, beating someone for teaching algebra?”

In November, gunmen came for Mohammed Halim and dragged him from his home at Ghazni while his children cried and his wife begged for mercy. The 46-year-old schoolteacher was then partly disembowelled before being torn apart with his legs and arms tied to motorbikes. His remains were put on display as a warning to others to stop educating girls. Halim was one of four teachers killed in rapid succession at Ghazni for defying a Taliban order to not teach girls.

Before they can hope to gain an education, Afghan women and girls need protection from abduction and rape by armed men, being traded to settle disputes and debts, and forced and underage marriage. By being married as young as 12, females are denied their right to education and the freedom to decide the course that they wish their lives to take. A ban on interaction between unrelated men and women greatly inhibits women’s access to the workplace, courts, and schools, because these places are segregated or exclusively male.

Afghan women get almost no protection from the state. In fact, a report issued in November by the Pentagon and the US State Department found that the police force in Afghanistan is largely incapable of carrying out routine law enforcement. Violence against Afghan women is normal. It is tolerated at the highest levels of government. Some judges disregard the law and rely on tradition to hold women responsible for being attacked, thus sanctioning brutality. The perpetrators of violence against women are rarely charged. If cases are prosecuted, the men are usually let go or punished lightly. Women who report rape risk being accused of having committed the crime of having sex outside marriage.

Violence against women by family members also is common. It ranges from forced deprivation of education to beatings, sexual violence and killings. Many acts of violence involve traditional crimes of honour, when a female is punished by her family for shaming them; perhaps she got raped. Punishment can mean being stoned or burned or beaten to death.

Glimmers of progress are visible in Afghanistan. In 2004 a new constitution was adopted which proclaimed that “the citizens of Afghanistan-whether man or woman-have equal rights before the law.” It also provides for a minimum representation of women in both houses of parliament.

In 2005 the first woman was appointed as governor of a province. Over 40 percent of women were registered as voters in 2004. Women are officially allowed to seek employment-albeit with permission from family members. One in five girls now attends primary school. Nearly all the younger women interviewed recently by Amnesty International expressed their wish for the future as simply being able to continue their education. As skeptics in New Zealand look to soldier on in 2007, we can be thankful for the freedoms we enjoy.

The Wedge’s thin edge gets blunted

The decision by Judge John Jones ruling that the promotion of Intelligent Design (ID) in schools is a violation of the constitutional ban on teaching religion, is at least a temporary victory for scientific integrity (Newsfront, p10). Previous attempts to get creationism into the American classroom have been more ambitious, notably a Louisiana act which would have mandated for biblical literalism to be granted equal time alongside evolutionary theory, finally struck down in a majority Supreme Court decision in 1987. The proposal in Dover, Pennsylvania, was modest by comparison. It required that teachers read a 159-word statement declaring evolution “a theory … [t]he theory is not a fact”, and stating that ID is “an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin’s view.” The book, Of Pandas and People, was recommended for students who wished to understand what ID involves.

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Opening Pandora’s Box

Demands for equal time cut both ways.

Armies of the night, science-writer and novelist Isaac Asimov once called them. He was referring to the countless millions of evangelicals who believe the book of Genesis to be literally true and therefore reject any evidence to the contrary.

President Bush is one of them. So is Michael Drake, principal of Auckland’s Carey College.

As reported in the Weekend Herald (27 August), Drake believes that one can provide dates for the main events in the history of the universe by adding up all the ‘begats’ in the Bible. The date of creation turns out to be just over 4000 BC, and that of Noah’s Flood about 2400 BC.

What can these young-earth creationists say when confronted by scientific evidence that the universe began more than 12 billion years ago, that life began over 4 billion years ago, that dinosaurs became extinct some 63 million years ago, or that fossils of our hominid ancestors are shown by potassiumargon dating to be more than three million years old?

Their best ploy is to say that God created the universe with all this contrary evidence built into it. This, says Drake, is “perfectly possible”. It seems not to bother him that this hypothesis makes God, not just a Great Designer, but a Great Deceiver as well.

And what about the ancient civilisations whose historical and archaeological records spitefully ignore the Flood and the death of all living creatures, other than the inhabitants of the ark? Clearly, God must have even more tricks up his sleeve. After all, as Drake points out, tautologically, “God is God.”

Most mainstream Christians outside the US would reject this version of intelligent design. Like fifth century St Augustine, they would say that biblical literalists deserve to be “laughed to scorn” for their “utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements.”

Adopting Augustine’s figurative interpretation of Genesis, liberal Christians believe they can accommodate the findings of science and history. Thus those who call themselves theistic evolutionists can, without contradiction, accept Darwin’s laws of natural selection as one of the laws of nature — along with those of physics and chemistry — with which God endowed his creation at the outset. No need for him to intervene on this account.

Enter a third version, one that reintroduces elements of evangelical creationism into the evolutionary story. Michael Behe, in his 1996 book Darwin’s Black Box, claimed that although evolutionary mechanisms can explain a lot, they can’t explain the emergence of certain highly complex biological systems. His examples include the flagellum of E. coli, and the human immune system.

These systems, Behe argues, are “irreducibly complex” in the sense that none of their simpler parts would have survival value until they were assembled in the right way by the intervention of a supernatural deity. Unlike theistic evolutionists, Behe believes God has to tinker with his initial design.

How scientific is all this? Well, Behe himself is a scientist. And scientists certainly do find complexity in the biological world, especially at the molecular level.

But is there scientific evidence that this complexity is irreducible? Scientists can literally see complexity. But they can’t see irreducibility. Behe has to argue for it. And his arguments have been found wanting by both philosophers and scientists.

Philosophers disparage his argument’s form: “We don’t yet understand how these complex forms could have emerged, so God must have created them”. It is a rehash of the ‘God of the Gaps’ fallacy. Flawed faith-based reasoning. Not sound evidence-based science.

Meanwhile scientists continue to plug those gaps with accounts of the evolutionary pathways that generated these supposedly irreducible systems. What becomes of Behe’s argument for an intelligent designer if all the gaps get filled?

Now to the important question: Should intelligent design be taught in schools? If so, which version?

Mary Chamberlain, curriculum manager for the Ministry of Education, says science classes should allow for some version or other. She seems to echo Bush’s recent call for ‘equal time’ for those who oppose evolution.

Equal time counts both ways. If equal time is to be given to those who think there are arguments against evolution, then it should also be given to those who think there are arguments against intelligent design. But then we get into what philosophers call “the problem of natural evil.”

If you think an intelligent designer designed the universe, then think about the unsavoury aspects of his design. Think of diseases like Alzheimers, cancer, smallpox, and those caused by Behe’s favourite, E. coli. Think of disasters like tsunamis, hurricanes, and earthquakes. If complex design demonstrates intelligence, then by the same token the “god-awful” nature of much of God’s design demonstrates defective or malevolent intelligence.

On reflection, do its promoters really want intelligent design analysed and evaluated in schools? And if so, by whom? Do they really want to open Pandora’s box?

Newsfront

In a decision which sets an important precedent for US science education, a court has ruled against the teaching of the theory of ‘Intelligent Design’ alongside Darwinian evolution (BBC, 20 December). The ruling comes after a group of parents in the Pennsylvania town of Dover had taken the school board to court for demanding biology classes not teach evolution as fact.

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The Tertiary anti-Education Commission

New Zealand’s tertiary institutions have some strange ways of measuring academic performance

The Tertiary Education Commission (TEC) is gaining a reputation as a Mickey Mouse government organisation that harms the reputation and integrity of New Zealand’s tertiary institutions.

In April, I called publicly for the acting chair of the TEC, Kaye Turner, to resign. Her defence of the teaching of homeopathy at New Zealand’s tertiary institutions is an embarrassment. She insisted that the TEC would continue to support the teaching of homeopathy because students want it and there are jobs for people with qualifications in the subject. Thus, skeptics and other taxpayers are forced to support courses in mumbo-jumbo if the courses sell. Dr Turner expressed indignation that I called homeopathy nonsense, and she called it an alternative to antibiotics. The TEC thus helps to spread dangerous twaddle; quackery can be a matter of life and death.

The TEC is also responsible for another abomination afflicting our tertiary institutions: the Performance-based Research Fund (PBRF). The PBRF process ranks academic staff from “A” for world class to “R” for research-inactive. It then allocates millions of dollars to polytechnics, universities, private training establishments, wananga and colleges of education, according to their rankings.

The most important part of the PBRF round requires staff to list their Research Outputs over the previous six years. A panel of experts then examines each list and awards a grade of A, B, C or the dreaded R. There are major problems with this procedure that generate unfair and invalid results.

First, the PBRF process assumes that there is a single model of what constitutes good research. This assumption may hold true in mathematics, medicine and the hard sciences, where other scholars can replicate work. In these subjects, the process of peer-review can work well.

But there are other areas of academic endeavour, such as the Arts and Social Sciences, where there is no agreed model. Scholars who rely on empirical research clash with radical postmodernists and academics who insist that there are ways of knowing other than the rational. Politically Correct fashions come and go. A peer-reviewer rejected one of my history articles on the grounds that it did not contain ‘a feminist/pacifist perspective’.

And on what grounds will the panellists rate the research? The history of intellectual activity is full of examples of work that was dismissed by experts at the time, only to be recognised later as insightful. On the other hand, peer-reviewed journals have published garbage. The hoax perpetrated in 1996 by Alan Sokal is telling; he deliberately submitted a nonsensical article to the peer-reviewed journal Social Text, which published it. And in September 2001 the Journal of Reproductive Medicine, a peer-reviewed medical journal, published a paper about how a Columbia University study showed the power of Christians’ prayers to help patients at a fertility clinic to conceive (see NZ Skeptic 75).

The PBRF process distorts research activity because it rewards academics for churning out quick projects, such as articles, at the expense of big efforts. Books in, say, history, often take years to produce. The scholar has to read first all the books and articles relevant to the field, then piles of documents that may be kept in far-flung collections. Then the writing begins, with each key assertion carefully footnoted to a reliable source. It is not uncommon for such efforts to take ten or more years, and sometimes a lifetime. But the PBRF process focuses on a six-year period. Scholars who are devoting time to long-term projects receive the inaccurate and offensive label of Research Inactive, as if they spend their time snoozing in a hammock. A Waikato University senior manager pointedly urged a historian to abandon a lengthy biography because it was an unwise research choice in the PBRF environment.

The PBRF process is distorting work at universities because it pressures academics to play a game. The university tearooms are full of talk about how to work the system. Some academics team up with friends who are referees in order to publish a couple of articles each year. The PBRF discourages in-depth projects and those aspects of the job such as teaching preparation and community service that do not help PBRF scores. It frustrates academic freedom by shaping research plans to fit its arbitrary scheme.

The PBRF also encourages departments to downgrade the importance of teaching so that the trend will be for them to become like some overseas departments I have seen, where graduate students do much of the teaching while lecturers lock themselves away to turn out articles. The TEC’s latest plan, to introduce ratings for teaching, inspires no confidence. Perhaps lecturers will score well by teaching homeopathy to lots of students.

While thinking about this subject I benefited from discussions with Dr Ron Smith of Waikato University.

Self-Esteem: too much of a Good Thing?

The idea that low self-esteem is the cause of violent behaviour has been current for some time. Many years ago I attended numerous education meetings where I heard that certain (male) individuals “lacked self-esteem” when it seemed patently obvious that this was not true. I argued that these individuals greatly esteemed many of their own behaviours – it was just that these behaviours were those the counsellors thought should be deplored.

The result was that schools developed programmes to encourage pupils to make lists of their wonderful features and to compose poems of self-celebration. Parents and teachers were afraid to criticise children, or to let them take part in exams and competitions as this could turn them into violent thugs. It became important above all that children never experienced failure.

Scientific American (April 2001) had an article entitled Violent Pride: Do people turn violent because of self-hate or self-love? by Roy F Baumeister. This dealt with the problem of violent young men and characterised them as being usually egoists with a grandiose sense of personal superiority and entitlement; yet counselling textbooks say such people really suffer from low self-esteem.

Although it was a “well-known fact” that low self-esteem causes violence, Baumeister was unable to find a formal statement of the theory, let alone any evidence to support it. According to Baumeister: “…we found no indicators that aggressive male bullies are anxious and insecure under a tough surface.”

Self-esteem can be measured using a questionnaire with such examples as:

  • How well do you get along with other people?
  • Are you generally successful in your work or studies?

Baumeister et al also tested for narcissistic tendencies in a similar manner. People with high self-esteem were not necessarily narcissistic – most could recognise that they genuinely were good at some things but not all.

A study on men imprisoned for violent crimes showed these had the highest mean score for narcissism (among prisoners), though their score for self-esteem was about in the middle. Narcissism correlated very strongly with violent behaviour.

The idea that low self-esteem is the underlying cause of “just about every psychological problem” originates with Nathaniel Branden (originally Nathan Blumenthal), psychotherapist and author of several books on the subject. According to Branden: “faulty self-esteem [is] a flawed self-concept, intellectual self-doubt, a sense of unworthiness or guilt, an experience or inadequacy, a feeling that ‘something is wrong with me’ or that ‘I am not enough.’ ” But of course if the concept is made as broad as this everybody must experience low self-esteem at times.

Nash published Branden’s first book on the topic, The Psychology of Self-Esteem, late in 1969, but it was taken up by Bantam and over a million paperback copies were sold worldwide. In 1977 Branden started a series of intensive “workshop” courses to teach his ideas. The course was called Self-Esteem and the Art of Being. Originally the attendees were psychotherapy students. These people spread the gospel and the idea really took off.

Branden had been a member of the Ayn Rand inner circle and, although 20-odd years younger, was her lover for a considerable period. This grand idea, of the importance of low self-esteem, was formulated by or with Rand sometime in 1955, certainly before the spring of 1956. But we have only Branden’s word that he had any involvement then – about 14 years before he published anything on the subject. Rand would later claim that Branden had stolen her idea; after Branden rejected her sexually she became extremely bitter. However when Atlas Shrugged (which seems to have introduced the idea) was published, it was dedicated to both her husband and her lover!

Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged contains a speech by John Galt, Rand’s superman hero that sets out three principles as the supreme and ruling values of human life:

  1. Reason
  2. Purpose
  3. Self-esteem

I regret that I was unaware of the Ayn Rand connection around 25 years ago, when I was involved in education and attacking the idea that low self-esteem was the problem with difficult boys. Rand’s anti-communism of course made her “Right Wing”. The “Left Wing” trendy types that were pushing faulty self-esteem as the cause of problems with difficult adolescents would have been horrified at the connection. I had found Atlas Shrugged and other Rand books unreadable; recently I had to read some Rand to write this essay but did not enjoy the experience. I still have not finished any of her books.

Rand frequently used archaic meanings for common English words. Few skeptics would quibble about basing their ideas on reason, but today this means that we organise our ideas to avoid contradictions. Rand’s philosophy involved a resurrection of the mediaeval idea of Rationalism, which meant something quite different – that one can acquire true knowledge of the world simply through thought. Modern science has rejected this idea – and Rand largely rejected science.

The Baumeister studies are very relevant to New Zealand today, but I suspect that few teachers or social workers involved with difficult and violent young males have even heard of them. Jim Ring is a Nelson Skeptic.

Communicating the nature of science: Evolution as an exemplar

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Science as taught at school is often portrayed as a collection of facts, rather than as a process. Taking a historical approach to the teaching of evolution is a useful way to illustrate the way science works.

The need for a scientifically literate population is probably greater now than ever before, given the rapid pace of change in science and technology. Members of such a population have the tools to examine the world around them, and the ability to critically assess claims made in the media. However, there are difficulties with conveying just what science is about and how it is done; in letting people know how the scientific world-view differs from “other ways of knowing”. This is particularly evident when dealing with evolutionary theory, often described as “just a theory”, and probably the only scientific theory to be rejected on the grounds of personal belief. How can we alter such misconceptions and extend scientific understanding?

Part of my role at Waikato University involves liaising with local and regional high school teachers of biology and science. Over the past few years I have received numerous requests from local secondary school teachers to provide a resource they could use in teaching evolution. Discussion with teacher focus groups revealed a number of content areas they would like to have available:

  • links to the New Zealand curriculum and to relevant web-sites,
  • evolutionary process (including the sources of genetic variation and how natural selection operates),
  • human evolution,
  • New Zealand examples,
  • evidence for evolution,
  • ways of dealing with opposition among students (and colleagues),
  • and the historical perspective.

These last two items are particularly significant, since modelling a way of presenting the historical development of evolutionary thought, and by extension the nature of science itself, offers a way of countering opposition to the theory of evolution.

I have deliberately used the example of evolution, because there is good evidence (eg Abd-El-Khalick and Lederman 2000; Passmore and Stewart 2000; Passmore and Stewart 2002) that altering the way in which evolution is traditionally taught offers the opportunity to show people the nature of science – what it is and how it works. For example, rather than taking a confrontational approach to their students’ beliefs, Passmore and Stewart (2000) provided a number of models of evolution and encouraged the students to determine which model best explained a particular phenomenon.

Similarly, William Cobern (1994) has commented:

“Teaching evolution at the sec-ondary level is very much like Darwin presenting the Origin of Species to a public who historically held a very different view of origins. To meet this challenge, teachers [should] preface the conceptual study of evolution with a classroom dialogue… informed with material on the cultural history of Darwinism.”

He goes on (Cobern 1995):

“I do not believe that evolution can be taught effectively by ignoring significant metaphysical (ie essentially religious) questions. One addresses these issues not by teaching a doctrine, but by looking back historically to the cultural and intellectual milieu of Darwin’s day and the great questions over which people struggled.”

Taking such an approach is highly significant in developing an understanding of the nature of science, since an historical narrative will not only place Darwin’s work into its historical and social context, but will also show how he applied the scientific method to solving his “problem” of evolution. This approach is central to the Evolution for Teaching website (sci.waikato.ac.nz/evolution – see NZ Skeptic 71; the other members of the website team are Dr Penelope Cooke of Earth Sciences, Dr Kathrin Cass, and Kerry Earl from the Centre for Science & Technology Education Research), and is also one I use in my own teaching, where every year I encounter students who have a creationist worldview. Such views may well become more common, given that there appears to be a coordinated effort to make material promoting Intelligent Design Theory (and denigrating evolutionary thought) available in schools.

This teacher-generated list, and the philosophy described above, informed the planning and design of the Evolution for Teaching website, which is hosted by the School of Science and Technology at Waikato University. First we felt it important to make explicit the nature of scientific hypotheses, theories, and laws, to overcome difficulties originating in differing understandings of the word “theory”. (Much of the language of science offers opportunities for such misunderstandings, since it invests many everyday terms with other, very specific meanings eg Cassels and Johnstone 1985; Letsoalo 1996.)

The site offers links to the NCEA matrices for Science and Biology, plus FAQs, book and site reviews, and a glossary.

Feedback has been almost entirely positive, with all the teachers attending its launch in March indicating that they would use it in their teaching and recommend it to their students. Without exception they found it attractive, easy to navigate, and informative, providing information at a level suitable for both themselves and their students. Student comments support this last point. Since the site went “live” in March 2004 it has received around 100,000 hits per month, indicative of a very high level of interest.

Why are we crying into our beer?

The battle between the Enlightenment and Romantic traditions is far from over, though it has taken on new forms. This article is abridged from a presentation to the NZ Skeptics Conference, 2004.

P J O’Rourke famously asked “Here we are, the longest lived, healthiest, wealthiest, best educated, best fed generation that has ever lived — so why are we crying into our beer?” This question begs the reverse question “Why are some of us not crying into our beer?”

Many of us recognise that we are indeed well off and are optimistic about the future. Virginia Postrel has recognised the existence of two cultures, in a political sense, in her book, The Future and its Enemies. In this she divides people into two groups, the stasists, who fear the future, and the dynamists who enjoy change, choice and the multiple futures which lie before us.

The Root Cause

Previously I have argued that these big debates about the nature of our world continue to reflect the contest between the conflicting traditions of the Enlightenment and of Romanticism. Of course these traditions overlap in their influence on all our lives. The most reasonable of us is likely to have some affection for nature. So we are talking about positions on a spectrum.

My earlier argument was that:

  • Socialism is the dark side of the Enlightenment tradition — if we can use science to design a bridge then we can use science to design Europe.
  • Fascism is the dark side of the Romantic tradition — Fascism is anti-reason, believes that truth is culturally constructed, looks to the racial wisdom of the “volk” and promotes the need for great leaders to tells the masses what truths are holistically true.
  • Communism combines these two dark sides into an engineered utopia which also accepts fascistic leadership to reveal the truth of the Marxist “book”.

All three belief systems maintained that the modern world is too complex to depend on spontaneous order, and must be planned, and that wise men must therefore direct and control the rest of us. The alternative was economic chaos. There are many people who are happy to be planned and only too many who are happy to do the planning. Since the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and the belief systems which shored it up, these models are no longer there — but the conflict between reason and romanticism remains. And the controllers are always waiting in the wings. The new controllers have identified a new chaos or dystopia. They say that our population, wealth and technology and consumption is destroying the planet, or will do so in future, unless, of course, the environmental planners take control and manage our lives so as to avoid this future.

The Two Views

These two conflicting cultures have differing views on the environment. The people of the Enlightenment tradition, or the dynamists, are concerned about the environment because they live in it, and know that their enjoyment of life depends on clean surroundings. They know that as people get wealthier they become increasingly concerned about the quality of their physical environment. At a certain income per capita people want clean water, at a somewhat higher income they want clean air, and at a higher income again they want clean soil, waterways and visual amenity etc. Which is where we are.

We are rich enough to care about the environment and have the discretionary wealth to do something about it. Truly poor people focus on finding tomorrow’s breakfast. The truly poor people of the past were responsible for the great megafaunal extinctions.

However, the Romantics interpret our care for the environment as a sign of our willingness to make penance for our sinful consumption and that everything wrong with the environment is our fault. We have sinned against nature and must be punished for our sins.

Global warming presents the perfect punishment — we shall be burnt in the heat of a greenhoused Earth. A new group, Powerless New Zealand, are convinced we are about to run out of fossil fuels and have cheerfully predicted that only two billion of our present six billion will survive this century. No doubt they continue to believe we shall be cooked in greenhouse gases at the same time because many nature worshippers are able to believe in two impossible things before every breakfast.

How are these alternate views expressed?

Environmental law

After almost a century of neglect there is now much discussion of the role of private property in promoting personal freedom and generating wealth. Property and Freedom by Richard Pipes, and The Mystery of Capital by Hernando de Soto are two excellent examples. Both implicitly support the view that environmental law should maximise human welfare.

Klaus Bosselmann and David Grinlinton, of Auckland University’s School of Environmental Law, reject the “anthropocentric” view that environmental law should focus on managing adverse effects on the environment in order to maximise human welfare. This “anthropocentric” view, reflected in the concept of sustainable management within the Resource Management Act (RMA), assumes that there is not much point in being rich if you cannot swim in the sea, breathe the air, or drink the water.

Instead, Bosselmann and Grinlinton’s collection promotes an “ecocentric” world view which assumes “that nature with all its life forms has intrinsic value independently from any instrumental values for humans.” The ecocentric view assumes that nature exists in stable harmony and that extinctions and similar catastrophes can be prevented by human action — or inaction. Unfortunately, nature does not see it this way. As John Gribbin explains in Deep Simplicity, virtually all species are now extinct, and every surviving species is at equal risk of extinction at any time. We occupy a biosphere continually on the edge of chaos. The ecocentric view also assumes that the purpose of environmental law is to protect nature from human activity. We are the problem and our welfare ranks below the welfare of “nature”.

Most authors introduce us to Rousseau’s thoughts on property rights with the following quote from his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality: “The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, wars, murder, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared had someone pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellow men: “Do not listen to this impostor. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and the earth to no one!”

Rousseau’s assault on private property reflected his recent discovery of “the state of nature” enjoyed by “the noble savages” of Tahiti and elsewhere.

Rousseau clearly flagged that nature worship leads to an assault on private property in favour of communal ownership and governance. Bosselmann and Ginlinton appear to be happy with Rousseau’s position, and appear equally comfortable with contemporary equivalents of the “noble savage” who uphold their own ecocentric view.

Their collection includes a chapter by Andrea Tunks, lecturer in the Auckland University Faculty of Law from 1994–2001, which records her “indigenous vision” of sustainable development, which suggests:
“… indigenous peoples see ‘the West’ as responsible for cumulative environmental degradation and environmental catastrophe. This is due to its economic and political ideologies which do not have a holistic and spiritual understanding of the environment nor the humility attached to being one small part of a complex web of environmental systems.”

Ms Tunks then quotes from Maori Marsden’s Kaitiakitanga: A definitive introduction to the Holistic World View of Maori, written for the Ministry for the Environment in 1992:
“Man is the conscious mind of Mother Earth and plays a vital part in the regulation of her life support systems and man’s duty is to support and enhance these systems. The tragedy however is that when these first principles are forsaken and Mother Earth is perceived as a commodity and her natural resources as disposable property … man becomes a pillager, despoiler and rapist of his own mother.”

One wonders if Rousseau himself dropped in on early New Zealand and shared a few thoughts with the locals.

The Bosselmann and Grinlinton collection honestly acknowledges that ecocentric environmental law inevitably undermines private property and the freedoms we associate with the Open Society. The authors see man as a tool of nature and nature’s needs must determine what we can or cannot do. Once again, human beings are subservient to the state, but this time it’s “the state of nature”.

These ecocentric arguments are mounted by intellectuals sitting in the comfortable affluence of Western societies, which have generated sufficient wealth to allow them to promote the welfare of insects and rocks above the welfare of their fellow human beings. They can even afford to espouse the animist wisdom of indigenous peoples over the scientific traditions of the Open Society.

Hernando de Soto sees a different world. In the Mystery of Capital he asks why capitalism works in the West and fails everywhere else. De Soto is a third world economist who finds millions of people living short, brutish and poverty stricken lives within an environment which poses a continual threat to their health, safety and longevity.

These people have no great affection for their “state of nature” and want both the wealth and health of their capitalist neighbours. Traditional explanations for their failure to generate wealth have been either racist — bad genes, or culturalist — wrong beliefs. De Soto finds that their real problem is a lack of private property — both in lack of ownership of land and other assets, and in the legal framework needed to support secure property and to enable contracts and trade.

To the discomfort of the wealthy ecocentrists these people are increasingly raising their voices against the “ecoimperialists” who place the welfare of first world birds over the lives of third world children.

In his book Risk Society, Towards a New Modernity (1992), Ulrich Beck proposes that society is in the process of moving from the culture of the “Industrial Society” to a “New Modernity” which he calls the “Risk Society”.

I am not convinced that this is a universal movement in which Beck’s Risk Society will finally prevail. Once again, I see this new conflict as just as another example of the ongoing conflict between the Enlightenment and Romanticism.

Beck characterises the “Industrial Society” and the new “Risk Society” as follows:
The Industrial Society

  1. The Role of Science: Science is the keystone of the Enlightenment Tradition — science is in the service of man and generates wealth for all.
  2. The Major Concern: Having generated so much wealth the major problem is how to distribute the wealth among the people, and among different communities and nations.
  3. The Nature of Risk: Risk is an external factor subject to objective analysis. Risk analysis is one of the triumphs of mathematics. We manage risk by weighing benefits against risky side effects.
  4. Civilisation and Nature: Civilisation is safe and Nature is dangerous. The aim of the Industrial Society is to tame and harness nature for the benefit of people.
  5. Democracy: Industrial Society exports democracy along with the benefits of the Industrial Economy.
  6. Awareness of Risks: Members of the Industrial Society are aware of the risks they must deal with — such as loss of job, accident, and death, and these risks are assessed and managed by experts.

The Risk Society

  1. The Role of Science: Science is the destroyer of the environment and society. Science is the problem. Science has no monopoly on “truth”.
  2. The Major Concern: How to deal with the undesirable abundance and dangerous knowledge generated by unconstrained science. Waste is the problem.
  3. The Nature of Risk: Risk is internal and an outcome of modernity — rather than an external and manageable problem. These threats are global and unknowable — and all risk must be eliminated (eg the zero molecule approach).
  4. Civilisation and Nature: Civilisation is dangerous and Nature is safe. The key task is to protect nature from humanity and preserve its harmony and balance.
  5. Pollution: Industrial society exports pollution to underdeveloped societies and puts all at risk.
  6. Awareness of Risks: “Victims” cannot determine their level of unknowable risk. Hence risk is assessed by “self knowledge” and internal conviction. The precautionary principle protects us from the unknowable risks of change. Chernobyl is the turning point. We calculate the future dead rather than count the existing bodies.

At the root of Beck’s manifesto is the fear of a world “out of control”. The Socialists believed that the economy was too fragile to be left to Smith’s invisible hand or “spontaneous order”. Environmentalists and planners (by definition) believe the biosphere is too fragile to be left at the mercy of selfish individuals. Beck declares: “Society has become a laboratory where there is absolutely nobody in charge.”

As always, hordes of willing “controllers” are waiting in the wings.

There is a measure of truth in Beck’s comparative schema. The Industrial Society removed us from a human condition where naturally occurring hazards (disease, flood, famine, and the like) — along with social hazards such as invasion and conquest — moulded the fate of individuals and groups. Members of the Industrial Society take control of their own fate by deliberately undertaking risky behaviour for the sake of the benefits conferred. Achieving these benefits requires technologically mastery of nature. So far, so good.

Thereafter Beck’s arguments get murkier. His key position is that Risk Society begins where nature ends. We switch the focus of our anxieties from what nature can do to us to what we have done to nature.

Surely in the age of Aids, BSE, Sars, as well as earthquakes and eruptions, we are still subject to nature’s hazards. Nature is NOT safe.

The food supply is far safer than it has ever been, mainly because we are now protected against naturally occurring deadly toxins such as botulism.

How real is Beck’s assumed novelty of the “global dimension of risk”? The Mount Pinatubo eruption vented as much particulate matter into the atmosphere as the entire history of industrialism to date. Beck ignores such “global” impacts of nature’s handiwork.

Many of the “new modernists” aspire to zero risk or perfect safety, and yet we know that if we pursued this to its logical conclusion we would ban all human activity including conception. Indeed, life is a sexually transmitted terminal disease.

The State of Harmony

The idea that Nature is in a state of harmony and balance underlies much of the resistance to human activity. And yet this view is surely anthropocentric. Our surroundings appear stable only because we look at the world through the eye-blink of a human lifetime.

The idea of the stable fragile globe was hugely reinforced by those early Nasa photos of the Earth as seen from the Moon. These photos encourage modern stasists to believe that when our satellites tell us that sea levels are rising at about 2 mm a year on average then this is what is happening everywhere around the globe.

Local district plans are rushing to confirm that every beach in New Zealand is going to sink beneath the waves (a few hundred millimeters in a hundred years’ time) and hence we must withdraw from the coast and huddle behind the walls of inland towns, watch Coronation Street, and ride in trains.

Whakatane’s new plan is full of the problems of rising sea levels. I pointed out that the Institute for Geological and Nuclear Science’s measuring devices confirmed that the tectonic plate at Whakatane is rising over the Pacific Plate at a much faster rate than the sea level is rising, which adds up to an overall fall. In my submissions I pointed out that if someone in Whakatane had a sea view they were much more likely to have the floodwaters come through the back door than the front door and that this could happen next week — rather than in a hundred years’ time. Unfortunately, nature decided to appear as an expert witness on my behalf and delivered floods and an earthquake to Whakatane only a few weeks later.

The Conflict of the Culture Clubs

The new Romantics reveal their greatest inconsistencies when they deal with cultures, and tribal cultures in particular. On the one hand they oppose globalisation but are all for global government. The late Alistair Cooke’s favourite placard at an antiglobalisation rally read “Join the International Movement against Globalisation.”

Global government is espoused on the grounds that the air does not need a passport and only global government can enforce Kyoto protocols etc.

But the Romantics’ attack on reason draws on a conviction that scientific knowledge is just one human construct and that because all cultures are valid then all belief systems are valid. They conveniently overlook the fact that some seem to work better than others.

However, the Romantic nature worshippers’ attack science for several reasons — not the least of which being that they always have. Rousseau argued that the way we see the world depends on our upbringing and our cultural heritage and hence there is no single “truth”.

The Fascist Romantics have always turned to the forest people or völke whose deep wisdom was deemed to be superior to that of the rational thinkers, or elite — especially those of Europe, who just happened to be Jews.

The nature worshippers now turn to the indigenous peoples of the world because they are seen as maintaining a holistic view of the world as opposed to the hated reductionism of the Open Society, which rests on a foundation of science and democracy (which are two sides of the same coin).

The late Karl Popper, in The Open Society and its Enemies, reminded us that holistic thinking is the handmaiden of fascism. Although he wrote that while here in Christchurch I suspect it is seldom quoted in those halls of academe where social sciences prevail.

The irony is that not long ago we were encouraged to believe in “the family of man” and to overlook the differences in our colour, race, creed or religion. In these post-modern times we celebrate the difference between cultures and especially the difference between tribal cultures and the culture of the Open Society. Indeed these cultures are now regarded as “indigenous species” which must be protected from the impact of the Open Society.

Unknowable Cultures?

Many RMA documents, and the documents which surround them, argue that Maori culture is essentially unknowable to non-Maori. These views are strongly challenged by Pinker in The Language Instinct but they have gained much traction. Again, the cultural anthropologists emphasise the differences between our “tribes” at the same time as the biologists are finding that genetic differences between races are trivial.

The latest challenge comes from Germaine Greer, who, from the comfort of her home in England, is telling Australians that the only way they can gain an identity is to become aboriginal. As Nicoless Rothwell writes in the September 2004 issue of Prospect, “Greer assumes that ‘being aboriginal’ is straightforward, and that you can almost think yourself into that state.” I am not sure if the half million aboriginals would appreciate the impact of 20 million Aussies suddenly “thinking themselves” into being aboriginals, and just whose identity would finally prevail. On the one hand we are supposed to cherish these unknowable cultures and on the other we are supposed to embrace them — presumably without knowing what we embrace and even whether the indigenes actually look forward to the embrace.

What is remarkable is that this mythmaking gains any traction at all. But it does. Our Environment Court has concluded that the Maori holistic view of the world means they make no distinction between land and water. I find this hard to believe. Certainly the Maori who live around me seem to know when to turn off their outboard motors to avoid running aground. Indeed I suspect that the difference between land and water was central to the conceptual framework of the ocean-going Polynesians who settled so much of the Pacific.

But should we worry? We have done remarkably well and most of our great achievements have been in recent times. It’s not that long ago that there were only two of us. Now there are six thousand million of us. And yet as PJ reminds us we are richer, longer lived, healthier, better fed, and better educated and enjoy more creature comforts than at any time in history. If any of you have a hankering for the good old days, PJ reminds us to consider just one word — dentistry.

Owen McShane is director of the Centre for Resource Management Studies. He lives in Kaiwaka.

Evolution Website a Hit with Teachers

A Waikato University website on evolution has received overwhelmingly positive feedback from teachers, says biological sciences lecturer Alison Campbell.

“We held a teacher meeting in April for the Waikato and Bay of Plenty area from which we got some very favourable comments, but I’ve heard that teachers from Auckland and Wellington are quite taken with the site as well.”

The site is aimed primarily at providing expert support and quality material for New Zealand’s science teachers. It has been developed over eight months by a group of staff from the School of Science and Technology.

“Why did we do it? Penny Cooke and I have been concerned for quite a while now about the low level of understanding of evolutionary theory that we find in our first-year earth science and biology students. In addition, I’d been fielding requests from biology teachers for some sort of resource that could help them teach evolution.”

The team, which also includes Kathrin Cass and Kerry Earl, tried to produce a comprehensive site that dealt with many aspects of evolutionary theory and research and the related earth sciences concepts.

“We put a lot of effort into making it attractive and easy to use, and from teachers’ comments I feel we’ve succeeded in this.”

She has had other feedback, including a query from one person asking why there was nothing on “alternative theories” such as Intelligent Design. “I directed him to the site page addressing the nature of scientific theories. And then there was one from someone who intends to use the site to demonstrate the failings of scientists to their children, to counteract the teaching on evolution they’ll receive from school…”

Much of the content fits in with the curriculum objectives of the NCEA. “It was very important to us that the site has New Zealand flavour, as students are expected to be familiar with New Zealand examples of evolution.”

She feels there’s a lot of very good evolutionary material on the web, but it lacks this New Zealand focus.

The content will be reviewed annually so that the site remains accurate and relevant. “In human evolution, for example, there’s a lot of new information coming on stream every year, and it’s very hard for individual teachers to keep up with this, but we can offer them this service.”

The team felt that the sections on the nature of science and the context in which evolutionary thinking developed are essential areas of the site. “One of the main objections for many people is that evolution is ‘just a theory’. Similarly, science education research has demonstrated that students are more likely to come to accept the theory of evolution if they are given the opportunity to see how it developed, rather than just having the fact of it dumped on them.

Dr Campbell has heard that colleagues at other universities intend to use the Waikato website with their second and third-year students, and she has used it extensively with her own first and second-year classes.

“From what I’ve heard, my own students have found it a very useful resource.”

As well as dealing with the science of evolution, the site tackles, in rather oblique fashion, the old skeptics’ bugbear of creationism. Evolution is, the site says, probably the only theory to be rejected on grounds of personal belief.

There’s a section on the distinction between hypotheses, theories and laws, reinforced in the Frequently Asked Questions section, where “Isn’t evolution ‘only a theory’?” gets a clear response. The FAQs also include creationist-related queries such as: “If humans descended from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?” and, “Living things have fantastically intricate features, shouldn’t they be the products of intelligent design, not evolution?” As well as providing brief answers to these, the site has links to external sites which cover these issues in more detail.

A section titled Darwin and Religion has quotes from such people as Pope John Paul II and Stephen Jay Gould on the proper relationship between science and religion, followed by interviews with two scientists who see no real conflict between the two.

The Evolution for Teaching website is on: sci.waikato.ac.nz/evolution/index.shtml

Pseudohistory Rules


Like scientists, historians use a dependable methodology to ensure their findings are reliable. Assertions of historical fact can properly be based only on empirical evidence. Historians then use their critical thinking skills to assess the trustworthiness of this data.

Lately, however, a vogue called postmodernism has challenged all claims to knowledge, including the work of scientists and historians. Science and empirical research supposedly are approaches that elites insist upon in order to strengthen their own standing. There are ways of knowing other than the rational. There is no one reality, only different perceptions and paradigms, all equally valid.

My favourite example of such thinking is the lecturer who told me some Polynesian students think the Earth is flat and that I deserve to be charged with harassment if I tell them they are wrong.

As a historian of the United States, I encounter postmodernism a lot when I teach and research the history of the Mormon church.

This church was founded in the state of New York in 1830 by a young man called Joseph Smith, who tried to use his interest in the amazing to make money. Smith claimed he had found a magic stone that let him see buried treasure. After hiring himself out as a treasure diviner, he was convicted of fraud by a New York court and largely gave up the practice.

Smith then started to claim that angels had been visiting him for years. They had led him to a buried box that contained golden plates. The history of ancient times was inscribed on these plates in “reformed Egyptian,” which Smith could translate by using magic stones. His translation of the golden bible went on sale as The Book of Mormon.

According to the Mormons, the book gives a divinely inspired account of ancient events in the Middle East and America. It treats the biblical story of the Tower of Babel as factual and adds a twist. A man called Jared, his brother and about 100 others were saved by the Lord from having their language confounded. God commanded the brother of Jared to build eight submarines and to load them with their friends and families, as well as their flocks and herds, including elephants. After travelling on and under the ocean for almost a year, the Jaredites discovered America. There they built great cities. After several centuries of civil wars among the Jaredites, one man was left out of millions of people. This adventure took place about 2000 BC.

The Book of Mormon is full of tales that belong to the same fantasy genre as The Lord of the Rings. But the Mormon church insists this fiction is fact and that historians and scientists have got things all wrong. Mormon leaders are hostile to evidence-based scholarship. They claim that their revelations trump research.

Church leaders claim to speak as the voice of God and to be infallible. They place great pressure on members to accept their teachings. For example, someone who leaves the church and becomes an apostate supposedly will lose his or her family for eternity. Even to question the teachings is a sin. So controlling is the Mormon church that some observers consider it a cult.

Last year, at Waikato University, I presented a seminar on Mormonism in which I outlined the tales in the Book of Mormon and said they obviously are not authentic history. Imagine my amazement when a professor who is not a Mormon leapt to her feet and denounced me. She quoted post-modernist theory, and said The Book of Mormon might be accurate. We cannot prove what is not true, she said. Some of my fellow academics gave her enthusiastic applause. The seminar left me sad about the state of education at New Zealand universities.

Even international, academic presses recently have published Mormon pseudohistory. Last year Oxford University Press published By the Hand of Mormon, by Terryl Givens, a Mormon who is Professor of English at the University of Richmond, Virginia. Givens says an angel really did reveal the Book of Mormon to Joseph Smith, and that its history of ancient America really is divinely inspired and true. Shame on Oxford University Press. And they are not alone.

I suspect many academics have not spoken out against the challenge from the Mormon church because they are not informed about Mormon ideas. Others may feel reluctant to criticise a religion. But when a religion claims to be the supreme fount of fact, when it contradicts research and opposes freedom of inquiry, then it should be challenged by academics. Although students can be victims of this church, universities should fail students who use unsound methodology to believe in pseudoscholarship, such as Creationism or the Book of Mormon, as history. If they do not insist on competent thinking, then universities are a joke.

The Time Line, or, Genesis Aotearoa

The universe we live in is vast, in both space and time, so vast as to be beyond human comprehension. Mathematicians have devised a way in which the large numbers involved can be manipulated, the “exponent”1, but it can mislead us into thinking we comprehend more than we really do. It can blind us to the true difference between two numbers whose exponents differ by only one unit. Thus, if my bank balance grows from $102 to $103, I am richer by $900, but if it grows from $106 to $107, I have gained $9 million.

Books on geology and palaeontology usually display the Earth’s history as a vertical column, with the formation at the bottom and “now” at the top. To be at all useful, this column must be exponential, ie 4.5x109yr BP at the base, rising in equal steps, 108, 107, 106, etc to the present. A linear scale would have the whole of “civilised” human life as a minute fraction of a millimetre, the thickness of a small bacterium.

To emphasise the true relationship between the age of the Earth and the scale of human existence, Mr Bill Taylor has devised an ingenious and impressive work, “The Time Line”, or “Genesis Aotearoa” as the Royal Society of New Zealand, the funder of the project, call it. Take a piece of cord, and suppose each millimetre of its length to represent one thousand years. To represent the age of the Earth will need over four and a half kilometres of cord. This lengthy piece of rope hangs in the Cotton lecture theatre of the Victoria University of Wellington, arranged in vertical bits to fit the height of the room, and placed tightly together like a loom warped up for weaving.

The birth of the Earth starts in the back top corner, stage right, and time marches to the front, around the podium, and “now is about half way down next to the door, back stage left.” The development of different life forms is illustrated by objects hung on the rope in the appropriate places. At the end of this rope, the terminal half centimetre contains all of human history; a length about equal to the height of a person covers the time Homo sapiens has existed.

In contemplating this imaginative and instructive creation, I was struck by the large areas of it, corresponding to millions of years, which carried no objects indicating the appearance of something new. A reminder of Gould and Eldridge’s “Punctuated Equilibrium”?

See Bill Taylor’s comments on the installation here.

1We count the number of zeroes following 1, and write that as a superscript after ten, eg 10,000,000 = 107.