Readers will recall that Dayton, TN was where the celebrated Scopes trial on the teaching of evolution was held back in 1925. Well, that state is still fighting against the teaching of evolution.

The latest effort is chronicled in the newspaper the Nashville Postwhich reports on a resolution proposed by State Sen. Raymond Finney (R-Maryville). The senator, a retired physician, clearly thinks he has come up with a clever way of putting the state’s Department of Education on the spot, presumably because they teach evolution without mentioning god. So Finney is asking the Senate to endorse certain questions that he would like to pose to the Department of Education. The department has to provide a response by January 15, 2008.

A Tennessee State Senate member has filed a resolution asking the Tennessee Department of Education to address a few basic questions about life, the universe and all that:

(1) Is the Universe and all that is within it, including human beings, created through purposeful, intelligent design by a Supreme Being, that is a Creator?

Understand that this question does not ask that the Creator be given a name. To name the Creator is a matter of faith. The question simply asks whether the Universe has been created or has merely happened by random, unplanned, and purposeless occurrences.

Further understand that this question asks that the latest advances in multiple scientific disciplines –such as physics, astronomy, molecular biology, DNA studies, physiology, paleontology, mathematics, and statistics – be considered, rather than relying solely on descriptive and hypothetical suppositions.

If the answer to Question 1 is “Yes,” please answer Question 2:

(2) Since the Universe, including human beings, is created by a Supreme Being (a Creator), why is creationism not taught in Tennessee public schools?

If the answer to Question 1 is “This question cannot be proved or disproved,” please answer Question 3:

(3) Since it cannot be determined whether the Universe, including human beings, is created by a Supreme Being (a Creator), why is creationism not taught as an alternative concept, explanation, or theory, along with the theory of evolution in Tennessee public schools?

If the answer to Question 1 is “No” please accept the General Assembly’s admiration for being able to decide conclusively a question that has long perplexed and occupied the attention of scientists, philosophers, theologians, educators, and others.

I am always happy to help out people. So in the spirit of pure charity, I offer free-of charge to the Tennessee Department of Education, the answers to the senator’s questions.

1. This is a question that cannot be answered scientifically. (This answer corresponds to his option of “This question cannot be proved or disproved” but I changed it slightly because his wording is awkward since you cannot prove or disprove a question.) So following the senator’s flow chart, we move on to question 3.

2. Not applicable

3. Because creationism is not science, it should not be taught in science classes.

No need to thank me, Senator Finney and the Tennessee Department of Education. I am happy to oblige.

This has been an edition of simple answers to questions.

POST SCRIPT: Editorial cartoons

Bob Geiger has the latest roundup.

I watched the documentary What is said about. . .Arabs and Terrorism on Tuesday and Wednesday. Director Bassam Haddad, a professor of political science at St. Joseph’s University, had a good mix of interviews from America, Europe and the Middle East. It was especially interesting to hear the views of a spectrum of regular people, intellectuals, journalists, and activists from the Middle East, since we rarely get to hear those voices here. Listening to them, you are made aware of the common humanity that binds us all and transcends ethnic and religious divides. You realized that there was strong agreement across the board on some basic ideas of what kinds of actions were justified and what were deplorable.
[Read more…]

(Due to the holidays, I will be taking a break from blogging. Instead, I will be re-posting some of my more light-hearted essays, this week dealing with the Harry Potter books. New posts will begin on Wednesday, January 3, 2007.)

One of the appealing things for me personally about the Potter books are the similarities with my own education, which results in waves of nostalgia sweeping over me as I read the stories. I went to a single-sex private school in Sri Lanka that was modeled on the British boarding school like Hogwarts, although about half the students (including me) commuted from home. We were called ‘day-scholars’ which, looking back now, seems like a quaint but dignified label when compared to the more accurate ‘commuters.’
[Read more…]

In William Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar (act IV, scene III), there is a memorable passage that goes:

There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

As usual, Shakespeare captures well the sense of drama of arriving at some crossroads in one’s life where one can sense that one is on the cusp of events, where subsequent events can unfold in dramatically different directions depending on the decision one makes. Should we seize the moment and take the chance of achieving great success? Or do we, because we fear the consequences of failure, hold back and play safe and thus end up missing the chance for glory?
[Read more…]

It seems to be clear even to some formerly pro-war agitators that there is no good outcome that can emerge from the Iraq war. The US military presence in that country is not able to fend off the insurgency against it and stop the spiral into violence. In fact, it is now becoming clear that the US presence is actually accelerating the process. The only question that seems to remain is whether the US withdraws from that country in a dignified way, seemingly voluntarily, or whether the withdrawal is a humiliating one, with US troops forced out by a motley combination of irregular forces.

The surest sign that the current US policy in Iraq is a failure is the repositioning of its most ardent advocates. They are beginning to carefully distance themselves from the very thing they once were cheerleaders for, trying to make sure that the inevitable collapse is not laid at their feet.

This process is more advanced and apparent in England. The British Army’s chief of staff has come right out and called for the withdrawal ‘soon’ of all British troops in Iraq, saying that being there is only making things worse.

The chief of the British Army has called for a pullout of British troops from Iraq “sometime soon” and said that post-invasion planning for that war was “poor, probably based more on optimism than sound planning.”

Gen. Richard Dannatt told London’s Daily Mail newspaper that he had “more optimism” that “we can get it right in Afghanistan.”

Dannatt said that Britain’s continued presence in Iraq had made the country less secure.
Britain should “get ourselves out sometime soon because our presence exacerbates security problems,” he told the newspaper in an interview published Thursday.

Although this was a deliberate slap at his boss Tony Blair, the British prime minister’s authority has been so eroded by this war that rather than reprimand the general for publicly undermining him, he had no choice but to agree, while trying to put the best face on Dannatt’s words. Tony Blair, like George Bush, has to have realized that the only thing left for him personally is to wait out the time until he leaves office and leave it to his successor to try and salvage something out of the wreckage that he and Bush have created.

Lord Guthrie, a former British defense chief of staff and described as Tony Blair’s ‘most trusted military commander’ stuck the knife in him even further, charging that even the planners for the invasion of Afghanistan were “cuckoo”. He said:

Anyone who thought this was going to be a picnic in Afghanistan – anyone who had read any history, anyone who knew the Afghans, or had seen the terrain, anyone who had thought about the Taliban resurgence, anyone who understood what was going on across the border in Baluchistan and Waziristan [should have known] – to launch the British army in with the numbers there are, while we’re still going on in Iraq is cuckoo

Some pro-war voices in Britain have begun to distance themselves from blame by saying that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were good ideas and could have been successful but were botched by the ham-handedness of the American implementation. But Matthew Parris writing in The Times of London says that this convenient scape-goating of the US is wrong headed and that the wars themselves, hatched by the neoconservatives (both in the US and England), were wrong in principle and doomed to failure from the beginning.

It is no small thing to find oneself on the wrong side of an argument when the debate is about the biggest disaster in British foreign policy since Suez; no small thing to have handed Iran a final, undreamt-of victory in an Iran-Iraq war that we thought had ended in the 1980s; no small thing to have lost Britain her credit in half the world; no small thing — in the name of Atlanticism — to have shackled our own good name to a doomed US presidency and crazed foreign-policy adventure that the next political generation in America will remember only with an embarrassed shudder.
. . .
The strategy failed because of one big, bad idea at its very root. Your idea that we kick the door in. Everything has flowed from that.

We were not invited. We had no mandate. There were no “good” Iraqis to hand over to. We had nothing to latch on to, no legitimacy. It wasn’t a question of being tactful, respectful, munificent, or handing sweets to children. We were impostors, and that is all.
. . .
The former hawks of press and politics now scramble for the status of visionaries let down by functionaries. This is a lifeboat that will not float. Let these visionaries understand that occupation is always brutal and usually resisted; that occupying armies are always tactless, sometimes abusive and usually boneheaded; that in the argument between hands-on and hands-off you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t; and that the first, original and central cause of the Iraq fiasco was not the bad manners of this or that poor, half-educated squaddie from Missouri, nor the finer points of this or that State Department doctrine of neocolonial administration.

The reason for failure was not the post-invasion strategy. It was the strategy of invasion. Blame the vision, not the execution.

The process of rewriting history that Parris describes as being attempted in Britain is also being attempted in the US. The fact that even war supporters here have realized that the war has been a colossal blunder with no good end in sight can be seen in the way that the various players are now retreating from formerly held positions of cheery optimism and are now carefully trying to rewrite history to make sure the blame does not fall on them.

Next: Attempting to rewrite history in the US.

In the previous posting, I discussed the calculation of Joseph T. Chang in which he showed that the most recent common ancestor (MRCA) of all the people living today lived around 1100 CE, while around 400 CE everyone who lived then was either the ancestor of all of us or none of us. The date when this occurs is called the IA (identical ancestor) date.

Chang got these results assuming that the population is constant over time at some value N, that the generations (with each generation lasting 30 years) are discrete and non-overlapping (i.e. mating took place only between males and females of the same generation), and that mating was random (i.e., there was equal probability of any one male in a generation to breed with any female of that same generation.)

What happens to these dates if you relax these unrealistic assumptions? One practical difficulty of going to more realistic models is that exact mathematical calculations become impossible and one has to resort to computer simulations. This was done by Douglas L. T. Rohde, Steve Olson, and Joseph T. Chang and their results were published in the journal Nature (vol. 431, September 30, 2004, pages 562-566).

As a first improvement, they divided the world into ten population centers (or ‘nodes’): one each in North America, South America, Greenland, Australia, the Pacific Islands, and the Indonesian archipelago, and two nodes in Africa and in Asia. Within each subpopulation, they assumed random mating, but allowed for neighboring populations to exchange just one pair of migrants per generation. Their computer models found that the best way to accommodate varying populations was to take a fixed value N equal to the population at the time of the MRCA. They assumed N to be 250 million, which was approximately the global population in the year I CE.

Using this more realistic model, and a generation span of 30 years, they obtained the MRCA date as 300 BC and the IA date as about 3,000 BCE, both still surprisingly recent.

They then constructed an even more sophisticated and realistic model. They broke up the inhabited area into three levels of substructure: continents, countries, and towns. (These were not real places, of course, just models, but they used our knowledge of geography and migrations routes that existed before 1,500 CE to create their models.)

The model allowed for each person to have a single opportunity to migrate from his or her town of birth. Within a country, they could migrate to any other town. If the migrants went to another country, the probability of that occurring decreased with the distance to the new country. To go to another continent required them to go through certain ports, and so on. The model also incorporated our knowledge of the size of ports and when they opened up.

Generations could also overlap in this model and the birth rate of each continent was adjusted to match historical estimates.

After making all these sophisticated adjustments to make their model more realistic, they arrived at what they felt was a reasonable estimate for the MRCA and IA dates. It turns out that the MRCA lived around 55 CE and the IA date is about 2,000 BCE. They also found that our most recent common ancestor probably lived in eastern Asia, not Africa as had been commonly supposed.

So despite going to considerable lengths to simulate a realistic pattern of population growth, mating, and migration, the dates arrived at for the MRCA and the IA are still surprisingly recent.

(If the authors of the paper made their parameters very conservative, they pushed the date for the MRCA only as far back to 1,415 BCE and the IA date to 5,353 BCE.)

A little reflection should persuade anyone that this result that our most recent common ancestor lived as late as 55 CE and in just 2,000 BCE we had identical ancestors has profound implications for the way we view ourselves and our relationship with others. The authors capture the wonder of it all when they end their paper with the following comment:

[O]ur findings suggest a remarkable proposition: no matter the languages we speak or the colour of our skin, we share ancestors who planted rice on the banks of the Yangtze, who first domesticated horses on the steppes of the Ukraine, who hunted giant sloths in the forests of North and South America, and who laboured to build the Great Pyramid of Khufu.

I find this amazing and remarkably encouraging. It should be more widely known. If more people realized how close we are to each other, perhaps we would stop killing one another and treat each other like the fairly close relatives we truly are.

This was the startling title of a controversial segment in August on the MSNBC talk show Scarborough Country, in which host Joe Scarborough moderated a discussion between two guests who debated the possibility that it was true. The show also had a clip of some of Bush’s incoherent ramblings on important topics, a montage which has to be seen to be believed. It seemed to me that Scarborough had concluded that Bush was an idiot and was using the common rhetorical device of posing his conclusion as a question as a defensive strategy to protect himself.

(Most of the Bushisms in the montage were familiar golden oldies but there were some new ones. My personal favorite was when he says: “I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully.” I became curious as to what possible context could have prompted him to express this heartwarming sentiment about interspecies harmony. Perhaps he said it during one of those summer shark attack news frenzies and he was calling for dialogue between the two species to end the bloodshed, his reworking of Rodney King’s “Can’t we all just get along?” The website Snopes says that Bush said these memorable words when he departed from the text of a campaign speech about dams in Saginaw, Michigan in September 2000. He did not elaborate on what he meant.)

The Scarborough Country program was remarkable not because of what the final verdict was on Bush’s mental capabilities but because such a question was even being asked at all by the mainstream media. Just a short while ago, they would have been debating the question “Is George Bush a god or is he simply the smartest, bravest man who has ever lived?”

If you think I am exaggerating, then take a look at this passage written by John Hinderaker just one year ago:

“It must be very strange to be President Bush. A man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius, he can’t get anyone to notice. He is like a great painter or musician who is ahead of his time, and who unveils one masterpiece after another to a reception that, when not bored, is hostile.”

Bear in mind that Hinderaker is not some small-time nincompoop who suffers from an acute case of Bush worship. He and two others, all attorneys, are the authors of the Power Line blog which was voted by Time magazine as Blog of the Year in 2004. They are major players in the world of big-time nincompoops, the kind that populate the talking head shows on cable TV. Hinderaker is also someone who has access to the White House.

Scarborough came in for some heavy criticism from Bush cultists because of the program and he defended himself in a later program by showing even more clips of Bush’s idiocies. But he also said something significant. He pointed out that he himself is a proud conservative, who once served as a Republican congressman from the south, and that the question that he was posing was one that widely, but privately, being discussed among conservatives in the nation’s capital.

The reason that conservatives have become so uneasy about Bush is that his approval ratings have sunk to the thirties and remained there for some time. The Harriet Myers debacle, and Katrina fiasco, the continuing disaster that is Iraq, the unexpected disintegration of Afghanistan, and the horrendous events in Lebanon and Gaza have made it obvious to all but the most die-hard Bush supporters that this administration has completely botched almost everything it touched, with no end in sight to the steady ruination of the country.

It is clear that the White House is uneasy about this negative re-evaluation of Bush’s mental abilities. While they have been eager to cultivate the image of Bush as a folksy, plain-spoken, brush-clearing, mountain-bike riding ‘man of the people’, being seen as a total doofus would be going too far. So they have counterattacked, giving out, like the proud parents of a precocious child, what they claim is Bush’s summer and annual book reading lists that includes up to 60 titles including Albert Camus’ The Stranger, with the Press Secretary even saying that he and Bush had discussed that novel’s existentialist themes.

This attempt at intellectual rehabilitation has strained credulity among observers. Some have looked closely at the list and cranked out the numbers. Here is one analysis from the The Carpetbagger Report:

Of the twelve books listed, I come up with a total page count of 5,356 pages, including 1,585 pages not available until at least 4/2006 of this year. That is an average page count of 450 pages per book. Multiply by his 60 books so far this year for a total page count of 27,000. 27,000 pages means the President would have to average a little over 115 pages per day. Reading a quick pace of a little over a minute per page, that is two hours a day of reading, and let’s be honest, longer if you want to retain information in these types of books. And this from a man who prides himself in not reading the paper. I don’t buy it.

As the Carpetbagger reports: ” The fact that the White House gang is experimenting with a new persona — Bush, the reader — is embarrassing. He’s not supposed to be about book learnin’; he’s about governing by instinct and relying on the advice of educated people who tell him what he wants to hear. Switching gears now is not only literally unbelievable, it’s pointless. The die is already cast.”

But for an even more embarrassing display at damage control, one can reliably return to Hinderaker who is still determined to portray Bush as the obvious heir to Aristotle and Kant and Einstein and that it is only we who are the idiots for not being able to see the dazzling mind that is on display right in front of us. In an August 22, 2006 post, it is clear that while even other conservatives may see Bush as a low-power night light among the bright chandeliers in the showroom of great thinkers, Hinderaker, perhaps because of the special night vision goggles he wears, is still dazzled by the brilliance that is hidden from the rest of us.

I had the opportunity this afternoon to be part of a relatively small group who heard President Bush talk, extemporaneously, for around forty minutes. It was an absolutely riveting experience. It was the best I’ve ever seen him. Not only that; it may have been the best I’ve ever seen any politician. . .The conventional wisdom is that Bush is not a very good speaker. But up close, he is a great communicator, in a way that, in my opinion, Ronald Reagan was not. He was by turns instructive, persuasive, and funny. . . It was, in short, the most inspiring forty minutes I’ve experienced in politics.

There are many thinkers I admire greatly and have no hesitation in saying so. But I can never imagine myself writing about anybody using the words that Hinderaker habitually uses to describe Bush. There is an obsequiousness to them that is cloying and repulsive. Frankly, I cannot see how anyone, other than a total sycophant who has completely lost his self-respect and is angling for a job from a powerful person, could write in public in such an obviously ingratiating way.

Hinderaker is not, unfortunately, an isolated case. The disease that afflicts him can be found among many politicians and journalists who continue to assure us that the public still likes Bush and sees him as a great leader, when the polls have for a long time indicated that the country has turned away from him. And that raises an interesting issue. What exactly it is about Bush that makes so many men (and they do tend to be men) go weak in the knees and not see him clearly for what he is: a man who is completely out of his depth and desperately treading water, waiting for the clock to run out on his presidency before he drowns?

This intriguing question will be addressed in a future post.

The documentary An Inconvenient Truth provides a good introduction to the problem of global warming. The film has three interwoven threads: (1) a documentary showing a slide-show talk that former Vice-President Al Gore gives around the world on the facts of global warming, mixed with film footage of the impact of warming on the environment; (2) the story of Gore’s own interest in this topic; and (3) some self-promotion by Gore.

While I could have done without the last and was not particularly interested in the second, the first part was done very well. It captured most of the state of the science accurately and presented it in a visually captivating way. The film is sobering and well worth seeing to get an introduction to the science behind the problem and a sense of the gravity of the situation we are facing.
[Read more…]

(See part 1 , part 2, part 3, and part 4 of this series.)

Politicians love power. They try to obtain as much of it as possible and think that the more they have, the better able they are to solve any problems and crush any opposition they encounter. But what frequently gets overlooked is that there is only a limited class of problems for which power can provide the solution, but success in this very narrow area often deludes leaders into thinking that they can apply power in all areas.

Nowhere is this more apparent than with military power. In conventional battles involving conventional armies, the side that has more troops, more planes, more weapons, more tanks, and so on, will win. Power works in such cases. This was why there was never any doubt that the US would succeed in overthrowing Saddam Hussein’s government in Iraq, once it had committed itself to using its full conventional arsenal.

But raw military power fails to deliver the goods when it seeks to achieve more subtle political goals, such as creating stability and harmony among groups. But politicians seem to never learn this basic truth. Iraq is once again the prime example where power has failed to achieve a post-war peace.

Take, for another example, Sri Lanka. For decades, the Tamil minority had been complaining of discrimination by the Sinhala majority government. The Tamil leadership before 1980 were steeped in Gandhian nonviolent traditions and when it protested, the protests took the form of civil disobedience, such as ‘sit down strikes’, where large numbers of protestors blocked the entrances of government buildings. The protestors carried no arms and offered no resistance when the police or other authorities carted them off to jail.

The Tamils developed a reputation for non-violence to the point of being considered docile and passive, easily pushed around by the more powerful police and security forces. When a few young Tamils abandoned what they felt was this futile non-violence strategy and launched the movement known as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE or more commonly, Tamil Tigers) as an armed group willing to take on the Sri Lankan army militarily, it was not taken seriously at first, because the Tamils had never shown any inclination, let alone expertise, towards militaristic actions. When the Tigers launched their first significant military action in July 1983, a bombing that killed government 13 soldiers, they were still a small and seemingly insignificant group.

The Sri Lankan government reacted the way that governments tend to do in such situations when they are confronted by opposition from members of a different ethnic or religious group over which they think they have overwhelming military superiority. They try to exact revenge on the civilian population. The Sri Lankan government instigated attacks by mobs that killed Tamils in the streets, looted and ransacked and burned their houses, bombed Tamil areas, and arrested and imprisoned large numbers of Tamils, and murdered them in the prisons. The idea behind this massive show of force seemed to be to ‘teach the Tamils a lesson,’ and persuade the Tamil people that it was futile to resist the power of the government, that their best bet was to abandon any support for the Tigers and give up armed struggle in general and go back to pleading their cause the way they had done for decades, even though such methods had produced no meaningful results.

When those measures did not produce any immediate results of the kind they sought, the government then raised the stakes even more and that led to aerial bombing in the Tamil areas that killed and wounded many people, destroyed the infrastructure (roads, hospitals, schools, businesses), created huge numbers of refugees, and made ruins of large areas. (This is similar to what is being currently done in Lebanon, where estimates say that over 300 people have been killed, 1000 wounded and 500,000 displaced. United Nations’ emergency relief coordinator, Jan Egeland says that nearly a third of the Lebanese casualties are children.)

But the result of this approach was the opposite of what the government hoped. Support for the Tigers, instead of waning, actually expanded and solidified and the Tigers actually grew stronger militarily. Over time they became larger in numbers, more sophisticated in their tactics, and acquired better weapons. As a result we are now, twenty years later, in a virtual stalemate with the Tigers controlling significant portions of land and able to hold its own against the Sri Lankan military. Just last month, the Sri Lankan Army’s Deputy Chief of Staff was killed in a suicide bombing by suspected Tigers. (He was another victim of the war in Sri Lanka that I knew personally, since he went to the same school as I did and was just one year my junior.)

The examples can be multiplied. The US in Vietnam and the French in Vietnam and Algeria thought that their overwhelming military superiority could be used to inflict such pain on the civilian population that in despair they would abandon all support for the liberation forces and give up the struggle. The US used carpet bombing of huge swaths of land, defoliants to wipe out vegetation, and napalm, to terrorize villagers, all in an attempt to undermine support for the Vietnamese guerillas. But instead what happened was that the support actually increased, the opposition forces became stronger, and eventually both the US and the French militaries were beaten and had to leave ignominiously.

Overwhelming conventional power can win battles waged in conventional ways but cannot overcome the challenges posed by asymmetric warfare against a hostile population. The Tigers in Sri Lanka and the National Liberation Fronts of Vietnam and Algeria took care to position themselves as defenders of their own people, fighting an alien force, and provided the security, stability, and services that the people were looking for. More importantly, the fact that they were defending themselves and their own people militarily, and were no longer acting like patsies, instilled pride in the people. Thus these opposition forces won the political struggle, which enabled them to neutralize the military advantage of the major powers opposing them.

Israel is the predominant military power in that region but it faces a determined opposition in Hamas and Hezbollah, groups that remind me of the Tigers in their determination. What Israel seems to be doing is falling into the same trap as other powerful governments before them, seduced by their conventional military superiority into thinking that they can ‘teach the people a lesson,’ that by inflicting severe pain on the civilian populations of Gaza and Lebanon, the people in those regions will abandon support for Hamas and Hezbollah and rally round those political leaders who are acceptable to Israel and the US.

Perhaps there exist some historical examples where (overlooking for the moment its total immorality) this strategy of the military forces of one ethnicity/nationality/religion punishing civilian populations of a different ethnicity/nationality/religion has succeeded in cowing people and destroying support guerilla or insurgent or other resistance forces. I am at a loss of think of any. All the historical examples that I am aware of suggest that the opposite will happen. At most, what you get with such attempts at using military force is a temporary lull in hostilities, while the insurgency lies low and regroups. But they tend to return with greater vigor and more sophisticated munitions at a later time. Witness what is happening now with the Taliban in Afghanistan.

In the modern world, where all kinds of armaments are easily available in the global black market, the sophistication of the weapons used by the forces opposed to Israel will increase, just the way that the Tamil Tigers improved their weaponry over time and now seem have a wide array of advanced weapons at their disposal, despite living on a island which makes procurement difficult. We are already seeing that Hezbollah seems to have more sophisticated weapons than Israel had anticipated, able to attack Israeli navy vessels and penetrate deeper into Israel than before.

In Sri Lanka, the show of military force by the government resulted in the so-called ‘moderate’ Tamil leadership, those acceptable to the government and willing to talk to the government on the government’s terms, becoming completely marginalized and irrelevant. Eventually, the government was forced to negotiate directly with the Tigers, the very group it had condemned as terrorists and unworthy of being negotiating partners. In the case of Vietnam, the succession of Vietnamese leaders that the US wanted to see as representatives of the Vietnamese people (Nguyen Cao Ky, Nguyen Van Thieu, and Duong Van Minh) were seen as puppets by most of the Vietnamese people, as can be seen by the fact that their governments collapsed as soon as the US withdrew its support.

What amazes me is that this should be seen as at all surprising. After all, the same governments that think that ‘punishing’ civilian populations will lead to them withdrawing support for their representatives know that when they themselves are attacked, their own populations rally round them. In the US for example, we saw how the attacks of 9/11 caused George Bush’s support levels to soar. And he still routinely tries to use the terror threat to rally support for himself. Why would these governments think that the people they are fighting would think and act any differently? As Israeli academic Ran HaCohen says:

As often in war time, most citizens do flock together behind the army, no matter how much they suffer. What Israel fails to grasp is that this simple logic applies to the other side as well: devastating Gaza will only increase support for the Palestinian militants.

Arresting dozens of their Cabinet members and members of parliament is only going to increase Hamas’ support even more. In the case of Gaza, we have to remember that Hamas actually won the last elections. Commentator Pat Buchanan looks at what happened in the immediate aftermath of those elections:

To punish these people for the crime of electing Hamas, [Israeli prime minister] Olmert imposed an economic blockade of Gaza and the West Bank and withheld the $50 million in monthly tax and customs receipts due the Palestinians.

Then, Israel instructed the United States to terminate all aid to the Palestinian Authority, though Bush himself had called for the elections and for the participation of Hamas. Our Crawford cowboy meekly complied.

The predictable result: Fatah and Hamas fell to fratricidal fighting, and Hamas militants began launching Qassam rockets over the fence from Gaza into Israel. Hamas then tunneled into Israel, killed two soldiers, captured one, took him back into Gaza, and demanded a prisoner exchange.

Israel’s response was to abduct half of the Palestinian cabinet and parliament and blow up a $50 million U.S.-insured power plant. That cut off electricity for half a million Palestinians. Their food spoiled, their water could not be purified, and their families sweltered in the summer heat of the Gaza desert.

The fact that the US and Israel were dismayed by the election results and have since tried to destabilize the Hamas government will only serve to increase the suspicion that the attack on Gaza was meant to nullify the election results. Imprisoning the cabinet members and members of parliament of Gaza is an unmistakable signal that Israel wants to overthrow the elected authorities in Gaza. HaCohen suggests that such a move may have been planned well in advance and was simply waiting for a provocation that duly arrived in the form of the capture of the Israeli soldier.

If I may make a prediction, it is that I fully expect to see at some point in the future, after many, many more deaths of ordinary people on all sides and the consequent immense suffering, Israel (along with the US) sit down with Hamas to negotiate the future of the region, exactly as the Sri Lankan government ended up being forced to negotiate with the Tigers, and the US and French were forced to negotiate with the NLF in Vietnam and Algeria.

Instead of dragging the Palestinian and Israeli people through years and years of suffering, spilling rivers of blood, and destroying families and communities, just to end up negotiating with the people they are currently fighting, how much better would it be if far-sighted leaders skip that bloody intermediate step, save all that unnecessary suffering, and begin negotiating now on creating a just and viable Palestinian state, with security guarantees for all the people and states in the region.

POST SCRIPT: The warmongers are never wrong, are they?

Tom Tomorrow’s eerily prescient April 2003 cartoon.

As almost everyone is aware, the science-religion wars have focused largely on the opposition of some Christian groups to the teaching of evolution. The religious objections to Darwin’s theory of natural selection have been based on the fact that if the universe and the diversity of life that we see around us could have come about without the guidance of a conscious intelligence like god (even operating under the pseudonym of ‘intelligent designer’), then what need would we have for believing in a god?

But while evolution has been the main focus of attention, I see that as more of a preliminary skirmish to the real final battle battleground for religion, which involves the brain.

The crucial question for the sustaining of religious beliefs is the relationship of the mind to the brain. Is the mind purely a creature of the brain, and our thoughts and decisions merely the result of the neurons firing in our neuronal networks? If so, the mind is essentially a material thing. We may have ideas and thoughts and a sense of consciousness and free will that seem to be nonmaterial, but that is an illusion. All these things are purely the products of interactions of matter in our brains. In this model, the mind is entirely the product of the physical brain. This premise underlies the articles selected for the website MachinesLikeUs.com.

Or is the mind a separate (and non-material) entity, that exists independently of the brain and is indeed superior to it, since it is the agent that can cause the neurons in our brain to fire in certain ways and thus enable the brain to think and feel and make decisions? In this model, the ‘mind’ is who ‘I’ really am, and the material body ‘I’ possess is merely the vehicle through which ‘I’ am manifested. In this model, the mind is synonymous with the soul.

If we are to preserve the need for god, then it seems that one must adopt the second model, that human beings (at the very least among animals) are not merely machines operating according to physical laws. We need to possess minds that enable us to think and make decisions and tell our bodies how to act. Most importantly, our minds are supposed to have the capacity of free-will. After all, what would be the value of an act of ‘faith’ if the mind were purely driven by mechanical forces in the brain?

It should be immediately obvious why the nature of the mind is a far more disturbing question for religion than evolution is or ever will be. With evolution, the question centers around whether the mechanism of natural selection (and its corollary principles) is sufficient to explain the diversity of life and changes over time. As such, the debate boils down to the question of weighing the evidence for and against and determining whether which is more plausible.

But plausibility lies in the eye of the beholder and we have seen in a previous posting how the desire to preserve beliefs one holds dear leads people to adopt intellectual strategies that enable them to do so.

Tim van Gelder, writing in the article Teaching Critical Thinking: Some Lessons from Cognitive Science (College Teaching, Winter 2005, vol. 53, No. 1, p. 41-46) says that the strategies adopted are: “1. We seek evidence that supports what we believe and do not seek and avoid or ignore evidence that goes against it. . . 2. We rate evidence as good or bad depending on whether it supports or conflicts with our belief. That is, the belief dictates our evaluation of the evidence, rather than our evaluation of the evidence determining what we should believe. . . 3. We stick with our beliefs even in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence as long as we can find at least some support, no matter how slender.”

In the discussions about evolution, people who wish to preserve a role for god have plenty of viable options at their disposal. They can point to features that seem to have a low probability of occurring without the intervention of an external, willful, and intelligent guidance (aka god). These are the so-called ‘irreducibly complex’ systems touted by intelligent design creationism (IDC) advocates. Or they can point to the seeming absence of transitional fossils between species. Or they can point to seemingly miraculous events or spiritual experiences in their lives.

Scientists argue that none of these arguments are valid, that plausible naturalistic explanations exist for all these things, and that the overwhelming evidence supports evolution by natural selection as sufficient to explain things, without any need for any supernatural being.

But in one sense, that argument misses the point. As long as the debate is centered on weighing the merits of competing evidence and arriving at a judgment, van Gelder’s point is that it does not matter if the balance of evidence tilts overwhelmingly to one side. People who strongly want to believe in something will take the existence of even the slenderest evidence as sufficient for them. And it seems likely that the evolution debate, seeing as it involves complex systems and long and subtle chains of inferential arguments, will always provide some room to enable believers to retain their beliefs.

But the mind/brain debate is far more dangerous for religion because it involves the weighing of the plausibility of competing concepts, not of evidence. The fundamental question is quite simple and easily understood: Is the brain all there is and the mind subordinate to it, a product of its workings? Or is the mind an independently existing entity with the brain subordinate to it?

This is not a question that scientific data and evidence has much hope of answering in the near future. Eliminating the mind as an independently existing entity has all the problems associated with proving a negative, and is similar to trying to prove that god does not exist.

But since the mind, unlike god, is identified with each individual and is not necessarily directly linked to god, discussing its nature carries with it less religious baggage, and its nature can be examined more clinically

Next: Descartes gets the ball rolling on the mind and the brain.

POST SCRIPT: Choosing god

I came across this story (thanks to onegoodmove) that illustrates the point that I was trying to make on the way people choose what kind of god to believe in. I have no idea if the events actually occurred, though, or if the story has been embellished to make the point.

The subject was philosophy. Nietzsche, a philosopher well known for his dislike of Christianity and famous for his statement that ‘god is dead’, was the topic. Professor Hagen was lecturing and outside a thunderstorm was raging. It was a good one. Flashes of lightning were followed closely by ominous claps of thunder. Every time the professor would describe one of Nietzsche’s anti-Christian views the thunder seemingly echoed his remarks.

At the high point of the lecture a bolt of lightning struck the ground near the classroom followed by a deafening clap of thunder. The professor, non-plussed, walked to the window, opened it, and starting jabbing at the sky with his umbrella. He yelled, “You senile son of a bitch, your aim is getting worse!”

Suffice it to say that some students were offended by his irreverent remark and brought it to the attention of the Department Head. The Department Head in turn took it to the Dean of Humanities who called the professor in for a meeting. The Dean reminded the professor that the students pay a lot of tuition and that he shouldn’t unnecessarily insult their beliefs.

“Oh,” says the professor, “and what beliefs are those?”

“Well, you know” the Dean says, “most students attending this University are Christians. We can’t have you blaspheming during class.”

“Surely” says the professor, “the merciful God of Christianity wouldn’t throw lightning bolts. It’s Zeus who throws lightning bolts.”

Later the Dean spoke with the Department Head, and said, “The next time you have a problem with that professor, you handle it, and let him make an ass out of you instead.”