Experts and opinions

‘Experts’ have been so wrong on just
about everything
ADAM CREIGHTON
It’s hard to recall a period in history in which experts have been so
comprehensively wrong on so many topics in such a short time.
Think Covid-19, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and inflation.
Intelligence experts looked foolish when it turned out Iraq didn’t
have weapons of mass destruction after all.
The Queen took a dim view of economists, who failed en masse to
foresee problems in the world’s banking system that precipitated
the global financial crisis in 2008.
Economists have a long history of being wrong, at least since more
than 300 of them publicly warned Margaret Thatcher in 1981 that
the British prime minister’s belt-tightening policies would cause a
recession, only to be proved spectacularly wrong a few months
later.
But the decade beginning in 2020 appears to have taken
institutional wrongness to a higher plane. Economists, even after
the embarrassment of calling inflation “transitory” for most of
last year, are still at it; they wrote a public letter in September last
year playing down concerns about inflation and encouraging Joe
Biden to press ahead with his $US3.5 trillion Build Back Better
package. But with inflation at almost 9 per cent in the US,
supporters of the package have gone strangely quiet in recent
months.
Foreign policy experts, though, have given economists a run for
their money since Russia invaded Ukraine, prompting the US and
Europe to wallop Russia with unprecedented sanctions designed to
compel Vladimir Putin to stop his illegal invasion.
They fired a bazooka at their own feet, doing nothing to avert the
war while crushing the competitiveness of European industry and
slashing the living standards of ordinary Americans and
Europeans.
Goodbye German car industry, on current trends.
It’s worse, though. In late March Biden, under the advice of experts
no doubt, said Russia’s currency would be turned to “rubble” by
sanctions. This week the rouble reached a seven-year high against
the US dollar, becoming the best performing currency in the world
this year.
Interest rates on Russian 10- year government bonds, at about 9
per cent, are one percentage point lower than they were before the
war. The Russian central bank is cutting interest rates as the Fed
lifts them.
Soaring energy prices, as a result mainly of Western sanctions,
have supercharged Russian oil and gas revenues, quadrupling the
Russian government’s budget surplus in May compared with the
same month a year ago, as Putin gloated in St Petersburg last week.
Security and intelligence experts haven’t done much better,
routinely foreshadowing the collapse of Russian forces, or even the
imminent death of Putin from a variety of diseases, all while those
forces appear to have slowly occupied a fifth of Ukraine, including
the crucial land corridor between Crimea and Russia.
Perhaps these are the same US intelligence experts who in October
2020 publicly said they were convinced the files on Hunter Biden’s
laptops, which have since raised serious questions about the
business dealings of the US President’s family, had “all the classic
earmarks of a Russian infor- mation operation”. Perhaps, but it
was also entirely real, as similarly benighted media experts have
now conceded.
Then there’s the climate change and energy experts who have been
telling us for years a rising share of solar and wind power in
national grids would cause prices to decline, when the two nations
furthest down that path – Germany and Denmark – have the most
expensive power in Europe.
Batteries would continue to get cheaper, the experts told us,
seemingly oblivious of the impact an immense increase in
mandated demand for electric cars and giant lithium batteries
would have on the price of the critical minerals they require. Not
very smart.
But no group of experts can compete with epidemiologists and
other so-called public health experts for being so militantly and
repeatedly wrong about every aspect of their supposed speciality,
which will go down as one of the great fiascos of history.
Three weeks to flatten the curve turned into almost 850 days of
chaotic, arbitrary restrictions that appeared to do very little in the
end to stop the spread of Covid-19, let alone pass any sort of
rational cost-benefit assessment.
Cloth masks worked, then they didn’t; vaccines protected against
infection, then they didn’t. Two doses were enough, then three,
then four. The virus emerged zoonotically for certain, then it
didn’t.
“Experts say”, “experts warn” has become something of a joke.
It’s not surprising that less than a fifth of American parents, for
instance, intend to vaccinate their toddlers against Covid-19,
according to a recent Kaiser Foundation survey, even though
experts are recommending it urgently.
This false narrative of a consensus among experts risks damaging
public respect for all of them. That’s a pity because genuine
expertise is valuable.
The handful of people presented by the media as experts are a
sliver of the total, among whom there is rarely a true consensus on
anything. Social media has supercharged the incentives to
moralise and fall victim to groupthink. On top of that, expert ranks
have swollen as society has become richer, enabling more people
to think for a living.
That means the average quality of advice has declined, providing
the media with a greater number of potentially crowdpleasing,
dubious opinions to promote.
Experts get it wrong often because they bear few personal
consequences of their advice. The accuracy of past predictions or
assessments is rarely checked. For experts, it’s much more
important to be on the right side of the debate than to be right.
Most of all, experts’ incomes typically are guaranteed whatever
they say; others bear the consequences.
The past few years have been a crisis for the reputation of experts,
but not for experts themselves.

Constitutional recognition?

No place for separate voice in a liberal ethos 
GREG SHERIDAN



Peter Dutton is the right choice to lead the Liberal Party. This is certainly a time for a pragmatic conservative. However, as leader there are some questions of principle he and his party should not dodge.

Perhaps the most important this term is that they should oppose, in principle, the move to establish in the Constitution an elected voice to parliament exclusively for Indigenous people. Dutton is right to wait for the details of Labor’s proposal, but people should make the in-principle argument against racial classifications in the Constitution or a bad and emotional decision will be made.

The main reason to oppose the voice is not conservative but liberal, the basic principle that race and ethnicity should have no place in civic status.

This is part of the tradition of Christian universalism, that race and ethnicity cannot establish any kind of religious hierarchy. St Paul declared: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male and female, but you are all one in Christ Jesus.” That was a religious statement with profound civic consequences. No race, no social status, no sexuality, had favour with God compared with anyone else. The individual, not the group, has an immortal relationship with God.

This universalism became the heart of Western liberalism and the basis for human equality. It goes without saying that no nation has fully lived up to the universalism and non-discrimina­tion that is true liberalism.

In Australia, Aboriginal people were dispossessed and suffered terrible ongoing discrim­ination and disadvantage. I have benefited from the wisdom of Aboriginal friends. I admire and esteem Aboriginal cultures. I wish Aboriginal people every advancement and success. But I do not want racial categories added to the Constitution. There are already racial clauses in the Constitution but they do not allow discrimination, or they are not acted on at all.

The argument that First Nations status is about culture, not race, is disingenuous. If it were true, then anyone could gain First Nations status by adopting the culture and anyone could lose it by abandoning the culture. That’s nuts, of course. This ghastly proposal will mean governments will have to define citizens’ racial or cultural background to determine their eligibility to vote.

One of the most unattractive aspects of this debate is the way advocates intimidate opponents into silence by accusing them of racism, a lack of empathy or a range of lesser sins. No one, but no one, enjoys being accused of racism by a voice advocate. It’s an extremely career-limiting experience. Yet many advocates of this supposed mechanism of harmony will fling the vilest labels at people who simply have the temerity to disagree with them.

So let’s be clear about a founding principle. It cannot be racist to insist that there be no racial distinctions in civic status, and it is entirely possible to operate from goodwill, and with full knowledge, and still disagree with the constitutional proposal.

There are two categories of argument, one symbolic, one practical. Symbolic ambition is misplaced with our Constitution. Australians don’t look to their Constitution for active symbolic leadership. It contains plenty of anachronisms, but it also contains the world’s best system of government. Therefore, rightly, we seldom change it.

We already live in a society rich in symbolic recognition of Indigenous heritage. When I was a kid, civic functions often began with a prayer or, if a meal, grace. Now, routinely, on aeroplane flights, at official meetings, business and other functions, we start by acknowledging the traditional custodians etc. Like saying grace 50 years ago, part of the purpose is to show how pious and religious you are. Just a different religion.

The practical argument is even weaker. As Malcolm Turnbull points out in his memoir, the biggest population of Aboriginal people lives in western Sydney. So how is it that someone identifying as Indigenous who lives in, say, Parramatta should be meaningfully consulted about policy specifically directed towards a remote Aboriginal community in Arnhem Land?

Consultation with local communities is immensely important. Value in the type of grandstanding a voice would go in for is much less clear. If there is any real practical benefit in it, set one up outside the Constitution and see how useful it is. Because it would not affect anyone’s civic status, it would not import racial classifications into citizenship in the way a constitutionally mandated voice would.

It is in the nature of all modern identity politics that the symbolism is never complete, the apology never sufficient. Acts of atonement for history become performative, endless and ever more demanding. Next on the agenda will be treaties, acknowledgments of dual or multiple sovereignty, veto rights in certain policy areas and who knows what else.

The mess we are in on this partly arises from the characteristic way the Morrison government refused to deal with contentious issues. It neither did anything nor said anything. When the voice proposal was raised, then prime minister Turnbull and his cabinet considered it and rightly ruled it out on principle. The Morrison government, in characteristic intellectual abdication, never seriously took a position on it, while millions of dollars of taxpayer money was spent building support for the idea. If we get a referendum and it is defeated, the nation and history will look poorly on Scott Morrison’s failure to rule a referendum out, in principle, right from the start.

It is worth revisiting Turnbull’s memoirs for a fine, crisp statement of the principles that should rule out a constitutionally mandated voice. Turnbull wrote that he wasn’t “comfortable with the Constitution establishing a national assembly open only to the members of one race”.

He recalled his statement after the cabinet decision: “Our democracy is built on the foundation of all Australian citizens having equal civic rights – all being able to vote for, stand for and serve in either of two chambers in our national parliament …

“A constitutionally enshrined additional representative assembly for which only Indigenous Australians could vote for or serve in is inconsistent with this fundamental principle.”

The reason to oppose the voice is not conservative at all. Certain types of conservatives might well accept the idea of different races negotiating with each other. The reason to reject it is profoundly liberal. No human being is defined by, or limited by, race. Citizenship is colourblind and the only civic status that should count. Making these changes at the height of contemporary identity politics madness is deeply ill-advised.

If Dutton can get his party to argue energetically for colourblind civic equality in the Constitution, he will have done his nation a service.

Assault on our values

 

BRUTAL ASSAULT ON OUR

VALUES

A civilisational shift has rocked the

underpinnings of Western societies

DOUGLAS MURRAY

In recent years it has become clear that there is a war going

on: a war on the West. This is not like earlier wars, where

armies clash and victors are declared. It is a cultural war, and

it is being waged remorselessly against all the roots of the

Western tradition and against everything good that the

Western tradition has produced.

At first, this was hard to discern.

Many of us sensed that something was wrong. We wondered

why one-sided arguments kept being made and why unfair

claims kept being levelled. But we did not realise the full

scale of what was being attempted. Not least because even

the language of ideas was corrupted. Words no longer meant

what they had until recently meant. People began to talk of

“equality”, but they did not seem to care about equal rights.

They talked of “anti-racism”, but they sounded deeply

racist. They spoke of “justice”, but they seemed to mean

“revenge”.

It is only in recent years, when the fruits of this movement

have come into plain sight, that its scale has become clear.

There is an assault going on against everything to do with

the Western world – its past, present and future. Part of that

process is that we have become locked in a cycle of unending

punishment. With no serious effort at (or even consideration

for) its alleviation.

Of course, countries and states have the right to change.

Over time a certain amount of change is inevitable. But there

seemed something loaded in what was going on: something

unbalanced and off-kilter. The arguments were being made

not out of love for the countries in question but out of a

barely disguised loathing for them. In the eyes of many

people, not least within their own populations, these

countries appeared to have done something wrong.

Something for which they must atone. The West was the

problem. The dissolving of the West was a solution.

At the same time, it had become unacceptable to talk about

any other society in a remotely similar way. Despite the

unimaginable abuses perpetrated in our own time by the

Communist Party of China, almost nobody speaks of China

with an iota of the rage and disgust poured out daily against

the West from inside the West.

Western consumers still buy their clothes cheap from China.

There is no widespread attempt at a boycott.

“Made in China” is not a badge of shame. Terrible things go

on in that country right now, and still it is treated as normal.

Authors who refuse to allow their books to be translated into

Hebrew are thrilled to see them appear in China.

Because in the developed West some different standard

applies.

With regard to women’s rights and sexual-minority rights,

and in particular when it came to the issue of racism,

everything was presented as though it had never been worse

at the point at which it had never been better. Nobody could

deny the scourge of racism – a scourge that is to be found in

some form throughout recorded history.

Yet, in recent decades, the situation in Western countries in

regard to racial equality has been better than ever. Our

societies have made an effort to get “beyond race”, led by

the example of some remarkable men and women of every

racial background, but most notably by some extraordinary

black Americans.

A war on everything

It was not inevitable that Western societies would develop,

or even aspire to, the tradition of racial tolerance that we

have. It was not inevitable that we would end up living in

societies that justly regard racism as among the most

abhorrent sins. It happened because many brave men and

women made the case, fought for that situation and claimed

their rights. In recent years, it has come to sound as though

that fight never happened.

In recent years, I have come to think of racial issues in the

West as being like a pendulum that has swung past the point

of correction and into overcorrection. As though if the

pendulum stays in a slight overcorrection for long enough,

then equality can be more firmly established.

By now, it is clear that however well-intentioned such a

belief may have been, it was wildly misguided.

Race is now an issue in all Western countries in a way it has

not been for decades. In the place of colour blindness, we

have been pushed into racial ultra-awareness. A deeply

warped picture has now been painted. Like all societies in

history, all Western nations have racism in their histories.

But that is not the only history of our countries.

Racism is not the sole lens through which our societies can

be understood, and yet it is increasingly the only lens used.

Everything in the past is seen as racist, and so everything in

the past is tainted. Though, once again, only in the Western

past, thanks to the radical racial lenses that have been laid

over everything. Terrible racism exists at present across

Africa, expressed by black Africans against other black

Africans. The Middle East and the Indian subcontinent are

rife with racism.

Travel anywhere in the Middle East – even to the

“progressive” Gulf states – and you will see a modern caste

system at work.

There are the “higher class” racial groups who run these

societies and benefit from them. And then there are the

unprotected foreign workers flown in to work for them as an

imported labour class. These people are looked down upon,

mistreated and even disposed of as though their lives were

worthless.

And in the world’s second most populated country, as

anyone who has travelled through India will know, a caste

system remains in vivid and appalling operation.

Yet we hear very little about this. Instead, the world gets

only a daily report on how the countries in the world that by

any measure have the least racism, and where racism is most

abhorred, are the homes of racism.

This warped claim even has a final extension, which is that if

other countries do have any racism, it must be because the

West exported the vice to them. As though the non-Western

world is always made up of Edenic innocents.

Here again, it is clear that some unfair ledger has been

created.

A ledger in which the West is treated by one set of standards

and the rest of the world by another. A ledger in which it

seems that the West can do no right and the rest of the world

can do no wrong. Or do wrong only because we in the West

made them do it.

These are just some of the symptoms that can be discerned

in our time. The more I have considered them and the

farther across our world that I have travelled, the clearer it

has become that this era is defined by one thing above all – a

civilisational shift that has been under way throughout our

lifetimes.

A shift that has been rocking the deep underpinnings of our

societies because it is a war on everything in those societies.

A war on everything that has marked our societies out as

unusual – even remarkable.

A war on everything that the people who live in the West

had, until very recently, taken for granted.

Sign of things to come

If this war is to prove unsuccessful, then it will need to be

exposed and pushed back against. The War on the West is a

book about what happens when one side in a cold war – the

side of democracy, reason, rights and universal principles –

prematurely surrenders. Too often, we frame this fight all

wrong. We allow it to be called temporary or on the fringe or

merely dismiss it as a culture war.

We misinterpret the aims of the participants or downplay

the role it will have in the lives of future generations.

Yet the stakes here are as high as any fight in the 20th

century, with many of the same principles involved – even

with many of the same bad actors. We have gone from

appreciating and weighing up what is good about Western

culture to saying that every part of it must be dismantled.

It is now over 30 years since the Reverend Jesse Jackson led a

crowd of protesters at Stanford University with the chant

“Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go”. Back then,

Jackson and his followers were protesting against Stanford

University’s introductory program “Western Culture”.

They proposed that there was something wrong with

teaching the Western canon and the Western tradition. But it

was what happened next that was so striking.

The university swiftly gave in, replacing the study of

“Western culture” with the study of many cultures. What

happened at Stanford in 1987 was a sign of everything to

come.

In the decades that followed, nearly all of academia in the

Western world followed Stanford’s lead.

The history of Western thought, art, philosophy, and culture

became an ever less communicable subject. Indeed, it

became something of an embarrassment: the product of a

bunch of “dead white males”, to use just one of the

charming monikers that entered the language. Since then,

every effort to keep alive, let alone revive, the teaching of

Western civilisation has met with sustained hostility,

ridicule and even violence.

Academics who have sought to study Western nations in a

neutral light have been prevented from doing their work and

subjected to intimidation and defamation, including from

colleagues. In Australia, the Ramsay Centre for Western

Civilisation, whose board is chaired by former prime

minister John Howard, has tried to find universities to

partner with so students can study Western civilisation.

They have had great trouble finding any universities willing

to work with them. And that tells us something about the

speed of this great shift. Just a couple of decades ago, a

course in the history of Western civilisation was

commonplace.

Today it is so disreputable that you can’t pay universities to

do it.

In 1969, the BBC ran Sir Kenneth Clark’s extraordinary

documentary series Civilisation. It aimed to give a unified

history of Western civilisation, and it did so, informing the

understanding of millions of viewers around the world. In

2018, the BBC tried to follow this up. Civilisations (with an

emphasis on the s) was a hodgepodge creation of three

historians, trying desperately to make sure that they didn’t

sound as if they were saying the West was better than

anywhere else and giving a sort of world history that made

nothing very clear. In a few short decades, the Western

tradition has moved from being celebrated to being

embarrassing and anachronistic and, finally, to being

something shameful. It turned from a story meant to inspire

people and nurture them in their lives into a story meant to

shame people.

Of course, some swing of the pendulum is inevitable and may

even be desirable. There certainly have been times in the

past when the history of the West has been taught as though

it is a story of unabashed good. Historical criticism and

rethinking are never a bad idea. However, the hunt for

visible, tangible problems shouldn’t become a hunt for

invisible, intangible problems. Especially not if they are

carried out by dishonest people with the most extreme

answers.

If we allow malicious critics to misrepresent and hijack our

past, then the future they plan off the back of this will not be

harmonious.

It will be hell.

Through the spin cycle

Critics of Western civilisation do provide alternatives. They

venerate every culture so long as it is not Western. For

instance, all native thought and cultural expression are to be

celebrated, just so long as that native culture is not Western.

Two major problems come from celebrating all non-Western

cultures.

The first is that non-Western countries are able to get away

with contemporary crimes as monstrous as anything that

has happened in the Western past. A habit that some foreign

powers encourage.

After all, if the West is so preoccupied with denigrating

itself, what time could it find to look at the rest of the world?

But the other major problem is that it leads to a form of

parochial internationalism, where Westerners mistakenly

presume that aspects of the Western inheritance are

common aspirations across the rest of the globe. From

Australia to Canada and America and throughout Europe, a

new generation has imbibed the idea that aspects of the

Western tradition (such as “human rights”) are a historical

and global norm that have been rolled out everywhere. In

time, it has come to seem that the Western tradition that

evolved these norms has uniquely failed to live up to them

and that non- Western “Indigenous” cultures are (among

much else) purer and more enlightened than Western

culture can ever be.

These views are taught in universities and schools across the

Western world. And their results can be seen in almost every

major cultural and political institution Everything from art,

mathematics, and music to gardening, sport, and food has

been put through the same spin cycle. There are many

curiosities in all this. Not the least of them is that while the

West is assaulted for everything it has done wrong, it now

gets no credit for having got anything right. In fact, these

things – including the development of individual rights,

religious liberty, and pluralism – are held against it.

This leads us to a second, deeper puzzle. Why open

everything in the West to assault? The culture that gave the

world lifesaving advances in science, medicine and a free

market that has raised billions of people around the world

out of poverty and offered the greatest flowering of thought

anywhere in the world is interrogated through a lens of the

deepest hostility and simplicity.

The culture that produced Michelangelo, Leonardo, Bernini,

and Bach is portrayed as if it has nothing relevant to say.

New generations are taught this ignorant view of history.

They are offered a story of the West’s failings without

spending anything like a corresponding time on its glories.

Every schoolchild now knows about slavery. How many can

describe without irony, cringing or caveat the great gifts that

the Western tradition has given to the world? All aspects of

the Western tradition now suffer the same attack.

The Judeo-Christian tradition that formed a cornerstone of

the Western tradition finds itself under particular assault

and denigration.

But so does the tradition of secularism and the

Enlightenment, which produced a flourishing in politics,

sciences and the arts. And this has consequences. A new

generation does not appear to understand even the most

basic principles of free thought and free expression. Indeed,

these are themselves portrayed as products of European

Enlightenment and attacked by people who don’t

understand how or why the West came to the settlements

that it did over religion. Nor how the prioritising of the

scientific method allowed people around the world untold

improvements in their lives. Instead, these inheritances are

criticised as examples of Western arrogance, elitism, and

undeserved superiority. As a result, everything connected

with the Western tradition is being jettisoned.

At education colleges in America, aspiring teachers have

been given training seminars where they are taught that

even the term “diversity of opinion” is “white supremacist

bullshit”.

One-sided debate

I do not wish to shut down the considerable debate that is

going on at the moment. I enjoy that debate and think it

helpful. But to date it has been riotously one-sided.

Politicians, academics, historians and activists getting away

with saying things that are not simply incorrect or

injudicious but flat-out false. They have got away with it for

far too long.

There are many facets to this war on the West. It is carried

out across the media and airwaves, throughout the education

system, from as early as preschool. It is rife within the wider

culture, where all major cultural institutions are coming

under pressure or actually volunteering to distance

themselves from their own past. And it now exists at the

very top of the American government, where one of the first

acts of the new administration was to issue an executive

order calling for “equity” and the dismantling of what it

called “systemic racism”.

We appear to be in the process of killing the goose that has

laid some very golden eggs.

This is an edited extract from The War on the West: How to

Prevail in the Age of Unreason by Douglas Murray, published

by HarperCollins on May 18.

DarwinsDoubt

 

(A preamble to the book  ~ 15 minute read)

Prologue

When people today hear the term “information revolution,” they typically think of silicon chips and software code, cellular phones and supercomputers. They rarely think of tiny one-celled organisms or the rise of animal life. But, while writing these words in the summer of 2012, I am sitting at the end of a narrow medieval street in Cambridge, England, where more than half a century ago a far-reaching information revolution began in biology. This revolution was launched by an unlikely but now immortalized pair of scientists, Francis Crick and James Watson. Since my time as a Ph.D. student at Cambridge during the late 1980s, I have been fascinated by the way their discovery transformed our understanding of the nature of life. Indeed, since the 1950s, when Watson and Crick first illuminated the chemical structure and information-bearing properties of DNA, biologists have come to understand that living things, as much as high-tech devices, depend upon digital information—information that, in the case of life, is stored in a four-character chemical code embedded within the twisting figure of a double helix.

Because of the importance of information to living things, it has now become apparent that many distinct “information revolutions” have occurred in the history of life—not revolutions of human discovery or invention, but revolutions involving dramatic increases in the information present within the living world itself. Scientists now know that building a living organism requires information, and building a fundamentally new form of life from a simpler form of life requires an immense amount of new information. Thus, wherever the fossil record testifies to the origin of a completely new form of animal life—a pulse of biological innovation—it also testifies to a significant increase in the information content of the biosphere.

In 2009, I wrote a book called Signature in the Cell about the first “information revolution” in the history of life—the one that occurred with the origin of the first life on earth. My book described how discoveries in molecular biology during the 1950s and 1960s established that DNA contains information in digital form, with its four chemical subunits (called nucleotide bases) functioning like letters in a written language or symbols in a computer code. And molecular biology also revealed that cells employ a complex information-processing system to access and express the information stored in DNA as they use that information to build the proteins and protein machines that they need to stay alive. Scientists attempting to explain the origin of life must explain how both information-rich molecules and the cell’s information-processing system arose.

The type of information present in living cells—that is, “specified” information in which the sequence of characters matters to the function of the sequence as a whole—has generated an acute mystery. No undirected physical or chemical process has demonstrated the capacity to produce specified information starting “from purely physical or chemical” precursors. For this reason, chemical evolutionary theories have failed to solve the mystery of the origin of first life—a claim that few mainstream evolutionary theorists now dispute.

In Signature in the Cell, I not only reported the well-known impasse in origin-of-life studies; I also made an affirmative case for the theory of intelligent design. Although we don’t know of a material cause that generates functioning digital code from physical or chemical precursors, we do know—based upon our uniform and repeated experience—of one type of cause that has demonstrated the power to produce this type of information. That cause is intelligence or mind. As information theorist Henry Quastler observed, “The creation of information is habitually associated with conscious activity.”¹ Whenever we find functional information—whether embedded in a radio signal, carved in a stone monument, etched on a magnetic disc, or produced by an origin-of-life scientist attempting to engineer a self-replicating molecule—and we trace that information back to its ultimate source, invariably we come to a mind, not merely a material process. For this reason, the discovery of digital information in even the simplest living cells indicates the prior activity of a designing intelligence at work in the origin of the first life.

My book proved controversial, but in an unexpected way. Though I clearly stated that I was writing about the origin of the first life and about theories of chemical evolution that attempt to explain it from simpler preexisting chemicals, many critics responded as if I had written another book altogether. Indeed, few attempted to refute my book’s actual thesis that intelligent design provides the best explanation for the origin of the information necessary to produce the first life. Instead, most criticized the book as if it had presented a critique of the standard neo-Darwinian theories of biological evolution—theories that attempt to account for the origin of new forms of life from simpler preexisting forms of life. Thus, to refute my claim that no chemical evolutionary processes had demonstrated the power to explain the ultimate origin of information in the DNA (or RNA) necessary to produce life from simpler preexisting chemicals in the first place, many critics cited processes at work in already living organisms—in particular, the process of natural selection acting on random mutations in already existing sections of information-rich DNA. In other words, these critics cited an undirected process that acts on preexistent information-rich DNA to refute my argument about the failure of undirected material processes to produce information in DNA in the first place.²

For example, the eminent evolutionary biologist Francisco Ayala attempted to refute Signature by arguing that evidence from the DNA of humans and lower primates showed that the genomes of these organisms had arisen as the result of an unguided, rather than intelligently designed, process—even though my book did not address the question of human evolution or attempt to explain the origin of the human genome, and even though the process to which Ayala alluded clearly presupposed the existence of another information-rich genome in some hypothetical lower primate.³

Other discussions of the book cited the mammalian immune system as an example of the power of natural selection and mutation to generate new biological information, even though the mammalian immune system can only perform the marvels it does because its mammalian hosts are already alive, and even though the mammalian immune system depends upon an elaborately preprogrammed form of adaptive capacity rich in genetic information—one that arose long after the origin of the first life. Another critic steadfastly maintained that “Meyer’s main argument” concerns “the inability of random mutation and selection to add information to [preexisting] DNA”⁴ and attempted to refute the book’s presumed critique of the neo-Darwinian mechanism of biological evolution accordingly.

I found this all a bit surreal, as if I had wandered into a lost chapter from a Kafka novel. Signature in the Cell simply did not critique the theory of biological evolution, nor did it ask whether mutation and selection can add new information to preexisting information-rich DNA. To imply otherwise, as many of my critics did, was simply to erect a straw man.

To those unfamiliar with the particular problems faced by scientists trying to explain the origin of life, it might not seem obvious why invoking natural selection does not help to explain the origin of the first life. After all, if natural selection and random mutations can generate new information in living organisms, why can it also not do so in a prebiotic environment? But the distinction between a biological and prebiotic context was crucially important to my argument. Natural selection assumes the existence of living organisms with a capacity to reproduce. Yet self-replication in all extant cells depends upon information-rich proteins and nucleic acids (DNA and RNA), and the origin of such information-rich molecules is precisely what origin-of-life research needs to explain. That’s why Theodosius Dobzhansky, one of the founders of the modern neo-Darwinian synthesis, can state flatly, “Pre-biological natural selection is a contradiction in terms.”⁵ Or, as Nobel Prize–winning molecular biologist and origin-of-life researcher Christian de Duve explains, theories of prebiotic natural selection fail because they “need information which implies they have to presuppose what is to be explained in the first place.”⁶ Clearly, it is not sufficient to invoke a process that commences only once life has begun, or once biological information has arisen, to explain the origin of life or the origin of the information necessary to produce it.

All this notwithstanding, I have long been aware of strong reasons for doubting that mutation and selection can add enough new information of the right kind to account for large-scale, or “macroevolutionary,” innovations—the various information revolutions that have occurred after the origin of life. For this reason, I have found it increasingly tedious to have to concede, if only for the sake of argument, the substance of claims I think likely to be false.

And so the repeated prodding of my critics has paid off. Even though I did not write the book or make the argument that many of my critics critiqued in responding to Signature in the Cell, I have decided to write that book. And this is that book.

Of course, it might have seemed a safer course to leave well enough alone. Many evolutionary biologists now grudgingly acknowledge that no chemical evolutionary theory has offered an adequate explanation of the origin of life or the ultimate origin of the information necessary to produce it. Why press a point you never made in the first place?

Because despite the widespread impression to the contrary—conveyed by textbooks, the popular media, and spokespersons for official science—the orthodox neo-Darwinian theory of biological evolution has reached an impasse nearly as acute as the one faced by chemical evolutionary theory. Leading figures in several subdisciplines of biology—cell biology, developmental biology, molecular biology, paleontology, and even evolutionary biology—now openly criticize key tenets of the modern version of Darwinian theory in the peer-reviewed technical literature. Since 1980, when Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould declared that neo-Darwinism “is effectively dead, despite its persistence as textbook orthodoxy,”⁷ the weight of critical opinion in biology has grown steadily with each passing  year.

A steady stream of technical articles and books have cast new doubt on the creative power of the mutation and selection mechanism.⁸ So well established are these doubts that prominent evolutionary theorists must now periodically assure the public, as biologist Douglas Futuyma has done, that “just because we don’t know how evolution occurred, does not justify doubt about whether it occurred.”⁹ Some leading evolutionary biologists, particularly those associated with a group of scientists known as the “Altenberg 16,” are openly calling for a new theory of evolution because they doubt the creative power of the mutation and natural selection mechanism.¹⁰

The fundamental problem confronting neo-Darwinism, as with chemical evolutionary theory, is the problem of the origin of new biological information. Though neo-Darwinists often dismiss the problem of the origin of life as an isolated anomaly, leading theoreticians acknowledge that neo-Darwinism has also failed to explain the source of novel variation without which natural selection can do nothing—a problem equivalent to the problem of the origin of biological information. Indeed, the problem of the origin of information lies at the root of a host of other acknowledged problems in contemporary Darwinian theory—from the origin of new body plans to the origin of complex structures and systems such as wings, feathers, eyes, echolocation, blood clotting, molecular machines, the amniotic egg, skin, nervous systems, and multicellularity, to name just a few.

At the same time, classical examples illustrating the prowess of natural selection and random mutations do not involve the creation of novel genetic information. Many biology texts tell, for example, about the famous finches in the Galápagos Islands, whose beaks have varied in shape and length over time. They also recall how moth populations in England darkened and then lightened in response to varying levels of industrial pollution. Such episodes are often presented as conclusive evidence for the power of evolution. And indeed they are, depending on how one defines “evolution.” That term has many meanings, and few biology textbooks distinguish between them. “Evolution” can refer to anything from trivial cyclical change within the limits of a preexisting gene pool to the creation of entirely novel genetic information and structure as the result of natural selection acting on random mutations. As a host of distinguished biologists have explained in recent technical papers, small-scale, or “microevolutionary,” change cannot be extrapolated to explain large-scale, or “macroevolutionary,” innovation.¹¹ For the most part, microevolutionary changes (such as variation in color or shape) merely utilize or express existing genetic information, while the macroevolutionary change necessary to assemble new organs or whole body plans requires the creation of entirely new information. As an increasing number of evolutionary biologists have noted, natural selection explains “only the survival of the fittest, not the arrival of the fittest.”¹² The technical literature in biology is now replete with world-class biologists¹³ routinely expressing doubts about various aspects of neo-Darwinian theory, and especially about its central tenet, namely, the alleged creative power of the natural selection and mutation mechanism.

Nevertheless, popular defenses of the theory continue apace, rarely if ever acknowledging the growing body of critical scientific opinion about the standing of the theory. Rarely has there been such a great disparity between the popular perception of a theory and its actual standing in the relevant peer-reviewed scientific literature. Today modern neo-Darwinism seems to enjoy almost universal acclaim among science journalists and bloggers, biology textbook writers, and other popular spokespersons for science as the great unifying theory of all biology. High-school and college textbooks present its tenets without qualification and do not acknowledge the existence of any significant scientific criticism of it. At the same time, official scientific organizations—such as the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (AAAS), and the National Association of Biology Teachers (NABT)—routinely assure the public that the contemporary version of Darwinian theory enjoys unequivocal support among qualified scientists and that the evidence of biology overwhelmingly supports the theory. For example, in 2006 the AAAS declared, “There is no significant controversy within the scientific community about the validity of the theory of evolution.”¹⁴ The media dutifully echo these pronouncements. As New York Times science writer Cornelia Dean asserted in 2007, “There is no credible scientific challenge to the theory of evolution as an explanation for the complexity and diversity of life on earth.”¹⁵

The extent of the disparity between popular representations of the status of the theory and its actual status, as indicated in the peer-reviewed technical journals, came home to me with particular poignancy as I was preparing to testify before the Texas State Board of Education in 2009. At the time the board was considering the adoption of a provision in its science education standards that would encourage teachers to inform students of both the strengths and weaknesses of scientific theories. This provision had become a political hot potato after several groups asserted that “teaching strengths and weaknesses” were code words for biblical creationism or for removing the teaching of the theory of evolution from the curriculum. Nevertheless, after defenders of the provision insisted that it neither sanctioned teaching creationism nor censored evolutionary theory, opponents of the provision shifted their ground. They attacked the provision by insisting that there was no need to consider weaknesses in modern evolutionary theory because, as Eugenie Scott, spokeswoman for the National Center for Science Education, insisted in The Dallas Morning News, “There are no weaknesses in the theory of evolution.”¹⁶

At the same time, I was preparing a binder of one hundred peer-reviewed scientific articles in which biologists described significant problems with the theory—a binder later presented to the board during my testimony. So I knew—unequivocally—that Dr. Scott was misrepresenting the status of scientific opinion about the theory in the relevant scientific literature. I also knew that her attempts to prevent students from hearing about significant problems with evolutionary theory would have likely made Charles Darwin himself uncomfortable. In On the Origin of Species, Darwin openly acknowledged important weaknesses in his theory and professed his own doubts about key aspects of it. Yet today’s public defenders of a Darwin-only science curriculum apparently do not want these, or any other scientific doubts about contemporary Darwinian theory, reported to students.

This book addresses Darwin’s most significant doubt and what has become of it. It examines an event during a remote period of geological history in which numerous animal forms appear to have arisen suddenly and without evolutionary precursors in the fossil record, a mysterious event commonly referred to as the “Cambrian explosion.” As he acknowledged in the Origin, Darwin viewed this event as a troubling anomaly—one that he hoped future fossil discoveries would eventually eliminate.

The book is divided into three main parts. Part One, “The Mystery of the Missing Fossils,” describes the problem that first generated Darwin’s doubt—the missing ancestors of the Cambrian animals in the earlier Precambrian fossil record—and then tells the story of the successive, but unsuccessful, attempts that biologists and paleontologists have made to resolve that mystery.

Part Two, “How to Build an Animal,” explains why the discovery of the importance of information to living systems has made the mystery of the Cambrian explosion more acute. Biologists now know that the Cambrian explosion not only represents an explosion of new animal form and structure but also an explosion of information—that it was, indeed, one of the most significant “information revolutions” in the history of life. Part Two examines the problem of explaining how the unguided mechanism of natural selection and random mutations could have produced the biological information necessary to build the Cambrian animal forms. This group of chapters explains why so many leading biologists now doubt the creative power of the neo-Darwinian mechanism and it presents four rigorous critiques of the mechanism based on recent biological research.

Part Three, “After Darwin, What?” evaluates more current evolutionary theories to see if any of them explain the origin of form and information more satisfactorily than standard neo-Darwinism does. Part Three also presents and assesses the theory of intelligent design as a possible solution to the Cambrian mystery. A concluding chapter discusses the implications of the debate about design in biology for the larger philosophical questions that animate human existence. As the story of the book unfolds, it will become apparent that a seemingly isolated anomaly that Darwin acknowledged almost in passing has grown to become illustrative of a fundamental problem for all of evolutionary biology: the problem of the origin of biological form and information.

To see where that problem came from and why it has generated a crisis in evolutionary biology, we need to begin at the beginning: with Darwin’s own doubt, with the fossil evidence that elicited it, and with a clash between a pair of celebrated Victorian naturalists—the famed Harvard paleontologist Louis Agassiz and Charles Darwin himself.

 

Euthanasia

The Australian 24thJan2022

Rise of death tech reflects fall in how West values life 

Jennifer Oriel

During euthanasia debates, critics argue that legalising the procedure leads to a slippery slope that can threaten the most vulnerable groups in society, such as the elderly and people with disabilities. In some European countries, euthanasia is permitted for the mentally unwell and the elderly without terminal illnesses. As Australian society ages, the welfare cost of caring for our elders grows. Unless preventive action is taken, our ageing population could face pressure to accept their euthanasia as a public good.

The Covid pandemic exposed an ugly side to the Western world. As governments imposed restrictions to reduce the risk to vulnerable populations, resentment grew. The hashtag Boomer Remover trended on Twitter. People argued the baby boomer generation was selfish to prioritise their health over the economic wellbeing of younger generations who would be saddled with Covid debt. It was a window into the future where the young will be forced to pay for the care of millions of ageing Australians they do not know.

In a 2009 column for The Guardian, Colin Feltham wrote: “There are good reasons for arguing that a stabilisation or gradual reduction in population would be the best way to address the carbon emissions problem.” He questioned how many severely disabled or old people society can carry given their “expensive support needs”, and whether people with “terminal disease, paralysing disability, chronic mental illness or life imprisonment” should have to have the choice of “state-approved and assisted suicide”.

In a 2020 article on euthanasia, Lars Melhum et al expressed concern about the legal recognition of mental illness as grounds for the procedure. However, more Western countries are decriminalising assisted suicide or euthanasia for the mentally ill. Australian Philip Nitschke is renowned for euthanasia advocacy and recently made headlines for innovation in the field. He is on the cusp of trialling a hi-tech coffin that ticks all the boxes. It is marketed as portable, eco-friendly and, say euthanasia fanciers, “elegant”. The Sarco, as it is called, has a biodegradable pod that can be detached from the base and used as a coffin. Once activated, nitrogen is pumped into the pod and oxygen levels fall until the occupant dies. But why stop there? My other half suggested that to be truly clean and green, Sarco should be equipped with the latest autonomous vehicle technology to “propel itself toward the crematorium”.
The market in death tech could be viewed as a symbol of Western decline, or the rise of societies that deny God by measuring human life in material rather than spiritual terms. For many, passive euthanasia and the continuous sedation of people in pain with terminal illnesses is more justifiable than euthanising people for the burden of age or mental illness. But the grounds for ending life prematurely are multiplying.

The Netherlands permits euthanasia for people with dementia who prepare statements to authorise it, even if they are unable to provide consent in later stages of the illness. Several issues have been raised in relation to the reform. People can experience symptoms of dementia before diagnosis, such as confusion, withdrawal, apathy, despondency and depression. If they prepare an advance directive with undiagnosed dementia, is it truly informed by reason, rationality, choice and autonomy? What if a patient changes their mind later, but lacks the capacity to withdraw consent?

Such questions were asked in relation to the case of a Dutch woman who was euthanised without her knowledge. After being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, she had prepared a statement indicating that she consented to be euthanised before she had to enter a care home but wanted to decide the timing. When the time came for her to be admitted into care, a doctor decided the patient should be euthanised based on her earlier statement. The doctor slipped a sedative into the woman’s coffee, but it did not kill her. After she woke up, family members restrained her while the doctor administered a lethal dose. The case was brought before the courts where Judge Mariette Renckens cleared the doctor of wrongdoing. The following year, the Dutch Supreme Court approved the euthanasia of patients with dementia who have previously authorised it in writing, even if they do not express a wish for it later.

Laws for euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide have been passed in Victoria, Western Australia, Tasmania, South Australia and Queensland. Currently, they do not recognise advance directives for the euthanasia of dementia patients. However, there is some indication of support for it.

According to Dementia Australia chair Graeme Samuel, there are an estimated half a million people living with dementia across the country. Two thousand cases are diagnosed a week. It is the leading cause of death among Australian women. The number of Australians with dementia is expected to triple by 2050. Samuel revealed that every year, dementia costs more than $6bn in healthcare and productivity loss. In a consultation paper to the Queensland Law Reform Commission, Dementia Australia recommended “people with degenerative disorders have the ability to make enduring requests for voluntary assisted dying in an advanced care plan”.

Alienation is a dangerous thing and never more so when it drifts into public sentiment and seeds the division of people into the useful and useless, the independent and dependent, the economically productive and unproductive.

The true value of human life is unquantifiable. Every person has something to teach another. No life is useless. No person is without hope. In a healthy society, every life is viewed as a divine gift to be cherished and protected. In an unhealthy one, human lives are quantified and some deemed worthless. The slippery slope of euthanasia begins when people measure the value of life in economic terms, or come to believe they can judge the worth of a human soul.

Religious freedom

 Anti-Enlightenment secularists are wrong on rights

HENRY ERGAS

In a country virtually drowning with rights, it is ironic that religious freedom should be the last cab off the rank – and the one that seems to be facing the greatest legislative opposition.

After all, religious freedom, with its intimate linkages to the freedoms of conscience, expression and association, was at the heart of the modern conceptions of liberty that took shape in the 17th and 18th centuries; and while the very early acceptance of those freedoms in the Australian colonies did not entirely avoid sectarian conflict, it contributed powerfully to our long history of social peace.

But that very early acceptance came at a cost: like the air we breathe, religious freedom was largely taken for granted. As new rights that impinge on it were sought and granted, we became, almost without noticing it, one of the advanced democracies in which religious freedom enjoys the weakest protections.

There is, however, a deeper element to the irony that now sees religious freedom so seriously threatened: it is only thanks to religion, and in particular to the fusion of Judaic legalism with Christian universalism, that the idea of human rights emerged, eventually becoming a defining feature of the Western tradition.Condemned, as religious freedom now is, to struggle against vocal and determined enemies, it is not difficult to imagine a future in which expressing many longstanding religious beliefs will be rendered illegal, as will the actions that give those beliefs practical life.

No one has shown that more clearly than Jurgen Habermas, the German intellectual who has been a towering figure of the European left since the 1960s, in his recently published Another History of Philosophy, which will appear in English translation next year. The West’s Judaeo-Christian heritage was “not a mere passing phase” in the formation of the contemporary concepts of freedom, Habermas argues in this extraordinary – if forbiddingly lengthy – book; rather, that heritage contributed their essential core and remains their vital underpinning.
The path leading from the biblical precepts to today’s versions of those concepts was never simple, untroubled or pure. It was, however, the Judaeo-Christian heritage that allowed Western thought to repeatedly overcome the obstacles it encountered along the way.

For example, Thomas Aquinas’s distinction between divine law, which was accessible only through grace, and natural law, which was accessible to every human being through the God-given capacity to reason, may seem of purely antiquarian interest. However, from that distinction Aquinas, and his great disciples in the Salamanca School of theology, derived not just the bedrock principle of human equality but the entirely novel, intensely controversial and eventually immensely influential contention that “heathens” – whose minds had unimpaired access to natural law – had rights as good as those of their Christian neighbours.

Equally, John Locke readily conceded that some people were not as clever as others (though bitter experience also taught him it was not the uneducated who caused society’s troubles but the overweening “pretensions of power” of the “all-knowing Doctors”).

Yet no matter how great the “difference in Men’s Understandings” might be, “the Candle that is set up in us, shines bright enough to lead (all) to the Knowledge of their Maker”, making us equally accountable to the Almighty.

And because we each bear that fearsome accountability’s full brunt, we are entitled to be “equal one amongst another without Subordination or Subjection”, and hence, he concluded, “cannot be subjected to Political Power without (our) Consent” – thus setting the philosophical foundations that shaped the American Revolution.

It would, however, be wrong to believe those brilliant thinkers viewed rights in isolation from their social context. On the contrary, particularly after Europe’s calamitous wars of religion had highlighted just how fragile societies could be, immense weight was placed on the need to recon­cile individual claims with a peaceful, stable and secure social order. Few concepts played a greater role in ultimately achieving that reconciliation than that of “things indifferent”. Referred to in Greek as Adiaphora, the concept, which originated with the Stoics and figured in 1 Corinthians 8:8-9, came to mean practices that were morally neutral.

Beginning with the Augsburg Interim of 1548, in which Charles V, in attempting to secure peace between Reformers and Catholics, advanced the principle of distinguishing those matters that were fundamental from those that were morally indifferent, the notion that there were many things on which we could agree to disagree without imperilling our immortal souls laid the intellectual basis for mutual toleration. Thus was born what is undoubtedly the most fundamental right of them all: the right to live in peaceful coexistence, perhaps not basking in loving friendship but at least respecting each other’s continuing presence.

However, few virtues have proven harder to secure and maintain than that of indifference and its indispensable companion, charity. Nor are there many virtues that are more manifestly lacking in the secularists’ attack on religious freedom.

Rather, just like the Anabaptists – who provoked Philipp Melanchthon to coin for them the term “fanatic” (that is, believer in phantasms) by claiming that any concession to the principle of indifference would set off a chain of further concessions that led to eternal damnation – so our secularists, in their opposition to a legislated right of religious freedom, agitate slippery slopes that seem utterly fantastic.

How, for example, could anyone familiar with contemporary Australia seriously suggest allowing a baker to refuse to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding would unleash uncontrollable torrents of homophobia across this sunbaked land? And is it even vaguely credible to contend that if a small, entirely self-funded, religious school decided to not admit gay students, or to hire only evangelical gardeners, the consequences would be so dreadful as to justify coercing them to do otherwise?

Perhaps those contentions are made in good faith; they are certainly not made with good sense.

Redolent of Lenin’s dictum that liberty is “so precious that it must be rationed” – with none of it going to the people one detests – they reflect a view of rights antithetical to that which the Judaeo-Christian tradition did so much to forge. That view saw rights as the fences within which we can each peacefully exercise our freedoms. Instead, for today’s secularists, their own rights are the bulldozers with which to crush the fences of others.

Little wonder then that Habermas, in this 2000-page masterpiece that fittingly caps a brilliant career, castigates that zero-sum mentality as an intellectually vacuous betrayal of the Enlightenment’s hopes and values. Unfortunately, in an age that has managed to lose both its faith and its reason, it may take a miracle for voices like his to be heard.