From Dr. Gene Schulz

To my erudite colleagues: I sure hope you are finding ways to pass on your knowledge to the next generations of Psychologists beyond this listserve.

The best treatise I have found for "Intelligent Design" is "The Case for a Creator" by Lee Strobel, a journalist who interviewed some leading scientists in several different scientific fields. He acknowledges change over time (which I would call evolution) but attacks Darwinism as the ultimate theory on the development of the human race. Unlike the Creationists who take the Bible literally (and can't explain how the kangaroos got from Australia to Noah's Ark in time to be saved from the flood), Strobel does not claim that it all happened a few thousand years ago. Strobel "evolved" from skepticism to Christianity and has written several books defending the faith. My own interest has been in the question of the evolution of human and animal consciousness, and the ongoing source of our conscious experience. I recall a quote from my reading years ago: "There is nothing more empirical than our own experience." In today's NY Times there is a book review by John Williams of "Out of My Head: On the Trail of Consciousness" by Tim Parks. While I am always intrigued by reports that suggest consciousness beyond the brain (e.g. in ghosts) this book is not likely to get my attention because it is too far out even for me.

I did come across a significant article in yesterday's NYTimes Weekend Arts I yesterday (Nov.22) about the vocalist Lucy Dhegrae, who suffered from vocal paralysis after she had been drugged and raped while a freshman at the University of Michigan. She kept it as a secret for over 10 years. To quote from the NYT: "Soon after that 2013 performance of 'Dithyramb,' Ms Dhegrae, the founder of the Resonant Bodies Festival of contemporary vocal music, found she could no longer sing." The article, by Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, describes the long process of training, that included martial arts, that allowed her to regain her voice. It also involved her decision to disregard previous advice against revealing what had happened to her.

Gene

On Saturday, November 23, 2019 - John Auerbach

Damon,

It’s late, but there is considerable debate on the links between Darwin and the British liberalism of the early 19th century. He was apparently influenced mainly by Malthus’s “Essay on the Principle of Population” and appears to have had the typical political views of a 19th-century British liberal—individualist and also abolitionist with regard to slavery—but in his theory, there is none or little of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” that will eventually produce the “best” outcome for all concerned. There is instead recognition that sometimes good outcomes for an individual organism are bad for the group and vice versa. Darwin also had started wanting to be a minister, but his discovery of natural selection created a crisis of faith in him that he could never resolve because one clear implication of natural selection is that God did not create all the animals. He became an agnostic as a result. This crisis of faith may have dampened Darwin’s wholesale acceptance of the notion of progress, but I would have to spend some time researching the idea. The subtlety of his thought, his understanding that biological and social evolution may diverge, is one reason that we still rely heavily on Darwin but think of Herbert Spencer, one of the leading figures of the 19th Century, as an historical curiosity. Spencer really did believe that progress, the improvement of both individuals and society at large, was an inevitability, and that “survival of the fittest” (Spencer’s phrase), hence laissez-faire capitalism, was the means to do it. Hence, he opposed welfare state policies that were actually championed by Benjamin Disraeli’s Conservative Party as interfering with the competition he thought was necessary for progress, and his ideas remain one of the pillars of anarch-capitalism or libertarianism. But even so, Spencer, to his credit, is not so easily pegged, not really that much in league with modern American conservatism, insofar as modern American conservatism (a) is so heavily influenced by the Conservative Christian thought that Spencer, an agnostic, abhorred and (b) was also influenced, until recently, by a muscular foreign interventionism. He was a feminist (at least in his early days), an anti-imperialist, and an abolitionist, however much he also believed in a natural hierarchy of races that he thought resulted from competition and “survival of the fittest."

Finally, my cell phone typing is terrible, but weirdly enough, I think and write in complete sentences. It has been this way ever since my 10th-grade English teacher taught me how to write. You may not remember this, but I was the executive editor of our college newspaper. I have written this way since I was 15, although it took many years to find my personal and therefore authorial voice.

John

On Nov 22, 2019, at 11:59 PM, Damon LaBarbera wrote:

John, Was Darwin influenced by laissez-faire economics--that competition leads to maximum utility? Would he have been reviled politically if he had dropped the idea of progress?

Hofstadter had a book on Spencer. My recollection is he described a tightly wound, asocial individual. What, in particular, was Spencer's idea of progress—a better human? a better economy? a more efficient society? cell And, at a personal level, which I hope you don't mind—how are you getting such prose from your cellphone? This can't be thumb typing.

Damon L

On Friday, November 22, 2019, 04:03:34 PM CST, John Auerbach wrote:

Some thoughts:

I agree with Damon that evolution through natural selection does NOT involve progress, only adaptation. Even Darwin himself seems to have been confused about this idea, and Herbert Spencer, the founder of Social Darwinism, even more so. Alternatively, the only progress under the theory of natural selection is toward greater adaptation, not toward higher forms of life. No matter how “evolved” my brain, a panda is better at being a panda than I am.

Also, intelligent design may be a true explanation of evolution, but it can never be a scientific one. Why? First, intelligent design is not a falsifiable theory, but natural selection is. Second, intelligent design posits a non-natural cause (i.e., an intelligent designer), and scientific explanation is, or requires, a natural explanation.

John S. Auerbach, PhD

Sent from my iPhone

On Nov 22, 2019, at 12:35 PM, Bruce Borkosky wrote: Robert Hazen has been a prolific author and presenter on the evolution of minerals. It seems to me that a major flaw in creationism is viewing life through the prism of today's mineralogy. Earth was much different 3.5 billion years ago. Hazen makes a convincing argument that BOTH minerals and life evolved together - i.e., that life caused the Earth's mineral diversity to explode, which enriched life's diversity, etc. So, we don't really know what early forms of life looked like or how they worked.

[References]

• Mineral evolution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mineral_evolution
• Earliest known life forms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earliest_known_life_forms
• Hazen's research on mineral evolution: https://hazen.carnegiescience.edu/research/mineral-evolution
• Scientific American article on the evolution of minerals: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/evolution-of-minerals/