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Catholic experts urge caution in evolution debate
07/26/2005 - National Catholic Reporter (cir. 50,000)
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Catholic experts urge caution in evolution debate Scientists, theologians take issue with Schnborn's op-ed article By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.Rome A recent article by Cardinal Christoph Schnborn in The New York Times, asserting that unguided, unplanned evolution is inconsistent with Catholic faith, should be read with caution warn a number of Catholic scientists and theologians, including the head of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. Most of the experts interviewed said the article can offer a useful alert if taken at a theological level.
Evolution, they point out, has sometimes been invoked to justify atheism, as well as immanentism (that God is a vague life force) or deism (that God set the universe in motion and has nothing more to do with it). To the extent Schnborn's point is that Christianity cannot accept a universe without an active, personal God, they say, there's little to dispute. If taken as a scientific statement, on the other hand, these observers warn that Schnborn's insistence on seeing purpose and design in nature could steer the Catholic church towards creationism in the bitter cultural debate, especially prominent in the United States, between evolution and intelligent design. Doing so, they say, risks overstepping the bounds of the church's competence, as well as reopening a divide between science and the Catholic church that had seemed largely overcome.
Several said Schnborn's July 7 piece should be read in the context of a 2004 document of the International Theological Commission, an advisory body of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the most recent Vatican document to treat evolution. The document, titled Communion and Stewardship, argues that Catholic theology does not commit the church to one side or the other in the strictly scientific dispute between evolution and design. Even if evolution appears random and undirected from an empirical point of view, the document asserts, it could still be part of God's providence.
That view is welcomed by many Catholic scientists, who say the problem with evolution is not so much the theory itself, but the philosophical applications some make of it. The theory of evolution can be disturbing to Christians because it seems to clash with the idea of divine creation, said Nicola Cabibbo, president of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, a 78-member body of academics who advise the pope on scientific matters. Cabibbo is a professor of particle physics at Rome's La Sapienza University. However, this clash is false.
What clashes with divine creation is an extension of the theory of evolution into materialistic interpretations, so-called 'evolutionism,' Cabbibo told NCR July 18. That's not science, it's metaphysics. This distinction between evolution as a scientific hypothesis, and Darwinism or neo-Darwinism as a philosophical system, is crucial, observers say, to understanding Catholic thought on the subject.
Long history of compatibility Cabibbo's confidence in the compatibility of evolution with Catholic faith reflects a long history. In 1950, Pope Pius XII, in his encyclical Humani Generis, signaled acceptance of the basic principles of evolutionary theory. The church does not forbid that... research and discussions, on the part of men experienced in both fields, take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from preexistent and living matter, Pius wrote. Commenting on the creation accounts in Genesis during a 1986 general audience, Pope John Paul II extended this idea.
The theory of natural evolution, understood in a sense that does not exclude divine causality, is not in principle opposed to the truth about the creation of the visible world as presented in the Book of Genesis, the pope said. John Paul went further in a 1996 message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, referring to evolution as more than a hypothesis. It is indeed remarkable that this theory has been progressively accepted by researchers, following a series of discoveries in various fields of knowledge, John Paul wrote.
The convergence, neither sought nor fabricated, of the results of work that was conducted independently is in itself a significant argument in favor of this theory. Yet in conservative Catholic intellectual circles, critics for some time have been questioning this formula. They argue that it is not so simple to separate evolution from its philosophical applications -- that atheism, in effect, may be part of the genetic code of evolutionary theory. One voice making that argument has been Philip Johnson, a law professor at the University of California in Berkeley.
Though a Presbyterian, Johnson's work has been featured in First Things, an influential journal of American Catholic opinion. It is the alleged absence of divine intervention throughout the history of life -- the strict materialism of the orthodox [Darwinian] theory -- that explains why a great many people, only some of whom are biblical fundamentalists, think that Darwinian evolution (beyond the micro level) is basically materialistic philosophy disguised as scientific fact, Johnson wrote in First Things in 1997. Another important contributor to a Catholic reappraisal of evolution is Michael Behe, professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University and author of Darwin's Black Box, perhaps the most-read scientific challenge to evolutionary theory.
Behe is a Catholic, and a senior fellow at the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, a think tank that supports the intelligent design argument. A public relations firm associated with the Discovery Institute, according to reporting in The New York Times, helped place Schnborn's piece in the newspaper. Schnborn's July 7 article, therefore, did not come out of the blue. The Catholic church, while leaving to science many details about the history of life on earth, proclaims that by the light of reason the human intellect can readily and clearly discern purpose and design in the natural world, including the world of living things, Schnborn wrote.
Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense -- an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection -- is not. Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science. Schnborn referred to the 1996 statement of John Paul II as rather vague and unimportant.
He cited other statements of the pope to the effect that evolution presents an internal finality that leads one to suppose the existence of a creator. Weighing Schnborn's words In the wake of the Times piece, some observers have noted that there are 181 cardinals in the world, which means that Schnborn's views on evolution, while they may be interesting, are not determinative of the church's stance. Indeed, just four days after Schnborn's piece appeared, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington told an audience at the National Press Club that as long as scientists leave room for God in the evolutionary process, the church can work with that and accept that in principle. Yet Schnborn is not just any cardinal.
A polyglot intellectual, a Dominican, and the scion of old Bohemian nobility, he is widely regarded as one of the leading theologians at the senior levels of the church, and served as general editor of the 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church. He is also a member of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the church's doctrinal agency. Perhaps more to the point, Schnborn is a close friend of Pope Benedict XVI.
He did postdoctoral work with then-Fr. Joseph Ratzinger at the University of Regensburg in Germany in the late 1970s, and was one of the grand electors in the April conclave that made Ratzinger pope. His views, therefore, could be influential in shaping the thinking of Benedict's pontificate. Charles Townes, a Nobel laureate in physics at the University of California in Berkeley, has been a member of the Vatican's Pontifical Academy of Science for more than 20 years.
A Protestant, Townes told NCR July 18 that he found Schnborn's piece disappointing. Some materialists may use evolution in the sense Schnborn talks about, but there's no necessary connection, he said. Behe, however, disagreed.
Most people don't realize that Darwinian evolution makes a very radical claim, Behe said. Not only does evolution work by natural selection, but it was totally unintended by anyone or anything. ... I think that any Christian, any theist, would have to say that life was intended by God, he said. Behe hints at the key question -- does the theological affirmation that life comes from God also obligate Catholics to insist, as a scientific matter, that intelligent design is evident in nature? Townes said that things are not so clear-cut.
Even processes that appear random, he said, can have an underlying logic. The idea that calling something 'random' means that it's without direction is a mistake, Townes said. In a gas, for example, random interaction among particles ensures uniform distribution and temperature.
In other words, an unplanned process produces an orderly outcome. Evolution, Townes said, is like that. It's a random process that produces spectacular things. Jesuit Fr.
George Coyne, head of the Vatican observatory, agreed. Chance is the way we scientists see the universe. It has nothing to do with God.
It's not chancy to God, it's chancy to us, Coyne said. Coyne told NCR in a July 20 interview that far from implying atheism, evolution can equally well be interpreted to the glory of God. I see a God who caresses the universe, who puts into the universe some of his own creativity and dynamism, Coyne said. Cabbibo said he would call evolution self-directed rather than undirected.
The point is that random genetic mutation, coupled with natural selection, does not require anything external to direct the process. This does not exclude, Cabibbo said, the faith conviction that God arranged things this way. As a scientist, what I can say is this If the will of God was to create man, he certainly organized things in a beautiful way to do it, Cabibbo said.
Some Catholic theologians point to Communion and Stewardship, issued with the approval of then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, in 2004, as offering a different approach. The debate between evolution and intelligent design, the document notes in paragraph 69, involves scientific observation and generalization concerning whether the available data support inferences of design or chance, and cannot be settled by theology. But it is important to note, it says, that according to the Catholic understanding of divine causality, true contingency in the created order is not incompatible with a purposeful divine providence. ... Thus, even the outcome of a truly contingent natural process can nonetheless fall within God's providential plan for creation.
The document then warns against philosophical abuse of evolutionary theory. Any evolutionary mechanism that is contingent can only be contingent because God made it so, it says. An unguided evolutionary process -- one that falls outside the bounds of divine providence -- simply cannot exist.
The document, according to experts such as Cabibbo, provides a basis for Catholics to accept evolution as it is understood by modern scientists, without thereby surrendering belief in God as the ultimate cause of life. One Catholic scholar who worked on Communion and Stewardship agrees. There's quite a strong element in the natural sciences who simply don't approve of any transcendental cause as a matter of philosophy, said Jesuit Fr. Shun ichi Takayanagi of Sophia University in Tokyo.
That doesn't mean, however, that evolution as such is incompatible with Christianity, Takayanagi said in a July 17 phone interview. We are not against evolution as such, but the materialist use of evolutionary theory. Even Behe, who believes the scientific data does not support evolution, nevertheless said he believes a faithful Catholic could accept evolutionary theory.
I'm a biochemist, not a theologian, he said. But it seems to me that belief in mutation and natural selection is compatible with Catholicism, as long as the underlying premise is that God set it up that way. That seems to me an orthodox Catholic position. I'm critical of evolutionary theory not because it's unorthodox, he said, but because it can't do what it purports to do.
What does the pope think? A final question about Schnborn's piece is the extent to which it reflects the thinking of Pope Benedict XVI. Schnborn told The New York Times that he wrote the article after being encouraged to look into the issue of evolution by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, prior to his election as pope. Moreover, the new pope himself struck a note not dissimilar to Schnborn's in the homily at his April 24 installation Mass We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution, Benedict XVI said.
Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary. Yet Communion and Stewardship, which clearly distinguishes between a scientific and a theological analysis of evolution, was published in 2004 with Ratzinger's authority. That permission was given in forma specifica, which generally means the one giving permission makes the conclusions his own.
Cabibbo also pointed out that as prefect, Ratzinger opened the archives of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to scientific research, and chose to announce the move during a meeting of a secular scientific academy in Italy. Moreover, Cabibbo said, Ratzinger himself had been a member of the Pontifical Academy of Science since 2003. He certainly seems to have an appreciation of science, Cabibbo said.
I'm optimistic. In the end, Cabibbo argued, the trick is for both scientists and theologians to respect the limits of their competence. We know that God wanted to create man by revelation, Cabibbo said, but we don't know how he did it. This is what science attempts to explain.
There should be no clash between science and religion, because they do different things. John L. Allen Jr. is the NCR Rome correspondent.
His e-mail address is jallen@natcath.org. Keeping 'divine causality' in the process Excerpt from the Vatican's International Theological Commission document, Communion and Stewardship Human Persons Created in the Image of God. 69. The current scientific debate about the mechanisms at work in evolution requires theological comment insofar as it sometimes implies a misunderstanding of the nature of divine causality. Many neo-Darwinian scientists, as well as some of their critics, have concluded that, if evolution is a radically contingent materialistic process driven by natural selection and random genetic variation, then there can be no place in it for divine providential causality.
A growing body of scientific critics of neo-Darwinism point to evidence of design (e.g., biological structures that exhibit specified complexity) that, in their view, cannot be explained in terms of a purely contingent process and that neo-Darwinians have ignored or misinterpreted. The nub of this currently lively disagreement involves scientific observation and generalization concerning whether the available data support inferences of design or chance, and cannot be settled by theology. But it is important to note that, according to the Catholic understanding of divine causality, true contingency in the created order is not incompatible with a purposeful divine providence.
Divine causality and created causality radically differ in kind and not only in degree. Thus, even the outcome of a truly contingent natural process can nonetheless fall within God's providential plan for creation. According to St. Thomas Aquinas The effect of divine providence is not only that things should happen somehow, but that they should happen either by necessity or by contingency.
Therefore, whatsoever divine providence ordains to happen infallibly and of necessity happens infallibly and of and that happens from contingency, which the divine providence conceives to happen from contingency (Summa theologiae, I, 22,4 ad 1). In the Catholic perspective, neo-Darwinians who adduce random genetic variation and natural selection as evidence that the process of evolution is absolutely unguided are straying beyond what can be demonstrated by science. Divine causality can be active in a process that is both contingent and guided.
Any evolutionary mechanism that is contingent can only be contingent because God made it so. An unguided evolutionary process -- one that falls outside the bounds of divine providence -- simply cannot exist because the causality of God, Who is the first agent, extends to all being, not only as to constituent principles of species, but also as to the individualizing principles. ... It necessarily follows that all things, inasmuch as they participate in existence, must likewise be subject to divine providence (Summa theologiae, I, 22, 2). National Catholic Reporter, July 29, 2005 Copyright The National Catholic Reporter Publishing Company, 115 E.
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The Daily Dose: July 25, 2005
07/25/2005 - Science & Theology News (cir. )
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In Today’s Dose…
Pick of the Crop: An evo devo bonus; 4-D evolution; Pope John Paul II’s science-and-religion legacy
The Lighter Side: Philosophy made easy
Rest of the Best: Planet of the retired apes; tsunami wreaks mental health havoc; what’s the big idea?
Pick of the Crop
An evo devo bonus for readers of The Daily Dose
On Friday, July 29, we will post an engaging series of articles on the new science of evolutionary development (or “evo devo”). Here is what we have planned:
Michael Ruse’s review of Sean Carroll’s Endless Forms Most Beautiful
An interview with Sean Carroll
A response to Ruse and Carroll by William Dembski
But readers of The Daily Dose don’t have to wait until Friday. Watch for the article links in Thursday’s edition.
4-D evolution
In his review of Evolution in Four Dimensions, by Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb for The Guardian newspaper, Steven Rose minces no words:
Charles Darwin's great insight is based on a simple syllogism: (a) Like begets like, with variations; (b) all creatures produce more offspring than can survive to reproduce in turn; (c) those most fit — adapted — to the environment are more likely to survive; and therefore (d) favourable variations will be preserved and species will evolve — change over time. This is natural selection, and its logic is irrefutable — the philosopher Dan Dennett called it a universal acid. This is why "Darwinism" is not merely a "theory" to be confronted with mumbo-jumbo like "intelligent design", but, like gravity, an inevitable feature of the universe we inhabit.
While rejecting intelligent design, Rose knows that science has not agreed upon the mechanisms by which evolution operated. He argues, though, that a “genocentric view of the world,” popularized by Richard Dawkins, has suffered an intellectual knockout and therefore can be cast aside:
But it was Richard Dawkins above all who captured the sense of ultra-Darwinism when he divided the living world between replicators — structures which can be accurately copied, like DNA molecules — and vehicles, the "lumbering robots" whose function is to enable that copying.
Despite the attractions of its doctrinal simplicity, important strands of biological thinking have never accepted this genocentric view of the world, and many doubt that Darwin would have either. The late Stephen Jay Gould, for example, insisted that selection acted at multiple levels, not just on individual genes, but on populations of organisms and indeed on species and ecosystems as a whole. In this perspective, Dawkins' lumbering robots become players in their own destiny.
An even more fundamental attack has come from researchers interested in how organisms develop. To appreciate the importance of this, think about the fact that humans are just under 99% genetically identical to chimpanzees, yet no one would confuse the two. The origin of the differences between the two phenotypes lies in their development, which in turn depends on which genes are switched on or off at any time — a process regulated by the cellular environment in which the genes are embedded. Genes do not exist in isolation, but as part of a web of interactions extending in time as well as space.
There are four ways in which evolution can operate, and together they form a web of explanation:
There are, [the authors] suggest, four levels at which such [genetic] variation can occur. The first is unexceptional: the shuffling of DNA in sexual reproduction, which mixes variants from both parents, coupled with mutations — random changes in the DNA sequence. A second major source is not genetic but epigenetic — it depends on changes that occur in the "meaning" of given strands of DNA. Molecular biologists are discovering an increasing number of esoteric ways that DNA, or the proteins that surround it and ensure its orderly translation, are chemically modified during development. Such modifications, which profoundly alter how an organism develops, can, just like copies of DNA, be transmitted during reproduction, and in due course can feed back to modify the sequence of DNA itself.
A third dimension of evolution is one whose study Jablonka has made particularly her own — the inheritance of behavioural traditions. Rabbit mothers who feed on juniper berries transmit to their offspring a preference for such food, an inheritance stable across generations. In the days when milk was delivered in bottles to our doorsteps, blue tits learned to peck open the foil tops to drink the cream, a tradition acquired and passed on, by social learning, from generation to generation but now presumably lost because, in an environment of Tetra Paks, it is no longer an adaptive form of behaviour.
The authors' final dimension, a uniquely human one, is symbolic inheritance, the traditions we learn and pass on not by subtle odour-based cues in our mother's milk or feaces, or by direct imitation of our elders or peers, but through our capacity for language, and culture, our representations of how to behave, communicated by speech and writing.
… The slowest of all these forms of evolutionary change is that based on DNA, and there is a tendency to dismiss the others as all dependent "in the last analysis" on genes. Jablonka and Lamb vigorously rebut this. Rather, they insist, there are constant interactions between the levels — epigenetic, behavioural and even symbolic inheritance mechanisms also produce selection pressures on DNA-based inheritance and can, in some cases, even help direct DNA changes themselves — so "evolving evolution".
For an interview with Stephen Rose, see “Explaining the mind: an interview with Steven Rose”. A review of Rose’s The Future Of The Brain will appear in the September print issue of Science & Theology News.
John Paul II's take on evolution still a crucial issue (free registration required)
Terry Mattingly, an instructor at Palm Beach Atlantic University and a senior fellow for journalism at the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities, reports on the continuing story over the Catholic Church and evolution. Readers of The Daily Dose have been following developments since the beginning of July.
As Mattingly notes, The New York Times eulogized Pope John Paul II in part by noting that he helped to bridge the gap between science and religion:
It would be hard to name two more radically different men than the late Pope John Paul II and New York Times columnist Frank Rich.
Nevertheless, the acerbic culture-beat scribe did his best to say something positive when bidding the pope farewell. At least, said Rich, John Paul II had seen the light on the "core belief of how life began."
"Though the president of the United States believes that the jury is still out on evolution," he wrote, "John Paul in 1996 officially declared that 'fresh knowledge leads to recognition of the theory of evolution as more than just a hypothesis.' "
America's newspaper of record underlined this in its obituary, claiming that the pope believed "the human body might not have been the immediate creation of God, but was the product of evolution, which he called 'more than just a hypothesis.' "
Now it seems that a more nuanced view of the late pontiff’s writings reveals that the matter is not quite so simple, as the remarks of Cardinal Christoph Schonborn of Vienna make clear:
Part of the problem is the 1996 papal address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, with its familiar quotation that "new knowledge leads us to recognize that the theory of evolution is more than a hypothesis."
The question is whether John Paul said "theory" or "theories." According to official translations, the pope said: "Rather than the theory of evolution, we should speak of several theories of evolution. On the one hand, this plurality has to do with the different explanations advanced for the mechanism of evolution, and on the other, with the various philosophies on which it is based."
The pope then rejected all theories arguing that humanity is the product of a random, unguided process of creation. Thus, he said that "theories of evolution which, because of the philosophies which inspire them, regard the spirit either as emerging from the forces of living matter, or as a simple epiphenomenon of that matter, are incompatible with the truth about man."
At the time John Paul II spoke these words, the National Association of Biology Teachers had officially defined evolution as an "unsupervised, impersonal, unpredictable, and natural process that is affected by natural selection, chance, historical contingencies and changing environments."
Critics said this definition veered beyond science into theological speculation. Thus, in 1997 the association's board reversed itself and removed the words "unsupervised" and "impersonal."
This is still the crucial issue today, said Michael J. Behe, author of "Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution." He is a Catholic who teaches at Lehigh University.
"The problem is that people can't agree on what 'evolution' means," he said. "Common origins are not the problem. What the church has never accepted is the idea of a blind, random, meaningless process of creation. The church cannot accept that, because that would be atheism."
The Lighter Side
Philosophy made easy
From a review of What's it All About? Philosophy and the Meaning of Life, by Julian Baggini: “Baggini takes us on a brisk jaunt through life's biggest questions, with a little help from Monty Python, Marcus Aurelius, Spinoza and Snoopy.”
Rest of the Best
Planet of the retired apes | “Under the watchful eyes of animal behaviorists, veterinarians, enrichment specialists and daily caretakers, Rita and Teresa checked in on the afternoon of April 4 at the recently opened Chimp Haven, the first federally financed, taxpayer-supported retirement home for chimpanzees.” (The New York Times; free registration required)
Tsunami wreaks mental health havoc | “Survivors are likely to spend years wrestling with the mental health impact of the Asian tsunami and the earthquake off the Indonesian coast.” (World Health Organization)
What's the big idea? | “Dinosaur jets, eternal life, the end of poverty: the world's biggest brains met in Oxford last week to pitch schemes that really could change the world.” (The Guardian)
Story tips? E-mail mdonnelly@stnews.org
Matt Donnelly is web editor at Science & Theology News.
Cigarettes, Taxes and Thin French Women
07/25/2005 - Star-News (cir. 54,232)
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Cigarettes, Taxes and Thin French Women New York Times THE obesity epidemic isn't just a growing health it's also a problem for the economy. The percentage of Americans over 20 who are regarded as obese has more than doubled, to about 30 percent, from about 14 percent in the early 1970's. And the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says obesity was responsible for 112,000 premature deaths in 2002, and for $75 billion in medical costs in 2003.
But as the United s lost the battle against the bulge, it waged a more successful campaign against another menace to public health smoking. Because of an aggressive public information campaign, new restrictive laws and huge increases in federal and state taxes, the percentage of the population that smoked fell to 22.5 percent in 2002, from 37 percent in 1970. Strange as it may sound at first, many economists and health care experts say they believe that the two trends may be related. Experts blame factors ranging from urban sprawl to junk-food-laden diets for the increase in the number of Americans who are obese - defined as having a body mass index of over 30.
But smoking, or the decline of smoking, may also play a role. Nicotine is a stimulant, which means that smokers burn calories faster. And it's an appetite suppressant, which means that smokers eat less.
Consider French Women Don't Get Fat, the best selling book. Some critics said that the real reason chic Parisian women stayed trim while gorging themselves on croissants was that they smoked more than their American counterparts. Indeed, conventional wisdom, soundly rooted in the personal experience of millions of former smokers and in several studies, has long held that short-term weight gain is the price to be paid for quitting smoking. But economists are increasingly applying their tools to measure the way monetary incentives, or disincentives, affect all sorts of human behavior - and hence the ability of government policy to alter it.
And they've been wondering whether high cigarette taxes, which are intended to encourage people to quit smoking, may have the unintended effect of redirecting them from one form of unhealthy behavior to another. According to William Orzechowski and Rob Walker, two economic consultants based in Arlington, Va., the price of a pack of cigarettes rose to $3.37 a pack in 2001 from 63 cents in 1980, thanks in large measure to various state and federal tax increases. (Adjusted for inflation, that's a 164 percent gain.) And smokers responded the way any economically rational consumer would, despite the fact that many felt as if they were addicted they stopped using the product as it became more expensive. Broadly speaking, said Michael Grossman, an economics professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, a 10 percent increase in the price of cigarettes leads to a 5 percent reduction in cigarette consumption.
But the fear of gaining weight as a result of quitting may have discouraged some smokers from stopping - and apparently with good reason. In a 2004 study, Professor Grossman, along with Shin-Yi Chou of Lehigh University and Inas Rashad of Georgia State, mined state-by-state behavioral surveys from 1984 to 1999 to get to the root causes of rising obesity. While they found that the prevalence of fast-food restaurants was responsible for most of the climb, they concluded that the decline in smoking accounted for about 20 percent of it. Over all, they found that each 10 percent increase in the real price of cigarettes produces a 2 percent increase in the number of obese people, other things being equal.
Jonathan Gruber, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, didn't believe that the relationship between lower smoking and higher obesity rates was so direct. While people may gain weight when they quit smoking, they tend to shed those pounds later. There's no evidence in the medical literature that quitting smoking will affect your weight over a long period of time, he said.
And by themselves, the short-term weight gains associated with smoking shouldn't be enough to push masses of former smokers into obesity. Professor Gruber, with the assistance of Michael Frakes, a Ph.D. student, analyzed the same numbers that Professors Grossman, Chou and Rashad did, but with different methodology. Rather than focusing on the way prices affected consumption, Professor Gruber looked at how people living in different states reacted when state cigarette taxes were sharply increased. He also ignored factors like the number of fast-food restaurants.
His method allowed him to isolate the way sudden government-imposed price increases affected consumer behavior. And when he compared the results with obesity figures in the states, he reached a surprising conclusion. Raising cigarette taxes causes smoking to fall, but it doesn't lead to obesity, Professor Gruber said.
If anything, it was lower. There are a maze of possibilities for this explanation - beyond economics. Perhaps the conventional wisdom is wrong about stopping smoking and gaining weight. Or perhaps people who quit smoking decide at the same time to start exercising more and to watch their weight.
Professor Grossman finds the results intriguing, but he is not prepared to embrace them wholeheartedly. If you come up with a counterintuitive finding like this, he said, you have to ask if you've gone too far. Professor Gruber says his results need further testing.
But if borne out, the findings would add to the evidence in favor of high cigarette taxes. After all, what other act of government has been shown to raise needed government revenue and discourage citizens from engaging in an expensive, unhealthful habit - all while helping them shed a few pounds? DENTAL FRONT DESK, F/T Seeking multi tasked, attention to detail, team member for fast CNC MACHINIST Join our team! Del Laboratories recently expanded their manufacturing ACCOUNTANT/ BOOKKEEPER Position available in Whiteville/Chadbourn area. Accounting FINANCE OFFICER For Wilmington area governmental Sanitary District. The applicant should HUMAN SERVICES Supports Coordinator Must have BA in Human Service and 2 years 5605 Chelon AvenueAs you enter this custom built Georgian home a three story foyer 336 Settlers Lane Kure BeachImmaculate home in Beachwalk at Kure Beach! Brick 302 N.
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When nukes and cash equal stability
07/24/2005 - star-telegram.com (cir. 3,000,000)
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By Rajan Menon
Special to the Los Angeles Times
The Bush foreign policy squad hasn't had much to cheer about lately. The Iraqi insurgency won't die. Iran is suspected of seeking nuclear weapons. North Korea already appears to have acquired a small stash.
But as the president met with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Monday, the White House could take heart from what's happening in South Asia.
For starters, nuclear weapons have promoted peace in that volatile region, it turns out.
When India and Pakistan went nuclear in 1998, most people in the West believed that South Asia had become a more dangerous place. That was a gloomy assessment, considering that the subcontinent had seen full-scale war between India and Pakistan, intermittent skirmishes and terrorist attacks.
But South Asia is more stable than it was a decade ago, and the prospects for a settlement of the competing claims to Kashmir are better than they have ever been.
What accounts for the turnaround?
As was true for the Soviet Union and the United States, nuclear weapons magnify the risk of conflict and thereby concentrate the minds of leaders. The danger that a crisis could escalate and bring nuclear weapons into play is not an academic abstraction -- it's a reality.
Which is why India and Pakistan have been building mutual trust since 1998. Occasionally they've approached the line of conflict, but they have taken care not to cross it.
After the attack on the Indian parliament by Kashmiri terrorists in late 2001, India massed troops on the border with Pakistan but stopped short of firing and eventually disengaged. Even under a hawkish Indian government, leaders from both countries met to promote political dialogue, cultural exchanges and trade.
Both countries have been jettisoning intractable positions. Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has put forward some tantalizing ideas. Specifics remain hazy, but he seems ready to drop Pakistan's traditional demands, including an internationally supervised plebiscite to determine the region's future.
India's leaders have refused to be rushed by Musharraf's warning that there is a brief window for making dramatic progress on Kashmir, but they too have tried to maintain the momentum. They have allowed bus service to resume between the Indian and Pakistani parts of Kashmir, and a delegation of leaders from Indian-controlled Kashmir was permitted to travel to Pakistan-held Kashmir for talks.
Just as important has been India's overhaul of its perspective. For half a century, the Pakistan-India partition has been considered a challenge to India's reason for being.
As India won its independence from Britain, its Muslims feared they would become second-class citizens among the Hindu majority. The creation of Pakistan in effect denied India's claim to being a secular democracy in which all citizens, regardless of ethnic or religious background, could enjoy equal rights.
Successive Indian governments therefore believed that Pakistan's disintegration would not be a bad thing. In 1971, civil war erupted in Pakistan, India intervened militarily, and Bangladesh rose from the debris. Pakistan's dismemberment was wildly popular among Indians.
But now Indian leaders see that the unraveling of a nuclear Pakistan would be disastrous. Given the strength of fundamentalism in Pakistan, an upheaval could bring nuclear-armed Islamic hard-liners to power.
And it's not just India's security that is threatened, but its newfound economic power.
Since the early 1990s, India has pared down labyrinthine regulations, privatized unprofitable state-owned industries, lowered tariffs and welcomed foreign investment. Once derided for its "Hindu rate of growth," India has become one of the world's fastest-growing economies and a prime destination for foreign investment. Its information-technology firms are world-class, and American firms are outsourcing work to India's hard-working, technically proficient, English-speaking college graduates.
This bolsters India's growing acceptance of Pakistan. Upheavals in the Muslim nation could derail India's economic advance.
Foreign investors, currency markets, bankers and traders dislike chaos. Serious unrest or a fundamentalist takeover in Islamabad could put a stop to projects like the planned gas pipeline from Iran to India via Pakistan.
India's success is tied to Pakistan's. That's good news for South Asia, and one fewer hot spot is good news for the United States, too.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Rajan Menon, a professor of international relations at Lehigh University, is a fellow at the New American Foundation. This essay appeared previously in the Los Angeles Times.
PC Poker that Learns From Your Mistakes
07/24/2005 - Ledger, The (cir. 65,987)
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Published Sunday, July 24, 2005 Database document.title = unescape('PC%20Poker%20that%20Learns%20From%20Your%20Mistakes') + ' | theledger.com'; PC Poker that Learns From Your Mistakes By Lonnie Brown lonnie.brown@theledger.com For the better part of the evening, Richard had been pretty free with his chips in this game of no-limit Texas hold 'em. Having burned me once with his pair of pocket jacks, he'd managed to scare me away from a pot or two -- or three -- that I normally would have pursued.But this hand was too good I held two kings, and the flop had a third, with the king the high card. The fourth card on the table offered no improvement for my three-of-a-kind kings -- nor did it give Richard a chance at having a straight, flush or full house, given the mix of four cards on the table.Darned if he didn't make another big bet.
I went all in. He folded.I then took the liberty of peeking at his folded hand Two trash cards. Richard had been bluffing. And although I didn't know it at the time, it became clear later Richard didn't bluff often, but when he did, he did so effectively.Normally, a peek at an opponent's cards will get one tossed from the poker table -- or perhaps a worse fate.
But I didn't get in trouble because this was a computer game.More correctly, it is a computer simulation of no-limit hold 'em, and a very complete one at that.Poker Academy (Standard) and Poker Academy Pro v2 are one-trick ponies They play Texas hold 'em -- and no other poker variation. But since World Poker Tour and the World Series of Poker have made that game all the rage, that shouldn't be much of a drawback when it comes to marketing the program.The standard version (about $20) has the same hard-playing poker opponents as the Pro version (about $130). Unless you're serious about going on the poker tour, the $20 version will fulfill the needs of the large majority of players.Those who hanker to hone their game for the next trip to a Las Vegas cardroom might find the Pro version's price is cheap if it provides the background to win a sizable pot.What sets PA apart is its artificial intelligence.
Once a user enters his or her name under which to play (more than one can be entered if a user wants to test several styles of play), the computer will track how every hand was played. If a showdown was involved, it will record the cards played and bets made.Once it's honed in on a player's quirks, it goes for the weaknesses. 'Only a few games currently employ the kind of adaptive artificial intelligence found in Poker Academy,' said Hector Munoz-Avila, assistant professor of computer senses and engineering at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa.The artificial intelligence (AI) engine the program uses was developed by the University of Alberta, which has been in the process of perfecting it for the past 10 years.In computer lingo, the AI players are known as 'bots' because they are governed by robotic-like rules. There are about a dozen different bots in PA that each play by a different set of rules telling them when to call, raise or fold.Unlike chess, where a player's current position and potential moves are displayed for all to see, poker is a guessing game. What might the other player have?Sometimes it seems like the unseen players in the computer monitor are looking out, picking up on the human player's ticks and wrinkled brow, or vague smile.Unless you want to peak at an opponent's cards (one of the optional features available in the game), you'll have to compare your hand with possible winning hands and act accordingly.Poker Academy's two versions show the current strength of the hand, the odds of improving it, and other relative information.
There's also a coach that will offer graphic advice on when to call, raise or fold.Poker Academy's standard edition is available in stores; the Pro version is available only online.As noted previously, the standard version will be fine for the Friday night poker player. Those who engage in more serious games should consider the Pro version.In addition to the hand evaluator and a detailed statistical history of a player's hand outcomes, it also features advanced AI and the ability to create custom tables for network play.Moreover, it can simulate the World's Series of Poker championship play and can be set to start the tournament with as many as 10,000 players.If you've daydreamed about giving up your day job to become a professional poker player, the bots from Poker Academy can add a dose of reality.For more information, including a limited demo game www.poker-academy.com.Lonnie Brown is The Ledger's associate editor. He can be reached by e-mail at lonnie.brown@theledger.com.
Last modified July 24. 2005 12 00AM Back to Top Copyright 2005 The Ledger Printer-Friendly Version E-Mail This Article
In South Asia, nukes and cash make for stability
07/24/2005 - Repository, The (cir. 66,812)
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By Rajan Menon Los Angeles TimesThe Bush foreign policy squad hasn't had much to cheer about lately. The Iraqi insurgency won't die. Iran is suspected of seeking nuclear weapons.
North Korea already appears to have acquired a small stash. But as the president met with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Monday, the White House could take heart from what's happening in South Asia. For starters, nuclear weapons have promoted peace in that volatile region, it turns out. When India and Pakistan went nuclear in 1998, most people in the West believed that South Asia had become a more dangerous place.
That was a gloomy assessment, considering that the subcontinent had seen full-scale war between India and Pakistan, intermittent skirmishes and terrorist attacks. But now South Asia is more stable than it was a decade ago, and the prospects for a settlement of the competing claims to Kashmir are better, arguably, than they have ever been. What accounts for the turnaround? As was true for the Soviet Union and the United States, nuclear weapons magnify the risk of conflict and thereby concentrate the minds of leaders.
The danger that a crisis could escalate and bring nuclear weapons into play is not an academic abstraction, it's a reality. Which is why India and Pakistan have been building mutual trust since 1998. Occasionally, they've approached the line of conflict, but they have taken care not to cross it. After the attack on the Indian parliament by Kashmiri terrorists in late 2001, India massed troops on the border with Pakistan but stopped short of firing and eventually disengaged.
And even under a hawkish Indian government, leaders from both countries met (Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf visited India, his birthplace; India's foreign minister went to Islamabad) to promote political dialogue, cultural exchanges and trade. Both countries have also been trying to cut the Gordian knot on Kashmir by jettisoning shopworn, intractable positions. Musharraf has put forward some tantalizing ideas.
The specifics remain hazy, but he seems ready to drop Pakistan's traditional demands, including an internationally supervised plebiscite to determine the region's future. India's leaders have refused to be rushed by Musharraf's warning that there is a brief window for making dramatic progress on Kashmir, but they too have tried to maintain the momentum. They have allowed bus service to resume between the Indian and Pakistani parts of Kashmir, and a delegation of leaders from Indian-controlled Kashmir was permitted to travel to Pakistan-held Kashmir for talks. As important has been India's overhaul of its perspective on Pakistan.
For half a century, the Pakistan-India partition has been considered a challenge to India's reason for being. As India won its independence from Britain, the subcontinent's Muslims feared they would become second-class citizens among the Hindu majority. The creation of Pakistan in effect denied India's claim to being a secular democracy in which all citizens, regardless of ethnic or religious background, could enjoy equal rights.
Successive Indian governments therefore believed that Pakistan's disintegration would not be a bad thing. In 1971, civil war erupted in Pakistan, India intervened militarily and Bangladesh rose from the debris. Pakistan's dismemberment was wildly popular among Indians. But now Indian leaders see that the unraveling of a nuclear Pakistan would be disastrous for India's security.
Given the strength of fundamentalism in Pakistan, an upheaval could bring nuclear-armed Islamic hard-liners to power. And it's not just India's security that is threatened, but its newfound economic power. Since the early 1990s, India has pared down labyrinthine regulations, privatized unprofitable state-owned industries, lowered tariffs and welcomed foreign investment.
Once derided for its Hindu rate of growth, India has become one of the world's fastest-growing economies and a prime destination for foreign investment. Its information-technology firms are world-class, and American firms are outsourcing work to India's hardworking, technically proficient, English-speaking college graduates. All of this only bolsters India's growing acceptance of Pakistan. War with the Muslim nation, or upheavals there, could derail the economic advance of its neighbor.
Foreign investors, currency markets, bankers and traders dislike chaos. Serious unrest or a fundamentalist takeover in Islamabad could put a stop to projects like the planned gas pipeline from Iran to India via Pakistan. India's success is now tied to Pakistan's.
That's good news for South Asia, and one fewer global hot spot is good news for President Bush and the United States, too. Rajan Menon is professor of international relations at Lehigh University and a fellow at the New American Foundation.
Cigarettes, Taxes and Thin French Women
07/24/2005 - Gadsden Times, The (cir. 26,213)
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THE obesity epidemic isn't just a growing health risk; it's also a problem for the economy. The percentage of Americans over 20 who are regarded as obese has more than doubled, to about 30 percent, from about 14 percent in the early 1970's. And the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says obesity was responsible for 112,000 premature deaths in 2002, and for $75 billion in medical costs in 2003.
But as the United States lost the battle against the bulge, it waged a more successful campaign against another menace to public health: smoking. Because of an aggressive public information campaign, new restrictive laws and huge increases in federal and state taxes, the percentage of the population that smoked fell to 22.5 percent in 2002, from 37 percent in 1970.
Strange as it may sound at first, many economists and health care experts say they believe that the two trends may be related. Experts blame factors ranging from urban sprawl to junk-food-laden diets for the increase in the number of Americans who are obese - defined as having a body mass index of over 30.
But smoking, or the decline of smoking, may also play a role. Nicotine is a stimulant, which means that smokers burn calories faster. And it's an appetite suppressant, which means that smokers eat less. Consider "French Women Don't Get Fat," the best selling book. Some critics said that the real reason chic Parisian women stayed trim while gorging themselves on croissants was that they smoked more than their American counterparts.
Indeed, conventional wisdom, soundly rooted in the personal experience of millions of former smokers and in several studies, has long held that short-term weight gain is the price to be paid for quitting smoking. But economists are increasingly applying their tools to measure the way monetary incentives, or disincentives, affect all sorts of human behavior - and hence the ability of government policy to alter it. And they've been wondering whether high cigarette taxes, which are intended to encourage people to quit smoking, may have the unintended effect of redirecting them from one form of unhealthy behavior to another.
According to William Orzechowski and Rob Walker, two economic consultants based in Arlington, Va., the price of a pack of cigarettes rose to $3.37 a pack in 2001 from 63 cents in 1980, thanks in large measure to various state and federal tax increases. (Adjusted for inflation, that's a 164 percent gain.) And smokers responded the way any economically rational consumer would, despite the fact that many felt as if they were addicted: they stopped using the product as it became more expensive. Broadly speaking, said Michael Grossman, an economics professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, a 10 percent increase in the price of cigarettes leads to a 5 percent reduction in cigarette consumption.
But the fear of gaining weight as a result of quitting may have discouraged some smokers from stopping - and apparently with good reason. In a 2004 study, Professor Grossman, along with Shin-Yi Chou of Lehigh University and Inas Rashad of Georgia State, mined state-by-state behavioral surveys from 1984 to 1999 to get to the root causes of rising obesity. While they found that the prevalence of fast-food restaurants was responsible for most of the climb, they concluded that the decline in smoking accounted for about 20 percent of it. Over all, they found that "each 10 percent increase in the real price of cigarettes produces a 2 percent increase in the number of obese people, other things being equal."
Jonathan Gruber, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, didn't believe that the relationship between lower smoking and higher obesity rates was so direct. While people may gain weight when they quit smoking, they tend to shed those pounds later. "There's no evidence in the medical literature that quitting smoking will affect your weight over a long period of time," he said. And by themselves, the short-term weight gains associated with smoking shouldn't be enough to push masses of former smokers into obesity.
Professor Gruber, with the assistance of Michael Frakes, a Ph.D. student, analyzed the same numbers that Professors Grossman, Chou and Rashad did, but with different methodology. Rather than focusing on the way prices affected consumption, Professor Gruber looked at how people living in different states reacted when state cigarette taxes were sharply increased. He also ignored factors like the number of fast-food restaurants. His method allowed him to isolate the way sudden government-imposed price increases affected consumer behavior. And when he compared the results with obesity figures in the states, he reached a surprising conclusion. "Raising cigarette taxes causes smoking to fall, but it doesn't lead to obesity," Professor Gruber said. "If anything, it was lower."
There are a maze of possibilities for this explanation - beyond economics. Perhaps the conventional wisdom is wrong about stopping smoking and gaining weight. Or perhaps people who quit smoking decide at the same time to start exercising more and to watch their weight. Professor Grossman finds the results intriguing, but he is not prepared to embrace them wholeheartedly. "If you come up with a counterintuitive finding like this," he said, "you have to ask if you've gone too far."
Professor Gruber says his results need further testing. But if borne out, the findings would add to the evidence in favor of high cigarette taxes. After all, what other act of government has been shown to raise needed government revenue and discourage citizens from engaging in an expensive, unhealthful habit - all while helping them shed a few pounds?
Cigarettes, Taxes and Thin French Women
07/24/2005 - Spartanburg Herald-Journal (cir. 48,798)
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THE obesity epidemic isn't just a growing health risk; it's also a problem for the economy. The percentage of Americans over 20 who are regarded as obese has more than doubled, to about 30 percent, from about 14 percent in the early 1970's. And the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says obesity was responsible for 112,000 premature deaths in 2002, and for $75 billion in medical costs in 2003.
But as the United States lost the battle against the bulge, it waged a more successful campaign against another menace to public health: smoking. Because of an aggressive public information campaign, new restrictive laws and huge increases in federal and state taxes, the percentage of the population that smoked fell to 22.5 percent in 2002, from 37 percent in 1970.
Strange as it may sound at first, many economists and health care experts say they believe that the two trends may be related. Experts blame factors ranging from urban sprawl to junk-food-laden diets for the increase in the number of Americans who are obese - defined as having a body mass index of over 30.
But smoking, or the decline of smoking, may also play a role. Nicotine is a stimulant, which means that smokers burn calories faster. And it's an appetite suppressant, which means that smokers eat less. Consider "French Women Don't Get Fat," the best selling book. Some critics said that the real reason chic Parisian women stayed trim while gorging themselves on croissants was that they smoked more than their American counterparts.
Indeed, conventional wisdom, soundly rooted in the personal experience of millions of former smokers and in several studies, has long held that short-term weight gain is the price to be paid for quitting smoking. But economists are increasingly applying their tools to measure the way monetary incentives, or disincentives, affect all sorts of human behavior - and hence the ability of government policy to alter it. And they've been wondering whether high cigarette taxes, which are intended to encourage people to quit smoking, may have the unintended effect of redirecting them from one form of unhealthy behavior to another.
According to William Orzechowski and Rob Walker, two economic consultants based in Arlington, Va., the price of a pack of cigarettes rose to $3.37 a pack in 2001 from 63 cents in 1980, thanks in large measure to various state and federal tax increases. (Adjusted for inflation, that's a 164 percent gain.) And smokers responded the way any economically rational consumer would, despite the fact that many felt as if they were addicted: they stopped using the product as it became more expensive. Broadly speaking, said Michael Grossman, an economics professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, a 10 percent increase in the price of cigarettes leads to a 5 percent reduction in cigarette consumption.
But the fear of gaining weight as a result of quitting may have discouraged some smokers from stopping - and apparently with good reason. In a 2004 study, Professor Grossman, along with Shin-Yi Chou of Lehigh University and Inas Rashad of Georgia State, mined state-by-state behavioral surveys from 1984 to 1999 to get to the root causes of rising obesity. While they found that the prevalence of fast-food restaurants was responsible for most of the climb, they concluded that the decline in smoking accounted for about 20 percent of it. Over all, they found that "each 10 percent increase in the real price of cigarettes produces a 2 percent increase in the number of obese people, other things being equal."
Jonathan Gruber, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, didn't believe that the relationship between lower smoking and higher obesity rates was so direct. While people may gain weight when they quit smoking, they tend to shed those pounds later. "There's no evidence in the medical literature that quitting smoking will affect your weight over a long period of time," he said. And by themselves, the short-term weight gains associated with smoking shouldn't be enough to push masses of former smokers into obesity.
Professor Gruber, with the assistance of Michael Frakes, a Ph.D. student, analyzed the same numbers that Professors Grossman, Chou and Rashad did, but with different methodology. Rather than focusing on the way prices affected consumption, Professor Gruber looked at how people living in different states reacted when state cigarette taxes were sharply increased. He also ignored factors like the number of fast-food restaurants. His method allowed him to isolate the way sudden government-imposed price increases affected consumer behavior. And when he compared the results with obesity figures in the states, he reached a surprising conclusion. "Raising cigarette taxes causes smoking to fall, but it doesn't lead to obesity," Professor Gruber said. "If anything, it was lower."
There are a maze of possibilities for this explanation - beyond economics. Perhaps the conventional wisdom is wrong about stopping smoking and gaining weight. Or perhaps people who quit smoking decide at the same time to start exercising more and to watch their weight. Professor Grossman finds the results intriguing, but he is not prepared to embrace them wholeheartedly. "If you come up with a counterintuitive finding like this," he said, "you have to ask if you've gone too far."
Professor Gruber says his results need further testing. But if borne out, the findings would add to the evidence in favor of high cigarette taxes. After all, what other act of government has been shown to raise needed government revenue and discourage citizens from engaging in an expensive, unhealthful habit - all while helping them shed a few pounds?
Cigarettes, Taxes and Thin French Women
07/24/2005 - Sarasota Herald-Tribune (cir. 100,294)
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Cigarettes, Taxes and Thin French Women By DANIEL GROSS New York Times THE obesity epidemic isn't just a growing health risk; it's also a problem for the economy. The percentage of Americans over 20 who are regarded as obese has more than doubled, to about 30 percent, from about 14 percent in the early 1970's. And the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says obesity was responsible for 112,000 premature deaths in 2002, and for $75 billion in medical costs in 2003.
But as the United States lost the battle against the bulge, it waged a more successful campaign against another menace to public health smoking. Because of an aggressive public information campaign, new restrictive laws and huge increases in federal and state taxes, the percentage of the population that smoked fell to 22.5 percent in 2002, from 37 percent in 1970. Strange as it may sound at first, many economists and health care experts say they believe that the two trends may be related. Experts blame factors ranging from urban sprawl to junk-food-laden diets for the increase in the number of Americans who are obese - defined as having a body mass index of over 30.
But smoking, or the decline of smoking, may also play a role. Nicotine is a stimulant, which means that smokers burn calories faster. And it's an appetite suppressant, which means that smokers eat less.
Consider 'French Women Don't Get Fat,' the best selling book. Some critics said that the real reason chic Parisian women stayed trim while gorging themselves on croissants was that they smoked more than their American counterparts. Indeed, conventional wisdom, soundly rooted in the personal experience of millions of former smokers and in several studies, has long held that short-term weight gain is the price to be paid for quitting smoking. But economists are increasingly applying their tools to measure the way monetary incentives, or disincentives, affect all sorts of human behavior - and hence the ability of government policy to alter it.
And they've been wondering whether high cigarette taxes, which are intended to encourage people to quit smoking, may have the unintended effect of redirecting them from one form of unhealthy behavior to another. According to William Orzechowski and Rob Walker, two economic consultants based in Arlington, Va., the price of a pack of cigarettes rose to $3.37 a pack in 2001 from 63 cents in 1980, thanks in large measure to various state and federal tax increases. (Adjusted for inflation, that's a 164 percent gain.) And smokers responded the way any economically rational consumer would, despite the fact that many felt as if they were addicted they stopped using the product as it became more expensive. Broadly speaking, said Michael Grossman, an economics professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, a 10 percent increase in the price of cigarettes leads to a 5 percent reduction in cigarette consumption.
But the fear of gaining weight as a result of quitting may have discouraged some smokers from stopping - and apparently with good reason. In a 2004 study, Professor Grossman, along with Shin-Yi Chou of Lehigh University and Inas Rashad of Georgia State, mined state-by-state behavioral surveys from 1984 to 1999 to get to the root causes of rising obesity. While they found that the prevalence of fast-food restaurants was responsible for most of the climb, they concluded that the decline in smoking accounted for about 20 percent of it. Over all, they found that 'each 10 percent increase in the real price of cigarettes produces a 2 percent increase in the number of obese people, other things being equal.' Jonathan Gruber, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, didn't believe that the relationship between lower smoking and higher obesity rates was so direct.
While people may gain weight when they quit smoking, they tend to shed those pounds later. 'There's no evidence in the medical literature that quitting smoking will affect your weight over a long period of time,' he said. And by themselves, the short-term weight gains associated with smoking shouldn't be enough to push masses of former smokers into obesity. Professor Gruber, with the assistance of Michael Frakes, a Ph.D. student, analyzed the same numbers that Professors Grossman, Chou and Rashad did, but with different methodology.
Rather than focusing on the way prices affected consumption, Professor Gruber looked at how people living in different states reacted when state cigarette taxes were sharply increased. He also ignored factors like the number of fast-food restaurants. His method allowed him to isolate the way sudden government-imposed price increases affected consumer behavior. And when he compared the results with obesity figures in the states, he reached a surprising conclusion. 'Raising cigarette taxes causes smoking to fall, but it doesn't lead to obesity,' Professor Gruber said. 'If anything, it was lower.' There are a maze of possibilities for this explanation - beyond economics.
Perhaps the conventional wisdom is wrong about stopping smoking and gaining weight. Or perhaps people who quit smoking decide at the same time to start exercising more and to watch their weight. Professor Grossman finds the results intriguing, but he is not prepared to embrace them wholeheartedly. 'If you come up with a counterintuitive finding like this,' he said, 'you have to ask if you've gone too far.' Professor Gruber says his results need further testing.
But if borne out, the findings would add to the evidence in favor of high cigarette taxes. After all, what other act of government has been shown to raise needed government revenue and discourage citizens from engaging in an expensive, unhealthful habit - all while helping them shed a few pounds? Last modified July 24. 2005 12 00AM
Cigarettes, Taxes and Thin French Women
07/24/2005 - Gainesville Sun, The (cir. 48,747)
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Cigarettes, Taxes and Thin French Women New York Times July 24. 2005 getElementPosition(element)} return } getElement(id)} moveAd()} if } } } enlargeAd(url) } } HE obesity epidemic isn't just a growing health it's also a problem for the economy. The percentage of Americans over 20 who are regarded as obese has more than doubled, to about 30 percent, from about 14 percent in the early 1970's. And the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says obesity was responsible for 112,000 premature deaths in 2002, and for $75 billion in medical costs in 2003.
But as the United s lost the battle against the bulge, it waged a more successful campaign against another menace to public health smoking. Because of an aggressive public information campaign, new restrictive laws and huge increases in federal and state taxes, the percentage of the population that smoked fell to 22.5 percent in 2002, from 37 percent in 1970. Strange as it may sound at first, many economists and health care experts say they believe that the two trends may be related. Experts blame factors ranging from urban sprawl to junk-food-laden diets for the increase in the number of Americans who are obese - defined as having a body mass index of over 30.
But smoking, or the decline of smoking, may also play a role. Nicotine is a stimulant, which means that smokers burn calories faster. And it's an appetite suppressant, which means that smokers eat less.
Consider French Women Don't Get Fat, the best selling book. Some critics said that the real reason chic Parisian women stayed trim while gorging themselves on croissants was that they smoked more than their American counterparts. Indeed, conventional wisdom, soundly rooted in the personal experience of millions of former smokers and in several studies, has long held that short-term weight gain is the price to be paid for quitting smoking. But economists are increasingly applying their tools to measure the way monetary incentives, or disincentives, affect all sorts of human behavior - and hence the ability of government policy to alter it.
And they've been wondering whether high cigarette taxes, which are intended to encourage people to quit smoking, may have the unintended effect of redirecting them from one form of unhealthy behavior to another. According to William Orzechowski and Rob Walker, two economic consultants based in Arlington, Va., the price of a pack of cigarettes rose to $3.37 a pack in 2001 from 63 cents in 1980, thanks in large measure to various state and federal tax increases. (Adjusted for inflation, that's a 164 percent gain.) And smokers responded the way any economically rational consumer would, despite the fact that many felt as if they were addicted they stopped using the product as it became more expensive. Broadly speaking, said Michael Grossman, an economics professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, a 10 percent increase in the price of cigarettes leads to a 5 percent reduction in cigarette consumption.
But the fear of gaining weight as a result of quitting may have discouraged some smokers from stopping - and apparently with good reason. In a 2004 study, Professor Grossman, along with Shin-Yi Chou of Lehigh University and Inas Rashad of Georgia State, mined state-by-state behavioral surveys from 1984 to 1999 to get to the root causes of rising obesity. While they found that the prevalence of fast-food restaurants was responsible for most of the climb, they concluded that the decline in smoking accounted for about 20 percent of it. Over all, they found that each 10 percent increase in the real price of cigarettes produces a 2 percent increase in the number of obese people, other things being equal.
Jonathan Gruber, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, didn't believe that the relationship between lower smoking and higher obesity rates was so direct. While people may gain weight when they quit smoking, they tend to shed those pounds later. There's no evidence in the medical literature that quitting smoking will affect your weight over a long period of time, he said.
And by themselves, the short-term weight gains associated with smoking shouldn't be enough to push masses of former smokers into obesity. Professor Gruber, with the assistance of Michael Frakes, a Ph.D. student, analyzed the same numbers that Professors Grossman, Chou and Rashad did, but with different methodology. Rather than focusing on the way prices affected consumption, Professor Gruber looked at how people living in different states reacted when state cigarette taxes were sharply increased. He also ignored factors like the number of fast-food restaurants.
His method allowed him to isolate the way sudden government-imposed price increases affected consumer behavior. And when he compared the results with obesity figures in the states, he reached a surprising conclusion. Raising cigarette taxes causes smoking to fall, but it doesn't lead to obesity, Professor Gruber said.
If anything, it was lower. There are a maze of possibilities for this explanation - beyond economics. Perhaps the conventional wisdom is wrong about stopping smoking and gaining weight. Or perhaps people who quit smoking decide at the same time to start exercising more and to watch their weight.
Professor Grossman finds the results intriguing, but he is not prepared to embrace them wholeheartedly. If you come up with a counterintuitive finding like this, he said, you have to ask if you've gone too far. Professor Gruber says his results need further testing.
But if borne out, the findings would add to the evidence in favor of high cigarette taxes. After all, what other act of government has been shown to raise needed government revenue and discourage citizens from engaging in an expensive, unhealthful habit - all while helping them shed a few pounds? fs = new bodyText) OTHER HEADLINES MOST POPULAR Employment ads from our newspaper cantile Bank has opportunities for exceptional sales and service e depts.. in SW FL now hiring. Must be high school grad/GED. . apt maintenance pref **Groundskeepers Exp. power equip & software company is recruiting for the following positions Training | Copyright 2004, The Gainesville Sun, Reproduction without consent is prohibited. |
The Sound Of A Distant Rumble Researchers Track Underwater Noise Generated By December 26
07/23/2005 - ScienceDaily (cir. 38,880)
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When the sea floor off the coast of Sumatra split on the morning of December 26, 2004, it took days to measure the full extent of the rupture. Recently, researchers at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory analyzed recordings of the underwater sound produced by the magnitude 9.3 earthquake. Their unique approach enabled them to track the rupture as it moved along the Sumatra-Andaman Fault, raising the possibility that scientists could one day use the method to track underwater earthquakes in near real time and opening new avenues in seismologic research.
University Of Ulster Scientists Issue Indonesia Earthquake Warning (March 28, 2005) -- The stresses in the earth's crust which have resulted from the Sumatra-Andaman earthquake have significantly increased the risk of another large earthquake in the already-devastated Indonesian ... Seismic Network Could Improve Disaster Response (February 12, 2005) -- While nothing can undo the devastation from the massive tsunami that recently struck in Southeast Asia, lives can be saved in the future if scientists can rapidly characterize the earthquakes that ... Sumatra Earthquake Three Times Larger Than Originally Thought (February 12, 2005) -- Northwestern University seismologists have determined that the Dec. 26 Sumatra earthquake that set off a deadly tsunami throughout the Indian Ocean was three times larger than originally thought, ... Subduction Zone, Shallow Depth Make Lethal Mix In Earthquake That Triggered Asian Tsunami (January 7, 2005) -- The location of the recent earthquake that triggered a deadly tsunami in the Indian Ocean came as no surprise to geologists, says Anne Meltzer, a world-renowned seismologist at Lehigh University.
The ... > more related stories 'We were able to constrain some details such as the speed and duration of the rupture more accurately than traditional seismic methods,' said Maya Tolstoy, a Doherty Research Scientist and lead author of the study. 'Moreover, we found the earthquake happened in two distinct phases, with faster rupture to the south and slower to the north, almost as if there were two back-to-back events.' The study appears in the July/August edition of Seismological Research Letters. The researchers found that the first phase encompassed the first three minutes of the eight-minute earthquake, during which the rupture proceeded north at about 1.7 miles per second (2.8 km/sec) from the epicenter. During the second phase, the rupture slowed to 1.3 miles per second (2.1 km/sec) and continued north for another five minutes until it reached a plate boundary where the fault changes from subduction to strike-slip.
This suggests that had the subduction zone continued, this longest-ever-recorded earthquake might have been even longer. The analysis that Tolstoy and her co-author DelWayne Bohnenstiehl used also shows promise for helping officials quickly determine where relief activities are needed. In the case of the Indonesian earthquake, early seismic data indicated that only the southernmost third of the fault was involved. Later analysis revealed that about 750 miles actually ruptured, a finding that was supported by Tolstoy and Bohnenstiehls study.
Recently the International Monitoring System of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which operates the microphones that picked up sounds of the earthquake, began making their data available on a trial basis to tsunami warning organizations recognized by UNESCO. Tolstoy hopes that eventually scientists will gain easier access to these data as well, which would help them learn more about the basic processes of the Earth. 'There is an opportunity here to make a contribution to international disaster monitoring, as well as help us better understand earthquakes and tsunamis and potentially mitigate these events in the future.' said Tolstoy. 'It makes sense to let others listen in.' About The Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory The Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, a member of The Earth Institute at Columbia University, is one of the world's leading research centers seeking fundamental knowledge about the origin, evolution and future of the natural world. More than 200 research scientists study the planet from its deepest interior to the outer reaches of its atmosphere, on every continent and in every ocean.
From global climate change to earthquakes, volcanoes, nonrenewable resources, environmental hazards and beyond, Observatory scientists provide a rational basis for the difficult choices facing humankind in the planet's stewardship. For more information, visit www.ldeo.columbia.edu. About The Earth Institute at Columbia University The Earth Institute at Columbia University is the worlds leading academic center for the integrated study of Earth, its environment and society. The Earth Institute builds upon excellence in the core disciplinesearth sciences, biological sciences, engineering sciences, social sciences and health sciencesand stresses cross-disciplinary approaches to complex problems.
Through research, training and global partnerships, the Earth Institute mobilizes science and technology to advance sustainable development, while placing special emphasis on the needs of the worlds poor.
Iran Sits Pretty in World's Hottest Region
07/23/2005 - LewRockwell.com (cir. )
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Despite the best efforts of the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush to make Iran an international pariah, the Islamic Republic keeps wracking up one diplomatic victory after another.
One month after the surprise election victory of hardline President-elect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran finds itself in a substantially stronger position to resist the U.S. campaign to isolate it as part of a strategy of "regime change."
Last weekend's three-day visit by U.S.-backed Iraqi President Ibrahim Jaafari to Tehran, where he was warmly received by the regime's top religious and government officials, was only the latest, albeit the most spectacular, of a series of events that underlines Iran's growing leverage.
That his visit, which followed a series of high-level meetings between the two countries that produced a military-cooperation accord among other agreements, included a prayerful pilgrimage to the tomb of Ayatollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic and arch-foe of the "Great Satan" itself, must have stuck deeply in the craw of neoconservatives and other hawks here who had long assumed that a "liberated" Iraq would gratefully cooperate in ousting the mullahs in Tehran.
The hawks, who welcomed Ahmedinejad's victory in the belief that an ostentatiously hardline president would put to rest the notion that there was a "moderate" faction the West could deal with, have still not given up hopes for achieving regime change – be it through a U.S.-supported "democratic revolution" à la Ukraine and/or by military strikes on selected nuclear and political targets that would foment a popular uprising.
Despite a greater-than-expected turnout and landslide victory by the winner, the hawks have continued to argue that "the country is ripe for revolution," as Jeffrey Gedmin, the neoconservative director of the Aspen Institute in Berlin, wrote in the current Weekly Standard.
But even if – and most Iran experts here dismiss Gedmin's opinion as more ideological than informed – internal unhappiness with the Islamic regime has reached an all-time high, the international context is significantly more favorable to Iran in any confrontation with the U.S. than it has been for some time.
While Washington's military campaign in Afghanistan and invasion of Iraq were designed in part to intimidate Iran, Tehran actually emerged with as a big winner, according to most regional observers.
"Its two greatest regional enemies, the Ba'athist government in Iraq and the Sunni extremist regime in Afghanistan, were both smashed without Iran having to fire a shot," notes Anatol Lieven, an analyst at the New America Foundation.
"Now, it has governments in Afghanistan and still more in Iraq that are basically very sympathetic to Tehran and Tehran's view of regional affairs" – an observation given much more force by last weekend's festivities in Tehran.
And even though Iran suddenly found some 160,000 U.S. military troops just next door, that, too, was not necessarily as daunting as the hawks had thought it might be. After all, Iran's unspoken potential to make life much more difficult for many of its new and already overstretched U.S. neighbors has always given it a certain amount of leverage.
But in recent weeks, Iran has found its position getting stronger, sometimes even with Bush's seemingly unwitting assistance.
The Bush administration's agreement this week to sell India advanced nuclear technology despite Delhi's boycott of the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), for example, has created the perception of a double standard that Iran is likely to use to its advantage both in negotiations with the EU-3 (Britain, France, and Germany) and in fending off U.S. efforts to get the UN Security Council to impose sanctions against it for allegedly violating the NPT.
"Iran will argue how can it be penalized for minor transgressions of the NPT, which it has signed, when India, a nuclear power, gets full nuclear cooperation from the U.S. when it is not even a member," noted Arjun Makhijani, director of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research.
"How can you argue that Russia can't sell [nuclear] reactors to Iran after this?" said Joseph Cirincione, a proliferation expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International peace. "That's what Iran is going to count on."
Bush, of course, approved the nuclear deal as part of a diplomatic effort to promote India as "a major world power in the 21st century" and, more specifically, as a counterweight to China (whose growing demonization by Republicans in Congress and Sinophobes in the Pentagon also helps Iran by diverting attention to an even bigger "threat").
But conferring on India regional superpower status to contain China may further shield Tehran, which has long-standing and close ties to New Delhi, from Washington's more aggressive designs.
The fact that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his delegation, despite having been given the red-carpet treatment at the White House this week, reportedly rejected all appeals to reconsider their support for the proposed multi-billion-dollar "peace pipeline" that will transport Iranian gas to India via Pakistan offered clear evidence that Delhi has no intention of acting as Washington's pawn on the global chessboard.
"The Indians will not be corralled into any kind of containment policy regarding China and Iran, but especially Iran," said Rajan Menon, a foreign-policy expert at Lehigh University. Given the strength of its own relationship with Iran and its large Muslim population, he said, "The U.S. would risk a break with India if it actually attacked Iran."
The fact, of course, that Iran is an oil and gas exporter at a time of record prices (in part due to the instability in U.S.-occupied Iraq) and growing great-power competition for energy resources is also a major factor in Tehran's increasing clout. In addition to India, China, which late last year signed a 25-year, $100 billion gas deal with Iran, has a great deal invested in Iran's stability.
"China sees Iran as a very important part of its energy strategy, and it's powerful enough to stand up with them if they need support at the UN Security Council," said Gary Sick, an Iran expert at Columbia University who advised former President Jimmy Carter on the National Security Council. "For its part, Iran sees China as a potentially very valuable ally."
Nor is it just China. Russia, which continues to support Iran's civilian nuclear program nuclear plant, is also more likely to support Iran at the Security Council, less for love of Tehran than because it has become increasingly alienated from Washington over the past year, according to Wayne White, director of the Middle East Institute (MEI) and a former top State Department expert on the Gulf.
That alienation was on display earlier this month when Russia and China encouraged the four other Central Asia members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) to call on Washington to set a deadline for withdrawing from military bases in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, both SCO states.
The bases, which have been used to support U.S. military and intelligence operations in both Afghanistan and Iraq and which some have suggested could be used in similar ways against Iran, was widely seen as the opening shot by both Moscow and Beijing in a concerted effort to roll back strategic gains made by Washington in Central Asia in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and the Pentagon.
"Without even having orchestrated some master plan, Iran is sitting pretty in Central Asia at the moment," said Menon, who recalled Russia and Iran helped broker a peace accord ending the civil war in Tajikistan in 1994. "It's a multipolar region, and the fact that we're having problems with so many players gives the Iranians a lot more running room."
Meanwhile, the rapidly fading likelihood that Turkey will be admitted to the EU in the wake of the French and Dutch rejection of the EU Constitution, as well as growing concerns in Ankara about both Kurdish unrest in a weakened Syria and its own Kurdish insurgency, offers yet another opening to woo a key neighbor whose alliance with Washington has been under unprecedented strain for more than two years now.
These diplomatic advances have contributed to growing self-confidence inside Iran, particularly among the new generation of leaders, including Ahmadinejad, who "have grown up with the idea that Iran makes its own decisions and takes its own path regardless of what outsiders think," according to Sick. "From inside Iran, there's a sense that everything is breaking for us."
"What I worry about is that they will conclude that they don't need to worry so much about compromise, and that could be very dangerous," he went on. "They do still have to think about their neighbors, which at this point includes the U.S."
July 23, 2005
Cigarettes, Taxes and Thin French Women
07/23/2005 - New York Times, The (cir. 1,121,057)
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THE obesity epidemic isn't just a growing health risk; it's also a problem for the economy. The percentage of Americans over 20 who are regarded as obese has more than doubled, to about 30 percent, from about 14 percent in the early 1970's. And the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says obesity was responsible for 112,000 premature deaths in 2002, and for $75 billion in medical costs in 2003.
Skip to next paragraph Illustration by The New York Times A Trade-Off? But as the United States lost the battle against the bulge, it waged a more successful campaign against another menace to public health smoking. Because of an aggressive public information campaign, new restrictive laws and huge increases in federal and state taxes, the percentage of the population that smoked fell to 22.5 percent in 2002, from 37 percent in 1970.Strange as it may sound at first, many economists and health care experts say they believe that the two trends may be related. Experts blame factors ranging from urban sprawl to junk-food-laden diets for the increase in the number of Americans who are obese - defined as having a body mass index of over 30. But smoking, or the decline of smoking, may also play a role.
Nicotine is a stimulant, which means that smokers burn calories faster. And it's an appetite suppressant, which means that smokers eat less. Consider 'French Women Don't Get Fat,' the best selling book.
Some critics said that the real reason chic Parisian women stayed trim while gorging themselves on croissants was that they smoked more than their American counterparts. Indeed, conventional wisdom, soundly rooted in the personal experience of millions of former smokers and in several studies, has long held that short-term weight gain is the price to be paid for quitting smoking. But economists are increasingly applying their tools to measure the way monetary incentives, or disincentives, affect all sorts of human behavior - and hence the ability of government policy to alter it. And they've been wondering whether high cigarette taxes, which are intended to encourage people to quit smoking, may have the unintended effect of redirecting them from one form of unhealthy behavior to another.According to William Orzechowski and Rob Walker, two economic consultants based in Arlington, Va., the price of a pack of cigarettes rose to $3.37 a pack in 2001 from 63 cents in 1980, thanks in large measure to various state and federal tax increases. (Adjusted for inflation, that's a 164 percent gain.) And smokers responded the way any economically rational consumer would, despite the fact that many felt as if they were addicted they stopped using the product as it became more expensive.
Broadly speaking, said Michael Grossman, an economics professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, a 10 percent increase in the price of cigarettes leads to a 5 percent reduction in cigarette consumption.But the fear of gaining weight as a result of quitting may have discouraged some smokers from stopping - and apparently with good reason. In a 2004 study, Professor Grossman, along with Shin-Yi Chou of Lehigh University and Inas Rashad of Georgia State, mined state-by-state behavioral surveys from 1984 to 1999 to get to the root causes of rising obesity. While they found that the prevalence of fast-food restaurants was responsible for most of the climb, they concluded that the decline in smoking accounted for about 20 percent of it.
Over all, they found that 'each 10 percent increase in the real price of cigarettes produces a 2 percent increase in the number of obese people, other things being equal.'Jonathan Gruber, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, didn't believe that the relationship between lower smoking and higher obesity rates was so direct. While people may gain weight when they quit smoking, they tend to shed those pounds later. 'There's no evidence in the medical literature that quitting smoking will affect your weight over a long period of time,' he said. And by themselves, the short-term weight gains associated with smoking shouldn't be enough to push masses of former smokers into obesity. Professor Gruber, with the assistance of Michael Frakes, a Ph.D. student, analyzed the same numbers that Professors Grossman, Chou and Rashad did, but with different methodology.
Rather than focusing on the way prices affected consumption, Professor Gruber looked at how people living in different states reacted when state cigarette taxes were sharply increased. He also ignored factors like the number of fast-food restaurants. His method allowed him to isolate the way sudden government-imposed price increases affected consumer behavior.
And when he compared the results with obesity figures in the states, he reached a surprising conclusion. 'Raising cigarette taxes causes smoking to fall, but it doesn't lead to obesity,' Professor Gruber said. 'If anything, it was lower.'There are a maze of possibilities for this explanation - beyond economics. Perhaps the conventional wisdom is wrong about stopping smoking and gaining weight. Or perhaps people who quit smoking decide at the same time to start exercising more and to watch their weight. Professor Grossman finds the results intriguing, but he is not prepared to embrace them wholeheartedly. 'If you come up with a counterintuitive finding like this,' he said, 'you have to ask if you've gone too far.'Professor Gruber says his results need further testing.
But if borne out, the findings would add to the evidence in favor of high cigarette taxes. After all, what other act of government has been shown to raise needed government revenue and discourage citizens from engaging in an expensive, unhealthful habit - all while helping them shed a few pounds? Daniel Gross writes the 'Moneybox' column for Slate.com. More Articles in Business >
Schnborn and science vs. theology; Questions to an academician, an astrophysicist, and a biochemist;
07/22/2005 - National Catholic Reporter (cir. 50,000)
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Schnborn of Vienna in The New York Times on evolution has caused no small amount of ferment in both scientific and theological circles. In it, Schnborn challenges the widely held perception that the Catholic Church has reconciled itself to the theory of evolution. I've written a story about the Schnborn piece for NCR that will be posted to on July 26. (CNS) Cardinal Christoph Schnborn of Vienna In speaking to a number of Catholic scientists and theologians, the consensus seems to be that Schnborn has a valid point if his argument is read on a theological level.
Christianity cannot accept the idea of a universe without an active, personal God, and evolutionary theory has sometimes been used to justify not only atheism, but also immanentism (God as a vague life-force) and Deism (that God set the universe in motion and has nothing more to do with it). Richard Dawkins, one of the most widely read popularizers of evolutionary theory, has written that Charles Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually satisfied atheist. On the other hand, if Schnborn's statements are read as claims about science, things quickly become murkier. At face value, Schnborn seems to suggest it is a matter of Catholic faith that design and purpose can be empirically discovered in nature.
If so, the widely held (though certainly not undisputed) scientific understanding of evolution as a process driven by random genetic mutation and natural selection would be, in itself, irreconciliable with Christianity, driving a serious wedge between science and the church. In this regard, it seems important to clearly distinguish two questions What is the best scientific explanation for the origins and development of organic life, based on data such as the fossil record, genetic studies, and so on? Does evolutionary theory, whether true or not, pose a conflict with Catholic theology? Most observers would say that the church is competent to answer the second question, but not the first. To try to settle the scientific dispute, they say, would take the Catholic Church close to what is conventionally known as creationism, the belief that a scientific analysis of nature requires the inference of a creator.
What Christianity can affirm instead, some Catholic scientists and theologians say, is that whatever the process by which life originated and developed, it did so in accord with the plan of God. Even if it turns out to be correct, from an empirical point of view, that evolution is unguided, that does not rule out divine providence as the cause of causes. To talk these issues through, I sat down this week with Professor Nicola Cabibbo, president for the past 12 years of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. A 78-member panel of distinguished scientists from around the world, the academy advises the pope on scientific matters.
It's descended from the Academy of the Lynxes, founded in 1603, making it the oldest scientific academy in the world. The full text of my interview with Cabibbo can be found here .* * * The following are excerpts from that interview. Q What did you think of Cardinal Schnborn's article in The New York Times? Cabibbo ...
The theory of evolution can be disturbing to Christians because it seems to clash with the idea of divine creation. However, this is not true. What clashes with divine creation is an extension of the theory of evolution into materialistic interpretations, the so-called evolutionism. What evolutionism says, and here I'm thinking about people such as Dawkins, is that there's no need for God.
But that is not science, it's not part of what has been discovered by science. ... The great intuition of Darwin was that there is an evolution, that different species evolved over time, even if he could not understand the mechanism. ... To this, there are two different reactions.
One is the atheistic view, saying that we know how it works now, we don't need God. This goes beyond the scientific facts because it is a metaphysical conclusion. The other is the theistic response, believing that God is the cause of this process. ... In reality the contrast between evolutionism and creationism has nothing to do with science.
They are instead two very different religious and philosophical positions. What troubles many people is that scientists use words such as 'unguided' and 'unplanned' in referring to evolution. As a scientist, what do those terms mean to you? Let me come at it from a distance.
In Italian, there is a popular saying, non cade foglia che Dio non voglia. [No leaf falls unless God wants it.] What science does is to try to explain the mechanism by which the leaf falls. ... This doesn't mean that what happens doesn't have its own logic, its own way of happening. It's not like we're all puppets in God's hands. It would be debasing to think that God is directly causing every leaf to fall from the tree.
Instead there is a system, a mechanism, by which things happen. I think there is no philosophical, no theological, problem here. This was the thought of John Paul II -- there is no a priori reason to see a clash between science and religion.
When Cardinal Schnborn says that purpose and design can be clearly discerned in the natural world, would you agree? Not scientifically. As a scientist, I cannot draw this conclusion. What I can say is this If the will of God was to create man, he certainly organized things in a beautiful way to do it. Of course, we know that God wanted to create man by revelation, but we don't know how he did it.
This is what science attempts to explain. There should be no problem. There cannot be any clash or controversy between science and religion, because they do different things.
Some creationists argue that on the basis of an examination of the scientific facts, you can conclude that there must be a creator. This is not believed by any serious scientist. ... They have found some renegade scientists, or people with some scientific education, to give them some credibility. ... You can certainly construct an argument about how beautiful creation is, how intelligent it is, but these are not scientific concepts.
It's aesthetic, not scientific.* * * I also had the chance to speak with Jesuit Fr. George Coyne, an American astrophysicist who has served as director of the Vatican observatory since 1978. It's one of the oldest observatories in the world, whose roots in some sense go back to astronomical observations commissioned by Pope Gregory XIII as part of his reform of the calendar in 1582.
I reached Coyne in Tucson, Arizona, where he spends part of each year. Coyne said he was disappointed in the way Schnborn dealt with a 1996 message of Pope John Paul II to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, in which the pope referred to evolution as more than a hypothesis. In his New York Times piece, Schnborn called this text rather vague and unimportant. Coyne said the pope's 1996 message was carefully considered.
The academy had brought together the world's best researchers to study the origins and early development of life, along with some philosophers and theologians, Coyne said. Moreover, the circumstances were dramatic. Just a week before, an announcement had been made of the discovery of possible bacterial life on Mars.
That turned out to be wrong, but it created an atmosphere of great interest. In that context, Coyne believes, what John Paul II said in 1996 is very important. Coyne said he's never understood why some people associate evolution with atheism. Why God cannot work with purpose through an evolutionary process that has stochastic features, I don't know, he said, invoking a term from mathematics that essentially means random.
Chance is the way we scientists see the universe, Coyne said. It has nothing to do with God. It's not chancy to God, it's chancy to us.
Coyne said phrasing the debate over evolution as a contest between necessity and chance is misleading. You have to recognize a third element, which is the fertility of the universe, Coyne said. The universe is some14 billion years old, containing 10 to the 22nd stars and some150 known planetary systems. The birth of planets is not a miracle, but a routine physical process.
The universe is constantly spewing out the chemistry for life. We would not be here if stars were not routinely being born and dying, he said. There would not be enough carbon in the universe to make an amoeba, or a toenail. What happens is that two hydrogen atoms meet, on the basis of chance.
Then, by necessity, they make a hydrogen molecule, assuming that the pressure, temperature conditions and so on are right. Then the molecule continues to wander around until it finds oxygen, and then, again by necessity, it has to make water. This process of increasing chemical complexity continues, Coyne said, until out comes the human brain. We don't know everything about the process, he said, but the interplay between chance and necessity in a fertile universe is the best explanation for everything that has come out of the universe, including ourselves. I haven't come to believe in God from my scientific knowledge of the universe, Coyne said.
But as a believer, I necessarily want to make a relationship with that knowledge. So I ask, what kind of God would have made a universe that scientifically I see in this way? What does it mean that certain things are not pre-determined, that there is chance involved? To me it suggests a very scriptural God, one who, like a parent, nurtures a child through necessary processes, but for whom there also comes a time, and I suspect it is the most difficult time of parenting, of letting go. I look upon God dealing with the universe that way.
In that sense, Coyne said, he believes evolution underscores God's glory. I see a God who caresses the universe, who works with the universe, who has put into the universe some of his own dynamism and creativity, Coyne said.* * * One frequently overlooked resource for this discussion is a 2004 document of the International Theological Commission, the chief advisory body to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, called . That document, which was published with the specific permission of then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, took up the issues posed by evolution in paragraphs 62-70. The heart of its argument comes in paragraph 69, where the document suggests that theology does not have to settle the argument between design and contingency in the development of life -- following St.
Thomas Aquinas, the document argues that divine providence can work through either one. The document can be found here . This approach, several scientists and theologians say, creates the possibility for Catholics to accept the basic framework of evolutionary theory, without thereby creating a Trojan horse for philosophical materialism.
This does not mean evolutionary theory is true, merely that it is not necessarily inconsistent with Catholic theology. On this score, I was struck by a conversation I had with Professor Michael Behe, a biochemist at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania and author of Darwin's Black Box, perhaps the most-read scientific challenge to evolutionary theory. Behe is a Catholic and a senior fellow at the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, a think tank that supports the intelligent design argument. A public relations firm associated with the Discovery Institute, according to reporting in The New York Times, helped place Schnborn's piece in the newspaper.
Yet Behe told me he believes a Catholic in good faith can accept the scientific mechanisms posited by evolutionary theory. I'm a biochemist, not a theologian, he said. But it seems to me that belief in mutation and natural selection is compatible with Catholicism, as long as the underlying premise is that God set it up that way.
That seems to me an orthodox Catholic position. I'm critical of evolutionary theory not because it's unorthodox, he said, but because it can't do what it purports to do.* * * A recent decree by a Vatican congregation removing the well-known founder of a religious order from active ministry could indicate how Pope Benedict XVI will handle the sexual abuse crisis. The action also may provide some hint of how the Vatican could handle other high profile cases of a similar nature, including one involving the founder of the Legionaries of Christ, a worldwide religious order. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued the decree May 27 in the case of 73-year-old Italian Fr.
Gino Burresi, founder of a religious order called the Congregation of the Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. The contents of the decree, which drew little public notice, were announced by the Italian bishops' conference on July 19. It specifies that Burresi's faculties to hear confessions are He is definitively prohibited from providing spiritual He is barred from preaching, as well as from celebrating the sacraments and sacramentals in He is barred from giving interviews, publishing and taking part in broadcasts that have anything to do with faith, morals, or supernatural phenomena.
The decree, in effect, amounts to removal from public ministry. The only thing left is private celebration of the Mass. The original Vatican decree, which was not released publicly, but a copy of which was obtained by NCR, was signed by Archbishop William Levada, the new prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, as well as Archbishop Angelo Amato, the secretary. It stipulates that in an audience given by Benedict XVI to Amato on May 27, the pope confirmed the decree in forma specifica, meaning that he made its conclusions his own, and that no appeal is possible.
Though the decree cites abuses of confession and spiritual direction, Vatican sources told NCR in mid-July that another motive for the action against Burresi were accusations of sexual abuse with seminarians, dating back to the 1970s and 1980s. The case has significance for at least three reasons it's the first such decree under Levada and the new Burresi is a widely known mystic and Fatima devotee sometimes compared by his followers, including groups in the United States and Canada, to the Capuchin mystic and saint Padre and finally, because it involves action against a widely known founder of a religious community on the basis of decades-old accusations. This last point, observers say, could potentially have implications for how the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith eventually handles similar cases, such as charges of sexual abuse against Fr.
Marcial Maciel Degollado, the founder of the Legionaries of Christ. Maciel has been accused by a number of former seminarians of sexual abuse. His case is reportedly under investigation by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Until 1992, Burresi was a member of the Oblates of the Virgin Mary, an order founded in 1816 by Italian priest Bruno Lanteri.
Burresi became a devotee of the Fatima revelations in the 1950s, and was the driving force behind the creation of a Marian sanctuary in San Vittorino, outside Rome. At the time he was a he was not ordained as a priest until 1983. In the 1960s and 1970s, Burresi acquired a worldwide reputation as a mystic.
He was alleged to be able to read souls, to carry the stigmata (the wounds of Christ), to have the odor of sanctity, and to be able to produce paintings and other artwork miraculously. Critics later charged that Burresi faked these phenomena, using, for example, rose-scented perfume to produce the odor. Burresi attracted a number of vocations to the Oblates, as well as a larger circle of adherents. One person who came to know Burresi in the 1970s was Fr.
Nicholas Gruner, who has gone on to become an ardent champion for the Fatima message, often clashing with church authorities. In September 2001 the Vatican issued a press release stating that Gruner, whose canonical status has long been ambiguous, is suspended a divinis (i.e., barred from performing priestly functions but not removed from the cleric state), and that his activities do not have the support of the Holy See. Burresi left the Oblates of the Virgin Mary in 1992 amid a bitter internal dispute and founded a new order, the Congregation of the Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
Currently the Servants number some 150 members. The May 27 decree against Burresi is the culmination of a long ecclesiastical battle. Accusations of sexual misconduct with seminarians first emerged in June 1988, at which time Burresi was removed from San Vittorino and sent first to an Oblate residence in Austria, and then to Tuscany. The Oblates conducted a lengthy investigation.
In the end, 11 accusations surfaced, though no canonical process against Burresi was launched. These accusations generally involved sexual contact between Burresi and young adult seminarians, not minors. Sexual misconduct, however, is not the primary charge.
On May 10, 2002, a tribunal within the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith concluded a penal process against Burresi that had been launched in 1997, five years after his split with the Oblates. The process resulted in a decree signed by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and his secretary Tarcisio Bertone, today the cardinal of Genoa. That decree, similar to the one issued on May 27, was never applied because the criminal process on which it was based had been annulled by a 10-year statute of limitations in canon law. A 20-page report from the tribunal, a separate document from the decree, was obtained by NCR.
It cites seven offenses by Burresi Direct violation of the seal of the Indirect violation of the seal of the Soliciting the violation of the seal of the Illegitimate use of knowledge acquired in the confessional to the detriment of the Illegitimate injury to one's good name and violation of the right of personal Soliciting aversion and disobedience against Pseudo-mysticism, as well as asserted apparitions, visions and messages attributed to supernatural origins. Sources told NCR that the charges of violating the confessional stemmed from Burresi's practice of encouraging penitents to repeat their confessions for purposes of transcription, and if they declined, sometimes making his own notes, with names included. The report also mentions that in 1989 a commission of cardinals was created to examine accusations against Burresi, including homosexuality.
In its conclusion, the report urged the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to take administrative action against Burresi despite the statute of limitations. One concern, the report suggested, was that if no action resulted, Burresi's followers would interpret the investigation as evidence of unfair hostility against him. It should not be forgotten that during this process some persons said that the accused 'would come out of it triumphant, more esteemed than ever, and thus without any shadow, indeed more glorious than before,' the judges wrote. [They said] 'that the Secretariat of State defends Fr. Gino, thus victory is assured.' If no new limitation is applied to his ministerial liberty simply due to the fact that the proven offenses have been prescribed [by the statute of limitations], probably the sentence of this court will be used as an instrument of propaganda in favor of the accused.
He will be able to continue to do harm to those psychologically weak persons who place themselves under his spiritual direction. The findings were signed by a four-judge panel. The president of the panel was Velasio De Paolis, now a bishop and secretary of the Apostolic Signatura, the Supreme Court of the Catholic church.
Though the document does not clarify the reference to the Secretariat of State, a member of the Congregation of the Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, the order founded by Burresi, is Fr. Angelo Tognoni, a mid-level official in the Secretariat of State. Tognoni sometimes appears with the pope at the Wednesday General Audience, reading greetings in Italian. Burresi currently resides in Tuscany.
Efforts to reach him for comment were unsuccessful.* * * Times are a bit tough at the English embassy to the Holy See. The embassy's headquarters have been dislodged from their traditional location overlooking the Spanish Steps, and have been consolidated into the existing British embassy to Italy. The ambassador will maintain a separate staff and offices, to honor the letter of the 1929 Lateran Pacts that require countries with diplomatic relations with the Holy See to maintain separate embassies, but the English press has nevertheless referred to the move as a downgrading.
Speaking of the ambassador, the incumbent, Kathryn Colvin, is nearing the end of her term, and Her Majesty's Government therefore needs to name a replacement. Normally the selection of an ambassador is a highly discreet process, often involving delicate questions of diplomacy, geopolitics, and both political and personal interests. In this case, however, the English have opted for a much more direct route they took out a help wanted ad in the newspaper. On July 19, the following advertisement ran in The Times of London The Holy See has the status of a sovereign state.
It plays an important role on international issues of importance to HMG such as Africa, development and the fight against poverty. As Ambassador, you will act on instructions from the UK Government, report on the Holy See's response, advance HMG's overseas priorities, and represent the UK at official functions and ceremonial events (including religious ceremonies). We require a high caliber individual, with proven political and strategic awareness, diplomatic and interpersonal skills, and in-depth knowledge of government.
You must be able to deal with complex issues, build effective and lasting relationships, and be able to communicate in Italian and French to a high standard. Supplementary materials note that the applicant must be a British citizen, and must be acceptable to the Vatican. The salary range in U.S. dollars, by the way, is $74,000-$105,000. Applications are due by Aug. 9.
Many in the diplomatic world around Rome have snickered at the announcement, though one potentially optimistic Vatican official theorized that perhaps casting a wide net would result in non-traditional candidates with unusual strengths, such as a deeper theological sophistication than one often gets from career civil servants or political appointees. Finally, three former British ambassadors to the Vatican have issued a public appeal against what they regard as neglect of the embassy. The July 16 letter in the Times from Mark Pellew, Andrew Palmer and John Broadley reads The timing is unfortunate.
Pope Benedict XVI shows signs of wanting closer relations with Britain. The Holy See's agenda is largely centred on global issues of poverty, development and debt relief, coinciding with our own G8 priorities. The Vatican is influential and well informed, a first-class listening post in which all other G8 countries have resident diplomats.... The reason is, of course, cost-cutting.
Yet the post has always been one of our least expensive. This proposal is cheese-paring in the extreme. Let us at least continue to staff it with a properly supported professional diplomat of sufficient standing to make his or her voice heard in Whitehall.* * * If you're reading this, it's despite the best efforts of much of the world's media to convince you that the only literature worth perusing this summer is the new Harry Potter book.
Perhaps the only dark cloud surrounding the book's release in mid-July was the news that then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, wrote to a German author in March 2003, praising her criticism of the Potter books. The books contain subtle seductions, Ratzinger wrote in a private letter, that deeply distort Christianity in the soul, before it can grow properly. For anyone familiar with the pope's views on other facets of pop culture -- he once excoriated rock music as a vehicle of anti-religion -- the verdict is probably not much of a surprise. On the other hand, it is also not a magisterial judgment, and Catholics are free to take other views.
One such perspective came on Vatican Radio on July 14, in an interview with Msgr. Peter Fleetwood, a former official of the Pontifical Council for Culture who now works in the Council for European Bishops' Conferences in Geneva. Fleetwood is no stranger to the discussion over Harry Potter.
Back in 2003, he appeared at a Vatican press conference to discuss a document on the New Age movement. I asked him about the Harry Potter books, and he delivered a basically positive judgment, which, in the style of secular reporting, soon made the rounds under the headline of Vatican OKs Harry Potter, causing some minor consternation. On July 14, he once again took to the defense of the Potter series. I remain firmly convinced that the Harry Potter novels are very well written, Fleetwood said.
They are written on the classical plot of good versus evil in the standard way that the old myths were written. The characters are built up around that the goodies and the baddies so to speak, and I can't see that that's a bad thing for children, when goodness, and the people on the side of goodness, are portrayed as the ones who will eventually win. Harry's enemies resort to all sorts of evil things, and they are the ones who lose in the end.
I don't see what's wrong with that, and I can't see that does any harm to children. Maybe I'm blind, as one article about me said, maybe I'm stupid and doing the devil's work, as another article about me said. I have a funny feeling I'm not doing the devil's work, and I have another feeling I am not blind or stupid. I just think that there's a lot of scare-mongering going on, particularly among people who like to find the devil around every corner.
I don't think that's a healthy view of the world. ... The e-mail address for John L. Allen Jr. is Copyright 2005 The National Catholic Reporter Publishing Company, 115 E.
Armour Blvd., Kansas City, MO 64111 TEL 1-816-531-0538 FAX 1-816-968-2280
Iran Sits Pretty in World's Hottest Region
07/22/2005 - Antiwar.com (cir. )
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Despite the best efforts of the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush to make Iran an international pariah, the Islamic Republic keeps wracking up one diplomatic victory after another.
One month after the surprise election victory of hardline President-elect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran finds itself in a substantially stronger position to resist the U.S. campaign to isolate it as part of a strategy of 'regime change.' Last weekend's three-day visit by U.S.-backed Iraqi President Ibrahim Jaafari to Tehran, where he was warmly received by the regime's top religious and government officials, was only the latest, albeit the most spectacular, of a series of events that underlines Iran's growing leverage. That his visit, which followed a series high-level meetings between the two countries that produced a military-cooperation accord among other agreements, included a prayerful pilgrimage to the tomb of Ayatollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic and arch-foe of the 'Great Satan' itself, must have stuck deeply in the craw of neoconservatives and other hawks here who had long assumed that a 'liberated' Iraq would gratefully cooperate in ousting the mullahs in Tehran. The hawks, who welcomed Ahmedinejad's victory in the belief that an ostentatiously hardline president would put to rest the notion that there was a 'moderate' faction the West could deal with, have still not given up hopes for achieving regime change - be it through a U.S.-supported 'democratic revolution' a la Ukraine and/or by military strikes on selected nuclear and political targets that would foment a popular uprising. Despite a greater-than-expected turnout and landslide victory by the winner, the hawks have continued to argue that 'the country is ripe for revolution,' as Jeffrey Gedmin, the neoconservative director of the Aspen Institute in Berlin, wrote in the current Weekly Standard.
But even if - and most Iran experts here dismiss Gedmin's opinion as more ideological than informed - internal unhappiness with the Islamic regime has reached an all-time high, the international context is significantly more favorable to Iran in any confrontation with the U.S. than it has been for some time. While Washington's military campaign in Afghanistan and invasion of Iraq were designed in part to intimidate Iran, Tehran actually emerged with as a big winner, according to most regional observers. 'Its two greatest regional enemies, the Ba'athist government in Iraq and the Sunni extremist regime in Afghanistan, were both smashed without Iran having to fire a shot,' notes Anatol Lieven, an analyst at the New America Foundation. 'Now, it has governments in Afghanistan and still more in Iraq that are basically very sympathetic to Tehran and Tehran's view of regional affairs' - an observation given much more force by last weekend's festivities in Tehran. And even though Iran suddenly found some 160,000 U.S. military troops just next door, that, too, was not necessarily as daunting as the hawks had thought it might be.
After all, Iran's unspoken potential to make life much more difficult for many of its new and already overstretched U.S. neighbors has always given it a certain amount of leverage. But in recent weeks, Iran has found its position getting stronger, sometimes even with Bush's seemingly unwitting assistance. The Bush administration's agreement this week to sell India advanced nuclear technology despite Delhi's boycott of the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), for example, has created the perception of a double standard that Iran is likely to use to its advantage both in negotiations with the EU-3 (Britain, France, and Germany) and in fending off U.S. efforts to get the UN Security Council to impose sanctions against it for allegedly violating the NPT. 'Iran will argue how can it be penalized for minor transgressions of the NPT, which it has signed, when India, a nuclear power, gets full nuclear cooperation from the U.S. when it is not even a member,' noted Arjun Makhijani, director of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research. 'How can you argue that Russia can't sell [nuclear] reactors to Iran after this?' said Joseph Cirincione, a proliferation expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International peace. 'That's what Iran is going to count on.' Bush, of course, approved the nuclear deal as part of a diplomatic effort to promote India as 'a major world power in the 21st century' and, more specifically, as a counterweight to China (whose growing demonization by Republicans in Congress and Sinophobes in the Pentagon also helps Iran by diverting attention to an even bigger 'threat'). But conferring on India regional superpower status to contain China may further shield Tehran, which has long-standing and close ties to New Delhi, from Washington's more aggressive designs.
The fact that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his delegation, despite having been given the red-carpet treatment at the White House this week, reportedly rejected all appeals to reconsider their support for the proposed multi-billion-dollar 'peace pipeline' that will transport Iranian gas to India via Pakistan offered clear evidence that Delhi has no intention of acting as Washington's pawn on the global chessboard. 'The Indians will not be corralled into any kind of containment policy regarding China and Iran, but especially Iran,' said Rajan Menon, a foreign-policy expert at Lehigh University. Given the strength of its own relationship with Iran and its large Muslim population, he said, 'The U.S. would risk a break with India if it actually attacked Iran.' The fact, of course, that Iran is a oil and gas exporter at a time of record prices (in part due to the instability in U.S.-occupied Iraq) and growing great-power competition for energy resources is also a major factor in Tehran's increasing clout. In addition to India, China, which late last year signed a 25-year, $100 billion gas deal with Iran, has a great deal invested in Iran's stability. 'China sees Iran as a very important part of its energy strategy, and it's powerful enough to stand up with them if they need support at the UN Security Council,' said Gary Sick, an Iran expert at Columbia University who advised former President Jimmy Carter on the National Security Council. 'For its part, Iran sees China as a potentially very valuable ally.' Nor is it just China.
Russia, which continues to support Iran's civilian nuclear program nuclear plant, is also more likely to support Iran at the Security Council, less for love of Tehran than because it has become increasingly alienated from Washington over the past year, according to Wayne White, director of the Middle East Institute (MEI) and a former top State Department expert on the Gulf. That alienation was on display earlier this month when Russia and China encouraged the four other Central Asia members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) to call on Washington to set a deadline for withdrawing from military bases in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, both SCO states. The bases, which have been used to support U.S. military and intelligence operations in both Afghanistan and Iraq and which some have suggested could be used in similar ways against Iran, was widely seen as the opening shot by both Moscow and Beijing in a concerted effort to roll back strategic gains made by Washington in Central Asia in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and the Pentagon. 'Without even having orchestrated some master plan, Iran is sitting pretty in Central Asia at the moment,' said Menon, who recalled Russia and Iran helped broker a peace accord ending the civil war in Tajikistan in 1994. 'It's a multipolar region, and the fact that we're having problems with so many players gives the Iranians a lot more running room.' Meanwhile, the rapidly fading likelihood that Turkey will be admitted to the EU in the wake of the French and Dutch rejection of the EU Constitution, as well as growing concerns in Ankara about both Kurdish unrest in a weakened Syria and its own Kurdish insurgency, offers yet another opening to woo a key neighbor whose alliance with Washington has been under unprecedented strain for more than two years now. These diplomatic advances have contributed to growing self-confidence inside Iran, particularly among the new generation of leaders, including Ahmadinejad, who 'have grown up with the idea that Iran makes its own decisions and takes its own path regardless of what outsiders think,' according to Sick. 'From inside Iran, there's a sense that everything is breaking for us.' 'What I worry about is that they will conclude that they don't need to worry so much about compromise, and that could be very dangerous,' he went on. 'They do still have to think about their neighbors, which at this point includes the U.S.' (Inter Press Service) Jim Lobe, works as Inter Press Service's correspondent in the Washington, D.C., bureau.
He has followed the ups and downs of neo-conservatives since well before their rise in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks.
'God Said It, That Settles It'
07/22/2005 - Reason (cir. 52,000)
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Lynchburg, VA-Science and scripture cannot contradict one another, and if they appear to do so, then there is something wrong with the science. God created the world in six 24-hour days, according to Georgia Purdom, an assistant professor of biology at Mount Vernon Nazarene University in Mount Vernon, OH. 'It's what God said, and that's enough, and that's the way it has to be,' said she. Purdom testified to the attendees of the 2005 Creation Mega-Conference that five years ago she 'felt called to understand what I believe and why I believe it.' Answering this call brought her to read Darwin's Black Box The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (1996) by Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe.
The book introduced her to the 'intelligent design' movement. Initially attracted to intelligent design theorizing, Purdom eventually found it unsatisfactory. Thus the question in her talk 'The Intelligent Design Movement How Intelligent Is It?' Purdom rejects evolution because it is built on the notion that the process of natural selection relies on death, pain, suffering, and disease to produce our contemporary world. According to creationists, death did not enter the universe until Adam and Eve sinned (Genesis 3 19). 'I couldn't believe it because it did not fit with the God I know; the God with whom I have a personal relationship,' insisted Purdom.
Intelligent designers share the same problem with evolutionists-both ignore Scripture. Purdom explained that intelligent design was just 'refurbished natural theology' of the sort made famous by Anglican divine William Paley in his Natural Theology; or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity (1802). Paley famously argued that if someone stumbled over a watch in a forest that he would immediately perceive that 'the watch must have had a maker.' Paley claimed that the complex mechanisms of organisms in the natural world point to the same conclusion.
Purdom believes that both natural theology and intelligent design are fine as far as they go, but they don't go far enough. The problem is that nature is a general revelation while scripture is a special revelation and special revelation trumps general revelation. Purdom sums up intelligent design as saying, 'If it looks designed, it is designed.' But still, how are intelligent design theorists going to determine if something is designed or not? 'You can't just look at something and tell if it is designed,' she says. This is where she still finds Behe valuable.
In Darwin's Black Box, Behe explains the concept of 'irreducible complexity' using the homely example of a mousetrap. A standard mousetrap is irreducibly complex because it will only catch mice if it has a board, a spring, a trigger and so forth. If any part is missing, it will catch no mice.
The existence of irreducible complexity in organisms similarly points to an intelligent designer. Behe offers examples of several irreducibly complex biological systems such as the biochemistry of sight and the operation of the bacterial flagellum which must have the existence and coordinated action of many different proteins and other molecules or they will fail. Purdom points especially to the complexity of the mammalian blood clotting cascade. We do know that genetic mutations disable blood clotting in people.
For example, one version of hemophilia is caused by a lack of the blood-clotting Factor VIII, which is perhaps analogous to a mousetrap missing its spring. Purdom thinks that this is a knockdown argument against evolution, which is supposed to work by small gradual successive steps. If a new modification is not immediately functional, then it's gone. 'Evolution doesn't believe in keeping leftovers,' declares Purdom.
But is the mammalian blood clotting system irreducibly complex? While the work is far from complete, researchers are making progress in figuring out how that system came into existence over hundreds of millions of years. Strangely, Purdom rejects a well-known pathway for creating novel functions at the molecular level-gene duplication with subsequent modification of the redundant gene, which leads to new functions. In any case, while accepting a good bit of the Intelligent Design movement's arguments, Purdom points out that Intelligent Design also allows for macroevolution-that is, new species can arise from earlier species. This a definite no-no since the Bible clearly states that God 'created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, after their kind.' If all creatures reproduce only their own 'kind,' then there is no way for evolution to produce new species.
However, according to Purdom, 'the biggest problem is that Intelligent Design theory divorces Creator from Creation. They do not presume to pierce the veil of the Designer. They won't say 'who done it.'' Purdom is also annoyed that ID advocates will not talk about the optimality of design.
She pointed to a statement by ID godfather, Philip Johnson who recently said, 'I suppose the Creator could have made it so that we would live forever and be bulletproof. Flawless design may not be his point.' In Purdom's creationist interpretation of Genesis, God made a perfect world in which Adam and Eve were the moral equivalent of immortal and bulletproof; however, it is now flawed due to Adam's sin. Even more horrifying to Purdom is the statement by Baylor University professor and Design Inference author William A. Dembski, 'One looks at some biological structure and remarks, 'Gee, that sure looks evil.' Did it start out evil? Was that its function when a good and all-powerful God created it? Objects invented for good purposes are regularly co-opted and used for evil purposes.' Can Dembski be implying that God created evil in the world? Purdom replies that Christians know that 'sin has broken this world, including all of nature.' To illustrate evil in nature, Purdom offers the example of the nature documentary showing an idyllic scene of a 'zebra grazing peacefully, and then a tiger leaps out and bites its head off.' (Of course this documentary would have to be filmed in a zoo, since that's the only place in which African zebras are likely to encounter Asian tigers, but never mind.) The problem with ID theory, as Purdom sees it, is that it implies that God is the author of evil unless you have Biblical understanding of how evil came into the universe through Adam's fall.
ID is flawed because it lacks 'the Bible as a foundation and framework.' Purdom ended her lecture with a Power Point slide illustrating the ultimate argument from authority 'God Said It, That Settles It.' On this third day of the Creation Mega-Conference, participants got a half day off from their lucubrations, so there was only one more session in the morning, 'The Human Origins Controversy.' Australian plant physiologist Dr. Don Batten started out with the by-now-familiar trope of Adam versus Ape. Batten explained that if Adam is in your past, you are owned by God, who gives you absolute moral rules and who has the right to sit in judgment over you.
If an ape is in your past, that leads to moral relativism in which morality evolved as way to help us pass along our genes. Man sets the rules. Batten then pointed out that, according to Genesis, God took dust to fashion Adam. He did not take another animal and transform it into a man.
Thus Genesis makes it clear that humanity did not evolve from lower animals. Batten then goes after the various 'controversies' among paleo-anthropologists. 'You don't have to research yourself because they (the evolutionists) start fighting among themselves,' explained Batten. Anyone who follows the debates among paleo-anthropologists knows that the field is extremely contentious.
Just consider the recent controversies over Sahelanthropus tchadensis and Homo floresiensis. In 2002, French paleo-anthropologist Michel Brunet announced the discovery of a hominid skull in the Sahel region of Chad (Sahelanthropus tchadensis) that he dated to between 6 million and 7 million years old. His claim was challenged by researcher Brigitte Senut, who thinks that it is the skull of a gorilla ancestor. In 2004, researchers announced that they had uncovered the 18,000 year old bones of a diminutive human species, Homo floresiensis, on Flores Island in Indonesia.
The creature was immediately dubbed 'the Hobbit.' This conclusion was challenged by Professor Maciej Henneberg, head of anatomy at Adelaide University in Australia, who thinks the bones are those of a normal human whose growth had been stunted by disease. Batten implied to his audience that such contentions among scientists mean that the whole field of paleo-anthropology has been discredited. However, such disagreements among scientists are not a sign of weakness; they are instead evidence of a field that is still developing.
To cut through all the controversies, horticulturist Batten told the conferees that he was going to prune and graft onto the tree of human ancestry as depicted by the Smithsonian Institution. Batten proceeded to systematically prune away many of the earliest branches in the Smithsonian tree of human ancestry, lopping off Ardipithecus ramidus, Australopithecus afarensis, Australopithecus garhi, Homo habilis and Homo rudolfensis. Batten portrays himself as bravely cutting through a corrupt and self-serving evolutionist literature to show that none of the early hominids depicted by the Smithsonian are human ancestors. But hold on a minute.
Close inspection of the Smithsonian early human phylogeny graphic finds that in fact all possible ancestors trimmed by Batten are connected by dotted lines and question marks. Contrary to what Batten implies, the Smithsonian is not claiming that it is settled science that creatures like Ardipithecus ramidus and Homo rudolfensis are human ancestors; only that they might be shown to be so as scientific discoveries advance. Batten also claims to have discerned that Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalensis, and Homo sapiens are all simply human.
He fails to mention that the Smithsonian agrees, and joins all three with solid lines suggesting that science has strongly demonstrated that they are all connected. With Batten's lecture, my time among the creationists came to an end. Just as the Reverend Jerry Falwell promised, there were no snake-handlers at the Creation Mega-Conference. Instead the conferees were a bunch of decent people trying to make sense of the world and live good lives.
The deeply saddening thing is that these decent people have come to believe they have to reject modern science in order to do so. Ronald Bailey is Reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.
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Designing a universe free of evolution
07/22/2005 - Home News Tribune (cir. 58,977)
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Designing a universe free of evolution Home News Tribune Online 07/22/05 .advert {font-family Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size 10px; color #000000; font-weight bold; padding-left 6px; text-align center;} - advertisements - There is something like a mini-summer storm brewing on the Letters pages about the scientific basis of evolution. Steven Brill from the department of molecular biology at Rutgers, weighed in with ''No beauty pageant winner, just evolution.'The jist of his letter is that ''After 140 years of the most intense testing there is no doubt among scientists regarding the validity of the basic process of evolution.'Well, I have doubts, and if the scientists Steven Brill speaks for have no doubt about current explanations for the origin of life then that may be just the core of the problem. In fact, the '90s witnessed intense debates about evolution among scientists, including such a prestigious figure as Steven Jay Gould of Harward.
If these debates left most of the established members without doubt then may be we should conclude that they are imbued with dogmatic certainty. Doubt, questioning established paradigms and probing uncharted territory surely is or should be the lifeblood of scientific inquiry, especially when newer research on the incredible complexity of cell structure would make some doubting and openness to new paradigms very helpful.Ever since the publication in 1986 of Michael Denton's ''Evolution, a theory in crisis,' Darwin has been on trial. Denton, a biochemist and medical doctor, woke the academic community from their dogmatic slumber and became a trailblazer for others to follow - and follow they did. Michael Behe, from Lehigh University, another biochemist, published ''Darwin's Black Box' in 1996, amid furious controversies in the media.
Steven Brill said no controversy exists. That is clearly not true.Steven Brill makes it sound that all that is involved in the selection of scientific theories is validity, established by objective judges in the context of checks and balances. I think that Steven Kuhn in his 1977 book, ''The Structure of Scientific Revolution,' poked a little hole in that comfortable notion.Taking a dogmatic high and mightly attitude to the crucial questions of the origin of life left the American public skeptical about the value of this manner of scientific inquiry.
Some recent poll numbers indicate that after 12 years of indoctrination in the public schools, only about 9 percent believe in the theory. Not surprisingly 95 percent of the scientists do. There is a little credibility gap here, wouldn't you say.?Most Americans are imbued with common sense that tells them that order never comes out of chaos no matter how many million years you add to the mix.I believe that established evolutionary scholars in fact know that the theory of evolution is in crisis because it cannot explain observeble order and design. Due to their a priori convictions, they absolutely would not touch with a 10-foot pole already existing, voluminous scientific research in ''intelligent design.' The intelligent reader knows exactly why, but let me say it anyway because design involves a designer.Maria Van SertimaHIGHLAND PARK