Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: A Weblog

How did we ever get to the point in this society where the intellectual capacity of someone who "doesn't believe in the theory of evolution" is treated with any sort of respect? What would you do when confronted by someone who believes the world is flat becuase his vision (and some readings of the Bible) tell him so?

This is the ultimate outsome of those damn "culture wars"; we're not allowed to lump Creationists in with the Maoists, Fascisti, Lysenkoists, Eugenicists and others promulgators of (sometime dangerous) stupidity, richly deserving of active avoidance and ridicule.

And yet Rep. Souder is probably a fairly decent person in many areas of his life. But his church requires him to believe in the literal truth of the bible. Since a great deal of science contradicts biblical cosmology--what else doesn't he believe in? He serves on the House Committee on Resources--shades of James Watt! Does he believe in geology?

His church's web page is [http://www.emmanuelcommunity.org] I don't suppose he keeps kosher, though I can't see why not.

"If this is one of the most thoughtful Republicans, what are the least thoughtful--or the average--Republicans like?"

Two words: James Inhofe

To paraphrase a line by Murray Kempton on the subject Robert MacNamara, "what you have to understand about this David Brooks is that he's a warm, troubled intellectual."

Okay, lesse. . . They use the theory of radioactivity to date fossils and remains, the collection of data resulting in a timeline for evolution. As we all know, evolution's figures for the age of the earth disagree strongly with the Old Testament's.

They also use radioactivity in smoke detectors. Exact same principle. If the theory, as applied in fossil dating, was inaccurate in any way, then your smoke detector would not work.

Ergo, Creationists do not believe in smoke detectors.

So go out and buy one, and set it off in front of them to prove your point.

Darwin never used the term "survival of the fittest", that was Herbert Spencer.

I will be contrarian and say that the man is entitled to his beliefs.

Hmm, feels good. I will be more contrarian and say that it is fine with me to teach evolution and creation "science" in the class room if unvarnished accounts of mainstream scientists' evaluations of creation "science" are allowed.

And if the creation scientists want to sneak in some religion, we can give them the other side of that too (John Calvin: you want to learn astronomy, go buy an astronomy book, don't go to the Bible. I have no idea if Calvin could swallow evolution, but he was not a fanatical literalist). And we could point out that St. Augustine, who was more devoted to literalism than Calvin was so troubled by the Biblical creation account that he cooked up a weird baby theory of evolution (or some kind of gradual development from "seeds" sown by the creator).

Of course, this would lead to complete chaos and huge fights at school board meetings. That would provide the opportunity for joint civics and biology class field trips to the school board meetings.

Utter and complete chaos would result, and I am sure the kids would love it -probably perk their interest in both science and Biblical criticism.

Constitutional amendments might be proposed, if close to an election and polls were just right. And it would be good test of how thoughtful people like Rep. Souder are. I dunno, maybe he'd be willing to go for it.

I think it takes a thoughtful person to know a thoughtful person. And i think David Brooks obviously does not qualify.

And the "Thumb", of the Panda.

Polls show that over half the country does not "believe" (I actually hate that word in this context) in evolution. I think this explains a lot about why Bush can still hover near 50 percent in the polls.

Until they cannot deny it any longer.

"In a report sent to Congress this week, the administration noted a recent government-sponsored study supported the view of many
scientists that human action from driving automobiles to running power plants helped cause global warming." -snip-
"The brief passage in the report was surprising because President George W. Bush and other senior administration officials have long
insisted there was no clear scientific proof to link human activities to global warming."
(site - almost any friggin' newspaper)

Oh, the time and opportunities wasted!

Jon Gallagher writes:
>
> How did we ever get to the point in this society where the
> intellectual capacity of someone who "doesn't believe in the
> theory of evolution" is treated with any sort of respect?

I think this is unfair. Intellectual capacity is not the issue. Not to sound too much like Watson (the behaviorist), but somebody could have taken Souder as a baby, raised him under different conditions, and found him quite well-informed about modern biology.

There are some very general and insidious forces at work here. We do a lot to down-play the importance of science when most teachers K-12 (and not even just K-6) know very, very little science. Children look at adults in general and their role models in particular, and knowledge of biology does not obviously let you tell the winners from the losers. In church, many will hear that evolution is the work of an evil agent. In the press, they will only read "he said, she said" stories about attempts to introduce scientific creationism into the curriculum. Our ideas about science are quite like our beliefs about many other things that are both important and true these days: optional unless overwhelmingly proven otherwise. It is a very unfortunate state to be in.

Three years ago, I was wandering around the kid section of a bookstore, and saw among the big "DK" science books for young readers one on Evolution. Fearing the worst (for reasons I'm not quite sure of) I checked it out. As it turns out, I had little or nothing to fear; it was really quite good given the intended audience (kids) and what it was trying to do (inform and not brow-beat). It also included about 50 times as much information about the theory of evolution and its application as you are likely to see in the whole K-12 curriculum here in the US. Mark Souder and half of the rest of Congress could and would learn something from it. And it was a kid's book!

Last year, I began looking for this book in stores again; most places that otherwise quite complete stocks of other DK titles often didn't have this one. Slow seller? Attractor of unwanted attention? I never did try to find out.

Mr. Souder (R-IN) also once referred to Kentuckians as being inbred (in a bizarre referrence to the Waco/Branch Davidian incident). Thoughtful, indeed. I'm a Hoosier who now lives in Kentucky and can tell you I'd take Ben Chandler (D-KY) over his sorry @ss any day.

I also study the Theory of Evolution fairly intensly and debate it with a couple of my home-schooler co-workers. The reason so many folks have trouble believing it is that it is wildly complex, ranging from genetics to group selection to evolutionary psychology. Most school teachers are teaching terribly outdated concepts. (Try getting kids to grasp punctuated equilibrium.) It has serious implications for biomechanics and ecomorphology, which would be good angles. Unless a practical application of the knowledge is brought forward, it will continue to struggle in a practical-minded populous.

Also, it shouldn't be used as a battering ram against "superstition" since the theory does no more damage to someone's religious beliefs than cosmology and no one questions that anymore. It's really more the curriculum developers' fault at this point. Anyone who cares about the future and value of the theory should be protective of its best interests. It will replace the Israelites' Creation Story in our culture someday, but we hold it in our power to either advance or delay that day based on how adaptive we are in promoting the theory. Hmmm...where have I heard the about the value of adaptiveness before?

The thing about David Brooks is that he got consistent encouragement and B+'s for his writing in high school and decided he wanted to "be a writer" no less than he wanted to be an "in" kinda guy, not one of those, you know, se-e-e-e-rious writers who don't take baths.

He likes the limelight. He knows he's less of a person than many of the people he's coupled with on air (EJ Dionne, for starters), so he blusters more and has learned to laugh things off. Resolutely superficial. I don't think he's capable of serious code for anything though I don't disagree with Brad's comments. Code is just too deep for him.

I was just listening to a discussion of the Swifties on the Tavis Smiley show when I turned on the computer and was struck once again by the moral relativism which has taken over the political debate, as it having someone in the discussion who defends the Swifties as deserving respect for "having their own truth." So Jon Gallagher's "How did we ever get to the point in this society where the intellectual capacity of someone who 'doesn't believe in the theory of evolution' is treated with any sort of respect?" (above) got a loud cheer!

Jonathan,

Good point on the question of "capacity" but that just leads us to refine our language a bit. If Souder has the capacity to absorb science, but doesn't bother to absorb it, then we have to question his intellectual accomplishments. Revel as he may in his failure to acknowledge the intellectual progress that has been made over the centuries, Souder's intellectual failures are a risk to the rest of us. Insidious is the right word.

I see a good bit of double-think going on in our political life right now. One of the favorite subjects of our politicians is intolerance among our enemies - their brand of fundamentalism reveres another diety and performs other rites the the brand favored by our politicians. Many of these same politicians then miss, or ignore, the fact that it is the fruits of the Enlightenment, including religious pluralism and tolerance, a substitution of knowledge for belief, that has set Western culture apart. That diffence is a large part of the reason that our intolerant enemies have attacked us. It seems to me a sign of our own growing bigotry that we cannot see when our own behavior is approaching the behavior of those who attack us. It seems to me a very worrying thing when our leaders disparage the very root of our military advantage over our attackers - science. We won't be able to have it both ways forever.

Maybe he is thoughtful. Have you ever contemplated how many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Great historical thinkers such as Newton spent a lot of time contemplating arcane theology.

Thoughtful is important, but it is only one component of intellect. All the thought in the world will be misdirected if your basic assumptions are incorrect. Content matters.

I might add that he is right in line with the 50% of Americans that believe in biblical creationism instead of evolution. This is one of the reason that religious conservatives feel the press is liberal. The press is very dismissive of the core relgious dogma of fundamentalists when it is contradicted by fact.

bakho wrote:
> Maybe he is thoughtful. Have you ever contemplated how many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Great historical thinkers such as Newton spent a lot of time contemplating arcane theology.

I was going to make a similar comment.

Who says he has not thought about the Galapagos finches? I'm sure there's somewhere in the "creation science" literature in which a non-evolutionary explanation is proposed. Often the problem is not a question of lacking thoughtfulness, but on focusing efforts so much to support a pre-determined conclusion, that you eventually develop a model to support it. The model is invariably overfitted, but that does not mean it isn't the product of a thoughtful intellect. (Though it does suggest a lack of appreciation for Occam's razor, or at least a blindspot with respect to the issue in question.)

Maybe partaking in science education is considered "acting liberal" in some parts.

I for one don't care if Souder has ever thought about finches or whales or dogs. What I do care about is the fact that he is obviously unwilling to form conclusions based on actual evidence. Maybe, as Brooks claims, Souder "defies stereotypes." So what? If he can't, or won't, base his ideas on facts and logic then all his bouncing around is not thoughtfulness but just the political equivalent of Brownian motion.

(And by the way, the Buckley of the 60's was a pretty nasty character. I wouldn't be proud of having acted like him if I were Souder).

Does anyone has any numbers on how the population of other developed countries does at this? It seems to me as a strangely "American" issue. I live in Uruguay, where our educational system isn't exactly world class, and still I'd bet that a huge majority of people believes in evolution.

You are dealing with someone whose ethos is shaped, primarily, by a force that tells him to take a written document as *literally true.* Anything that contradicts this document and that can't be *proven* as literally true can therefore be discarded, thoughtfully or otherwise, but why waste cerebral resources when the outcome is a foregone conclusion.

I tend to agree that we have gotten to this pass because of the way science is taught. So much theoretical physics and other scientific disciplines hinge on things that can be "seen" only under a powerful microscope or telescope, or through mathematical conjecture, that their practical applications for most people might as well be the result of magic. And yet, people happily use the technology that results from the theorizing -- how can science be taught more from the ground up -- i.e., taking a practical application and showing how a principle, while perhaps amazingly complex, is not magic, is, in short, quite different from faith?

There's a long way to go. It's no joke that my Catholic parish church allowed itself to be used by a group that hosted a "scientific" conference to discuss existing evidence for the proposition that, in fact, the sun does revolve around the earth.

Much depends on what Souder means by "theory of evolution". The finches of the Galapagos are a case of evolution within distinct limits, which most intelligent design proponents accept. Same with the variety of dogs. Souder might even accept the hip bone of the whale. What he presumably rejects is macroevolution, which Brad never touches upon.

kharris writes:

> Good point on the question of "capacity" but that just leads us
> to refine our language a bit. If Souder has the capacity to
> absorb science, but doesn't bother to absorb it, then we have
> to question his intellectual accomplishments.

I agree up to a point. But outside of academia, it has always been the norm that there is a well-defined period of (maybe intensive) schooling, and it is just less likely that you would have the time to go back and seriously wonder at finches or DNA sequences at some later point. This is especially true since our beliefs and habits really do become fairly well set earlier than we might like to admit. So when you grow up in an environment where you don't hear the Good News of Biology when young, it is NOT going to be easy to listen to it when you are older.

> Revel as he may in his failure to acknowledge the intellectual
> progress that has been made over the centuries, Souder's
> intellectual failures are a risk to the rest of us. Insidious is the
> right word.

There are two problems here. One problem that is definitely more extreme for evolution than most scientific areas. Evolution flies in the face with strongly accepted religious dogma, which caps its popularity at a pretty low number, and creates a political opportunity to oppose evolution on strictly political (and cyncially poltical) grounds. I feel much more endangered by the cynical politicians than the merely ignorant ones. A second problem is the recent incredible "anti-elitist" movement in policy and politics. Any and every expert is believed to be no more likely to have the right answer on a topic with political ramifications than any random person, because to believe otherwise is elitist, or to question the authority of whoever it is that is making the decision. This has become an artform in the Bush White House, where policy experts have no pull whatsoever, whether they be talking about the economy, the prospects for space science, how many troops we need in Iraq, or almost anything else.

> I see a good bit of double-think going on in our political life
> right now. One of the favorite subjects of our politicians is
> intolerance among our enemies - their brand of
> fundamentalism reveres another diety and performs other
> rites the the brand favored by our politicians. Many of these
> same politicians then miss, or ignore, the fact that it is the
> fruits of the Enlightenment, including religious pluralism and
> tolerance, a substitution of knowledge for belief, that has set
> Western culture apart.

That is true, but the blindness goes even deeper than that. Politicians make the screwy assumption that, because *they themselves* do not believe in the tenets of Islamic fundamentalism, THAT THE PEOPLE WHO DO MUST NOT HOLD THESE BELIEFS THAT STRONGLY. This exotic failure of the theory of mind (at the cultural level) has enabled all sorts of magical thinking about how easy it will be for us to call all the shots in Iraq. And it gets worse, as you note:

> That diffence is a large part of the reason that our intolerant
> enemies have attacked us. It seems to me a sign of our own
> growing bigotry that we cannot see when our own behavior is
> approaching the behavior of those who attack us.

And I have no response to this. We have so throroughly lost the hearts and minds of most Iraqis, it is as though that was our primary goal.

General Glut writes:

> Much depends on what Souder means by "theory of evolution".
> The finches of the Galapagos are a case of evolution within
> distinct limits, which most intelligent design proponents
> accept. Same with the variety of dogs. Souder might even
> accept the hip bone of the whale. What he presumably rejects
> is macroevolution, which Brad never touches upon.

This has always struck me as the most magical kind of thinking. So you believe in genes, you believe in selection, you believe in mutation, but then go out and accept an argument from ignorance that the same principles can't apply except within genera and species? OK, then, fine. To be most honest, the most shockingly complete and formidable evidence for evolution is the stuff that modern molecular biology is made of. Take any MolBio or molecular genetics text off the shelf, and just try to make sense of what we know without so-called "macro" evolution.

Or just do some one-stop shopping on the web:

http://www.talkorigins.org/

We live in a wonderful age. There is a continually growing opportunity to be informed about anything without even cracking a book.

It says a lot about the political and intellectual culture of this country that there is such a gap between intellectuals and the rest of the population.
The contempt of educated liberals for the lower middle class goes hand in hand with the skewed tone in discussions of Islam. (I've had a little fun at Crooked Timber recently with this.)

One of the advantages of the literary bent of Continental thought is that it takes for granted that basic mental features are shared by all, educated, and uneducated. Everybody wants to fuck. Anglo-American pseudorationalism ignores this in favor of an illusory sense that there is- or worse there should be- a unifying logic to human behavior. Yeah, economics is a 'science.' and Ophelia Benson is my favorite movie critic (and dream date.)

The notion that faith is for other people is silly. Every once in awhile Delong admits to the intellectual limitataions of economic theory, and then he continues to go about his business. Economics is his master narrative.
So Souder is a stupid peasant and Brooks is a troubled intellectual. What or who is to blame? The Climate of Northern Europe? Martin Luther? Weber? Modernism? An indulgence is intellectual synchronism?

If you're a carpenter working in an apartment on the upper east side of Manhattan-York Ave.- clients ignore you.
When you're working on Central Park west or West End Ave. they avoid you.

Fucking liberals

I can't say much on the subject of molecular genetics textbooks, but if they are made of the same stuff as standard liberal international trade textbooks, then we're all in trouble.

Well, isn't wanting to fuck a 'single unifying logic'?

The geneticist Richard C. Lewontin has some interesting observations on the intellectual history of the opposition to the theory of evolution. I think that an article in the New York Review of Books (June 16, 1983: Darwin's Revolution) contains some stuff on that. I think this essay is reprinted in one of his books of essays.

Lewontin sees powerful socio-economic forces at work, and I agree with him -though more because I think the story is plausible, not that I know enough to really judge the evidence. He claims that the people like William Jennings Bryan's opposition came from their reaction to the use of the theory to form the reactionary doctrine of social Darwinism. This got mixed up with very conservative Reformed theology and the bizarre doctrine of dispensationalism, that demanded Biblical literalism. So after a few decades a progressive political position adopted to combat a political use of science was converted into a very reactionary position adopted by the population that Bryan thought was going to be oppressed by social Darwinism.

So, if this intellectual history is true, there is much more going on than closed minds. Anyone know anything about this? If so, I'd like to hear your views.

Lewontin is one of the reasons I still read the NY Review.
A brilliant, decent, man.
And logical

seth edenbaum, Murray Kempton, whom I cite upthread at 11:22 PM, was an intellectual who lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan--a "fucking liberal," if you will. He sprang right up from the workers' movements in the thirties and never left their side (he rode around town on an old bike). He wasn't an easy read, he wrote with care, and he would have blown Brooks straight to hell for the kind of smarmy pseudo-paradox he puts forth in his comments about Souder. As for me, when I lived on the Upper West Side (up until twenty years ago), I was so glad to find a carpenter who'd actually show up for the job that I'd give him the biggest tip I could afford no matter how he actually performed.

kharris:
> If Souder has the capacity to absorb science, but doesn't bother to absorb it, then we have to question his intellectual accomplishments.

This would make him par for the course among politicians and educated non-scientists in general. Politicians are usually reasonably intelligent, particularly when it comes to language. Many are lawyers, and law school (I've heard) is no picnic. But a lot of educated people are not very informed about science, and are not even very interested.

Before touching evolution, I'd first want to quiz politicians on less touchy areas.

E.g., take a congressperson who just voted on NASA appropriations and ask them why shuttle astronauts experience weightlessness? I'd be impressed at one who could explain coherently, without hesitating, that it is not the distance from earth's center (which might as well be sea level) but the fact that they're in free fall and are not subject to a normal force acting against gravity.

Maybe I'm a science snob, and maybe politicians are better at science than I think, but honestly, I know plenty of intelligent people outside science who get simple questions like this one wrong. It's just an area that never interested them, which there was no incentive for them to understand, and which defies common sense in a subtle way.

Even Alex Cockburn had good things to say about Kempton when he died. Kempton was more than a liberal.

And things have changed in 20 years. A lot of liberals got rich in the Reagan years and money breeds hypocrisy.
Also, then as now: stay away from unions!

How's that for a contradiction?

Brooks is one of my favorites to read because I'm always amused by the way he tries to spin things. To read him properly, you need to decipher his code. His prose always sounds soothing and relaxed, yet there's he's always pushing some talking point in his own special way. With the GOP convention this week they are trying to put a friendly face on what they call compassionate conservativism. So running this piece throught the De-Brooksifier, here's what the piece really says:

Republicans may seem like a bunch of religious nuts, corporate executives, war-mongers/profiteers and rednecks. Given folks like Tom Delay and Dick Cheney, I can see where that impression comes from. But it's really not that simple. Take this guy Souder. On the surface he looks like a typical religious right loonie. But look closer. Religious pacifist. Anti-corporate, "small-town socialist". Voted against Clinton's impreachment (well ok, 3 out of 4 articles but who's counting). But hey, he likes beer and had a '66 Mustang! See, he's thoughful and complex!

seth edenbaum, to judge from your remarks on this thread, one might suppose you take Brooks to be a thinker--maybe because he's cute, and someone who doesn't do cute is just a "fucking liberal," or a creature of "contempt" for the working class--a class represented, I suppose, by "Souder". But my comment at 11:22 PM was not about Souter, it was about Brooks, a lame celebrity who likes to strike easy moral poses. He's easy with the factoids, too, just like you at 10:09 AM--because factoids can be made to look like a concrete ideas. But I see nothing "contrarian" at work in you or Brooks--just a walking, talking attitude.

"It is the fruits of the Enlightenment, including religious pluralism and tolerance, a substitution of knowledge for belief, that has set Western culture apart."

KHarris has as usual made a most important point. That we are a secular pluralistic society with a deep respect for education and science is a wonderful source of our strength. The absurd dismissal of the very subject of biology for fear that it might in some impossible to understand way interfere with religious faith is a danger. To dismiss evolution is indeed to dismiss biology for evolution is the basis for understanding how plants and animals have come to be as they are.

Seth Edenbaum's 10:09 post is on the right track, for any of the other posters here that _genuinely_ want to know what the 'other half' is thinking. Evolution by natural selection almost always brings with it a bundle of metaphysical baggage that much of the country finds abhorrent - nihilism, atheism, etc.

Now, perhaps it doesn't have to be this way. I've read essays by well-meaning people that attempt to disentangle the observable science from any larger conclusions. All well and good. Trouble is, in practice, this disentanglement almost always fails. William Provine thinks there is no rapprochement between the two, because they are fundamentally at odds, and fully agrees with Daniel Dennett's 'Universal Acid' viewpoint.

The 'other half' is suspicious that they are being sold a metaphysical pig in a poke....and in many cases they are.

It's all shades of grey, baby.

"Ontogeny recapitulates philogeny" has been largely discredited as a postulate, and the theory of evolution as espoused by Darwin has been largely subsumed under the 19th Century Calvinist fundamental rubric "survival of the fittest", (rather than "survival of the best fit," as Darwin had originally intended).

What's taught today is just reformed capitalism.

None of which goes towards a universal theory of evolution, either for life on earth or for the universe as a whole. Why are even the tiniest fish on a tropical reef so brilliantly painted in such infinitesimal detail? Why are the most remote galaxies filled to overflowing with more galaxies? Why have birds of the air got feet?

Read Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science."

What we do know: Things appear and disappear, whirl about for epochs in fits of rebirth, then are gone. That's about all we know. It's as easy to modulate Christian Genesis or the Buddhist Wheel to fit this agora called "life", as it is to cram the consummate complexity of existence into Darwin's dark little evolutionary shoebox.

The universe created "life", and in the seventh epoch, it rested, while life destroyed itself, pins and needles. We live in that seventh epoch.

Ingmar Bergman, "The Seventh Seal"
http://course1.winona.msus.edu/pjohnson/h140/seal.htm

General Glut wrote, "Much depends on what Souder means by 'theory of evolution'."

There's only one "theory" of evolution, and it's not a theory to most scientists; it's established scientific fact. (That is, species descended from simpler forms, etc.)

There *is* a "theory of natural selection" which purports to *explain* how evolution could occur. But the term "evolution" does not automatically refer to "natural selection". And you don't have to believe in natural selection to believe in evolution.

General Glut wrote, "I can't say much on the subject of molecular genetics textbooks, but if they are made of the same stuff as standard liberal international trade textbooks, then we're all in trouble."

What kind of asinine statement is that? Why would you assume there's any sort of connection between the two?

I could just as well write, "I can't say much on the subject of textbooks on carpentry, but if they are made of the same stuff as standard liberal international trade textbooks, then we're all in trouble."

Neither Brooks nor Souder are thoughtful enough. Here is what a thoughtful column in the NYT looks like:

It's Not New Jobs. It's All the Jobs.
By LOUIS UCHITELLE

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/29/business/yourmoney/29view.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/29/business/yourmoney/29view.html?

It's Not New Jobs. It's All the Jobs.
By LOUIS UCHITELLE

NOW that the work force is growing again, President Bush and Senator John Kerry have been arguing about the quality of the newly created jobs - whether a majority are toward the higher or lower end of the wage scale. That is the wrong debate. The real issue is not how well the new jobs pay, but whether the incomes of workers in general are rising or falling. On the second score, there is not much to debate. The incomes of most workers, adjusted for inflation, are sinking.

The evidence for this assertion is piling up. The Census Bureau weighed in last week with the latest update on family and household incomes. Both declined through the first three years of the Bush administration. From the Bureau of Labor Statistics comes a similar story for individual workers. Whether the measure is median weekly pay or average weekly pay, the increases have been too small since last summer to keep up with a measly climb of 1 percentage point in the inflation rate.

"That is true across nearly all full-time wage earners," said Mark Zandi, chief economist for Economy.com. Lower-end workers have taken the biggest hit, but people at the higher end - earning as much as $75,000 a year - are hurt, too. "The job market is still very weak," Mr. Zandi said, "and employers have the upper hand in negotiations."

Against this backdrop, the two presidential camps have spent an inordinate amount of time on a minor point, the quality of the 1.5 million jobs that have been created since last August. That is a minuscule slice of the 131.3 million jobs in the overall work force, and we know less about the new jobs than we do about the work force as a whole, which is clearly losing ground.

Government data do tell us that a majority of the new jobs are in industries and occupations at the lower end of the wage scale - restaurant workers, for example. What we do not know from this data is the pay for specific jobs. A cook at a fancy restaurant earns much more than one at a diner. Yet both are put in the same classification by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Mr. Kerry argues that a majority of the new jobs are low-paying "bad jobs." But that overstates the case. The data suggest that he is probably right, but not with the certainty he asserts. The Bush camp, on the other hand, argues that the quality of the new jobs is unknowable. Or as N. Gregory Mankiw, chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, wrote recently, "Different analysts using these imperfect data can reach wildly different conclusions.'' But that dismisses too easily the evidence that a majority of the new jobs are in industries and occupations that generate low-wage work.

Income, meanwhile, sinks for the work force as a whole. Much more definitive numbers, ignored so far by both candidates, make that point vividly. This set of numbers deals with laid-off workers. There were 9.86 million wage earners who lost full-time jobs from 2001 through 2003, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported last month, releasing the latest results of a survey conducted every two years.

Tante Aime wrote, "Read Wolfram's 'A New Kind of Science.' "

LOL!

"It's as easy to modulate Christian Genesis or the Buddhist Wheel to fit this agora called 'life', as it is to cram the consummate complexity of existence into Darwin's dark little evolutionary shoebox."

Nonsense. Darwin's theory of natural selection can actually be used to explain all sorts of things. Of course, it doesn't mean that the wonders of the complexity of life are *obviously* reduced to a few simple postulates. But that doesn't mean that Darwin doesn't have explanatory power.

Fine, Bruce Cleaver, we'd really like to know what "the other half" is thinking. But does it actually think? I find that it has no use for writers of the past two centuries who speculate along "genealogical" lines--such as Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, not to mention our old friend Darwin. Picking on Darwin is easy, of course, since he writes about biological forms supposedly "present" to our eyes, while the others are easily dismissed because they speak of things unseen. So I offer the following test of an "anti-Darwinian's" claim to intellectual honesty: if he or she can show the slightest capacity to receive and ponder the works of Darwin's peers, then the claim may have some interest, and even, perhaps, some merit. If not, then it's just an attitude--something altogether welcome to David Brooks and his many admirers.

"Evolution by natural selection almost always brings with it a bundle of metaphysical baggage that much of the country finds abhorrent - nihilism, atheism, etc."

Jacob Bronowski didn't think so, and in his book "Science and Human Values" makes what I think is a pretty good case for the proposition that science is a deeply moral human endeavor rooted in the search for, and the telling of truth. He identifies in it, a simple, beautiful moral axiom: "We ought to act in such a way, that what is true, can be verified to be so."

Nihilism is a charge fundamentalism often levels at science, for its rejection of dogma in favor of knowledge that changes as new facts become known. Bronowski writing in "The Ascent of Man" spoke forcefully to that too:

"It is said that science will dehumanise people and turn them into numbers. That is false, tragically false. Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.

"Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known, we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error, and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible. In the end the words were said by Oliver Cromwell: 'I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken'.

The tragedy of the state of science education in this country isn't that we are loosing our technology edge to other nations, but that we are loosing our ability to distinguish what is true from what isn't. And there is no morality that doesn't require that compass.

Hasn't anyone noticed how odd it is for non-scientists to have an "opinion" on scientific matters? I am not a scientist myself, and all I know about any science is what scientists say about it. I know, that, among scientists, the theory of evolution by natural selection is well accepted. Therefore, I accept it. I also know that there are issues within the theory about which scientists are divided: gradualism v. punctuated equilibrium, group v. individual selection. I have no way of evaluating the respective arguments and know that scientists who do have ways of evaluating them are in disagreement. Therefore, I have no opinion about them, just as I have no "opinion" about string theory or NAIRU.
Why must people have opinions on things they have no basis for having opinions about?

"seth edenbaum, to judge from your remarks on this thread, one might suppose you take Brooks to be a thinker--"

The impression I got of Seth was that he was a carpenter who wanted to fuck somebody living in Park West and got the brush-off.

I'd be willing to bet that Bush himself doesn't believe in evolution, but he is (or his handlers are) politically shrewd enough not to come out and say that. He's been evasive about it in the past, re legislation in Kansas or Oklahoma or whatever backwards place legitimated teaching "creation science" in school.

Please, someone, help me understand the phrase "to believe in evolution". Hypotheses are not dogmas, after all. Isn't it enough for us to say that Darwin has provided the most comprehensive hypothesis to account for a range of perplexing observations? If someone called "Bush" doesn't understand what science gives us, then let's just say that he doesn't understand it, not that he doesn't "believe in it". If, of course, he thinks it's something you "believe in," then he provides us with more, and rather telling, information about the kind of person he is.

I would never call Brooks a thinker. He's a mediocre mind torn between any number of conflicts. And he's not smart enough to admit, let alone articulate his dilemma.
He defends the Pope as a gret thinker the same week it becomes known that the old man's minions are found to be teaching that condoms do nothing to stop the transmision of HIV.
He's never apologized.
He's a hypocrite in the service of his 'higher' truth.
Souder I know nothing about

Never mind Rep. Souder. The problem is that at least half of the American people know nothing of the scientific method, and the distinction between truth and falsehood that it alone enables. They prefer to live in a world without facts, one in which the only attribute of any statement is its local usefulness, which in turn hinges not upon its content but upon who said it. It is the largest and most complete failure of education that history has ever witnessed. We are about to find out just how much ignorance a free society can indulge, and we are going to locate that boundary by drifting all the way across it.

I've thought about the issue of how and what people learn recently. I teach economics -- I'm actually using Brad's textbook this year. It covers (I would judge) 75 percent more material than the equivalent Keynesian textbook did four decades at close to the level of graduate material four decades ago. Education for the elite in the United States is very good. We teach better and more accurately and more efficiently than we did a generation ago. It's quite spectacular to see undergrad science students at my University doing what amounts to genetic engineering, and our econ students doing growth theory, game theory, experimental economics and advanced econometrics.

But the majority of the population do not have access to this education. They don't read Steve Gould or Paul Krugman, they don't have the training to follow a complex argument like evolution (actually four to six distinct arguments synthesized), and perforce fall back on simplistic and sad to say superstitious accounts of reality.

Our democracy is in crisis. One of the structural reasons is that we underpaid elementary and secondary school teachers. The best and the brightest of my generation went into university and college education; the subsequent cohort into law, medicine and the MBA. Low pay for public school teachers generates adverse selection; we are now seeing the delayed effects of that selection operating over a long generation. An uneducated electorate -- the most dangerous condition a democracy can possess.

My teachers were products of the Great Depression. Jobs were scarce and jobs with security highly prized. My high school English teacher in a small town in Washington published articles in the Nebraska Review (a literary mag). My biology teacher was a Harvard grad. We don't see much of that any more. In my darker moments I think our situation is hopeless.

Re Alabama's last post above, one of my brothers teaches high school biology in Colorado. He says that when he teaches advanced placement biology, he prefaces the evolution material with this: you don't have to believe it, you just have to learn enough of it to pass the test. Then, he just hopes that it takes.

He also told me that when Kansas passed the absurd no evolution rule, that he figured it would help his kids get into college, by removing a major source of competitors for his charges.

Knut,
I absolutely agree on the deleterious effects our historic underinvestment in education has had on the electorate. If I were of a conspiratorial bent, I would say that this is now a Republican plot to keep the voting population ignorant and critically untrained.

Good point, Knut Wicksell--and validated by a parallel phenomenon in the humanities. We now introduce students, in their junior and senior college years, to materials that we ourselves first encountered in high school. Not only have we lost the high school cycle--and the teachers who knew how to pitch it--we've also lost the freshman and sophomore "survey" cycle that built on the high school cycle. Meeting up with Shakespeare when you're graduating from college is really a lost opportunity--a lost discipline, finally--and it shows in the prose of our law students.

Frank Wilhoit writes: "American people know nothing of...the distinction between truth and falsehood... They prefer to live in a world without facts, one in which the only attribute of any statement is its local usefulness, which in turn hinges not upon its content but upon who said it."

An apt description of today's Republicans.

"So while young, he developed the habit, which he's kept up, of reading almost one nonfiction book a week."

Well, if he thinks you "beleive" in scientific theories I wonder if he is finisihing those books before starting new ones.

Back again, only briefly.
Other than foreign policy, the most important issues facing this country are ones of class (and of course, the two are related.)
In any other country it might be possible to be religious, socially conservative, and left wing on matters of economics. But here we have snobbish liberals; go figure. Having read the article (finally) Souder, unlike Brooks, seems educable, at least about foreign policy, but all I'm hearing are lectures on science and abstract logic.

"They prefer to live in a world without facts, one in which the only attribute of any statement is its local usefulness, which in turn hinges not upon its content but upon who said it."

In the real world, the world with neither luxury or the time to exjoy it, local usefullness is all there is; so cut the self serving crap.

Yes, we have peasants in this country. And no they're not idiots. What's the education level of the population of Brasil? And who elected Lula?

But I forget, I'm at a meeting of the Cambridge Apostles, with all of the snobbery and sense of entitlement, and none of the sense of service.

seth edenbaum writes: "with all of the snobbery and sense of entitlement, and none of the sense of service."

An apt description of today's Republicans. But I repeat myself.

Responding to Barbara's post far, far above:

Lots of religions claim that they are reading their source texts literally. In fact, I would assume that almost all claim (at least some of the time) that they do so. Very few religions turned out to be fundamentalists. I'm not an expert on this, but it seems to me that fundamentalism has little to do with the claim of reading the source text literally, but rather on what "literally" means and on how "literally" is constructed. If we note the simularity of fundamentalists of supposedly highly differing faiths to each other (i.e. Christian fundamentalists resemble Jewish fundamentalists resemble Hindu fundamentalists and so on) more so than resembling their own supposed co-religionists, I think there's something entirely different going on. I suspect that fundamentalism is inherent or is a potentiality within modern political structures since there's seemingly very little of it before. Might it be a social construct that persons of conservative bents build to protect/enhance themselves within modern societies?

Alabama: you're right, the "believes in evolution" locution is unsatisfactory in a sense, but I think we can all understand its use as a convenient shorthand for whatever expression you prefer: "accepts that the theory of evolution is well-confirmed enough to be considered scientific truth," or whatever.
But the "believes in" version actually also points to an important epistemological fact: most of us are not scientists, and get our knowledge of scientific truth on an entirely received basis, by trusting reports from people who count as experts. In that sense we really do take such things on faith, to the extent that we haven't acquired the necessary expertise to confirm them for ourselves.

Urrr...he got me on this one too...as though it were interchangeable with the theory of crop-circles. And not eating junk food because it has "devil" in the name, as opposed to because none of the ingredients are recognizable...same, same.

Brooks succeeds again- master provocateur. Knows not- many things; but is great at stirring it up, making people think he's maybe a liberal sort of conservative. Has amiable down, knows how to keep everyone laughing, provoked, reading more, writing letters to the editor, blogging about him. Feeds his family well no doubt.

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