Dawkins and the Evil Gene

I suppose I shouldn't use Dawkins' writing as a jumping off point for so many posts. It has a certain shooting-fish-in-a-barrel quality. But while I generally consider it bad form to use the antics of a Michael Savage or Al Franken type as fodder for commentary (on the theory that if one goes into the loony bin for material, one always finds it) Dawkins is considered a terribly clever person my a large number of people. So for the time being I shall continue to indulge myself.

In this case, the fodder consists of an article I noted some time back, but didn't have the chance to blog about at the time. When Saddam Hussein was executed, a number of people had their say as to why it should not have happened. Dawkins, however, had an unusual reaction, he felt that one of the main reasons why Hussein should have been spared was in order to provide a research subject into why some people are evil:

Most people can't even come close to understanding how any man could be so cruel as Hitler or Saddam Hussein, or how such transparently evil monsters could secure sufficient support to take over an entire country.... We don't have a clear answer to these questions. We need to do the research.... It is in the nature of research on ruthless national dictators that the sample size is small. Wasn't the judicial destruction of one of the very few research subjects we had – and a prime specimen at that – an act of vandalism?

To a lot of people, this probably sounds foolish right on the face of it. Why were Hitler and Hussein evil? Because they chose to be. Everyone makes choices in life, many choose well, some choose very, very badly.

However, there's another whole school of thought which much more closely follows Dawkins' line of thinking here, though perhaps not often with the scientistic trappings he introduces. It's common to hear Hitler, Stalin, Mao, etc. referred to as "madmen" and for people to wonder aloud if there is some deep-seated, even genetic, defect in certain nationalities which makes them subject to a willingness to follow a dictator into terrible deeds.

This is too brief a post to launch into the whole question of whether there can be said to be a single "human nature" which all people have in common. However, there is certainly a respectable intellectual tradition which maintains that there is, and that thus someone who does terrible deeds not because he possesses some nature wholly different from us "ordinary people" but because he makes difference choices than we do.

Dawkins seems implicitly to hold to a deterministic view of human nature and morality. And yet, in this view, is there really very much to learn from history? Perhaps if one could perform enough 'research' to map out based on each person's genetic inputs and experiences and thus extrapolate what that person is likely to do in society, one could then deal with each person accordingly. But there is no lesson of personal responsibility, no "Having seen that others followed charismatic leaders into terrible deeds, I must be aware of what lurks below the rhetoric and national feeling of our choices."

This world view, I think, does not make intuitive sense to many people. Most of us feel instinctively that others humans throughout history are the same sort of creatures, in essentials, as we are. And that what separates us from history's heroes and monsters is not nature, but action. And if this is so, the great criminals of history do not need to be studied, but rather judged.

More Practicing Catholics than Anglicans in UK

DarwinSister (currently earning a masters degree in Cool Linguistic Stuff at Oxford) sent along a link to this story from The Times, according to which Catholic mass attendence is now surging well past Anglican Sunday observance in the UK.

Roman Catholicism is set to become the dominant religion in Britain for the first time since the Reformation because of massive migration from Catholic countries across the world.

Catholic parishes will swell by hundreds of thousands over the next few years after managing years of decline, according to a new report, as both legal and illegal migrants enter the country.
It says that the influx of migrants could be the Catholic community’s “greatest threat” or its “greatest opportunity”.

While in some places the Catholic Church has responded positively, in others it has been “overwhelmed” by the scale of the challenge. The growth of Catholicism in Britain comes as the established Church of England and the Anglican provinces in Scotland, Wales and Ireland face continuing, if slow, decline.

Average Sunday attendance of both churches stood even at nearly one million in 2005, according to the latest statistics available for England and Wales, but the attendance at Mass is expected to soar....

Figures for 2005 show that there are 4.2 million Catholics in England and Wales, under one fifth the 25 million baptised Anglicans and double the number of Muslims....

But the head of the Polish vicariate told The Times that the number of Poles in London had doubled since their country’s EU accession to at least 600,000. According to the report, the number recorded attending Mass represents a fraction of the total number of baptised Catholic migrants now in London.

I imagine that this will give the Catholic hierarchy in the UK much the same set of issues to deal with that the US heirarchy has been grappling with in regards to immigration from Central and South America.

Plus it's nice to finally see "Good Queen Bess" and company on the losing side of history...

Dido's Lament

True story: When I was eleven, I went to a practice of the local community orchestra. Since I was interested in learning the flute at that time (a noble ambition that was soon forgotten) I sat with the flautists as they rehearsed the overture to The Barber of Seville, a piece familiar to me from watching Elmer Fudd get his head shaved by the Rabbit of Seville. Afterwards, the fellow next to me asked, "Have you ever heard that before?" Not wanting to admit that I derived all my culture from cartoons, I hedged and allowed as how I thought I might have, somewhere. He said, "I've only heard it in Bugs Bunny."

Another true story: when I was 18, my best friend and I decided to get a subscription to the Cincinnati Opera's summer series. We sat dutifully through La Boheme and Don Giovanni, and were gearing up for the third opera, Faust. That summer we were working at a mentally dulling, low-paid job that kept us on our feet all day, so on the Friday night of the performance we were so worn out that the prospect of wading through one more opera was more than we could bear. I burn with shame to confess that we blew off Faust in favor of vegging through Muppets from Space. Ah, the follies of youth...

To remedy our cultural defects, Darwin and I have been listening to a series of lectures entitled "How to Listen to and Understand Great Music", from the Teaching Company. We're enjoying these immensely, due in part to the fact that the professor could make a lump of coal accessible to the masses. The lectures on opera, in particular, have been favorites with the budding soprano in the infant seat who loves to shriek along with the high notes. Darwin and I have never felt entirely comfortable with our lack of opera appreciation -- isn't every intellectually pretentious couple supposed to enjoy opera? Why don't we enjoy it? What are we missing?

Perhaps listening to operas in English is a good way to foster appreciation for the art form. One of the lectures featured an aria from Purcell's Dido and Aeneas: Dido's Lament. I thought it was some of the loveliest music I'd ever heard, full of aching sadness, featuring a pure soprano with hints of Irish intonation. I have a great desire to hear the rest of the opera, and perhaps see it one day, just to hear this song again.

Here's a clip of Jessye Norman singing Dido's Lament.

Scott Carson on the Death of Determinism

Scott Carson of An Examined Life has a good post up on the increasing untenability of determinism, inspired in part by a recent First Things article by Stephen Barr:

There is another way to interpret probabilities, however, and it is much more congenial to both quantum mechanics and evolutionary theory. We may call this the metaphysical interpretation, because it posits that probabilities reflect, not limitations in our own knowledge of the physical universe, but the stochastic properties of a non-deterministic universe. That is, on the metaphysical interpretation of probabilities, we say that there is a certain chance that something will happen not because we do not know for sure what all of the variable are that will lead to one outcome rather than another, but because it is genuinely undetermined, at the time of our prediction, which outcome is going to take place.

Although he does not say much about this in his article, Professor Barr notes that this view of probability is congenial not only for quantum theory, but also for those who endorse the idea that the human will is free. As I mentioned in one of my earlier posts in this series, if the universe is a purely deterministic place, where materialism is the only correct metaphysics, then our wills cannot be free. So if you happen to believe that your will is free, it seems that you have to abandon either materialism or determinism. Some will want to abandon both, of course: the Christian must, in my view. But even if you are wedded to your materialism it might be time to dump that dinosaur, determinism.

For those who don't find a way to work philosophical terminology into their daily routine often enough ("Oh but mommy, don't be angry, the crayon is only accidental to the wall's nature."): Determinism is the belief that with sufficient knowledge of a situation, you can invariably predict the outcome. When applied to human beings, determinism states that we are entirely the products of our genetic makeup, past experiences and current stimuli, while free will is essentially an illusion.

Determinism (in its less explicit, more popular forms) is perhaps the most pervasive remaining relic of the clockwork universe model which gained such during the two centuries after Newton.

Darwin Succumbs to Perversity

In the beginning, God formed Adam from clay. Dust he was, and to dust he was destined to return. And as a creature of clay, Adam was subject to certain base temptations. Some things he knew to be low, sensual pleasures, yet he indulged them anyway, while his wife shook her head and wondered what went on in that overly hairy head.

I am but a son of Adam, and as such, my friends, there are certain perversities from which I can not free myself.

One of these is the vodka martini.

I know. You thought of me as a cultured fellow, someone who reads the drinks columns and imbibes the wisdom therein. And six days out of seven, I am indeed. But on the seventh day, I take Blue Ice Vodka and pour it into a shaker with two ice cubes and a splash of dry vermouth.

As with all sins, there is at the core of this desire a yearning for the good. (Plato didn't even know what a vodka martini was, and yet he clearly saw this much.) Your correspondent finds himself thinking (perhaps reasonably enough) that fine gin such as Citadel or Bombay Sapphire has so much flavor on its own that adding vermouth to it achieves little. And so people resort to these silly antics such as swirling the vermouth around in the glass and then pouring it out. That may be terribly good performance art for the bar tender, but it is not a mixed drink. It is gin shaken with ice pretending to be a mixed drink. And however pure and unsullied a drink it may be, I cannot bring myself to do it.

No, if I am to have a martini it must have vermouth in it. And if it is to have vermouth in it, then it must be possible to taste the vermouth. And if I am to taste the vermouth, I must use vodka instead of gin. And if I use vodka instead of gin, I shall be that scorned creature: the vodkatini drinker.

And thus I find myself. A flawed man perhaps, but a man who drinks his gin straight, and his martinis made with vodka.

And the toddlers? They're both shaken and stirred.

The Heavy Burden of Love

In a college acting class, we were asked to do an exercise in "emotional recall": choosing a moment in your life and using the memory of all the environmental details to dredge up the emotions you felt. The moment I chose was the previous Valentine's Day, and the memory was of having my heart broken.

I closed my eyes and remembered standing against the wainscotting next to the kitchen door, the light switches pressing into my back. I remembered staring at the floor and the dining room table. I remembered the tension of the atmosphere and the deadness in the pit of my stomach. And I remembered my loved one telling me and my family that it wasn't my fault, that it wasn't our faults, but that it was time to go. I remembered the footsteps down the stairs and the click of the latch on the door and the rush of tears as my mother left the house, seeminly for good. I remembered the sense of relief afterward at the thought of the severing of this relationship and the lightness of having the burden of love taken off my back. And, when she suddenly reconsidered, the almost unbearable weight of having to shoulder the cross of love again.

This is why, for me, Valentine's Day has never been about the sweetness of love, but rather a memorial of its overwhelming and almost unbearably crushing weight.

When Did Rudy Become Inevitable?

Looking over the blog awards ballot (yes, we really will shut up about the awards soon, I promise) has had me visiting a lot of blogs that I haven't read in a while. One of these is ZippyCatholic.

Now Zippy is a really smart guy, so far as I can tell. And from the hints he drops, clearly a more successful businessman than I am. But we also manage to have our fair share (or perhaps more) of philosophical disagreements when we run into each other.

Anyway, the post he has up is one that I agree with in principle, and yet mystifies me in assumptions. He writes that the "perfect is the enemy of the good" approach to life is often simply a recipe for betrayal of ideals and failure (at least if you consider achieving your ideals to be the definition of success.) So far so good. I'm in agreement that it's very important what "incremental steps" you agree to support on absolute moral issues, lest you end up supporting things that you don't actually agree with.

The thing I don't get is the idea (and I guess this comes from a post he commented on over at Right Reason) that the only ways that the Republicans can win the presidential election in 2008 is by running Rudy Giuliani. The way I see it, they almost certainly couldn't win by running Rudy Giuliani.

Maybe I'm living in a political hole in the ground, but I just can't see a pro-gun control, pro-abortion, pro-gay marriage, twice divorced New Yorker whose been repeatedly photographed in drag being elected president. I think he could make a strong showing for quite some time based simply on having done a good job of being mayor of NY City right after 9/11. But once enough details about his stances and enough pictures of him in a pink dress and heels got out, it just wouldn't fly.

Giuliani is not the kind of candidate who will do what "moderate Republican" candidates are supposed to do: bring in moderate to liberal votes. Giuliani is abbrasive, and he's got plenty of past to exploit. Nor does he stand for any signature issues. He'd get torn apart by the left, and would not inspire confidence in the serious right. Honestly, if we were going to have a "moderate" Republican candidate, the winner would be McCain, not Giuliani.

Now I've got to say, as a strong conservative I don't know how far I trust McCain. But I think that conservatives should trust him far more than Giuliani. And on the moral front he is (while not perfect) at least mostly in the pro-life camp. So far as I know, at least as much so as GWB. I think he would probably do about as well as Giuliani in running the War on Terror (a name with which I am increasingly tired -- would we move to "middle east war" or something like that?) and goodness knows he should the credibility and integrity to address the "torture issue" to the satisfaction of everyone except possibly Mark Shea.

This is not to say that I definately like the idea of a McCain ticket. I'd much prefer to see Sen. Brownback or some such. But it is to say that I don't understand the idea that running Giuliani is some sort of perfect devil's compromise for the conservative voter. I just don't see that he could win.

Though I suppose Zippy would rejoin: You never can really win by making what you think is a devil's compromise.

In which he would, of course, be right.

Music You Can Sink Your Teeth Into

One of my favorite CDs for some time was a recording of Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante, with soloists Itzhak Perlman and Pinchas Zukerman, playing with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. It's a great recording of a great piece. The problem is, that my CD now has tooth marks in it -- little bites that go all the way through the media surface and make it unplayable in any CD player except (for some reason) our Sony DVD player, which somehow manages to oversample enough not to even skip. But I can't get the CD into iTunes or play it on any of my work computers or the stereo.

Thus I found myself looking for a new copy the other night. Amazon sells it for $17 (a bit less used or through resellers) and iTunes sells it for $10.

Now, these days, we pretty much exclusively end up listening to music via iTunes. The stereo is hooked up to the computer, and if we're not listening to things outloud, I'm listening to them over headphones while at work. Yet my first reaction was, "I guess I better shell out the extra money so I can get a real copy."

However, as I thought about it, a CD is just another digital format. It's not as if the CD is somehow more a product of the musician's craft than a digital file. There's nothing "crafted" about a CD, it's just a piece of write once/read many digital media. And with the baby (whoever fills that niche in our ecosystem at the moment) having a tendency to go through the CDs -- they have a pretty limited life around here lately. (Which is unduly annoying to me, as I always priced myself on keeping CDs in pristine condition.)

For all that people have often talked about digital books taking over from their hard copy forebears, I've never been able to imagine collecting electronic copies of books instead of the real thing. There's something about the book form that has far too much history to be abandoned at this point. Call me old fashioned -- even call me a "crunchy con" but I'll remain a book collector as long as my days last.

Now I think about it, though, all collections of recorded music are collections of a secondary source anway. We have CDs or cassettes or 8-tracks or LPs because we can't actually be present and hear the artists perform a piece of music every time we feel like hearing it. But does the recorded medium itself have any particular value? Is there any reason to cling to CDs rather than switching to digital files? (I already keep backups of our recorded music, of course -- but that can much more easily be done via USB hard drive.)

iTunes still seems like a rather transient means to be your only way of owning a piece of music. But I'm not sure that there's any reason behind that, or if it's just my reflexive conservative suspicion of "the new".

Minor Prophets take Major Step

The Cincinnati Enquirer runs a follow-up article on the Minor Prophets and their surprising performance in the seminary tournament.

Say this for the Minor Prophets: They know how to break a losing streak.

After going 0-6 the past two years at the seminary tournament in Columbus, the Minor Prophets of Mount St. Mary's in Mount Washington shocked second-seeded Kenrick Seminary of St. Louis in the opening game by going 5-for-5 from 3-point range, all by different players.

"You know what the odds of that are?" asked coach Kevin Kahmann, who had 10 points, seven rebounds and seven assists (and no threes) in the Prophets' 53-44 opening game victory.

The odds are astronomical.

The Prophets knew they were in 1 Samuel 17:49 range ("And David put his hand in the bag and took out a stone and flung it...") when former high school soccer player Ryan Ruiz drained a trey.

Another 3 was by Dan Hess, a Notre Dame Law School graduate, who was a monster in the Friday night opener (15 points on 7-of-9 from the field with eight boards and three assists). The other three treys were by Tim Ralston, sixth man Matt Robben (three assists) and point guard Will Egan, a steady presence throughout the Prophets' three-game stay (1-2) in the tournament at the Pontifical College Josephinum.

Egan, of the West Side, had no turnovers, seven assists and 23 points for the tournament that was won by the Josephinum College team, which beat the Prophets by only four points (55-51) in Game Two. Last year, the Prophets lost to the eventual tournament winner by 40 points.

A (rather long) sampling of Darwin

It may be that with the Catholic Blog Awards in full swing (in which you may wish to vote) there are people visiting who are new to the DarwinCatholic scene. On the other hand, it may just be that it seemed easier to put together a compendium of this past year's greats at 11pm at night than to write something cogent and substantive. Take your pick...

We hit the high notes of musical history.

Darwin reviewed the court's decision in the Dover school board ID case.

Darwin takes aim at patent law.

MrsDarwin contemplated the baby while Darwin contemplated something else.

MrsDarwin had to get up off the couch.

We endorse liturgical theatrics!

Extreme Ironing!

Darwin on faith in an age of science.

Meditations on hunting and gathering in suburbia.

Thoughts on Rod Dreher, immanentizing the eschaton, and what the heck a parish is for anyway.

Darwin examines an inconvenient truth about global warming. And comes back for more.

What every 18-year-old should know.

MrsDarwin fights off sloth.

The night the bed fell.

The Mind of God: Part One and Part Two.

Notes on the reading of Pooh.

Thoughts on Modesty, Illustrated.

Darwin on lies, damned lies, and statistics.

Darwin on the income gap.

Belief, Evidence, and Will.

And, of course, some great posts on drinks.

Note: as it turns out, it's not actually faster to read through a year's worth of posts than it is to write a fresh piece. Who knew?

2007 Catholic Blog Awards

The 2007 Catholic Blog Awards are open for voting, and we'd like to thank our loyal readers for nominating us to these categories:

Smartest Blog
Best Written Catholic Blog
Best Political/Social Commentary Catholic Blog
Best Group Blog

Welcome to any new readers who found us while sifting through the press of candidates.

**Update (from Darwin)**
Clearly, we'd be gready to run actively for all of these. Given that the awards this year allow you to vote only once, and require that you do so in all categories you're going to vote in at once, votes must be used wisely. If anyone wants to chime in with guidance as to what our campaign strategy should be, feel free. Otherwise, we'll come in with some ideas from campaign headquarters once we've convinced the little ones that it is not acceptable to fight in the war room.

Stepping to a Different Beat

Growing up, I always figured that classical music was better than popular music. My parents were are some pains to help this inculcate this belief. The message was never so much that popular music was bad, but there was certainly a general impression given that it wasn't as worth while.

However, there was very little classical music that I was all that into. Much of it struck me as slow and boring. Sure, there was some that I enjoyed. Something with sufficient excitement in it like the 1812 Overture or Prokofiev's Alexander Nevsky score or Holst's The Planets.

Through high school and even more so college, the only orchestral music I listed to tended to be movie sound tracks. And Brahms, for which I'd developed a taste, though no other classical composers interested me. Aside from that, I listed to all modern music: Cake, Smash Mouth, Barenaked Ladiews, Metallica, Creed, P.O.D., Coldplay, Dave Matthews' Band, The Beatles, you get the idea...

I think the style and themes of rock are inherently more appealing when you're in your teens and early twenties. Something is different in the speed with which you feel and think, and what you feel and think, that makes "rocking out" feel much more congenial than the more complex and subtle rhythms of classical music. (At this point, some purist may point out that "classical" music is really only stuff written between 1730 and 1820, but this person is being tiresome and can go shake their ears, because I'm not thinking of a better term at the moment.)

Somewhere along the line, however, something changed. It must have been at some point in the first year or so of our marriage, because I think I started to listen to classical music finally while commuting.

I hadn't made any particular effort to cultivate the like in quite some time, yet for whatever reason one day I flipped to the classical station and suddenly found classical music far more involving than I ever had before.

Again, I wonder if there's something that changed in the general tempo of my life, intellectual and physical that caused this to happen. Suddenly works which had seemed hopelessly "slow" and "quiet" such as Vaughan Williams and Debussy, or "fussy" such as Handel and baroque liturgical music seemed not only interesting but absorbing.

I haven't fully dropped popular music, though I don't listen to it as often as I used to. It's become something that only seems to fit with certain moods rather than being a constant underscore to life. And I find myself trying to curtail how much I listen to it around the kids, although they do have a few favorites, such as the Blues Traveller album they call the "angry cat".

I wonder how common this arc from more popular music in youth to more staid styles as you get older is. Goodness knows, I know a number of people much older than I am who remain fully engaged in the modern music scene. Yet, in my case at least, it seems very much a case of maturity causing a change in my listening habits that no amount of trying to appreciate classical music more when I was a teenager could achieve.

It's not a bug, it's a feature!

My comment on Jennifer F.'s blog:

(A previous commenter said): Just by making NFP a standard thing implies that most of us will need it as a standard part of marriage, when all HV says is if there are serious motives to space out births, which derive from the physical or psychological conditions of husband and wife, or from external conditions, the Church teaches that it is then licit to take into account the natural rhythms immanent in the generative functions . Sounds like an optional thing to me.

Humanae Vitae also says that "With regard to the biological processes, responsible parenthood means an awareness of, and respect for, their proper functions. In the procreative faculty the human mind discerns biological laws that apply to the human person." It seems only appropriate that Catholic couples understand the biological processes by which their fertility is governed.

I agree that NFP classes are too long to present the necessary biological material. Still, it seems that a newly married couple would be prudent to realize that even if they are "eagerly anticipating children as quickly as their fertility allows", there may be events in the future which might necessitate spacing of children if only for a month or two. Implying that couples who use NFP prudentially (and with the church's blessing) are less open to life or don't trust God enough comes off as rather a childish slur.

The response:

mrs darwin, I have to respectfully disagree. m_david actually hit upon the exact reason that many Protestants simply cannot accept the teachings of the Catholic Church on this particular issue.

Please allow me to explain. If a couple is using NFP to space children, then they are abstaining from intercourse whenever the woman is ovulating. OTOH, if a couple is using a condom to space children, then they are probably having intercourse regardless of whether or not the woman is ovulating. The people using the condom are actually more likely to conceive than the couple using NFP.

So who's really more open to life?

FTR, I'm not arguing that Catholics should toss out Church teachings on this subject and go buy a pack of Trojans. However, under the circumstances, it does come across as a bit of a childish slur when Protestants are told by Catholics that we're not open to life, or that we're part of the culture of death, just because we use condoms instead of NFP. "Because the Church said so" does not make it a logical argument, and since I don't recognize the authority of the Catholic Church, the argument would have to be more logical to convince me.

The sound you hear is my head exploding.

Update: The sorely missed Opinionated Homeschooler replies as well:

Frankly the "open to life" argument for NFP always left me cold. I know Mormon couples who use contraceptive methods to space their families of six or more children. "Open to life" means anything and nothing.

The *only* reason to say yes to NFP and no to contraceptive methods is that Christians have always forbidden contraception, and condoms etc. are contraceptive while NFP is not. That this is unclear to many, Catholics and non-Catholics, is because of a fudging of the meaning of "contraception."

Contraception is a deliberate interference with the conjugal act so as to prevent pregnancy. Condoms so interfere; abstaining from intercourse does not, because there is no conjugal act to interfere with.

That's it. "Contraception" doesn't mean "having a contraceptive mentality" or "not being open to life" or "family planning." It may be that using NFP to avoid any children, or to limit children for selfish reasons, is a sin--but it's not the sin of contraception, and so to say that it "can be used with a contraceptive mentality" and that then "there is little difference between [NFP] and a condom" is simply muddying the moral waters.

Protestants are right to be offended by being told that by using artificial contraception they are "part of the culture of death" or "not open to life" or "using each other as sex objects" (I actually heard this used in an RCIA class, to the great offense of most of the potential converts present, and was later removed from the RCIA team for pointing out how offensive it was). There's no need for that kind of insulting hyperbole; all that needs to be said is that (a) condoms, the Pill, etc. are contraceptive (while NFP is not), by the meaning of "contraception" that's always been used; and (b) Christians from the earliest times have shunned contraception.

The Pandagon Papers

Everyone's heard by now about the anti-Catholic bigots John Edwards hired to blog for his campaign. Well, Iowahawk has been dumpster-diving again and has discovered the behind-the-scenes email to John Edwards from one of the bloggers.

To: Senator John Edwards
From: Amanda Marcotte
Re: Campaign Ideas

Dear Senator Edwards:

I had a couple of ideas for getting the campaign off to a f***ing roaring start. I ran some numbers and discovered that (1) Orange County North Carolina has a shocking lack of women's reproductive health centers, and (2) your new home there has 28,000 square feet of space. What better way to address community health needs -- and appeal to the women's vote -- than by installing an abortion clinic inside your own house? It would only take up about 500 square feet total (not counting the exterior biohazard dumpster), and you appear to have a f***ing awesome space between the indoor basketball court and reflective koi pond.

Be warned: extreme comic profanity content. Read at your own risk (and put down your coffee first...).

Jammin' with the seminarians

And speaking of my brothers' Irish band... It's called Easter Rising, and you can listen to snips of the those rockin' seminarians here. They've just released their latest album, entitled Danny O'he.

The two guys right in front are my brothers.

Ballin' with the seminarians

The Cincinnati Enquirer features an article about the Minor Prophets, the basketball team at Mount St. Mary's seminary.

MT. WASHINGTON – They’re a young team in terms of eligibility. Their starting five and sixth man all have game. The seventh, eighth and ninth men all are physical.

But their best shooter is 42, their tallest player is 6-foot-3 and they throw the ball away too much. Their approach to handling tough defenses is this: “We know each other pretty well – we’ll be able to handle it if somebody presses us.”

This basketball team does, however, have the best nickname in town. They are the Minor Prophets of Mount St. Mary’s Seminary in Mt. Washington.

Their only games are in a three-day tournament that begins today in Columbus at the Pontifical College Josephinum. That’s a fancy name for a place where guys in shorts and tank tops tip it off today in the seminary circuit’s version of the Elite Eight.

OK, so there are only eight teams in the tournament. But this is still the Minor Prophets’ March Madness no matter what the calendar says.

One of the players is my brother, the homeschooled guy who "plays six musical instruments and is in an Irish band."

Will Egan played some organized sports as a kid, but, who knows, maybe he’d have played more if he wasn’t home-schooled. It was he who brought in his buddies from the West Side to play the Minor Prophets in a full-scale scrimmage at Guardian Angel gym last Tuesday night.

Egan can spot the open man, has some good moves and decent quickness, is selfless, and just needs to play more so he will learn to open up the passing lanes and won’t need to thread the needle quite so much.

“I’m no John Stockton,” he says, a reference to the retired assists king of the Utah Jazz. “I’m also not a scorer. I’ve just got to find a way to get it to the big guys.”

I'd root for the Minor Prophets to beat the team from the Josephinum if it weren't that one of my other brothers is still up at the Josephinum...

H/T t0 commenter Barb -- why did I not hear about this from anyone in my family?

Schoenborn Speaks on Evolution

I hadn't heard about this until the radiant MrsDarwin forwarded me a link to The Corner, but it seems that Cardinal Schoenborn has been in the news in relation to evolution again:

Christoph Schoenborn, the cardinal archbishop of Vienna, touched off a controversy with a July 2005 New York Times op-ed hinting at a change in the Catholic Church's position on the creationism-vs.-evolution debate. Tonight he delivered a 62-minute lecture here in Manhattan outlining a judicious middle ground on the controversy, accepting the scientific evidence on evolution but rejecting the philosophical claims that evolution disproves the existence of God or of purpose in the universe. (He said that it was time to reclaim Darwin from Darwinism.) The evening's fireworks came when a representative of a traditional Catholic group called the Kolbe Center for the Study of Creation asked the cardinal whether he would be interested in scientific evidence that disproves evolution. The cardinal dismissed the notion, replying that "I'm sorry," but creation did not take six chronological days. He added that the same sort of biblical exegesis that led to such a conclusion would also require belief that the sun literally stood still in one of Joshua's battles (Jos. 10:13).

It is hard to exclude the possibility that the events in Joshua actually occurred, unless one accepts a priori the hypothesis that miraculous events reported in the Old Testament are necessarily unhistorical—which hypothesis I believe Cardinal Schoenborn would hesitate to affirm. But in general, he outlined a credible way to affirm simultaneously both evolution and the intelligent design of the universe. His remarks are helpful, and I hope they will be published soon.

Vocabulary of Virtue

Our diocesan newspaper, The Catholic Spirit, recently ran an article purporting to give a new perspective on Lent. To guide Catholics out of the stultifying routine of giving up candy or desserts (the whipping boys of the piece) for Lent, we are offered the following suggestions:

• "Let's give up looking for a pat on the back. This Lent, let's do at least one thing each day for someone who will never be able to repay us. When we get good at that, we can try doing something each day for someone who will never be able to thank us."

• "Let's give up trying to be comfortable all the time. Instead of seeking comfort, let's find something to be enthusiastic about and put God's gifts -- our brains, our talents, our resources -- to work on behalf of that activity, organization, or program."

Someone should tell all the energetic young interns around the country that they don't need to worry about giving up anything for Lent because they're already enthusiastically putting their talents to work for a cause or activity or organization.

• "Let's give up trying to one-up others. There's a Hindu proverb that goes like this: 'There is nothing noble in being superior to others. True nobility comes from being superior to your previous self.' Let's find something we can improve about us."

It would be edifying to hear that proverb explicated in light of the Hindu caste system.

A few more examples:

• "Let's give up taking care of No. 1. Instead of thinking about how everything and anything impacts us, let's worry first about how others are going to be affected -- by proposed new laws, by policies, by trends, by economic shifts -- by our own actions and behaviors."
• "Let's give up being practical... Let's give up being in a hurry... Let's not argue over small things... Let's not be crabby..."

There is nothing wrong with any of these offerings, as far as they go. They just don't go very far. Each of them try desperately to be relevant to the modern Catholic and as a result they smack of self-improvement pap. The thing is, Catholics already have a vocabulary of virtue. I suppose there's nothing wrong with "Lenten Lite" ideas, but I very much doubt that very much spiritual benefit can be derived from "Let's give up looking for a pat on the back" without tying that effort into the theological virtue of charity.

In the same vein, "giving up trying to be comfortable" is merely a simplistic gloss on what we Catholics term "mortification of the flesh". (That's why we give up stupid things like candy and dessert during Lent -- not because they're bad in and of themselves, but because we set aside one good for the sake of attaining the Good.) Patience and humility require a more radical realignment of our lives toward the divine than "Let's not be crabby" or "Let's give up taking care of No. 1".

Want to make Lent seem irrelevant and meaningless? Unmoor the idea of Lenten sacrifice from the rich vocabulary of virtue. That's the way to make Lent seem onerous and antiquated to any "modern Catholic".

Ora et Labora

It seems to be one of the unavoidable elements of my life right now (and for the forseeable future) that the vast majority of my waking time is spent at work -- in my case, in an office. And much of the time that I spend not at work is spent in activities that preclude a lot of through: trying to keep the kids under control, making meals, cleaning up, doing yard work, chores, etc. I typically get home around 6-7pm and often have a bit more work (usually phone calls) to clean up. Then dinner and kid time and bed time and by the time MrsDarwin and I sit down to contemplate adult activities such as reading, writing or conversation without interruption, it's definately after 9pm.

Thus we seem to find ourselves, much of the time, having a family prayer life that consists almost entirely of "with the kids" activities: mass with the kids, grace with the kids, bedtime prayers with the kids, bible stories with the kids, rosary or chaplet in the car with the kids, etc.

All of which is, of course, good. But once if all of your spiritual is "with the kids" you end up feeling a little stiffled as an adult sometimes. This leads every so often to resolutions on our part to get up early every morning and pray together before the kids get up. But beating the kids up is rather more difficult than beating the sun up, and these always seem to drop off after a while. (The senior Darwins are not morning people.)

Lately I've been wondering if what I need to do is set aside a brief break every day at work (that is, after all, my longest stretch of waking time) to go off and catch some prayer or spiritual reading time. Which leaves, of course, the question of what to do with that time. Say an hour of the Divine Office? The liturgy of the hours is available online through Universalis. However, I must admit that reading prayers off a computer screen just doesn't seem very prayerful.

We just got a subscription to Magnificat (first issue hasn't arrived yet) so perhaps that will seem like the right sort of thing. Or maybe I need to buy a compact copy of the Bible (ours are all pretty large), though I'm thinking I want something a little more directed than just working through selected books.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Coulter, Evolution and Catholicism

Reader Literacy-Chic linked in the comments to an article over on Roman Catholic Blog regarding Ann Coulter's discussion (perhaps a mild word when it comes to anything originating with Coulter) of Darwinism and atheism/immorality in her recent book, Godless.

Thomistic, the author at RCB, rightly notes that there is certainly no inherent conflict between Catholic doctrine and either an old Earth or the gradual development of species. However, he does seems concerned by some of the points that Coulter brings up, as do some of his commenters.

The anti-evolution arguments that I'd like to cover based on the post are:

1) Evolution is the intellectual justification for genocide and totalitarianism by 20th century figures such at Hitler and Stalin.

2) Evolution is problematic for Catholic doctrine because the doctrine of Original Sin requires that there be a single historical Adam and Eve, and evolution makes this problematic.

3) The evidence doesn't even support evolution, since no one has ever found a fossil of an animal halfway in between species.

-- 1. Evolution as Justification for Evil --

Thomistic quotes an article about Coulter's book which summarizes this line of argument as follows:

As Coulter puts it, "From Marx to Hitler, the men responsible for the greatest mass murders of the twentieth century were avid Darwinists." As evidence of this, one can cite Richard Weikart's book From Darwin to Hitler, wherein the author traces the evidence that eugenics organizations in Germany at the dawn of the 20th Century touted "scientific" theories of the laws of evolution.

To start with, Coulter is indulging in some sadly characteristic sloppiness when she labels Marx as an avid Darwinist. Marx and Engels published the Communist Manifesto in 1848, eleven years before Darwin published the Origin of Species in 1859. What Ms. Coulter (and perhaps Mr. Weikart, if his guilt may be determined by association) seems to have missed in her cultural analysis is Marx and Darwin were drinking from the same pool of cultural fascinations rather more than directly influencing one another. The mid to late nineteenth century was teaming with notions of golden ages, progress, regress and rebirth. In many ways, the notion of progress of some grand, world-transforming sort was taking the place which salvation had once filled, for what was already a secularizing Europe. Indeed, one of the ideas that it took nearly a hundred years to purge out of evolutionary thought was the idea that evolutionary change was necessarily directional: "upward" from simpler, baser creatures to more complex, "better" ones.

As science replaced religion as the key to deep knowledge (there is, I think, a certain gnosticism about the popular attitude towards science from the mid nineteenth century through the Great War), scientifically framed ideas of progress came into vogue. And from them (with a generous splash of poorly absorbed evolutionary theory) came the fantasies of eugenics or breeding a "super race" which fascinated the likes of Hitler (and Margaret Sanger and Oliver Wendel Holmes and many others).

The theory of evolution provided a certain fodder to the evils of the 20th century, but I don't think one is any more reasonable to dismiss the theory qua theory because of it than one would be to reject Newton's physics because they helped create the cultural climate of the Enlightenment, and thus fed the blood-fest of the French Revolution.

-- 2. Adam, Eve, Evolution and Original Sin --

From a doctrinal point of view, the most commonly cited objection to evolution based on Catholic doctrine is the question of original sin and whether all of humanity is indeed descended from a single set of parents who fell from grace and caused the original rupture in the relationship between God and humanity.

In the encyclical Humani Generis, Pope Pius XII wrote: "[T]he faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains either that after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parents of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. ... [I]t is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled... with regard to original sin which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam in which through generation is passed onto all and is in everyone as his own."

I think in regards to this kind of thing it's important to keep clear in one's mind what elements of the Adam and Eve story are essential de fide and which are not. I think that the essential elements are clearly that:

• God created two first humans, who are the parents of the whole current human race.
• These first parents sinned directly against God, despite their originally having a more direct relationship with him than we do.
• We all bear the mark of original sin: both a tendency to do wrong and a gulf that separates us (as a tribe) from God.

As Pius XII observes elsewhere in Humani Generis, it is certainly not impossible that God created our first human parents by infusing souls into already existing, man-like creatures, the product of a long natural process. Nor, from a scientific point of view, is it by any means impossible to believe that all modern humans are descended from a common ancestor. Indeed, there are at least two points at which all living humans can be traced to a single biological ancestor: Mitochondrial Eve (about 150,000 years ago) and Y-chromosomal Adam (60,000-90,000 years ago).

The idea of there being other human-ish creatures wandering the Earth at the same time as Adam and Eve doesn't fit well with the standard Sunday school version of the story, but the Bible itself is slightly odder than the children's version. Recall that at several point in the early chapters of Genesis people are mentioned as going off and interbreeding with other creatures (giants, 'the sons of heaven', etc.) Indeed, after the initial description of the time in the garden itself, one doesn't necessarily get the impression that Adam and Eve are alone in the world. (Why, for instance, does Cain fear that when he is banished people will kill him? He's just killed one of the four named people in the world up to that point, and the other two are his parents.) Rather, Adam and Eve seem to be described tribally: as the tribe of true humans, but not necessarily the only creatures on Earth. Now, the idea of early (ensouled) humans interbreeding with (soul-less) human-ish creatures is unappealing. But then, the idea of Adam and Eve's children having no options other than incest isn't exactly appealing either.

I think it's important to remember that (without denying the truth of the stories of the creation and fall) the early parts of Genesis were never meant to be anything like a historical or scientific test. The stories about Adam and Eve and their children convey a number of important truths, but in other senses the narrative is sketchy and disjointed. I don't think it's meant to answer questions like: Who did Adam and Eve's children marry?

From a Catholic point of view, we have the doctrine of Original Sin, and that that sin is the result of a transgression committed by our first parents. Beyond that, I don't think that part of the Bible is meant to satisfy the historical and scientific areas of our curiosity.

-- 3. There are no fossils of transitional forms --

This isn't really a question with any specifically Catholic relevance, but one of the commentors over on RCB brought it up, and it's a favorite of anti-evolution writing. Coulter, characteristically, deploys a particularly loud and uninformed example of this set of claims in Godless.

I won't spend a ton of time on this here, since the post is already so long, and I've already covered the issue of speciation a bit here. However, let me just take the time to point out that the most basic flaw in this line of reasoning is that it fails to take into account how paleontologists do their work. When a paleontologist finds fossils from a given individual, one of the things he seeks to do is classify it as belonging to a species. If it seems very late or very early (in relation to the time period during which the species is generally found) or if its characteristics seem on the edge of what would be considered normal for that species, he may consider classifying it as belonging to a different but similar species. Or he may classify it as belonging to a known species, but as an outlier within the set of characteristics generally found in that species.

What he won't do is say: "Well gosh. This critter doesn't seem to be in a species. What we have here is a transitional form. I better not put this one in a species." Everything is assigned to a species, because it is by classifying it as belonging to a particular species that the paleontologist can convey how he believes that individual is related to other populations of creatures.

Thus, the argument that evolution is disproved because scientists have only found fossils of creatures that belong to species, not transitions creatures, isn't a "gotcha", it's display of basic ignorance.