Argument Readings

Junk Science: Climate-Controlled Classroom?

Thursday, May 10, 2007
By Steven Milloy

Should schools teach the global warming controversy by showing students only Al Gore?s alarmist movie? Roger Williams University just learned the answer to that question the hard way.

One week before Earth Day, the professors of the RWU course, ?Core 101: Science, Technology and Society,? required their students to watch ?An Inconvenient Truth.? The students were not presented with any other viewpoint on global warming.

Controversy erupted when the president of RWU?s College Republicans club complained to assistant dean Jeffrey Hughes, ?With the issue of global warming being such a highly politicized topic, with the scientific community unsure if global warming is man-induced or part of the natural cycle of the earth, do you think that it is intellectually honest to only show the alarmist viewpoint??

Hughes responded that Gore?s movie is an ?ideal subject for a Core lab? because ?the point of Core is to inform students of scientific principles and help them make decisions on issues with a scientific basis in their everyday lives,? according to a CNSNews.com report.

Dean Hughes continued, ?After an initial and heated debate, scientists no longer question whether the atmosphere is being warmed due to human activities and instead are increasingly impressed with the speed and impact of the process.

“I repeat: There is no doubt that we?re warming the earth and that a continuation of our activities will lead to profound changes. Penguins, polar bears and your unborn children have no vote in this. They must live with decisions we make today. As educators, we?re charged to encourage your intellectual growth.

“That can (actually, will) be uncomfortable at times, and we?re also here to help you deal with that discomfort. It?s truly what makes being a human such a joy, privilege and challenge.?

But if anyone has learned about how ?uncomfortable? learning can be, it is Dean Hughes, who seems to have changed his mind about RWU?s one-sided global warming curriculum.

An RWU spokesman told me that the backlash against the required viewing of Gore?s movie prompted Dean Hughes to ?explore alternatives? to teaching global warming. The spokesman said that one alternative includes the presentation this fall of the counter-alarmism movie, “The Great Global Warming Swindle,” a Channel 4 (U.K.) documentary that is best described as must-see global warming TV.

As the chastened Dean Hughes learned, while many people have made up their minds about global warming, many others have not. Further, there is evidence that, when presented with both sides of the debate, many believers end up changing their mindset from alarmism to skepticism about the alleged climate crisis.

Last March, the prestigious New York debating society Intelligence Squared sponsored a debate on global warming.

On the alarmist side of the debate were the Union of Concerned Scientists Brenda Ekwurzel, NASA climate modeler Gavin Schmidt and University of California oceanographer Richard C. J. Somerville.

The skeptical view of global warming alarmism was presented by Massachusetts Institute of Technology meteorologist Richard S. Lindzen, University of London bio-geographer Philip Stott, and ?State of Fear? author Michael Crichton, who is also a Harvard-trained physician and an instructor at Cambridge University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

A pre-debate poll indicated that, by 2-to-1 (57 percent to 29 percent, with 14 percent undecided), the audience believed that manmade global warming was a crisis. But in the post-debate poll, the audience reversed its pre-debate views ? the ranks of the skeptics swelled to 46 percent, the believers plummeted to 42 percent and the undecided declined slightly to 12 percent.

That?s the power of debate.

It follows that schools, if they choose to teach the global warming controversy at all, ought to be teaching both sides of the controversy, not just Al Gore?s alarmism.

Last fall, the National Science Teachers Association rejected Al Gore?s offer of 50,000 free DVDs of ?An Inconvenient Truth? for use in classrooms.

Recognizing that Al Gore and his global warming viewpoint is just that, opinion rather than undisputed fact, the NSTA expressed concern that other ?special interests? might also want to distribute materials and that it didn?t want to offer ?political? endorsement of the film, according to a Washington Post report.

The NSTA probably made the correct decision at the time simply because it would be egregiously biased to present just one particular viewpoint about a controversy as heated and important as global warming.

Now that the counter-viewpoints are available, however, schools ought to show their students ?An Inconvenient Truth,? ?The Great Global Warming Swindle? and the Intelligence Squared debate.

According to a recent front-page Washington Post story, one-sided teaching about global warming is taking a terrible emotional toll on children.

?For many children and young adults, global warming is the atomic bomb of today?Parents say they’re searching for ?productive? outlets for their 8-year-olds’ obsessions with dying polar bears. Teachers say enrollment in high school and college environmental studies classes is doubling year after year. And psychologists say they’re seeing an increasing number of young patients preoccupied by a climactic Armageddon.?

It?s time to learn that bias plus teaching does not equal education.

Steven Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and CSRWatch.com. He is a junk science expert, and advocate of free enterprise and an adjunct scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Blue Streak: GOP Presidential Hopefuls Dump Darwin

Thursday, May 10, 2007
By Susan Estrich

LOS ANGELES ? “Are these guys nuts” my son asked me, as the men we were watching paused to think about it before three raised their hands to signal that, no, they didn’t believe in the brilliant scientific theory that changed the way we think of everything.

They don’t believe in evolution.

Iowa, yes. Evolution, no.

There were three of them, hands in the air, rejecting everything they’d learned in eighth grade science, and every year afterward, in their desperate pursuit of voters similarly inclined. They are not fringe loons: Sam Brownback is a senator, Mike Huckabee is a respected former governor. Tom Tancredo, enough said.

There was even a fourth, clarifying his stance. Science isn’t right about everything. Surely not. Not always right about who is ahead in Iowa.

I should be pleased. My son does not always agree with me about politics. He is a passionate moderate; having run a number of small businesses, he is very much against high taxes and paperwork, and he is suspicious of government regulation, including regulation of a woman’s right to choose. He likes Arnold. He liked Bill Clinton. If he ever liked George W. Bush (he did when he got that first tax refund), he has stopped.

My son would be happy to find a candidate he liked among the crowd at the Reagan library, but what he sees instead is sending him straight into my arms, figuratively speaking.

People used to joke that Democrats who competed in Iowa would go so far to the left that they could never get back, or as President Reagan more memorably put it, so far left that they left America. Republicans now face that danger on the right, in a crowded field, in their desperation to appeal to the religious right, even at the cost of making themselves look like fools, or worse. They have gone so far right than they look all wrong.

Because, of course, it wasn’t only the Darwin-haters showing their stuff to a new generation of appalled would-be Republicans. There were also the born-again right-to-lifers, who used to think abortion was fine but have now changed their minds in time to appeal to like-minded principled voters. Do they think we’re stupid, my son wanted to know, after Romney, widely perceived to be the debate’s winner, explained how you turn your brain into a pretzel and remain firmly in that position while smiling for the camera. And did anyone say global warming? What a speculative notion! Says who?

Of course, none of this even begins to deal with the real elephant in the room, the war with which even those, like my son, who welcomed their first tax cut from President Bush and were inclined to give him latitude, have lost patience.

You want to defend the war, attack evolution and take away women’s right to choose. Aren’t sure about global warming either?

Did you have any particular reason anyone under 90 should vote for you?

My son is 14 years old. He understands evolution better than I do. He could grow up to be a Republican. But not if you tell him to ignore what he is learning and turn his back on the ways in which the world is changing. Not with a bunch of old guys who probably still believe the earth is the center of everything, as he puts it, doing all the talking. If this is the Republican Party being offered to the young and the educated and the forward-thinking, Democrats are in better shape than we deserve.

Casting Soldiers as Victims of War

Monday, May 07, 2007
By James Jay Carafano

As members of a democratic republic, Americans are free to debate how, or even if, we should fight wars.

We argue about whether to go to war, we argue about how a particular war is being conducted and we argue for years about the outcome.

We do all that because democracies don’t like war. Democracies believe war is the weapon of last resort ? so when they’re forced to fight, they want to see something good come of it.

But it’s always possible to take robust policy debates too far. When war debate turns to undermining the civil society that allows for healthy disagreements in wartime, there’s a problem.

Consider the latest move by MoveOn.org.

The group has announced it’s “launching an important new project with our friends at VoteVets.org that will use the power of Internet video to help spread the truth about how veterans and military families feel about the war.”

Really? All military families? That would require millions of videos.

No, the MoveOn.org project focuses on particular families ? those that oppose our military interventions.

While there’s nothing inappropriate about veterans voicing strong opinions about operations in Iraq or Afghanistan, it’s wrong to use the uniform they wore to make an overtly political statement.

No one should play politics with the lives of the men and women wearing a military uniform. Those who oppose the course of the war in Iraq should find other ways to make their case.

Of course, that’s exactly what has proven so difficult for anyone who opposes America’s involvement in any war: how to oppose the war without appearing to oppose the troops.

Throughout its history, America’s army has been filled with citizen-soldiers. Critics of the Iraq war have had to think hard about how to speak about their fellow citizens.

After all, wars cannot be fought without soldiers, and when critics want to end a war they often feel compelled to make the case that their neighbors ? the very people facing death on the front lines while serving their country ? are wrong.

In the Vietnam era, opponents chose to demonize the military. The war, they said, was “evil,” and thus so was anyone who fought in it.

When John Kerry told the Senate in 1971 that American soldiers had “razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan,” he was simply mimicking the rhetoric of the day.

Fortunately, the military-is-evil moniker didn’t stand the test of time.

The “Winter Soldier Investigation” Kerry cited, for example, was a collection of oral testimonies meant to highlight U.S. atrocities. But it proved to be largely a mess of undocumented assertions.

History showed that intentional acts of barbarism, such as the My Lai massacre, were tragic exceptions, not the rule.

In addition, over the next 20 years the junior officers and sergeants who fought in Vietnam proved pretty adept at building the best military in American history, so they couldn’t have been so bad after all.

Sober assessors of the anti-war movement would acknowledge that demonizing the military was wrong. It was simply a fiction promoted to push a political agenda.

As a result, today, almost no one attempts to replicate the Vietnam approach. Everybody wants to “support the troops,” recognizing that deplorable incidents such as Abu Ghraib don’t reflect the true character of the millions in uniform.

But the temptation to play politics again is proving too strong. Hence a new anti-war narrative: the “soldiers are victims” rhetoric.

Some claim the burden of fighting the war falls on the poor and uneducated who can’t find any other job. Yet studies examining the geographical distribution and income of recruits show this isn’t the case.

Portraying members of the armed forces as victims may be an effective way for the anti-war crowd to win sympathy. But just because it’s effective doesn’t make it right.

The fact that Americans argue about the course of the war in Iraq isn’t a sign of American weakness; it’s the symbol of the nation’s greatest strength, a vibrant civil society that can be questioning and self-examining even during the course of conflict.

But we shouldn’t drag the military into the argument. If our missions are going to succeed, we must also leave the troops to do their job while the rest of us argue about what we want them to do.

James Jay Carafano, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, is a senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation (http://www.heritage.org).

Neo-Darwinism Vs. Reason

by Father Jonathan Morris
Fox News
October 2, 2006

This week’s edition of Time magazine hits newsstands today and dons pictures of two halves of two chubby faces, one belonging to a chimpanzee and the other to a human baby. Despite its provocative title, ?How we became human,? the article starts off well, objectively, and reports new and valuable data. Then, it bursts into a ball of ideological flames.

Using good science, the authors remind us that when it comes to DNA, a human is closer to a chimpanzee than a mouse is to a rat. Those advances, in the mapping of primate genomes, are teaching us just how minute the biological distinctions between the species truly are.

But, by using bad philosophy ? and never saying it is philosophy ? Michael Lemonick and Andrea Dorfman finally reveal their true intentions (or bad logic) by making a wild, pseudo-scientific (and very common) conclusion about the nature of evolution and of man.

They start by suggesting an ambiguous premise about the reaches of science:

?Laid side by side, these three sets of genetic blueprints (chimp, Neanderthal, and human) ? plus the genomes of gorillas and other primates, which are already well on the way to being completely sequences ? will not only begin to explain precisely what makes us human, but could lead to a better understanding of human diseases and how to treat them.?

With the authors, I believe there is great hope that such advances in anthropological and biological sciences will lead us to a better ?understanding of human diseases and how to treat them.? But to purport, in the same sentence that these same advances will ?begin to explain precisely what makes us human? induces the reader to assume we are equal to the sum of our biological parts.

If the article had been shorter, we could have given the authors the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps, they were speaking not about ?human persons,? but just about ?humans? ? the biological species ? and thus escaping, somehow, the thorny issue of what makes us who we are. But that would be boring, and the authors knew it.

??but somewhere in the nuclei of our cells are handfuls of amino acids, arranged in a specific order that endow us with the brainpower to outthink and outdo our closest relatives on the tree of life. They give us the ability to speak and write and read, to compose symphonies, paint masterpieces, and delve into the molecular biology that makes us what we are?

What we are? Or who we are? Both are valid questions, but to write an article that intends to explain ?how we became human? without ever breaching the topic of our rational and spiritual nature ? the ultimate distinction between humans and all other animals ? is to suggest that the first question invalidates the second and that ?who? we are as persons actually contradicts new scientific findings.

The assumptions these authors make are common. They showcase the materialistic, post-modern ideology (not scientific theory) that reigns in the classrooms and in the textbooks of scientific America and Europe. According to this worldview, the idea of a personal God, a creator, or even a clockwork intelligent designer is all together pass? and unacceptable. According to them, the problem is not that this is not a scientific question, but that it doesn’t fit with their “scientific” theory.

This is the ideological instinct of more than one generation of scientists. When they see the ever-increasing evidence of intra-species evolution and learn more about animals’ ability to improve in order to survive, they fall back on the great neo-Darwinian principle that this adaptation, and its amazing results, is, at its very origin, necessarily random and irrational.

It is no wonder that the article in question spirals downward and ends with this astonishing philosophical conclusion:

?As scientists keep reminding us, evolution is a random process in which haphazard genetic changes interact with random environmental conditions to produce an organism somehow fitter than its fellows. After 3.5 billion years of randomness, a creature emerged that could ponder its own origins ? and revel in a Mozart adagio. Within a few short years, we may finally understand precisely when and how that happened.??

Strangely, the authors ended their article with a question mark, immediately following a period. Even they seem to know their conclusion is far-fetched, and way beyond the purview of science.

What they don’t seem to know, or want to tell, is that we will never understand what makes people different from chimpanzees if we are determined to find it in the 1 percent of gray area between our genes and theirs. And isn’t that what matters?

In our fight against radical fundamentalists, we are beginning to see the real clash is not of competing civilizations, but of the irrational with the rational, of those who claim the right to act against the dictates of reason with those who try in vain, through reason, to dissuade them.

It is easy to see a similar fundamentalist trend in science and philosophy, especially in the important study of evolutionary processes. Too often the debate is defined by those who, on the one hand, rule out a priori, any possibility of intelligent design, and call everything absolutely random just because they say so, and on the other hand, those who rule out any possibility that the designer is intelligent enough to make use of evolution to create just because they say so.

My opinion? I think the human intellect, through the light of reason, can easily and clearly find a program or a design in the physical world. And some evolutionary theories ? free of neo-Darwinian atheistic principles ? help us to do just that.

FAMILY: SNAPSHOTS OF LIFE AT HOME.

Little Geniuses

WHAT KIND OF PRAISE DO KIDS NEED TO HEAR?

By Emily Bazelon
Posted Friday, May 11, 2007, at 12:09 PM ET

My mother abstains from Mother’s Day. She thinks the whole thing is forced and commercial and not worth the fuss. In asking around, I turned up only one other friend whose mother similarly sniffs at the day as a “Hallmark holiday.” My own feeling is that while my kids are small, I’m happy to forfeit Mother’s Day in exchange for not having to engineer a Father’s Day hoopla for my husband. But once the holiday isn’t a bartered work exchange, I’m planning to milk it.

Motherhood, after all, is already all about self-abnegation. Why give up the one day of praise to which we’ve entitled ourselves? The kids eat up far more than their share of the praise pie the rest of the year?though lately we’re being told the boosting and raving isn’t very good for them. That’s a killjoy note worth hearing, though we should approach it with a bit of skepticism.

The Wall Street Journal reported last month on the travails of employers faced with twenty- and thirtysomethings who’ve been told how brilliant and wonderful and special they are all their lives. The article tells of a consultant who counsels a manager to praise young employees for showing up on time after a pattern of lateness. How to conjure a compliment out of “pathetic” and “entitled”? A personality test for narcissism given to college students every year shows an inexorable rise, with today’s students being on average 30 percent more narcissistic than the students of 1982. Substitute “self-esteem” for “narcissism” and the results suddenly look rosy, but you simply can’t, because all the $10 trophies and the lavish praise of mediocrity, or even failure, doesn’t really bolster kids’ self-worth. They drink the Kool-Aid, but they also know it.

New York magazine offers a solution of sorts, in the person of Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck. In a February piece* called “How Not To Talk to Your Kids,” the magazine lays out Dweck’s prescription?also found in her recent book, Mindset?that it’s not praise itself that’s the problem, it’s the kind of praise we heap on our offspring. We tell them that they’re smart or athletic or musically gifted, when what we should be praising is hard work and effort. Tell a kid he’s smart and the only place he’s got to go is down, so he’ll avoid challenges and freeze at failure. Tell a kid you admire his determination and he’ll keep plugging away, bettering himself all the while.

In my favorite Dweck-inspired experiment, discussed in the New York article, researcher Elizabeth Blackwell divided middle-school students at a magnet school into two groups. One group got eight weeks of study skills. The other group got study skills plus lessons on brain plasticity and neuron growth. The second group improved their grades and math scores. Tell kids their brains can get bigger and?voil?!?they do. The kids in this experiment happened to come from a mostly minority school, but Dweck says her findings are the same across races and classes.

Findings like these resonate with the better-known studies by Claude Steele, in which groups of students who tend to fall prey to stereotypes?black students not being smart, women not being good at math?fared worse when told they were being tested for ability and better when told they were taking a test designed to generally measure problem-solving. Black students and women also score more poorly when they’re simply asked to check a box for race or gender before test taking. Steele attributes this to “stereotype threat”?the idea that a reminder that you’re part of a group about which expectations are low will worsen your test score. Being told that you’re smart is of course the opposite; you’re being stereotyped as high-achieving. But Dweck’s point is that whatever the stereotype, it’s a distraction. This has intuitive appeal: After all, the best way to psych someone out is to tell them that they just can’t miss.

If this all sounds a bit pat and absolutist, however, that’s because it is. Dweck is so devoted to the power of her theory that when she slips and calls her husband “brilliant” for solving a hard problem they’d been mulling, she writes in her book, “Needless to say, I was appalled at what I had done, and as the look of horror spread across my face, he rushed to reassure me, ‘I know you meant it in the most “growth-minded” way.’ ” Blech. I wonder also about the leaps Dweck makes from school to home and then back to school again. There’s evidence for Steele’s insight that it’s a bad idea to make kids self-conscious about their innate ability right before a test. But does that really mean that parents should zealously guard against sneaking in any praise for a kid’s smarts among all the carefully coached “good efforts”? Dweck seems a bit overwrought when she warns that “every word and action from parent to child sends a message.” She also probably overestimates parents’ power. And I couldn’t help cringing at her sample “good” praise: “That picture has so many beautiful colors. Tell me about them.” “The passion you put into that piano piece gives me a real feeling of joy. How do you feel when you play it?” There’s a fine line, it seems, between praise that is properly supportive and insipidly intrusive. I’m pretty sure my sons would rather hear, “Hey, nice playing,” after a soccer game than be invited to share their ball-kicking emotions.

Still, with the specter dangling before us of offices in which employees need constant head-patting, who can really argue with better acquainting kids with the value of hard work rather than gushing over their supposed genius? Especially because by definition most kids can’t be in the tippy top of academic or athletic or musical achievement, which means we’re lying to them when we insist otherwise, a deception that they will surely sniff out. For all those parents who respond to every instance of their children’s mediocrity by insisting on their brilliance (and by blaming teachers and coaches for not recognizing it): Listen to Carol Dweck, and cut it out.

Isn’t it more likely, though, that most of us are in the muddled middle? We may hope our kids are smarter than they are and sometimes tell them so. And inevitably, underlying some of this praise is a suspect form of self-love: We take pride in them out of a puffed-up sense that they’re reflecting our best selves. But at the same time, we want them to try hard at school or sports or music because we know they won’t get anywhere unless they do and because we know how good it feels to put in that sort of effort. We’re not out to turn them into child-adults who think they deserve a gold star for turning up on time. Or so I hope, anyway. And since it’s Mother’s Day, I give us the benefit of the doubt.