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A more virulent nuclear era has superseded the perils of the cold


Did you know that the mere act of asking what kind of warning members of
the Bush Administration may have received about a 9/11-like attack is
just clever hype by that sneaky liberal media conspiracy? So goes the
argument of the regular National Review seat on Communist News
Network liberal media program, Reliable Sources. Recently, host
(and Washington Post media reporter) Howard Kurtz decided to fill
the chair not with his favorite guest/source, NR editor Rich Lowry, or the much-invited NR
editor, Jonah Goldberg, but with the relatively obscure
NR managing editor, Jay Nordlinger. Nordlinger explained, "The
story is surprisingly slight," blown up by a liberal media fearing Bush
was getting "a free ride." Give the man points for consistency. The Bush
White House's exploitation of 9/11 to fatten Republican coffers via the
sale of the President's photo that fateful day--scurrying from safe
location to safe location--was also, in Nordlinger's view, "another
almost nonstory."

Nordlinger's complaint echoed the even stronger contention of another
Kurtz favorite, Andrew Sullivan. The world-famous
gaycatholictorygapmodel took the amazing position that potential
warnings about a terrorist threat that would kill thousands and land us
in Afghanistan was "not a story" at all. Sounding like a Karl Rove/Mary
Matalin love child, Sullivan contended, "The real story here is the
press and the Democrats' need for a story about the war to change the
climate of support for the President."

But Sullivan at least deserves our admiration for expertly spinning
Kurtz regarding The New York Times Magazine's decision to cut him
loose. Echoing Sullivan's PR campaign--and with a supportive quote from,
uh, Rich Lowry--Kurtz framed the story entirely as one of Times
executive editor Howell Raines avenging Sullivan's obsessive attacks on
the paper's liberal bias. OK, perhaps the standards for a Post
writer tweaking the Times top dog are not those of, say, Robert
Caro on Robert Moses, but where's the evidence that Raines was even
involved? The paper had plenty of reasons to lose Sullivan even if his
stupendously narcissistic website never existed. Sullivan's Times
work may have been better disciplined than his "TRB" columns in the
notsoliberal New Republic (before he was replaced by editor Peter
Beinart) and certainly than the nonsense he posts online, but it still
must have embarrassed the Newspaper of Record. As (now Times Book
columnist) Judith Shulevitz pointed out in a critique of his
"dangerously misleading" paean to testosterone, Sullivan was permitted
to "mix up his subjective reactions with laboratory work." Stanford
neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky told Shulevitz at the time, Sullivan "is
entitled to his fairly nonscientific opinion, but I'm astonished at the
New York Times." The Andrew Sullivan Principles of Pre-Emptive
Sexual Disclosure also embarrassed the magazine when he used its pages
to out as gay two Clinton Cabinet members and liberal Democrats like
Rosie O'Donnell. (I imagine he came to regret this invasion of privacy
when his own life became tabloid fare.) Meanwhile, Sullivan's
McCarthyite London Sunday Times column about September 11--in
which he waxed hysterical about the alleged danger of a pro-terrorist
"Fifth Column" located in the very city that suffered the attack--should
have been enough to put off any discerning editor forever. Yet the myth
of his martyrdom continues. Sullivan's website carries the vainglorious
moniker "unfit to print." For once, he's right.

* * *

Sorry, I know enough can be more than enough, but this quote of Sully's
is irresistible: "I ignored Geoffrey Nunberg's piece in The American
in April, debunking the notion of liberal media bias by
numbers, because it so flew in the face of what I knew that I figured
something had to be wrong." When a conservative pundit "knows" something
to be true, don't go hassling him with contrary evidence. It so happens
that linguist Geoffrey Nunberg did the necessary heavy lifting to
disprove perhaps the one contention in Bernard Goldberg's book
Bias the so-called liberal media felt compelled--perhaps out of
misplaced generosity--to accept: that the media tend to label
conservatives as such more frequently than alleged liberals. Tom
Goldstein bought into it in Columbia Journalism Review. So did
Jonathan Chait in TNR. Howard Kurtz and Jeff Greenfield let it go
unchallenged on Communist News Network. Meanwhile, Goldberg admits to
"knowing," Sullivan style, happily ignorant of any relevant data beyond
his own biases. He did no research, he says, because he did not want his
book "to be written from a social scientist point of view."

Unfortunately for Bernie, Nunberg discovered that alleged liberals are
actually labeled as such by mainstream journalists more frequently than
are conservatives. This is true for politicians, for actors, for
lawyers, for everyone--even institutions like think tanks and pressure
groups. The reasons for this are open to speculation, but Nunberg has
the numbers. A weblogger named Edward Boyd ran his own set of numbers
that came out differently, but Nunberg effectively disposed of Boyd's
(honest) errors in a follow-up article for TAP Online. In a truly
bizarre Village Voice column, Nat Hentoff recently sought to ally
himself with the pixilated Goldberg but felt a need to add the
qualifier, "The merits of Goldberg's book aside..." Actually, it's no
qualifier at all. Goldberg's worthless book has only one merit, which
was to inspire my own forthcoming book refuting it. (Hentoff
mischaracterizes that, too.) Meanwhile, the merits of Hentoff's column
aside, it's a great column.

* * *

Speaking of ex-leftists, what's up with Christopher Hitchens calling
Todd Gitlin and me "incurable liberals"? Since when is liberalism
treated as something akin to a disease in this, America's oldest
continuously published liberal magazine? Here's hoping my old friend
gets some treatment for his worsening case of incurable Horowitzism. (Or
is it Sullivanism? Hentoffism? Is there a Doctor of Philosophy in the

Meanwhile, I've got a new weblog with more of this kind of thing at Check it every day, or the terrorists

One of the biggest problems Palestine's supporters face is

OK, so maybe John Ashcroft and Robert Mueller are not the sharpest tools in the shed. How else to explain that, after September.

The question is not the 1970s clich&eacute;, What did the President know
and when did he know it? The appropriate query is, What did US
intelligence know--and what did the President know and do about that?
The flap over the August 6, 2001, intelligence briefing of George W.
Bush--in which he was told that Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network was
interested in hijackings and looking to strike the United States
directly--should not have focused on whether the President ignored that
information and missed the chance to prevent the September 11 strikes.
Still, a political dust-up ensued, as the White House, overreacting to
the overreaction of the Democrats, went into full spin mode. The crucial
issue was broached when National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice
stated, "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people

Actually, it was predicted, and the recent hullabaloo called
attention to the sad fact that the Clinton and the Bush II national
security establishments did not heed hints going back to 1995. In that
year a terrorist arrested in the Philippines said bin Laden operatives
were considering a plot to bomb airliners and fly a plane into CIA
headquarters--information shared with the United States. Two weeks
before that arrest, Algerian terrorists linked to Al Qaeda hijacked a
plane, hoping to crash it into the Eiffel Tower (French commandos killed
the hijackers at a refueling stop).

From 1995 on, US intelligence and the military should have taken steps
to detect and prevent a 9/11-like scheme. There was enough information
in the system to cause the US air command to draw up plans for dealing
with an airliner-turned-missile and to prompt the CIA and the FBI (and
other intelligence outfits) to seek intelligence related to plots of
this type. Apparently nothing of the sort happened. Not even when
terrorism experts continued to raise airliner attacks as a possibility.
In 1998 terrorism analysts briefed Federal Aviation Administration
security officials on scenarios in which terrorists flew planes into US
nuclear plants or commandeered Federal Express cargo planes and crashed
Capitol and other targets. In 1999 a report prepared for the National
Intelligence Council noted that Al Qaeda suicide bombers could fly an
aircraft filled with explosives into the Pentagon, CIA headquarters or
the White House.

In 2001 the FBI--not looking for signs of a suicide-bombing plot--failed
to recognize the significance of information its agents received while
investigating foreign students at a Phoenix flight school and Zacarias
Moussaoui, a French national enrolled in a Minnesota aviation school,
later charged with participating in the 9/11 conspiracy. In July Italian
authorities warned the United States that bin Laden agents might try to
attack Bush and other Western leaders at the Genoa summit using an

True, these leads were small pieces of data among the massive amounts of
material swept up by the sprawling intelligence system. But what's the
point of spending more than $30 billion annually on spies and high-tech
eavesdropping if the system can't sort out the valuable nuggets?
Hindsight is indeed easy. The Bush and Clinton administrations, based on
what's now known, don't deserve to be faulted for not discovering the
9/11 plot. But both failed to oversee the intelligence and
law-enforcement communities and make sure they were pointed in the right

There is evidence that the Bush team didn't move quickly on the
counterterrorism front. Newsweek reported that Attorney General
John Ashcroft prodded the FBI to concentrate on violent crime, drugs and
child porn more than on counterterrorism (a story the Justice Department
denied). And Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld threatened to veto a move
that shifted $600 million from the anti-ballistic missile program to
antiterrorism. Was there a counterterrorism policy delay? Other
questions linger. In July 2001 Richard Clarke, then the National
Security Council official in charge of counterterrorism, put out an
urgent alert, placing the government at its highest state of readiness
for a possible terrorist attack. The alert faded six weeks later. What
triggered it? What caused the stand-down? Should there have been a

The multiple failures of policy, imagination and coordination over two
administrations should be investigated. To assign blame? Accountability
does have its place in a democracy. The public has a right to know who
messed up and to be assured that those who did aren't in a position to
commit further mistakes. The point, of course, is to learn from those
mistakes and to be able to tell the public the failures have been
addressed. Does the intelligence system deserve more billions, as Bush
has requested, without demonstrating that it can use the money wisely?

After 9/11 the Bush Administration didn't rush to examine what went
wrong. We're too busy fighting the war, it said, while urging Congress
not to pursue the matter. Belatedly, Congress authorized a joint
investigation by the House and Senate intelligence committees, two
panels that traditionally have been cozy with the intelligence crowd.
That probe has gotten off to a terrible start--the investigators
fighting among themselves over whether to examine government failures or
to concentrate on how best to reorganize the intelligence system and
accusing the CIA and the Justice Department of not cooperating. One
positive consequence of the maelstrom over the August 6 briefing is that
it has prompted more calls for an independent commission, which Senators
John McCain and Joseph Lieberman have been advocating. Yet so far no
inquiry is committed to mounting a no-holds-barred examination and to
conducting as much of it as possible in public.

"I don't have any problem with a legitimate debate over the performance
of our intelligence agencies," said Vice President Cheney. But he has
opposed sharing the August 6 briefing with Congress. How can there be
worthwhile debate without information? After all, the recent tussle
began when the press sensed that the White House had withheld a
significant--or intriguing--fact. And how can there be information
without investigation? The issue is not what Bush knew--but why he
didn't know, and whether his Administration took sufficient steps before
and after that awful day to deal with the failings of the agencies that
are supposed to thwart and protect.

George W. Bush, it is true, did not create the FBI's smug, insular,
muscle-bound bureaucracy or the CIA's well-known penchant for loopy spy
tips and wrongheaded geopolitical analysis. But the President is now in
the political cross-hairs for the failures of these agencies in
identifying and understanding terrorist threats. And what's wrong with
that? Bush is President, after all, and it is mildly amusing to hear the
conservative claque plead excusable ignorance or the complexities of
governing as his alibi. The trouble is, this failure is too serious to
amuse. The ineptitude preceding September 11 arguably heightens the
gravest, most immediate threat to national security because, while the
dangers may lurk in the twilight zone, they can, as we learned, turn
real. Yet this nation is relying on two intelligence agencies that don't
even wish to talk to each other--and that not only failed to anticipate
September 11 but that have also failed to locate Osama bin Laden, the
man George W. Bush said he wanted "dead or alive," or to identify the
anthrax killer.

Instead of expressing a little executive impatience, even anger at
possible misfeasance, this President responds, once again, by calling
for more secrecy in government, more silence from his critics. And we're
not the only ones to suspect a connection between the cascade of
Administration warnings about new threats and its wish to turn the
public's gaze away from its shortcomings.

The imperative now is to get a down-to-business accounting of the
negligence or inertia that preceded September 11--a systematic inquiry
that is not a headhunting exercise but could begin the long-overdue
reformation of FBI and CIA operating practices. Whether this is the
Congressional investigation already under way or a new independent
commission such as Senator Daschle wants, the results will be persuasive
only if the public learns a lot more, not less, about how to cope with
this new era of shadowy threats. Also needed are elected officials
willing to ask the Administration tough questions--fearlessly, in public
forums, with no thought as to whether Dick Cheney will brand them as

If Bush were a leader of more substance, he would understand that a
thorough ventilation is in his self-interest, both politically and
otherwise. His green-yellow-red warning code is already a joke. Should
terrorists indeed attack again, a rattled populace may begin to wonder,
What did the President know? Where was the Vice President hiding? If
Americans are going to have to live with uncertainty for a long time,
then the government owes them a grown-up conversation on the
complexities, what is known and knowable, what is not. People can handle
straight talk, but that's not what they are getting.

This President used last fall's tragedy to pump himself up as the
resolute warrior who tossed complexity into the trash can. Bush's
I'm-gonna-get-you rhetoric described an open-ended series of
battlefields ahead and did wonders for his ratings. But the complicated
counterrealities have already blurred that picture, just as the recent
revelations greatly diminish his luster as the straight-talking cowboy.
Now he wants Americans to appreciate the gray areas and accept that some
facts are unknowable. And please, don't ask any more questions of your
leader, because it's unpatriotic.

Just one question, Mr. President: What else didn't you tell us after
September 11?

Popular perception notwithstanding, the theory of natural selection was
accepted by every serious evolutionist long before Darwin. Earlier
scientists interpreted it as the clearest possible evidence for
intelligent design of the universe. William Paley's Natural Theology
(1802), for example, employs the famous image of the "great watchmaker" to account for the perfect adaptation of creatures to harmonious ecosystems. Darwin's innovation, which may appear small but is in fact immense, lay in his claim that natural selection is the only cause of evolution.

In one sense, this was merely a change of emphasis: The impulse of
pre-Darwinian evolutionists, faced with incontrovertible evidence of
natural selection, had been to ask why it occurred. They sought after
the "final cause" of evolution, and they found it in the proposal of an
intelligent designer. But one of the essential principles of modern
science is that such final causes are unknowable. Science must limit
itself to "efficient" or "material" causes; it must not ask why things
happen, but how. Darwin applied this principle to evolution. Whereas his
predecessors had seen the adaptation of organisms to their environment
as the effects of design, Darwin saw the physical development of
creatures as the sole cause of evolution. The great watchmaker had been

As Stephen J. Gould (who died as this issue was going to press) shows in
The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, Darwin's breakthrough was
essentially methodological. Darwinism is what you get when you focus on
the micrological details, resolutely refusing to lift your eyes to the
level of the whole. Over the course of the nineteenth century, this
methodological sine qua non for scientific investigation was imposed on
every discipline, but it originated in the "dismal science" of
economics. The "political economy" of Adam Smith began from the material
actions of individuals in pursuit of their own selfish ends, and
extrapolated from this micrological level to abstract generalizations
about the economy as a whole.

What Smith calls "the economy" is thus an amalgamation of all the
self-interested actions of individuals, and precisely the same is true
of what Darwin understood as "evolution." In fact, Darwin consciously
and deliberately imported Smith's economic methodology into biology in
order to refute natural theology's argument from design. As Gould baldly
puts it, "the theory of natural selection is, in essence, Adam Smith's
economics transferred to nature." He is reluctant to dwell too long on
this kinship, no doubt because he understands the severity of the threat
it poses to Darwinism's pretensions to objectivity. Gould's ally and
sometime collaborator Richard Lewontin has criticized him for such
reticence in several exchanges first published in the New York Review
of Books
. Lewontin has called Gould's work "curiously unpolitical"
for failing to draw out the implications of "the overwhelming influence
of ideology in science." For Lewontin, "Darwin's theory of evolution by
natural selection is obviously nineteenth-century capitalism writ
large," and attempts to press it into the service of psychology are
"pure reification."

The distinguishing theoretical characteristic of both Darwin and Smith
is reductionism--they reduce all knowledge to the level of the
individual. As Gould notes, "The rebuttal of the former centerpiece of
natural history--the belief that organic designs record the intentions
of an omnipotent creative power--rests upon the radical demotion of
agency to a much lower level, devoid of any prospect for conscious
intent, or any 'view' beyond the immediate and personal." Today,
technological progress has enabled evolutionists to carry Darwin's
reduction a stage further. The smallest individual Darwin could study
was the organism, but it is now possible to analyze the behavior of the
gene. People like Richard Dawkins now claim that evolution is driven not
by competition between individual organisms, but by struggles among

Many evolutionary biologists keep a guilty silence regarding the ethical
implications of their theory, but Dawkins positively revels in
dehumanization. His imagery dwells lasciviously on the mechanical--our
bodies are merely "lumbering robots," or "survival machines" for genes.
His infamous book The Selfish Gene (1976) abounds in brazen
antihumanist provocations: "I am treating a mother as a machine
programmed to do everything in its power to propagate copies of the
genes which reside inside it." Nor does mechanization stop with the
body; evolutionary psychology views the mind itself as a machine,
reducing our thoughts and ideas to the chemical reactions that accompany
them. Dawkins has even propounded a theory that the history of ideas
follows rules analogous to competitive gene selection, reducing
dialectic to a tedious and pointless struggle between what he calls
"memes." Lately he has taken to writing letters to the British press,
suggesting that Osama bin Laden and George W. Bush will be enlightened
if they "study memes."

The idea that genes determine all social behavior, that human beings are
machines, evidently strikes a chord in the Western popular mind.
Postmodernist works such as Donna Haraway's "A Cyborg Manifesto"
celebrate the "posthuman" from what their authors apparently regard as a
radical perspective, while the theoretical texts of Michel Foucault and
Jean-Francois Lyotard advocate a micrological materialism that excludes
on principle any interest in "totalizing grand narratives." As John
Dupr&eacute; has recently remarked, this "tyranny of the microscopic"
really constitutes an "intellectual pathology" whose significance is
sociological rather than scientific. Gould swats Dawkins away easily
enough--sardonically appropriating his vocabulary to dismiss his theory,
cruelly but fairly, as an "impotent meme"--but he does not explain why
such theories have come to seem plausible to many in the general public.
To examine that, we have to back up about 65 million years.

Reptilia served as Exhibit A then. Imagine Triceratops glancing
up from its grazing to notice a seven-mile-wide asteroid descending
rapidly toward its head. Triceratops had not expected this.
Nature had prepared it for the expected; it could expect to spend a
great deal of time fighting with Tyrannosaurus rex, for example,
and was formidably well-equipped for that purpose. But natural selection
had not prepared it to withstand a direct hit from a piece of rock a
league long.

The lump of stone that crashed into what is now the Yucatan Peninsula
ended the Cretaceous Period by showering the earth with fire and
brimstone, thus destroying 70 percent of living species, including
almost all the dinosaurs. This was something of a spanner in the works
of natural selection, from which it may not recover. The implications of
this catastrophe, conclusive evidence for which was discovered only in
1980, have yet to be fully assimilated by evolutionary theory. For most
of the twentieth century, orthodox Darwinists held that natural
selection--the competitive adaptation of individual organisms to their
environment--was the exclusive motor of evolutionary change. Now they
must qualify this dogma, but it is proving a laborious process.

Many scientists remain convinced that catastrophic change is the
exception. If it weren't for that pesky asteroid, they gripe, natural
selection would have continued unabated. They note that natural
selection will always work ceteris paribus--that is, other things
being equal, under the controlled laboratory environment in which modern
scientists conduct their experiments. It will work, that is to say, in
the absence of the unexpected. But don't we know from experience that
the unexpected happens all the time, and occasionally with catastrophic

The "K-T event," as the asteroid strike is known, casts suspicion on the
doctrinaire claim that evolution is solely the result of the competitive
adaptation of individual organisms to their environment. It indicates
that the external constraints under which adaptation occurs must
inevitably exert an influence on the course of evolution. And it raises
the possibility that random, "chance" events play at least as
significant a role as the incremental, purposive process of natural

Although it represents a mortal threat to mainstream Darwinism, the
theory of catastrophic evolution is quite consistent with Stephen Jay
Gould and Niles Eldredge's epochal discovery of "punctuated
equilibrium." Punctuated equilibrium, or "punk-ek," holds that evolution
does not take place incrementally but rather in spurts that are divided
by long periods of stasis. It departs from Darwin by implying that
natural selection by competition among individual organisms cannot be
the exclusive cause of evolutionary change, since such competition does
not pause for periods of equilibrium.

Darwin is often thought to have rescued the history of life from the
superstitious fantasies of religion, by basing his theory on good,
solid, empirical evidence. But, as Gould and Eldredge noticed, the
empirical evidence does not indicate that evolution proceeds by
incremental, incessant natural selection, as Darwin claimed. In fact,
the empirical evidence indicates quite the opposite. When we look at the
living species around us, we do not find a continuum of creatures in
infinitesimally graduated stages of evolution. We find, instead, clearly
distinct species. We find the same when we look at the fossil record;
paleontology testifies that evolutionary stasis is the norm, and that
change takes place in abrupt bursts, as though suddenly spurred forward
by some external stimulus.

One of the many fascinating questions raised in Gould's The Structure
of Evolutionary Theory
is why Darwin did not see this. Why did he
insist on attributing sole determining power to natural selection in
defiance of the evidence? His own explanation was that the fossil record
gives a false impression because it is radically incomplete. But this
does not alter the fact that natural selection is an imposition on the
available evidence, a bold reading against the grain. Did Darwin nod?
Why was he so convinced that all evolution is caused by natural
selection among individual organisms in competition with one another?

Gould does not explain this, almost certainly for a very interesting
reason: He has often been accused, by sociobiologists and orthodox
Darwinians, of handing ammunition to creationists. There is no room for
an intelligent designer in a universe formed entirely through relentless
competition between selfish individuals, but because it allows that
external factors may influence evolution, the theory of punctuated
equilibrium is not incompatible with theories of intelligent design--a
fact that has caused no small embarrassment to its authors. The charge
of neocreationism is deeply unfair--Gould testified against creationism
in landmark court cases and ridiculed it mercilessly in his writing. He
opposed intelligent design on the grounds that it is "theology" and not
"science." In this book, obviously intended as his legacy to scientific
posterity, Gould repeatedly and emphatically protests that no matter how
many revisions and qualifications he may impose upon Darwin, he remains
a faithful follower of the great man. In a rare and revealing mixed
metaphor, he claims to have retained "the guts of the machine," and he
uses a cumbersome simile involving a piece of coral to argue, again and
again, that his own work is merely an "addition" to Darwin.

That is rubbish, and Gould must have known it. The Structure of
Evolutionary Theory
is an "addition" to The Origin of Species
in the same sense that Capital is an "addition" to The Wealth
of Nations
. Gould certainly built upon Darwin's work, assuming its
premises as his own and erecting his own theory on the foundation of a
meticulous analysis of the original texts. But there comes a stage in
the construction at which, in fulfillment of the dialectical law,
quantitative change becomes qualitative change, and the extension to the
edifice deserves to be called a new building.

Despite (and because of) his vehement denials, I believe that Gould
reached that stage. His theory is more than a supplement to Darwinism,
it is an alternative view, a paradigm shift. Gould has deprived natural
selection of the exclusive role Darwin assigned to it, using the most
unimpeachable logic and the most scrupulous empirical research.

Gould obviously liked to limit the destructive impact of his criticism
to distortions of the founder's aims. But Darwin cannot so easily be
exonerated--Gould himself admits that the work of Dawkins constitutes "a
furthering and intensification of Darwin's intent." Indeed, Gould often
refers to theorists of gene selection as "ultra-Darwinists" or
"Darwinian fundamentalists," because they take the master's reductionist
method to the logical conclusion permitted by modern technology. Gould
would have been mortified to hear it, but his own interpretation
suggests that, were Darwin alive today, he might be Richard Dawkins.

Traditional creationism is based on a literal reading of Genesis and
represents no intellectual danger to Darwinism. The recent advocates of
"intelligent design," however, demand to be taken a little more
seriously because of their recent political and pedagogical successes;
they admit to the apparent age of the earth as established in the
geological record, for example, and accept the fossil record as evidence
of species change. Hard-fought cases involving the boards of education
of Kansas (1999) and Ohio (2002) have established a new beachhead for
intelligent design in the public mind, while simultaneously throwing a
shadow on natural selection's claim to be the exclusive motor of
evolutionary change.

The idea that schools in Kansas might depart from Darwinist orthodoxy
induced apoplexy among the commissars of science. John Rennie, editor of
Scientific American, urged colleges to be skeptical of applicants
from Kansas: "If kids in Kansas aren't being taught properly about
science, they won't be able to keep up with children taught competently
elsewhere. It's called survival of the fittest. Maybe the Board of
Education needs to learn about natural selection firsthand." In an
edition of the American Spectator, a leading theorist of
intelligent design, Michael Behe, professed to be mystified at Rennie's
outburst: "What is it about the topic of evolution that drives so many
people nuts? Why does a change in a farm state's high school examination
policy call forth damning editorials all the way from London, England,
and have normally staid editors threatening children?"

The answer is obvious, blindingly so. Behe does not see it because he,
like most advocates of intelligent design, approaches the issue from a
socially conservative point of view. Much scholarship on intelligent
design is sponsored by the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based
foundation that describes itself as "dedicated to exploring and
promoting public policies that advance representative democracy, free
enterprise and individual liberty," and whose mission statement commits
it to boosting the "common sense" of the "free market." It is this
commitment, I suppose, that distracts Behe from one of the reasons the
American establishment goes "nuts" when the educational privilege of
natural selection is threatened: A threat to the exclusivity of natural
selection--individual competition--is a threat to market ideology.
(Although he tactfully pays it less attention than it deserves, Gould
acknowledges the full extent of Darwinism's complicity with Adam Smith.
But the alterations Gould introduces into evolutionary theory do not
depend on its ideological kinship with classical economics.)

Neither Behe nor his book Darwin's Black Box rate a mention in
The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, and Gould's silence on the
subject of intelligent design can be regarded as extremely eloquent. He
would have denied it, but this book really charts Gould's arduous
passage through Darwinism and his emergence on the other side. This
breakthrough seems to have been facilitated by his discovery of the
literature that Darwin was writing against. Gould blithely informs us
that "I had never read [Paley's] Natural Theology straight
through before pursuing my research for this book." Lay readers may find
this an astonishing confession from the world's leading Darwin scholar,
but those familiar with scientists' undiscriminating rejection of
metaphysics will be unsurprised. Having forced himself to pick up the
book, Gould finds that Paley's primary observation is "undoubtedly
correct," and largely accepted by Darwin--nature does indeed indicate
exquisite adaptation to environment. The difference lies in the reason
Darwin gives for this order in creation. Paley thought it bespoke a
benign creator, but Darwin "seems to mock the standard interpretation in
a manner that could almost be called cruel" when he introduces the
micrological economics of Adam Smith:

as the cruellest twist of all, this lower-level cause of pattern seems
to suggest a moral reading exactly opposite to Paley's lofty hopes for
the meaning of comprehensive order--for nature's individuals struggle
for their own personal benefit, and nothing else! Paley's
observations could not be faulted--organisms are well designed and
ecosystems are harmonious. But his interpretations could not have been
more askew--for these features do not arise as direct products of divine
benevolence, but only as epiphenomena of an opposite process both in
level of action and intent of outcome: individuals struggling for
themselves alone.

Read that last sentence again. What might bring about the triumph of the
"opposite process" to "divine benevolence"? Clue: It is not the blind
indifference of nature. The history of human thought is hardly silent
concerning the struggle between a benevolent deity and a cruel mocker.
But Gould shies away from considering the theological implications of
his theory with the standard get-out clause: "This book cannot address
such a vital issue at any depth."

Many readers will be tempted to respond: "Why on earth not? It's 1,400
pages long!" But Gould was not eager to incur again, in his magnum opus,
the tired charge of neocreationism. He does begin to speculate about why
the homologous visions of Darwin and Smith should complement each other
so conveniently, and he also raises the question of why this connection
has come to seem so glaring in recent years. But his uncharacteristic
hesitancy reveals his discomfort away from scientific terrain: "I
venture these ill-formulated statements about Zeitgeist because I feel
that something important lurks behind my inability to express these
inchoate thoughts with precision."

Indeed it does. Later in the book, Gould remarks that "the exclusivity
of organismal selection...provides the punch line that allowed the
vision of Adam Smith to destroy the explicit beauty and harmony of
William Paley's world." Absolutely true. But the exclusivity of
organismal selection is what Gould denied, too. Is it really accurate,
then, to continue calling him a "Darwinist"? At one point, Gould demands
that creationists throw in the towel and acknowledge Darwin as "the
Muhammad Ali of biology." Ali was undoubtedly a great champion, but his
present condition renders Gould's image rather ambiguous. And then, too,
the reader is left in some doubt as to whether Gould saw himself in the
role of Angelo Dundee or Joe Frazier.

For Senator Clinton to flourish a copy of the New York Post--the paper that has called her pretty much everything from Satanic to Sapphist--merely because it had the pungent headline "Bush Knew" is not yet her height of opportunism. (The height so far was reached last fall, when she said she could understand the rage and hatred behind the attacks on the World Trade Center because, after all, she had been attacked herself in her time.) But the failure of her husband's regime to take Al Qaeda seriously is the clue to the same failure on the part of the Bush gang.


It’s the 100th anniversary of the Christmas Truce of WWI.

December 23, 2014


December 23, 2014


December 23, 2014


December 22, 2014


December 18, 2014


December 17, 2014

The two countries have resumed a dialogue after fifty years.

December 17, 2014


December 17, 2014

Dick Cheney clarifies what he means by American Exceptionalism.

December 17, 2014


December 12, 2014