Bioethics

In a stunningly biased headline this week, The Washington Post said “Obama Aims to Shield Science from Politics.” Well that is certainly one interpretation of the Administration’s announcement that it will fund new embryo-destructive research! Of course, this is nothing new. It has been an anti-Bush mantra of the hard Left for some years now that there is “A Republican War on Science,” to borrow Chris Mooney’s delightfully fatuous phrase.

In the debate over how to teach evolution in public schools, we often hear Darwinists cry, “Science is not democratic.” To which I’ve heard John West sagely reply a thousand times, “But public policy is!”

The recent headlines, and the Administration’s own rhetoric, regarding the President’s decision to have taxpayers (many of whom are morally opposed) fund new embryo-destructive research display the same naiveté in demarcating politics and science. It seems not to occur to certain folks that the answer to the question, “Is it good policy to Federally fund embryo-destructive research?” is not a scientific one. Rather, this sort of answer involves questions of a moral and prudential (political) nature.

As Robert George and Eric Cohen note, the new President’s position is itself highly political:

While the Christmas season brings out the best in most people, it seems to have the opposite effect on many Darwinists, who become even more sour and dismal than usual. Even Eugenie Scott, who perennially tries to be the happy face of Darwinists everywhere, can’t resist sounding like a Scrooge. In an article co-authored with Glenn Branch in this month’s Scientific American, Scott sounds the alarms against the “dangerous lie” that Darwinism is a theory in crisis, and implies that civilization itself will collapse if we allow teachers and students the freedom to discuss criticisms of Darwinian theory—because as every thinking person knows, all of our knowledge of everything depends on Darwin. Seriously. Anyone tempted to believe such predictions of Read More ›

Alfred Russel Wallace, who along with Charles Darwin discovered and advanced the theory of evolution, was, unlike Darwin, a deeply spiritual man who was convinced that materialistic natural selection did not fully explain the origin of man. Unlike so many of his philosophically materialistic scientific colleagues, Wallace was a fierce critic of eugenics and the arrogant scientism of his day. Wallace wrote: Segregation of the unfit is a mere excuse for establishing a medical tyranny. And we have had enough of this kind of tyranny already…the world does not want the eugenist to set it straight … Eugenics is simply the meddlesome interference of an arrogant scientific priestcraft.1 Commenting on our modern scientific priestcraft, Steven Lenzer has a superb essay Read More ›

The McCain-Obama sex education for kindergartners flap doesn’t seem to be going away. Despite the best efforts of the traditional news media to deny reality, the facts have been trickling out thanks primarily to alternative media outlets like National Review Online (here and here), The Weekly Standard, and Rush Limbaugh.

But there is a whole lot more to this story that hasn’t been widely reported yet—and it needs to be.

As I documented in chapters 12 and 13 of my book Darwin Day in America, there is a growing movement in the United States to provide explicit sex education to very young children. It’s a movement that thoughtful parents have every right to be disturbed about. What is scandalous is the way “mainstream” reporters are doing their best to make sure nobody finds out what is actually being proposed.

First, a recap of the current brouhaha: The flap started earlier this month when the McCain campaign aired an inflammatory ad accusing Senator Obama of supporting a bill in the Illinois legislature that would have required comprehensive sex ed for children starting in kindergarten. For days, the ad was denounced by most major media outlets as a contemptible lie. Too bad the journalists making such claims didn’t bother to read the legislation for themselves. Had they done so, they would have seen that the bill for comprehensive sex education supported by Sen. Obama clearly proposed expanding instruction about sexually transmitted diseases from grades “6-12” to grades “K-12” (see pages 1, 5, and 9 of the bill).

What has yet to be widely reported is that the bill supported by Obama is part of a much broader campaign by the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS) to implement its radical Guidelines for Comprehensive Sexuality Education: Kindergarten through 12th Grade in school districts across the nation. The SIECUS guidelines make clear that sex ed for kindergartners is precisely what the mainline sex education lobby wants right now, and last year the Obama campaign itself cited the SIECUS guidelines as an example of the kind of “age appropriate” sex education that Sen. Obama favors.

According to the SIECUS standards, children starting at age 5 are supposed to be taught about vaginal intercourse (p. 26), homosexual relationships (p. 29), same-sex marriage (p. 39), masturbation (pp. 51-52), unwanted pregnancies (p. 61), AIDS (p. 65), and other sexually transmitted diseases (p. 63). That’s right, all this starting at age 5. If you don’t believe me, read the SIECUS guidelines for yourself. One can support “age appropriate” sex education (as I do) without embracing SIECUS’s intrusive effort to force five-year-olds to deal with all manner of explicit topics.
Unfortunately, SIECUS is far from a fringe organization. It is the leading “mainstream” sex education group in the United States. That’s not to say it doesn’t have a pretty sordid history. As I recount in detail in my book, SIECUS was founded by partisans of evolutionary biologist Alfred Kinsey, who revolutionized sexual morality by attempting to apply a reductionist Darwinian approach to human sexuality.

Click here to listen.

Next time someone tells you intelligent design is “based on religion,” you might point him to American Founder Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence. As I explain in a special July 4th edition of ID the Future, Jefferson not only believed in intelligent design, he insisted it was based on the plain evidence of nature, not religion.

Ironically, the critics of intelligent design often think they are defending the principles of Jefferson. The National Council for the Social Studies, for example, claims that intelligent design is religion and then cites Jefferson’s famous Letter to the Danbury Baptists calling for a “wall of separation” between church and state. The clear implication is that Thomas Jefferson would agree with them that intelligent design is religion. A writer for Irregular Times goes even further, insisting that “the case of Thomas Jefferson makes it quite clear that there was not a consensus of support among the authors of the Constitution to allow for the mixing of religion and government to support theological doctrines such as intelligent design.”

Richard Dawkins just can’t seem to keep his foot out of his mouth. He has spent the last several weeks trying to recover from his embarrassing interview in the film Expelled where he concedes that intelligent design is a scientific hypothesis after all — so long as you limit the intelligence being studied to space aliens. Now, after denouncing Expelled as “wicked, evil” and an “outrage” for pointing out that Darwinism was one of the intellectual influences on Nazism, Dawkins has compared a popular Rabbi who dares to criticize him to Hitler! And he did it no less on World Holocaust Remembrance Day. No, I’m not joking. As I’ve said before, it’s getting really hard to parody the Darwinists. They do it so well themselves.

[Note: For a more comprehensive defense of Ben Stein’s documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, please see: NCSE Exposed at NCSEExposed.org]

In an over-the-top “review” of the film Expelled, bioethicist and MSNBC columnist Arthur Caplan has made the preposterous claim that Ben Stein is a Holocaust denier. Caplan’s so-called review is so inaccurate that one can’t help but wonder whether Caplan even watched the film he denounced. If he did, he obviously didn’t pay attention. For the record, here’s a catalog of Caplan’s most egregious errors:

According The New York Times, arch-Darwinist Richard Dawkins is now asserting that the new film Expelled perpetrates a “major outrage” because the film suggests there is a link between Darwinian ideology and ideas like Nazism.

Say what?

In 2005, Dawkins himself declared that such a link existed, responding to an Austrian interviewer that “a Darwinian State would be a Fascist state,” which is why he says he opposes trying to run a society “according to Darwinian laws”:

Canadian science journalist Denyse O’Leary (co-author of the terrific book The Spiritual Brain) offers a multi-part review of my book Darwin Day in America here. O’Leary is a wry as well as perceptive writer, and I loved her description of my chapter on modern architecture, which she describes as a discussion of “featureless apartment buildings that resemble broiler houses.”

Note: This is one of a series of posts adapted from my new book, Darwin Day in America. You can find other posts in the series here. When Kellogg needed advice about Tony the Tiger, Seagrams wanted to know more about whisky, and Samonsite wanted to understand the deeper meaning of luggage, they all called one man: Clotaire Rapaille, Boca Raton marketing guru extraordinaire. A native of France, Rapaille has parlayed a master’s degree in psychology and a doctorate in medical anthropology from the Sorbonne into a lucrative career in high-stakes world of corporate advertising. Featured by such news outlets as CNN, The New York Times, and Newsweek, Rapaille has assembled an elite client list straight from the Fortune 100. Read More ›