Naked Evolution Doesn’t Explain Human Exceptionalism

by Wesley J. Smith

I am not so much interested in why and how human beings became exceptional, just in defending the fact that we are.

But others keep trying. Darwinists are apparently having fits figuring it all out. From The Economist story:

HUMAN intelligence is a biological mystery. Evolution is usually a stingy process, giving animals just what they need to thrive in their niche and no more. But humans stand out. Not only are they much cleverer than their closest living relatives, the chimpanzees, they are also much cleverer than seems strictly necessary.

The ability to do geometry, or to prove Pythagoras’s theorem, has turned out to be rather handy over the past few thousand years. But it is hard to imagine that a brain capable of such feats was required to survive on the prehistoric plains of east Africa, especially given the steep price at which it was bought. Humans’ outsized, power-hungry brains suck up around a quarter of their body’s oxygen supplies.

So, they keep trying to figure some means for blind evolution to explain it all. So far no go. Latest attempt, the helplessness of babies:

Their idea is that helpless babies require intelligent parents to look after them. But to get big-brained parents you must start with big-headed—and therefore helpless—babies. The result is a feedback loop, in which the pressure for clever parents requires ever-more incompetent infants, requiring ever-brighter parents to ensure they survive childhood.

Aaand, another no-go:

Although their theory is intriguing, Dr Piantadosi and Dr Kidd admit that none of this adds up to definitive proof.

That, unfortunately, can be the fate of many who study human evolution. Any such feedback loop would be a slow process (at least as reckoned by the humans themselves), most of which would have taken place in the distant past.

There are gaps in the theory, too. Even if such a process could drastically boost intelligence, something would need to get it going in the first place. It may be that some other factor—perhaps sexual selection, or the demands of a complex environment, or some mixture of the two—was required to jump-start the process. Dr Piantadosi and Dr Kidd’s idea seems a plausible addition to the list of explanations.

But unless human intelligence turns out to be up to the task of building a time machine, it is unlikely that anyone will ever know for sure.

Sometimes the restrictive approach of contemporary science puts handcuffs on questers for knowledge rather than opening the door to enlightenment.

Maybe it’s time for these theorists to talk to my colleagues at the Discovery Institute. I am sure they have some interesting approaches that could add to the search.

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Oh brother: Now “Euthanasia” is “Dignicide”

by Wesley J. Smith

The euthanasia movement has always been about finding words and terms to mask the harshness of killing as a response to suffering.

Indeed, the word “euthanasia”–good death–did not originally refer to killing. Rather, it meant dying peacefully in a state of grace.

Now, the suicide fanatic Faye Girsh–former head of the Hemlock Society–reporting from a convention of the World Federation of Right to Die Societies, says the psychiatrist that brought euthanasia to the mentally ill in Netherlands has coined an obscuring word to replace “euthanasia” in the movement’s lexicon. From her summary:

Boudewijn Chabot (de Einder) disclosed the name of the patient  whose death 25 years ago brought him into conflict with the Dutch  Supreme Court and opened the way for help for psychiatric patients. He  is now using the term ”dignicide” (which my spell checker is rejecting)  as the word promoted by some to describe a self-selected rational and  dignified death.  

You can call a dung beetle a butterfly–but it is still a dung beetle. 

 

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Scientist: We Are Not “Just Apes”

by Wesley J. Smith

Defending human exceptionalism can be a lonely job these days.

So many in the science community, participants in the increasingly radical environmental movement, animal rights ideologues, and even some of the most mainstream writers in the popular media, have become emotionally committed to proving that humans are just another species in the forest.

That is why I was heartened to see an article at the Real Clear Science Website, authored by medical professor S. Joshua Swamidass (discussing a longer presentation embedded on video) declaring that we are “More Than Just Apes:”

First Swamidass notes the same trends I have repeated deconstructed:

Is this really what science tells us? That humans are just intelligent apes, unexceptional in most important ways? Many scientists answer, “yes, we are just apes.”

Even non-religious people reject evolution because of this answer. Any theory that argues “humans are just animals” seems seems dehumanizing, and might even be dangerous. On face value, this feels wrong. This, however, is the instinct and the message of the current scientific world.

Swamidass argues that despite our seeming genetic closeness to apes:

…it is fallacious to argue, therefore, that we are not exceptional. In fact, this leap misrepresents our current understanding of evolution. Remarkably, a mere 2% difference in our genomes, biologically-speaking, is more than enough to explain the “human condition.”

However, according to neutral theory, genome similarity measures the time since we separated from apes (which was quite recently), rather than measuring functional differences or distance. Therefore, we should consider the obvious, as Dr. Ajit Varki puts it, “humans are very very unusual.” We humans, it seems, are more than just apes.

I have presented many attributes and unique capacities that distinguish us from animals of the field (as they were once called), and won’t repeat them here. Swamidass adds a few more attributes and phenomenon to the human exceptionalism list:

Humans are the only known species that has out compete all other sibling species (e.g. Neanderthals and Denisovans) to spread into every habitat across the globe. As far as we know, this has never happened before in the history of the planet.

The human mind is unique, and nothing like it has been encountered in all our planet’s history…

People left Africa 70,000 years ago spread across the planet, acquiring new genetic variation as they went, but still have the same remarkable abilities. “That means that all the mental abilities to do calculus, astrophysics, symphonic music, and philosophy, and theology, and Veritas Forums, was already there.” This is not a normal example of exaptation (reuse of a structure for a new purpose). How can evolution do that?

Human evolution, even from a strictly scientific perspective, reveals that humans truly are exceptional. A “singularity” in our planet’s history has occurred. Nothing like us has ever arisen on the planet before. Something transcendent and special has happened here.

I would have liked to see more meat on the bones of this essay. But, it is good to see a fellow human exceptionalism give voice to what should be a self-evident truth.

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OK Governor Right to Veto Bill Outlawing Abortion

by Wesley J. Smith

Pro-lifers are so well-intentioned, their commitment to protecting innocent human life at all stages so absolute, that they sometimes give their hearts too much control over their brains, tactics, and strategies.

Take the recent bill passed by the Oklahoma Legislature that would make it a felony for a doctor to perform an abortion. Talk about a profoundly misguided effort! Thank goodness, the governor has vetoed. From the Huffington Post story:

Oklahoma’s Republican Governor Mary Fallin vetoed a bill calling for prison terms of up to three years for doctors who performed abortions, saying the legislation would not withstand a criminal constitutional legal challenge, her office said on Friday.

Fallin is exactly right.

Given the Supreme Court’s refusal on several occasions to overturn Roe, the fact that it is less pro-life now than it was at those times, and the likelihood that the replacement for the late Justice Scalia will be less conservative than he was–the chances that the Court would uphold such a law are exactly nil.

But the foolishness of the attempt goes far beyond its futility. The outcome of a Supreme Court ruling on the law could easily leave things far worse from the pro-life perspective than they are now.

As I have repeatedly warned, pro-abortion forces also wish to do away with Roe. They think the current law allows too many restrictions. They want the right to be made absolute.

They have the means to achieve that goal by shifting the constitutional basis for the right to abortion from privacy to equal protection.

If they succeed, the right to abortion through the ninth month would become absolute,and in one fell swoop, all the inroads the pro-life movement has made in the last decades would be wiped out.

I believe there are currently four votes to make that epochal shift. If Hillary Clinton replaces Scalia, there will be five.

If Trump does, there will still not be the votes there to overturn Roe and return the issue of abortion to the states.

Making this effort even more foolish, a law outlawing abortion altogether would be the perfect vehicle for such a “reverse” reversal because it would put the entire issue before the Court, not just whether a state regulation did or did not constitute an undue burden.

And then, the pro-life movement could see every one of its successes destroyed.

Pro-lifers are swimming against an intense cultural tide. Their goal is to save lives. They have succeeded tremendously toward that end by using their brains more than their hearts.

That approach needs to continue. A statute outlawing abortion altogether would not only be in vain, but potentially worse, handing pro-abortion activists the knife with which to slay the pro-life movement.

Let the veto stand.

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Radical Environmentalist Admits Human Exceptionalism

by Wesley J. Smith

The War On Humans Book Cover

The New York Times often publishes articles and columns denigrating of human exceptionalism.

But its anti-human meme sometimes crashes with its focus on convincing us to cut off our noses to spite our collective faces in order to “save the planet.” On such occasions, our unique duties as humans come out of the advocacy drawer demanding that we sacrifice ourselves–a core capacity of human exceptionalism–on the altar of the earth goddess Gaia.

Latest example, a radical environmentalist philosopher claims that we are committing crimes against humanity and the planet in our environmental practices. From the interview with Adrian Parr:

This is a crime against what makes us uniquely human — the creative agency that comes from a combination of reasoning, imagination and emotion. We may all have different capacities and opportunities through which to realize our agency, but we share the same ability to collectively and individually realize our innovative potential. 

That, my friends, is a statement in support of human exceptionalism. I am shocked it wasn’t edited out!

I don’t want to get too deep into the woods with this–my The War on Humans delves into the anti-humanism infecting the environmental movement. But I think we should ponder how the professor’s perspective would add to human destitution and misery.

The fight against global warming is as much about anti-capitalism as making the planet greener. Parr lets some of that garbage out of her leftist bag:

Because human activities cause this environmental damage, our species is culpable for a crime we are committing against ourselves.

But in our defense, humanity is largely trapped by the political form of liberal state power, which facilitates the smooth functioning of global capitalism — the source of the problem. 

Baloney. Communist countries have always been the worst polluters.

In contrast, at least since the end of the 19th century, the free market and democratic West has (mostly) sought to improve environmental practices and tread more lightly on the land, particularly in the last fifty years.

But we do want to thrive and prosper. If people like Parr were in charge, we would cease promoting economic growth: 

The idea that we can “green” a capitalist economy without radically rethinking the basic premises at the heart of neoliberal economic theory is truly an example of misplaced politics.

The system is premised upon a model of endless growth, competition, private property and consumer citizenship, all of which combine to produce a terribly exploitative, oppressive and violent structure that has come to infuse all aspects of everyday life. 

Well, that’s rich: A well-off professor living off of the huge endowments contributed by capitalists past at Taft, advocating policies that would devastate our standard of living and add exponentially to the destitution and misery of the developing world.

That would be a true crime against humanity.

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Einstein’s Clone Wouldn’t BE “Einstein”

by Wesley J. Smith

As the world sleeps, scientists are moving forward full speed ahead to perfect human cloning.

Really, Wesley, why that’s…Look, Kim Kardashian’s butt!

Back to my point: Various bioethicists discuss this potential in a story published by The Express

Laurie Zoloth, a bioethicist at Northwestern University, and Drew Endy, a bioengineer at Stanford University, said: “Would it be OK, for example, to sequence and then synthesise Einstein’s genome?

“If so, how many Einstein genomes should be made and installed in cells, and who would get to make them?”

Here’s the thing. It took much more than his genes for Einstein to become “Einstein.” Ditto, a clone of Hitler–a fun plot n some old horror movies–wouldn’t be destined to be “Hitler.”

Thus, even if we could make many clones of Einstein, they would probably be very intelligent–although no guarantees there, either–but that would not mean they would necessarily possess his wisdom or humanity.

A clone, if manufactured, would be a whole new individual, starting from scratch.

It would be cruel, a futuristic form of slavery–and almost surely futile–to try to force him or her into a predetermined life niche.

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Pfizer Says No Use of Drugs in Assisted Suicide

by Wesley J. Smith

Pfizer has instructed that none of its drugs and medicines be used to kill in assisted suicide. From the company’s press release:

Pfizer strongly objects to the use of its products as lethal injections for capital punishment.

Pfizer’s obligation is to ensure the availability of our products to patients who rely on them for medically necessary purposes. At the same time, we are enforcing a distribution restriction for specific products that have been part of, or considered by some states for their lethal injection protocols.

Oh, executions! Never mind.

Cruel and unusual death with dignity can proceed with no interference from drug companies.

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Artificial Womb Will Not Reduce Abortion

by Wesley J. Smith

Fordham University professor Charles Camosy argues in the Daily News that the creation of an artificial placenta in which gestating babies can be maintained pre-viability will have a major impeding impact on abortion law. From, “The Coming Abortion Earthquake:”

But a scientific advance could soon shake its very foundations. One of those foundations, legally and morally, is the viability of the fetus — or what we call her when the topic isn’t abortion: the baby. (Ever hear of a “fetus bump”?)

In their 1973 Roe ruling, the justices said abortion should be broadly legal before the prenatal child can live outside her mother, but could be broadly restricted after this time. In 1973, viability came in the third trimester. But with today’s technology, viability is at 21 weeks, five days. And dropping.

Technology could drop that time dramatically:

Let’s be conservative and posit that within 10 years, an artificial placenta will knock back viability to 12 weeks. This means, under the legal framework of Roe, states could restrict abortion beyond 12 weeks.

They could try. But color me doubtful that this gambit would succeed–particularly if Hillary Clinton is the next president and appoints two or three Ruth Bader Ginsberg clones.

The law will never require a woman who wishes to abort to transfer the fetus to an artificial womb as a condition to ending her pregnancy. That would be to coerce a woman into a medical treatment. But that isn’t what Camosy is talking about.

I also don’t think the technological ability to keep fetuses alive in such an environment would affect the time when the law could restrict the legality of abortion based on “viability.” Indeed, given current political trends, I doubt that will continue to be a line that can be drawn.

Roe is under attack from two directions, not just the pro-life side.  Indeed, abortion supporters are moving very quickly to move the foundation of the abortion license from privacy–Roe v. Wade’s justification–to equal protection for women.

The latter view precludes any limit on abortion because the absolute right not to have baby is deemed by these advocates as necessary to women achieving full equality in the workplace and society.

If equality becomes the justification, the right to an abortion will become the right to a dead fetus–regardless of the gestational age of the unborn baby or the technological abilities to save his or her life in an artificial womb.

The artificial placenta will save babies from miscarriage. But I doubt they will have any impact on the abortion issue.

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