Getting back to the Things: Business Management

How we carry ourselves and the way we live our lives have profound philosophical implications. Take for example the latest installment of Peter Day's BBC program Global Business:

This week’s programme explores an intriguing proposition: that craftspeople know better than most business people how organisations ought to be run. Peter Day explores the mystery of crafts and speaks to a big thinker, who believes that good craftsmanship – knowing the practicalities of the job – lies at the heart of good business. (Source: ZenCast)

Mr. Day interviewed sociologist Richard Sennett of London School of Economics and NYU about the value of craftsmanship. Sennett says,

I'm thinking about craftsmanship as trying to do a good job for its own sake.... rather than trying to find a niche in the market.... The last thing you want to do if you want to achieve quality in an organization: separate people with power from people with knowledge.... You can have a very profitable company and do very poor work in the short term. My argument is that in the long term, craftsmanship is quite economic.

Sennett cites W. Edwards Deming, who helped set up Toyota-Honda autoworks, as a predecessor in this approach.

As Mr. Day prompts, "There's something about the fingertips..., the touch...." even in management. Sennett picks up on this with an idea that has implications for how we approach nature (and life in general):

The point I'm making to you is a much larger one: it's that we don't think in the abstract. We think through instances, through particulars, through touching things, even if those things we touch are a particular person's character, a particular task they do, and so on.

He continues with the human application of this idea¹:

If you don't have a sense of the craft of focusing on other people and their needs and helping them focus, you're running a business where you're not doing everything yourself, your business will run down. You don't proceed by principle to particulars.... You start with a bit of wood or a particular problem in the office....

(Mr. Day likewise interviewed Richard Taylor in New Zealand, who did the effects for the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Mr. Taylor's ideas are very similar to Prof. Sennett's.)

Sennett and Taylor's ideas run against professional management model around which businesses are organized today, presided over by an army of MBAs. An article in the Atlantic Monthly revealed the vacuousness of that degree. The article recounts how, at the last turn of the century, Frederick Winslow Taylor applied mathematics to managing workers and called it "scientific management." In a roundabout kind of way this was appropriate, because his ideas reinforce the prevailing philosophical climate that's grown in the shadow of science, but that actually have very little to do with real science:

At the same moment was born the notion that management is a distinct function best handled by a distinct group of people—people characterized by a particular kind of education, way of speaking, and fashion sensibility. Taylor, who favored a manly kind of prose, expressed it best in passages like this:

… the science of handling pig iron is so great and amounts to so much that it is impossible for the man who is best suited to this type of work to understand the principles of this science, or even to work in accordance with these principles, without the aid of a man better educated than he is.

From a metaphysical perspective, one could say that Taylor was a “dualist”: there is brain, there is brawn, and the two, he believed, very rarely meet.

So Sennett is essentially opposing a practical instance of philosophical dualism.

For decades, we've been laboring under the illusion that one needn't know anything about the particularities of business to manage it. So, when you really sit down to think about it, the resulting short-term thinking comes as no surprise. It's no wonder, for example, that management looks to the bottom line instead of employee loyalty: it's not as if the employee is a spiritual creature with intelligence and free will. Rather the employee is seen as an interchangeable unit of production, to be disposed of at management's pleasure. Never mind that quality of work diminishes when experienced employees move on.

The result is shoddy work, but more ominously people instrumentalizing other people. Can today's pitiful moral climate be any surprise?

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This interesting article discusses Professor Sennett's ideas on the design of cities.

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Notes

1. The ordering of Sennett's procedure here appears to be the reverse of that he is advocating. The difference is that he's doing so in explaining an idea, whereas his approach is about discovering the world.

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Peter Day, "Crafts," Global Business (08 Jan 08).

Matthew Stewart, "The Management Myth," Atlantic Monthly (June 2006). [subscription required for full-text access]

Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (Allen Lane, 2008).

Hume: Miracles Are Possible

Dinesh D'Souza has an excellent article on the possibility of miracles in the January Columbia.¹ He starts off with the point that atheist rat-pack authors like Dawkins and Hitchens cite David Hume's as the strongest argument against miracles.

In his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Hume argued: 1) A miracle is a violation of the known laws of nature; 2) We know these laws through repeated and constant experience; 3) The testimony of those who report miracles contradicts the operation of known scientific laws; 4) Consequently, no one can rationally believe in miracles.

D'Souza turns Hume's skepticism against him to argue for miracles:

Interestingly, Hume's argument against miracles can be overthrown using his own empirical skeptical philosophy. In short, we may observe that: 1) A miracle is a violation of the known laws of nature; 2) Scientific laws are on Hume's own account empirically unverifiable; 3) Thus violations of the known laws of nature are quite possible; 4) Therefore, miracles are possible.

Pretty much, Hume's saying empirical laws are all inductive and we can never be entirely sure about such conclusions. All we have are experiences that provide associations, and we really cannot argue based on cause and effect. We don't know that matches cause fire, for example, but we simply associate striking a match with a subsequent fire. A skeptical point of view indeed. This means that whatever laws we come up with are not based on any real causality, but merely on association.

While Hume goes too far in arguing against our knowledge of causes, he has a point. Reason (modern) science is uncertain in that it argues by affirming the consequent, which means that we only confirm a hypothesized rule by confirming its consequences. To claim that such arguments provide certain knowledge is to succumb to a fallacy.²

Let's take as an example the principle "if it has rained, the sidewalk is wet." I find that the sidewalk is wet, so can I validly conclude that it has rained? No, there are plenty of other possible causes for the sidewalk's humidity. A garden hose, for example.

D'Souza's scientific example is the supercession of Einstein's physics over Newton's. Newton's laws provided the correct results for centuries in countless contexts, but none of that success guaranteed they were absolutely true in all contexts.

There is nothing wrong in all this [taking scientific laws as provisionally true], as long as we realize that scientific laws are not "laws of nature." They are human laws, and they represent a form of best-guessing about the world. What we call laws are nothing more than observed patterns and sequences. We think the world works in this way until future experience proves the contrary.

So the laws of physics seem to rule out miracles only because we unduly inflate the power of these laws.

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Recently, philosophers like Nancy Cartwright have championed anti-realism, the belief that scientific laws do not represent reality, or do so in only a very limited way.

I propose a simulacrum account of explanation. The route from theory to reality is from theory to model, and then from model to phenomenological law. The phenomenological laws are indeed true of the objects in reality—or might be; but the fundamental laws are only true of objects in the model. (4)

Although I claim that a successful causal explanation gives good reason to believe in the theoretical entities and theoretical properties it postulates, I have repeatedly said that I do not believe in theoretical laws. (8)

I can't claim to be able to evaluate Cartwright's stance at this point, as am not yet able to understand how one can believe in theoretical entities but disbelieve in the theories that propose them. Much of what she says strikes me as true, but I suspect that she goes too far in questioning the veracity of the laws of physics.

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Notes

1. I get two Columbia magazines. On might say there's a slight difference of perspective between the one published by the Knights of Columbus and the one published by Columbia University.

2. Aristotelians claim that certain knowledge is possible of the sensible world. The latest philosopher to support this cause is William Wallace. See his The Modeling of Nature (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1996).

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Dinesh D'Souza, "What's So Great about Christianity: Why Miracles Are Possible," Columbia 88:1 (January 2008), 21-22. [the online version doesn't bear much apparent relationship to the printed version]

Nancy Cartwright, How the Laws of Physics Lie (New York: Clarendon Press, 1983).

Making God an Alien

In putting together last month's post on the Nature Institute, I was doing a little research on Lewis, Barfield, and Steiner and I came across this Kjos Ministries page of excerpts and commentary on C.S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man.

The page exemplifies an unfortunate presumption that has developed among some segments of the Christian community: that the the Fall so completely alienated creation from God that He has absolutely no claim on us apart from Christian faith.

Take a look at a selection from this page that quotes passages from chapter 3 of Lewis's The Abolition of Man. (I'm quoting everything here verbatim, leaving in place all emphases and brackets.)

Apparently, the Chinese Tao replaces the Bible as ultimate authority and guide for our lives -- and for the common good:

Either we are rational spirit obliged for ever to obey the absolute values of the Tao, or else we are mere nature to be kneaded and cut into new shapes for the pleasures of masters who must, by hypothesis, have not motive but their own 'natural' impulses. Only the Tao proves a common human law of action which can overarch rulers and ruled alike. A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery."

"In the Tao itself, as long as we remain within it, we find the concrete reality in which to participate is to be truly human: the real common will and common reason for humanity, alive, and growing like a tree, and branching out, as the situation varies, into ever new beauties and dignities of application. While we speak from within the Tao we can speak of Man having power over himself in a sense truly analogous to an individual's self-control. But the moment we step outside and retard the Tao as mere subjective product, this possibility has disappeared."

"I hear rumours that Goethe's approach to nature deserves fuller consideration  -- that even Dr. [Rudolf] Steiner [occult founder of Waldorf Schools] may have seen something that orthodox researchers have missed."

The author (probably Berit Kjos) fails to acknowledge that Lewis is not directing people away from the Gospel, but making common cause with other traditions against "scientific" secularists whose flat view of nature permits them to manipulate the natural world and their fellow men. He uses the Tao as a name for the natural law accessible to a limited degree by all men, but made most perfectly manifest in Judeo-Christian revelation. As he writes in chapter 1,

The Chinese also speak of a great thing (the greatest thing) called the Tao. It is the reality beyond all predicates, the abyss that was before the Creator Himself. It is Nature, it is the Way, the Road. It is the Way in which the universe goes on, the Way in which things everlastingly emerge, stilly and tranquilly, into space and time. It is also the Way which every man should tread in imitation of that cosmic and supercosmic progression, conforming all activities to that great exemplar. 'In ritual', say the Analects, 'it is harmony with Nature that is prized.' The ancient Jews likewise praise the Law as being 'true'.

This conception in all its forms, Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Christian, and Oriental alike, I shall henceforth refer to for brevity simply as 'the Tao'.

In essence, the Tao is another name for the law that the Bible teaches (i.e., the Ten Commandments).¹ That Christianity teaches that there is a natural moral law open to all men is explicit in Scripture. Surely a "Biblical Christian" like Kjos is familiar with St. Paul's Letter to the Romans:

For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made. (1:19-20; of course this a paraphrase of Wisdom 13)

...

When Gentiles who have not the law do by nature what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness and their conflicting thoughts accuse or perhaps excuse them on that day when, according to my gospel, God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus. (2:14-16)

In other words, man can know of God through His creation and God's law is written on the heart of men even in their falleness. (It would hardly be just for God to condemn men who had absolutely no way of knowing Him or His law.²)

In chapter three of Jesus through the Centuries, Church historian Jaroslav Pelikan reviews how early Christian apologists used the elements of pagan culture as sign-posts to Christ:

While messianic hope and messianic prophecy had been the peculiar feature of the history of the Jewish people, they were not the exclusive possession of the history of Israel. "Even in other nations," Augustine said, "there were those to whom this mystery was revealed and who were impelled to proclaim it." Job, Jethro the father-in-law of Moses, and Balaam the prophet were three such "Gentile saints," spoken of in the Hebrew Bible, with whose existence both rabbis and the church fathers had to come to terms. Armed with such biblical warrant, Christian apologists found in Gentile literature other evidence of messianic prophecy that pointed forward to Jesus. (35)

Not to mention those quintessential Gentile saints, the Magi, who arrived to worship Jesus on the Epiphany, the feast we celebrate today; their Zoroastrian religion prepared the way for them to recognize Christ. (Of course Zoroastrianism also brings to mind Cyrus, of whom Scripture goes so far as to call the anointed or messiah—see Isaiah 45.)

With the exception of the death of Socrates, the most striking example of Jesus' prefigurement in pagan literature is in the second book of Plato's Republic. As Pelikan recounts it, Glaucon tells (Plato's character) Socrates,

let this one "righteous man, in his nobleness and simplicity, one who desires, in the words of Aeschylus, to be a good man and not merely to give the impression of being a good man," now be accused of being in fact the worst of men. Let him, moreover, "remain steadfast to the hour of death, seeming to be unrighteous and yet being righteous." What will be the outcome? The answer, for whose gruesomeness Glaucon apologized in advance to Socrates, must be (and to preserve the neutrality of language, this translation is that of Gilbert Murray) nothing other than the following: "He shall be scourged, tortured, bound, his eyes burnt out, and at last, after suffering every evil, shall be impaled or crucified." (44-45)

Another Kjos page on Tolkien and Lewis comments revealingly:

Lewis was wrong in calling the gospel "a true myth" that works "on us in the same way as the others." The gospel is made alive in us by the work of the Holy Spirit, not by human imagination. God's mercy has always reached out to pagans around the world through the sacrificial lives of faithful missionaries. But His gift of salvation comes through His Word and Spirit. Believers who were formerly oppressed by occult forces were transformed in spite of, not because of their pagan beliefs.

Kjos certainly is correct that occult forces of themselves do not lead to truth. But notice the unfortunate opposition drawn between the Holy Spirit and the human imagination: as if the Holy Spirit couldn't work in and through the imagination and other human faculties. The implication is that God comes in solely from the outside: as if our omniscient Creator couldn't work with our native faculties.^3,4 The implication is that the world is not just wrong, but completely wrong and contains no elements of truth. It is to the core rotten: grace doesn't build on creation but negates nature, or merely covers it over.

But one has to wonder: if the flesh were completely evil, how could God come in it? To say that the flesh is completely corrupt is a subtle denial of the Incarnation. Rather, our Creator became our Savior to rebuild the goodness that He had made and that Sin could not completely destroy.⁵

Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are of God; for many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit which confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit which does not confess Jesus is not of God. This is the spirit of antichrist, of which you heard that it was coming, and now it is in the world already. (1 Jn 4:1-3)

Kjos seems a sincere believer. She rightly repudiates the gnosticism of Steiner (that she thinks is also present in Tolkien and Lewis). The irony is that by going to the other extreme, by turning God from our Creator into an Invader, she has in fact made God an alien, and thus slipped into a subtle form of gnosticism. As in Hans Jonas's The Gnostic Religion: the Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity, the gnostic god is "acosmic" and has no real relationship to creation, except perhaps to negate it.

Beloved, do not believe every spirit,
but test the spirits to see whether they are of God.

It is no wonder that this is the sort of extrinsic god that Philip Pullman, the atheistic author of the His Dark Materials trilogy, thinks Christians believe in: an old killjoy, that is, a Creator who seeks to frustrate His creation. Pullman is right to reject such a God, but wrong to think that it is the real Christian conception of God. In reality the Judeo-Christian conception of God is like a gardener, who prunes his garden to help it grow better. Our "natural" inclinations require discipline so that they work together to the good of our whole nature, not just some narrow slice of it on which we obsess.

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Notes

1. It may sound that Lewis is placing the Tao before God; this is true in the order of discovery (we know nature before we know God), and not the absolute order of things (God is prior to all in His creation). Of course, Christians identify the Torah or Law with the Logos: understood so, the Tao is uncreated.

2. Alas, integral justice isn't the issue for some Christians, so much as being decreed "just" through forensic or nominal justification.

3. God in this view isn't so much a creator (responsible for the integral being of every thing) as a maker, which is to say, one who simply re-arranges pre-existing matter.

4. I sincerely doubt that Mrs. Kjos is a feminist, but this extrinsic notion of God makes an interesting parallel with some feminist doctrines that portray the masculine element as completely foreign to the female: as if the female weren't made for the male and didn't find fulfillment in union with the male. (Lest I fall afoul of feminists out there, let me point out that I don't mean to imply that the male in our created world isn't completed in the female.)

5. In the first millennium there were seven ecumenical councils (meetings of all the world's bishops) to repudiate heresies about who Jesus was and is. Many of the early heresies taught that Jesus was either not truly God or truly man. One of the early heresies was monothelitism, the belief that Jesus had only one will. In reality, Jesus had a human will as well as a divine will. Through the Incarnation, God rectified the human will and didn't merely replace it with a divine will. God fixes our faculties and doesn't destroy them.

Greatness in Smallness

A quotation appropriate for this final day of the Octave of Christmas¹:

But, we think, in an age when we know how infinitely different things are, how unimportant the earth is in the vast universe and consequently how unimportant that little speck of dust, man, is in comparison with the dimensions of the cosmos—in an age like this it seems an absurd idea that this supreme being should concern himself with man, his pitiful little world, his cares, his sins and his non-sins. But although we may think that in this way we are speaking truly appropriately about God, in reality we are in fact thinking of him in a very petty and only too human way, as if his retention of a general view involved making a choice. We thereby imagine him as a consciousness like ours, which has limits, must somewhere or other call a halt, and can never embrace the whole.

In contrast to such limited notions the aphorism with which Hölderlin prefaced his "Hyperion" will serve to recall the Christian image of the true greatness of God: "Non coerceri maximo, contineri tamen a minimo, divinum est" ("Not to be encompassed by the greatest, but to let oneself be encompassed by the smallest—that is divine"). The boundless spirit who bears in himself the totality of Being reaches beyond the "greatest", so that to him it is small, and he reaches into the smallest, because to him nothing is too small. Precisely this overstepping of the greatest and teaching down into the smallest is the true nature of absolute spirit. At the same time we see here a reversal in value of maximum and minimum, greatest and smallest, that is typical of the Christian understanding of reality. To him who as spirit bears up and encompasses the universe, a spirit, a man's heart with it ability to love, is greater than all the milky ways of the universe. Quantitative criteria become irrelevant; other scales become visible, reckoned by which the infinitely small is the truly embracing and truly great.

The Immortal became mortal, the Almighty became powerless, the Boundless bounded himself.

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Notes

1. Of course the twelve days of Christmas don't end until the 6th.

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Joseph Ratzinger, trans. J.R. Foster, Introduction to Christianity (New York: Herder and Herder, 1970), 101-2.

Keeping Silence

With everyone clamoring to cash in on Christmas¹, it is difficult to shut out the noise long enough to reflect on the real meaning of this silent night.

Last month's issue of The Atlantic featured an insightful article by Walter Kirn on multitasking and how it is driving us to distraction:

Through a variety of experiments, many using functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure brain activity, [scientists have] torn the mask off multitasking and revealed its true face, which is blank and pale and drawn.

Multitasking messes with the brain in several ways. At the most basic level, the mental balancing acts that it requires—the constant switching and pivoting—energize regions of the brain that specialize in visual processing and physical coordination and simultaneously appear to shortchange some of the higher areas related to memory and learning. We concentrate on the act of concentration at the expense of whatever it is that we’re supposed to be concentrating on.

What does this mean in practice? Consider a recent experiment at UCLA, where researchers asked a group of 20-somethings to sort index cards in two trials, once in silence and once while simultaneously listening for specific tones in a series of randomly presented sounds. The subjects’ brains coped with the additional task by shifting responsibility from the hippocampus—which stores and recalls information—to the striatum, which takes care of rote, repetitive activities. Thanks to this switch, the subjects managed to sort the cards just as well with the musical distraction—but they had a much harder time remembering what, exactly, they’d been sorting once the experiment was over.

The lack of silence robs us of the ability to be fully present to the Here and Now. To know something instead of simply touching and releasing.

Even worse, certain studies find that multitasking boosts the level of stress-related hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline and wears down our systems through biochemical friction, prematurely aging us. In the short term, the confusion, fatigue, and chaos merely hamper our ability to focus and analyze, but in the long term, they may cause it to atrophy.

The next generation, presumably, is the hardest-hit. They’re the ones way out there on the cutting edge of the multitasking revolution, texting and instant messaging each other while they download music to their iPod and update their Facebook page and complete a homework assignment and keep an eye on the episode of The Hills flickering on a nearby television. (A recent study from the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 53 percent of students in grades seven through 12 report consuming some other form of media while watching television; 58 percent multitask while reading; 62 percent while using the computer; and 63 percent while listening to music. “I get bored if it’s not all going at once,” said a 17-year-old quoted in the study.) They’re the ones whose still-maturing brains are being shaped to process information rather than understand or even remember it.

This is the great irony of multitasking—that its overall goal, getting more done in less time, turns out to be chimerical. In reality, multitasking slows our thinking. It forces us to chop competing tasks into pieces, set them in different piles, then hunt for the pile we’re interested in, pick up its pieces, review the rules for putting the pieces back together, and then attempt to do so, often quite awkwardly. (Fact, and one more reason the bubble will pop: A brain attempting to perform two tasks simultaneously will, because of all the back-and-forth stress, exhibit a substantial lag in information processing.)

Productive? Efficient? More like running up and down a beach repairing a row of sand castles as the tide comes rolling in and the rain comes pouring down.

The next point is a bit off the main topic of the post, but not the topic of this blog: how we think about ourselves—the model we pattern ourselves after—is a big part of the reason we find ourselves in a ceaseless frenzy of activity:

Multitasking, a definition: “The attempt by human beings to operate like computers, often done with the assistance of computers.”

...In the days of rudimentary chemistry, the mind was thought to be a beaker of swirling volatile essences. Then came classical physical mechanics, and the mind was regarded as a clocklike thing, with springs and wheels. Then it was steam-driven, maybe. A combustion chamber. Then came electricity and Freud, and it was a dynamo of polarized energies—the id charged one way, the superego the other.

Now, in the heyday of the microchip, the brain is a computer. A CPU.

Except that it’s not a CPU. It’s whatever that thing is that’s driven to misconstrue itself—over and over, century after century—as a prototype, rendered in all-too- vulnerable tissue, of our latest marvel of technology.

Funny how when we think of ourselves as a thing, we truly come to acquire the attributes of that thing.² There is a point to the regnant thinking of our elites that emphasizes the need for role models: but what if our role model is a computer?

Recovering the Silence

As Josef Pieper wrote, leisure is the basis of culture. Only by taking time to withdraw from the activities of the world can we reflect on it and ourselves and see the direction we need to our lives to point. Pieper writes that the church (building) is to space what the sabbath rest is to time.

It seems particularly a problem up in New England where I live that people have deficient notion of the sacredness of the church (though this trend is growing elsewhere). A Protestant friend back in New York would often pray in a Catholic church because, he said, there was a silence there not present in other churches. (Yes, the silence follows on a Presence. Has an unusual feeling of "silence" ever alerted you to being watched?) Catholics in this part of the country have trouble appreciating that their quotidian conversations belong outside the Church.³ A silence should reign that allows us to hear our Lord's "still, small voice."

Only if we recover the silence, can we "hear" the Presence come in our flesh:

Let all mortal flesh keep silence,
and with fear and trembling stand;
ponder nothing earthly minded,
for with blessing in his hand
Christ our God to earth descendeth,
our full homage to demand.

(Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence, a fifth-century hymn from the Liturgy of Saint James, translated into English by Gerald Moultrie in 1864)

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Notes

1. Or maybe all the pre-Christmas clamor is secretly a financial penalty imposed on those who fail to recognize that Christmas begins on the 25th, along with the "after-Christmas" sales? One has to wonder how long we can make the "Christmas" season without diluting it to meaninglessness—a place in western NH had its Christmas lights up before Halloween (I'm ashamed to say it was a Catholic shrine—this diocese is particularly unhealthy). One hears "Christmas" songs by former Beatles and wonders how far we can distance Christmas from its fundamental meaning before it loses all meaning: how long can we go on being excited about being excited about... something?

2. Walker Percy writes about the transparency and malleability of the self in The Message in the Bottle.

3. Granted, there is still some notion that the church is sacred space, but it is compromised. The old people who after Mass shout the rosary across the Church to each other likewise detract from the silence—admittedly they are at least praying, though it is praying publicly what (unlike like the Liturgy of the Hours or the Mass) isn't a public prayer. Back at St. Leo's in Fairfax, Virginia, the rosary group very considerately withdrew to a small section of the church to allow others elsewhere to continue their personal prayer in silence.

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Walter Kirn, "The Autumn of the Multitaskers" The Atlantic (November 2007). Subscription required for full-text access.

Josef Pieper, Leisure the Basis of Culture

Amazing Evolution!

Just came across another example of superfluous invocations of evolution in this New York Times article:

Spines, Made Extra Curvy for Women by John Schwartz

Let me just start off by saying that, as you may know from reading this blog before, I really don't have a dog in the fight of the "Evolution Wars." Whether or not God used evolution or some other secondary cause to develop life seems in the big picture much less interesting to me than investigating the actual natures of organisms.

With that disclaimer, here's some of the article's text:

Anthropologists have long known that the lower spine in humans developed a unique forward curve to help compensate for the strains that arose when the primate ancestors began walking upright. Researchers looked for a mechanism that compensated for pregnancy’s additional burden as well.

What they found, said Katherine K. Whitcome, a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard and the lead author of the paper, was evidence that evolution had produced a stronger and more flexible lower spine for women.

I don't understand why (aside from personal piety) evolution has to be brought into the picture at all. Concretely speaking, is there any difference between saying that humans developed such-and-such feature and saying that they have such-and-such feature. What value does evolution actually add to the discussion?

Answer: absolutely zero. Judging from the Times article (and from previous similar instances), there's nothing in the science here particular to evolution. It's pretty old news that women are more flexible than men. Evolution is just a buzz word that sexes up an somewhat interesting but rather unremarkable observation.¹

But then there's this paragraph:

As solutions go, the extra flexibility is only partly successful, Professor Shapiro said, since women still commonly complain of back trouble during pregnancy. And that is the difference between the way that evolution works and the way that actual designers do their job, Dr. Whitcome said: nature tinkers. For natural selection to favor one feature over another, “It doesn’t have to be an ideal solution,” she said. “It just has to be better.”

That's the standard claim: that evolution explains shortcomings in somatic form. But that claim treats an organism's traits as if they were independent from each other and not integrally related parts of a whole. How do we know that the "imperfection" in spine design is a "bug" and not a "feature" for some other reason? How do we know that the "imperfection" isn't necessary because "fixing" it would wildly upset another part of the organism?

Nature differs from human designers in that it works with the whole organism. Organisms are much more perfect, more integrated, than anything humans can every make on their own. We humans have trouble even comprehending all the interconnections between the different parts and metabolic pathways of an organism. That is why artificial genetic modification (as opposed to artificial breeding) is the height of arrogance.

It is also presumptuous to declare the shortcomings in the female human spine a defect. Years ago geneticists declared DNA that didn't code for proteins "junk DNA." Now we are learning that it is far from junk. The present case is just another instance in which scientists, failing to see the use of something, declare it useless.

When will we learn that nature holds much more wisdom than we can know?

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Notes

1. It would be quite another thing if the scientists traced out an evolutionary pathway that resulted in the spine curvature. But that would involve genetic and biochemical work, and the journal article in which the findings are reported is by two anthropologists, so the chance of there being any such work here is nil.

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John Schwartz, "Spines, Made Extra Curvy for Women" New York Times (December 13, 2007).

Katherine K. Whitcome, Liza J. Shapiro & Daniel E. Lieberman, "Fetal load and the evolution of lumbar lordosis in bipedal hominins," Nature 450 (13 December 2007), 1075-1078.

Climate Models Found Wanting

Science Blog posted a report this morning, "New study increases concerns about climate model reliability"¹:

A new study comparing the composite output of 22 leading global climate models with actual climate data finds that the models do an unsatisfactory job of mimicking climate change in key portions of the atmosphere.

Here is a provocative paragraph from the article's body:

The 22 climate models used in this study are the same models used by the UN Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC), which recently shared a Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore.

The news is rather timely, as Gore just gave his Nobel lecture yesterday.

Of course, this is just another example of the a Nobel Committee rewarding ideas that have yet to show their worth. The Prizes have to be awarded to the living and I think this colors the culture of the Committees to favor the hear-and-now even when none of the nominees are all that old or near death. So, the fact that the committee would honor stylish results over truth is built into its constitution.² But then, Alfred Nobel himself was—like all of us—the product of a here-and-now culture that values results over truth.

Doubtless someone will point out the concluding line of the original journal article's abstract: "These conclusions contrast strongly with those of recent publications based on essentially the same data." But that's exactly my point: the whole field of climate modeling is so riven by uncertainty that no one can really say what to believe. Liberals may well have a point that industry should be regulated, but to use "climate change" as justification at this point is tendentious.³

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Notes

1. This link includes the contact information for the story (the journal is published by Wiley Interscience). It's on a site run by the AAAS, of all organizations. Maybe this signals an openness to free discussion of climate change on their part?

2. I take consolation from the fact that awardees tend to come from the left side: receiving a prize as big and prestigious as the Nobel would tend to have a stultifying effect on one's future productivity.

3. Today's liberals could well make the point based on a just ordering of the goods of society. Unfortunately, in order to eliminate scruples about some of their favorite "rights" (e.g., to unrestricted sexual license) they've had to jettison not only the notion of the good, but also the notion of the human person for whom and by whom society exists.

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David H. Douglass, et al., "A comparison of tropical temperature trends with model predictions," International Journal of Climatology (Online: 5 Dec 2007).