Men and Women in Science

A recent report published by the National Academies of Science calls into question the convential (PC) wisdom that women are more poorly represented than men in science because they are victims of prejudice (h/t to Chistina Hoff Sommers). The executive summary says,

Our survey findings do indicate that, at many critical transition points in their academic careers (e.g., hiring for tenure-track and tenure positions and promotions) women appear to have fared as well as or better than men... These findings are in contrast to the COSEPUP [Shalala] committee’s general conclusions, that “women who are interested in science and engineering careers are lost at every educational transition” and the “evaluation criterion contain arbitrary and subjective components that disadvantage women.”

The 2006 Shalala report set Capitol Hill aglow¹ with the reports of uncorrected "gender bias" even though the report itself was discounted as politically biased by credible researchers. Surprise: a report issued by Donna Shalala, Secretary of Health and Human Services under President Clinton, is politically biased.

As Christina Hoff Sommers writes about the findings of the new report,

To give one typical finding, in the years studied, 2004 and 2005, women accounted for approximately 20 percent of applicants for positions in mathematics, but were 28 percent of those interviewed and 32 percent of those who received job offers. Furthermore, once women attained jobs in math or science programs, their teaching loads and research resources were comparable to men’s. Female full professors were paid, on average, 8 percent less than males. But the committee attributed this to the fact that the senior male professors had more years of experience. There were no differences in salaries for male and female assistant and associate professors. “I don’t think we would have anticipated that in so many areas that there would have been such a balance in opportunities for men and women,” said Dr. Sally Shaywitz, Yale University research scientist and co-chair of the committee that wrote the report.

The new study does not claim that women have achieved parity with men. It found, for example, that women with Ph.D.s in math and science are far less likely than men to pursue a career at a research-intensive university. Why should that be? The report does not say, but suggests it would be an important question to pursue. In fact, there is now a lively and growing literature on gender and vocation. While some scholars contend that “unconscious bias” and persistent stereotypes are primary reasons for the paucity of women in the high echelons of math and science, others, perhaps a majority, suggest that men and women, on average, have different career interests and propensities. (AEI Press will soon be publishing The Science on Women and Science, a collection of articles by scholars who argue different sides of this issue.)

The big question: how does one define "parity"? On what basis is 50-50 representation considered equitable?

Might it be that women (whether consciously or not) are more interested in sustaining human life directly (via family), than indirectly (in science)? Might it be that women (whether by conscious decision or not) have their priorities straight?

What seems clear is that fewer women than men desire to advance in science. This means the effort to achieve 50-50 representation is misguided. The preferences afforded to women in its pursuance disproportionately fall to the smaller number of women more devoted to science than to traditional family roles. In other words, a small, vocal minority of women is using "equality" as a pretext for preferential treatment.

George Orwell's been quoted very often, but can't be quoted excessively these days: "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."

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Selections

Some quotations from summary in the prepublication edition available online. All of the results were not in the same direction, but these show some ways women are given a disproportionate advantage in hiring and tenure evaluations (and men consequently given a disadvantage).

For the most part, men and women faculty in science, engineering, and mathematics have enjoyed comparable opportunities within the university, and gender does not appear to have been a factor in a number important career transitions and outcomes. (4)

The proportion of women who were interviewed for tenure-track or tenured positions was higher than the percentage of women who apply.... The proportion of women who received the first job offer was higher than the percentrage who were invited to interview. (6)

Women were more likely than men to receive tenure when they came up for tenure review. (9)

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Notes

1. Including Republican Congressman Vernon Ehlers. He's a physicist: it just goes to show how difficult it is to get a truly conservative scientist. There's too much implicit indoctrination in science education. The undercurrent running through all of it, especially physics, is that there are no inherent natures in the world and that the order of the world is arbitrary and should be recreated to man's arbitrary standards.

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Christina Hoff Sommers, "Baseless Bias and the New Second Sex," The American (June 10, 2009).

Committee on Gender Differences in the Careers of Science, Engineering, and Mathematics Faculty; Committee on Women in Science, Engineering, and Medicine; National Research Council, Gender Difference at Critical Transitions in the Careers of Science, Engineering and Mathematics Faculty (Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2009).

Matter and Becoming

On a friend's recommendation, I ordered a copy of a book on book I of Aristotle's Physics. It's an old book (not quite as old as the Physics!)—Matter and Becoming by Richard J. Connell, who studied at Laval.

I haven't started reading it yet, but even the title is highly suggestive. Matter in Aristotle's thought is what becomes something else; it's the principle of substantial becoming, the potentiality for one thing to become another. In contrast, matter in modern thought doesn't become anything, but is merely rearranged; in fact, strictly speaking there is nothing: there is only matter. Everything else is merely various arrangements of the "real substance" underlying everything.

It's amazing how Aristotle simply takes our experience at face value: there are things in the world and some things become other things. Meanwhile, modern thought starts with a bald postulate, an unproven hypothesis, a dogma not based on experience: there is only matter.

Which view is more empirical? Which is more reasonable?

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Richard J. Connell, Matter and Becoming (Chicago: The Priory Press, 1966).

The Continuing West Controversy

Christopher West has published a clarification of his ABC interview. Not exactly satisfying, but good enough. Needless to say, West does not endorse Hefner or pornography.

Jimmy Akin has some well thought-out criticisms of both Christopher West and ABC's treatment of him. For whatever it's worth, I think Akin is spot-on.

Then David Schindler, head of the John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family, published an article criticizing West in general. Schindler is an extremely learned man; I suspect there's something to his criticism of West, but I wish he would have unpacked some of the compact technical formulations he uses.

Michael Waldstein, translator of the latest edition of John Paul II's Theology of the Body responded, defending West from Schindler's criticisms. I was a little disappointed by this article, as it suffers from the vagueness he (rightly) attributes to Schindler; but it needs to be kept in mind that Waldstein is not in the best of health these days. However, Janet Smith's response to Schindler (at greater length) is much better—excellent and even-handed.

Naivete or Stupidity? West on Hefner

Christopher West is a popular exponent of Pope John Paul II's "Theology of the Body," which teaches a positive view to spousal intimacy as a reflection of God's love.¹ Over the years I've heard untoward rumors about some questionable sexual practices that West is supposed to have advocated. In the absence of any solid evidence, I've discounted them as Jansenistic misunderstandings.

But now a friend sends me this ABC Nightline article. Here's the core of contention:

The seeming paradox of West's position is captured in the unlikely pairing of his two big heroes -- his muses, you might say. They are Pope John Paul II, and Hugh Hefner. A saint and a sinner.

"I actually see very profound historical connections between Hugh Hefner and John Paul II," said West.... Each man in his own way, West insisted, rescued sex from prudish Victorian morality....²

"I love Hugh Hefner," said West. "I really do. Why? Because I think I understand his ache. I think I understand his longing because I feel it myself. There is this yearning, this ache, this longing we all have for love, for union, for intimacy."

Pornography is a longing for intimacy...? Right. "Honey, I log into that website as an expression of my longing for intimacy," I can hear some husband trying to justify his porn addiction. Rather a remote reflection of any longing for intimacy!

Either West has been taken out of context, or else he needs to read more by Pope John Paul II and about Hefner, or both.

The Pope specifically condemns pornography in Love and Responsibility as a failure of real intimacy:

Pornography is a marked tendency to accentuate the sexual element when reproducing the human body or human love in a work of art, with the object of inducing the reader or viewer to believe that sexual values are the only real values of the person, and that love is nothing more than the experience, individual or shared, of those values alone. This tendency is harmful for.... the truth about human love consists always in reproducing the interpersonal relationship, however large sexual values may loom in that relationship.³ (192-3, emphasis added)

From what I know about Playboy, it's not exactly a complete interpersonal relationship that's being represented in its pages. That this is Hefner's schtick is grossly apparent in an article that West would be profitably familiar with, "The Cultural Victory of Hugh Hefner": "Sandy Bentley, the Playboy cover girl and former Hefner girlfriend (along with her twin sister Mandy), describes Hugh Hefner's current sexual practices in just enough detail to give you a good long pause." That Hefner's public persona includes two girlfriends at once is a big enough statement that the man doesn't represent a "longing for intimacy"—does anyone (outside of West) suffer from the illusion that playboys do? I won't reproduce the key passage on Hefner's practices, but here is the upshot:

Yes, you read that right. There it is, attributed to someone who ought to know, the stated fact on the public record. It may seem shocking or it may seem trivial, but it amounts to a significant confirmation that Hugh Hefner embodies what his detractors have been saying for years: All pornography is ultimately homosexual. All pornography stifles the development of genuine human relationships. All pornography is a manifestation of arrested development. All pornography reduces spiritual desire to Newtonian mechanics. All pornography, indulged long enough, hollows out sex to the point where even the horniest old Viagra-stoked goat is unable to physically enjoy the bodies of nubile young females.

(The entire article is well worth reading.)

Pornography is a serious problem in our society. Greedy businessmen hijack a God-given human desire and enslave a large fraction of the population for their own selfish gain.⁴ No one should trivialize the problem by proposing Hefner as any source of inspiration.

I vaguely recall from one of West's talks that he may have been involved in pornography before his (re)conversion. Perhaps his statements are part of such a recollection. Still, I can't understand why he would parallel Hefner with JP2. (On his website West rightly evaluates pornography.) On the other hand, it is easy to see how the MSM would magnify any misspoken word.⁵ At worst, this is an idiotic rhetorical move by Christopher West. At best this is West trying to appeal to more people and thinking rather naively that he can handle the media beast: West doesn't realize how easily attention-grabbing statements that work in a talk are taken out of context in today's slice-and-dice media culture... and thanks to ABC he's now learning really, really fast.

Either way, it is a genuine scandal. Christopher West should publicly clarify his position specifically in response to this article. Unfortunately whatever new statement he makes will not have nearly the reach of the old one.

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Notes

1. I highly recommend Michael Waldstein's excellent introduction to his new translation of the work, Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology Of The Body.

2. As if "prudish Victorian morality" were the demon to flee. Love and Responsibility actually says that such morality and today's pornographic culture have much more in common with each other than with authentic sexuality:

If any one of the above-mentioned purposes of marriage is considered without reference to the personalistic norm—that is to say, without taking into account of the fact that man and woman are persons—this is bound to lead to some form of utilitarianism in the first or second meaning of the word 'use'. To regard procreation in this way leads to the rigorist distortion, while the 'libidinistic' distortion is rooted in a similar attitude to the tertiary end of marriage—remedium concupiscentiae. (67)

The two meanings of 'use': (1) employ as a means to an end, the end being procreation, and (2) enjoy. Thus both "prudish Victorian morality" and hedonism ignore the full reality of the person in favor of using the person either merely for procreation or merely for pleasure. Maybe West's invocation of "prudish Victorian morality" is rhetorical?

3. Extended quotation:

The human body is an authentic part of the truth about man, just as its sensual and sexual aspects are an authentic part of the truth about human love. But it would be wrong to let this part obscure the whole—and this is what often happens in art.

However, the essence of what we call pornography in art is further to seek. Pornography is a marked tendency to accentuate the sexual element when reproducing the human body or human love in a work of art, with the object of inducing the reader or viewer to believe that sexual values are the only real values of the person, and that love is nothing more than the experience, individual or shared, of those values alone. This tendency is harmful, for it destroys the integral image of that important fragment of human reality which is love between man and woman. For the truth about human love consists always in reproducing the interpersonal relationship, however large sexual values may loom in that relationship. Just as the truth about man is that he is a person, however conspicuous sexual values are in his or her physical appearance.

A work of art must get at this truth, no matter how deeply it has to go into sexual matters. If it shows a tendency to distort this it can only give a distorted picture of reality. But pornography is not just a lapse or an error. It is a deliberate trend. If a distorted image is endowed with the power and prestige of artistic beauty there is a still greater likelihood that it will take root and establish itself in the mind and the will of those who contemplate it. For the human will often shows a great susceptibility to deformed images of reality. But for this very reason, when we condemn pornography we should often put the blame on immaturity and impurity, the absence of 'emotional shame' in those responsible for it. (192-3)

4. Funny how silent liberals largely are about this manifestation of "evil capitalism."

5. On yet another hand, ABC seems to have faithfully transmitted West's nuanced stances on oral sex, etc. So one wonders where the fault lies.

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David Wright and Ely Brown, "Sex Sermonist's Heroes: Pope John Paul II and Hugh Hefner: Devout Catholic Christopher West Lays Out Unexpected Vision of What Sex Can Mean for Christians," ABC News Nightline (May 7, 2009).

Karol Wojtyla, Love and Responsibility (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993).

Read Mercer Schuchardt, "The Cultural Victory of Hugh Hefner," GodSpy (October 1, 2003), originally published as "Play Boy! The Cultural Victory of Hugh Hefner" in re:generation quarterly (July 1, 2001). The quotation I've omitted is from the June 2001 issue of Philadelphia magazine.

News Flash: Women Are Different than Men

A couple recent examples of our willful blindness of the unique nature of women.

There's a provocative article in The Atlantic on "The Case Against Breast-Feeding." Hanna Rosin argues that studies showing the benefits of breast-feeding are exaggerated. It's a challenge to design a study that isolates breast-feeding from other factors accidentally correlated to it.

Nearly all the researchers I talked to pointed me to a series of studies designed by Kramer, published starting in 2001. Kramer followed 17,000 infants born in Belarus throughout their childhoods. He came up with a clever way to randomize his study, at least somewhat, without doing anything unethical. He took mothers who had already started nursing, and then subjected half of them to an intervention strongly encouraging them to nurse exclusively for several months. The intervention worked: many women nursed longer as a result. And extended breast-feeding did reduce the risk of a gastrointestinal infection by 40 percent. This result seems to be consistent with the protection that sIgA provides; in real life, it adds up to about four out of 100 babies having one less incident of diarrhea or vomiting. Kramer also noted some reduction in infant rashes. Otherwise, his studies found very few significant differences: none, for instance, in weight, blood pressure, ear infections, or allergies—some of the most commonly cited benefits in the breast-feeding literature.

Both the Kramer study and the sibling study did turn up one interesting finding: a bump in “cognitive ability” among breast-fed children. But intelligence is tricky to measure, because it’s subjective and affected by so many factors. Other recent studies, particularly those that have factored out the mother’s IQ, have found no difference at all between breast-fed and formula-fed babies. In Kramer’s study, the mean scores varied widely and mysteriously from clinic to clinic. What’s more, the connection he found “could be banal,” he told me—simply the result of “breast-feeding mothers’ interacting more with their babies, rather than of anything in the milk.”

The IQ studies run into the central problem of breast-feeding research: it is impossible to separate a mother’s decision to breast-feed—and everything that goes along with it—from the breast-feeding itself. (68)

What I want to know: why does nature have to be backed-up by science? Why isn't the presumption in favor of nature? Infant formula is the alternative. But why do we think we can synthesize a breast-milk alternative? Assuming we can even know all the components adequately, what makes us think we can put them together in exactly the way that nature has arranged?

Why are we talking about whatever we put in the infant's stomach as if it in itself has got to be the magic elixir? Isn't the whole culture of breast-feeding what should be under consideration? This would mean that benefits of a mother's interaction with her child in breast-feeding would be a legitimate benefit of breast-feeding.

This is human life we're talking about. It has a wholeness whose depths we can only guess at. As members of a consumeristic society, we think we can pick and choose elements of it as would the color of an automobile or the flavor of ice cream.

The underlying agenda becomes clear near the end of the article:

About seven years ago, I met a woman from Montreal, the sister-in-law of a friend, who was young and healthy and normal in every way, except that she refused to breast-feed her children. She wasn’t working at the time. She just felt that breast-feeding would set up an unequal dynamic in her marriage—one in which the mother, who was responsible for the very sustenance of the infant, would naturally become responsible for everything else as well. (69-70, emphasis added)

Again, perhaps the natural dynamic of motherhood is for the one responsible for the infant's sustenance to be closest to the child. But we all know that inequality is the greatest evil in the world. If we don't, we of course need to take more sensitivity courses. So, let's make a point of using our screwdrivers as hammers and vice versa.

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The Columbia University alumni magazine has an article about the very real problem women in the military being sexually harassed.

Spranger’s experience [of harassment] is hardly unusual among military women. According to several recent surveys conducted by researchers at veterans centers, nearly a third of female troops are raped by their comrades, while some three-quarters are sexually assaulted, and 90 percent are sexually harassed. “The harassment got to be so commonplace that I didn’t even think it was wrong,” Spranger says. “Anyway, it went up so high in the ranks there was nobody to tell.” (14)

It comes as a big surprise only to those wearing ideological blinders that men treat women differently. They treat women differently because they are different. Simply awarding them a different "role" doesn't change their essence. Why did we need a study to tell us this? Look around at the world. From time immemorial, armies have been followed by prostitutes. Sex and war have a natural tendency to go together.

It's well-known that the male hormone, testosterone, increases aggression, and that aggression increases testosterone.¹ So why would we ever think that men in combat would behave any better than men in civilian life? Certainly harassment is wrong and the men doing it are wrong. But what else would we expect? These guys are put into extremely tense, life-threatening situations. Men in bad situations have a pronounced tendency to act badly. Can't we consider this an empirical fact without commissioning a study to "scientifically" access it?

In the military, curbing sexual harassment has about as much chance of success as curbing profanity. No matter how many sensitivity courses you force men into, they have natural tendencies (for good or bad) that no one will ever eliminate except by denaturing or killing the patient.

Instead of banging at the square peg to get it into the round hole, perhaps we should look for a square hole.

But putting women in the military is more than just a problem of misunderstanding men. Much more importantly it's a problem of misunderstanding women. A couple later paragraphs are remarkable on this score:

Sergeant Marti Ribeiro, a wife and mother who entered the Air Force to follow family tradition [!], was relentlessly harassed throughout her deployment in 2003. So when she was redeployed in 2006 and sent to Afghanistan as a combat correspondent with the Army’s all-male 10th Mountain Division, she resolved that this time would be different.

“Excuse my language,” says Ribeiro, “but I decided to be a bitch. So I stepped off the plane into my own personal hell. Yes, I was able to put up a wall, but at a price. My wall became thicker and thicker. I’m normally a very bubbly person, but that disappeared behind the wall, and to this day I don’t know if I’ve ever regained that part of my personality.” (15)

We learn later (17) that Ribeiro was trying to follow in the footsteps of her father and grandfather, both officers. I can only wonder how the tradition-minded men in her family could imagine letting a woman fight in combat. Further, why would a mother, with any sense of responsibility to her children voluntarily put herself in harm's way? Out of a sense of family tradition? (Strange family that has a tradition of mothers abandoning their children.) The mind boggles.

In the second paragraph, we see how a woman in the military has to change herself to suit her new role. It would be interesting to compare this to the experience of how men adjust to the military, but it's clear it wouldn't be nearly the same transformation, if only for the reason that very few men aptly describe themselves in terms like "bubbly."

Sexual harassment in the military is a very real problem. But the real question this publication's ideological commitments² don't allow it to ask: why are we putting women in these situations in the first place? It's as if we feel obliged to deny that there are distinct natures in the world by proving that women have no essential nature.

The politically correct orthodoxy assumes that everyone should be able to step in to any role they want, and then forces everyone else to conform to that choice. The problem, this orthodoxy tells us, is not the institution of women in the military, but with the men who won't accept them.

In our egalitarian, individualistic society, an abundance of choices is held to indicate our freedom. But what if most of those choices lead not to our happiness, but to our misery? Wouldn't elimination of those bad possibilities better enable us to thrive? Highway guardrails are not restrictions on freedom, but better enable us to get where we're going safely.

It is only in acknowledging the distinct natures of men and women that we can help them to excel in the respective roles for which they are naturally suited and that are their natural glory.

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Notes

1. It seems wisest for children's primary caregivers not to be pumped up with testosterone whether by nature or by profession.

2. Whenever I feel guilty about not donating to my alma mater, a quick look at the alumni magazine cures me.

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Helen Benedict, "Betrayal in the Field," Columbia (Spring 2009), 12-17.

Hanna Rosin, "The Case Against Breast-Feeding" The Atlantic (April 2009), 64-70.

Dawkins's Dune

Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion (2007) is probably one of the most overblown rants in the English language published in living memory. Other than revealing how shallow and arrogant the author is (he cannot even condescend to read and understand his opponents' arguments—and admits as much), the book is not very useful.

However, in spite of himself, Dawkins does manage to allow through some glimmers of light. One such point of light is an example that forms part of an argument in which Dawkins is trying to undermine our perceptions of matter and material things, including ourselves, as really being things. As he writes on p. 371:

Steve Grand points out that you and I are more like waves than permanent 'things'. He invites his reader to think...

...of an experience from your childhood. Something you remember clearly, something you can see, feel, maybe even smell, as if you were really there. After all, you really were there at the time, weren't you? How else would you remember it? But here is the bombshell: you weren't there. Not a single atom that is in your body today was there when that event took place...Matter flows from place to place and momentarily comes together to be you. Whatever you are, therefore, you are not the stuff of which you are made. If that doesn't make the hair stand up on the back of your neck, read it again until it does, because it is important.

To which the appropriate response—the one for which the authors will pause expectantly until you gratify them—is a "Deeep, dude!" uttered with exaggerated awe. (Otherwise, they'll give you a hound-dog dejected look.) The tone of the whole book is similarly, sophistically sophomoric. Notice that if neither you, nor I, nor Dr. Dawkins, nor Dr. Grand are really the same in the past as now, what are we? Furthermore, how can we be said to exist then or now or to the point where any of us can say, "I think such-and-such to be the case," for example, "I think that I do not exist." If "I" do not exist, then how can "I" think? The argument is self-defeating.

Grand is actually right when he says, "Whatever you are, therefore, you are not the stuff of which you are made," though by his company with Richard Dawkins one has to suspect that he doesn't draw the right conclusions. Dawkins has the world upside-down: our ordinary perceptions (appropriately sifted through philosophical reason) are actually more certain than "scientific" conclusions that would undermine them. As I've already pointed out, if "I" don't exist, how can "I" know the existence of anything else, including scientific evidence? Dawkins manages to make such ridiculous claims only by implicitly exempting himself: it's as if he's a god, above it all.

Anyway, to get to Dawkins's thought-provoking passage:

In a desert plain in Tanzania, in the shadow of Ol Donyo Lengai, sacred volcano of the Masai, there is a large dune made of ash from an eruption in 1969. It is carved into shape by the wind. But the beautiful thing is that it moves bodily. It is what is technically known as a barchan (pronounced bahkahn). The entire dune walks across the desert in a westerly direction at a speed of about 17 metres per year. It retains its crescent shape and creeps along the direction of the horns. The wind blows sand up the shallower slope. Then as each sand grain hits the top of the ridge, it cascades down the steeper slope on the inside of the crescent. (370)

Like an organism, say a plant, the barchan's matter stays with it, without it being completely identified with the particular matter that constitutes it at a given time. The dynamics of the sand that makes up the dune is certainly part of the dynamics of the dune, but notice that for the most part the sand is simply inert and the forces that shape the dune are external and extrinsic to the dune itself, namely, the wind.

In contrast there is an intimate connection between the dynamics of a plant and the dynamics of its parts: the plant can truly be said to be controlled from the inside, that is, intrinsically.² (It is typical of modern, "scientific" mentality that it cannot recognize intrinsic properties.) This is most evident in the early stages of an organism’s development. This difference from non-living matter is particularly evident in the plant’s initial burst of growth. The principle directing all the action is intrinsic to the seed; in growing, what develops or unfolds is something that is already present. The sprouting seed takes in new matter and incorporates it into the structure of itself.

The parts of an organism are interdependent: they all rely on each other and support each other. For example, the roots bring in the water and nutrients the leaves need to photosynthesize, but the roots can't operate without energy from the leaves: which came first the roots or the leaves? The answer is both. Interdependence means that the whole system has to be present in some way from the beginning, before more matter has been assimilated: it's all or nothing. This is not to say that the living being is somehow independent of matter (manifestly it has to be instantiated by some matter all along), but simply that the matter is secondary, fungible (the form supervenes on the matter). While the matter comes and goes, it is actively involved in recruiting new matter to take its place in forming the organism.

Nature, as Aristotle wrote, is an intrinsic principle of motion and rest. While a barchan and a plant depend on matter without being identical with their matter, the barchan doesn't have a nature and isn't really a cohesive "thing" because its motion is governed from without. But a plant, like every other organism, has a nature—an inner principle—that controls its growth.³

Dawkins and company would have us believe that we organisms are a casual agglomeration of matter, like a barchan. Odd isn't it, that a man who claims to study nature would have such a poor grasp of it?⁴

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Notes

1. From the good chunk of Edward Feser's The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism I've already read, I recommend it highly.

2. Notice the word is "intrinsically," not "internally." It's not hard to conceive of something being inside a plant without it being part of the plant. For example, trees often grow around obstacles, like barbed-wire fences. A piece of matter is part of a living being to the extent that it contributes to its life.

3. It is instructive to compare these distinctions with the recent discussion of the (still nameless) fire creature.

4. Bertrand Russell said, "Mathematics is the only science where one never knows what one is talking about nor whether what is said is true." Something of this attitude has rubbed off on modern science.

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Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2007).

Steve Grand, Creation: Life and How to Make It (Harvard University Press, 2001).

Aristotle, Physics II.1.

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Note: —

Fr. Jaki Roundup

Last week I told you about the passing of Fr. Stanley L. Jaki. Eventually I will have to post something more in-depth about the man and his work. But in the meantime, I'll simply link to some recent items about him and highlight the more noteworthy information. This first group is obituaries.

• What Does Prayer Really Say? (April 7)
  a simple announcement, but the comments include a broadcast email from Seton Hall president Monsignor Robert Sheeran
• ISI First Principles (April 7)
• Communio blog (April 8)
• Pertinacious Papist (April 11)
  blog and discussion
• New York Times (April 12)
• Associated Press (April 13)
• Los Angeles Times (April 15)

The Los Angeles Times includes this interesting local detail: "From 1957 to 1960, Jaki lived and worked as bookkeeper at the Woodside Priory, which he co-founded with six other Benedictine priests, in the San Francisco Bay Area town of Portola Valley." The New York Times obituary concludes, "He is survived by two brothers, both Benedictine priests, the Rev. Zeno Jaki and the Rev. Theodose Jaki, who live at the Archabbey of Pannonhalma." So he is being buried at the Archabbey of Pannonhalma, about an hour and a half west of Budapest.¹

There is also a beautiful series of posts at Casa Santa Lidia:

• Father Jaki in Rome (March 30)
  photos from his last Rome visit
• Please Keep Praying for Fr. Jaki (April 7)
  more photos from Rome visit
• Father Stanley Jaki 1924 - 2009 (April 7)
  a couple more excellent photos
• In paradisum deducant te angeli (April 8)
  funeral arrangements
• From the Pontifical Academy of Sciences (April 14)
  memorial letter from Chancellor Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo
• An update (April 16)
  burial arrangements

From which we learn that Fr. Jaki's funeral was at "Monasterio de Nuestra Senora de Montserrat in Madrid (plaza San Bernardo, 79) at 17:00 this evening (Wednesday the 8th April)" and "Father Jaki's body will return to Hungary on Friday [the 17th]. Burial will take place on the 29th April at Pannonhalma, at 14:30 (2:30 p.m.)." (h/t the Blue Boar)

This next group are older items that I include as background:

• His Gifford Lectures (later published as The Road of Science and the Ways to God)
• Absolute Astronomy bio
• His 1996 CV

In the wake of Fr. Jaki's death, the Duhem Society has been founded to study the works of those two great historians of science, Fr. Jaki and Pierre Duhem. (h/t the Curt Jester) One of the more useful posts so far is a list of their works available online.

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Notes

1. A friend has asked for a prayer card. If anyone has one, and would take the trouble to scan and post online, it would be appreciated.

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Update (4/24): Fr. Rutler has a wonderful tribute to Fr. Jaki on Inside Catholic. Yes, Fr. Jaki was a Benedictine, though in the photo he appears to be dressed as a Jesuit. ;o)