The price of such staples as wheat, corn, and rice has been rising dramatically for some time now. At least part of the increase in price has been blamed on the production of biofuel, seen by many as an eco-friendly alternative energy source whose use diminishes the emission of greenhouse gases and so helps prevent global warming, or as it is more commonly called nowadays, climate change.

As a 6 December 2007 article in the Economist tells us:

“This year biofuels will take a third of America's (record )maize harvest. That affects food markets directly: fill up an SUV's fuel tank with ethanol and you have used enough maize to feed a person for a year. And it affects them indirectly, as farmers switch to maize from other crops. The 30m tonnes of extra maize going to ethanol this year amounts to half the fall in the world's overall grain stocks.” 1

A poster on forums.cnet has worked out the math to his own satisfaction thus:

“I decided to try to work out the ‘The grain required to fill a 25-gallon SUV gas tank with ethanol, for instance, could feed one person for a year.’ statement. I think I figured out how he did it. Most of the nutritional sites I looked at used 2,000 calories as a figure of 1 day's calorie requirements, so let's use that as a base. Yellow corn meal is 110 calories in 30 grams. That would make 545 grams for one day's calories. Times 365 days in a year = 198,925 grams for a year. 454 grams in a pound makes that 438 pounds....Coming up with yield in a corn mash was not easy but I found one moonshine reference that said it was 1.5 gallons yield per 28 lb. bushel. The 438 pounds above would be 15.6 bushels. Times 1.5 gallons per bushel makes about 23.4 gallons total. That's damned close to the 25 gallons for a SUV tank, so I think that that's his logic.” 2

A 27 October 2007 Associated Press article cites a U.N. expert who “called the growing practice of converting food crops into biofuel ‘a crime against humanity,’ saying it is creating food shortages and price jumps that cause millions of poor people to go hungry.

Jean Ziegler, who has been the United Nations' independent expert on the right to food since the position was established in 2000, called for a five-year moratorium on biofuel production to halt what he called agrowing ‘catastrophe’ for the poor....” 3

And in a more recent, 12 April 2008 Globe and Mail article, we have:

“Fatal food riots in Haiti. Violent food-price protests in Egypt and Ivory Coast. Rice so valuable it is transported in armoured convoys. Soldiers guarding fields and warehouses. Export bans to keep local populations from starving.

"For the first time in decades, the spectre of widespread hunger for millions looms as food prices explode. Two words not in common currency in recent years — famine and starvation — are now being raised as distinct possibilities in the poorest, food-importing countries....

"The dramatic price rises have been driven by factors absent in previous food shortages.

"They include turning food into fuel...Driven by fears of global warming, biofuel has become big business in the U.S., Canada and the European Union. The incentive to produce the fuels is overwhelming because they are subsidized by taxpayers and, depending on the country or the region, come with content mandates.” 4

How could an attempt to save the planet lead to the possibility of mass hunger and starvation? Perhaps Michael Crichton is on to something when he writes that “one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists....If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.

“There's an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there's a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment.” 5

The overwhelming desire of energy sinners to put themselves into an ecological state of grace might explain their shortsightedness as regards the effects of their rush to the salvation of sustainability.

On the other hand, there is an ecological school of thought that sees depopulation as a positive thing because it regards Man (as he exists today) as a disruptive force in Nature. Indeed, Dave Foreman, author of Confessions of an Eco-Warrior and founder of environmentalist movement EarthFirst, has articulated as one of that movement’s principles “a placing of Earth first in all decisions, even ahead of human welfare if necessary.” Foreman feels that “an individual human life has no more intrinsic value than does an individual Grizzly Bear life.”

One of Foreman’s principles is “a recognition that there are far too many human beings on Earth…[I]n our decimation of biological diversity, in our production of toxins, in our attack on the basic life-support system of Earth, in our explosive population growth, we humans have become a disease—the Humanpox” which “has metastasized from a simple, uncomfortable, localized skin rash to a systemic life threat.”

Certainly, mass starvation in the poorer countries would reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that environmentalists feel are destroying the planet. And the idea of depopulation as a means of ushering in a new Eden is a recurrent theme in history: from the Jacobins’ attempt to depopulate France through mass executions, to the attempt by Stalin to depopulate the Soviet Union through the creation of artificial famine, to the attempt of Pol Pot to depopulate Cambodia though mass executions.

It remains to be seen how much of the world food crisis has been caused by the conversion of food crops into car fuel. But at the very least, this diversion of food to fuel has exacerbated the crisis. And it is certainly ironic that a West obsessed with universal egalitarianism should have put, through its efforts to make the world a better place to live in, so many millions at risk.

Also ironic is the fact that the more he accumulates scientific knowledge, the more Man sees himself as center of the universe. He sees his existence of such consequence that he ascribes to his actions the cyclical variations in the temperature of the earth and other natural phenomena. This attitude can perhaps be put down to the vanity that is part of the human condition, a vanity that also manifests itself in the desire to take charge of human evolution.

In his Henry IV, Part l, Shakespeare ridiculed Man’s tendency to self-aggrandizement:

GLENDOWER [A]t my nativity

The front of heaven was full of fiery shapes,

Of burning cressets; and at my birth

The frame and huge foundation of the earth

Shaked like a coward.

HOTSPUR Why, so it would have done at the same season, if your mother's cat had but kittened, though yourself had never been born....

Diseased nature oftentimes breaks forth

In strange eruptions; oft the teeming earth

Is with a kind of colic pinch'd and vex'd

By the imprisoning of unruly wind

Within her womb; which, for enlargement striving,

Shakes the old beldam earth and topples down

Steeples and moss-grown towers. At your birth

Our grandam earth, having this distemperature,

In passion shook.

Shakespeare’s poetic description of earthquakes is in line with that of Mark Buchanan (in Ubiquity), who writes: “[A]long the principal fault of the San Andreas, the plate to the west drifts northward, while the plate to the east moves southwards. If the rocks don’t slip at the boundary, then they bend, and develop internal stress. The more stress, the more likely slipping becomes. Earthquakes come from the buildup and release of stress.”

Of course, man-made disasters do exist, and it is as evident as it is incontrovertible that a sharp reduction in the production of food can lead to famine and mass death, especially in the poorer nations. The artificial famine in the Ukraine in the early 1930s—produced by Stalin in his attempt to take control of and speed up what he saw as the historical process, thereby ushering in a classless, egalitarian society—is documented by Robert Conquest in his Harvest of Sorrow.

Sources:

1.http://www.economist.com/research/articlesBySubject/displaystory.cfm?subjectid=7216688&story_id=10252015

2.http://forums.cnet.com/5208-7813_102-0.html?forumID=50&threadID=266801&messageID=2601236

3.http://www.livescience.com/environment/071027-ap-biofuel-crime.html

4.http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080410.wfood0411/BNStory/International/?&pageRequested=all&print=true

5.http://www.crichton-official.com/speech-environmentalismaseligion.html

Postgenderism & Egalitarianism

In their essay Postgenderism: Beyond the Gender Binary, George Dvorsky and James Hughes (hereafter D&H), argue that “the erosion of binary gender will be liberatory” and contend that “dyadic gender roles and sexual dimorphisms are generally to the detriment of individuals and society.” “Binary gender” refers to the existence of two genders, male and female. Therefore, D&H envisage a future in which male and female no longer exist and in which the two genders have been assimilated (in the sense of made the same) through the use of various biotechnologies. “Dyadic gender roles” are those roles that the male and female assume in a pair bond. The most obviously different role is that of child bearing. “Sexual dimorphism” refers to the difference in physical attributes between the male and the female, most strikingly the difference in height, strength, and sexual organs.

For some reason, D&H do not explain why the creation of an androgynous race will be liberatory. Perhaps they have addressed the question elsewhere. But the reader is left to wonder: Liberatory in what sense? What will the human race of today be liberated from? It’s “gendered traits”? But do humans want to lose their masculine or feminine natures, and if not, wouldn’t they experience the loss of such traits as a deprivation rather than a liberation?Again, one must ask how the existence of males and females is “generally to the detriment of individuals and society.” One often hears men complaining about women, and vice versa. But one rarely hears either men or women saying that the world would be better of if there was only one androgynous sex.

Though D&H state that “[p]ostgenderists donot call for the end of all gender traits, or universal androgyny, but rather that those traits become a matterof choice,” they do indicate their preference for androgyny as the ideal human condition when they assert that gender differences “are to the detriment of individuals and society.”

As regards “choice,” there are two issues: 1) Will the decision to androgynize always remain a matter of choice? It is possible that an elite of biotechnicians, if they ever achieved political power, will force androgynization on a mass scale. After all, if binary gender is detrimental to society, one could make the case for its elimination through legislation requiring biotechnological interventions. 2) Will parents or guardians make the choice for their children or wards? Might a child who has been androgynized through the use of various biotechnologies, including the use of irreversible genetic engineering, by his parents feel himself to be a freak of biotechnology once he had grown and started to interact with normal children? Could that adult child sue his parents for their having inflicted bodily harm and psychological damage?

It is possible that D&H’s dislike of gender differences arises from what bioconservative Leon Kass (in his Life, Liberty, and the Defense of Dignity) calls a transformation or corruption by expansion and exaggeration of the liberal democratic principles of freedom and equality (or egalitarianism). D&H refer approvingly to “our Enlightenment values” and are happy that what they term “the burdenof patriarchal oppression on women” has been reduced. But they point out that “[e]fforts to ameliorate patriarchy and the disabilities of binary gender through social, educational, political and economic reform can only achieve so much so long as the material basis, biological gendering of the body, brain and reproduction, remains fixed. Postgenderism confronts the limits of a social constructionist account of gender and sexuality, and proposes that the transcending of gender by social and political means is now being complemented and completed by technological means.”

Perhaps D&H view patriarchy negatively because it conflicts with their ideal of exaggerated equality. In any case, their solution to the problem of patriarchy is to assimilate humans beings into androgynes. This assimilation will be accomplished in part by drugs: “[T]he final liberation from dyadic, gendered, heteronormative relationships will likely come aboutthrough use of drugs that suppress pair-bonding impulses.”“Heteronormative relationships” we can assume are normal, heterosexual pair-bond relationships, which D&H are against because such relationships presuppose the existence of “binary gender.”

Surprisingly, the authors validate the contention of many people who see homosexual marriage as threatening the existence of the traditional family. “The spread of legal gay marriage in Europe,” D&H write, “and its slower adoption in the US, has accelerated the recognition of legal marriage as an arbitrary contract, rather than a religious, heterosexual, dyadic institution. Therefore laws against polygamy and group marriages must eventually fall, since they are clearly based in religious discrimination....The erosion of dyadic marriage will, in turn, help to erode the gender binary.”

The authors recognize a Marxist element in postgenderism: “In her 1970 book The Dialectic of Sex socialist-feminist Shulamith Firestone argued that, just as the material reality of the means of production determined the power differential between the owners and workers, the material reality of women having to bear children determined the gendering of power insociety.”Firestone states that “the heart of women's oppression is her childbearing and child-rearing roles… To assure the elimination of sexual classes requires the revolt of the underclass (women) and seizure of control of reproduction:... so the end goal of the feminist revolution must be unlike that of the first feminist movement, not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself; genital differences between human beings would no longer matter.”

It is true that there always exists tension between the various social and economic classes, just as there always exits tension between male and female. The question is whether the attempt to resolve the tension by assimilating the classes produces more harm then good.

As regards “the seizure of control of reproduction,” it’s difficult to see why women should have to seize control of something that is going on inside them. Indeed, women nowadays have the legal right to kill their unborn children in the womb—surely an indication of absolute control.

“For Firestone,” D&H write, “the only way to fundamentally undermine patriarchy and gender itself was to liberate women from the necessity of childbearing with the technology of the artificial womb.”But the use of an artificial womb would put control of childbearing into the hands of technicians, possibly male technicians. In reality, Firestone is advocating not that women take control of reproduction, but that they put it into strangers’ hands. So great is her personal distaste for motherhood that she attempts to universalize that distaste by trying to convince all women that motherhood somehow oppresses them. To eliminate what she regards as male privilege, Firestone wants to deprive women “of the necessity of childbearing.” In other words, she wants to deprive women of their womanhood, their essential womanly nature. She sees pregnancy in negative terms, as a “deformation of the body” and as something that “hurts and isn’t good for you.”Why Firestone should take her personal distaste for motherhood and construct out of it an unnatural social and political ideology is a question to be asked.

D&H see in the current use of certain psychotropic drugs the beginnings of a means to assimilate the sexes: “[Psychotropic] efforts to treat female depression and male aggression, autism and ADD would give us ways to make the brain more androgynous. Francis Fukuyama lamented these trends, the ‘masculinizing’ of depressive women's moods by antidepressants, and the ‘feminizing’ of ADD boys with stimulant medications, in Our Posthuman Future, asserting that they were the result of pressure to conform to an ‘androgynous median personality’ in American society.”

As stated previously, the desire to create an “androgynous median personality,” or an actual androgyne, seems to stem from a desire for exaggerated equality. Kass points out that “liberal principles were, to begin with, narrowly political. The rights of the Declaration of Independence were asserted to protect against despotism, not to serve as sole moral tender in all social matters and private life....Yet as the nation has become more pluralistic and more secularized, and as the once merely political language of rights has invaded and come to dominate all moral discourse, the liberal principles have been transformed—and, in my view, corrupted—by expansion and exaggeration.”

Indeed, the idea of political equality cannot be transferred onto the natural world, being made up, as it is, of boundaries, hierarchies—in a word, of inequalities. Sex differences and the patriarchal family are aspects of a survival strategy that has evolved over evolutionary time.

Today, we in the West are wealthy, comfortable, and face no present threat. It has not always been so in the past. Will it always be so in the future? Someday, perhaps even tomorrow, we will need the evolutionary advantages that our sexual and familial strategies have given us. We cannot afford to tamper with them just because such tampering gratifies our egalitarian sensibilities.

The West, for the moment sustained by its great wealth and protected by its nuclear arsenal, is a kind of hothouse where all types of exotica can flourish. But once the hothouse glass is broken, and the merciless forces of selection pressure enter, these delicate organisms will wither. The androgynization of the human race would comport the loss of survival strategies that have been honed over evolutionary time. Therefore, what might be considered eccentric behavior in a few individuals could become dangerous when universalized into a mass movement.

Link to Postgenderism: Beyond the Gender Binary, by George Dvorsky and James Hughes, PhD: http://ieet.org/archive/IEET-03-PostGender.pdf

A critique of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion from an evolutionary point of view.

by eloi

Odd book for an evolutionary biologist to write. For in rejecting the adaptive function of religious belief, Dawkins also rejects the significance of adaptation, which consists in the selection of any behavior, however irrational it may seem, that enhances either individual or group survival.

The God Delusion is not remarkable for its arguments, but for the fact that these arguments are made by the man who wrote, 30 years ago, the much more entertaining The Selfish Gene. In The God Delusion, Dawkins attempts to perform the remarkable feat of distancing himself from all the implications of his earlier work, while still trying to hold on to his credentials as an evolutionist.

Dawkins does state in his chapter entitled The Roots of Religion that “[u]niversal features of a species demand a Darwinian explanation.” But then he goes on to say that “It is hard to believe...that health is improved by the semi-permanent state of morbid guilt suffered by a Roman Catholic possessed of normal human frailty and less than normal intelligence.”

As an evolutionary biologist, Dawkins should be aware that guilt is an emotion that serves an adaptive purpose. As with other unpleasant emotions, such as shame and fear, it enables individuals to survive and prosper. It is an emotion that can be experienced equally intensely by a Roman Catholic as by an Oxford don. Why does Dawkins ignore such a fundamental truth about the evolutionary importance of unpleasant emotions?

Dawkins also mentions in passing the idea of group selection, referring to David Sloan Wilson, author of Darwin’s Cathedral, as “the American group-selection apostle.” Dawkins states that he is not a supporter of group selection, adding: “Those of us who belittle group selection admit that in principle it can happen. The question is whether it amounts to a significant force in evolution.” He gives no reason for his rejection of the evolutionary significance of group selection, but his reason is easy enough to deduce: acceptance of group selection would give credibility to D. S. Wilson’s arguments for religion as a group evolutionary strategy, and so would invalidate the thesis of The God Delusion from an evolutionary point of view.

But in any case, Dawkins cannot dismiss religion altogether, if he wants to keep any shred of his credentials as an evolutionary biologist, so he attempts to explain religion as “a misfiring, an unfortunate by-product of an underlying psychological propensity which in other circumstances is, or once was, useful.” Dawkins’ theory concerns children, and their need to believe what grown-ups tell them in order to survive. He implies that this belief is transferred onto a belief in a supernatural God. Unfortunately for Dawkins, this kind of theory is more appropriate to the social sciences in general and to the Frankfurt School’s The Authoritarian Personality in particular than to evolutionary biology.

Dawkins is especially upset by the Bible, and argues that it encourages “a system of morals which any civilized modern person...would find...obnoxious.” One of the Biblical horror stories he relates is that of Joshua:

“The ethnic cleansing begun in the time of Moses is brought to bloody fruition in the book of Joshua, a text remarkable for the bloodthirsty massacres it records and the xenophobic relish with which it does so....Good old Joshua didn’t rest until ‘they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old...with the edge of the sword.’”

Yet Dawkins wrote in TheSelfish Gene, in the chapter titled “Aggression,” that “members of the same species, being very similar to each other, being machines for preserving genes in the same kind of place, with the same kind of way of life, are particularly direct competitors for all the resources necessary for life.”

That’s an elegantly simple theory, and indeed is accepted by Darwinists: conflict between individuals and groups is normally a conflict over access to resources.

But we have a problem here. James Burnham, in his Suicide of the West, points out that liberalism, the ideology of the Secular State, “holds that there is nothing intrinsic to the nature of man that makes it impossible for human society to achieve the goals of peace, freedom, justice and well-being that liberalism assumes to be desirable and to define ‘the good society.’...[W]hat liberalism notices as the evils of society—crime, delinquency, war... —are the results of ignorance and faulty social institutions or arrangements.”

The faulty social institution, for Dawkins, is religion, especially Christianity. But we can assume that in what evolutionary psychologists call the EEA (Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness), and what the rest of us know as the Stone Age, there weren’t any copies of the Old Testament handy. Did their ignorance of the Old Testament make cave men especially peaceful? The archeological evidence suggests otherwise. Many Neanderthal skeletons show signs of stab wounds and blows to the head.

Dawkins does admit that “humanity’s powerful tendencies towards in-group loyalties and out-group hostilities would exist even in the absence of religion.” But this statement undercuts his entire anti-religion argument, and is as good an example as any of Dawkins’ confusion and ultimate inability to reconcile Darwinism with the ideology of the Secular State.

In the section titled Faithand the Sanctity of Human life, Dawkins bemoans the anti-abortion sentiment that is the basis of opposition to embryonic stem cell experimentation. But let us return here to the selfish gene. No matter how selfish the gene is, and no matter how intent it is on replicating itself, it doesn’t have much of a chance to do so if women are destroying their unborn children.

Any society that encourages abortion while disparaging motherhood is on thin evolutionary ice. Dawkins, the promoter of the selfish gene, isn’t being very considerate of his star attraction. He even goes so far as to put the humanness of the selfish human gene into question. “The humanness of an embryo’s cells cannot confer upon it any absolutely discontinuous moral status. It cannot, because of our evolutionary continuity with chimpanzees and, more distantly, with every species on the planet... [T]here are no natural borderlines in evolution.”

Dawkins concludes this section with the extraordinary statement (given the arguments in his book), that “it is surely very odd to think that a truth about the real world can be reversed by considerations of what would be morally desirable”! Very odd indeed.

Dawkins’ “group-selection apostle,” D. S. Wilson, in his Darwin’s Cathedral, does a very good job of explaining the adaptive value of religion. In his book, he makes the case for religion’s causing human groups to function as adaptive units. While admitting that some religious beliefs seem irrational to the modern mind,“[r]ationality,” he points out, “is not the gold standard against which all other forms of thought are to be judged. Adaptation is the gold standard against which rationality must be judged.” I doubt that any bona-fide evolutionary biologist would take issue with this affirmation. Indeed, as Wilson notes, “factual realists detached from practical reality were not among our ancestors.”

Taking Calvinism as an example, Wilson writes that its “seemingly irrational features...seem gratifyingly functional from an evolutionary perspective. For all its otherworldliness, Calvinism caused its community of believers to behave adaptively in the real world, which is all that evolution can be expected to accomplish.”

And in a passage that Dawkins might take to heart, Wilson writes that “[t]hose who regard themselves as nonreligious often scorn otherworldliness as a form of mental weakness....This stance itself can be criticized for misconstruing and cheapening a set of issues that deserves our most serious attention as scientists and intellectuals.”

Ironically, Dawkins himself seems to confirm Wilson’s view that seemingly rational, non-adaptive behavior leads to extinction. “[E]ven if it were conclusively demonstrated,” writes Dawkins, “that belief in God’s existence is completely essential to human psychological and emotional well-being; even if all atheists were despairing neurotics driven to suicide by relentless cosmic angst—none of this would contribute the tiniest jot or tittle of evidence that religious belief is true.”

The implication here is that even if a belief system that seems rational to you leads you to despair and suicide, it is still to be preferred over a belief system that might seem irrational but faith in which enables you to go on living. Scientific truth—or what passes for scientific truth in the age you live in—overrides all other concerns, even that of survival! Hardly a likely strategy for a bearer ofselfish genes.

The ironic thing about Dawkins’ preaching is that in the end, the society that values non-adaptive rationality over adaptiveness will succumb to others that value adaptiveness over rationality. And so the atheistic society that holds as sacred what it considers to be scientific truth will eventually disappear, replaced by a society made up of those “dyed-in-the-wool faith-heads” whom Dawkins finds so repugnant.

No one can be a true Darwinian and politically correct at the same time. And readers of The God Delusion cannot be faulted for wondering why they should be expected to believe in evolution and all its implications if such high-profile evolutionists like Dawkins don’t even seem to believe in it themselves.