My life as a sponge

Why do so many people fight the idea that humans evolved from simpler life forms? Perhaps, this resistance is the natural consequence of the "chain of being," the long-time teaching that God and the Angels are the most superior forms of existence, humans inferior to them, and "beasts" and plants more inferior still, with rocks at the very bottom. Great_Chain_of_Being - new.jpg [The 1579 drawing of the great chain of being from Didacus Valades, Rhetorica Christiana] Even though biology does not recognize a status hierarchy among living things, the “chain of being” schematic nonetheless lingers in the minds of some people, especially among people who fail to appreciate the immense biological record uncovered by dedicated scientists, the importance of the scientific method and the elegance of evolutionary theory. Those who oppose evolution tend to be the same people who go around dissing organisms traditionally plotted lower on the chain of being diagram. A good example would be the (lack of) respect given to sponges. You can almost hear the fundamentalists spitting and hissing as they utter something like the following: "How dare those evolutionists claim that we come from sponges!" To me, however, this reasoning does not reveal a scientific dispute, but only ignorance regarding the intimate biological relationship between humans and sponges. I find the harsh anti-evolutionary rhetoric of fundamentalists to be, essentially, anti-spongist. Since one can further trace human ancestry all the way to bacteria, I find such reasoning also anti-bacterialist. It makes me want to shout: You anti-spongists! You anti-bacterialists! The remedy for this attitude problem of fundamentalists is that they need to take the time to honor and appreciate the complexity of "simpler" organisms.

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NASA cancels/delays global warming projects

Today, the Boston Globe reported that NASA is "canceling or delaying a number of satellites designed to give scientists critical information on the earth's changing climate and environment."  The paper further reports that The space agency has shelved a $200 million satellite mission headed by a Massachusetts Institute of Technology…

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Why gay people simply must go to hell

A few years ago I had an extended conversation about gay people with an evangelical man in his mid-50s.  I thought that this conversation might be illuminating, in that this fellow is a decent fellow in many ways.  He would make a nice neighbor, for instance.  He works hard, pays his taxes, makes contributions to poor people, loves his children and abhors bigotry, at least when it involves blatant discrimination of African-Americans. On the other hand, he is deeply troubled with the “problem” of gays.  For purposes of this post, I will refer to him as “Donald.”

Here’s how the conversation went:

Do gays choose to be gay?  Donald is really perturbed that some people choose to engage in homosexual sex as a matter of sexual variety or perverted fun.  On the other hand, he does acknowledge that there are numerous gay people who have not chosen to be gay.  They were born or raised in such a way that they turned out “differently.”  Donald admits that they had no choice. They have innocently found themselves attracted to members of the same sex.  I asked Donald whether his God created them this way, and he shrugged.

Donald admits that many heterosexuals engage in sex that he considers degenerate or immoral.  This would include oral sex, anal sex or S&M for example.  Donald reluctantly admits that these people should nonetheless be allowed to marry.  People who do not want to have children or who physically can’t have children should also be …

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We must do X because we’ve ALWAYS done X

We’ve recently raised a few issues regarding justifications for bigotry.  What especially rankles some of us is the often-heard argument that people should do something a particular way (recently, the issue is preventing gay marriage) because that is the way that it has been done in the past.  

What a ridiculous-sounding principle on which to base an argument! Ridiculous sounding, unless you are a lawyer arguing an important case.  In courtrooms across this country, multitudes of lawyers lawyers stand up every day with straight faces and proceed to argue to judges that a case should be decided a particular way solely because a previous and similar case was handled that same way.

In law, this principle that judges should rely on precendent is given the obscure and mysterious-sounding label “stare decisis,” from the Latin, “stand by the thing decided.” [Stare decisis et non quieta movere, meaning “to stand by the decisions and not to disturb settled points”].

There is the great power in this heuristic.  At least it’s an equal opportunity principle:  Analogizing to old cases is a technique that can be used by crafty opportunists, as well as good-hearted seekers of justice. 

Though we are tempted to scoff at this principle (of relying on precedent) when it is employed by bigots, we need to keep things in context.  That very same principle is the heartbeat of justice.  How strange, you might think, that such an amoral principle determines outcomes of important cases!  That’s the way it is, however.  I’ll …

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