The Secret Life of Snap Decisions

 The Locked Door: The Secret Life of Snap Decisions

Not long ago, one of the world’s top tennis coaches, a man named Vic Braden, began to notice something strange whenever he watched a tennis match. In tennis, players are given two chances to successfully hit a serve, and if they miss on their second chance, they are said to double-fault, and what Braden realized was that he always knew when a player was about to double-fault. A player would toss the ball up in the air and draw his racket back, and just as he was about to make contact, Braden would blurt out, “Oh, no, double fault,” and sure enough, the ball would go wide or long or it would hit the net. It didn’t seem to matter who was playing, man or woman, whether he was watching the match live or on television, or how well he knew the person serving. “I was calling double faults on girls from Russia I’d never seen before in my life,” Braden says. Nor was Braden simply lucky. Lucky is when you call a coin toss correctly. But double-faulting is rare. In an entire match, a professional tennis player might hit hundreds of serves and double-fault no more than three or four times. One year, at the big professional tennis tournament at Indian Wells, near Braden’s house in Southern California, he decided to keep track and found he correctly predicted sixteen out of seventeen double faults in the matches he watched. “For a while it got so bad that I got scared,” Braden says. “It literally scared me. I was getting twenty out of twenty right, and we’re talking about guys who almost never double-fault.”

Braden is now in his seventies. When he was young, he was a world-class tennis player, and over the past fifty years, he has coached and counseled and known many of the greatest tennis players in the history of the game. He is a small and irrepressible man with the energy of someone half his age, and if you were to talk to people in the tennis world, they’d tell you that Vic Braden knows as much about the nuances and subtleties of the game as any man alive. It isn’t surprising, then, that Vic Braden should be really good at reading a serve in the blink of an eye. It really isn’t any different from the ability of an art expert to look at the Getty kouros and know, instantly, that it’s a fake. Something in the way the tennis players hold themselves, or the way they toss the ball, or the fluidity of their motion triggers something in his unconscious. He instinctively picks up the “giss” of a double fault. He thin-slices some part of the service motion and—blink!—he just knows. But here’s the catch: much to Braden’s frustration, he simply cannot figure out how he knows.

“What did I see?” he says. “I would lie in bed, thinking, How did I do this? I don’t know. It drove me crazy. It tortured me. I’d go back and I’d go over the serve in my mind and I’d try to figure it out. Did they stumble? Did they take another step? Did they add a bounce to the ball—something that changed their motor program?” The evidence he used to draw his conclusions seemed to be buried somewhere in his unconscious, and he could not dredge it up.

This is the second critical fact about the thoughts and decisions that bubble up from our unconscious. Snap judgments are, first of all, enormously quick: they rely on the thinnest slices of experience. But they are also unconscious. In the Iowa gambling experiment, the gamblers started avoiding the dangerous red decks long before they were actually aware that they were avoiding them. It took another seventy cards for the conscious brain to finally figure out what was going on. When Harrison and Hoving and the Greek experts first confronted the kouros, they experienced waves of repulsion and words popping into their heads, and Harrison blurted out, “I’m sorry to hear that.” But at that moment of first doubt, they were a long way from being able to enumerate precisely why they felt the way they did. Hoving has talked to many art experts whom he calls fakebusters, and they all describe the act of getting at the truth of a work of art as an extraordinarily imprecise process. Hoving says they feel “a kind of mental rush, a flurry of visual facts flooding their minds when looking at a work of art. One fakebuster described the experience as if his eyes and senses were a flock of hummingbirds popping in and out of dozens of way stations. Within minutes, sometimes seconds, this fakebuster registered hosts of things that seemed to call out to him, ‘Watch out!’”

Here is Hoving on the art historian Bernard Berenson. “[He] sometimes distressed his colleagues with his inability to articulate how he could see so clearly the tiny defects and inconsistencies in a particular work that branded it either an unintelligent reworking or a fake. In one court case, in fact, Berenson was able to say only that his stomach felt wrong. He had a curious ringing in his ears. He was struck by a momentary depression. Or he felt woozy and off balance. Hardly scientific descriptions of how he knew he was in the presence of something cooked up or faked. But that’s as far as he was able to go.”

Snap judgments and rapid cognition take place behind a locked door. Vic Braden tried to look inside that room. He stayed up at night, trying to figure out what it is in the delivery of a tennis serve that primes his judgment. But he couldn’t. (...)

Braden has had a similar experience in his work with professional athletes. Over the years, he has made a point of talking to as many of the world’s top tennis players as possible, asking them questions about why and how they play the way they do, and invariably he comes away disappointed. “Out of all the research that we’ve done with top players, we haven’t found a single player who is consistent in knowing and explaining exactly what he does,” Braden says. “They give different answers at different times, or they have answers that simply are not meaningful.” One of the things he does, for instance, is videotape top tennis players and then digitize their movements, breaking them down frame by frame on a computer so that he knows, say, precisely how many degrees Pete Sampras rotates his shoulder on a cross-court backhand.

One of Braden’s digitized videotapes is of the tennis great Andre Agassi hitting a forehand. The image has been stripped down. Agassi has been reduced to a skeleton, so that as he moves to hit the ball, the movement of every joint in his body is clearly visible and measurable. The Agassi tape is a perfect illustration of our inability to describe how we behave in the moment. “Almost every pro in the world says that he uses his wrist to roll the racket over the ball when he hits a forehand,” Braden says. “Why? What are they seeing? Look”—and here Braden points to the screen—“see when he hits the ball? We can tell with digitized imaging whether a wrist turns an eighth of a degree. But players almost never move their wrist at all. Look how fixed it is. He doesn’t move his wrist until long after the ball is hit. He thinks he’s moving it at impact, but he’s actually not moving it until long after impact. How can so many people be fooled? People are going to coaches and paying hundreds of dollars to be taught how to roll their wrist over the ball, and all that’s happening is that the number of injuries to the arm is exploding.”

Braden found the same problem with the baseball player Ted Williams. Williams was perhaps the greatest hitter of all time, a man revered for his knowledge and insight into the art of hitting. One thing he always said was that he could look the ball onto the bat, that he could track it right to the point where he made contact. But Braden knew from his work in tennis that that is impossible. In the final five feet of a tennis ball’s flight toward a player, the ball is far too close and moving much too fast to be seen. The player, at that moment, is effectively blind. The same is true with baseball. No one can look a ball onto the bat. “I met with Ted Williams once,” Braden says. “We both worked for Sears and were both appearing at the same event. I said, ‘Gee, Ted. We just did a study that showed that human beings can’t track the ball onto the bat. It’s a three-millisecond event.’ And he was honest. He said, ‘Well, I guess it just seemed like I could do that.’”

Ted Williams could hit a baseball as well as anyone in history, and he could explain with utter confidence how to do it. But his explanation did not match his actions, just as Mary’s explanation for what she wanted in a man did not necessarily match who she was attracted to in the moment. We have, as human beings, a storytelling problem. We’re a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we don’t really have an explanation for.

***

In the Second World War, the British assembled thousands of so-called interceptors—mostly women—whose job it was to tune in every day and night to the radio broadcasts of the various divisions of the German military. The Germans were, of course, broadcasting in code, so—at least in the early part of the war—the British couldn’t understand what was being said. But that didn’t necessarily matter, because before long, just by listening to the cadence of the transmission, the interceptors began to pick up on the individual fists of the German operators, and by doing so, they knew something nearly as important, which was who was doing the sending. “If you listened to the same call signs over a certain period, you would begin to recognize that there were, say, three or four different operators in that unit, working on a shift system, each with his own characteristics,” says Nigel West, a British military historian. “And invariably, quite apart from the text, there would be the preambles, and the illicit exchanges. How are you today? How’s the girlfriend? What’s the weather like in Munich? So you fill out a little card, on which you write down all that kind of information, and pretty soon you have a kind of relationship with that person.”

The interceptors came up with descriptions of the fists and styles of the operators they were following. They assigned them names and assembled elaborate profiles of their personalities. After they identified the person who was sending the message, the interceptors would then locate their signal. So now they knew something more. They knew who was where. West goes on: “The interceptors had such a good handle on the transmitting characteristics of the German radio operators that they could literally follow them around Europe—wherever they were. That was extraordinarily valuable in constructing an order of battle, which is a diagram of what the individual military units in the field are doing and what their location is. If a particular radio operator was with a particular unit and transmitting from Florence, and then three weeks later you recognized that same operator, only this time he was in Linz, then you could assume that that particular unit had moved from northern Italy to the eastern front. Or you would know that a particular operator was with a tank repair unit and he always came up on the air every day at twelve o’clock. But now, after a big battle, he’s coming up at twelve, four in the afternoon, and seven in the evening, so you can assume that unit has a lot of work going on. And in a moment of crisis, when someone very high up asks, ‘Can you really be absolutely certain that this particular Luftwaffe Fliegerkorps [German air force squadron] is outside of Tobruk and not in Italy?’ you can answer, ‘Yes, that was Oscar, we are absolutely sure.’”

The key thing about fists is that they emerge naturally. Radio operators don’t deliberately try to sound distinctive. They simply end up sounding distinctive, because some part of their personality appears to express itself automatically and unconsciously in the way they work the Morse code keys. The other thing about a fist is that it reveals itself in even the smallest sample of Morse code. We have to listen to only a few characters to pick out an individual’s pattern. It doesn’t change or disappear for stretches or show up only in certain words or phrases. That’s why the British interceptors could listen to just a few bursts and say, with absolute certainty, “It’s Oscar, which means that yes, his unit is now definitely outside of Tobruk.” An operator’s fist is stable.

Malcolm Gladwell

Blink 

Imre Kertesz

 Imre Kertész (9 Nov. 1929 – 31 March 2016) was a Hungarian Jew who, at the age of 14, was deported to Auschwitz in 1944. After the war, he wrote a novel – and he insisted that it is a novel, not an autobiography! – titled Fatelessness. It was first published in 1975 in Hungary, and is only very loosely based on basic data of his own life, such as his brief presence at Auschwitz – where he presumably stayed only four days before being transferred on to Buchenwald (rather than being gassed on arrival, as was the fate of all other kids his age, or so the orthodoxy claims). Kertész received the Nobel Prize in Literature for this book in 2002.

A detailed analysis of the book shows that Kertész plagiarized platitudes from other texts, such as Elie Wiesel’s mendacious book Night. Vice versa, a scene described in the fictitious novel Fragments by Binjamin Wilkomirski (aka Bruno Doesekker) about an SS man wielding a whip was probably inspired by a passage in Kertész’s novel. In Kertész’s novel, we read, among other things:

A “real firework of flames and sparks” escaped from the Auschwitz crematorium chimneys – although that was technically impossible.

The crematorium chimneys also spread an unpleasant smell – which is also impossible, unless they were operated at such low temperatures that the bodies were not cremated but merely fried.

Poison gas streamed out of showerheads onto the victim’s heads – the morgues of Crematoria II and III had real showers, and the gas was supposedly supplied by throwing in Zyklon-B pellets.

Soap was handed out to those going into the gas chamber – which most certainly would not have happened.

What is the Nobel Prize in Literature worth if it is awarded to purveyors of lies exactly because they wrote a cock-and-bull story? And what about a civilization that celebrates such a literary fraud? (For more, see Springer 2004.)

Holocaust Encyklopedia 

The Company

The project www.HolocaustEncyclopedia.com and its related products (videos, audio book, eBook, print book) is implemented by the Academic Research Media Review Education Group LTD (ARG LTD). Any copyrights and trademarks deriving from products created with this project are owned by ARG LTD.

This project is moreover sponsored by the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH), and by a number of individuals and entities who value their privacy. Unless explicitly expressed in writing to us that sponsors wish to be publicly associated with this project, their identity will not be disclosed by us to anyone.

The Team

Our team consists of several scholars and numerous volunteers from various countries. Unless Western societies stop persecuting and prosecuting scholars and laypersons who peacefully voice their skepticism about aspects of the orthodox Holocaust narrative, we will not disclose the identity of any of these individuals.

Company Philosophy

Freedom of Speech (in any form) needs to be defended where it is threatened. The expression of non-controversial views is basically never threatened, hence needs no pro-active protection. Only views considered controversial or even offensive by those in power, or by an intolerant lynch mob, are threatened. However, as long as the views expressed do not advocate, promote, approve of, justify or condone the violation of anyone’s civil rights, there is no objective justification, and thus no legitimacy, to limit the expression of such views. If anyone strives to suppress them anyway, they turn into oppressive powers meriting every human being’s stiff opposition.

Criticizing an individual (such as a witness to a claimed historical event) or a group of individuals (such as survivors of a historical tragedy) for their behaviors or attitudes, and scrutinizing their expressed views, is NOT a violation of their civil rights. Disagreeing in a civilized manner with the views people expressed, and with their actions, is a fundamental part of Freedom of Speech. Anyone infringing on this right needs to be met with peaceful resistance and civil disobedience, in the tradition of Henry David Thoreau and Mahatma Gandhi.

This is the very core of our engagement.

 

The generally accepted climate science is false and dangerously wrong ...

 There are still genuinely brave scientists who understand that the generally accepted climate science is false and dangerously wrong with deadly consequences for humanity. 

a)   Dr John Clauser[20]

The US physicist Dr John Clauser was the co-winner of the 2022 Nobel Physics prize. He is a leading authority on quantum mechanics. In 2010, he was awarded the Wolf Prize in Physics, considered the second most prestigious physics award after the Nobel.   

On 5 May 2023, when he joined the board of the CO2 coalition, he was quoted as saying: “The popular narrative about climate change reflects a dangerous corruption of science that threatens the world’s economy and the well-being of billions of people…. In my opinion, there is no real climate crisis. There is, however, a very real problem with providing a decent standard of living to the world’s large population and an associated energy crisis. The latter is being unnecessarily exacerbated by what, in my opinion, is incorrect climate science.” b)   Dr Patrick Moore

The Canadian environmentalist; Dr Patrick Moore, believes that the anti-carbon-dioxide narrative is a scam, and that the inverse is true. He argues that an increased level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is beneficial. 

Dr Patrick Moore was also a co-founder of Greenpeace. He explains why he left the organisation: 

It was an easy decision to make because I had no choice. We started out with a fairly strong humanitarian orientation to save civilisation from nuclear war. That must mean you care about people at least a little bit. And it came to the point where the environmental movement, including Greenpeace, was basically characterising humans as the enemies of nature. We are the enemies of the earth. It was sort of like, “human beings are the only evil species on the planet, and even cockroaches are better than we are” type thing. So, this is the high philosophical level, this judgmental idea that human beings are the enemies of nature.[21]

c)   Dr Walter Manheimer PhD

Wallace Manheimer is a leading US nuclear physicist. He wrote a paper in September 2022 called “While the Climate Always Has and Always Will Change, There Is no Climate Crisis”. The abstract follows:

The emphasis on a false climate crisis is becoming a tragedy for modern civilization, which depends on reliable, economic, and environmentally viable energy. The windmills, solar panels and backup batteries have none of these qualities. This falsehood is pushed by a powerful lobby which Bjorn Lomborg has called a climate industrial complex, comprising some scientists, most media, industrialists, and legislators. It has somehow managed to convince many that CO2 in the atmosphere, a gas necessary for life on earth, one which we exhale with every breath, is an environmental poison. Multiple scientific theories and measurements show that there is no climate crisis… Over the period of human civilization, the temperature has oscillated between quite a few warm and cold periods, with many of the warm periods being warmer than today. During geological times, it and the carbon dioxide levels have been all over the place with no correlation between them. 

d)   Professor Dr Friedrich-Karl Ewert 

“It is important to understand whether CO2 truly causes climate change,” said Professor Dr Friedrich-Karl Ewert, “We rely entirely on simulation models.  Reality looks very different from simulations.” 

Dr Ewert is professor emeritus of geophysics at the University of Paderborn.  He spoke at a scientific conference put on by EIKE, the European Institute for Climate and Energy in Essen, Germany that was co-sponsored by CFACT and the Heartland Institute.

Ewert conducted exhaustive research comparing climate computer models to real world temperatures.  His findings confirm what others have concluded, that the models run far hotter than measured observations. He points out that the UN IPCC likes to carefully select the dates and data it presents, but that, “if we look at temperature changes over a larger period, any temperature trend disappears.”

In the course of his research, Ewert found something shocking.

“In 2012, we realized that the data offered by NASA was not the same as that offered in 2010.  The data had been altered.  If in 2010 someone had, for instance, looked up the data for Palma de Mallorca, they would have seen a cooling of .0076 degrees.  But in 2012 it suddenly showed a temperature increase of .0074 degrees.  This is not a one-off.”

“Until then measurements were sacrosanct.  Can you call it fraud or falsification?  I’m not a lawyer, but I can say it has been changed retroactively.  If I show you the data a negative judgment is justified.  In 2012 there was twice as much warming in the sample we examined compared with just two years prior.”

Warming campaigners have been confounded by a lack of any global warming since last century.  This contradicts large numbers of computer model projections that warming should have occurred.  They’ve attempted to gloss over this inconvenient fact by trumping up records.  They routinely claim some period of time as the “hottest ever,” in the expectation that the casual observer will never realize that their records are set by meaningless hundredths of a degree.  These tiny measurements run far below the margin of error.   Even the word “hottest” is unjustified.  Global temperature has been running around one-half degree above baseline with just a few years above.  Nothing hot about that.

It is fundamental to the scientific method that scientists must adapt their conclusions to fit their data.  They must never alter their data to serve a favoured conclusion.

Dr Ewert presents a powerful case.  If we cannot trust the keepers of the scientific data taxpayers paid for, what is there about global warming we can trust?[22]

e)   World Climate Declaration

The World Climate Declaration was issued on June 27, 2022. It baldly states that there is no climate emergency and that the climate models are wrong. It was signed by a global network of over 1,800 scientists and other professionals.

There is no climate emergency

Climate science should be less political, while climate policies should be more scientific. Scientists should openly address uncertainties and exaggerations in their predictions of global warming, while politicians should dispassionately count the real costs as well as the imagined benefits of their policy measures.

Natural as well as anthropogenic factors cause warming

The geological archive reveals that Earth’s climate has varied as long as the planet has existed, with natural cold and warm phases. The Little Ice Age ended as recently as 1850. Therefore, it is no surprise that we now are experiencing a period of warming.

Warming is far slower than predicted

The world has warmed significantly less than predicted by IPCC on the basis of modelled anthropogenic forcing. The gap between the real world and the modelled world tells us that we are far from understanding climate change. Climate policy relies on inadequate models. Climate models have many shortcomings and are not remotely plausible as policy tools. They do not only exaggerate the effect of greenhouse gases; they also ignore the fact that enriching the atmosphere with CO2 is beneficial.

CO2 is plant food, the basis of all life on Earth

CO2 is not a pollutant. It is essential to all life on Earth. More CO2 is favorable for nature, greening our planet. Additional CO2 in the air has promoted growth in global plant biomass. It is also profitable for agriculture, increasing the yields of crops worldwide.

Global warming has not increased natural disasters. There is no statistical evidence that global warming is intensifying hurricanes, floods, droughts and suchlike natural disasters, or making them more frequent. However, there is ample evidence that CO2-mitigation measures are as damaging as they are costly. Climate policy must respect scientific and economic realities. There is no climate emergency. Therefore, there is no cause for panic and alarm. We strongly oppose the harmful and unrealistic net-zero CO2 policy proposed for 2050. Go for adaptation instead of mitigation; adaptation works whatever the causes are.

OUR ADVICE TO THE EUROPEAN LEADERS IS THAT SCIENCE SHOULD STRIVE FOR A SIGNIFICANTLY BETTER UNDERSTANDING OF THE CLIMATE SYSTEM, WHILE POLITICS SHOULD FOCUS ON MINIMIZING POTENTIAL CLIMATE DAMAGE BY PRIORITIZING ADAPTATION STRATEGIES BASED ON PROVEN AND AFFORDABLE TECHNOLOGIES.

To believe the outcome of a climate model is to believe what the model makers have put in. This is precisely the problem of today’s climate discussion to which climate models are central. Climate science has degenerated into a discussion based on beliefs, not on sound self-critical science. Should not we free ourselves from the naive belief in immature climate models?[23]

OVERCOMING THE GERM THEORY MEDICAL MYTH

James McCumiskey

Uncommon Dissent Intellectuals Who Find Darwinism Unconvincing

 John Wilson

  FOREWORD

For years now, the New York Review of Books has been sending a direct-mail letter that asks—in bright red letters—“Are you an intellectual?” I was glad to see that the subtitle of Uncommon Dissent is Intellectuals Who Find Darwinism Unconvincing. “Intellectual” is a perfectly good noun that has fallen on hard times, particularly among conservatives, where it is almost always used pejoratively.

An intellectual may be, but is not necessarily, a specialist. Not all academics are intellectuals; not all intellectuals are academics. To be an intellectual is to possess a hungry mind and a willingness to question received opinion. But, contrary to a fashionable perversion of the intellectual’s calling, intellectual is not a synonym for skeptic. Healthy skepticism is indeed essential to the intellectual life, but it must not become an end in itself. There is a reality to which we are all accountable, a reality that invites our understanding.

Since you have picked up Uncommon Dissent, there’s a good chance that you would have to answer yes to the NYRB’s question. And you may already know that the book you’re holding is dangerous; it may get you into trouble. By questioning Darwinism, you place yourself in the company of all the cranks who have violated the taboos enforced by our current opinion-makers.

 In many settings, the contempt of the enlightened won’t affect you. If, however, you are teaching at a college or university, the costs may be considerable. (False dramatics? Not at all. The art of blackballing is practiced with great skill and ruthlessness in academia.)

Of course, the ferocity of resistance merely underlines the need for informed dissent. The almost comically hyperbolic arrogance of the Darwinian establishment, well documented in William Dembski’s introduction  to this volume, is representative of a larger malaise. As Steve Fuller observes in his new book, Kuhn vs Popper: The Struggle for the Soul of Science,

Popper’s view that a non-scientist might criticize science for failing to abide by its own publicly avowed standards is rarely found inside academia today. For those who have inherited Kuhn’s Cold War belief that normal science is a bulwark in a volatile world, it comes as no surprise that philosophers today would sooner criticize creationists for violating evolutionary strictures than evolutionists for violating more general scientific norms—an activity for which Popper had been notorious.

But there’s another, subtler danger to which almost every reader of this book is potentially vulnerable. The role of dissenter can be costly, but it can also be powerfully seductive. How easy it is, after reading a book such as this, to puff oneself up with pride, to wax dogmatic about the “crumbling edifice of evolutionary theory,” and to fall into the very arrogance that is characteristic of Darwinism at its worst.

If you really are an intellectual, and not what Solzhenitsyn calls a “smatterer,” you will finish this book with more questions than answers. You won’t simply accept the assertions of the authors gathered here, themselves a very diverse bunch; you’ll subject them to the same sort of searching critique they have brought to bear on Darwinism.

You will wonder, for starters, what precisely is meant by “Darwinism”—or “evolution,” for that matter, a notoriously slippery word. Is it the notion that life is merely a cosmic accident, the product of chance and natural selection? If so—and that is an essential aspect of the doctrine of some of the most visible proponents of Darwinism—there’s no reason not to toss it overboard.

But what about common descent? “Evolution,” Richard Dawkins writes in his introduction to The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2003, “is one of the most securely established facts in all science. The knowledge that we are cousins to apes, kangaroos, and bacteria is beyond all educated doubt.” Isn’t there abundant evidence that—in this limited but hardly insignificant sense—evolution is real, however open to dispute the adequacy of natural selection as its engine may be? (Even Richard Dawkins is right once in a while.)

What about scientists like Simon Conway Morris, the distinguished Cambridge paleobiologist whose book Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans  in a Lonely Universe argues that the evolution of life reveals a pattern, an underlying direction, in which he finds “the richness of a Creation”? Nothing of this “complexity and beauty,” he adds, “presupposes, let alone proves, the existence of God, but all is congruent.” Is he right? If so, why? If not, why not? Part of your job as a reader of Uncommon Dissent is to read it in dialogue with books such as Life’s Solution or Perspectives on an Evolving Creation, a newly published collection of essays edited by Keith B. Miller.

Since I have given you the beginnings of a reading list, let me conclude with one of my favorite books on Darwinism—one that is unfairly neglected in the literature. It is a small children’s book, Yellow and Pink, written and illustrated by William Steig, who died in the fall of 2003 at the age of ninety-five. Steig, whose cartoons appeared in the New Yorker from 1930 on, was best known for his children’s books (including Shrek!, the basis for the hit movie).

Yellow and Pink was first published in 1984 and was reissued in 2003 just a few months before Steig’s death. It is the story, as the opening lines tell us, of “two small figures made of wood, … lying out in the sun one day on an old newspaper. One was short, fat, and painted pink; the other was tall, thin, and painted yellow.” They are wondering how they came to be there—indeed, how they came to exist in the first place.

Pink looks at his companion—“He found Yellow’s color, his well-chiseled head, his whole form, admirable”—and he decides: “Someone must have made us.”

Not so, counters Yellow: “I say we’re an accident, somehow or other we just happened.” And they begin a debate, each forcefully pressing his case.

I don’t want to reveal the rest of the plot and spoil it for you. But I will say this: on the issue at stake, Steig’s little fable is far more penetrating than whole stacks of books that have accumulated in my study. I hope you will put it on your own bookshelf, not far from Uncommon Dissent. 

(...)

Because of the myth of invincibility that now surrounds it, Darwinism has become monopolistic and imperialistic. Though often associated with “liberalism,” Darwinism as practiced today knows nothing of the classical liberalism of John Stuart Mill. The proponents of “Darwinian liberalism” tolerate no dissent and regard all criticism of Darwinism’s fundamental tenets as false and reprehensible.

Yet according to Mill, “We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion; and even if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.” Mill expanded:

First, if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility. Secondly, though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any object is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied. Thirdly, even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds. And not only this, but, fourthly, the meaning of the doctrine itself will be in danger of being lost, or enfeebled, and deprived of its vital effect on the character and conduct: the dogma becoming a mere formal profession, inefficacious for good, but cumbering the ground,  and preventing the growth of any real and heartfelt conviction, from reason or personal experience.5Charles Darwin was Mill’s contemporary and fully accepted Mill’s classical liberalism. In the Origin of Species, Darwin wrote: “A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question.”6

By contrast, many of Darwin’s contemporary disciples have turned stifling dissent into an art form. Because the myth of invincibility must be preserved at all costs, it is not acceptable to place doubts about Darwinism on the table for vigorous discussion. Rather, the doubts must be disqualified and repressed. To see this, consider the response by Darwinists to Senator Rick Santorum’s “Sense of the Senate” amendment to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act:

It is the sense of the Senate that (1) good science education should prepare students to distinguish the data or testable theories of science from philosophical or religious claims that are made in the name of science; and (2) where biological evolution is taught, the curriculum should help students to understand why this subject generates so much continuing controversy, and should prepare the students to be informed participants in public discussions regarding the subject.7An eminently reasonable amendment, no doubt. Indeed, the U.S. Senate voted overwhelmingly for it (91-8). Even Senator Ted Kennedy, rarely an ally of Santorum’s, voted for it. What’s more, by merely reflecting the “sense of the Senate,” this amendment was nonbinding. And yet, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Center for Science Education, and the American Civil Liberties Union (to name but a few) were up in arms over this amendment. Why? Because evolution was singled out for special treatment and opened to critical scrutiny. Why, detractors of the amendment demanded, wasn’t general relativity or the atomic theory of matter singled out for similar treatment?

Comparisons of evolutionary theory with well-established theories of physics and chemistry display wishful thinking. The reason those theories were not singled out for critical scrutiny is, of course, because they are well established and evolutionary theory is not. This book will detail the weaknesses of Darwinian evolutionary theory and, going even further, argue that the preponderance of evidence goes against Darwinism.  Regardless of one’s point of view, it’s actually quite easy to see that Darwinism is not in the same league as the hard sciences. For instance, Darwinists will often compare their theory favorably to Einsteinian physics, claiming that Darwinism is just as well established as general relativity. Yet how many physicists, while arguing for the truth of Einsteinian physics, will claim that general relativity is as well established as Darwin’s theory? Zero.

Once Darwinism becomes a target for critical scrutiny, its proponents change the target. Thus, when David Berlinski criticized Darwinism in his December 2002 article in Commentary (titled “Has Darwin Met His Match?”), biologist Paul Gross took him to task for making “Darwinism” the topic of controversy. According to Gross, only “those who do not know much evolutionary biology” refer to something called “Darwinism.”8 Evolutionary biology, we are assured, is far richer than the caricature of it called Darwinism.

Despite such protestations, Darwinism is in fact the right target. It is no accident that in debates over biological evolution Darwin’s name keeps coming up. Repeated references to Darwin and Darwinism are not made simply out of respect for the history of the subject, as though evolutionary biology needed constantly to be reminded of its founder. Darwin’s theory constitutes the very core of evolutionary biology; he therefore looms larger than life in the study of biological origins. Indeed, nothing in evolutionary biology makes sense apart from Darwinism.

To see this, we need to understand Darwinism’s role in evolutionary biology. Darwinism is really two claims. The less crucial claim is that all organisms trace their lineage back to a universal common ancestor. Any two organisms are n-th cousins k-times removed where n and k depend on the two organisms in question. This claim is referred to as “common descent.” Although evolutionary biology is committed to common descent, that is not its central claim.

Rather, the central claim of evolutionary biology is that an unguided physical process can account for the emergence of all biological complexity and diversity. Filling in the details of that process remains a matter for debate among evolutionary biologists. Yet it is an in-house debate, and one essentially about details. In broad strokes, however, any unguided physical process capable of producing biological complexity must have three components: (1) hereditary transmission, (2) incidental change, and (3) natural selection.

Think of it this way: We start with some organism. It incurs some change. The change is incidental in the sense that it doesn’t anticipate  future changes that subsequent generations of organisms may experience (neo-Darwinism, for instance, treats such changes as random mutations or errors in genetic material). What’s more, incidental change is heritable and therefore can be transmitted to the next generation. Whether it actually is transmitted to the next generation and then preferentially preserved in subsequent generations, however, depends on whether the change is in some sense beneficial to the organism. If so, then natural selection will be likely to preserve organisms exhibiting that change.

This picture is perfectly general. As I already noted, it can accommodate neo-Darwinism. It can also accommodate Lamarckian evolution, whose incidental changes occur as organisms, simply by putting to use existing structures, enhance or modify the functionalities of those structures. It can accommodate Lynn Margulis’s idea of symbiogenetic evolution, whose incidental changes occur as different types of organisms come together to form a new, hybrid organism. And it can also accommodate other forms of incidental change, including genetic drift, lateral gene transfer, and the activity of regulatory genes in development.

Evolutionary biologists debate the precise role and extent of hereditary transmission and incidental change. The debate can even be quite sharp at times. But evolutionary biology leaves unchallenged Darwinism’s holy of holies—natural selection. Darwin himself was unclear about the mechanisms of hereditary transmission and incidental change. But whatever form they took, Darwin was convinced that natural selection was the key to harnessing them. The same is true for contemporary evolutionary biologists. That’s why to this day we hear repeated references to Darwin’s theory of natural selection but not to Darwin’s theory of variation or Darwin’s theory of inheritance.

Apart from design or teleology, what could coordinate the incidental changes that hereditary transmission passes from one generation to the next? To perform such coordination, evolution requires a substitute for a designer. Darwin’s claim to fame was to propose natural selection as a designer substitute. But natural selection is no substitute for intelligent coordination. All natural selection does is narrow the variability of incidental change by weeding out the less fit. What’s more, it acts on the spur of the moment, based solely on what the environment at present deems fit, and thus without any foresight of future possibilities. And yet this blind process, when coupled with another blind process (incidental change), is supposed to produce designs that exceed the capacities of any designers in our experience.

 Leaving aside small-scale evolutionary changes, such as insects developing insecticide resistance (which no one disputes), where is the evidence that natural selection can accomplish the intricacies of bioengineering that are manifest throughout the living world (such as producing insects in the first place)? Where is the evidence that the sorts of incidental changes required for large-scale evolution ever occur? The evidence simply isn’t there. Robert Koons (chapter 1) helps us appreciate what’s at stake by imagining what would happen to the germ theory of disease if scientists never found any microorganisms or viruses that produced diseases. That’s the problem with Darwinism: In place of detailed, testable accounts of how a complex biological system could realistically have emerged, Darwinism offers just-so stories about how such systems might have emerged in some idealized conceptual space far removed from biological reality.

Why, then, does Darwinism continue to garner such a huge following, especially among the intellectual elite? There are two reasons: (1) It provides a materialistic creation story that dispenses with any need for design, purpose, or God (which is convenient for those who want to escape the demands of religion, morality, and conscience). (2) The promise of getting design without a designer is incredibly seductive—it’s the ultimate free lunch. No wonder Daniel Dennett, in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, credits Darwin with “the single best idea anyone has ever had.”9 Getting design without a designer is a good trick indeed.

But all good tricks need some sleight of hand to deflect critical scrutiny. With Darwinism, that sleight of hand takes the form of myths. Darwinism depends on several subsidiary myths to prop its primary myth—the myth of invincibility. Artfully invoked and applied, these subsidiary myths have been enormously successful at censoring all doubts about Darwinism. Altogether, there are four subsidiary myths, and it is instructive to see how they work in detail:

(1) The myth of fundamentalist intransigence. According to this myth, only religious fanatics oppose Darwinism. What else could prevent the immediate and cheerful acceptance of Darwinism except fundamentalist intransigence? Darwinism, to the convinced Darwinist, is a self-evident truth. Biologist Paul Ewald, for instance, writes: “You have heritable variation, and you’ve got differences in survival and reproduction among the variants. That’s the beauty of it. It has to be true—it’s like arithmetic. And if there is life on other planets, natural selection has to be the fundamental organizing principle there, too.”10 If Darwin’s theory is as sure as arithmetic, what could prevent people from seeing its truth?

 Perhaps the failure of people to accept Darwinian evolution is a failure of education. One frequently gets this sense from reading publications by the National Academy of Sciences, the National Center for Science Education, and the National Association of Biology Teachers. If only people could be made to understand Darwin’s theory properly, they would readily sign off on it. But since Darwinists hold a monopoly on biology education in America, something else must be hindering Darwinism’s acceptance. Accordingly, a mindless fundamentalism must reign over the minds of a vast majority of Americans, leading them to dig in their heels and resist Darwinism’s truth, which otherwise would be plain for all to see.

Thus, what many Darwinists desire is not just more talented communicators to promote Darwinism in America’s biology classrooms, but an enforced educational and cultural policy for total worldview reprogramming, one that is sufficiently aggressive to capture and convert to Darwinism even the most recalcitrant among “religiously programmed” youth. That’s why Darwinists like Daniel Dennett, to all appearances a participant in and advocate of democracy, fantasize about quarantining religious parents. It seems ridiculous to convinced Darwinists like Dennett that the fault might lie with their theory and that the public might be picking up on faults inherent in that theory.

For the Darwinist, the myth of fundamentalist intransigence justifies all forms of character assassination, ad hominem attacks, guilt by association, and demonization. An increasing cultural groundswell against Darwinism has meant that Darwinists are no longer able to simply ignore their critics. Instead, they routinely begin their responses to critics by labeling them as creationists, which in the current intellectual climate is equivalent to being called a holocaust denier, a flat-earther, or a believer in horoscopes. Creationism, properly speaking, refers to a literal interpretation of Genesis in which God through special acts of creation brings the biophysical universe into existence in six literal twentyfour-hour days, somewhere in the last several thousand years. When Richard Dawkins replies to David Berlinski’s criticisms of Darwinism (see chapter 14), he will call Berlinski, who is a secular Jew, a “creationist.” This is not only name-calling, it is also incorrect. Recently Berlinski remarked: “I have no creationist agenda whatsoever and, beyond respecting the injunction to have a good time all the time, no religious principles, either.”11 If Berlinski can be branded a creationist, then woe to those who actually have religious convictions and oppose Darwinism.

(2) The Myth of Prometheus. This myth is the flipside of the previous one. If only religious crazies oppose Darwinism, then it is only  the intelligent and courageous who embrace Darwinism and fully accept its consequences. In the original myth, Prometheus brought fire to humanity and thus gave human beings control over nature (a power previously reserved to the gods). Prometheus did this at great personal cost, incurring the wrath of the gods, who chained him to a mountaintop and decreed that birds of prey should forever tear and consume his liver. By opposing arbitrary limitations that the gods imposed on humanity, Prometheus symbolized liberation from ignorance and superstition. In place of comforting myths that assure us of a special place in the great scheme of things, Prometheus teaches us to spurn the gods and stare the ultimate meaninglessness of reality in the eye without flinching.

Darwinists enjoy styling themselves as Prometheus’s heirs. Accordingly, they are humanity’s benefactors, conferring scientific insights that tell us the grim truth about our biological origins and thereby liberate us from our benighted fundamentalist past. Darwinism views the organic world as a great competition for life in which all living forms are ultimately destined for extinction. This is a bitter pill, but it is the best medicine we have. Fundamentalism, by contrast, is an opiate that causes us to sleepwalk through life, accepting fairy tales about our biological origins as well as fairy tales about any life beyond death. (Conflating the language of fairy tales with the language of ordinary religious belief is a favorite among more extreme Darwinists such as Steven Weinberg.)

The myth of Prometheus has been a public relations bonanza for Darwinists, helping them to score some of their best propaganda points. Take, for instance, the movie Inherit the Wind, a fictional portrayal of the Scopes monkey trial in which the forces of reason in the guise of Darwinism struggle against the mindless fundamentalism of a backwater town. The movie portrays Darwinism as the defender of scientific truth and intellectual honesty and also as the great liberator from religious bigotry. Given only this movie, who in their right mind would not support Darwinism? Notwithstanding, the actual Scopes trial, as Edward Sisson recounts in chapter 5 of this book, provided a quite different picture. Clarence Darrow, the Darwinist attorney who defended Scopes, carefully arranged the trial so that Darwinism was never subjected to cross-examination.

Although the myth of Prometheus has lofty pretensions, for many Darwinists it provides an excuse for elitism and snobbery. Accordingly, they divide the world into the moronic masses who reject Darwinism and its consequences, and the smart people (themselves) who believe it. Take Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett’s latest attempt to make atheism more alluring to the wider culture. They propose the word “bright”  to serve the same role with respect to atheism as the word “gay” serves with respect to homosexuality. Dawkins writes:

Paul Geisert and Mynga Futrell, of Sacramento, California, have set out to coin a new word, a new “gay.” Like gay, it should be a noun hijacked from an adjective, with its original meaning changed but not too much. Like gay, it should be catchy.… Like gay, it should be positive, warm, cheerful, bright. Bright? Yes, bright. Bright is the word, the new noun. I am a bright. You are a bright. She is a bright. We are the brights. Isn’t it about time you came out as a bright? Is he a bright? I can’t imagine falling for a woman who was not a bright. The website www.celeb-atheists.com suggests numerous intellectuals and other famous people are brights.… A bright is a person whose world view is free of supernatural and mystical elements. The ethics and actions of a bright are based on a naturalistic world view.… You can sign on as a bright at www.the-brights.net.12Since an atheistic worldview is best nourished on Darwinism (it was Dawkins, after all, who said that Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist), it follows that “brights” are also Darwinists. Perhaps in the future we shall see articles and books about “Darwin’s Bright Idea.”

(3) The myth of victory past. A scene in the Marx Brothers movie Duck Soup illustrates this myth. Groucho Marx, president of Freedonia, presides over a meeting of the cabinet. The following exchange ensues between Groucho and one of Freedonia’s ministers:

Groucho: “And now, members of the Cabinet, we’ll take up old business.”

Minister: “I wish to discuss the Tariff!”

Groucho: “Sit down, that’s new business! No old business? Very well—then we’ll take up new business”

Minister: “Now about that Tariff …”

Groucho: “Too late—that’s old business already!”

This exchange epitomizes Darwinism’s handling of criticism. When a valid criticism of Darwinism is first proposed, it is dismissed without an adequate response, either on a technicality or with some irrelevant point, or is simply ignored. As time passes, people forget that Darwinists never adequately met the criticism. But Darwinism is still calling the shots. Since the criticism failed to dislodge Darwinism, the criticism itself  must have been discredited or refuted somewhere. Thereafter the criticism becomes known as “that discredited criticism that was refuted a long time ago.” And, after that, even to raise the criticism betrays an outdated conception of evolutionary theory. In this way, the criticism, though entirely valid, simply vanishes into oblivion. With the internet and an emerging intellectual community that refuses to be cowed by Darwinist bullying, that scenario is beginning to change, but historically that is how Darwinists have handled criticism.

Michael Behe’s challenge to Darwinian evolution provides a recent case study in the myth of victory past. Certain biochemical systems are molecular machines of great sophistication and intricacy whose parts are each indispensable to the system’s function. Such systems are, as Behe defines them in his 1996 book Darwin’s Black Box, irreducibly complex. What’s more, as Behe also notes, such systems resist Darwinian explanations. Indeed, the biological community has no detailed, testable proposals for how irreducibly complex systems might have arisen through Darwinian means, only a variety of wishful speculations. Biologists like James Shapiro and Franklin Harold, who have no “creationist” or “intelligent design” agenda, admit that this is so.13 Nevertheless, it is routine among Darwinists to declare that Behe’s ideas have been decisively refuted and even to provide references to the biological literature in which Behe’s ideas are supposed to have been refuted.But what happens when one tracks down those references in the biological literature that are said to have refuted Behe? David Ray Griffin, a philosopher with no animus against Darwinism or sympathy for Behe’s intelligent design perspective, remarks:

The response I have received from repeating Behe’s claim [that the evolutionary literature fails to account for irreducible complexity] is that I obviously have not read the right books. There are, I am assured, evolutionists who have described how the transitions in question could have occurred [i.e., how, contra Behe, Darwinian pathways could lead to irreducibly complex biochemical systems]. When I ask in which books I can find these discussions, however, I either get no answer or else some titles that, upon examination, do not in fact contain the promised accounts. That such accounts exist seems to be something that is widely known, but I have yet to encounter someone who knows where they exist.

(...)

As this book shows, the public is right to remain unconvinced. This book divides into four parts. The first part shows why Darwinism faces a growing crisis of confidence. Robert Koons starts the ball rolling with his chapter “The Check Is in the Mail.” In this chapter Koons details how Darwinism substitutes theft for honest labor by insulating Darwinian theories from all possible criticism. Koons argues that the real motivation for Darwinism is to be found in a thoroughgoing metaphysical attack on the idea of agency, both human and divine, that has been ongoing for two hundred years. He also suggests that by undermining the idea of reasonable and responsible agency, Darwinism helped prepare the way for a variety of destructive experiments in social engineering.  Next comes Phillip Johnson’s well-known essay “Darwinism as Dogma,” which originally appeared back in 1990 in First Things. This essay masterfully disentangles Darwinism’s interweaving with materialist philosophy. And finally, there is Marcel-Paul Schützenberger’s 1996 interview with La Recherche, conducted shortly before his death, in which he recapitulates his ideas about functional complexity and the challenge this feature of biological systems poses to Darwinism. The original interview was in French and was translated into English by David Berlinski for the journal Origins & Design. It has been further edited here for style and clarity.

Part two focuses on Darwinism’s cultural inroads. Nancy Pearcey starts things off with a sweeping overview. The effect of reading her essay is dizzying as she documents how Darwinism has inveigled itself into one academic discipline after another. Next comes Edward Sisson’s brilliant analysis of how the professionalization of science has rendered science incapable of correcting itself in the case of Darwinism. Essentially, the critic of Darwinism faces a prisoner’s dilemma in which perpetuating Darwinian falsehoods, either by actively promoting them or by silent complicity, is the best strategy for advancing one’s career. J. Budziszewski’s chapter on natural law is a much needed corrective to an emerging literature that seeks to combat postmodern ethical relativism with a distorted version of natural law based on Darwinism. And finally, Frank Tipler’s chapter on refereed journals shows how the peerreview process increasingly stifles scientific creativity and enforces orthodoxies like Darwinism. Although the chapter was specifically commissioned for this volume, Tipler’s analysis has such huge public policy implications for the practice and funding of science that his chapter has now also appeared as an article on the web.25Part three examines the dynamics of converting to and deconverting from Darwinism. Often, in the writings of Darwinists (e.g., Ronald Numbers’s book The Creationists), one gets the impression that the more educated people become, the more reasonable Darwinism seems. Part three shows that this is not the case. Michael Behe, raised as a Roman Catholic and trained as a biologist, accepted Darwinism as he began his scientific career. Only later, as he reflected on what he had been taught about evolution, did his doubts about Darwinism arise and finally lead to a full deconversion from Darwinism. Michael Denton, by contrast, never accepted Darwinism. Though early in his life he rejected Darwinism because of his religious faith, Denton continued to reject Darwinism even after he had shed his religious faith and learned an awful lot of biology. James Barham began as Christian fundamentalist, turned to a  hardcore atheistic brand of Darwinism, and then, after thinking deeply about the nature of biological function, turned to a naturalized form of teleology at odds with both fundamentalism and Darwinism.

Finally, part four examines the nitty-gritty of why Darwinism is a failed intellectual project. After reviewing and overturning many of the key evidences used to prop Darwinism, Cornelius Hunter shows why Darwinism should properly be regarded not as a positive scientific research program but as a reactionary metaphysical program whose justification depends intrinsically on naive assumptions about what God would and would not have done in designing biological systems. Next Roland Hirsch overviews many of the recent advances in molecular biology and biochemistry, showing how Darwinism has failed either to anticipate or to explain them. After that, Christopher Langan carefully examines the nature of causality and shows how Darwinism depends on a superficial analysis of causality to hide its fundamental conceptual problems. Finally, we come to the chapter that inspired this book, David Berlinski’s June 1996 Commentary essay, “The Deniable Darwin.” In exposing Darwinism’s failure to resolve biology’s information problem, this essay provoked an enormous response (over thirty published letters pro and con). In addition to the essay, this chapter includes some of the key letters by Darwinists critical of Berlinski’s essay. It also includes Berlinski’s replies to these critics.

In commending this volume to the reader, I wish to leave Darwinists with this closing thought: You’ve had it way too easy until now. It is no longer credible to conflate informed criticism of Darwinism with ignorance, stupidity, insanity, wickedness, or brainwashing. Informed critiques of Darwinism have consistently appeared ever since Darwin published his Origin of Species (cf. the work of Louis Agassiz, St. George Mivart, Richard Goldschmidt, Pierre Grassé, Gerald Kerkut, and Michael Polanyi). Unfortunately, because Darwinism’s myths are so entrenched, such critiques have until now been unable to reach a critical mass and actually overthrow Darwinism. That is now changing. We’ll know that a critical mass has been achieved when it becomes widely acceptable among intellectuals to challenge Darwinism. When that happens—when it becomes acceptable to say that the emperor has no clothes—Darwin’s actual theory will assume the modest role in science that it deserves and Darwinism’s grandiose pretensions will become dissertation fodder for nineteenth- and twentieth-century intellectual history. In other words, Darwinism will be history.

Inherit the Wind

 Inherit the Wind

The Play’s the Thing

After almost every lecture I give, some person—usually a parent—asks me for advice about how to come across as a reasonable person when speaking up at a school-board meeting against the dogmatic teaching of Darwinian evolution. People who only want unbiased, honest science education that sticks to the evidence are bewildered by the reception they get when they try to make their case. Their specific points are brushed aside, and they are dismissed out of hand as religious fanatics. The newspapers report that “creationists” are once again trying to censor science education because it offends their religious beliefs. Why is it so hard for reasoned criticism of biased teaching to get a hearing?The answer to that question begins with a Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee play called Inherit the Wind, which was made into a movie in 1960 starring Spencer Tracy, Gene Kelly and Frederic March. You can rent the movie at any video store with a “classics” section, and I urge you to do so and watch it carefully after reading this chapter. The play is a fictionalized treatment of the “Scopes Trial” of 1925, the legendary courtroom confrontation in Tennessee over the teaching of evolution. Inherit the Wind is a masterpiece of propaganda, promoting a stereotype of the public debate about creation and evolution that gives all virtue and intelligence to the Darwinists. The play did not create the stereotype, but it presented it in the form of a powerful story that sticks in the minds of journalists, scientists and intellectuals generally.If you speak out about the teaching of evolution at a public hearing, audience and reporters will be placing your words in the context of Inherit the Wind. Whether you know it or not, you are playing a role in a play. The question is, which role in the story will be yours? The Story of the Play 

A handsome young science teacher named Bert Cates, dedicated to his students and his teaching, is jailed for violating a state law against the teaching of evolution. Bert is in love with Rachel Brown, also a teacher and the daughter of the Reverend Jeremiah Brown, the most powerful of the local ministers. Reverend Brown is a vicious bigot with no redeeming qualities whatsoever, whose practice of Christian ministry seems to be limited to cursing people like Bert and threatening them with damnation. Rachel herself is a conformist; although she adores Bert, she continually urges him to stop making trouble for himself by speaking out against the community’s religious prejudices.The trial of Bert Cates becomes America’s first media circus when Matthew Harrison Brady volunteers to be the prosecutor. Brady, a former presidential candidate, has become an antievolution crusader in his declining years. As the town of Hillsboro is preparing to give Brady a hero’s welcome, journalist E. K. Hornbeck arrives from Baltimore. Hornbeck is a familiar movie character: the hard-boiled reporter who makes sarcastic comments about events on stage, a bit like the chorus in an ancient Greek drama. The townspeople provide him with many opportunities to exercise his wit, as they display their ignorance and vulgarity while mindlessly singing choruses of “Give Me That Old-Time Religion.”Brady eventually arrives, makes a phony-sounding speech, eats picnic food like the glutton he is, and generally shows himself to be a pompous old fool. He is also sneaky. After meeting the Reverend Brown and learning that Rachel Brown is friendly with Bert Cates, he induces the gullible Rachel to confide in him about ideas Bert has shared with her in confidence. Brady treacherously intends to use these against Bert in court, and even to call Rachel as a prosecution witness against her future husband.The Brady welcoming banquet is interrupted by the news that the famous Henry Drummond is coming to be the defense lawyer. Drummond is another familiar movie character: the fearless advocate who fights for justice against seemingly hopeless odds. As the trial begins we see him trying to counter the religious prejudice of the community and the court. His every witticism strikes home, just as every feeble attempt by Brady to score a point backfires. If the deck in Hillsboro is stacked heavily against Drummond, the deck in Hollywood is stacked just as heavily in his favor. This black-and-white morality play could not be starker: all intelligence and goodness are on the side of Drummond and Cates, all folly and malice belong to Brady and Brown.Although the defense is pure in mind and heart, it has an impossible legal position. Bert admits that he taught evolution, and that is what the law forbids. The prosecution proves its case by making some reluctant students testify that they were taught evolution. Brady unnecessarily supplements this evidence by forcing Rachel to testify to Bert’s dangerous opinions, of which the most dangerous is this: “God created man in his own image, and man, being a gentleman, returned the compliment.” Rachel’s testimony has no legal significance, but its dramatic purpose is to underscore Bert’s kindness and decency. He forgives Rachel and puts himself at risk by forbidding Drummond to upset her with cross-examination. Drummond has brought several scientific and theological experts to Hillsboro to testify that Darwinism is scientifically valid and no danger to a properly rational religion. The judge rules the expert testimony inadmissible, thus leaving the defense temporarily at a loss.Drummond brilliantly saves the situation by calling his adversary Brady to the witness stand as an expert on the Bible. The judge correctly points out that this testimony is also irrelevant to the question whether Bert violated the law, but Brady is so conceited that he insists on taking the stand to show he can defeat the unbeliever. Drummond skillfully takes advantage of Brady’s overconfidence. After some preliminary sparring about details like Jonah and the whale, Drummond stuns Brady by pointing out that the biblical patriarchs did their “begetting” by sexual intercourse. Apparently Brady had not previously thought of this embarrassing but undeniable fact, and he blurts out that the Bible calls sex “original sin.” The dramatic point, of course, is that Bible believers are killjoys and prudes who want to abolish sex.Eventually a rattled Brady concedes that since the first day of creation occurred before the sun existed, it might have been longer than twenty-four hours. Drummond seizes on this concession to demolish Brady’s confidence, and gets Brady to talk such obvious nonsense that even his supporters laugh at him. The day ends in a spectacular moral victory for the defense.None of this has anything to do with the legal issue, so the jury returns a guilty verdict the next day anyway. The town fathers are sufficiently embarrassed by the fiasco, however, that they pressure the judge to impose a nominal fine in the hope that this will end the publicity. Bert refuses to pay the fine and vows to go on speaking up for truth and freedom. Brady desperately attempts to retrieve the situation with another speech and is so upset by his own incoherent rant that he has a stroke and dies on the spot. Rachel tells Bert that she has decided to start thinking for herself, which in the context of the play seems to mean that she will accept Bert’s way of thinking instead of her father’s. (I can’t help wondering whether her new independence of mind will have unexpected consequences, and whether Bert will ever have any second thoughts about having encouraged it.) The two lovers decide to leave town and get married. Love and reason thus overcome prejudice and bigotry.As the play ends, Drummond is left alone on the stage courtroom with his reflections. According to the stage directions, he picks up a copy of Darwin’s Origin of Species and a copy of the Bible, “balancing them thoughtfully, as if his hands were scales. He half-smiles, half-shrugs.” Then he jams the two books together into his briefcase. The symbolism tells us that the Bible and Darwin can balance each other, if we allow Henry Drummond to do the balancing. It is roughly the line of reasoning that we saw Emilio accepting at the beginning of the previous chapter. The Scopes Trial: What Really Happened 

As the authors of Inherit the Wind admit in their preface, the play is not history. That is an understatement. The real Scopes trial was not a serious criminal prosecution but a symbolic confrontation engineered to put the town of Dayton, Tennessee, on the map. The Tennessee legislature had funded a new science education program and, to reassure the public that science would not be used to discredit religion, had included as a symbolic measure a clause forbidding the teaching of evolution. The governor who signed the bill, realizing that any prosecution would be an embarrassment, predicted that the law would not be enforced. The American Civil Liberties Union wanted a test case, however, and advertised for a teacher willing to be a nominal defendant in a staged prosecution. Local boosters in Dayton took up the offer in the hope that the mock trial would be good for business. The volunteer defendant, John T. Scopes, was a physical education teacher who taught biology briefly as a substitute. He was never in danger of going to jail.Local prosecutors fell in with the scheme and obligingly obtained an indictment against Scopes, respectfully declining the ACLU’s offer to pay the costs of the prosecution. The trial got out of hand and became a media circus when William Jennings Bryan volunteered to speak for the prosecution and Clarence Darrow volunteered to be the defense lawyer. Darrow, fresh from a sensational murder trial in Chicago, was also nationally famous as an agnostic lecturer. Bryan, a three-time Democratic presidential candidate, was no reactionary but a progressive politician who had led political battles to protect working people and farmers from the excesses of big business. His reasons for opposing Darwinism appealed to many liberals and socialists in his day, as they still would. Bryan had seen Darwinism used in America to justify unrestrained capitalism, and in Germany to justify the brutal militarism that led to World War I.Like Bryan, Clarence Darrow was a friend of labor unions and an opponent of unrestrained capitalism. He was also a materialist and a determinist who defended his clients by denying that they possessed free will. Darrow did notwant to balance the Bible with evolutionary science; he wanted to get rid of religion and replace it with science and agnostic philosophy. On the other hand, Bryan truly was a scientific ignoramus, and the wily Darrow really did make a fool of him. If Darrow had wanted, he probably could just as easily have made the leading evolutionary scientists of the day look foolish. For example, some of these scientists confidently cited the fraudulent Piltdown Man and the tooth of “Nebraska Man” (which turned out to be from a kind of pig) as proof of human evolution. If Bryan was confused about the evidence for evolution, he had a lot of respectable company. What the Play Means 

I won’t go any further into the discrepancies between the play and history, because the play has had so much impact that its story is more important than what really happened. The play is not primarily about a single event; it is about the modernist understanding of freedom.Once upon a time, the story says, the world was ruled by cruel religious oppressors called Christians, similar to the wicked stepmother and stepsisters in “Cinderella,” who tried to prevent people from thinking and from marrying their true love. Liberation from this oppression came via Darwin, who taught us that our real creator was a natural process that leaves human reason free to make up new rules whenever we want. Most modernist intellectuals interpret the story that way, and of course a liberated Cinderella is not likely to give the wicked stepmother another chance to enslave her. Whatever the stepmother says, Cinderella knows who she is and what she wants to do.Read that way, Inherit the Wind is a bitter attack upon Christianity, or at least the conservative Christianity that considers the Bible to be in some sense a reliable historical record. The rationalists have all the good lines and all the virtues. Brady and Brown are a combination of folly, pride and malice, and their followers are so many mindless puppets. One would suppose from the play that Christianity has no program other than to teach hatred. At the surface level the play is a smear, although it smears an acceptable target and hence is considered suitable for use in public schools.Just how ugly the smear is came home to me the first time I saw the movie, in a theater next to Harvard University (at a time when I would have called myself an agnostic). The demonstrative student audience freely jeered at the rubes of Hillsboro, whooped with delight at every wisecrack from Hornbeck or Drummond, and reveled in Brady’s humiliation. It occurred to me that the Harvard students were reacting much like the worst of the Hillsboro citizens in the movie. They thought they were showing how smart they were by aping the prejudices of their teachers and by being cruel to the ghost of William Jennings Bryan—who was probably a much better man than any of them.Maybe Hillsboro isn’t just Dayton, Tennessee. Maybe sometimes it’s Harvard, or Berkeley. The Story Told Another Way 

That memory has stayed with me, and shows that there may be more than one way to interpret the play. I’ve told the bare bones of the story literally; now let me retell the story at a different level, with just a tad of artistic license.A brilliant young teacher develops a following because he has exciting ideas that open up a new way of life. His friends and students love him, but the ruling elders of his community hate the very thought of him. These elders are themselves cruel hypocrites who pile up burdens on the people and do not lift a finger to help them. The elders rule the people by fear and are themselves ruled by fear. They substitute dogmas and empty rituals for the true teaching they once knew, which commands truth and love as its first principles.The elders want to destroy the teacher who threatens their control over the people, but his behavior and character are so exemplary that they can find no fault to justify condemning him. They plan to entrap him by convincing one of his closest friends to betray him. Eventually they are able to arrange a rigged legal proceeding and get a guilty verdict. Their victory is empty, however. The teacher wins even when he apparently loses, and he sums up his teaching in these words: “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”Does that story sound familiar? Of course Bert Cates is not Jesus, although the play does portray him as virtually sinless. It would be more accurate to say that the authors aimed to give Cates and Drummond the virtues of Cinderella and Socrates. My point is that even this most seemingly antibiblical of dramas achieves its moral effect by borrowing elements from the gospel, which is the good news of how we can be delivered from the power of sin. Sin has power over us in many ways, and one of them is through the mind control practiced by fearful and hypocritical religious authorities. The independent mind that overthrows such oppressive power is good news for everyone but the oppressor.Inherit the Wind is therefore probably truer than its authors knew. There is nothing wrong with its basic story of liberation. That story itself becomes a vehicle of oppression, however, when it invites the people with power to cast themselves as the liberators. It’s like the dictators of the former Soviet Union calling themselves the champions of the poor working man. Whatever may have been the case a long time ago, by the time the movie was made Bert Cates and Henry Drummond were the ones with the power to shut other people up. Owning the Microphone 

My summary of Inherit the Wind left out two events that I now want to bring into the picture. When Henry Drummond is humiliating Matthew Harrison Brady on the witness stand, he accuses Brady of setting himself up as God by presuming to suppress freedom of thought in others. Drummond warns Brady that someday the power may be in other hands, saying, “Suppose Mr. Cates had enough influence and lung power to railroad through the State Legislature a law that only Darwin should be taught in the schools!”That possibility may have seemed remote in Hillsboro, but of course it is exactly what happened later. The real story of the Scopes trial is that the stereotype it promoted helped the Darwinists capture the power of the law, and they have since used the law to prevent other people from thinking independently. By labeling any fundamental dissent from Darwinism as “religion,” they are able to ban criticism of the official evolution story from public education far more effectively than the teaching of evolution was banned from Tennessee schools in the 1920s.But how was this reversal accomplished in a voting democracy? Given that a majority of Americans still believe that God is our Creator, how have the Darwinists been able to obtain so much influence and lung power?The play answers that question too. In the final scene of Inherit the Wind, when the jury returns to the courtroom to deliver its verdict, a character identified as “Radio Man” appears in the courtroom, carrying a large microphone. He explains to the judge that the microphone is connected by direct wire to Station WGN in Chicago. Radio Man proceeds to report directly to the public on the proceedings as they happen. Brady, famed for decades as an orator with a huge voice, attempts to speak into the microphone but can’t master the technique. During Brady’s final tirade the radio program director decides that his speech has become boring, and Radio Man breaks in to announce that the station will return to the Chicago studio for some music. The stage directions describe this as Brady’s “final indignity,” and it brings on his fatal stroke.The microphone (that is, the news media) can nullify Brady’s power by (in effect) outshouting him. But does this development imply liberation, or a new form of control that will be more oppressive than the old one? There is only one microphone in that courtroom, and whoever decides when to turn it on or off controls what the world will learn about the trial. That is why what happened in the real-life Scopes trial hardly matters; the writers and producers of Inherit the Wind owned the microphone, making their interpretation far more important than the reality. Bert Cates didn’t have enough lung power to make law in Hillsboro, but his successors had enough microphone power to take over the law at the national level.When the creation-evolution conflict is replayed in our own media-dominated times, the microphone-owners of the media get to decide who plays the heroes and who plays the villains. What this has meant for decades is that Darwinists—who are now the legal and political power holders—nonetheless appear before the microphone as Bert Cates or Henry Drummond. The defenders of creation are assigned the role of Brady or of the despicable Reverend Brown. No matter what happens in the real courtroom, or the real schoolroom, the microphones keep telling the same old story.This has very practical consequences. I have found it practically impossible, for example, to get newspapers to acknowledge that there are scientific problems with Darwinism that are quite independent of what anybody thinks about the Bible. A reporter may seem to get the point during an interview, but after the story goes through the editors it almost always comes back with the same formula: creationists are trying to substitute Genesis for the science textbook. Scientific journals follow the same practice. That Matthew Harrison Brady may have valid scientific points to make just isn’t in the script. Danny Phillips 

Occasionally a dissenter from Darwinism threatens to take over the role of Bert Cates. Here is one example: Danny Phillips was a fifteen-year-old high-school junior in the Denver area who thought for himself. His class was assigned to watch a Nova program, produced with government funds for National Public Television, which stated the usual evolutionary story as fact. Its story went something like this: “The first organized form of primitive life was a tiny protozoan.... From these one-celled organisms evolved all life on earth.”Science education today encourages students to memorize that sort of naturalistic doctrine and repeat it on a test as fact. Because Danny has a special interest in truth, however, and because his father is pastor of a church that has an interest in questioning evolutionary naturalism, Danny knew that this claim of molecule-to-man evolution goes far beyond the scientific evidence. So he wrote a lengthy paper criticizing the Nova program as propaganda. School administrators at first agreed that Danny had a point, and they tentatively decided to withdraw the Nova program from the curriculum. That set off a media firestorm.Of course Danny was making a reasonable point. The doctrine that some known process of evolution turned a protozoan into a human is a philosophical assumption, not something that can be confirmed by experiment or by historical studies of the fossil record. But the fact that administrators seriously considered any dissent from evolutionary naturalism infuriated the Darwinists, who flooded the city’s newspapers with their letters. Some of the letters were so venomous that the editorial page editor of the Denver Post admitted that her liberal faith had been shaken. She wrote that “these defenders of intellectual freedom behaved, in fact, just like a bunch of conservative Christians. Their’s was a different kind of fundamentalism, but no less dogmatic and no less intolerant.”In other words, at least one editor wasn’t sure who was playing what role in the revival of Inherit the Wind. When Danny’s story appeared on CBS television a little later, however, an experienced Darwinist debater named Eugenie Scott was careful to cast Danny as the opponent of learning. She argued, “If Danny Phillips doesn’t want to learn evolution, ... that’s his own business. But his views should not prevail for eighty thousand students who need to learn evolution to be educated.” When evolution is the subject, questioning whether the official story is true is enough to make you an enemy of education.This manufactured image of a high-school junior censoring science education replaced the real Danny Phillips on national television, just as Inherit the Wind replaced the real Scopes trial. What Danny said when he got a chance to speak for himself was reported only in a local paper. He said, “Students’ minds are to be kept open and not limited by a set of beliefs.” That is exactly the right line to take, and Danny had for a moment a partial success in getting past the microphone owners. The CBS network and the Denver school board decided against Danny in the end—but then, the Hillsboro jury also decided against Bert Cates. All they inherited was the wind.

Philip E. Johnson 

Defeating Darwinism...

Joe McMoneagle

 Background. 

Joe McMoneagle (1946- ), a distinguished American Army officer, now retired, has been described as “the best Operational Remote Viewer in the history of the U.S. Army’s Special Project – Star Gate” (McMoneagle, 2002, front page). He was selected for the remote viewing project by the army because he was one of the small group of people who kept surviving the most dangerous situations against all odds in various ways, somehow “knowing” when something was about to happen in a particular location, to the point when others would mimic his actions in the field.

After graduating from high school, McMoneagle joined the US Army. In 1978 he took part in a trial of psychic ability carried out on  behalf of the Army by Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff at the Stanford Research Institute. He was one of six people selected for the project of remote viewing (generally now known as Star Gate), and this was the beginning of his career as a ‘remote viewer’ in the military, working on operational requests from various bodies, including CIA, FBI, Army Intelligence and a number of other agencies. He retired from his career in the army after 13 years, with the Legion of Merit Award for distinguished military service. (McMoneagle, 2006) His task as a remote viewer in the Star Gate programme was to locate and describe military and other facilities using geographical coordinates as targets, and to provide detailed descriptions of devices kept inside such facilities. The case described below is probably his most famous exploit and provides a detailed account of the process.

 The case of the Typhoon Submarine: seeing the present and the future 

There are many accurate accounts of the viewing of the Typhoon submarine, probably the best known, most detailed and perhaps the most astounding case of remote viewing. The one given here is based on that by Paul Smith, another famous remote viewer, a military “outsider” who later became an “insider” (Smith, 2015, pp. 45-63):

The story of the remote viewing of the Typhoon is not hearsay. It is not just another old “war story” that my fellow Star Gate remote viewers and I expect you to believe just on our say-so. The provenance (the chain of custody) for this information is impeccable. Copies of nearly all the original documents that still exist became available when the CIA publicly released the Star Gate project’s archives in 2004. Until then they had been in the protective custody of the CIA. The account I have given in this book of the remote viewing of the Typhoon is authentic, taken from the actual records and not from anyone’s faulty memory.”

There were 10 remote viewing sessions over 2 months in the autumn of 1979. They were aimed at discovering what was happening inside the building at Shipyard 402 on the White Sea in what was then the Soviet Union.

The remote viewers were Joe McMoneagle and Hartleigh Trent. They reported that inside the building the Russians were building submarines. This was regarded as impossible, because the building had no access to water, while the submarine described by Joe was  totally unlike any known submarines: twice the size of anything that existed, built against the principles of naval architecture, with missile tubes in the “wrong” place. The National Security Council dismissed the data as fantasy.

However, soon after, an enormous canal was excavated between the building and the water, and almost 11 months after the remote viewing sessions the first Typhoon super submarine, of the new design precisely as described by Joe McMoneagle, was photographed in the new canal alongside the building on 28 September 1980. In the words of Paul Smith:

“At the time, I was serving as the strategic intelligence officer for the Special Forces command in Germany and had not yet even so much as heard the term “remote viewing.” It was my job to review … the latest top-secret intelligence obtained by the Special Security Office in Munich. I still recall the almost panicked tone of the intelligence cables and briefs I read and passed on to the colonel. The Soviets had outmaneuvered the Western intelligence services, taking them completely by surprise, and both sides knew it.”

In this case we also learn about the process of remote viewing, from Joe McMoneagle himself (McMoneagle, 2006, p. 124). His first target was a set of geographic coordinates from which he was able to describe the location and the facility. He “saw” the right place, a cold wasteland with ice, rocks, a very large industrial building and a harbour and sea with ice caps in the distance. Next he was given a photograph of a large building of industrial type, near a large body of water, with general materials stacked outside, located somewhere in Russia (it later turned out to be Severodvinsk on the White Sea (p. 121). As he describes it: “Spending a considerable amount of time relaxing and trying to empty my mind, I imagined myself drifting down and slowly passing through the shed-like roof to the inside of the structure. … I felt as though I was hovering inside a building that was the size of two and a half to three shopping centers, all under one roof. I had completely misconstrued the size of the building … [here McMoneagle gives a detailed description of the inside, of giant bays between walls, scaffolding, interlocking steel pipes, cylinders being welded…] … I felt as though I were standing inside the building and able to actually see vividly what was going on. This rarely occurs in remote viewing, but for some reason it was happening on this target … “My vision of the target was so precise that it almost seemed unreal. … I had an overwhelming sense that this was a submarine, a really big one, with twin hulls”.

 The case of the kidnapped general 

This ability to focus extends to pinpointing the location of a kidnapped general and being aware of his thoughts. Brigadier General James Dozier, deputy chief of staff at NATO headquarters in Italy in Verona had been abducted in December 1981 by members of the Italian Red Brigade. Three remote viewers, including Joe, were charged with trying to locate him. They were given a picture of Dozier; initially they were not totally accurate about the course of the kidnapping, but all gave similar accounts. They targeted the general over a number of days and had similar impressions: “We all reported him alive and having his eyes and mouth taped shut, with a set of earphones taped over his ears, as if he were being forced to listen to music he didn’t like.”

A later, very successful session by McMoneagle started “… with an almost perfect image of a coastline the right-hand side of Italy towards the north”. It was followed by vivid images, which felt as if he was floating over the area, able to see what he wanted to see. He seemed to be following in the footsteps of the kidnappers:

“I suddenly found myself hovering directly over a fairly large town not far from the coast and just south and southeast of a very large mountain range. I moved closer to the ground and began to pick out roadways and buildings. I followed the roads and eventually found myself near a small central plaza, across from some kind of a fountain, and picked up the smells of a butcher shop, and the faint hint of a place where they did some kind of tanning or worked with hides. I got an image of a very large apartment building and settled in on the second floor. I came out of the session knowing that I could pretty much replicate the images and streets that I had seen.” McMoneagle produced a regional map that was specific enough to identify the city as Padua. He then sketched a rough street map, pointing out the location of the apartment house where the kidnapped general was being held on the second floor.

General Dozier was released unharmed from an apartment in Padua after 42 days (not on the basis of the information provided by remote viewers, which was not used). However, the General judged their viewing accurate, especially stunning in “thought-content”, the personal aspect: “information in our reports had originated within his own thoughts while he was being held – blindfolded, tape across his mouth, being forced to listen to hard rock, heavy-metal music through headsets … (McMoneagle, 2006 pp. 116-120).

McMoneagle also successfully finds missing persons and on at least two occasions accurately locates dead bodies, very much like Jackowski.  This is something which was done spectacularly on one occasion by Stefan Ossowiecki, although he is more famous for other things.

The Mind At Large

Clairvoyance, Psychics, Police And Life After Death: A Polish Perspective

Zofia Weaver & Krzysztof Janoszka

The Forbidden Zone: Archeology and Archeologists In Planet of the Apes

In September 2007, I presented a paper at the annual meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists. This year, it was held in Zadar, a beautiful old town on the Adriatic coast of Croatia. I gave the paper in a section on “invented civilizations” and what they can tell us about the practice of archeology. I chose to speak on the invented civilization depicted in Planet of the Apes.In the 1968 film version of Planet of the Apes, an American astronaut named Taylor, played by Charlton Heston, crash lands with his crew in a lake on an unknown planet. They escape from their sinking spaceship, taking a raft to the shores of a desolate mountainous desert, seeing no sign of life. After crossing the desert, they come to a green, semi-forested area, where they observe humans foraging for food in lush agricultural fields. The astronauts join the speechless humans, who appear to be on the level of animals, feeding on fruits and vegetables. Suddenly, the humans begin to flee, pursued by bands of gorillas, clad in dark military dress, riding on horses and armed with rifles. Some of the humans, including Taylor, are captured and taken to an ape city. In his captivity, Taylor learns that the ape population has three classes—the gorillas, who serve as soldiers and laborers; the orangutans, who serve as administrators; and the chimpanzees, who serve as research scientists and intellectuals. Speechless humans, of a low level of culture, are treated as animals. Mostly they live in the wild, but some are kept as research animals. 

In his captivity on the planet of the apes, Taylor is studied by Dr. Zira, a chimpanzee scientist who does research in animal psychology. Taylor is one of her lab animals. During his capture, Taylor’s throat was wounded, and he lost his ability to speak. So at first he appeared to Zira like an ordinary speechless human animal. By writing messages on pieces of paper, Taylor convinces Zira that he is able to use language. This contradicts one of the main doctrines of ape science, namely that humans are incapable of language. 

 Zira tells her chimpanzee colleague and fiancé Dr. Cornelius, an archeologist, about Taylor’s remarkable abilities. Cornelius himself has made some remarkable discoveries related to the history of humans and apes. In a cave in the Forbidden Zone, the desert wasteland where Taylor’s spaceship crashed, Cornelius had found archeological evidence for an advanced human culture preceding that of the apes. So Zira and Cornelius have two categories of evidence that challenge the orthodox views of ape science on humans. They have evidence that humans can speak and that humans with a culture superior to that of the apes had once existed on their planet. 

These ideas about advanced human intelligence and past cultural superiority of humans to apes are quite dangerous to the established ape civilization. Dr. Zaius, an orangutan, who serves as the ape minister of science, cautions Zira and Cornelius. When they persist in trying to draw his attention to the abilities of Taylor, they are called along with Taylor before a government tribunal, which includes Dr. Zaius. Taylor is dismissed as a freak of nature (Zaius threatens to have him neutered and sent to a brain research lab for a lobotomy), and Zira and Cornelius are accused of scientific heresy. 

Here a particular scientific party (represented by Zaius) maintains its views with the aid of the state over other scientific views (represented by Zira and Cornelius), with the aim of upholding an ape society that depends on keeping humans, including Taylor, in the status of subordinate animals. We see things like this happening on earth today. A dominant scientific party committed to a particular theory of ape-human relationships (the Darwinian theory of human evolution) seeks to maintain its authority and power by identifying its interests with those of the state and by using the compliant state to suppress alternative views. In recent years in the United States, Darwinist scientists have used the state’s judicial system to suppress even the slightest expression of alternative views, such as creationism and intelligent design, in the state education systems.  

To escape repression by the combined forces of orthodox ape science and the ape state, Zira, Cornelius, and Taylor (with a human female named Nova) escape to the Forbidden Zone. They go to the cave site that had been discovered by Cornelius. 

As soon as Taylor, Nova, Zira, and Cornelius arrive outside the cave, which is situated high above them on a seaside cliff, they are intercepted by a squadron of gorilla soldiers led by Dr. Zaius. But Taylor manages to capture Zaius. Together, Zaius, Taylor, Nova, Zira, and Cornelius go into the cave. Cornelius, the ape archeologist, shows them the excavations. He points out a location where he found ape bones with primitive stone tools. He explains that below that level he had found human bones with signs of a culture much more advanced than that of the ancient apes. At one point, Taylor starts going through some of the objects, and finds some eye glasses and also some metal rings that he recognizes as part of an artificial heart. But the key artifact is a doll, in the form of a human female infant. It has a voice mechanism and speaks. The archeological evidence challenges the whole orthodox ape science view of the relationship between humans and apes. It turns out that humans of the past could not only speak but were once superior to apes, thus shaking the ideological foundations of the ape state and culture. 

Emerging from the cave, Taylor ties up Dr. Zaius. Then Taylor and Nova, on horseback, decide to journey further into the Forbidden Zone. Taylor asks Zira and Cornelius to come with them, but they refuse. They are part of the ape civilization and do not want to leave their culture behind. As Taylor and Nova ride away, Zira and Cornelius release Dr. Zaius, who orders the gorilla soldiers to blow up the cave, destroying the archeological evidence.  

So what lesson can archeologists learn from this popular invented civilization? One big lesson is that there might be the equivalent of an archeological forbidden zone on this planet, with evidence contradicting current theories of human origins and antiquity.

A few years ago, I was a consultant for a television documentary called The Mysterious Origins of Man. Produced by Bill Cote, it aired on NBC. The program featured, among other things, material from my book Forbidden Archeology, and both my coauthor and I appeared in the show. The show was hosted by Charlton Heston, who said in one of the opening scenes: “What happens when we find a modern human skull in rock strata far beneath even the oldest of man’s ancestors? In their controversial book, 

Forbidden Archeology, Michael Cremo and Dr. Richard Thompson have documented hundreds of these anomalous artifacts.” Here we find echoes of Planet of the Apes. Charlton Heston was still speaking like Taylor, and I was put into a role like that of Cornelius, speaking about forbidden archeological evidence that challenges conventional accounts of human origins. 

Then some characters like Dr. Zaius entered the scene. As far as I know, the broadcast of The Mysterious Origins of Man by NBC in February of 1996 was the first time a major American television network had aired a program challenging Darwinian explanations of human origins. This apparently caught the orthodox scientific community in the United States by surprise. They thought they “owned” the mainstream media.  

Although evolution scientists in America were outraged when the program was first shown, they became even more upset when they learned NBC was going to show it again. Scientists organized attempts to influence NBC not to show the documentary again. When these attempts failed, these scientists, like Dr. Zaius on the planet of the apes, wanted to convene a state tribunal to set things right. On June 17, 1996, Dr. Allison R. Palmer, president of the Institute for Cambrian Studies, wrote to the Federal Communications Commission: “This e-mail is a request for the FCC to investigate and, I hope, seriously censure the National Broadcasting Company.” Palmer continued: “At the very least NBC should be required to make substantial prime-time apologies to their viewing audience for a sufficient period of time so that the audience clearly gets the message that they were duped. In addition, NBC should perhaps be fined sufficiently so that a major fund for public science education can be established.” Palmer’s attempt to get the FCC to punish NBC failed, but the very fact that such an attempt was made should tell us something. Palmer’s letter was widely circulated to scientists, who were asked to send letters of support to the FCC. This is reminiscent of the efforts of Dr. Zaius to suppress the archeological finds of Cornelius. So perhaps in this respect, as Taylor found in the final scene of the 1968 film, the planet of the apes is really our planet.

The Forbidden Archeologist 

Michael Cremo