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1. 1 Comment by Lee on 30 May 2007:

   Is there room/time for TJF to comment on ancient (Aristotle and Cicero) and modern (Darwin and Wade) notions of “chance”?

2. 2 Comment by TJF on 30 May 2007:

   Yes, as we progress I hope you will formulate a detailed question.

3. 3 Comment by Friedrich von Hardenberg on 30 May 2007:

   With Dr. Fleming I agree. I add:

   1. A theory cannot do what it was never intended to do. The theory of evolution was set up to explain speciation, i.e., why we have tigers and trees. It was not set up to explain why we have bios as such. Nor can it do so.

   2. How evolution happened Darwin had no idea. When he was old, rich, and famous, someone told him of a Augustinian religious in Austria fiddling around with peas. But Darwin was too old, too rich, and too famous to pay any attention, and by that time Mendel was abbot, and thus had Higher Concerns. Just as well, for I’ve been told that the good monk fudged a bit with his data – what in the trade is called a “dry lab”. What is more, biology has actually two theories of genetics, the Mendelian and the Molecular, and they don’t seem to have much to do with each other.

   3. When the Royal Society was founded in a. D. 1660, natural science (how I wish it were called what the 18th Century termed it: natural philosophy!) was empirical in method. For example, there was in 1660 the belief that a bug would cross no chalk line. So the Royal Society drew a chalk circle, placed a bug in the middle, and watched it cross the chalk line. QED. Yet when natural science talks about the past, an empirical method fails, for upon the past no experiment can be made. Thus evolution is known only by a hermeneutic method, not an empirical one. When told that we know the rate that the Carbon 14 atom deteriorates, and thus can so date a object with that atom, I reply, Has Carbon 14 deteriorated at that rate always? Only the Law of Uniformitarianism can “prove” that, and such a law is an hypothesis, or for some, to be taken de fide. Of course I’m only repeating the views of Heisenberg and Husserl, for whom natural science was not a strenge Wissenschaft. And forget that mathematics, indispensable to natural science, isn’t a science at all, but a humanity.

   4. 4. Evolution did not stop, but human groups, even after the exodus from Africa, evolved along different lines, physically and mentally. Well, since the days of Gobineau, this topic has been … well, somewhat incendiary, and labeled with highly charged McCarthyite language! Not that I’m taking the side of such incendiaries, mind you.

4. 4 Comment by TJF on 30 May 2007:

   Thanks to Novalis for making comments that I now shall not have to make. Two clarifications. My remarks on continuing evolution were only meant to represent some of what Wade reports in the book, and, secondly, the Royal Society deserves extended treatment since some of the most empiricist members, e.g., Boyle and Newton, were also religious zanies and alchemists.

5. 5 Comment by Dan McCulloch on 30 May 2007:

   The failures of so many contemporary scientists and philosophers come largely from an insufficient grounding in the basics. I despair, at times, of engaging people who don’t understand 1) the methodological and teleological differences between science and philosophy, and 2), the symbiotic relationship between them. Simply put, contemporary scientists don’t recognize when the science has ended and they’ve begun to philosophize, and philosophers are even worse. When it is they who should be correcting the matter, philosophers instead fail to recognize their own method, at the same time that they assist in dogmatizing the worst excesses of science.

   The necessary corrective to this situation is Phil 101, but unfortunately this cannot be summarized in a combox. Even so, the problem can be addressed piecemeal.

   First, science as such being notably doubly empirical in method, there is no strictly scientific method at work in homologation. There is only induction by analogy. One thing looks sort of like another thing, therefore the big one came from the little one (or the converse). The day will never come when the fundamental idea that the one came from the other is more likely than not. Homology is therefore a non-demonstrable first principle. This means it has to be taken on faith. First principles, like the law of non-contradiction for example, can always be argued for. But in the case of homology, the only argument that makes it seem plausible is that God doesn’t exist. Needless to say, scientists are not competent to make these arguments, but in any case the negative arguments against God’s existence are only two: 1) the argument from evil, and 2), the argument from evolution, which depends on homology. This leaves only the argument from evil, which is easily handled in Christian theology. Here, then, is the first reason that macroevolution rests on faith; the second is of course the problem of probability: evolution is a cosmogony for the probability challenged. No matter what numbers we give to it, it can never become more probable than not (P = .51).

   The methodological concern of which I spoke is simply that no claim that something is “proven” by metaphysical biology can ever be rationally asserted given the above ‘meta’ considerations. If a thing is proven, it is so for all time. It can never be falsified. This means that most things asserted as true even by a genuinely scientific method, have not been “proven,” in this sense. There is only more or less evidence to support the hypothesis; it is only more or less strongly confirmed. “Given that” (Sorry, TF) the characteristic method of science as such is not operative here, but only the methods of historical science (paleontology) and philosophy (metaphysics, poorly), we do not even have the relative kind of certainty normally attributed to the science-god.

   There is simply no justification for dogmatizing from these methods, or for stigmatizing those who dissent. ALL of those dates that Dr. Fleming notes are guesses. In respect of the comment by von Hardenberg on radiometric dating, I would just add that it is not only that we don’t know if Carbon-14 has always deteriorated at the same rate, it is that the rate varies with moisture! (Something rather common and unpredictable hereabouts.)

6. 6 Comment by TJF on 30 May 2007:

   I don’t think I at all disagree with DM, and I thank him for the help, which I badly need. I have been content to begin with a summary of the first chapter, with only one or two cavils, because he goes into more detail–with consequent decrease in probability–in later chapters.

   Aristotle was the first, I believe, to distinguish between the methods appropriate to abstract thought (logic, metaphysics, mathematics) and those that can be applied to ethical things such as human psychology, politics, and art. With human evolution we are in a no-man’s land where some relatively exact methods may sometimes apply but where probabilistic reasoning is almost always necessary. The problem comes, obviously, when one conjectures a date, through a series of probabilities, and then uses the date as a fact from which conclusions can be drawn. This usually results in a case where “not proven” (the only licit use of that Scottish participle, by the way) is the only reasonable answer.

7. 7 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 30 May 2007:

   Call me simple, but I always thought The Great Chain of Being explained much better what Evolution claims to explain.

8. 8 Comment by Michael on 30 May 2007:

   To the poster who noted that Newton and Boyle were “religious zanies and alchemists,” it should be added that alchemy was the extant science of matter at the time, and was the only foundation on which these investigators had to build. In the context of the period, they were not eccentric in their acceptance of it, at least as a point of departure. Furthermore, their religious beliefs must also be measured against the standards of their time rather than ours. The profound religious discord that seized Britain in the middle of the seventeenth century is evident from any examination of contemporary literature, such as the Earl of Clarendon’s History or Samuel Butler’s mock-epic Hudibras. Measured against Hudibras and Ralpho, or some of its other characters, Boyle and Newton are again not particularly zany.

   Boyle was a serious student of philosophy and religion before studying “chymistry.” As best I am able to tell he became interested in it because he opposed the doctrine of Epicurus, as set forth in Lucretius’s De rerum natura. The Epicurean belief is an early atomic theory, in which atoms, infinite in number and eternal, fall endlessly through space by their own nature, colliding and congealing into masses, from which the universe was by pure happenstance built up. This seemed to Boyle to impute an animate and sensible nature to matter, an idea to which he objected. He believed that motion had to be given to matter by the intention of a Creator – again, an orthodox Christian idea (then and now). From his efforts to understand matter, and in the light of earlier authorities such as Sendivogius, van Helmont, and Starkey (Philaletha), developed his chemical ideas.

   It is worth noting that the intellectual underpinning of modern evolutionism is not to be found in Darwin but in Epicurus, just as the underpinning of “intelligent design” is not so much the Bible as it is Plato’s notion of a craftsman-creator – the Freemasons’ “Great Architect of the Universe” – which he expounds in the Republic and the Timaeus.

9. 9 Comment by Harry Wisniewski on 30 May 2007:

   I have read to references that Godel’s Theorem presents problems using mathematics with absolute certainity in some areas of science. Do any of the contributors to this post, or others, know if Godel’s Theorem can be applied to Wade’s thesis?

   It’s too bad Wade does not share how we can now “infer in one instance, what the first language sounded like” or how we know that “most infants were sired by the society’s dominate male or his allies.” I wonder how much of the “holes” we have in knowledge are filled by speculation or how much of the bits and pieces of information we have from the more recent past that fill the scientist;s desired view of the world. No matter what the “most objective” scientist says, we all bring in some prejudice to our views. We can only measure what we can calculate and understand.

10. 10 Comment by robert m. peters on 30 May 2007:

    While here and there within the machinations of naturalistic evolution, cloaked as it is with the alleged objectivity of science, there are some factoids which sweeten the art of speculation, most of the models or sets of models generated by the naturalistic mind are mere plausibility arguments sold to fools as facts and truth.

11. 11 Comment by David Jones on 31 May 2007:

    After reading the above, especially Hardenberg, McCulloch and Michael, I can see that its back to school for me.

    I am reminded of Mr. George Carlin, and his bit that goes: “Now I know what it is that I don’t like about you. You were one of those smart kids in school. I hated you smart kids…”

12. 12 Comment by Simon Newman on 31 May 2007:

    “Evolution did not stop, but human groups, even after the exodus from Africa, evolved along different lines, physically and mentally”

    Although Wade is careful to say that different alleles for enhanced cognitive ability may have resulted in the same median cognitive ability among all human population groups, which seems unlikely unless the evolutionary pressures were identical worldwide, and is contradicted by the available evidence.

13. 13 Comment by Friedrich von Hardenberg on 31 May 2007:

    After reading the above, especially Hardenberg, McCulloch and Michael, I can see that its back to school for me.

    Herr David Jones: This blog makes for a fine classroom. Welcome, hang up your coat, and take your seat on the front row.

14. 14 Comment by TJF on 31 May 2007:

    We can take up the question of Boyle, Newton, and alchemy at a later date. I am preparing a lecture for our Summer School on exactly that topic. At this point, however, I might point out first, that Newton’s zaniness is extreme and puts him on the lunatic fringe of radical Protestantism. He is a predecessor of the pre-millenialists and Pentacostalists, with his obsession about fixing the date for the end of the world–I think it is 1868. There is a long mainstream Christian tradition, including Christ himself, Paul, Dionysius the great bishop of Alexandria and the Medieval Church that saw the danger in this line of speculation and condemned it. Of course, nothing stops Pat Robertson.

    Alchemy is not merely a fairly harmless precursor to modern science. Some of the primary alchemical texts are Hermetic and neo-pagan. Like the later neo-Platonists, the Alchemists promise power over the elements. This desire is in itself evil, at least from a Christian point of view. Boyle is a very great researcher and Newton was clearly a genius of the first water, but their great abilities and merits cannot exempt them from rational scrutiny into their bizarre beliefs, which were not typical of an age that also knew such men as Dryden, Chilingworth, and Baxter. This is a period I know perhaps as well as the age I live in–I have certainly read more 17th century poetry and philosophy and drama than 20th/21st century, and it is no more fair to characterize that age by Newton’s zany religion than it would be to characterize the entire 20th century by Alistair Crowley, though, admittedly, Crowley does appear to be the precursor.

    Finally, I do believe I began with a brief observation on the antiquity of evolutionary theory and of the influence of Epicurus, which extend, by the way, to Gassendi, Hobbes, and Marx (who wrote his diss. on Epicurus).

15. 15 Comment by Frank Mathias on 31 May 2007:

    What a bunch of smug, supercilious simpletons. Can we get a straight answer from anyone here? If Darwin was wrong, why don’t you just come out and say it! Why the posts full of science-bashing obfuscation. If you have a better idea than evolution through natural selection let’s put it on the table.

    Funniest quote: “Cloaked as it is in the ALLEGED obectivity of science…(my caps).”

    That’s rich! I’m sure Robert M. Peters completely trusts this ALLEGED objectivity every time he boards a jumbo jet or uses his cellphone. How very conservative of him.

16. 16 Comment by TJF on 31 May 2007:

    If Mr. Mathias wishes to apologize for his outburst, he is welcome to participate. Otherwise, his ejaculation will be removed. Of course Darwin was wrong: He could not explain the mechanism by which mutations were passed on. The synthesis of natural selection with genetics is quite another matter and must be taken seriously if not as a complete explanation.

    I have never met anyone who was objective about anything. As a philologist I ride my hobbyhorse of language; scientists ride theirs. One should note that a false or partial theory can give rise to true discoveries. If this were not true, science could never advance. So far as I am concerned, the question of evolution is not a simple black-and-white choice. I am perfectly prepared to accept any convincing argument, but, on the other hand, I am not prepared to accept the sweeping and unsubstantiated truth claims of scientists who do not know even how to pose a problem, much less how to answer it.

17. 17 Comment by Bill Jenkins on 31 May 2007:

    Not capable of participating at the lofty level at which this forum is flying, I am enjoying, thoroughly, the reading, observing and learning. But, I would think that a little earthy rough and tumble of the likes of Mr. Mathias’ comment could be tolerated, if not appreciated.

18. 18 Comment by Ronduck on 31 May 2007:

    When I was in the fifth grade we had a lab technician from the county forensics lab visit my school and explain how DNA can be used to match people to samples found at crime scenes. This was about 12 years ago. She told us about one technique called PCR(?) whereby what was believed to be junk DNA spread throughout the chromosomes was copied repeatedly and matched to the suspects sample. It was not as accurate as the other method that used most of the DNA and I think I remember the junk genes being described as being an evolutionary leftover.

    About 2 years ago I was standing in front of a magazine rack and read an article in Scientific American describing a new method of genetic control that no one had realized existed. In small organisms the chromosomes just unzip and the RNA gets busy making protiens. But in large organisms this will lead to chaos so there is a mechanism for turning individual genes on and off. This mechanism is controlled by only a small fraction of the DNA, I believe the genes that the lab technician was taught were junk.

    So much for certainty that we know it all.

19. 19 Comment by Michael on 31 May 2007:

    No one disputes that the origins of alchemy were pagan, but one might point out that so are those of physics (Aristotle, Archimedes); biology (Dioscurides, Pliny the Elder) etc. Karl Popper observed that almost every idea advanced by recent scientific cosmologists can be traced back to the pre-Socratic Greeks. Pagan origins do not, of themselves, make ideas evil.

    The claim that Boyle’s and Newton’s ideas about the nature of matter were not typical of their time does not stand up to an examination of contemporary sources. Belief in elemental transmutation was an understandable outgrowth of the observation that apparent spontaneous change went on constantly in the mineral kingdom, and could be helped and hastened by the intervention of man, as in, e.g., the cultivation of artificial nitre beds, or the apparent renewal of iron ore on the island of Elba, mentioned, e.g., by Biringuccio. Transmutation was supported by such impeccably orthodox authors as Athanasius Kircher, S.J., in his “Mundus subterraneus” (published in several parts between 1665-1678) and was entirely typical of 17th century thought. It should be borne in mind that the role of microbial action in the obseved phenomena was not understood until the time of Pasteur.

    In any event, Boyle’s and Newton’s “chymistry” drew far more on the theory and technical accomplishments of Sendivogius (who developed a better understanding of combustion than the later phlogiston theory of Becher and Stahl), van Helmont (whose gravimentric techniques and knowledge of gases Lavoisier admired), and Starkey (an accomplished laboratory operator) than they did on the diffuse ramblings and metaphors of the Corpus Hermetica. Their understanding of natural phenomena has to be measured against the standards of their own time rather than that of ours.

20. 20 Comment by G.S. on 31 May 2007:

    The fundamental point about scientific “objectivity” is that science as defined today excludes any approach which is not based in materialism — materialism being a philosophical creed which one is free to embrace or reject, rather than something which may be empirically verified in a laboratory.

    Evolution as it is batted around in our society today is not a scientific theory, but rather a religion which proclaims that all facets of human existence may be understood via material explanations.

    “That’s rich! I’m sure Robert M. Peters completely trusts this ALLEGED objectivity every time he boards a jumbo jet or uses his cellphone.”

    Jumbo jets and cell-phones are products of engineering, not science.

    Railroad trains functioned perfectly well even though constructed whilst the physical picture of the cosmos was that of a collection of indivisible atoms — a picture later displaced by quantum mechanics.

    Anyone who has the slightest iota of knowledge about the history of science would concede that scientists’ views at any given time are partially informed by the culture in which they are born.

    Scientists have in the past stared radical changes in scientific understanding right in the face without seeing it — yet today Mr. Mathias is scandalized because some question whether Modern Man has finally solved the question of his own origins quite so well and thoroughly as Discovery Channel chattering would imply.

    “If you have a better idea than evolution through natural selection let’s put it on the table. ”

    Undoubtedly Mr. Mathias is of the sort who would extoll the value of skepticism and doubt — until of course that skepticism and doubt is leveled at one of his own fashionably-sacred cows.

    One need not provide a workable counter-theory in order to demonstrate that another theory is weak: I need not prove that light is made of quantized photons in order to prove that light is not made of really, really tiny Chicken McNuggets.

    Nor do the worthwhile aspects of a theory need to be jettisoned simply because the theory does not explain everything it claims to.
    The original heliocentric model proposed by Copernicus depicts planets orbiting in circles — this model was later modified into ellipses.

    In the same way we may criticize the grandiose claims of Darwinian ideology without trying to supplant it with the (also misguided) theory of “intelligent design”.

    Socrates had a “better idea” than the dogma of the High Church of Chuck Darwin as preached by Archibishop Dawkins: “I know that I don’t know.”

    As near as I can tell, Dr. Fleming’s objective is not to compose some competing theory, but to point out the flaws in what is now accepted as dogma among the servile and stupid.

    The presumption of knowledge claimed by materialist-hucksters is far more dangerous than mere honest ignorance.

21. 21 Comment by TJF on 31 May 2007:

    I did not say pagan but neo-pagan, and I am not at all disputing the importance or accomplishments of Boyle.

    This is not the place or time to go into a long and complex issue. In late antiquity, a movement arose, partly among Neo-Platonists and partly among thaumaturges, to combat Christianity. The significant names in this tradition are Iamblichus , “Hermes Trismegistus,” Proclus, and Julian the misnamed apostate. In the Italian Renaissance it gains new life at the Florentine Academy–the Greek George Gemistus Pletho, probably his friend Cardinal Bessarion, certainly Ficino, Pico, and Bruno who helped establish it in Britain, where it began to thrive. This tradition includes rationalists like Bacon and Descartes and Newton as well as more eccentric characters like the mathematician/spiritualist John Dee. To talk about each of these characters and their relationship to the Rosicrucian and Masonic movements would take a good deal of time and reading. Let us drop it for now, please.

22. 22 Comment by Friedrich von Hardenberg on 31 May 2007:

    I wrote below before I had seen GS’ fine posting. Excuse my repetition:

    Though Herr Mathias expresses a popular view, this popular view is wanting. Before examining his argument (obscured as it is by vituperative smog), let me express my surprise at how natural science seems stuck in the early 18th Century, never sparing a thought to the problematic nature of empirical knowledge, totally unaware of the reflections made by Hume, his most famous student (Kant), the German Idealists (Schelling, Hegel, Schleiermacher, Bradley), the borderline solipsists (Fichte, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche), the phenomenologists (the early and later Husserl, and his followers), to say nothing of Thomas Kuhn. Perhaps these Herren Professoren Doktoren are all “smug, supercilious, obfuscating simpletons”, yet the claimers of purported scientific objectivity at least have the burden of rejoinder. Indeed, I would ask, Isn’t the very beginning of modern natural philosophy based on a rejection of the empirical world’s reliability? For in the Lebenswelt I know that the sun circles the earth; I see it do so every day! But Copernicus and Galileo have demonstrated otherwise.

    As to Herr Mathias’ first argument: If you have a better idea than evolution through natural selection let’s put it on the table.. That an idea is wanting is not made less wanting because a better idea is wanting, and that the undisputed facts of the matter do not necessarily warrant the claim made, because such a warrant is wanting; and that the point of a critique is say they are so wanting, and that all a gentlemanly critic can do is to say how sorry he is that such are wanting.

    As to his second argument, the ostensible fiduciary objectivity every time he boards a jumbo jet or uses his cellphone. Most of our certainty (a word preferable to “objectivity”) about the Lebenswelt is in fact based on probability. I trust that my phone or a jet will function, or that the ceiling above my head will not fall on me, not because of any absolute certainty, but because the probability of these events is fairly high. The objective/subjective issue draws us out into deep water indeed. Suffice to say that the truth of a claim is not based on supposed objectivity, but rather the ability to examine claims, to demonstrate their degree of probability as to what they claim, and to point out what they do not and cannot claim.

    Behind this argument of Herr Mathias is a hidden one: that the wonder-workings of technology prove the objective certitude of natural science. Forget that technology and medicine are arts, not sciences. Forget that the analogy is wanting: phones and jet are machines, Darwinian evolution that mental construct called “theory”. Forget also that one can fly Herr Mathias’ jumbo jet with Newtonian physics, however surpassed such have been by Einsteinian – and one needs only old Archimedes in his bathtub to float a boat. Rather I suspect, perhaps not rightly, that the real purport of Herr Mathias’ claim is moral. And to judge the moral worth of the wonder-workings of technology, I would respectfully submit that most of us are not the right jurors. Let’s choose six men from Hiroshima, and six from Nagasaki, and let such men render a verdict on modern technology.

    I commend the work of Paul Feyerabend, Stephen Toulin’s The Uses of Argument, and Newman’s Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent.

23. 23 Comment by Michael on 31 May 2007:

    OK, we’ll drop the discussion with the note that in the past decade, there has been a major scholarly re-evaluation of Boyle’s and Newton’s (and other seventeenth-century chymists’ ) investigations into the nature of matter. If you are going to lecture on them at your Summer School you might first wish to read Lawrence Principe’s “The Aspiring Adept” and his collaboration with William Newman, “Alchemy Tried in the Fire.”

    Boyle and Newton were assuredly creatures of their age, with all its faults. Even so, in associating these early scientists with Ficino, Pico, Bruno, and Dee, you are making the same sort of mistake that the church of Rome did when it associated Galileo’s scientific heliocentrism with Bruno’s occult heliocentrism, condemning both as two pease from the same poisonous pod; or as in the converse situation during the 19th century, when atheistic rationalists portrayed Bruno as a forerunner to Galileo and a martyr to religious obscurantism. I sympathize entirely with your wish to defend orthodoxy, and suggest only that you use carefully-aimed rifle shots rather than a scattergun blast in so doing.

24. 24 Comment by Lee on 31 May 2007:

    Other than quoting Aristotle’s summary on chance, I can’t add more, but I know other ancients had significant things to say. Aristotle said that “whatever happens always or for the most part cannot happen by chance”. He goes on to say that “chance” as it would be used by a Darwin or Wade is destructive of the obvious order that the real world is full of.
    Evolution, of course, just means change. But the Theory of Evolution is a materialist, metaphysical, ideology. It is obviously materialist in a way that science (originally and still a Christian project, having been still-born (Jaki) in all other cultures) is not. Science is the project of discovering the laws governing the working of the material world. Materialism is an ideology that asserts, without proof, that the material world is all there is and interprets, but never prooves, everything under that mantra. It is metaphysical because it dismisses most ancient metaphysics (not only pricniples of chance, but also of order, and formal and final causality) and asserts without discusssion its own. On The Origin of Species is full of teleology all the while denying there is any such thing. It is ideological because it never brooks dissent, seeing and interpreting all through its own lens, while lying about much of its content. (The lie in the Origin of Speices begins with the title. He says early on that he is not sure what species means; later in the work he says that speices cannot be differentiated from variation; and toward the end of the book, he says that it doesn’t matter because their is no such thing as speices, just resting points of gradation.)
    The Theory of Evolution is not scientific for 2 reasons. First, it is not experimental. There is no demonstration of one species changing into another, nowhere. And not for lack of trying — the experiments run into the millions, and all failed. Secondly, after Feynmann, an American Nobel Prize winning physicist, a real science (and scientist) exhausts all other possible explanations, showing their inadequacy, before presenting its own, of course, with demonstration, and which demonstration is verified independently in the course of time. Evolutionists never get beyond the ideological first assertion. Check the paleontological record: it is full of the, in-time, appearance and later disappearance of individual species. And some appear, are pronounced fossils, but still hang around.
    Another defect of the Theory of E is that it dismisses (very conveniently for abortionists) Aristotle’s contention that substance never admits of degree. If you are an oak tree, whether an acorn, a sapling, or a 200 year old and 200 ft high tree, you are still an oak (planking is a different matter).
    In Wade’s book he never defines evolution, assumes that it is in the genes and then asserts that it — evolution — as opposed to merely genetic mutation is still going on. There is no proof that Homo sapiens sapiens if evloving, although there is plenty of inherent variability being expressed around the world — all of whom seem to be mutually fertile, and thus the same speices. ANd his chain of reasoning is short but includes a lot of “probably”s.
    Two more things about the Theory of E. One, it is a tautology, that is it is circular reasoning. It is the survival of the fittest, etc.. Who are the fittest? Those who survive. Thus the Theory of E is “the survival of the survivors”. Second, the deceit of Darwin’s popularizers who never qoute the whole title which is “On the Origin of Speices by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life”, thanks to the the influence of Malthus who thought there were too many bottom feeders hanging around. And I’m told that the Favoured Races did not include many besides his favorite Anglo-Saxons. The rest were just place holders. Most variations in animals are referred to as breeds, but maybe 19th century England was different.
    I think it is wonderful that genetics can contribute to an increased understanding of the material world. But those who try to harness it to the Theory of E are going to produce more recyclable refuse.

25. 25 Comment by TJF on 31 May 2007:

    I have posted a brief account of chapter II as an addition to the original posting.

26. 26 Comment by TJF on 31 May 2007:

    As for the final words on Boyl et al, I do not think I am making any mistake, in drawing attention to the dangers of the Hermetic tradition. Many fine thinkers were infected, not just scientists, including Thomas More and Henry More.

    In reading recent studies of Newton, I have learned a great deal but I am also struck by the ignorance of specialists whose lack of grounding in older traditions blinds them to important aspects of their subject. A recent work on Henry More, for example, vainly grapples with More as a scientist but makes hash of the connection of his neo-platonism with his interest in science. Galileo is a complex case, both a scientist and a wise-guy that could not keep his mouth shut. Yet he too apparently accepted the Church’s sentence. It is good to force scientists to be careful about the sweeping conclusions they draw from specialized and partial research. In the end, the Church must embrace the truth or else it is not the Church.

27. 27 Comment by TJF on 31 May 2007:

    Finally, a brief answer to Lee on the many interesting questions he has raised. I have never been entirely persuaded by Fr. Jaki’s argument, which is not, as I recall, original with him, that science could and did only develop in a Christian world. The cognitive skills necessary for science were developed by the Greeks. This includes both dialectic, Aristotelian method, and the experimental method. Wonderful mechanical devices–steam engines and hydraulics–were created in Hellenistic Roman times, though our knowledge of them is limited by a lack of surviving evidence.

    What distinguishes a culture that produced Strato and Galen from one that produced Boyle and Harvey? I don’t know except that post-Renaissance Europe pursued specialization and developed the institutions to foster specialized research. But that is exactly the period in Christian history when the faith was ebbing and the ancient classics on science and mathematics were being studied. There are many strands to scientific thought: one is a pure pursuit of knowledge and that derives from early Greek philosopher; the other is the pursuit of powr over nature and that seem to come from late-ancient magic and thaumaturgy.

    As for chance, the problem I have in speaking apodictically on this topic is manifold. In the first place, Greek writers use different words: one set of them suggests the notion of fate and necessity–the way things are in the universe causes specific things, in a general way, to work out the way they due. Then there is a cluster of words and concepts best expressed by tuche, derived from the same root as tunchanein, to happen to, meet with, befall, hence ho tuchon, a passerby.

    But some Greeks in Aristotle’ day and before took Tuche to be some sort of cosmic force, inexplicable but powerful. Stuff happens. Such a view, if taken too far, encourages supersition and supineness and a refusal to look for meaning.

    Aristotle is often accused of being too teleological but he was careful to distinguish among four causes. Modern scientists, although they reject teleology, cannot escape it. They say the evolution of man is no more significant than the evolution of the cockroach, but which subject gets the big research money. French scientists have written a great deal on chance, but I have read only a little. I know I have not answered your question, but this wil have to do as a start.

28. 28 Comment by Michael Kenny on 31 May 2007:

    As to whether or not the Pope contradicts evolutionary theory, he doesn’t! In Catholic school 40 years ago, I was taught darwinian evolution in biology class as established scientific fact and in religion class, evolution was pointed to as one of the best possible arguments for the existence of God. There’s an old joke to the effect that if a monkey threw molucules into the air, there is a calculatable mathematical probility they would come down as a TV set (and many TV producers seem to assume that that is what actaully happened!) but how likely is that? Such a complex thing as evolution suggests a higher intelligence than ours. As we used to say, I don’t BELIEVE in God, because I don’t need to just believe, I KNOW through the reasoning power God gave me that He must exist.

29. 29 Comment by Friedrich von Hardenberg on 31 May 2007:

    As to whether or not the Pope contradicts evolutionary theory, he doesn’t!
    Pius XII in 1950 held that evolution did not contradict revelation. He only raised a warning about “Polygenismus” as possibly causing a problem for the dogma of original sin. Vide: Humani generis, in Denzinger, 40th ed, Herder Verlag, ## 3896, 3897

    What I could not figure out then and cannot figure out now is who is who, that is, who are apes and who are humans.
    Back in my salad days, “human” was defined anthropologically as
    1. bipedal, or just having a foot rather than a big hand,
    2. use of fire, and
    3. burial of the dead.

    I suppose the Chomskyans would like to add “use of language”, as the ancients would have said “use of logos”; yet I’ve known “profoundly retarded” who aren’t verbal, and all of them still smarter than chimps. I’m not, of course, supporting or opposing any of these definitions.

    On The Origin of Species is full of teleology all the while denying there is any such thing.
    At university I had an outstanding teacher of biology, who taught natural science as a liberal art. He told us that to say “wings are for flying and feet for walking” is to use teleological language. (His physical resemblance was the splitting image of the preacher in Rembrandt’s The Mennonite Minister Cornelis Claesz. Anslo in Conversation with his Wife, Aaltje [http://www.wga.hu , "r", “Rembrandt”, "Group Portraits”]) .

    the Theory of Evolution is a materialist, metaphysical, ideology
    One Friday before class, we students were talking about a weekend surfing the waves at the shore, my biology professor standing up front and overhearing us. He folded his arms and said, “When I look at the waves of the surf, I don’t see any thing moving.” Thus with one stroke, he ripped out the foundation of “scientific” materialism, or at least of a simple materialism. How Max Planck would love it!

30. 30 Comment by Monte Poitevint on 31 May 2007:

    At the risk of appearing foolish in a debate with those with far greater knowledge and education than my own, I’ll throw my own two cents in. Darwin, I believe, is mostly attributed with ‘discovering’ natural selection. Evolution was not a new concept; natural selection was. It is seen as the ‘mechanism’ by which the process operates – competition for limited resources.

    As we are all quite aware, a vast chasm exists between life and non-life. One might even say that one is the antithesis of the other. Life, no matter how simple, in its drive for food and reproduction, shows a purposefulness that is completely lacking in non-life. Even the most primitive single cell exhibits the ability to alter the natural world to its own advantage. But this same single cell illustrates the complexity that is life. It digest without a digestive tract. It senses light and touch without a nervous system. It moves without muscles. The ‘experts’ tell us that macromolecules do these things. But how can something give life to these macromolecules? How can they be ‘motivated’ to do something other than what is natural for them in a state of non-life? Herein lies the mystery that science seems to miss. I’m reminded of Allen Tate’s analogy of the half horse. You can look at it as horse power, but that’s only half the horse. It misses the whole horse, the essence of the horse.

31. 31 Comment by T. Chan on 31 May 2007:

    Mr. Poitevint:
    Life, no matter how simple, in its drive for food and reproduction, shows a purposefulness that is completely lacking in non-life. Even the most primitive single cell exhibits the ability to alter the natural world to its own advantage. But this same single cell illustrates the complexity that is life.

    Following Aristotle I would maintain that non-living things also show purposefulness; what differentiates living things from non-living things (as is implicit in your post), is that living things move (in the technical Aristotelian sense of the word) themselves, while non-living things do not.

    The ‘experts’ tell us that macromolecules do these things. But how can something give life to these macromolecules? How can they be ‘motivated’ to do something other than what is natural for them in a state of non-life?
    If we are talking about consciousness or intentionality then we must look to the First Mover and not to the macromolecules. Even if some version of evolution is true, it does not do away with the need for a First Mover. It seems to me that if evolution is true, one can construct an argument for the existence of God from design, but it should be easier to do so with respect to motion (though perhaps not as clear to the average person). But first one must show that evolution has happened.

32. 32 Comment by Lee on 31 May 2007:

    WRT the Church on evolution. The Church neither affirms nor denies that the material shape and structure of man, the visibly apparent form, could have developed in some “evolutionary” way. That is less complex/capable to greater complexity/capability. But it denies absolutely the materialism in the formal Theory of Evolution. Man did not come by blind chance, for no special purpose. The Church formally claims doctrinally that each man is a special creation anew by God, albeit with the cooperation of the parents and the appropriation of available “matter”. To use evolution in the above sense interchangeably with its usage in the Theory of Evolution is equivocal and sloppy when not deliberately deceptive in the extreme.

33. 33 Comment by Frank Mathias on 31 May 2007:

    “Undoubtedly Mr. Mathias is of the sort who would extoll the value of skepticism and doubt — until of course that skepticism and doubt is leveled at one of his own fashionably-sacred cows.”

    Yep, love skepticism alright. It’s hubris I can’t stomach. As JBS Haldane famously quipped when he was asked for a simple disproof of evolution, “rabbits in the Cambrian.” I would love to see evolution toppled, t’would be exciting and Nobel-worthy in the extreme. Alas, quite unlikely as the mountain of converging lines of evidence gathered in the last 150 years makes abundantly clear. I love the blanket dismissals though, clothed in an affected world-weary pseudo-intellectualism. Inadvertantly hilarious. Ah, I feel better. Now, commence to pillorying me with more long-winded posts.

34. 34 Comment by Mace Price: The Despised Redneck of Barstow on 31 May 2007:

    …How can you look at Bush, and still deny that humans are the descendants of apes?

35. 35 Comment by Monte Poitevint on 1 June 2007:

    Mr. Chan,
    Trees – plants – don’t move. Yet I don’t think we doubt that they live. Chemistry is based upon certain principles. You mix this with this and you get this. With life, things don’t follow some simple chemical or physical law. I eat. But if given food, I may eat; I may not. In some cases, reverse osmosis comes to mind, life may accomplish the opposite of simple mechanical, physical law. The point I was trying to make is that to consider such things is to render an abstraction of things, thereby missing the whole. Descartes found his way back from nothingness by realising that God would not deceive him. That is, he could trust his senses. But that is not true from the Schroedinger’s ‘dead cat’ theory, where the cat is both dead and alive simultaneously. Nor in string theory, where, we are told, the real world is quite different from what we see and experience. This, to my mind, shows the absurdity of human knowledge, since, if we can’t trust our senses (as Descartes realised) science and knowledge is impossible.

    Only God can comprehend. All else is human arrogance and vanity.

36. 36 Comment by Adrien Larrarte on 1 June 2007:

    I have enjoyed reading Dr. Fleming’s article and the responses, and so I have a very small question. I feel slightly overwhemled with much of the information, so I am asking either Dr. Fleming or others to recomend a few books or other resources to truly understand Evolution and a grounded orthodox Christian response.

37. 37 Comment by Bill Jenkins on 1 June 2007:

    Mr. Mathias accuses evolution skeptics of hubris. That’s rich.

38. 38 Comment by TJF on 1 June 2007:

    To Adrien Larrate, I think there are others in this discussion who are better qualified to make this recommendation. While they were doing biology, I was mastering the Greek verb. What little I know, I swotted up in the 70’s and 80’s and then I was looking only for a convergence of biological theory with my own Aristotelian approach. The result was The Politics of Human Nature, which tries to incorporate genetics, sociobiology, etc., with an approach that is consistent with Christianity. The trouble with many critiques of Darwinism is that the authors often seem to me fundamentally dishonest. They begin with an apriori position, take the extremists and ridicule them, then assume, QED that they have proved creationism. Even Tom Bethell, whom I admire as a journalist, fell into this trap in claiming that the cladists had rejected evolutionary theory. Before long, such people will expect us to believe the Earl of Oxford wrote Hamlet.

    I think a better way of approaching this question is to study Aristotle and Thomas and then read what seems to me an excellent book, though a bit technical, Ernst Mayr’s The Growth of Biological Thought. Mayr was one of the major architects of modern evolutionary theory, a careful thinker (so far as I can tell) and, unlike the witty atheist Haldane (assumed to be the model for CS Lewis’s Weston), not an ideologue.

    Mayr, of course, spent much of his life studying the question of what a species is, and his work is relevant to my question of who is human. In the old days, people were content to say that members of the same species could conceivably mate and reproduce, even if two non-interbreeding subspecies lived on opposite sides of the world. But the theory has moved on from there. I have never entirely understood the value of numerical taxonomy, but, then I have scarcely tried. Would one of our scientifically literate people take up this question. I have a long shelf of books on evolutionary theory, but my brain is too lazy to go back to them.

    To Mr. Mathias, whose apology I am still awaiting, I have to say you do not appear to understand the nature of the conversation, much less the various points of view of the participants. If I were asked, do I believe or not believe that there is a good deal of truth in modern evolutionary theory, I woud say I do believe, though I am not entirely competent to have an opinion. Of living thinkers, the only one to have influenced my own though is E.O. Wilson, whose early work I studied with great profit. My point, at least, is not to trash science but to show the dangers of philosophically naive minds drawing conclusions from such little evidence. Two issues ago, I wrote an albeit imperfect piece in Chronicles on scientific atheism, focussing on Dawkins and Weinberg. I’ll have it posted on the site.

39. 39 Comment by Frank Mathias on 1 June 2007:

    You have to understand Mr. Jenkins, biologists are evolution’s skeptics. That’s their life’s work and they are truly qualified to do it. The great arrogance of people like you and many at this site is the ease with which you make a blanket dismissal of a field about which you have only the vaguest familiarity. I anticipated just your response to the hubris comment. I think what you mean is how dare I take some of the folk here to task for poo-pooing Darwin’s idea. What cheek! That’s not hubris, that’s criticism and based on the available evidence it is well-placed.

    There’s a new museum open near Cincinnati that caters to arrogance. Run by people who will be damned if they’ll let any scientist tell ‘em anything. Darwin’s been thrown out and Adam and Eve cavort with velociraptors.

    By the way, great books to read on evolution would be:

    The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
    River out of Eden by Richard Dawkins
    The Flamingo’s Smile by Stephen Jay Gould
    The Red Queen by Matt Ridley
    Trilobite by Richard Fortey
    Endless Forms Most Beautiful by Sean B. Carroll
    The Beak of the Finch by Jonathan Weiner

    and many, many more.

    Great books written by creationists….um…none. (That’s not my liberal bias, I just happen to like good writing)

40. 40 Comment by TJF on 1 June 2007:

    I agree with Mr. Mathias, whose apology I am not going to await much longer, on the creationists, though I cannot say that either Dawkins or Gould are good writers. They have that drippy purple prose I associate with Time Magazine and they mix it with uninformed polemics on subjects they have never studied. Talking philosophy, they are ike Fundamentalists discussing Darwinism.

    Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene is nicely provocative, though only a series of thought experiments. I prefer the Extended Phenotype. I exchanged letters with Dawkins once and defended him against simplistic detractors. He is, unfortunately, a typically modern man, a perpetual adolescent, the Christopher Hitchens of science.

    Gould was a more serious scientist, though some biologists have suggested (at least privately) that the theory of punctuated equilibrium, with which he is associated, was really developed by his co-author Niles Eldridge. At his worst, which is pretty often when he is engaged in general pontifications, Gould is as irresponsible as Dawkins equalling even the nadir of pop science authors, Carl Sagan.

41. 41 Comment by Bill Jenkins on 1 June 2007:

    Mr. Mathias,

    I know I’m out of my league on this forum. But, one thing I know for sure is that TJF does not want this to DE-volve into a p—ing match of gotchyas. So, suffice it to say that my hubris remark was directed at the prevailing quality of skepticism encountered by the man-in-the-street from the mainstream scientific community regarding any but material explanations for life on Earth. That quality seemed to me to be in abundance in your comments.

    P.S.

    By your own reckoning Biblical Creationism is not the only logical conclusion to Evolution skepticism. That’s a just a very tired and hackneyed straw-man in the debate.

42. 42 Comment by T. Chan on 1 June 2007:

    Mr. Poitevint:

    Trees – plants – don’t move. Yet I don’t think we doubt that they live. Chemistry is based upon certain principles.

    I was not talking about locomotion–hence I specified “living things move (in the technical Aristotelian sense of the word) themselves.”

    Here to move/motion can be subsituted with the word “change.”

    But that is not true from the Schroedinger’s ‘dead cat’ theory, where the cat is both dead and alive simultaneously. Nor in string theory, where, we are told, the real world is quite different from what we see and experience. This, to my mind, shows the absurdity of human knowledge, since, if we can’t trust our senses (as Descartes realised) science and knowledge is impossible.

    I think we would go too far from Dr. Fleming’s post in discussing epistemology and the claims of a certain understanding of quantum physics. I’ll just say that to draw conclusions about what we can know or the way things are from the results of quantum physics is a mistake, because those who would make those conclusions don’t really understand the results and how they are obtained. (It has a lot to do with the nature of measurement at the level of reality–to say that we cannot measure something does not mean that it cannot be measured–it may simply mean that we do not have the means to make that measurement.)

43. 43 Comment by T. Chan on 1 June 2007:

    Alas, quite unlikely as the mountain of converging lines of evidence gathered in the last 150 years makes abundantly clear.

    Converging lines of evidence can be interpreted as probable arguments. Tto take those arguments as being certain is to commit the fallacy of affirming the consequent, and hence they do not prove that the mechanism of neo-Darwinism is true. As it stands, neo-Darwinism is insufficient to explain the generation of structure. DNA encodes for proteins–what those proteins do in tandem with other parts and the impact of a change in makeup of protein (and its function) is what is missing in neo-Darwinist analysis. If neo-Darwinism is to be convincing, it needs to show that changes in protein functionality can lead to major structural changes.

44. 44 Pingback by ChroniclesMagazine.org » Dead Monkeys and the Living God on 1 June 2007:

    [...] For a discussion of this topic, please click on “Descent of Man, Ascent of Apes?“ [...]

45. 45 Comment by Michael on 1 June 2007:

    As I have remarked before, I am sympathetic to Dr. Fleming’s wish to defend orthodoxy, but his zeal to sniff out heresy or enmity to Christianity where only a simple error in reasoning or a cranky opinion exists is rather disturbing. The resultant tone is that of one of Savonarola’s henchmen casting ‘vanities’ into the bonfire, or of a vituperative pamphleteer in the service of the third duke of Guise.

    The mention of Iamblichus should remind us that there is a far closer link between that thinker and Baroque music theory than there is between the Corpus Hermeticum and seventeenth century chymistry. Every composer from the time Mauduit set J.A. de Baïf’s vers mesurée until the death of Mozart (that impious Freemason!) was a practitioner of the doctrine of musical effects (“dagli effetti nascono gli affetti”). This finds its origins in Iamblichus’s “Life of Pythagoras,” lib. I, cap. 25. Indeed, Dryden’s lyrics for “Alexander’s Feast” are a bald restatement of the effects listed by Iamblichus, and Handel’s setting of them is a catalogue raisonée of the associated compositional techniques.

    Following Dr. Fleming’s reasoning, since Iamblichus was not just a late pagan with some odd ideas, but a malignant and dangerous adversary of Christianity, we should therefore consign the first two centuries of opera to the flames.

46. 46 Comment by TJF on 1 June 2007:

    One again “Michael” is putting arguments into my mouth that I have not only not made but I have explicitly rejected.

    “I do not think I am making any mistake, in drawing attention to the dangers of the Hermetic tradition. Many fine thinkers were infected, not just scientists, including Thomas More and Henry More.”

    It appears that it is not only the art of writing that is being lost but the art of reading.

    Mozart was a Freemason, Byron a rake, Milton a heretic, Vergil a Pythagorean pagan and probably a pederast. So what? I don’t like the libretto of The Magic Flute, dislike Byron’s treatment of his wife, find Milton’s theology laughable, and part company with Vergil on more than philosophy. Naturally, I have not given up listening to Mozart or quit reading Vergil and the others. However, when there is a tradition opposed to everything I believe, I do not see how I can be ridiculed for drawing attention to it, especially when it is embraced by the dominant intellectuals of the past 500 years. In some cases the infection runs so deep–in Pico and Bruno, for example–I would warn every non-scholar and even scholars without a well-formed religious sense away from the writers. In other cases, the two Mores for example or Newton, it is advisable to sort out the strands of their thought. Why anyone should object to this, I cannot guess, unless perhaps it is out of reverence for the Hermetic tradition

    Finally, I think the significance of Iamblichus on Baroque music has been rather overstated. Iamblichus’ music theories are hardly original but merely reflect a Platonic/Pythagorean tradition. The mere fact that a fraudulent thaumaturge says that the earth is round does not tempt one into flat-earthian views.

    The argument, however, is not without interest, With a lecture on Dryden half-written, I would be delighted to find a reference in Dryden to Iamblichus. I’m sure it is possible but I simply have not run across it–no inferences please but references. I find more overt and covert references in the Elizabethan and Jacobean period–e.. in Shakespeare, Sidney, Jonson, and Marlowe

47. 47 Comment by Bill Jenkins on 1 June 2007:

    I don’t know about the rest of you guys. But Michael and TJF have got my head spinning. And I’d venture that the readership capable of keeping-up is approaching that of the resale value of Egbert Souse’s chase vee-hicle, “virtually nil”. (Bank Dick, 1940)

    Sorry, I couldn’t resist.

48. 48 Comment by Frank Mathias on 1 June 2007:

    TJF, I apologize if you felt the “smug, supercilious simpletons” line was directed at you. You obviously know your way around and I agree with your synopses of the relative merits of Dawkins et al. However, they are good for a start. But Sagan, absolute nadir? Tosh.

    T. Chan. I mean this in the best possible way, but what in the heck are you talking about? What is neo-Darwinism? Is this a buzzword for the modern synthesis?

    Why don’t you use the term natural selection? That’s the mechanism that drives “neo-Darwinism” a.k.a plain old evolution. And it does a fantastic job of explaining the generation of structure. Ultimately, that’s what it’s all about! Sounds suspiciously like the old creationist “macroevolution vs. microevolution” canard. What’s next, neo-Darwinism violates the second law of thermodynamics?

49. 49 Comment by T. Chan on 1 June 2007:

    Mr. Mathias:

    Neo-Darwinism, modern synthesis, whatever you want to call it–the reductionistic model that attempts to explain “speciation” and the generation of structure through changes in DNA alone. Does it explain it? No. Scientists can claim it does, but they can’t lay out the mechanism, relying instead on faulty reasoning concerning causation.

    It is one thing to posit a change in DNA, it’s another to trace the effects of this all the way to the development of new structures with new functions. This is the mechanism I am talking about.

50. 50 Comment by T. Chan on 1 June 2007:

    or causal pathway, if you will

51. 51 Comment by TJF on 1 June 2007:

    Tosh? Billions and Bilions of stars, tosh? Unctuous and plagiarized platitudes, tosh? I actually once read the book version of Sagan’s TV show and discovered a little gem: a simplified and ideological treatment of the death of Hypatia. Where, I asked, would this ignoramus get such an interpretation. Then I took down an encylcopedia from the shelf and found it, word for word, probably copied out by the people who wrote the scripts and his book. Tosh, indeed. I don’t much care about my own feelings, which are not very bruisable, but about the language with which we conduct our conversations. Passion yes, insulting epithets no. Many of us are or have been teachers and we ought to set a better example.

    I agree with Jenkins that the conversation about Iamblichus should go private and if Michael would like, I can email him. Otherwise he can send an email to the webmaster, though that might take an extra day.

    I wonder if T. Chan could elaborate and perhaps suggest some reading

    Finally, the webmaster has posted my highly polemical attack on the simple-minded atheism of Dawkins and Weinberg, “Dead Monkeys and the Living God: http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/?p=101. If you have trouble with the link , go to the front page, then Chronicles Magazine, then choose the April 2007.

52. 52 Comment by Bill Jenkins on 1 June 2007:

    TJF,

    Please take my comment on your and Michael’s discussion of Iamblichus and the like as a moron wise-guy’s expression of awe, not impatience.

53. 53 Comment by G.S. on 1 June 2007:

    “It’s hubris I can’t stomach.”

    I was attempting to highlight the hubris of those for whom Evolution has become an all-encompassing, all-explaining deity.

    To my understanding, “neo-Darwinism” refers to the idea that the high priesthood of Evolution can give us the answers to every last facet of human existence — evolutionary psychology being the pre-eminent example.

    Religion, art, poetry, every aspect of human experience can be explained away in terms of the amoral, spiritually-void struggle for survival on the part of selfish genes.

    The term “evolution” as it is bandied about today is used to identify not the mechanism of natural selection but rather a philosophical worldview.

    Namely the materialism of Richard Dawkins and his fellow-travellers — with whom I am quite familiar, thanks.

    The biological-materialist worldview of Man as being no more than the sum of his parts is now conflated with recognizing the mechanism of natural selection, and the neo-Darwinian philosophical argument goes something like this:

    *Why, parental ‘love’ is nothing more than an evolved biochemical mechanism, full of sound and fury — ultimately signifying nothing more than bestial appetites that are in turn founded upon nothing.

    Want proof?

    Why, just look at gypsy moths and how they change color over generations.

    Plus, y’know, there’s the fossil record.

    Last but not least — why, we have jumbo jets and cell phones.

    QED.*

    I too agree that it is important for people to not get locked into reading books by groupthink authors who uniformly tout the same single ideogical framework… yea, verily, diversity is important.

    As to pop science which steps outside neo-Darwinian mindset, I would recommend Werner Loewenstein’s “The Touchstone of Life: Molecular Information, Cell Communication, and the Foundations of Life” or “The Fifth Miracle” by Paul Davies.

    Loewenstein is a former Columbia University professor and currently works for the Marine Biological Laboratory of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

    Davies is a British physicist who currently works for Arizona State.

    To my knowledge Loewenstein is not a Christian, and is not a “creationist” nor an “intelligent designer” — unless one defines a “creationist” as someone who believes the cosmos has a Creator and an “intelligent designer” as someone who thinks there is an underlying order and reason to existence.

    If one defines “science-bashing obfuscation” as failing to subscribe to the neo-Darwinian conception of life as being definable in terms of little biological-atoms (genes, memes, etc.) bouncing around in an absurd existential soup, then Professor Loewenstein is indeed a science-bashing obfuscator.

    My impression of Davies is that he is agnostic, or perhaps a noncomittal theist; as such he criticizes the cozy certainty with which a great many assume that the Alpha and Omega of the universe has been neatly tied up in a bow by philosophical materialism.

    Davies actively questions whether or not evolution as it is currently understood gives a clear or coherent picture of life. He utterly rejects materialism, as do most of the scientists with whom I have had the privelege of meeting.

    During an astronomy course I took in graduate school a couple years ago, one of the students attacked Copernicus, since Copernicus frequently refers to theological concepts and to God in his writings.

    “That’s religion, not *science*,” quoth the righteous student. (Not himself a scientist of course, but a loyal and true science-worshipper.)

    The instructor — an astrophysicist and former NASA researcher — asked in reply, “How is the belief that the universe conforms to the reasonability of mathematical harmony not also a form of religious faith?”

    As for Dawkins and his memes … I don’t particularly mind that Richard Dawkins is of the opinion that all ideas and values are merely the absurd byproducts of meaningless chance which allowed the strong to triumph over the less materially-fit.

    The only problem that comes in is when Dawkins uses a
    scientific-sounding word for paraphrasing an old, old, old argument, and then solemnly claims to have *invented* this stance.

    Now, it is true that some classicists get obnoxious and use high-falutin’ Greco-Roman pseudointellectualspeke to cover up their essential stupidity and inability to think– Victor Davis Hanson would be a prime case in point.

    But the same goes for sciencespeke.

    The only purpose of the syllable “meme” is that it identifies the one who utters it as a member of that exclusive fraternity of properly-modern elites who are much too clever to take religion seriously, much too progressive to accord any respect to silly-shallow works such as Augustine’s meditations, and much too enlightened to believe that traditional concepts such as chastity or honor or justice actually represent anything true or absolute or eternal.

    Dawkins’ philosophy can be expressed mathematically: Metaphysical Cynicism = Being Smart; Faith = Stupid.

    What irritates me about Dawkins, is his pretense at being innovative: If Plato’s Thrasymachus were alive today he could get himself a savvy lawyer and sue the pants off of the Good Cambridge Professor, for plagiarism.

    It’s as if I were to point at an egg and dub it a “monoroundoid” or something, and then develop a slavishly adoring fan-base who are illiterate enough to think I have performed a feat of sagely-scientific insight.

54. 54 Comment by Lee on 1 June 2007:

    To Frank Mathias: as a matter of fact all Darwinisms violate the second law of thermodynamics. But then that takes us away from Wade and into a discussion of what hard science (ie physics and chemistry, etc. ) really is.

    But one case in point. Newton proposed originally that physical laws are constant throughout the universe and time. It has generally been accepted by all scientists until recently as some astrophysicists look for ways to make their pet theories of the “evolution” of the universe give us the universe we have now. Over the last several hundred years, physicists have measure the universal constant of gravitation thousands of times and in hundreds of ways. The value is G = 6.67428 +/- .00067 x 10(-11) m(3) kg (-1) s (-2). What do we get from Wade? See page 5 of his book. Based on rates of mutation of genes (which throughout his book change from one gene to another and some of which don’t mutate al all), one guy calculated that the branch point in the evolution of body lice occurred 72,000 years ago give or take several thousand years (not 2000 or 6300 etc., but several thousand). But according to the footnote, which you have to go to the back of the book to read, other researchers (how many?, which ones?) dispute a technical point (which one?, and is there any other kind in a technical discussion than technical ones?) which could be sustained and which would put the branch point back 500,000 years. But that doesn’t fit his language theory nor his out of Affica theory, so the actual text doesn’t even mention the problem. This isn’t science, this is gossip, or is it just natural selection!

55. 55 Comment by Dan McCulloch on 1 June 2007:

    I’m far less inclined than Dr. Fleming to cede any credibility to the religious atheists and their apologetics. The point is well taken from many of the posters here that the Dogma should not be rejected merely because we find dishonesty among its advocates and in its doctrines, and because we know on other grounds that its aims are evil. For the sake of the remnant, however (who are our only concern now), we should continue to educate about the critical differences between science and philosophy, and how to recognize when scientists have begun to philosophize.

    The critical difference between theist scientists and the religious atheists in evolutionary biology is that the former do science for all the normal reasons, but latter have an additional reason, namely, to ground their faith. Christians don’t need science to ground their faith, nor can anything said in it ever contradict their faith. But things said that are not science in the strict sense certainly can, such as the metaphysical speculations of anti-Christ scientists.

    We cannot expect that in a dying civilization we are going to find ANY institutions uncorrupted by the death dealing ideologies in respect of which it is dying. We should not be surprised or shaken by the fact that so many apparently intelligent people are working so very hard to justify the unjustifiable. If it serves the purposes of the dominant culture to deny any distinction between philosophy and science, and it does, then we should expect more of it.

    In spite of the recent rise of the philosophical discipline of philosophy of science, more people than ever are ignorant of the nature of science and the conditions of its truth claims, especially scientists themselves. The common attitude, no doubt shared by the humble Mr. Mathias, is that if a scientist says it, and it concerns science, then it simply is science as such, and it shares in all the glories and privileges thereof. Furthermore, if there is a mainstream consensus on the matter (because the history of consensus science is so impressive), then to question it is tantamount to heresy, especially if concerns the sacred cows of religious atheists (witness the climate alarmism farce).

    Therefore, from the start we are cranks in the eyes of the mainstream. Mr. Mathias is an instructive example of this: he doesn’t need to address any of the substantive points made by anyone; he needs only sneer, condescend, and name call, make grand sweeping dismissals of everyone and their various characters, and then sit back smugly confident of his position in the mainstream. We really should not expect anything more than this. (The hope dies hard though, I know.)

    For those who understand nothing of philosophy, foundational philosophical criticisms appear grand and sweeping, but this is precisely because they are foundational. Philosophy studies the foundations of thought, being, value, and action. For those who don’t understand or deny that all sciences are grounded philosophically in fundamental metaphysical assumptions, this is bound to be confusing. But the edifice of knowledge does not start with science, or end with science, but instead it begins and ends in philosophy. Whenever we see the scientist with a new discovery rush out into the cameras and lights to tell us all What It Means, all should understand that he has begun to philosophize. And inevitably, except on rare occasions, he does so poorly. The conceit, of course, is that philosophy is nothing, and can be equally well done by anyone, but especially by the philosophical scientist. The usual results of this are all the evidence one needs to the contrary.

56. 56 Comment by Mace Price: The Despised Redneck of Barstow on 1 June 2007:

    …The predisposition and proclivity to Religion, Spirituality, etc. Is I believe, something genetic. Despite my long held conviction of Theology being the asking of questions that no one is listening to. Were the United States not founded upon—amongst other things—Religiosity: The best efforts of the Frankfurt Group et al would have easily succeeded; and initiated a far worse State of Affairs above, and of course below the Division of Labor…In this sense, Christianity, its History of Old World factionalism, malfeasance and oppression notwithstanding, has been, and must remain, an absolute imperative…Inviolable, and constant. As such it is effortlessly tolerated by many of those who cannot understand any logical basis to such “Blind Faith” whatsoever.

    To be blunt: No State Authority ever threatened me with Prosecution if I failed to attend Church Services. While the tenets of Political Correctness, or moreover Political Oppression? I’m sure you will agree threaten to be a much different matter entirely. Thus if Religion is good for other people? In that regard it is good for me too. So, please, pray your asses off!

57. 57 Comment by G.S. on 1 June 2007:

    Actually I suppose a better analogy to the “meme” would be “neoconservativism” — the global-democratic-revolution extolled by Trotskyites dusted off and re-phrased and then presented to the weak-minded as something new and original.

58. 58 Comment by G.S. on 1 June 2007:

    “The common attitude, no doubt shared by the humble Mr. Mathias, is that if a scientist says it, and it concerns science, then it simply is science as such, and it shares in all the glories and privileges thereof.”

    Bingo.

    Hence *The Selfish Gene* and the mindset it represents are taken as “objective” scientific writing rather than as philosophical speculation.

59. 59 Comment by Mace Price: The Despised Redneck of Barstow on 1 June 2007:

    …How about something more Classic GS?…Like neo-Marxist Billionaires in Trojan Horse?

60. 60 Comment by G.S. on 1 June 2007:

    1 Correction: Dawkins is at Oxford, not Cambridge.

61. 61 Comment by Dan McCulloch on 1 June 2007:

    GS said,

    “neoconservativism” — the global-democratic-revolution extolled by Trotskyites dusted off and re-phrased and then presented to the weak-minded as something new and original.

    You bring tears to my eyes, sir. Mind if I quote that?

62. 62 Comment by Michael on 1 June 2007:

    I agree that a lengthy discussion of the influence of Iamblichus would probably serve little purpose here, and will further allow that if in saying “no inferences but references” you mean you’ll be satisfied only by finding a direct quotation of Iamblichus in Dryden, then I’m not going to be able to give you one. However, it is possible to find several straighforward allusions to Iamblichus’s “Life of Pythagoras” in Dryden’s lyrics for “Alexander’s Feast,” originally written for Jeremiah Clarke to set (the setting is lost) and later set by Handel.

    Cf Dryden:

    Timotheus plac’d on high,
    Amid the tuneful Quire,
    With flying Fingers touch’d the Lyre:
    The trembling Notes ascend the Sky,
    and heav’nly Joys inspire.

    with Iamblichus (“Life of Pythagoras,” I, xxv):

    “For he placed in the middle a certain person who played on the lyre, and seated in a circle round him those who were able to sing. And thus, when the person in the center struck the lyre, those that surrounded him sung certain paeans, through which they were seen to be delighted, and to become elegant and orderly in their manners.”

    Alexander is charmed by the bard Timotheus’s music and in turn is exalted to Jovian heights, intoxicated by a Bacchic theme, rendered melancholy by “…a mournful Muse/Soft Pity to infuse” for the defeated Darius, then amorous towards the courtesan Thais. Finally:

    “Revenge, Revenge, Timotheus cries,
    See the Furies arise,
    See the Snakes that they rear,
    How they hiss in their Hair,
    And the Sparkles that flash from their Eyes!
    Behold the ghastly Band,
    Each a Torch in his Hand!
    Those are the Grecian Gholsts, that in Battle were salin,
    And unbury’d remain
    Inglorious on the Palin.
    Give the Vengeance due
    To the valiant Crew:
    Behold how they toss their Torches on hughm,
    How they point to the Persian Abodes,
    And glitt’ring Temples of their Hostile Gods!
    The Princes applaud with a furious Joy;
    And the King seize’d a Flambeau, with Zeal to destroy,
    Thais led the way,
    To light him to his Prey;
    And like Helen, fir’d another Troy.”

    Alexander’s burning of Persepolis, which has always been a mystery to historians, is thus attributed by Dryden to music. The theme of arson inspired by a song at a feast by night is a direct allusion to Iamblichus, who tells us:

    “Among the deeds of Pythagoras likewise, it is said, that once through a spondaic song of a piper, he extinguished the rage of a Tauromenian lad, who had been feasting by night, and intended to burn the vestibule of his mistress… the lad was inflamed and excited to this rash attempt by a Phyrgian song…”

    I haven’t looked at Handel’s score to see if the bass air “Revenge, Revenge..” has Phyrgian modal elements, but it would not surprise me if it did. Maybe the above is not enough of a “reference” to satisfy you, but it seems reasonably direct to me.

    You are probably aware that Handel’s “Harmonious Blacksmith” alludes to the legend of Pythagoras’s discovery of the relationship of pitch to weight (Iamblichus, op. cit., I, xxvi). The composer undoubtedly knew the story, if not from the original source, from its illustration on the frontispiece of Athanasius Kircher’s “Musurgia universalis,” which was a very popular music theory treatise at the time. Heinrich von Biber, for example, quotes birdsongs from this work in his “Sonata representativa”; and it is the source of the earliest melodies for the tarantella (another instance of Iamblicho-Pythagorean “music as medicine”). Kircher, though a Jesuit, was a thoroughoing Hermetist and Neoplatonist.

    Certainly the influence of Iamblichus on Dryden in “Alexander’s Feast” and generally on baroque music theory is far greater and more direct than any influence of the Corpus Hermeticum on Boyle.

    Boyle’s chymistry seems to me far more inspired by his opposition to Epicurean atomism, and its English adherents such as Henry More. This should be quite evident in reading Boyle’s “Origins of Forms and Qualities.” He used the term “hermetic” simply as a synonym for standard chemical praxis, much as we still do in speaking of “hermetically sealed” containers.

    Boyle adhered to the chemical theory of his time when it seemed to him to explain the phenomena he observed, such as the “incalescence of quicksilver with gold” (in modern terms, an exothermic intermetallic reaction upon the alloying with gold of mercury previously doped with antimony and copper). This also fascinated Newton and Locke.

    Incalescences are still not well understood (they occur for example between palladium and aluminum; gold and aluminum; and between nickel and aluminum); Boyle, Locke, and Newton are not the last people to have been fooled into the belief that something on the verge of transmutation was involved. Noble metals frequently exhibit incalescent behavior. The recent so-called “cold fusion” experiment involved an incalescent reaction between palladium and deuterium; the infamous “red mercury” said to have been used by the former Soviet Union in nuclear weapons may have been mercuric antimonyl heptoxide, known to Boyle, Homberg, et al., as a red powder prepared by “cohobation of the Sophick mercury.”

63. 63 Comment by Michael on 1 June 2007:

    In the quotation from Dryden beginning “Revenge, Revenge” lines 8 – 13 should read:

    “Those are the Grecian Ghosts, that in Battle were slain,
    And unbury’d remain,
    Inglorious on the Plain.
    Give the Vengeance due
    To the valiant Crew:
    Behold how they toss their Torches on high,”

    It would have been better for me to have proofread before posting, possessing such clumsy fingers as I do.

64. 64 Comment by TJF on 1 June 2007:

    For a brief moment, I thought you might have had something, but I think, again, you are confusing if not deliberately obfuscating the issue. Iamblichus qua hermetic philosopher is quite different from Iamblichus qua source for Pythagoras’ life. Yes, there is a long literature on Pythagoras and his discoveries and some of the best myths are preserved by Iamblichus, though in the case of Dryden he is more likely to have borrowed them second-hand, as he borrowed, for example, so much from Casaubon in writing on the history of satire. Yes, indeed, if you want to show that Dryden was actually influenced by the philosophy of Iamblichus, you are going to have to find real references to the philosophy of Iamblichus.

    But even if the influence is direct, it proves absolutely nothing. I cannot imagine why in a discussion of Darwinism, so much is being made of Boyle, and I cannot see why in a tangential discussion of the impact of neo-paganism on 17th century thought, an even more irrelevant topic–a poet or musician’s knowledge of Iamblichus’ writings on the Pythagoreans should be dragged in. We might just as well talk about Nicomachus, whose neo-Pythagorean writings on math and harmonics exercised enormous influence. That hardly makes everyone who quotes Nicomachus or refers to Pythagoras a neo-pagan or even a neo-Platonist.

    What is the point to your comments? To say that neo-pagan black magic does not exist or is really a good thing? If your point is rather to say that not everyone who cites an Hermetic/neo-pagan source is necessarily an hermetic neo-pagan, I’ve already said that, more than once. But if you cannot distinguish between references to a musical tradition and a long-standing and organized religious cult, then I have nothing more to say, though I can recommend some things to read. This closes this part of the discussion, though as I have said before, I am happy to take it up in private or in a public forum when that is the topic. It has nothing to do with Dryden and Handel, something to do with Boyle and Newton but a great deal more with Renaissance neo-Platonism and its Nachleben.

65. 65 Comment by Mace Price: The Despised Redneck of Barstow on 1 June 2007:

    …Erudition, and the Status of an Esoteric only goes so far in the Real World presently, if not decreasingly less. It has been my experience that Intellectuals share a common flaw; they are generally ineffective in any pursuit outside a particular, secure milieu, and one usually sponsored and dominated by some Goddamned wealthy dilettante of a Matron at that…Do not undertake the select attitudes of exclusivity Gentlemen. Because it is precisely that which will in the end will render you dangerously extinct…Rather like the present status of The Church in Europe.

66. 66 Comment by T. Chan on 1 June 2007:

    Dr. Fleming:

    The biggest critics of the reductionism of neo-Darwinists have been the biological structuralists, perhaps the most well-known being Gerry Webster and Brian Goodwin. Goodwin’s book How the Leopard Changed Its Spots is the most readily available one; Form and Transformation, written by both of them, covers the same material but in greater detail. Giuseppe Sermonti gives a critique of reductionism in Why is a Fly Not a Horse?; the book is published by the Center for Science & Culture, i.e. the Discovery Institute, so no doubt in the minds of many it is tainted as a result.

    Biological structuralism is an improvement over neo-Darwinism, but from the perspective of an Aristotelian, I find that it still falls short. While they have focused their attention on development, thus far they have not provided an example of a major new structure that has a new function developing from pre-existing living matter.

    I also find the reading list at the Institute for the Study of Nature to be rather helpful in addressing reductionism within biology and other issues.

67. 67 Comment by T. Chan on 1 June 2007:

    oops–close italics

68. 68 Comment by T. Chan on 1 June 2007:

    my apologies to the webmaster — my attempt to close italics didn’t work

69. 69 Comment by Michael on 1 June 2007:

    My point, at my first entrance into this discussion, was to defend Boyle against your charge that he was a neo-pagan. He was a Christian gentleman who died a faithful member of the church of England, whose funeral sermon was preached by that Anglican paragon, Bishop Burnet, and who endowed a series of lectures intended to defend the Christian religion against “notorious infidels,” namely atheists, deists, pagans, Jews and Muslims.

    Your case against Boyle is far weaker than mine on the doctrine of musical effects, which was not a mere literary or artistic convention. Dryden’s subtitle was “The Power of Music,” a power in which he and Handel appeared to believe firmly – as did their probable direct source of the Iamblichus material, Athanasius Kircher. What would you call Kircher’s argument that dancing the tarantella to the appropriate melody is efficacious against the venom of its corresponding species of spider? It is assuredly magic, whether black, white, or polka dotted I know not.

    If your argument is that natural science has historical roots in magic, Lynn Thorndike wrote 8 thick volumes to prove that point and nothing really need be added to them. Boyle and Newton were hardly as credulous as most of the people Thorndike describes.

    Newton was definitely heterodox, his beliefs probably lying somewhere on the trajectory between the deism of Lord Herbert of Cherbury and that of Locke. His calculation of the date of the apocalypse in 1868, which you mentioned, was no odder than the Anglican bishop Ussher’s determination that the world had been created in 4004 B.C. This kind of speculation was a hobby-horse of the period, just as was alchemical chrysopoeia. It should not be taken too seriously.

    Darwinism has less similarity to any of these beliefs than it does with ideas like Hegel’s theory of history, which has wrought far more serious mischief in the past century than any of the chimeræ of occultists, ancient or modern, ever did.

70. 70 Comment by TJF on 2 June 2007:

    I read Thorndike or at least much of him in graduate school, when I was studying Renaissance Latin, and there is a great deal more that needs to be said on neo-paganism, though not here. I have only a tangential interest in the magical/alchemical origins of modern science insofar as it is related to the wider question of the neo-pagan movement in ancient and modern times.

    As for defending Boyle from my attacks, you are, once again, not paying attention to what was said, only as an aside in an answer to a response:

    “the Royal Society deserves extended treatment since some of the most empiricist members, e.g., Boyle and Newton, were also religious zanies and alchemists.”

    This is, admittedly, sloppy and vague. Newton was a religious zany and an alchemist, Boyle–in whom I take little interest except as a minor player in something I am beginning to study–an alchemist. I said over and over that a decent and useful person may take an interest in unwholesome studies without being himself corrupted. As for Boyle’s faith, I simply do not know enough to say. He came from a fine family–one that connects him to Dryden, by the way, who was a friend of his brother. But in a world in which everyone was a Christian or thought he was or claimed to be, outward conformity means little. Ficino and Pico are always said to be pious Catholics, even by scholars who have studied their works. Reading Ficino’s letters make this claim absurd. Every heretic in England defended true religion against paganism and apostacy, and as for Bishop Burnet, you are welcome to his testimony. I once wasted time reading his history and learned from that not to trust him on anything. But I know of nothing whatsoever against Boyle’s character or faith, except his interest in a dark science.

    As for Kircher, I must also profess ignorance. He was a great man in his day, one of those cunning Jesuits interested in the East, but also a scientist. He certainly took the Hermetic nonsense seriously, though Casaubon had already debunked it. I have always assumed, without any study, that he is a typical adept masequerading as a Catholic, though the reality may be more complicated. I simply do not know if Dryden had read Kircher, much less been influenced by him. May I assume that if you had a reference, it would have been trotted out? One learns, over the years, that resemblance does not necessarily mean imitation. Dwight McDonald, in his wonderful book of parodies, includes, as a parody of Joyce, Dutch Schultz’s deathbed ravings.

    In conclusion, I still do not see your point, if you have one. I said, obiter dictum, that prominent members of the Royal Society were religious zanies and alchemists. I might better have cited the Elias Ashmole but few people outside of Oxford seems to know who he is. I said repeatedly I have no animus against Boyle or Newton, for that matter, a really unpleasant person as well as a zany. I am really interested in neither except as they exemplify certain tendencies of the age. I am not an historian of science, even in an amateur sense.

    However, it is a serious question, in studying 17th century philosophy, including natural philosophy, to what extent Hermetic influence may also represent, in a given writer, neo-pagan influence. Among the Italians it seems clear. In Bacon it also seems clear. Descartes seems to have believed the Rosicrucian nonsense for a time, but I am inclined to interprret that as a symptom of his anti-Christianity.

    In Newton’s case his religious obsession seems to rule out neo-paganism, but scientists and philosophers who cite Hermes and Iamblichus and Agrippa, and read Bruno and Paracelsus, are placing themselves within a tradition and it is entirely fair to study to what extent they are really inside the tradition rather than outsiders who might make a reference or two.
    By contrast, in the case of poets, it is only fair to speculate either when they are known, like Raleigh, to have practiced alchemy, or like Sidney, to have been in the circle of John Dee (whom he cleverly addresses in Latin as deus, god!) or even Marlowe who writes a play on an alchemist and has suspicious connections. In the case of Dryden, you bring up nothing but unsuspicious echoes of a tradition that goes back to Plato and was widely if not universally accepted in the Renaissance. If you cannot distinguish Dryden’s echoes from a serious interest in alchemy, then you could not distinguish Eliot’s quotations from Sanskrit texts from those of Mme Blavatsky.

    As a working scholar on ancient music and meter, I do not have to be lectured on the Pythagorean tradition either in the ancient or modern tradition. One thing, relevant to this discussion, we have learned–I believe F. Leo was the first to do the spadework–is that there are separate traditions in ancient music/rhythmic writing, but more than one tradition may turn up in an eclectic writer like Aristides Quintillianus. Similar language, terminology, and turns of expression may intrude themselves into a text without placing the author, necessarily, within a particular tradition. One has to weigh and balance the evidence. I cheerfully concede the probability that Boyle was a Christian gentleman–he was certainly a gentleman–despite an unwholesome interest typical of Renaissance philosophy, though by no means universal. If I had time, I would certainly be justified in going through Boyle, examining what he knew and believed.

    Neo-paganism, a movement that has everywhere triumphed in the West, is certainly worth taking seriously. The only reasons for not taking neo-paganism seriously is either adherence (or indifference) to its principles or ignorance of the tradition.

    I have allowed this interesting though irrelevant digression to disrupt the discussion for two long. I invite Michael to send a message to the webmaster, who will forward it to me. Future writebacks on this topic, however, will be removed without comment, though I also invite him to suggest a book, old or new, with which to develop the argument. We might try something of Frances Yates, though she is as much an apologist as an explicator of the Hermetics.

71. 71 Comment by Lee on 2 June 2007:

    Leaving all reference to Scripture aside, if Aristotle, the pagan, is correct, namely that substance admits of no degree, then the species homo sapiens sapiens (ie us) does (did) not develop faculties gradually. His nature and faculties were completely determined at his first formation. His speech, sociability, intellect etc. are whatever they will be and have been for all time.
    Also, as for genes, what exactly does it mean that we share 99% of a chimps genes? (rhetorical I know). After all there is a lot of similarity: organ systems, hair, skin, metabolism etc. Wade didn’t mention it but we also share, I believe, 65 % of the genes of blue green algae. That’s only 34% difference from a chimp. What does that prove other than living beings on the planet earth have a lot in common. Also, my recollection is that crayfish have 3 times as many chromosomes as we do and they taste good. Wade’s kind of trivia could go on almost forever and never prove anything.

72. 72 Comment by Dan McCulloch on 3 June 2007:

    “Leaving all reference to Scripture aside, if Aristotle, the pagan, is correct, namely that substance admits of no degree, then the species homo sapiens sapiens (ie us) does (did) not develop faculties gradually.”

    The evolutionists do not accept Aristotle’s substance ontology, nor do most moderns. Not that most of them have the first bloody clue what ontology is, beyond the dictionary definition. I suspect there is no refuge here, however, for A would probably not insist that substances remain the same across hundreds of millions of years. At any one time substances must be distinct and speciation does not occur, but evolution is not ruled out over the long term by hylomorphism.

    One thing that is going to give the naturalist project fits in the years to come is the problem of ‘mind.’ Even though most cognitive scientists deny that mind is anything over and above brain states, they still have the difficulty of explaining why it is that only one species is self-aware. If one is a materialist (physicalism and naturalism are the new-fangled philosophical versions), one must believe that consciousness spontaneously occurs at the attainment of a certain level of neural complexity. But many animals have brains larger and just as complex as humans. Why have these other animals not become self-aware? Thus far they have been able to duck the question by hiding behind the relative state of infancy of cognitve science, and claim that one day the answers will come. And that is probably where the situation will rest until the fall of the West, after which no one will care any longer.

    There is a well known British philosopher of science by the name of Paul Humphreys who has carried his physicalism to its logical extreme. He tours the world lecturing that one day very soon, science will begin doing itself for its own reasons. Science will produce hypotheses too complex for us to understand. He has charts and graphs that show that around the date 2025 this will occur, and this will be the opening of the age of “post-humanity.” Don’t laugh; this man is well-respected and taken seriously wherever he goes. But this is the kind of stupidity one is driven to by materialism. All of the “AI” folks believe essentially the same thing (except perhaps the date!), namely, that very soon our machines will achieve the state of complexity necessary to achieve self-awareness and consciousness.

    Cease to believe in God, and you will believe anything.

73. 73 Comment by TJF on 4 June 2007:

    I have posted a piece on chapter III but for your convenience or inconvenience, I am including it here:

    Before the Dawn, Chapter III: “First Words”

    What is the cause of language? To be more precise and Aristotelian, what are the causes? That is, what are its material requirements, what form(s) does it take, what purpose or functions does it serve? These are ancient questions, taken up by Platonists, Stoics, and Epicureans. Epicureans naturally saw language as a response to or expression of necessity, while Plato tried to link words with reality, much as he regarded the arts as mimetic representations of a more real reality beyond the senses.

    In modern times, philosophers have been joined by linguists and anthropologists, each with a particular theory unrelated to every other theory. The chaos and absurdity (matched only by the chaos and absurdity of professional metricians) reached a point that linguists agreed to ban discussions of the origins question from many conferences and journals. Wade knows none of this it seems, and repeats the absurd charge that Noam Chomsky is somehow responsible for the taboo.

    Wade’s approach, in a nutshell, is to assume that there must be a straightforward Neo-Darwinist explanation for the origin of language. In other words, a genetic variant can be discovered which multiplied under advantageous circumstances. He does not make the mistake of treating human language as simply a more sophisticated form of monkey cries and gestures. Language is “a vibrant, fully developed facility in people, but is not possessed, even in rudimentary form, by another species.” This is virtually the only statement in the chapter that can be accepted without serious qualifications, though, please note that Wade does not know enough of his own language to know that a comma is used to separate two clauses but not a verbal phrase lacking a subject (as in, “but is not possessed.”) It is a small point but indicative.

    The language mechanism, it has long been known, is sensitive to a person’s age, that is, if it is not kicked in at an early age, it will never properly develop. But even the primitive language of the deprived is a great advance over non-human forms of communication. As an example he cites “Shh!” which is interesting because it “requires a listener.” Apparently Wade thinks that “Shh” can be proved to be a primitive expression, an idea for which there is absolutely no evidence. “Shh” though a monosyllable sibilant is a command that quite possibly could only develop in languages where there is already a syntax for giving commands.

    He also assumes that the way sign-languages spring up among deaf people can tell us something about the origin of language. But maybe, maybe not is the only answer a prudent man can give. Perhaps we are dealing with a Kluge Hans syndrome, that is, the deaf children grow up responding to people who communicate through language, and their response is to develop a parallel set of signs. I am oversimplifying terribly, but no more than Wade.

    Wade cites a theorist who thinks that language evolved from gestures more than grunts and cries and another who relates it to grooming, in which case language begins as a bonding mechanism rather than as a communication tool. According to another, language is a peacock’s tail, that is, a hypertrophic development of a feature that is originally related to mating. But, as Wade notes, English has about 60,000 words in use. This seems more than a hypertrophic extension of “Nice pair!”. Then there is the equally trivial theory that as humans moved into information-rich ecological niches, they were forced to develop a means of communication.

    Wade is more impressed with the idea that more sophisticated and diversified tools required words to describe them, citing a theorist who says “It’s as though Upper Paleolithic flint workers were saying , ‘This is an end-scraper: I use it as an end-scraper, I call it an end-scraper and it must therefore look line an end-scraper.” (Another theorist who hasn’t learned comma rules.) The operative words are “It’s as though,” words which should have been used to introduce the entire chapter.

    The flint worker hypothesis allows Wade to assume that, once again, the key date is about 50,000, the eve of the human exodus from Africa. All that is needed is a gene involved with language that might have developed within a 10-20,000 years of the exodus, and, presto.

    The gene is FOXP2, which, if is broken, produces people who have trouble with language. The genetic research is valuable to a point: FOXP2 is associated with fetal brain development in just those parts of the brain associated with language, and it probably developed its human form within the past 200,000 years (close enough). But who knows how many genes are required for successful language development, and, even if all were identified and studied, we would only know something about the material basis of language, much as studies of tongue and jaw help us to understand how people speak.

    Is this the silliest chapter in the book or is it simply that I have thought enough about the subject to realize that he knows absolutely nothing of any use? Naturally he rejects teleology, but why is it inconceivable that the use of language by historical man (the past 5000 years) is reflects the origin and original function or purpose of language? In speaking of sign language, he neglected to mention something that is widely known about people born deaf: They tend not to develop a normal human affect toward other people. They are often observed to be cold, indifferent to human suffering, even cruel, whether or not they learn sign language. (I wonder if this explains part of the ridiculous behavior of Galaudet University students.) In that sense, sign-language then would be an entirely false scent to chase after—merely an inadequate substitute for a skill that is essential to our humanness.

    Part of Wade’s problem is that he is a science journalist and has no way of weighing evidence and testimony. He’s been told that Chomsky is the greatest linguist of modern times, so he does his best to follow Chomsky. But Chomsky is simply a theorist, a very successful one if we measure him by where his disciples are placed, but his work is almost entirely theoretical. I do not know what languages Chomsky knows, but from his writings I should say he is not competent even in English. I once heard one of his more important disciples declare there was no difference between saying, “I like him playing the violin, and “I like his playing the violin,” citing this as an example of what he chose to call the sloppiness of language, that is, having multiple forms of expression available. When someone tried to straighten him out, the Chomskyist (a Yale prof.) smiled and responded, “We must be speaking different dialects.” I see absolutely no evidence that Chomsky or his followers have any understanding of real languages as opposed to the theories of generative and transformational grammar that they have used to ruin the teaching of English.

    This will interest no one but I have observed a parallel to Chomskyite methods and their futility: the metrical theories applied to so-called Aeolic meters in Greek lyric poetry (e.g., Pindar, Bacchylides, Aeschylus). From a presumed core of –uu- to which various elements can be added, the theorists construct, through sequencing or through infixing [ as in –uu{-uu-} -] all the forms of Aeolic lyric verse. Just one thing: There is absolutely no evidence that Greek poet-musicians thought in this way or constructed verses in this fashion and no evidence of any poetic or musical rhythm of this type ever existing.

    In sum, though he has provided some interesting tidbits, Wade is too ignorant of language even to begin to speculate on the origin of language, but confident in the Neo-Darwinist method, he trots out a series of unrelated absurdities and builds them into what he regards as a probable scenario. Later on, he will go even further down this road, discussing the development of historical language with even more recklessness. As one of the wisest poets of our language once said, “Though I’m anything but clever, I could talk like that forever.”

    Two requests: First, let us take up this chapter before talking about anything else, and second, please do not ask me for my theory of the origin of language.

74. 74 Comment by Friedrich von Hardenberg on 4 June 2007:

    Syntactic Structures andAspects of the Theory of Syntax I’ve read, albeit many years ago. They’re not the New Organon, yet at the time they seemed reasonable and persuasive treatises on the theoretical foundations of language. What the arguments against this foundation might be I would gladly hear. If someone has a half-day free, then http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky and its links are worth a glance. Chomsky is in the Cartesian-Frege tradition of philosophy as opposed the two other main currents, British and B. F. Skinnerian Empiricism and Kantian-German-Husserlian Idealism. Thus his emphasis is on conceptualist and cognitive modes of rationality, on the logical structure and logical process of thought – context-free, with a mathematical paradigm. There are other modes, more context-sensitive.

75. 75 Comment by Friedrich von Hardenberg on 4 June 2007:

    I meant to say “modern traditions of philosophy”

76. 76 Comment by TJF on 4 June 2007:

    I do not say that as a philospher of language that Chomsky is without all merit, only that, first, a speculative philosophical system cannot properly be made the foundation of another seemiingly scientific theory and, second, that as a philologist who deals with the reality of languages that actually exist I am entirely unimpressed with most linguistic speculation about the nature of language. I studied comparative philology with George Sherman Lane, who, as a real scholar forced to teach in the linguistics department at Chapel Hill, had–quite properly–open contempt for “the boys at MIT. I also noticed in that class and another attended by linguists (Sanskrit) that the linguistics students were very good at speculation but did not appear to have learned any known language. In Sanskrit they were eager to discuss theories of phonological change, but they could not learn so simple a matter as the declension of a noun.

    In Chomsky’s quarrel with Skinner, I naturally supported Chomsky, more or less–nothing could be more stupid than Skinner on the subject of language and mind–but I am more inclined to say a plague on both their houses and to resent the time I spent on Syntactic Structures. This much I know for sure: Chomsky’s theories were used as weapons in the campaign to destroy the teaching of English grammar. I haven’t read Chomsky for years, apart from his political screeds, but back in the 70’s I noted what I was later to observe in cognitive psychologists influenced by him (e.g., Jerry Fodor) that they seem indifferent to research that is being done on the brain.

    Speaking of which, someone brought up the mind/brain problem, and it reminded me that the pioneers in neurophysiology, Eccles and Penfield, both said that mind could not be explained in terms of brain events, though anyone who ever took high school biology has been assured that consciousness has been proved to be, in Haldane’s words (if I remember right), an epiphenomenon like the steam whistle on a train.

77. 77 Comment by Dan McCulloch on 4 June 2007:

    “…in Haldane’s words (if I remember right), an epiphenomenon is like the steam whistle on a train. ”

    Someone else said the epiphenomenal mind is related to the brain as froth is to the beer, to which my old prof replied, “you can’t get drunk on the froth!”

78. 78 Comment by Friedrich von Hardenberg on 4 June 2007:

    With Dr. Fleming I certainly agree that we ain’t got no teaching of grammar these days. With Dr. Fleming (and The Venerable John Henry Newman) I would also agree that our chemists are not our best cooks, our geologists not our best stone masons, and our theoretical linguists not our best historical philologists and hickory-stick schoolmasters. And the vice versa is also true.

    Americans have always preferred the pragmatic to the theoretical – a fact lamented by that melancholy lefty Richard Hofstadter in his magisterial elegy, Anti Intellectualism in American Life – for my money still the best analysis of what’s wrong with American education (and American business, religion, and politics), however unfair he may be to conservatives. I know of an unfortunate provost at an American university who decided that the English department needed a linguist. Three candidates were invited, one a Structuralist, another a card-carrying Chomskyan, another a Generative Semanticist. They came, they gave their lectures, and the audience understood nothing. But then, what would they have understood from lectures about theoretical physics – say, a debate among a Newtonian, a Planckian, and and Einsteinian? Even less, a debate among theoretical mathematicians? Americans admire the telephone and honor its inventor, Bell (they also think him an American). But the name “Michael Faraday” remains a village in China. Americans also think they can corner the contemporary fabrics market and know nothing of John Newlands’ and Dimitri Mendeleev’s Period Table of Elements – a sad delusion.

    To stick with the math analogy: The concrete is certainly easier to grasp: one apple, two bananas, one half of a persimmon. But 1, 2, 1/2?, the rules of addition? One-ness, two-ness, one-half-ness are of a different order than apples, bananas, and persimmons. Is it an order of less esteem? I don’t think so. It certainly is an order that requires a certain aptitude to grasp and an iron-pants discipline to master. In the same way, “John hit the ball”is easier to grasp than {article+proper-noun+verb+article+noun}, to say nothing of the “strict subcategorization rules” of the various elements (definite/indefinite, count/non-count noun, etc), of the transformations of “generative grammar” that produce such syntax, or of its “deep structure” . (I think Chomsky would like this analogy.)

    In Germany, the shoe is on the other foot – and just as wrongly placed. Lessing (a German) remarked that if Germans (or at least German professors) were presented with two doors, one labeled “The Kingdom of God”, the other “Lectures on the Kingdom of God”, they would choose the latter. A student companion in my German university days was a theoretical mathematician. He told me of the twitters and giggles he and his follow Theoretical Mathematics majors had for poor Applied Mathematics majors, much as American students have for Education and P.E. majors. Never mind that theoretical mathematicians have theories the practical value of which is a number that resembles the shape of an egg. But then, it took a long time for Pascal’s math to become applied.

    Cloistered deep in the quiet of my library, at the close of the day, as the shadows gather, I wonder if this theoretic/applied division is really valid. Remember Faraday and Bell. In aesthetics, when I gaze upon Michelangelo’s design of for the Piazza del Campidoglio, I find it hard to believe that he knew nothing of x/y algebraic graphing or maybe even of Apollonius’ conic sections. (http://www.wga.hu, “artist index”, “M”, “Michelangelo”, “architectural works”, “after 1530″). To turn to medicine, I think I know why, in America, my pharmacist is from India, my physician from Pakistan. In those countries the pupils privileged enough to go to school do not eschew the theoretical, an mastery of which is needed to learn something like organic chemistry. Put simply, their kids like math; American (and German) kids don’t. Granted much of the blame is to be put on Dewey’s disastrous educational pragmatics, to say nothing of the dumbing-down from 1/2-ness to 1/2 persimmon so that the “retards” can get it (we pray), or turning the same into a moronic “project”. Math teachers indeed tell me how hard it is to turn their “chalk-and-talk” instruction into entertainment. I suspect Dewey and Co. are the real reason “kids don’t know no grammar [sic]”, be it English or Sanskrit.

    Of course Dr. Fleming isn’t advocating the reign of Deweyism (or its source, Benthamism). Yet I wonder if a thoroughgoing pejorative judgement with respect to “most linguistic speculation about the nature of language” obliges one to train one’s 50 Caliber Smith & Wesson on the source of all speculation and theory, the author of the second most influential book in the Western canon: Euclid. (And The Elements is a far better text book than what American and German children must endure in their geometry classes.) Just as Chomskyans might have done damage in America to applied grammar, so maybe the Euclidians did damage in Alexandria to applied road construction and house building. Still, to stand under the dome of the Pantheon in Rome or of Santa Fosca in Torcello is to take Euclid out of the cross-hairs and offer him a toast, exclaiming in wonder: “QED”.

79. 79 Comment by Lee on 4 June 2007:

    I have to believe, along with Aristotle, that, once you originate the species homo sapiens sapiens, you originate him whole. When man originated, and lacking experimental proof and independently and incontrovertibley proven demonstrations, the intelligence, the speech, the manual dexterity, the social nature, the upright posture, etc., etc., all came at the same instant. Other than warning or mating calls, animal sounds serve no other prupose. Speech goes hand-in-hand, simultaneously with thinking and knowing which are properties of the soul not the brain. The ancient attributed much of mans higher capabilities to his heart. Well the higher capabilities appear to work directly through the brain but there is no demonstration whatever (that dreaded scientific requirement) that the brain originates any of this stuff. I think the ancients were closer to the truth.

    Another thing about language that Wade does not even acknowledge (more of his natural selcection, I guess) is that in recorded history languages have gotten simpler. Latin once had 7 cases instead of the current 5, and verbs had 3 numbers: singular, dual, and plural, instead of the current singular and plural. The earliest record we have of language shows that it was very complex, which seems like an odd way to evolve something.

    As for education, the public project in the USA, as opposed to the familial or village or personal, and since the 1850’s has always been to program students, and they trusted the subsequent adults, for work and consumption. You can even find it in the public record: whole word reading was developed specifically to prevent children from learning to read too well! You don’t need to read well if at all to work in most factories and be cheated in the local stores.

80. 80 Comment by TJF on 5 June 2007:

    I don’t disagree much with Novalis’ defense of theory. The problem is with the misapplication of theoretical methods. To have a theory about language without knowing much about actual languages is, I continue to believe, a mistake, just as putting forward theories about the nature of society without studying known socieities leads to the nothing called sociology and the more vacuous nothing known as political science. My own natural bent, since childhood, is all-too theoretical and I narrowly escaped becoming a chemist. I do not say there is no merit in speculations about the nature and origin of language. Only the contrary, but I am not at convinced that Chomsky and his school have established their work on a foundation that excludes other approaches.

    Language is, among other things, a human art and though its tendencies are reducible to rules, the study of language must remain a hybrid between cooking and chemistry. But even traditional philologists have their bugs when they stray from particular studies. I know a comparative philologist who hates Chomsky but when I asked him why Slavic languages use the instrumental case for predication, e.g. I called him a fool, where fool goes in the instrumental, I was treated to an absurd theory that had absolutely no basis in anything, just a string of parallels attached to a big idea. Rather than looking for parallels in the ablative absolute, he should have got down to business in examining Slavic parallels and perhaps other language families–Indo-Persian–where the instrumental was preserved.

    The most important lesson I learned from Aristotle was to postpone speculation on human things until I had acquainted myself with a body of observed facts. Thus he collected and reviewed constitutiuons before writing the Politics. I do not think that it is asking too much to demand of linguists that they learn several languages well, including their own, before putting forward sweeping theories.

    In some respects the structuralists are hardly any better, and their effect on the teaching of English was the first round of the disaster. The analysis of sentences, diagramming, etc., have nothing to do with learning to use English correctly and effectively.

    The evolution or devolution of IE languages from a hypothetical proto-IE is a complex issue, because to construct the original IE, we have to read backwards from known languages, like Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Lithuanian, to construct a hypothetical original from which we then can trace the evolution. I think it mostly works but one must be careful. There does seem to be a set of parallel developments, collapsing case forms and developing prepositions as substitutes. Why Latin and Greek lost the instrumental is beyond me. In Slavic languages it seems indispensable. Latin at least develops a rather coherent ablative with three sets of uses–locative, ablative, and instrumental–but Greek in this respect seems sloppier.

    Finally on education. As a consequene of original and my peculiar sins, I used to read grants (gratis, by the way) for the US Department of Education. The funniest was an application for $1 million or so from a Harvard educationist who, in the 50’s, had pioneered the dumbing down of elementary school textbooks to the point that first grade readers could only use a few hundred words. Of course it was a complete disaster, so the perfessor wanted the million bucks to study the ill effects. But Harvard is Harvard and Secretary Bennet overruled the committtee’s recommendation.

81. 81 Comment by Dan McCulloch on 5 June 2007:

    “…and subsequently being brought further along to consciousness herself.”

    We are not ‘brought to consciousness’ by language, self-awareness or consciousness is the condition of possibility of language. That language is indexical, or self referencing, presupposes use by something with a self, i.e., a self-aware creature. It’s not as though language just fell from the sky with an inherent feature unuseable to available creatures, which could be used to develop consciousness. First you have self-aware creatures, then they use language. Neither are there degrees of self-awareness; a creature is either self-aware, or not.

82. 82 Comment by Friedrich von Hardenberg on 6 June 2007:

    With Dr. Fleming’s views, stated in his last posting, I am in agreement. I am also in agreement with his judgement of a simpleton in a scholar’s garb:

    I once heard one of his [Chomsky’s] more important disciples declare there was no difference between saying, “I like him playing the violin”, and “I like his playing the violin,” citing this as an example of what he chose to call the sloppiness of language, that is, having multiple forms of expression available. When someone tried to straighten him out, the Chomskyist (a Yale prof.) smiled and responded, “We must be speaking different dialects.”

    Allow me to lift the hood and look and the engine. Consider
    i. “I like his playing the violin”.

    What is meant is
    ii. I like the way [that] he plays the violin.

    Yet notice how much more elegant, and how much less prolix and breezy, (i) is when compared to (ii). What is more, (i), with its genitive pronoun modifying a gerund, is more likely to be printed than spoken – all proving not only Dr. Fleming’s point (i.e., his interlocutor having no contact with real language), but also that this linguist reads little. We are dealing thus not with a difference in dialect but in medium: Dr. Fleming reads; Mass Man watches TV. Such Mass Men, I am afraid, infest Mass Academe. Once when attempting to obtain a teaching license, I had a professor of Education who could not recognize as grammatical an absolute clause, herself something of an ignoramus.

    Now consider
    iii. “I like him playing the violin” [I don’t think the speaker means “him playing the violin” as an absolute],

    which can mean

    iv. I like him when he is playing the violin, and
    v. I would prefer that he, rather than another, play the violin
    .
    – which proves that the present active participle (“playing”) is beloved by the common writer, is often ambiguous, and often is grammatically misused. I would advise the writer to use (iv) and (v) rather than (iii).

    By the way, the difference between (i) and (iii) can indeed be explained by Chomskyan grammar – which leaves one to wonder if Dr. Fleming’s responder is ignorant of his own trade. Alas, Chomsky has been turned into a guru, with more groupies and camp followers than disciples.

    To turn to comma rules, themselves quite complex even for the those of us not functionally illiterate: For I myself am guilty of using the comma the way a composer uses a bar on a scale, my sensibility more auditory than visual. I am also guilty of using the Middle Style when the Plain would do. I am now about to enter into a kingdom where Dr. Fleming is king. Would he allow me thus to submit the following scan, as a pupil might submit to his teacher for the latter’s note and markings – “teacher-blood”, to translate the phrase beloved by German pupils?

    The ancients – I’m thinking of Quintillian – spoke of komma and kolon not only as we would use “phrase” and “clause” respectively, but also an units in a auditory structure. For the Grand Style, such units were to be arranged for a builded effect, to which was added the solemnity of cadence. Consider Cranmer’s first collect for Advent, as close to music as it gets, — in the Grand Style, moving more with Virgil’s weight than Homer’s swiftness.

    vi. ALMYGHTYE God, geue us grace, that we may cast awaye the workes of darknes, and put upon us the armour of light, now in the tyme of this mortall lyfe, (in which thy sonne Jesus Christ came to visite us in great humilitie;) that in the last daye whē he shall come again in his glorious maiesty to judge bothe the guicke and the dead, we waye ryse to the lyfe immortal, though him who liueth and reigneth with thee and the holy ghoste now and euer. Amen

    To put this in kola, with / and // indicating weak and strong caesuras respectively, and the meter marked after:

    1. Almighty God, give use grace
    u-u-/ -u-//

    2. that we may cast away the works of darkness
    uuu-u-/u-u-u//

    3. and put upon us the armour of light
    u-u-u/u-uu -//

    4. now in the time of this mortal life
    -uu-/ uu-u-//

    5. in which Thy Son Jesus Christ
    uuu-/-u-/

    came to visit us in great humility
    -u-uu/u-u-uu//

    6. that in the last day
    uuu – -

    7. when He shall come again in his glorious majesty
    uuu-u-/uu-uu-uu/

    to judge both the quick and the dead
    u-uu-uu-//

    8. we may rise to the life immortal
    uu-uu-u-u//

    9. through him who liveth and reigneth with Thee and the Holy Ghost
    uuu-uu-uu u – /uu-u-/

    now and ever. Amen.
    -u-u// – - //

    My point: wouldn’t commas be fine for the heavy caesuras, if not some of the light? As every pupil, I pray for a good note.

    Granted, “Window pane prose” Cranmer’s ain’t. Indeed, to write window pane prose well is a talent of no small order, and one that I lack. In the hands of a Swift or an Orwell, window pane prose can be elegant, even engrossing; in the hands of most writers, it is tiresome and wearying, Hemming Way notwithstanding (although he did know how to use the absolute well).

    To circle back to the participle and absolute, consider the line from Paradise Lost that C. S. Lewis used in his magisterial A Preface to Paradise Lost, a work that rescued Milton from the pejorative judgement of Eliot, Pound, and the New Critics, and is still the best defense that I know of Milton’s style. (whether Milton can be turned into a High Church Anglican is another matter.)

    vi. Heav’n op’ed wide her e’re enduring gates/harmonious sounds on golden hinges moving
    - — u-u-u-/u-uu-u-u-u-u

    Does the poet mean
    vii. an absolute: “harmonious sounds moving on golden hinges”, or
    viii. a participle (modifying “heaven” or “gates”?): “moving harmonious sounds on golden hinges”?

    Milton is certainly imitating Virgil, with Latin’s free word order. Yet were one to substitute (vii) and (viii) for (vi), beautiful cadence would be replaced with stumbling prose. (And, by rumor and report, Heaven’s weighty gates do open in a solemn and beautiful andante.) This is not to mention Milton’s use of glorious back vowels (o, a [“ah”], and u [“ooh”]), to be compared with Pound’s use of crisp front vowels leading to a open, to imitate soaking:

    The jewelled steps are already quite white with dew,
    It is so late that the dew soaks my gauze stockings ….
    u-u- uu-u – - u-// (or u– uu-u — u-)
    uuu- /uu- -uu-u [with an terminal Adonic foot in the manner of Homer],
    or perhaps uu – -/ uu-/ -u – -u)

    – beautiful in its own way, albeit to a different affect than Milton.

    Brevity, I’m afraid, isn’t Virgil’s and Milton’s virtue. It isn’t mine either.

83. 83 Comment by Friedrich von Hardenberg on 6 June 2007:

    I’m not to good with the close italics marking either. Sorry.

84. 84 Comment by Friedrich von Hardenberg on 6 June 2007:

    and when in haste I confuse “to” and “too” too.

85. 85 Comment by Friedrich von Hardenberg on 6 June 2007:

    Was my posting, to follow #86, too off-topic?

86. 86 Comment by TJF on 6 June 2007:

    Perhaps for others but not for me. I’ve only just glanced at it but I think I’ll have to print it out, so bad have my eyes become. If you are interested in these things, I’ll be happy to send you my most recent pedantic piece on the origin of the rhetorical/metrical term period. How many years have the terms period and colon floated through my nightmares!

    Although only an amateur (quite literally) in English studies, I am going through both Dryden and Milton looking at rhythmical and structural echoes of Latin and Greek. I used to know something about this, though I have forgotten most of what I knew when I taught a course on classical backgrounds to English literature at Chapel Hill.

    One major difference between Vergil and Milton is that, although Vergil is certainly capable of writing long, even periodic sentences as at the beginning of the Aeneid (echoed obviously by Milton at the beginning of PL), he is often quite terse. What are the lines we remember? Sunt lacrimae rerum, mentem mortalia tangunt. As Anthony Camps, from whom I once took an Aeneid course, pointed out both in his lectures and in his nice little book aimed at students, Vergil often achieves his most powerful effects through fairly brief sentences and tiny words–res, mens–and note the graphic simplicity of tangunt, touch. He might have said overwhelm, seize, thrill, set aflutter, etc, but he preferred the simplest word. Now, Milton is not incapable of a pithy phrase, but it is not his strongest suit.

    I’ll get back to you on your metrical analysis. The rhythms, by the way, are very similar to what you might find in Aeschylus: iamb + cretic (or a syncopated iambic dimeter), choriamb+iamb, etc. This is how I spend my early mornings, alas, doing the next-to-last round of revisions on the old dissertation.

87. 87 Comment by TJF on 6 June 2007:

    PS The rhetorical structure in the quotation from PL VII certainly suggests an absolute construction. Metrical analysis requires the two full lines:

    Attendant on thir Lord: Heav’n op’nd wide
    Her ever during Gates, Harmonious sound
    On golden Hinges moving, to let forth-

    The three lines in question if analyzed in terms of stress pattern are simply:

    x/x/x/x/x/
    x/x/x/x/x/
    x/x/x/x/x/

    But in terms of quantity, something more like

    u-u—–u-
    u-u-u-u—
    u-u—uuu-

    I have a font that can do a better job…

88. 88 Comment by TJF on 7 June 2007:

    Another PS. One of the problems with 20th century linguistic theories is that they abandon traditional language and terms of analysis. For the Chomskyans, the distinction between participles and gerunds is not meaningful, but to an educated speaker of English (one trained on Latin as nearly all good writers have been), the old categories were not merely terms of art and analysis, they described what we were taught to believe were real things. Thus, while FvH’s observations on the difficulties of an expression like “I like him playing” are quite true, the mere fact that such a sentence is possible shows that there is a structural category of that type available to us. It is not at all clear that we would have trouble with, “I heard him entering the room,” though it is true we would not typicall say, ” I heard his entering,” because we would prefer the simple noun “entry.” On the other hand, “I heard him singing” is clearly perceived by educated speakers to be both correct and distinct from “I heard his singing.”

    It would have been quite possible for Chomsky to have worked within the constraints of traditional grammar while producing his own theoretical take, but in changing the terms of analysis he and his followers also seriously damaged the language.

    I am going, probably tomorrow, to do two very short descriptions of the next two chapters and post them as a new entry. This way it will allow you all, many of whom know more of this than I do, to exercise your eloquence and ingenuity.

89. 89 Comment by Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg on 7 June 2007:

    I thank Dr. Fleming for his correcting my quotation from Milton, and for his correcting my notation for qualitative and quantitative stress. My relying on my very faulty memory was wrong.

90. 90 Comment by TJF on 7 June 2007:

    My dear baron,

    The misquotation was interesting in itself and momentarily confused me because Milton, in PL, does not usually have lines with feminine endings. It is good to quote verse without checking–Plato is filled with mistakes which indicate how much poetry he remembered–and, when mistakes are made, the quality of the mistake reveals the writer’s level of competence in versification.

    There is no good notation for English in common use. The macra/brevial system, technically, represents quantity, and, while quantity matters in poets like Dryden, Milton, Keats, Tennyson, it is a question of nuance and feeling, not a systematic pattern. The dumbest article on meter I have read was written by a fine scholar, Martin West, who imagined there could be 7 leves of stress in Greek verse, despite the fact that all verse and most art can be reduced to an ideal pattern of strong and weak. No matter how an artist may tune up or down individual instances, the theoretical pattern–if it is truly a rhythm–is basically an on/off switch. One could do the same thing with loud/soft, bright/dark, and, naturally, the pattern does not have to alternate strong weak. More complex ratios are common, though not, alas, in English, where we tied ourself so firmly to iambic verse that most experiments in other meters, even in trochaic, seem merely eccentric. The exceptions–including Tennyson’s Maude, Browning’s trochaic “Tocata etc.” with one of the stresses typically weakened to resemble the ionicus a minore (uu–, cf, Marvell’s great octosyllabic line “to a green though in a green shade”), and Hopkins’ misguided archaism–are wonderful.

91. 91 Comment by Jonathan Gress on 13 August 2007:

    I was disappointed by the cheap shot at the author’s use of commas. Firstly, you’re speaking more of orthographic convention than of language; remember, we all learn language orally, not graphically. Orthographic conventions may or may not have anything to do with the natural syntax of the language. In the case of the comma, the orthographic error on the part of the Wade shows that he is probably merely being influenced by his native syntax. Although you haven’t given the context, the phrase ‘but is not possessed’ certainly has a subject, only it is a subject which is not overtly expressed, namely the subject of the preceding clause with which this one is conjoined. This is a common phenomenon of discourse called ‘ellipsis’; you will almost certainly have come across the term in your classical studies. It serves to eliminate redundant information, and is allowable in languages which permit covert subjects. Were I to represent the syntax of the clause using the standard tree representation, there would be an empty subject ‘node’ before the verb. Clearly Wade unconsciously used punctuation to reflect the underlying, rather than the surface syntax.
    As to your cheap shots at Chomsky, all I can say is: Chomsky is only revered among generativists, and by no means are all linguists generativists, although non-generativists usually respect him. But even among generativists, there is certainly widespread debate about some of his ideas, for example over his most recent theoretical contribution of ‘minimalist’ syntax (already over a decade old), which many generativists have not accepted.
    Chomsky himself was famously sceptical of the ability of Darwinism to account for the evolution of language. If you want a more informed opinion of the current state of ‘evolutionary linguistics’, see the work of e.g. Terence Deacon. Naturally, what he says is controversial, like everything else in this debate. Most linguists as you noted are not involved in it, preferring to stick with areas where real empirical advances are possible.
    Please explain in what way generative transformational grammar has undermined the teaching of English. I’m all ears.
    In fact, professional linguists interested in language pedagogy try in vain to get professional language teachers to head their call for the formal study of grammar as a part of foreign language learning for adults. Currently, the vogue in adult foreign language teaching is to avoid formal grammar, on the incorrect belief that adults learn languages the same way as children. A child does not need you to tell her what the dative case is, but an adult does, if he speaks English and is trying to learn Russian.
    And what is the difference in meaning between ‘I like him playing the violin’ and ‘I like his playing the violin’? Many linguists will be dying to know.

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