Or Would They?

 

Obviously, or so we think, most Republicans would not take violent actions to secure permanent control over America. But maybe they would not need to. All they would have to do is sigh, look the other way, and let the extremists within their Party take violent actions.

After all, it is unlikely that most Germans actually shared Hitler’s passion for eradicating the Jews. But especially after Hitler became dictator in 1933, nobody would openly say so. Since there were so many domestic spies, they would not say so privately either. Most, but not all, youth were Hitler Youth. There were 22 assassination attempts on Hitler, not counting the “several” in early World War II. This culture of terror continued in East Germany, as part of the Soviet bloc. A Soviet bloc which, in the last couple of days, it seems that Vladimir Putin wants to re-establish.

During the War, many Germans wished they could get away from Hitler’s command, but by then they were trapped. I read Paul Brickhill’s The Great Escape, which was made into a fantastic movie in the 1960s. The Allied prisoners were constantly digging escape tunnels, and the Nazis were constantly searching for them. But I got the impression that the Nazi commanders weren’t searching very hard. They wanted to look to their superiors as if they were working hard to catch escapees. They tried to crush tunnels, they inserted rods, they implanted microphones, they hired spies to slip into the rafters or under the huts. If they did catch an escapee, this would make them look good to their superiors. But that is all they really wanted. When they did catch an escape tunnel, they just shut it down. The only punishment they gave to the would-be escapee was to put him in the “cooler” for a couple of weeks. One of the Nazi commanders actually told Brickhill, in prison, to not blame them for what the Gestapo did. Brickhill clearly communicated the idea that the Nazi commanders of prison camps didn’t want to do this job.

My uncle was in the European theatre of World War II and told us all a war story which, in retrospect, seems a little embellished. But not completely. He was guarding a group of prisoners at the end of the war. Most of the German soldiers seemed relieved that they had been captured. All except the SS officers. They were absolutely crazy. My uncle could tell that there was one SS officer among the prisoners. He was the one who attacked and tried to kill my uncle in what sounded to me like a kabuki drama. My uncle shot him eight times. When asked to explain to his superior why he had done this, he said, “Seven wasn’t quite enough, and I didn’t have nine bullets.” Anyway, the point was clear: only the crazy SS troops really believed in the Third Reich.

Most Republicans can, when the dictatorship is established, say that we should not blame them for what the extremists have done. And if there is a Judgment at Nuremberg style inquiry after the fall of the Republican dictatorship, only the leaders will be convicted.

Most Republicans do not worship Trump, at least anymore. But would they go along with those who do?

Natural selection favors the fitness of genes in their environments. In humans, natural selection also occurs on the level of ideas within society. Fitness is not an intrinsic value, with either genes or ideas, but have value relative to their environments. This explains some of the literally crazy ideas that people have had under social conditions that legitimized them. Examples include mass acts of violence during religious wars, such as the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. So far, right-wing acts of extreme violence in America have been small and sporadic, like the cashier being shot for asking a customer to wear a mask in Georgia earlier this year.

I believe that Republicans, as a whole, would not take up arms against fellow Americans. But they would not stand up against their powerful Party leaders.

Disabling a Century of Progress

Welcome readers, most of whom are from the United States. For those of you who are in Canada, Russia, France, Germany, India, and Bangladesh (according to my blog map), you might learn something today about the United States, and I regret to say that it will not be good.

The twentieth century saw an astonishing degree of progress in the United States with regard to saving natural areas and wild species, and protecting human health. The momentum of public health and conservation continued through both Democratic and Republican administrations. The current Republican leadership of the House, however, seems determined to disable all of this progress.

An article in the May 29, 2015 issue of Science describes how the House is doing this. The authors focused on five bills that have either passed or been advanced in the House and that pose a danger to:

• Clean Air Act
• Clean Water Act
• Occupational Safety and Health Act
• Endangered Species Act
• Consumer Product Safety Act

 The Republican House does not want to stir up notice by actually repealing these laws, but they are deliberately disabling their implementation by agencies such as the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Environmental Protection Agency. They do so by methods the authors call insidious, and you would probably agree with them. Among the excuses the House is using to disable these prominent pieces of twentieth century legislation are:

• Putting Congress in charge of deciding the regulations. The Regulations from the Executive In Need of Scrutiny (REINS) act is supposed to “rein in” the agencies by requiring Congressional approval of new agency regulations. Here is the most insidious part: if either house of Congress fails to act (which, as we all know, is in fact the norm) then the agency’s new regulations cannot be put into effect.
• Create new bureaucracy. House Republicans like to create the image that they are cutting out bureaucracy, but actually they want to create more of it. The Regulatory Accountability Act and the Sound Science Act create many new requirements on the processes by which federal agencies implement new regulations. The new requirements would add an additional $250 million a year to EPA at the same time that Congress is slashing its budget.
• Disable the information gathering process. The Secret Science Reform Act requires agencies to make public all sources of information upon which they base their decisions. This sounds great except when you consider that many of the data about effects of pollutants on human health are taken from studies that include confidential health records. Therefore the agencies cannot use the most important source of data on which pollution regulations are based.
• Manipulating the membership of advisory committees. The EPA Science Advisory Board Reform Act would require two major changes to EPA advisory committees. First, industry representatives would be allowed control over the regulations; and, second, any scientist who has received EPA funding becomes ineligible to serve on the committees.

 The result will be inevitable: no new pollution regulations and no new endangered species designations.

The Republicans who control Congress like to identify themselves with Christianity and the God of Love. But these actions reveal their true thinking. They seem to be thinking, first, “We love you, but we don’t care if environmental toxins kill you,” and, second, “We love God’s creation but we don’t care how much of it is destroyed.” Each of these lines of thinking contains fatal inconsistencies and is clearly indicative of hypocrisy regarding religion. This is one reason that I believe Congressional Republicans are just using Christianity as a shield to deflect criticism and behind which to hide their real agenda.

I was hoping someday to get endangered species protection for Alnus maritima, the seaside alder shrub, one of the rarest trees in the world. This seems to now be a hopeless endeavor. Instead, my focus is going to be on getting as many people as possible to plant this shrub in their gardens. Private rescue of endangered species worked for the ginkgo, the Franklinia, and the Torreya; it may be the only hope of the seaside alder and other rare plant species. With animals, of course, it is not so easy. It’s not like you can take an endangered animal species home to live with you. If you might be interested in planting some seaside alder seeds in your garden, let me know at this email, srice@se.edu. 

Why Creationists and Other Conservatives Reject Global Climate Disruption

Many of us have wondered why the same people who attack evolution also attack human-caused global climate disruption. Many evolution education organizations, from the National Center for Science Education to Oklahomans for Excellence in Science Education, now address both issues. Many of us have assumed that the two issues are connected by a general conservative attack on science, and perhaps by the fact that the Republican Party happens to reject both.

But I think there is a more direct reason. It is that conservatives believe that God designed the Earth so that we humans could live in technological comfort, raise lots of grain to feed to cattle, drive big fast pickup trucks, use water for private swimming pools, and have unlimited reproduction. The fact that God did not do so is deeply disturbing to them, and they reject this fact vigorously.

The early Old Testament writings assumed that God had designed the world, and designed it for man. These Biblical writers, however, assumed that big cities, based on massive agricultural production, were evil. Their ideal was wandering shepherds like Abel and Abraham and young David, not agriculturalists like Cain and big technologically-advanced cities like Babel (Babylon), Sodom, and Gomorrah. These early writers might have agreed that God did not design the world for the kinds of things we are now doing in it.

Our Overwhelming New Challenge: The Denial of Physical Reality

Science educators have always assumed that we will be challenged by creationists. More recently, we have been challenged by global warming denialists. Major science education associations, whether national (such as National Center forScientific Education) or local (such as Oklahomans for Excellence inScience Education), now consider it their mission to respond to both challenges.

But now the conservatives are attacking every branch of science. And they are attacking physical reality itself. This means that there is nothing that scientists can say or science educators can teach that will make any difference, since we always base our statements on physical proof.

The major example that has been in the news recently is Representative Todd Akin (R-MO) who is running as the Republican nominee for Senate. Even the Republican Party withdrew support for him when he made comments about “legitimate rape.” I am not sure whether the Republicans were all that upset about his scientific claim that a woman’s body can “shut down” a pregnancy. He apparently knows nothing about human anatomy and physiology, nor did he consider it worth his while to find out. Apparently he was satisfied with just making something up and saying it. Apparently reproductive anatomy and physiology is under attack by some conservatives.

And there are some conservatives who use biblical statements upon which to base their beliefs that the Earth is the center of the universe and does not move and that there are Methuselahs living inside the Earth.(Note: my browser indicates that the anti-Copernican website above may be unsafe to visit.) Warren Chisum, who was at one time the second most powerful Republican in the Texas House of Representatives (he is leaving office January 2013), informed some of his colleagues that the fixedearth.com website revealed important information indicating that the Copernican view might be a hoax.

I had an experience on August 31 that took me totally by surprise. I was teaching general biology, and the topic was global warming. I was presenting evidence of global warming. In a previous section of the class, I had talked about the Antarctic ice layers, and how scientists could determine global temperatures and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels from them. I was expecting, and got, a challenge about how global warming is part of a recurring cycle; I told the student that yes, indeed, it was, he was right, but I then explained how the global warming that is occurring today is different from the previous cycles of warming.

What I was not expecting, in this section, was loud criticism from two creationist students that, since the Earth is only 4,000 years old (I assume they meant since the Flood) there could not be 400,000 layers of ice in Antarctica. That would mean that 100 layers of ice would have to form every year for the last 4,000 years. This, I said, would have to be a miracle. They were unwilling to defend the idea of God doing such a deceptive miracle. The conclusion was, apparently, that I was lying about there being thousands of ice layers in Antarctica. I showed them a photograph of the ice layers that I had taken (not, of course, all 400,000 of them) but this was not good enough for the students. I suppose photos can be faked. What I had experienced was an attack on the admissibility of physical evidence itself—their religious view simply did not permit the existence of those ice layers. I was totally unable to know what to do next. Fortunately other students told the creationists that they had come to learn from me not from other students, and class went back to normal except that I could not concentrate.

These students had already challenged me earlier in the class. They said that if the atmospheric carbon dioxide readings were made in Hawaii, wouldn’t the volcanoes have messed up those measurements? This was a reasonable question and I answered it, in two ways: first, the Mauna Loa observatory is thousands of feet above current volcanic eruptions; second, the measured increase in carbon dioxide is uniform from year to year, irrespective of periods of volcanic eruption. I forgot all about this discussion until later, since it was a reasonable question. I did not become quietly upset until they attacked the existence of the 400,000 ice layers.

I think we will increasingly encounter such attacks. When we teach about the existence of human endogenous retroviruses (HERV) in our chromosomes, we can expect creationists to criticize their interpretation; but maybe we should now expect them to claim that HERV simply do not exist. Pseudogenes? Perhaps they do not exist either. If we said the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 2004 went to the discoverers of the olfactory pseudogenes, the students will perhaps simply say that is an international scientific hoax.

Of course creationists reject radiometric dating. Uranium-lead dating is based upon the fact that zircon crystals do not incorporate lead while they are forming. Perhaps now I should expect creationists to reject the facts of chemistry and say that, in fact, zircon crystals do contain lead when they form, even though uranium atoms have seven shells with a valence of two while lead has six shells and a valence of four. How could I prove this to them? I can’t say, “I just happen to have a uranium atom here, and as you can see it has seven shells of electrons, with two on the outside.” Or, “I just happen to have a freshly-forming zircon crystal, and as you can see there are no lead atoms in it.” How should I handle this? I simply cannot prepare for every possible challenge to the reality of physical evidence. Meanwhile all creationists have to do is to say, for example, “I won’t believe that carbon atoms exist unless you prove it to me right here in the middle of class.”

There are some things I can prove to them, maybe. If they claim that photosynthesis will clean all of the additional carbon dioxide out of the air even during droughts, I can tell them I have actually measured photosynthetic rates in drought-challenged plants and drought does indeed reduce and eventually stop photosynthesis. Or maybe they would just say I am lying. What can I do?

Conservatives have become very good at reinventing reality. Lots of people consider the Republican Party to be the party of fiscal responsibility, as if the administration of George W. Bush (with a trillion-dollar deficit-funded war) had never happened. You will notice they hardly mentioned it during their convention. The only mention was by Jeb Bush, who said, “I love my brother.” Otherwise, for aught we hear from Republicans, the Republican Party was created de novo ex nihilo in 2009 in Edenic perfection.

I fear that we have a new generation of extreme conservatives coming along who do not believe in physical evidence. Truth, to them, is whatever their party or their preacher tells them, even if there is physical evidence or historical records against it. There has, perhaps, never been such a challenge to science or to science education. At least not since the clerics simply refused to look through Galileo’s telescope and see the moons of Jupiter.

Please post comments about your experiences, or suggestions about what to do.

The Republican Party Is Going To Stop Loving Us

I have written many entries about altruism, which is one of the major products of evolution. Altruism closely resembles what people have always called love. I reported earlier that the Republican Party has officially rejected altruism. Now they have officially rejected love.

For many years, we have all known that the Republican Party is the party of love. They say only nice things about people so that everyone will love them. They gladly accept the label “bleeding hearts” for themselves because their hearts flow out with love toward not just the middle class and poor, such as the victims of bank robo-signing, but even toward the world of nature, you know, birds and stuff. They embrace the Bleeding Heart ideal because this term refers to the bleeding heart of Jesus Christ.

Nowhere has Republican love been more obvious than in the pronouncements of commentators such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Bill O’Reilly. For years, liberal writers such as myself have referred to them as “bloviators,” but we have been so wrong. Every word that has come from Rush Limbaugh’s mouth has been loving and nourishing, each an attempt to help his listeners by giving them truly constructive advice. Even Jesus himself would have a hard time matching the love that Republicans have showered upon their listeners. Where have you ever seen a more loving person than Donald Trump? When the Religious Right Republican commentators make it abundantly clear that everyone who disagrees with them in even the most minor detail is a Satan-possessed terrorist God-hater, this is only because they care about us and wish for us to be saved from hell by worshiping them. Pat Robertson, who pours his words of love from Trinity Broadcasting Network, is the ultimate Christian superman, and he consistently proclaims the Gospel of Republicanism.

So great has been their love that the Republican Religious Right fully deserves every last penny of their wealth. Paul and Jan Crouch, owners of the Trinity Broadcasting Network, have used millions of dollars of money sent by their worshipers to purchase numerous lavish mansions, a luxury jet, and then even have a $100,000 motor home for their dogs. Surely their mansions and the comfort of their dogs is more important than a few thousand children in Bangladesh—isn’t this what Jesus would have said?

But all of that is about to change. At the Republican convention, Governor Chris Christie said (as quoted by Fox News), “‘I believe we have become paralyzed, paralyzed by our desire to be loved.’ Christie said leaders chronically opt to do what is popular, ‘but tonight I say enough. Tonight, we’re gonna choose respect over love.’”

So the Republican Party is now going to command the kind of respect that one receives in the absence of love. What kind of respect could this be? It cannot be the respect that comes from doing a good job for your customers, since that is a form of love. Certainly it is not the kind of respect that comes from neighbors helping one another after a hurricane, such as the one that almost hit the Republican Convention. Both of those are forms of altruism, which Mitt Romney specifically rejected a couple of weeks before Christie’s Sermon on the Mound. It must be the kind of respect that comes from force and intimidation. The kind of respect that a schoolyard bully receives from the other kids whose faces have been beaten into the dirt. Limbaugh called student Sandra Fluke a slut. (Maybe I should call one of my unwed female mother students a slut, and see how long my tenure would protect me.) That, my friends, is love-speech. I wonder what respect-speech would look like.

And before you know it, the whole country will be dominated by the vast canopy of Republican respect. I am looking forward eagerly to all of us non-Republicans, and even moderate Republicans, being called a slut or a terrorist or a communist or a servant of Satan. I can hardly wait to live in this Republican utopia.