Meanwhile, the Slapfight Over Evolution Continues

Carthago Delenda Est linked this amusing insistence that the Grand and Complex Theory of Evolution can be reduced to the tautology "Survivors Survive." The knife-point:

Richard Dawkins asserts that Darwin's theory allows one to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. As an example of the deep scientific insight provided by Darwin's theory, Myers notes that more successful replicators relatively more successfully replicate, and that birds that are better able to get food during famine are better able to survive.
Myers is an intellectually fulfilled atheist.

Atheism is a small cup.

I should mention that I don't really have a dog in this fight. I'm a Catholic, and the Catholic Church has for the most part wisely refrained from getting drawn into the weeds about evolution. The last Pope said the theory was "credible," and so long as the theory is not used as a springboard for atheism, the Church teaches it in its schools. So I don't really have anything to say on the ins and outs of evolutionary biology, and as long as the Grand Inquisitors of High Atheism leave it alone, so will I.

Walter Russel Mead on Sun Tzu

Since I mentioned it, here's an example of the kind of argument that only military historians make, and only conservative military historians at that:

The Art of War, a book which has inspired Chinese emperors, Japanese shoguns, Napoleon, Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh, does not just subvert conventional morality. It is even more profoundly opposed to the bureaucratic mind: the approach to the world that believes that everything can be reduced to technique and procedures.

Much of America today is as addicted to bureaucratic, rule based thinking as ancient China. The uncertainties of life in a thermonuclear world haunt us. There must, we feel, be infallible techniques for making the economy grow, keeping inflation at bay, understanding international events and managing American foreign policy. When there is a problem — a financial crash, a revolution in a friendly country, an attack by hostile forces — somebody must have made an obvious mistake. They must have misapplied or failed to apply an obvious technique. We would rather believe that our leaders are foolish and incompetent (which they often are) than face the truth that we live in a radically unpredictable world in which no methods and no rules can guarantee safety.

We believe in reason, and reason is predictable. We claim that the world was made by forces which we can a) understand, and b) harness. This is a matter of gospel in the modern world. A conservatives, faced with an intractable problem which flies in the face of the creed, shrugs his shoulders and says, "it is what it is." A progressive cannot, for that is giving up on those who deserve his aid, and that is the sin by which the world is corrupted.

Bias Amongst the Bias-Hunters

In Other News, Duh.

The fields of psychology, sociology and anthropology have long attracted liberals, but they became more exclusive after the 1960s, according to Dr. Haidt. “The fight for civil rights and against racism became the sacred cause unifying the left throughout American society, and within the academy,” he said, arguing that this shared morality both “binds and blinds.”

Many on the Right have commented on this. I am of two minds about it. On the one hand, it's good to see epistemic cloture being breached, and anything that would let moonbats and wingnuts see each other as differently-thinking rather than non-thinking would be welcome.

On the other, I dislike the idea of being made part of a Designated Victim Group. One of the reasons conservatives don't study psychology and anthropology has to be that conservatives tend to be drawn to study other things. How many progressive military historians are there?

Still, if this is what it takes, well, such is the Age of Revolution.