Posted on 06/27/2006 11:35:02 PM PDT by neverdem
My wife is always giving me a hard time, saying I march in lockstep with other conservatives and conservatives all march together. I know it seems that way from the outside (she’s a liberal), but there’s also a certain truth to it.
In any tightly knit group there are certain phrases and shibboleths that people use to signal to each other. If anyone uses the word “fungible” a lot, for example, you know they’re conservative. (I think it was Thomas Sowell who started that one.)
The same holds for opinions. People tend to pick up their opinions from people they trust. (One of the fun things about being a writer is when you realize you’re doing other people’s thinking for them.) But if things go around often enough, it becomes an echo chamber and everybody is just holding a certain opinion because everybody else has it as well.
Here are a few points on which I depart from conservative orthodoxy:
Global warming. I realize it’s painful to have to confront this issue at a time when Al Gore’s movie is playing in the theaters but the plain evidence of our senses tells us that something unusual is happening to the earth’s climate. We were in Alaska for vacation last summer and you can’t find anybody in the state who won’t tell you they’re seeing things these days that nobody’s ever seen before.
The whole thing just makes sense. The carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere has varied between 140 parts per million and 280 ppm over the last 10,000 years. It’s now at 360. We’re in uncharted territory. Moreover, it’s all happened within about a hundred years. There doesn’t seem to be any other logical source except the huge quantities of carbon dioxide we throw into the atmosphere—and no one’s denying that, I hope. It may seem that environmentalists are fitting all this to the facts post facto, but they’ve been predicting this for almost 20 years. Time ran a cover story, “The Planet of the Year,” in 1989 that warned about global warming. The business of science is prediction. Let’s give credit where credit is due.
The reason conservatives instinctively gag at global warming, I think, is because they imagine it means accepting liberal pabulum about lowering our living standards and bringing the economy to a halt in order to prevent it. But this is absolutely wrong. The one thing liberals themselves fail to accept is that nuclear energy is the only plausible answer to the problem. They always talk about how “we have to change our lifestyle,” but they never accept that they may have to change their lifestyle and admit nuclear power is not the devil’s work.
Rudy Giuliani recently gave a speech at the Manhattan Institute in which he warned that global warming was a real problem and that nuclear power is a solution. He’s one of the few politicians who’s seen both sides of the coin—which is why he’s going to make a great Presidential candidate.
Evolution. It makes me cringe when otherwise intelligent people such as Ann Coulter start carrying on about evolution. The theory of evolution is one of the greatest triumphs of Western Civilization. Other civilizations have grasped the great age of the earth or that it wasn’t created at the snap of a finger, but only the steady gaze of Western science has been able to fathom the incredible age of the earth and recognize that the fossil record—another indisputable artifact—is the annals of a world that once held nothing but single-celled organisms and has grown progressively more complex and interactive ever since. It is impossible to explain anything in biology outside the context of evolution.
It has always bewildered me that conservatives feel compelled to dispute Darwin. When I first heard Tom Bethell talking this way 20 years ago, I thought it was because he was British and had an Oedipal rivalry with his fellow countryman. Then I realized a lot of conservatives have this same bone to pick. Sometimes it seems to come out of a deeply religious background; but the Catholic Church has accepted evolution, so why can’t other Christians?
The argument, of course, is that evolution is “godless,” but that’s a very narrow viewpoint. The world’s most sophisticated cosmologists—people who trace the universe back to a single instant 15 billion years ago—admit that all this knowledge offers no explanation of why the universe happened or what set off the Big Bang in the first place. (The Big Bang, by the way, was originally proposed in the 1920s by Georges-Henri Lemaitre, a Belgian priest. The theory was rejected by most physicists and astronomers, including Albert Einstein, on the basis that Father Lemaitre was “trying to sneak God back into the cosmos.” The theory has now been confirmed in several different ways and is almost universally accepted.)
In God and the Astronomers, Robert Jastrow, then head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, admitted that astronomers and physicists spend their whole lives laboring up the mountain of cosmology, trying to explain the origins of the universe, only to reach the top and find a conclave of theologians who have been discussing the same subject for centuries. Why can’t conservatives accept the same qualified mystery for evolutionary biology?
Hillary Clinton. Now there’s fighting words. I had dinner with a fellow conservative in New York recently and found that we were in profound agreement that Hillary Clinton is emerging as a very admirable politician. There were several mentions of Margaret Thatcher. Clinton would not be a wimp on foreign affairs. (I won’t mention where the comparison was here.) She is not an off-the-shelf liberal. She is not taking unorthodox positions simply to “court conservative voters” but because she has matured as a politician and is becoming more responsible in her views.
Clinton is doing everything you would want of a former leftist who is starting to admit that America is not the worst place in the world, that government programs can’t solve everything, and that there is such a thing as being “mugged by reality.” She seems sincere in her recognition that religion plays a large part in the stability of society. She hasn’t proposed any national health care plans lately. She isn’t backing away from her support of the war in Iraq. What else do you want? Would conservatives prefer a Howard Dean or Russ Feingold (who is now smugly predicting he can whip Clinton in a primary because she has deserted the Left)? I think the Democrats will have to nominate Hillary Clinton (are they going to turn her down because she’s a woman?) and I think it’s going to be a very tough election.
Which brings me back to my wife. She’s a big Hillary fan and has actually met the Senator through her job as director of publishing and new media at the New York Academy of Sciences. I’ve told her she’s probably going to end up as Hillary’s science advisor during the 2008 campaign.
Meanwhile, after I read about Giuliani’s speech, I sent over a manuscript copy of my book on nuclear and global warming to his press secretary. (I still haven’t found a publisher for it.) She said they might want me to brief Giuliani on energy.
It’s going to be an interesting election in our house.
William Tucker is a weekly columnist for The American Enterprise Online.
Please, don't let it be Hillary against Giuliani, McCain or both of them on the same ticket against her and whomever? Remember, the dems eventually picked Kerry as the more electable against Moveon.org moron preferred, moonbat Howard Dean. Don't let their boos against Hillary fool you. God help us.
Sounds like his wife is starting to wear him down.
Yeah, this is why mixed marriages don't work out. The stronger one always subsumes the weaker.
Anyone who can describe hillary with the term very admirable without barfing is certainly a different brand of conservative than I'm used to. Mentioning her and Margaret Thatcher in the same conversation is downright scary.
"Global warming. I realize it’s painful to have to confront this issue at a time when Al Gore’s movie is playing in the theaters but the plain evidence of our senses tells us that something unusual is happening to the earth’s climate. We were in Alaska for vacation last summer and you can’t find anybody in the state who won’t tell you they’re seeing things these days that nobody’s ever seen before."
Because, of course, one lifetime of experience is relevant to geological and climactic age. And of course the fact that we are barely on an upswing from a FREAKING LITTLE ICE AGE wouldn't have anything to do with it.
"Evolution."
It is mathematically impossible for life to have evolved randomly. If every cubic nanometer of the earth's surface to a height of 10,000 meters underwent one random evolution every nanosecond, it would still take more than about 200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times longer than the Earth has existed for a random sequence of 1,000 bits of genetic data to evolve, assuming that there are 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible life evolving combinations of those 1,000 bits. NOT POSSIBLE. So the theory of evolution at LEAST requires some modification to account for some type of non-random input.
"Hillary Clinton." Don't even go there.
by "1,000 bits of genetic data" I mean "1,000 bits of genetic data that result in a lifeform." Of course, 1,000 bits is nowhere near enough to encode even the simplest lifeform.
I take it you just made those numbers up because a quick check of the math on a piece of paper shows you are way, way off in your calculations.
A virus is simply a strand of RNA covered in a protein shell.
a "simple" strand of RNA and a protein shell require many data points, and on a molecular level are simple only in comparison to more complex organisms.
The degree of complexity in the simple virus is mind boggling compared to nonorganic molecules
I agree with your point of view on "global warming", which is in fact neither global nor warming. But, I think you meant to say that one lifetime of experience is IRRELEVANT to geological and climactic age.
As for you evaluation of evolution as an impossible manifestation of random molecular events, you are wrong in your assumption that life, or the chemistry underlying life, is random. Life is plainly a non-random event.
I could expand on this theme, if I had the time or inclination, ut for me it enough to say that it is obvious, if for no other reason that the fact that atoms are not all alike, as is made clear by a look at the Periodic Table. There is nothing alive there, nor is it random. Why then would life, which rests on non-random realities, would take on the characteristics of randomness?
Whatever the arguments about genetics, evolution and the like, we at least have to clear about that.
Must be a different branch of the Tucker family tree. My Dad told me mixed marriages are tough to maintain. Good advice.
"She hasn’t proposed any national health care plans lately."
No one says she is stupid, but given the power and the opportunity she will want to nationalize 14% of the economy.
If you put a thousand red balls and a thousand blue balls in a box and shake them up real good, then inspect them, and found that the red balls wre all clumped together and the blue balls were not, you would not just stop and declare: "IMPOSSIBLE! This is randomly impossible!"
In this case, investigation might find that the red balls are sticky, and the blue balls are teflon.
This is analagous to molecules; some will attach to each other in certain configurations, and other molecules will not. This differential reactivity can be extraordinarily specific when it comes to proteins.
Life is distinctly and incontrovertibly non-random.
Most obviously, it exists.
The writer invalidated himself right there. Maybe Pinch has an opening for him.
--We were in Alaska for vacation last summer and you can’t find anybody in the state who won’t tell you they’re seeing things these days that nobody’s ever seen before.--
I'm not sure I would have mentioned that anecdotal evidence. It's amazing what the average Joe believes to be true after watching television nonstop for 6-9 dark months.
The carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere has varied between 140 parts per million and 280 ppm over the last 10,000 years. It’s now at 360.
Yes and 400 hundred years ago it was warmer than it is now with the lower co2 readings. No connection here.
Clinton would not be a wimp on foreign affairs.
Then why bother with Giuliani? He and Hillary seem to be in total agreement.
I wouldn't trust her if she was speaking my words, dreaming my dreams, and supporting my beliefs.
Past actions trump carefully crafted imaged.
The fact dem media go after her for being too conservative and the MSM covers it, is telling. The MSM cheerfully covers her problems with the radical left with a little too much glee. They are priming her for middle-class acceptance. Hillary will play her own left as Sister Soulja - and the MSM will help her do it.
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