Reason Magazine - Staff > Ronald Bailey

Are Voters Stupid Enough to Sell Their Votes for Just $27 and Change?

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Tue, 06 May 2008 15:00:00 EDT

During the 1992 Democratic presidential primaries, former Massachusetts Sen. Paul Tsongas denounced rival Gov. Bill Clinton (D-Ark.) as a "pander bear" who "will say anything, do anything to get votes." Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) is clearly following in her husband's electoral footsteps by proposing a "gas tax holiday" for the summer driving season. When primary votes are at stake, who needs to heed the laws of economics or even good sense?

Clinton's idea, which is also endorsed by Republican presidential hopeful Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), is to suspend the 18.4 cents per gallon federal gas tax for three months in order to give cash-strapped motorists relief at the pump. Assuming that dropping the tax would actually lower the price per gallon by the full 18.4 cents, how much would this actually save the average family?

Let's make a rough calculation, using an average commute of 20 miles per day in an automobile with a 15 gallon tank getting the corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) mileage of 27.5. A commuter would then fill up every 20 days. There are 98 days between Memorial Day and Labor Day, so that means five fill-ups over the summer. Five 15 gallon fill-ups at 18.4 cents per gallon less would mean that motorists would save a total of $13.80 for the summer. Let's double that for vacation driving and shopping and that comes to a grand total of $27.60 in savings. About enough to buy five Big Mac Combos.

But would prices actually go down by 18.4 cents? Not likely. As the Tax Foundation reports, most economists assume "that a temporary gas tax holiday would merely increase the profits of the oil industry due to the inability of domestic supply to respond to increased demand in the short run."

In addition, if the federal gas tax is dropped for the summer, the highway trust fund that pays for the upkeep of our crumbling roads and bridges will be short $10 billion. Not to worry, says Sen. Clinton: We'll make up for that fiscal shortfall by taxing the excess profits of Big Oil.

Clinton clearly hopes that primary voters will want to stick it to the greedy oil companies. After all, Exxon Mobil just announced $10.9 billion in profits for the final quarter of 2007. So Sen. Clinton says she'll take away some of those profits to pay for her gas tax holiday. And Clinton's not alone. Her Democratic rival, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) is also calling for a windfall profits tax on oil companies. But will it work?

The last time the United States imposed a windfall profits tax on oil companies was in 1980 and it lasted until 1988. The result, according to a 1990 Congressional Research Service analysis, was that the tax on oil company profits decreased domestic production by 3 percent to 6 percent and increased dependence on foreign oil by 8 percent to 16 percent. Keep in mind that the big private oil companies actually control only about 6 percent of the world's known oil reserves—the rest are owned by gigantic foreign national oil companies. And just where do private oil companies get the billions they invest in projects to increase supplies? That's right; their profits. In other words, Clinton actually ends up sticking it to consumers when she tries to stick it to Big Oil.

Sen. Clinton may be feeling the pain of motorists right now, but once she's in the White House, she plans to inflict more pain at the pump. In fact, all three presidential hopefuls plan to do this. Why? Because Clinton champions "the most aggressive approach to reducing global warming out there." She wants to cut the emissions of greenhouse gases that warm the planet by 80 percent by 2050. To do this she favors a cap-and-trade market on carbon dioxide emissions. The Progressive Policy Institute has calculated that a relatively modest $15 per ton price for carbon dioxide emissions would boost the price of gasoline by 15 cents per gallon. But Sen. Clinton is counting on voters failing to connect the dots between gasoline prices and her global warming policies.

This past weekend, on ABC News' Sunday talk show, "This Week," Sen. Clinton was asked by host (and former Bill Clinton aide) George Stephanopoulos, "Can you name one economist, a credible economist who supports the suspension?" Sen. Clinton replied, "I'm not going to put my lot in with economists." For their part, economists are certainly not putting their lot in with Clinton. According to Bloomberg News, 200 prominent economists, including four Nobelists, have signed a petition denouncing Clinton's gas tax holiday as a "bad idea." Even the New York Times' Clinton votary economist Paul Krugman grumbled that her ploy is "pointless, and disappointing."

We will find out soon if Democratic Party primary voters are really stupid enough buy into this cynical Clinton pander.

Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

'Technology Is at the Center'

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Thu, 01 May 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Papers Please!

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Thu, 01 May 2008 19:44:00 EDT

Brandi Calderwood and her steer, Walker, were thrown out of the Colorado State Fair last year—not because Calderwood had cheated but because she hadn’t registered Walker with the federal government.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is rolling out its National Animal Identification System (NAIS). The aim is to tag and track every farm animal in America, including llamas, elk, and deer. Ultimately, every Bessie, Daisy, and Wilbur will wear a unique 15-digit radio frequency ID tag. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) claims the tags are necessary to help the feds track down disease outbreaks, either natural or bioterroristic, within 48 hours.

Small farmers object that the NAIS is an expensive paperwork nightmare that requires them to inform Washington every time they sell a cow or a sheep. They also note that they are competing against big feedlot operators who sell whole herds and aren’t required to register and track individual animals.

The USDA is careful to claim the program is “voluntary at the federal level,” and indeed, the Bush administration failed when it tried to ram through a mandatory version in 2005. But the agency has other ways of compelling compliance. It offers performance grants to states and farm groups to enroll farmers; groups such as the National FFA (formerly known as Future Farmers of America) and the Colorado 4-H Clubs have already signed up. The Colorado State Fair board also voted to require that all 4-H Club and FFA members provide proof of NAIS registration to participate in livestock auctions and other activities. Hence Calderwood and Walker’s ejection.

Colorado State Fair officials eventually paid Calderwood what Walker would have earned at auction, and the Colorado House of Representatives Agriculture Committee is considering legislation to overturn the registration requirement. Adding insult to injury, the White House admits that the eight head of cattle President Bush runs on his Crawford, Texas, ranch are not registered with the USDA.

Farm Bill Follies

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 12:00:00 EDT

The $300 billion farm bill is being cobbled together by Congress this week. As Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) noted, "It's not just a farm bill. This is a farm and a food and an energy bill."

As Otto von Bismarck quipped, "Laws are like sausage. It's better not to see them being made." Let's take a look at these three aspects of this unappetizing piece of sausage.

First, what do the farmers get? Answer: A lot. Last year, net farm income reached a record level of nearly $89 billion due to high crop prices. Farm household income averaged $84,000 in 2007, according to the Environmental Working Group (the 2006 average for all U.S. households was $66,000). Despite such good times, the federal government showered $5 billion in direct payments on 1.4 million farmers.

These direct payments have nothing to do with crop productivity or a safety net in case of low prices—they are basically gifts to farmers just because they are farmers. In fact, farmers with gross incomes up to $2.5 million have been eligible for these payments. President Bush wants to cap that at $200,000 in income, but the House is considering a cap of $500,000, and the Senate voted to cap the payments at $750,000 per year in income. Overall, Congress shaved just 2 percent off of the direct payments of $5 billion per year over the next four years. While this is a barely discernible improvement, one would think record high farm incomes combined with a world food crisis would make this a good time for Congress to scrap farming subsidies altogether.

It is true that about two-thirds of farm-bill spending funds nutrition programs such as school lunches and food stamps. Lawmakers added $10 billion to the food stamp program to help lower-income Americans address higher food prices. But why are food prices higher in the first place? Part of the reason is the federal government's subsidies and its mandate to turn food into fuel—which brings us to the legislation's energy policy madness.

In December, Congress passed and President Bush signed the Energy Independence and Security Act, which mandated that the U.S. produce 9 billion gallons of conventional biofuels this year. The Act requires that 15 billion gallons of conventional biofuels be produced by 2015 and that 36 billion gallons of conventional and "advanced" biofuels be produced by 2022. How does this affect food prices?

Higher corn prices result from biofuel mandates and subsidies, which encourage farmers to plant fewer acres of wheat and soybeans—which in turn raises their prices. In addition, corn is the chief feed grain for which producers of beef, poultry, and pork must pay higher prices which they will eventually pass along to consumers. In 2006, a bushel of corn sold for just under $2; today it sells for nearly $6.

Currently, most biofuels are produced by turning corn into ethanol. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that the 2008 corn crop will be 14.6 billion bushels, of which 3.2 billion[*] bushels will be fermented into ethanol. In other words, about 22 percent of our corn crop will be floating out the tailpipes of our automobiles next year.

The new farm bill contains a small gesture in the direction of sanity by reducing bioethanol subsidies from 51 cents per gallon to 45 cents per gallon. This should reduce the price of a bushel of corn by about 3 cents, according to the Des Moines Register. On the other hand, Congress is trying get around the unintended consequences of its biofuels policy by offering $1.01 per gallon subsidy for so-called cellulosic ethanol. Large-scale production of cellulosic ethanol has yet to take off, so the farm bill also disperses $400 million in tax credits in the hope of jumpstarting such production. In addition, the bill extends the tariff on imported ethanol until 2012.

The biofuel mandate is not the only reason for higher food prices—higher oil and fertilizer prices as well as commodity speculation also contribute substantially.

But there's no excuse for Congress to make matters worse with this farm bill. As Rep. Ron Kind (D-Wis.) declared, "Negotiators managed to avoid every opportunity to reform wasteful, outdated subsidies while piling on additional layers of unnecessary spending." As a consequence, Americans can look forward to thinner wallets as they struggle to fuel their cars and feed their kids.

Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

[*]: Due to an editing error, this originally read million.

Are You Stomping the Environment Flat?

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 15:00:00 EDT

Are you an ecological bigfoot? Various environmental groups now offer websites where you can supposedly find out. The site provided by the folks at Redefining Progress informs me that if everyone on the planet lived my lifestyle, we would need the resources of 6.5 Earths to supply everyone. I took the test again, this time selecting all the ecological choices, including living a 500-square-foot apartment filled with second-hand furniture in a large apartment building heated with biomass, using electricity generated by solar panels, equipped with low flow toilets and showers, buying all my food at farmers markets, planting my own garden fertilized by compost from my food scraps, eating a vegan diet, recycling all my paper, plastic, aluminum, glass and electronics, owning no car, never flying and traveling no more than 2,000 miles by bus or rail each year. If everyone lived like that we would only need 0.93 earths to accommodate everyone.

What happens if I choose a slightly less-ascetic lifestyle? For example, what if I decided to drive my hybrid car 10,000 miles per year, added occasional dairy products to my diet, and did not grow a garden? Redefining Progress calculates that the planet would be on its way to destruction because we would need 1.10 earths to provide that same lifestyle for everyone.

The Global Footprint Network (GFN) offers an Earth Day Footprint quiz which appears to be a version of the Redefining Progress quiz. Here I scored even worse—it would take 8.7 Earths for everyone to enjoy my lifestyle. My ecological footprint takes up 39 acres, whereas the American average is only 24 acres. The GFN claims that there are only 4.5 biologically productive acres per person worldwide.

Then there's the Eco-Footprint site by Conservation International. Answering the questions honestly, I scored a 22, making me an "eco-novice" which is much nicer than calling me an eco-criminal. At the end of the quiz, participants are offered a chance to pledge to "recycle, reuse and repair so I use fewer materials and reduce pollution and to make my home energy efficient by using compact fluorescent light bulbs and high-efficiency appliances." By selecting all of the ecological choices I achieved a score of 83, making me an "eco-warrior."

Next, I clicked over to the Carbon Footprint site. Its calculator estimated that my wife and my lifestyle fueled 39 metric tons of carbon dioxide annually. The site informed me that this is almost double the American average of 20.4 tons. But since I included my wife in the calculations, it means that we are typical Americans with regard to our per capita carbon dioxide emissions. My chief carbon sin is air travel, which emits more than 15 tons of carbon dioxide per year. The site informs visitors that the average footprint of people living in industrialized nations is 11 tons and the world average is 4 tons.

So in a quest to lower my impact on the environment, I calculated our carbon footprint if we cut our use of electricity and natural gas in half, switched our two cars for a single Toyota Prius and reduced our annual mileage by half, tripled our train travel, and never took an airplane. Furthermore, what if we became vegetarians, ate only local organic food in season, bought only second-hand clothes, furniture and appliances, never went to movies, bars or restaurants, and recycled or composted all our waste? Even then our combined carbon footprint would be 7.3 tons per year, but that would get us just below the world average of 4 tons per capita annually.

The Carbon Footprint site obligingly links to projects promising to offset my annual carbon overindulgence. For example, the site suggests that a check for $600 to fund verified clean energy projects—such as a wind energy project in India or burning biomass in Africa—instead of fossil fuels would offset the 39 tons of carbon dioxide my current lifestyle requires. Or I can buy offsets by funding a reforestation project in Kenya for $800, or pay to plant trees in Britain for $1300.

The bad news, according to the folks at Carbon Footprint, is that "to combat climate change the worldwide average needs to reduce to 2 tons." In other words, the average American must reduce his or her carbon emissions by 90 percent. Where in the world do people currently emit less than 2 tons of carbon dioxide per capita annually? Answer: Places like Togo, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Uganda and Mali.

That brings me to the Global Footprint Network's sustainability calculations. According to the GFN's Living Planet Report (2006), the minimum criteria for sustainability is measured by using the United Nations Development Program's Human Development Index (HDI) as an indicator of well-being, and its ecological footprint calculations as a measure of demand on the biosphere. "We only found one country that meets both minimum criteria, which doesn't mean that they are necessarily sustainable but they are providing long lives and high education and minimum income without using more than what is available globally worldwide per person. And this country is called Cuba," explained GFN executive director, Mathis Wackernagel on National Public Radio's Living On Earth show last November. Wackernagel added, "If we say Cuba meets the sustainable development criteria, we don't say that's the nirvana, the most beautiful life you could imagine." Indeed not.

Comparing the HDIs of the United States and Cuba, one finds that the U.S. ranks 12th out of 177countries measured while Cuba ranks 51st. In the three primary dimensions, the U.S. is 31st in life expectancy, 19th in educational achievement, and 2nd in per capita income. By contrast, Cuba ranks 32nd in life expectancy, 35th in education, and 94th in income—and that's assuming that Castro's government is truthful in its statistics. According to the U.N.'s HDI report, Cuba's per capita carbon dioxide emissions dropped from 3 tons per capita in 1990 and 2.3 tons in 2004. "If all countries in the world were to emit CO₂ at levels similar to Cuba's, we would exceed our sustainable carbon budget by approximately 3 percent," says the HDI report.

And where do countries that emit less than 2 tons of carbon dioxide per capita annually rank on the HDI? Out of 177 countries and territories ranked, Togo is 152;Nigeria, 158; Bangladesh, 140; Ethiopia, 169; Uganda, 154; and Mali, 173.

As noted above, the creators of Carbon Footprint claim that everyone in the world must eventually emit no more than 2 tons of carbon dioxide per year. When did Americans last emit so little carbon dioxide? Around 1870. Taking historical U.S. carbon emissions and multiplying them by a factor of 3.67 in order to derive total carbon dioxide emissions and then dividing that amount by the number of people living in the country, we find that Americans emitted per person roughly 2.5 tons of carbon dioxide annually back in 1870. In those days, per capita GDP was $194 per year which would be equivalent to about $2,500 today.

It is true that many of us in the rich countries could cut back a bit on our use of energy and other resources without too much pain. But 1.6 billion people around the world still lack access to electricity and 1.1 billion live on less than $1 per day. These poor people desperately need access to cheap sources of energy to improve their lives.

Assuming that these ecological footprint calculations have some merit, the upshot is that if one does not want to "redefine progress" as a return to 19th-century poverty (and surely no one does), then accelerated technological innovation aimed at finding low-carbon sources of cheap energy is crucial. How to achieve that goal is what the real environmental debate should be on this 38th Earth Day.

Ronald Bailey is Reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

Flunk This Movie!

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 12:00:00 EDT

"This is not a religious argument," asserts Discovery Institute president Bruce Chapman in conservative Hollywood gadfly Ben Stein's new anti-science propaganda film, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. The movie opens this Friday in 1,100 theaters, the largest theatrical release ever for a documentary, according to Expelled's producers.

The movie's basic point? To quote a transcript from a Rush Limbaugh show posted to the movie's offical website: "Darwinism has taken root, taken hold at every major intellectual institution around the world in Western Society, from Great Britain to the United States, you name it. Darwinism, of course, does not permit for the existence of a supreme being, a higher power, or a God."

Yet despite its topic, the film is entirely free of scientific content—no scientific evidence against biological evolution and none for "intelligent design" (ID) theory is given. Which makes sense because biological evolution is amply supported by evidence from the fossil record, molecular biology, and morphology. For example, the younger the rocks in which fossils are found, the more closely they resemble species alive today, and the older the rocks, the less resemblance there is. In addition, molecular biology confirms that the more distantly related the fossil record suggests species lineages are, the more their genes differ.

Instead of evaluating this evidence, Stein spends most of the movie asking various proponents of evolutionary theory, including Richard Dawkins, P.Z. Myers, Michael Ruse, and Daniel Dennett, for their religious views. Neither the producers nor Stein understand that offering critiques of a theory with which they disagree is not the same as proving their own theory.

Stein and the film's producers maintain that belief in evolutionary biology makes societies more likely to succumb to totalitarianism. The flick is replete with grim black-and-white shots of Soviet armies, Nazi thugs, Stalin, Hitler, and concentration camps. The filmmakers portray opposition to teaching ID in universities and public schools as a threat to freedom on a par with Communist and Nazi repression. But ID proponents in the academy are not being dragged off to concentration camps by goose-stepping Darwinist thugs—the worst thing they suffer is the loss of their jobs. That's not fun, but it's not the gas chamber either.

This silly, duplicitous film features one associate after another of the Discovery Institute, the Seattle-based "think tank" that has been at the forefront of campaign to smuggle intelligent design into science classrooms and public discourse. This campaign was outlined in the Discovery Institute's infamous "Wedge Strategy" document in 1998. That document begins with the sentence, "The proposition that human beings are created in the image of God is one of the bedrock principles on which Western civilization was built." The Wedge document goes on to complain: "Yet a little over a century ago, this cardinal idea came under wholesale attack by intellectuals drawing on the discoveries of modern science."

The Wedge document makes it crystal clear what comes first for intelligent designers, and it isn't evidence. Under activities to popularize intelligent design, the Wedge document mentions "documentaries and other media productions." Expelled is just part of that propaganda strategy.

The film is being bankrolled by Walt Ruloff, a Christian evangelical software millionaire. A resident of Vancouver, British Columbia, Ruloff hooked up with another Expelled producer, Logan Craft, when Craft was studying with evangelical theologian J.I. Packer at Regent College in Vancouver. Ruloff claims that he was shocked when one of the leading genomic researchers in the U.S. told him that as much 30 percent of research in his field is never published because it points toward intelligent design theory. Just how this much research is hidden from view goes unexplained.

The film begins with moody shots of Ben Stein backstage before he addresses an unidentified audience on the alleged suppression of scientific research in the name of Darwinian orthodoxy. Stein stalks onstage and declares that freedom is the essence of America. So far, so good. Then he muses, What if our freedom was taken away? In fact, Stein asserts that this is already happening. We are losing our freedom in one of the most important sectors of our society—science.

As evidence of this loss of freedom, Stein trots out a small parade of intelligent design martyrs. Let's look at a few cases. In 2004, Richard Sternberg, who was editor of the scientific journal Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, published an article by Stephen Meyer arguing that the "Cambrian explosion" 570 to 530 million years ago in which most of the body types of animals developed was evidence for intelligent design. Meyer was then a professor at Palm Beach Atlantic University where all "trustees, officers, members of the faculty or of the staff, must believe in the divine inspiration of the Bible, both the Old and New Testaments; that man was directly created by God."

Sternberg was serving on the editorial board of the Baraminology Study Group, a group of young-earth creationists. Baraminology is the study of biblical animal "kinds." Sternberg argued that he was a friendly outsider advising them against their young-earth views. Meyer is now the head of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture and Sternberg is a signatory of the Discovery Institute's A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism.

Many of Sternberg's colleagues reacted with dismay and the journal retracted Meyer's article. In the film, Sternberg says he lost his office at the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History, was pressured to resign, and had his religious and political beliefs questioned. Yet, he still has office space in the Museum and has been reappointed for three more years. To be sure, probably some of his colleagues are unhappy with him and don't want to hang out with him anymore. This is far cry from the concentration camps, or what Stalin did to proponents of evolutionary biology in the name of Lysenkoism.

In another case of alleged persecution, George Mason University (GMU) did not renew a teaching contract with Caroline Crocker, an adjunct biology lecturer who believes in ID. She says that she only wanted to teach students to question scientific orthodoxies. "I was only trying to teach what the university stands for—academic freedom," she says in the Stein's film. Since GMU let her go, she says that she can no longer find work. In the film, Crocker insists, "I did not teach creationism." Interestingly, Crocker apparently delivered the same offending lecture at a local community college later. It didn't turn out to be a "balanced" presentation of evidence for and against biological evolution. Why not? "There really is not a lot of evidence for evolution," Crocker said.

Assistant professor of astronomy and ID proponent Guillermo Gonzalez was denied tenure at Iowa State University in 2007. In 2004, Gonzalez was coauthor, with theologian and Discovery Institute fellow Jay Richards, of The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos is Designed for Discovery. The publisher's press release claims that the authors "demonstrate that our planet is exquisitely fit not only to support life, but also gives us the best view of the universe, as if Earth—and the universe itself—were designed both for life and for scientific discovery." Gonzalez is arguing that the Earth is precisely positioned to enable researchers like him to make scientific measurements. But is this so? An Iowa State colleague, associate professor of religious studies Hector Avalos, disagrees and neatly skewers this conceit. To wit:

This rationale is analogous to a plumber arguing that if our planet had not been positioned precisely where it is, then he might not be able to do his work as a plumber. Lead pipes might melt if the Sun were much closer. And, if our planet were any farther from the Sun, it might be so frozen that plumbers might not exist at all. Therefore, plumbing must have been the reason that our planet was located where it is.

Did Gonzalez fail to get tenure because of his ID views? Although the university denies it, my guess is probably yes. Why? On the evidence of The Privileged Planet, Guillermo's colleagues could reasonably worry that his ID views weren't likely to lead to fruitful research results. Gonzalez was not thrown into a concentration camp for his views. He just didn't get tenure.

The most egregious part of the film is the attempt to link evolutionary biology with Communism and Nazism. The claim that Communism was motivated by Darwin is just plain silly. Official Soviet biological doctrine was Lysenkoism, which was opposed to the findings of the modern synthesis of genetics and evolutionary biology. In fact, evolutionary biologists and geneticists were denounced as "Trotskyite agents of international fascism" and actually thrown into the Gulag for their scientific sins.

As for Nazism, the film interviews mathematician and Discovery Institute fellow David Berlinski who says, "Darwinism is not a sufficient condition for a phenomenon like Nazism, but I think it was a necessary one." To visually illustrate the alleged totalitarian temptations of evolutionary biology, Stein wanders through the Nazi death camp at Dachau. Berlinski and other Discovery Institute denizens are basically claiming that scientific materialism undermines the notion that human beings occupy a special place in the universe. If humans aren't special, goes this line of thinking, then morals don't apply. This is a variation of the adage, "If god is dead, then everything is permitted."

Of course, this overlooks the fact that people down through the millennia have found all sorts of justifications for why they are permitted to murder each other, including plunder, tribal competition, and, yes, religion. Meanwhile, insights from evolutionary psychology are helping us to better understand how our in-group/out-group dynamics contribute to our disturbing capacity for racism, xenophobia, genocide, and warfare. Evolutionary psychology is also offering new ideas about how human morality developed, including our capacities for cooperation, love, and tolerance.

Near the end of the film, Stein asks Dawkins, author of The God Delusion and arguably the best-known living evolutionary biologist on the planet, if he could think of any circumstances under which intelligent design might have occurred. Incautiously, Dawkins brings up the idea that aliens might have seeded life on earth; so-called directed panspermia. This idea was suggested by biologists Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel back in the 1970s. In the film, Stein acts like this a great "gotcha" and is the silliest thing he's ever heard. Of course, the irony is that this is precisely what proponents of intelligent design are claiming—that a higher intelligence created life on earth. Only, they don't want that higher intelligence to be a race of purple space squids. (By the way, Dawkins says that he is not a proponent of directed panspermia.)

The film's close returns to Stein's speech in which he declares, "There are people out there who want to keep science in a little box where it can't possibly touch a higher power." Earlier in the film, Warwick University "science studies" sociologist Steve Fuller archly poses the question: Which comes first, worldview or evidence? Fuller aims his question at the proponents of evolutionary biology. However, as this dreary film itself makes it painfully clear, the question is far more relevant to the supporters of intelligent design theory.

If ID is all worldview and no evidence, here's something else to ponder. At an April 15 press conference for bloggers held at the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., the movie's producers said that they plan to use the movie as part of a campaign to roll out legislation in states—so-called "freedom bills"—that would forbid anyone from "punishing" teachers and professors who question "Darwinism." Walt Ruloff noted that the science standards of about 26 states are currently in play and that Florida was likely to pass such a "freedom bill."

Asked if the movie's makers expected any friendly interest from scientific journals, Ruloff noted that Scientific American had savaged Expelled, adding, "I would expect that any other 'science rag' would do exactly the same thing."

"What's happening here is politics," lamented the film's star, Ben Stein, at Heritage. "Politics in the halls of science and that needs to be stopped."

I couldn't agree more.

Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His most recent book, Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution, is available from Prometheus Books.

The Biggest Green Mistake

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 15:00:00 EDT

In the last year, the price of wheat has tripled, corn doubled, and rice almost doubled. As prices soared, food riots have broken out in about 20 poor countries including Yemen, Haiti, Egypt, Pakistan, Indonesia, Ivory Coast, and Mexico. In response some countries, such as India, Pakistan Egypt and Vietnam, are banning the export of grains and imposing food price controls.

Are rising food prices the result of the economic dynamism of China and India, in which newly prosperous consumers are demanding more food—especially more meat? Perennial doomsters such as the Earth Policy Institute's Lester Brown predicted more than a decade ago that China's growing food demand would destabilize global markets and signal a permanent increase in grain prices. But that thesis has so far not been borne out by the facts. China is a net grain exporter. India is also largely self-sufficient in grains. At some time in the future, these countries may become net grain importers, but they are not now and so cannot be blamed to for today's higher food prices.

If surging demand is not the problem, what is? In three words: stupid energy policies. Although they are not perfect substitutes, oil and natural gas prices tend to move in tandem. So as oil prices rose above $100 per barrel, the price of gas also went up. Natural gas is the main feedstock for nitrogen fertilizer. As gas prices soared, so did fertilizer prices which rose by 200 percent.

As a report from the International Center for Soil Fertility and Agricultural Development (ICSFAD) notes, applying the fertilizer derived from 1000 cubic feet of natural gas yields around 480 pounds of grain. That amount of grain would supply enough calories to feed a person for one year. Rising oil prices also contribute to higher food prices because farmers need transport fuel to run their tractors and to get food to urban markets.

Even worse is the bioethanol craze. Politicians in both the United States and the European Union are mandating that vast quantities of food be turned into fuel as they chase the chimera of "energy independence." For example, Congress passed and President George W. Bush signed misbegotten legislation requiring fuel producers to use at least 36 billion gallons of biofuels by 2022-which equals about 27 percent of the gasoline Americans currently use each year and is about five times the amount being produced now. And the European Union set a goal that 10 percent of transport fuels come from biofuels by 2020.

The result of these mandates is that about 100 million tons of grain will be transformed this year into fuel, drawing down global grain stocks to their lowest levels in decades. Keep in mind that 100 million tons of grain is enough to feed nearly 450 million people for a year.

As Dennis Avery from the Hudson Institute's Center for Global Food Issues points out, the higher corn prices that result from biofuels mandates mean that farmers are shifting from producing wheat and soybeans to producing corn. Less wheat and soybeans means higher prices for those grains. In the face of higher prices for wheat, corn and soybeans consumers try to shift to rice which in turns raises that grain's price. In addition, higher grain prices encourage farmers in developing countries to chop down and plow up forests. It also hasn't helped that some traditionally strong grain exporters such as Australia have experienced extreme weather.

So what to do? In the short run, there is some good news. High prices are encouraging farmers to shift back toward wheat and soybeans which should relieve some of the pressure on grain prices. Second, the biofuels mandates must go. If biofuels are such a good idea, entrepreneurs, inventors and investors will make them into a viable energy source without any government subsidies. Thirdly, both high and low technologies are addressing high fertilizer prices. On the high tech front, Arcadia Biosciences has created biotech rice and corn varieties that need much less nitrogen fertilizer that conventional varieties require. In Bangladesh and other poor countries, farmers are embedding low tech fertilizer-infused briquettes in the soil to deliver nitrogen to rice. This boosts crop production 25 percent while cutting fertilizer use by 50 percent.

Expanding acreage to grow biofuels is bad for biodiversity and may even boost the carbon dioxide emissions that contribute to man-made global warming. Avery notes that food production needs to double because there will be more people who will want to eat better by 2050, at which point world population begins to slide back downwards. Turning food into fuel makes that goal much harder to achieve. Avery is right when he argues, "Biofuels are purely and simply the biggest Green mistake we've ever made and we're still making it."

Ronald Bailey is Reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

Humanizing Animals

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 15:00:00 EDT

Combining animal and human genes provokes unease among some philosophers, theologians, and ordinary citizens. Currently, scientists want to inject the nuclei of human cells into animal eggs-generally from cows and rabbits--that have been stripped of their nuclei to create cell hybrids, or cybrids. Human eggs are hard to come by and expensive whereas animal eggs are plentiful and cheap. The aim is to produce embryonic stem cells for research.

No one knows if such cybrid embryos might grow into human babies if implanted in an appropriate womb. Would such cybrid babies suffer some physical or mental problems as a result of their animal genetic heritage? That heritage would basically be the energy producing mitochondria derived from the cytoplasm of the animal cells into which the human nuclei were inserted. Since cows and rabbits live much shorter lives than do humans it might be that any cybrid humans with cow or rabbit mitochondria would not live as long as normal humans. In addition, the operation of animal mitochondria in cybrids might mimic some mutational mitochondrial diseases that already afflict people. These real risks of creating physically and mentally diminished human beings mean that it would be immoral to grow human-animal cybrids into full-term babies.

But let's flip the question-instead of diminishing humans, what about uplifting animals by boosting their intelligence and physical dexterity? Uplifting animals to human-like sapience has been explored by many speculative writers. For example, in H.G. Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), humanized animals are commanded to follow Moreau's law: "Not to go on all-fours; Not to suck up Drink; Not to eat Fish or Flesh; Not to claw the Bark of Trees; Not to chase other Men; that is the Law. Are we not Men?" But they are not Men and they eventually revert to their beast natures and destroy their hubristic creator. Even worse is Pierre Boulle's novel, The Planet of the Apes (1963), in which uplifted apes are now the masters of animal-like degenerate humans. On the other hand, in Cordwainer Smith's Norstrilia (1975), the underpeople, humanlike beings created from animals, struggle for their rights and are morally superior in many respects to their human masters.

The most popular novels of the genre are David Brin's The Uplift Saga and The Uplift Trilogy. In Brin's universe, one sapient species after another throughout the galaxies uses genetic engineering to uplift non-sapient species to self-aware intelligence. In Brin's books, humanity uplifts dolphins and chimps and we three earthly species go cheerfully caroming around the universe together.

Some technoprogressive thinkers such as editor-in-chief of Betterhumans.com George Dvorsky argue that we have a moral obligation to uplift other species to sapiency. "It would be negligent of us to leave animals behind to fend for themselves in the state of nature," declared Dvorsky. He foresees mostly great good coming out of any such project. On the other hand, the prospect of uplift inspires dread in bioconservatives like Francis Fukuyama who worries that biotechnologists will create slave chimpanzees with the intelligence of a ten-year old boy.

Setting aside the fact that no one has any idea of how to actually uplift, that is, to dramatically boost the intelligence of animals, would it be moral to do it? How would a dumb animal give its consent to being uplifted? Since no human being gives his or her consent to being born with whatever level of intelligence or health he or she has, why should prior consent be required for uplifting animals? Dvorsky actually thinks that it is more moral to uplift already born animals so that we can ask them before-and-after questions. Perhaps they would recall their pre-sapient state and tell us if it were preferable to the anxieties of self-awareness. But what if uplifted chimps and dolphins told us that self-aware intelligent language using is not all that it's cracked up to be and that they'd rather go back to their state of natural innocence?

Also, would uplifted animals retain something of their essential chimpanzee or dolphin natures? This could be problematic. For example, male chimpanzees share the human male proclivity for violence. And dolphins indulge in gang rape and kill for fun. It is possible that some intellectually-enhanced chimps and dolphins could be psychopathic murderers. In other words, uplifted animals might not be morally any better, and maybe even worse, than human beings. Would-be uplifters might suffer the fate of Dr. Moreau.

Fukuyama's concerns about subhuman slaves cannot be dismissed. Uplift advocate Dvorsky agrees: "Animals may also be engineered to have specialized physical or cognitive characteristics while lacking certain neurological faculties. Theoretically, such creatures could be designed for specific tasks, such as manual labour, dangerous work, or as sex trade workers--and at the same time be oblivious to the demeaning or hazardous nature of their work. For all intents and purposes these would be happy slaves."

So would it be wrong to uplift animals and make them happy slaves? One could imagine uplifted animals designed to receive an addictive jolt of pleasure inducing dopamine every time they successfully carry out a human command. Something like that already happens when a dog gets patted on its head by its owner for fetching a ball. Dvorsky denounces the prospect of uplifted happy slaves as "a repugnant possibility and an affront to humanitarian values."

Now imagine human beings who have been genetically engineered with a dopamine obedience circuit. It's pretty clear that we would consider such engineered people as "diminished" because their capacity for self-government would have been deliberately limited. We generally regard people as acting freely when they act on their own intentions and for their own reasons without coercion. In this case, the biotechnically juiced-up dopamine circuit functions as a kind of gentle coercion. But wait, aren't we all already in thrall to our un-tampered with dopamine reward circuits?

Creating happy uplifted animal slaves faces two chief moral objections. First, I would not want to be a happy slave. If I wouldn't want to be one then I assume no one else, including uplifted animals, would want to be. Second, a society dependent on happy slaves would be morally corrosive.

So why wouldn't I want to be a happy slave-after all I would be, by definition, happy. I reject happy servitude because I don't want limitations placed on my capacities and my aspirations. But of course, my genes and environment have already limited my intellectual and physical capacities and aspirations. However, living as a human discontented with my shortcomings, I know that it is "Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav'n." When sufficient progress has been made later this century, I hope to have the power of choosing how to use new technologies to enhance my capacities and even at the risk of overwhelming and destroying my own identity.

On the point of moral corrosion, consider the plot of The Planet of the Apes. What has happened is that the humans uplifted the apes and became so dependent upon their simian servants that their intellects decayed. There are, of course, lots of confounding factors, but history features no economically and technologically robust slave-holding civilizations. In any case, I suspect humanity will become deeply integrated with our increasingly powerful computational technologies so that happy animal slaves will be basically useless anyway.

Some have argued that self-aware intelligence is an ecological niche that can only be inhabited by one species. If two proto-intelligent species arise at the same time, one eventually out-competes and causes the extinction of the other. This may have happened to our Neanderthal cousins. Would uplifting animals spark a dangerous evolutionary competition for the occupation of the intelligence niche?

A rich speculative literature makes it clear that there a plenty of ways in which uplift technologies could be misused or go awry, but there is no bright moral line forbidding the uplift of animals to human-level intelligence. Successfully uplifted animals would have to be treated with the same moral respect that we owe to human persons.

Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His most recent book, Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution, is available from Prometheus Books.

The New Age of Reason

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 15:00:00 EDT

American society periodically weathers de-cades-long storms of moral renovation set off by thunderclaps of Christian evangelism. Old spiritual and moral doctrines get reinterpreted in a new light, producing far-ranging, and not always welcome, political change. Scholars commonly refer to these tumultuous periods as “Great Awakenings.”

Historians date the First Great Awakening to the mid-18th century, when widespread Presbyterian and Baptist revivals helped beget the American Revolution. The second came in the early 19th century, when evangelical Christians launched temperance, abolitionist, and other reform movements, culminating in the Civil War. The third was a response to Darwinian theory and to the social problems caused by rapid industrialization and urbanization in the late 19th century, ending with the Progressive Era in the early 20th century. The fourth unleashed the “culture war” that began in the 1960s and has dominated political debate ever since. But thankfully, there are signs that the Fourth Great Awakening is finally coming to a close. Among other beneficial side effects, this ending of an era likely will reduce calls for censorship and other legal intrusions into private activities while broadening tolerance for new and different ways of life.

Historian William McLoughlin, in his 1978 book Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform: An Essay on Religion and Social Change in America, 1607–1977, defined awakenings as “periods of ideological transformation.” They “begin in periods of cultural distortion and grave personal stress, when we lose faith in the legitimacy of our norms, the viability of our institutions, and the authority of our leaders in church and state,” McLoughlin wrote. “They eventuate in basic restructuring of our institutions and redefinitions of our social goals.”

The Nobel Prize–winning economist Robert Fogel, in his 2000 book The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism, posited that Great Awakenings “are primarily political phenomena in which the evangelical churches represent the leading edge of an ideological and political response to the accumulated technological, economic, and social changes that undermined the received culture.” Awakenings, Fogel maintains, go through three phases: revival, when cultural stresses produce religious revitalization movements; reform, when activists persuade governments to adopt moral improvement programs; and resistance, when religious fervor wanes and the forces of moralization encounter stiffened cultural opposition.

The Fourth Great Awakening has reached the stage where moral hectoring is being resisted. The once politically potent Moral Majority has disappeared, and the Christian Coalition is a shadow of its former self, its membership down from millions to tens of thousands. Voters have tossed out such Bible-thumpers as Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), Rep. John Hostettler (R-Ind.), Rep. Jim Ryun (R-Kan.), and Rep. J.D. Hayworth (R-Ariz.). Evangelical political projects have failed around the country, from a ballot measure to prohibit abortion in South Dakota to a Missouri initiative to ban embryonic stem-cell research. The Kansas state school board has repealed guidelines that had questioned biological evolution.

These developments may be glimmers of the Fourth Great Awakening’s impending demise. But there is a darker possibility as well: that the awakening is merely mutating into a more left-wing phase of moralizing.

The First Awakening
The First Great Awakening erupted in Great Britain and its American colonies in the 1730s. Preachers such as the English Methodist George Whitefield and the New England Congregationalist Jonathan Edwards began to soften the harsh Calvinist doctrine that only a few predestined elect would be admitted into the joys of Heaven while the majority of born sinners headed straight to Hell. Whitefield and Edwards stressed God’s willingness to save those who had truly repented of their sins. During revival meetings, repentant sinners experienced an emotional “new birth.”

The revivalists urged believers to trust their own experiences rather than depend on the authority of corrupt church officials. Consequently, many converts defied traditional authorities in asserting their new convictions. This spirit of defiance also led many Americans to challenge the colonies’ tax-supported churches as inimical to freedom of conscience.

The theological idea that all people were equal in the sight of God had other political implications. If everyone is equal before God, on what grounds could elites claim moral or political superiority? As the Protestant minister Elisha Williams put it in 1744, “Every man has an equal right to follow the dictates of his own conscience in the affairs of religion…even an equal right with any rulers be they civil or ecclesiastical.” By teaching citizens to question both church and civil authorities, the First Great Awakening helped unleash the American Revolution.

The period of resistance to reform, to use Fogel’s schema, took off after the Revolution. Paradoxically, as religious tolerance became widespread, religious enthusiasm waned. By 1790 only 5 percent to 10 percent of the adult population belonged to formal churches. Both the democratic spirit and the call of the frontier loosened American morals. In their 1982 book Drinking in America, the historians Mark Edward Lender and James Kirby Martin described the period from the 1790s until the early 1830s as “probably the heaviest drinking era in the nation’s history.” In 1800 the mean absolute alcohol intake for Americans 15 years and older was 5.8 gallons per year. By 1830 that had risen to 7.1 gallons per person, of which 4.3 gallons were hard liquor and 2.8 were beer, cider, or wine. The historian W.J. Rorabaugh argued in The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition (1979) that post-Revolutionary Americans regarded heavy drinking as their right as free people. As Lender and Martin summarized Rorabaugh’s argument, “a personal binge…was in a sense an assertion of individuality, a freedom from communal restraints. Even the drunkard, in essence, was a pluralist—free under the laws of the nation to pursue his or her own lifestyle no matter what others thought.”

In American Metropolis: A History of New York City (1999), the historian George Lankevich estimated that 1820 New York, with a population of 124,000 people, was home to 2,500 saloons—one bar for every 50 residents. Today, by comparison, there are just over 10,000 licensed bars, restaurants and nightclubs in a city of more than 8 million people—one bar for every 800 residents.

Prostitution also became common in cities during the period of the First Great Awakening. By 1831 moral reformers improbably claimed that New York City was home to some 10,000 prostitutes; that would have been 27 percent of the city’s young female population. The historian Timothy Gilfoyle offered a more reasonable, and still quite high, estimate in his 1992 book City of Eros: “five to 10 percent of all nineteenth-century young women in New York (between 15 and 30 years of age) prostituted at some point.” Whatever the number, it was clear that the fire-and-brimstone religious revival ushered in by the likes of Jonathan Edwards had become a distant memory in the wake of the revolution it helped inspire.

The Second Awakening
Even as Americans were enjoying themselves in barrooms and brothels, the revival phase of the Second Great Awakening was gathering strength. When Timothy Dwight, the grandson of Jonathan Edwards, became president of Yale, the vast majority of students described themselves as skeptics. But through a series of powerful sermons beginning in 1801, Dwight revived Christianity on campus. About the same time, Methodist camp revivals were taking root in the trans-Appalachian West.

These revivalists completely rejected Calvinist predestination in favor of free moral agency, arguing that anyone could be saved by God’s grace if he struggled fiercely against sin. Evil arose from an individual’s conscious choice, not, as Calvin had claimed, from his innate depravity. Since everyone was free to choose good or evil, the revivalists located the source of social problems in individuals. “Lurking in this view,” Fogel writes, “was the belief that poverty was the wages of sin.”

The Second Great Awakening fostered the rise of numerous single-issue organizations advocating programs of moral and political uplift, from temperance in alcohol to the abolition of prostitution to official enforcement of the Sabbath. The temperance movement proved so successful that per capita alcohol consumption fell by more than 50 percent between 1830 and 1840.

All this took place against a background of mass immigration, especially from Ireland. Some reformers feared the tide of alien Catholics would overwhelm and outbreed America’s Protestant majority. Thus arose a campaign to ban abortions, led by the newly formed American Medical Association. (In the early 1800s American women were legally free to terminate a pregnancy until quickening—that is, until fetal movement in the womb could be felt.) The Boston physician Horatio Storer kicked the anti-abortion campaign into high gear in 1855, a full 14 years before the Vatican definitively forbade abortion for Roman Catholics. “The fashionable young bride, accustomed to adulation, is reluctant to forego at once the excitement of society,” he warned. “Wishing still to enjoy the immunities of unmarried life—to be as free, as unshackled as ever—she will not endure the seclusion and deprivations necessarily connected with the pregnant condition, but resorts to means, readily procurable, to destroy the life within her.”

Reformers also preached the virtues of bodily purification. The Rev. Sylvester Graham, who in 1830 became the general agent for the Pennsylvania Temperance Society, inveighed against “venereal excess.” He claimed that immoderate sexual passion would cause indigestion, headaches, feebleness of circulation, pulmonary consumption, spinal diseases, epilepsy, insanity, early death of offspring, and more. He also claimed that “high-seasoned food; rich dishes; the free use of flesh; and even the excess of aliment; all, more or less—and some to a very great degree—increase the concupiscent excitability and sensibility of the genital organs.” To cool people’s sexual passions, the minister proposed a special diet that included two of his own inventions, Graham crackers and bland, whole wheat Graham bread.

The most politically significant reform movement linked to the Second Great Awakening—and the most appealing from a libertarian point of view—was the campaign to abolish slavery. If all men are equal before God, then no man may justifiably own another. By 1838 the American Anti-Slavery Society had grown to 1,350 chapters, with more than 250,000 members. Politically the reform period of the Second Great Awakening climaxed with the Civil War.

Resistance to these crusades rose in the aftermath of the Civil War. Once again, the expanses of the frontier beckoned Americans to leave behind the constraints of family, community, and church. The restless movement westward was complemented by an unprecedented spate of industrial, economic, and population growth. The richest industrialists indulged in showy displays of opulence, provoking Mark Twain to brand the era the Gilded Age.

The Third Awakening
The revival period of the Third Great Awakening began in the 1870s. Crusades by the evangelist Dwight L. Moody in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago drew tens of thousands of worshipers. Moody, sometimes described as the first Christian fundamentalist, preached a literal interpretation of the Bible and rejected any accommodation with the new evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin.

A theological split gradually opened within the evangelical movement. On one side stood the modernists: mainstream Protestants who no longer believed in the inerrancy of the Bible and who accepted Darwinian evolution. Their New Theology argued that God worked through natural laws and revealed Himself through the progress of history. Moody’s spiritual heirs, calling themselves fundamentalists, rejected the New Theology and asserted that a believer’s personal salvation was ultimately more important than social action. They insisted on the inerrancy of the Bible, the Virgin Birth, bodily resurrection, and salvation only through Christ. A series of 12 booklets, titled The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth, set out and defended these principles between 1910 and 1915. The two evangelical groups’ political agendas did not overlap significantly, although there were figures—most notably the three-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan—who straddled the divide, combining fundamentalist religious views with a modernist economic agenda.

It was the modernists who dominated the Third Awakening. In his 1917 book A Theology for the Social Gospel, the Baptist modernist Walter Rauschenbusch warned of “the sinfulness of the social order and its share in the sins of all individuals within it.” We couldn’t end personal sin, Rauschenbusch argued, without ending social sin; collective sin required collective redemption. Equality of opportunity as preached in the First and Second Awakenings was not enough for Third Awakening evangelicals, who called on the government to redistribute wealth. This, they believed, would enable the lower orders to rise above their spiritual poverty and amend their moral faults. Equality of condition became a prerequisite for moral improvement.

The reform stage of the Third Great Awakening flowered in the first two decades of the 20th century, known as the Progressive Era. This period saw both new interventions in the economy and new restrictions on private and public pleasures, from boxing to the movies. Prohibition advanced with breathtaking speed. By 1900 every state required mandatory “temperance education” in public schools. Under pressure from the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon League, the number of dry states increased from three in 1903 to 32 in 1916. The 18th Amendment, which established Prohibition nationally, was ratified in 1919. Many advocates of the Social Gospel were also prominent Progressives. Lyman Abbott, for example, was both the pastor of Brooklyn’s Plymouth Congregational Church and a confidante of President Theodore Roosevelt.

There was a concurrent surge in concern about hygiene, pure foods, and sexual self-control. The scientific cooking movement trained women in “domestic science,” showing them how to use precise recipes to produce uniform dishes in the home. One of the more prominent pieces of Progressive legislation was the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, which empowered the federal government to ensure foods and drugs were not adulterated. The authorities also launched campaigns against opium, cocaine, and heroin. A campaign against “self-abuse” had another lasting effect: The Seventh-Day Adventist doctor John Harvey Kellogg invented corn flakes, a bland breakfast cereal intended to suppress the urge to masturbate.

Resistance to the Third Great Awakening took off after World War I. Millions of troops returning from European battlefields wanted more than drudgery on the family farm or factory floor. Women who had flocked to wartime workplaces resisted being consigned again to the dull routines of homemaking. Wider access to new technologies such as automobiles and movies helped push traditional values into the background. The fact that by 1920 more than half of all Americans were living in urban areas also eroded traditional social bonds and hierarchies, since cities have always been refuges for people seeking greater autonomy and self-expression. The 1920s became the era of hot jazz, speakeasies, bathtub gin, and flappers. Novels, movies, and magazine stories became more sexually explicit. While mild by comparison to contemporary American mores, a new sexual freedom flowered.

The Fourth Awakening
After World War II, American economic expansion resumed. Often described as the era of the “organization man,” the 1950s also gave us books like Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), which exalted drugging, drinking, and sexual libertinism. In 1960 the anarchist sociologist Paul Goodman, in Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized System, highlighted “the disaffection of the growing generation” with “the disgrace of the Organized System of semimonopolies, government, advertisers, etc.” The sexy rhythms of rock and roll became popular, and Playboy magazine, founded in 1953, both reflected and amplified a new wave of sexual liberation. The introduction of the birth control pill in 1960 gave women much greater control over reproduction, putting them more on a par with men in the workplace. These liberating cultural and technological developments fueled the social and political eruptions of the 1960s and ’70s.

McLoughlin and Fogel both argue that the upheavals of the 1950s and ’60s were the beginning of the Fourth Great Awakening. Writing in 1978, McLoughlin argued that the Beats, the rise of interest in Asian religions such as Zen Buddhism, the growth of environmental consciousness, and the spread of “experimental life-styles” would “produce a new shift in our belief value system, a transformation of our world view that may be the most drastic in our history as a nation.” He even compared rock concerts to old-fashioned revivalist camp meetings.

In hindsight, this reading misinterpreted the turmoil of the period, which is better understood as a continuation of the arc of cultural liberation that began in the 1920s. But while McLoughlin was getting the period wrong, Dean Kelley was getting it right. Kelley, a United Methodist minister and an adviser to the National Council of Churches, presciently and controversially recognized a coming fundamentalist surge in his 1972 book Why Conservative Churches Are Growing. Membership in ecumenically minded mainline Protestant denominations was declining, he noted, while the doctrinal strictness and discipline of conservative denominations were attracting many Americans. Evangelical Protestant affiliation has grown from 17 percent to 20 percent of the American population in the early 1970s to between 25 percent and 28 percent today. Largely outside the purview of liberal intellectuals who were celebrating the counterculture, a social force was incubating that would eventually power the Fourth Great Awakening. These modern evangelicals were the direct descendants of Moody’s fundamentalists.

Proponents of conservative interpretations of Christianity felt themselves under attack by policies aimed at limiting public expressions of religious belief. In 1962 and 1963, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that any requirement that prayers and Bible verses be read in public schools violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. In 1968 the Court declared that a state cannot ban the teaching of biological evolution in public schools. And in 1973 the Court found in Roe v. Wade that women had a constitutionally protected right to privacy that allowed them to end their pregnancies in the first trimester.

Initially most Protestant denominations did not react strongly to Roe, viewing abortion as a “Catholic issue.” In 1974 the Southern Baptist Convention adopted a resolution reflecting the “middle ground between the extreme of abortion on demand and the opposite extreme of all abortion as murder.”

That moderation was not to last. Just six years later, the same group called for “appropriate legislation and/or a constitutional amendment prohibiting abortion except to save the life of the mother.” The shift on abortion was part of a strong negative reaction to what the Southern Baptists saw as countercultural excesses undermining the Christian moral order.

Although McLoughlin dismisses President Jimmy Carter’s neo-evangelicalism as a dead end, Carter’s professed religious faith awakened his fellow evangelicals to the potential for political action. Carter wore his born-again Christianity on his sleeve, declaring that his religious convictions were “the most important thing in my life.” Although it is not much appreciated now, Carter used the abortion issue to mobilize his fellow evangelicals. He declared during the 1976 presidential campaign that “abortion is wrong,” and he signaled his support for the Hyde Amendment, which cut off federal Medicaid funding for abortions. As president he eliminated funding for abortions for women in the military. Carter was no conservative, but he helped America’s 60 million self-described evangelicals find their way out of the political wilderness. He functioned as a Moses pointing his co-religionists to the promised land of political potency, although it would be another man who would lead them there.

Power to the Pulpit
In 1979 the National Association of Evangelicals, representing 60 denominations and 45,000 churches, passed a resolution opposing abortion, the Equal Rights Amendment, and homosexual rights. When the Democratic platform defended all three in 1980, evangelicals were horrified. That same year, Jerry Falwell, a 44-year-old Baptist preacher, founded the Moral Majority as a vehicle for evangelical Christians to influence national politics. After the 1980 election, Falwell claimed that the Moral Majority had 4 million members and that the organization had helped mobilize more than 10 million evangelical voters. With that election, the religious right made itself essential to the Republican Party’s political fortunes. The Fourth Great Awakening had entered its reform phase.

First the Moral Majority and then Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition launched political crusades against abortion, premarital sex, explicit entertainment, sex education, drug use, and homosexuality, all in the name of promoting traditional family values. For the first time since the 1920s, even evolution became a live political issue. Among other things, “traditional family values” meant restoring the authority of the husband in the family, because, as Falwell said, quoting Ephesians, “the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church.” Falwell blamed women’s lib on a “minority core of women who were once bored with life, whose real problems are spiritual problems.” He added that “many women have never accepted their God-given roles.”

As in previous awakenings, concerns about sexuality were paramount. In the 1980s, Falwell and evangelical leader Donald Wildmon campaigned against the “distributors” of pornography, by which they meant ordinary stores with magazine racks. Responding to the anti-porn crusade, the Reagan administration created the Meese Commission on Pornography in 1985. The commission concluded that smut contributed to sexual violence and discrimination against women, and it sent letters to 12 chains of drug, grocery, and convenience stores threatening to list them as “distributors of pornography.” Subsequently, thousands of outlets yanked Playboy and Penthouse from their shelves. Some frightened stores even dropped Cosmopolitan and the swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated.

The crusades were firmly bipartisan. In 1985 Tipper Gore, wife of Sen. Al Gore (D-Tenn.), and Susan Baker, wife of Treasury Secretary James Baker, founded the Parents Music Resource Center to attack rock music lyrics. At a 1985 Senate hearing, Baker testified, “The proliferation of songs glorifying rape, sadomasochism, incest, the occult, and suicide by a growing number of bands illustrates this escalating trend that is alarming.” In 1986 the Rev. Jimmy Swaggart joined the anti-rock crusade, declaring that music magazines were “pornography, pure and simple. They’re more dangerous than Hustler and Playboy.” In response to Swaggart, Wal-Mart pulled 32 rock and pop publications from its stores, including Rolling Stone, Creem, and Tiger Beat.

As gays began demanding greater acceptance, Falwell thundered, “If homosexuality is deemed normal, how long will it be before rape, adultery, alcoholism, drug addiction, and incest are labeled normal?” In 1981 he persuaded Congress to overturn a District of Columbia ordinance that would have decriminalized sodomy. In 1986, the same year a Gallup poll found that more than half of Americans considered homosexuality a sin, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Georgia’s anti-sodomy law in Bowers v. Hardwick. Falwell crowed that the Supreme Court “has issued a clear statement that perverted moral behavior is not accepted practice in this country.”

Unlike their fundamentalist forebears, the evangelical crusaders of the Fourth Great Awakening have not demanded that the government leave them alone; they want to use government for their own ends. As Bill McCartney, founder of the Christian men’s organization the Promise Keepers, explained in 1997, “Social problems are moral problems, which ultimately have a spiritual cause.” This inverts the Social Gospel conviction that poverty, slums, and ignorance prevent people from leading
Christian lives. On this view it is impossible to solve social problems without embracing spiritual reform first. So the followers of the Fourth Awakening are enthusiastic supporters of faith-based tax-funded social programs. Although Congress has never approved these programs, President George W. Bush issued an executive order in 2001 to create the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. In 2005 it distributed $2.1 billion to support religious efforts, about 11 percent of all federal community grants.

The election of the “compassionate conservative” Bush in 2000 was the high water mark in the reform phase of the Fourth Great Awakening. The Bush administration embraced abstinence-only sex education in public schools and appointed evangelically motivated advisers to the Food and Drug Administration, where they opposed the agency’s approval of the abortion pill RU-486 and the over-the-counter sale of the emergency contraceptive Plan B. Asked if intelligent design should be taught in public schools, Bush answered that “both sides” ought to be presented. Bush also supports a constitutional amendment restricting marriage to two people of the opposite sex. And the president’s condemnation of foreign “evildoers” surely is informed by his Christian faith. (It wasn’t the first time the awakening had an impact on international affairs. Many evangelicals interpreted the rise of the state of Israel as the fulfillment of biblical prophecies indicating the impending return of Jesus and his thousand-year reign of peace. Thus it became “God’s foreign policy” that the U.S. should back Israel.)

But just as each of the previous awakenings cycled through revival, reform, and resistance, there is evidence that the resistance phase to the Fourth Great Awakening is now under way.

The Beginning of the End?
Awakenings don’t end with a bang. Their conclusions begin with nearly imperceptible political shifts signaling a political realignment.

One bellwether event was the tragic case of Terry Schiavo, a brain-dead Florida woman attached to a feeding tube. Her husband wanted to let her die, and her parents did not; keeping her alive had become a rallying point for the religious right. According to a leaked strategy memo written by a senior staffer for Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.), congressional Republicans thought the case would be “a great political issue” because “the pro-life base will be excited” by it. Republican legislators and President Bush rushed back to Washington on Palm Sunday in 2005 to pass a law preventing the removal of Schiavo’s feeding tube. As the courts promptly ruled that the tube could be removed anyway, polls showed Americans disapproved of Washington’s intervention by almost 2 to 1.

Nationally, animus toward gays is fading. In the 2003 case Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court overruled its 1986 decision in Bowers v. Hardwick and found sodomy laws unconstitutional. A 2003 Harris Interactive poll found that 74 percent of Americans favored the Court’s decision. The same poll also found Americans opposed state laws regulating private, sexual relations between opposite-sex married couples (87 percent) and same-sex domestic partners (82 percent).

Gay marriage is still unpopular, but the trend is moving away from the fierce intolerance of the early Fourth Awakening. Since 1996 the Gallup Poll has asked Americans, “Do you think marriages between homosexuals should or should not be recognized by the law as valid, with the same rights as traditional marriages?” In 1996 only 27 percent of Americans approved of same-sex marriages. By May 2007, 46 percent did, and 62 percent of those under age 35 favored them. Most state ballot measures to ban gay marriage still pass, but in 2006, for the first time, one failed, and the ones that succeeded did so by much narrower margins.

The drug war’s moralistic march into private life may also be slowing down: Since 1996, a dozen states have passed legislation approving the use of medical marijuana, and polls show that more than 70 percent of Americans favor such measures.

Americans now spend an estimated $90 billion a year on gambling, despite myriad prohibitions. And even as evangelicals rail against it, pornography has become widely available and highly profitable, with an estimated $13 billion in revenues in 2006. Meanwhile, its allegedly corrosive effects on society are hard to discern: Since the early 1990s, divorce rates, rape rates, and domestic violence are all down.

Attempts to restrain biomedical progress in the name of religious values are receding too. In 1998 researchers derived stem cells from five-day-old human embryos, provoking a firestorm of protest from anti-abortion crusaders. But by 2007 a Gallup poll found that 60 percent of Americans favor embryonic stem cell research. Congress has twice voted to expand federal funding for such work.

And the party of moralizers lost the congressional elections of 2006. Many voters, admittedly, were motivated mainly by congressional corruption—the Jack Abramoff and Mark Foley scandals—and the increasingly unpopular Iraq war. But in the run-up to the 2008 elections, the evangelical coalition seems even less influential than in 2006. The Christian right is weak and divided, its leaders unable to settle on a favorite candidate. Even after Mike Huckabee emerged as the leading social conservative in the race, he failed to duplicate his stunning upset win in the heavily evangelical Iowa and at press time he was fighting for his political survival against a candidate (John McCain) who famously called Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson “agents of intolerance.” Robertson himself went so far as to endorse former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, despite Giuliani’s three marriages and his pro-choice, pro–gay rights record.

One of the most reliable constituency groups of the Republican Party has been born-again Christians. In 2004, 62 percent of born-agains voted for George Bush. In February, the Christian marketing consultancy, the Barna Group, released a striking poll which found that 40 percent of all born-agains say that if the 2008 election were today they would vote for the Democratic presidential candidate and just 29 percent would choose the Republican candidate. Even more stunning is the shift among self-described evangelicals. In 2004, 85 percent voted for Bush, but now 51 percent are either leaning Democratic or are undecided.

The Other Scenario
Then again, the Fourth Great Awakening might simply be taking a left turn. While the fundamentalists have dominated this awakening for the last quarter century, the intellectual descendants of the Social Gospel movement also have been busy, particularly in the movements for healthy living and environmental reform. Some of these activists have an overtly religious outlook, while others continue the secularization of the Social Gospel that began in the Progressive Era.

Environmentalism arose as a movement just a few years before the Moral Majority, with an end-of-the-world undercurrent that harked back to the millenarian sects of the Second Great Awakening. Green millenarians do not expect a wrathful God to end the corrupt world in a rain of fire; instead, humanity will die by its own gluttonous, polluting hand.

Such apocalyptic visions were limned in Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring, which predicted massive cancer epidemics as a result of chemical contamination of the environment. Paul Ehrlich asserted in his 1968 book The Population Bomb that in the 1970s “hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” And the Club of Rome’s 1972 report The Limits to Growth announced the imminent, catastrophic depletion of nonrenewable resources. In the run-up to the first Earth Day in 1970, the ecologist Kenneth Watt declared, “We have about five more years at the outside to do something.” The Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” Even the staid New York Times editorial page warned of the human species’ “possible extinction.” It wasn’t so far from the evangelists’ fears of a literal Armageddon, embodied in books like Hal Lindsey’s best-selling The Late Great Planet Earth (1970).

Although all those predictions failed, environmentalism still exhibits millenarian tendencies. Former Vice President Al Gore has warned that man-made global warming is producing a climate crisis that might “make it impossible for us to avoid irretrievable damage to the planet’s habitability for human civilization.” For Gore, global warming is not merely a technical question of how to produce the energy humanity needs without emitting greenhouse gases. It is “a moral issue.”

It is possible that environmental revivalism may supplant the fundamentalist aspect of the Fourth Great Awakening. If so, we may be in for a period in which campaigns for green reform programs dominate American politics. And it’s worth noting that some evangelical churches recently have embraced environmental issues. In 2004 the board of directors of the National Association of Evangelicals adopted an “Evangelical Call to Civic Responsibility” affirming that “because clean air, pure water, and adequate resources are crucial to public health and civic order, government has an obligation to protect its citizens from the effects of environmental degradation.” Huckabee, the evangelical candidate, says plainly that he wants to be “a good steward of the earth”—and, to that end, favors an economy-wide “cap-and-trade” system to control greenhouse gases.

The heirs of the Social Gospel have also enthusiastically embraced and promoted modern campaigns for clean living. Contemporary anti-smoking campaigns resemble the old crusades against demon rum, particularly in the willingness to go beyond educational efforts and push draconian government controls. Campaigns against lifestyle diseases are just beginning. In 2006 New York City public health officials began requiring medical labs to report the results of blood sugar tests for all the city’s diabetics directly to the health department. This is the first time that any government has tracked people with a chronic disease. The New York City Department of Health will analyze the data to identify those patients who are not adequately controlling their diabetes. They will then receive letters or phone calls urging them to be more vigilant about their medications, have more frequent checkups, or change their diet. If nagging is not sufficient, more coercive steps may be taken. For example, in a 2004 editorial in the American Journal of Public Health, New York City Health Commissioner Thomas Friedan called for “local requirements on food pricing, advertising, content, and labeling; regulations to facilitate physical activity, including point-of-service reminders at elevators and safe, accessible stairwells; tobacco and alcohol taxation and advertising and sales restrictions; and regulations to ensure a minimal level of clinical preventive services.”

Scientifically unfounded fears about the danger of exposure to chemicals have displaced religious anxieties about spiritual impurity with new worries about bodily impurity. (They also have fueled new lawsuits and regulations. Excessive fears about exposure to secondhand smoke, for example, prompted the city of Belmont, California, to forbid smoking in private apartments.) The contemporary cult of the body, with its obsession with diet and exercise and its emphasis on beauty and perfection, has roots in the biblical notion of the body as a “temple of the Holy Spirit.”

Still, it’s not clear these attitudes have seized the public imagination. Despite all of the hullabaloo about environmental issues, for example, polls regularly show that they are at the bottom of most Americans’ concerns. A December 2007 USA Today poll found only 2 percent of Americans saying they would take environmental issues into account when deciding for whom to vote. Every year Gallup asks Americans to identify the most important problem facing the country. In 2007 only 2 percent of respondents mentioned the environment.

Smoking bans are proliferating, although the percentage of Americans who believe second-hand smoke is very harmful has not budged from around 55 percent since 1997, according to various Gallup polls. And while it is true that most Americans favor some restrictions on smoking in public areas, they are against total bans in workplaces, bars, and hotels. In fact, Americans remain largely tolerant of their fellow citizens’ lifestyle choices. A 2003 Gallup poll asked Americans if they respect someone more or less because that person smokes, drinks, or is overweight. Seventy-seven percent said that smoking makes no difference and 83 percent said the same about drinking and being overweight.

Liberated Spaces
Perhaps the best evidence that the evangelical phase of the Fourth Great Awakening is winding down is that large numbers of young Americans are falling away from organized religion, just as the country did in the period between the first two awakenings. In the 1970s, the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago found that between 5 percent and 7 percent of the public declared they were not religiously affiliated. By 2006 that figure had risen to 17 percent. The trend is especially apparent among younger Americans: In 2006 nearly a quarter (23 percent) of Americans in their 20s and almost as many (19 percent) of those in their 30s said they were nonaffiliated.

The Barna Group finds that only 60 percent of 16-to-29-year-olds identify themselves as Christians. By contrast, 77 percent of Americans over age 60 call themselves Christian. That is “a momentous shift,” the firm’s president told the Ventura County Star. “Each generation is becoming increasingly secular.”

Just as movies and the pill enticed people out of the pews, so is modern technology making it harder to impose any single moral vision. In the old days, Roman Catholics could pressure Hollywood to adopt a Production Code decreeing that “no picture shall be produced that will lower the moral standards of those who see it.” Today the means to produce video entertainment are increasingly cheap and the methods of distribution are becoming more and more decentralized. The notion that a book could be banned in Boston—or anywhere with an Internet service provider—is laughable. Social utilities like Facebook and MySpace encourage the proliferation of virtual communities. Virtual worlds like Second Life enable people to privately experiment with different personalities and lifestyles.

Global trade, too, is making it harder to impose any single vision on a society. Attempts to restrict advanced biomedical treatments such as embryonic stem cell transplants will simply shift such activity to more tolerant jurisdictions. The next couple of decades will see the development of biotech and nanotech enhancements that dramatically extend the range of human capabilities. If they are outlawed in one country, more liberal ones will make them available.

In 1908 Clarence Darrow told the Personal Liberty League, “The world is suffering more today from the good people who want to mind other men’s business than it is from the bad people who are willing to let everybody look after their own individual affairs.” That has been true for a long time now, but we may finally be heading toward a better world—one where Americans are increasingly willing to live and let live.

Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey is the author of Liberation Biology (Prometheus).

Medical Speech

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 07:10:00 EST

More than a decade ago, Congress allowed pharmaceutical companies to distribute peer-reviewed medical journal articles to physicians describing alternative, “off-label” uses of federally approved drugs. Currently the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has to approve these reprints before they are circulated. But as the 1997 law authorizing the reprints expires, the FDA is mulling a plan to drop the approval requirement altogether, allowing companies to disseminate unabridged reprints of “truthful and non-misleading” medical journal articles more easily.

Apparently operating on the assumption that patients are best served when doctors are unaware of the latest medical information, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) says the proposal “would open the door to abusive marketing practices.” Waxman, who chairs the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, is trying to block the change.

These reprints are the only way pharmaceutical companies can legally market their products for off-label uses. Such prescriptions are routine for cardiac drugs (46 percent of all prescriptions), anticonvulsant drugs (46 percent), asthma medications (42 percent), and cancer treatments (33 percent). Waxman, age 68, may be unwilling to take off-label cardiac drugs, but millions of his fellow Americans have benefited from doing so.

Is Suppressing Scientific Research Sinful?

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 12:00:00 EDT

A couple of weeks ago, the Vatican denounced "experiments [and] genetic manipulation" as "violations of certain fundamental rights of human nature." Bishop Gianfranco Girotti, head of the Apostolic Penitentiary, the Vatican body which oversees confessions and absolutions, told the London Times, "You offend God not only by stealing, blaspheming or coveting your neighbour's wife, but also by ruining the environment, carrying out morally debatable scientific experiments, or allowing genetic manipulations which alter DNA or compromise embryos." So what kinds of genetic manipulation might earn researchers consignment to the flames of Hell should they die unshriven?

First, the Vatican has not spoken with clarity on the issue of genetically improving crops. Back in 2003, the London Times reported that the Vatican would soon come out in favor of biotech crops as part of the solution for world starvation and malnutrition. A year later, a message from Pope John Paul II expressed reservations about biotech crops. Last year, Filipino Archbishop Cardinal Gaudencio Rosales warned that "genetically modified crops and food products could be very harmful to the environment and to human beings." The Archbishop is factually wrong about the alleged dangers of current biotech crops. What are the divine penalties for the sin of scientific ignorance?

The Roman Catholic and generally free market think tank, the Acton Institute, notes that some religious thinkers believe that it might be all right with God for us to modify plants, but not animals. The distinction is based upon the idea that while God commanded Noah to save animal lineages, the Almighty said nothing about preserving plants on the Ark. As evangelical biologist Calvin Dewitt explains, "These lineages are creations of the Creator, and they are... gifts to the whole of creation."

However, the Creator doesn't seem to be much of a steward of His Creation, since an estimated 99.9 percent of all species that ever lived are now extinct. And of course, argument against genetically modifying animals overlooks the fact that the genetic lineages of all domesticated animals have been dramatically modified by people over the millennia. Perhaps the souls of some of our ancestors are roasting in the infernal abyss for the sin of turning wolves into dogs and aurochs into Holsteins.

Of course, modern scientists are constantly tampering with the genetic make-up of animals. Just this week, researchers at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York announced that they had used embryonic stem cells to cure Parkinson's disease in mice. The researchers, using a technique called nuclear transfer, isolated the nuclei from skin cells from the tails of mice that suffered from Parkinson's disease and installed them in mouse eggs that had been stripped of their nuclei. These eggs started growing into embryos that were genetic clones of the mice from which the skin cells were taken. The researchers then derived stem cells that were genetically matched to each individual mouse and in turn transformed the stem cells into dopamine producing neurons. These genetically matched neurons were injected into the brains of the mice.

The treatment worked. These perfect genetic cellular transplants basically cured the mice. As a control the researchers treated other mice with neurons derived from embryonic stem cells that were not genetically matched to each individual mouse. Those mice fared worse. This work is aimed at figuring out eventual treatments for the 1.5 million Americans who suffer from Parkinson's disease. Can research on mice designed to heal sick people really count as sinful genetic manipulation?

Also this week religious controversy broke out in Britain over new legislation that would allow researchers to combine abundant eggs from animals like cows and rabbits with human nuclei as way to produce stem cells. The BBC reported that Cardinal Keith O'Brien used his Easter sermon to condemn the bill as a "monstrous attack on human rights, human dignity and human life." In contrast, some 200 British medical charities signed a letter urging Parliament to pass the legislation. "The bill will allow new avenues of scientific inquiry to be pursued which could greatly increase our understanding of serious medical conditions affecting millions of people throughout the UK," declared the charities.

Roman Catholic bioethicist Michael Cook, who also opposes the combining human and animal genes, asserts, "To envelop all that makes us human, our genetic inheritance, in an animal carapace is creepy and repugnant." I wonder how "creepy and repugnant" Cook would find the fact that out of the 23,000 genes that comprise the human genome as few as 50 to 100 genes do not have counterparts in other animals. Our genetic make-up has come down to us through the animal carapaces of our evolutionary forebears. Of course, while our genes are very similar to animal genes, it is differential regulation of those genes that accounts for much of what makes us distinctively human.

O'Brien and Cook clearly believe that in some sense the human genome is sacrosanct. But surely it is morally laudable to insert the human insulin gene into bacteria to produce a better medicine for 14 million diabetic Americans. Or what about cows with human genes to produce human antibodies to fight disease? Human skin color genes in fish? Human color vision genes in mice? I suspect that Cardinal O'Brien and Cook do not think such manipulations of single human genes are monstrous or creepy. It is true that the proposed human animal cybrids would contain mostly human genes, but researchers have no intention of creating cow/human or rabbit/human babies. So perhaps it is the quantity of human genes involved in experiments that provoke accusations of monstrous violations of human dignity. That doesn't seem to be the case.

For example, a number of prominent Roman Catholic thinkers recently endorsed a proposal by Stanford University bioethicist William Hurlbut to create human stem cells through altered nuclear transfer. The technique is essentially the same as regular nuclear transfer except that it uses RNA interference to disable a single crucial gene so that the stem cells cannot grow into a fully developed embryo. In altered nuclear transfer all of the genes involved are human, even the one that has been deliberately broken. But doesn't altered nuclear transfer circle us back to Bishop Girotti's denunciations? The technique could be interpreted as "genetic manipulations which alter DNA or compromise embryos."

Finally, any genetic manipulations that aim to create human beings with diminished mental and physical capacities must be fiercely and relentlessly opposed. On the other hand, research whose goal is to reduce human suffering and increase our capacities should be vigorously encouraged.

In tracing these theologico-biotech controversies, many contemporary thinkers and leaders in the Roman Catholic Church appear to be haunted by the fear that scientific research will transgress God's will. It's as though they still find some wisdom in the old adage, "If God had meant for people to fly, He would have given them wings." But it could also be the case that "if God hadn't meant for people to fly, then He wouldn't have given them the brains to figure out how to do it." Finally, if the Vatican is looking for new sins, perhaps it would consider adding attempts to block important scientific research to the list.

Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His most recent book, Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution, is available from Prometheus Books.