That cartoon is breathtaking.

Yes, scientism is simply another faith. . at least its based on a system with a rational foundation. when something continues to work well to explain the micro and macro questions of our time...I tend to feel more comfortable having faith in its future efficacy. He's lecturing in Portland at Reed College on this subject on March 1st I think..... I can't wait to challenge him on his "fundamentalism".
I am picturing the Darwin fish eating the Jesus fish.....

At our scale of existence, the Genome is God..,

If you add this simple, testable, assertion, the extremities of this *dispute* collapse rather nicely.  Richard Dawkin's Selfish Gene cycle comprises an extended *tease* in this direction, but the canons of scientistic orthodoxy to which he strenuously adheres preclude his coming out and simply saying so.

Assuming that our model of genomic technology (species) survives long enough to complete its search, fundamental physics is the level where this problem will find its public resolution.  It has of course always been the traditional physiological grail level of instantiated awareness pursued by students of consciousness whose exploits have given rise to the perennial public misunderstanding that is mysticism and/or religion. 

I am disappointed in Leon Wieseltier's review of Dennett's “Breaking the Spell”, as much for its poor analysis, as for its closing, ad hominem insult. As a scientist, I know of no others who meet Mr. Wieseltier's definition of Scientism. They and Dennett are more accurately characterized as believing that science is the only arbiter for describing the properties of things in the natural world – things like liquid water, and theoretical constructs like the particle theory of subatomic phenomenon, and the evolution of religious behavior.

There is no problem in Dennett's assent to Hume's two questions regarding religion (its foundation in reason, and its origin in human nature), while not accepting Hume's response to the first. How many of us agree on a question while differing on our enlightened responses and discourses? Yet, Mr. Wieseltier uses the distinctions in Dennett's thought process to accuse him, inappropriately and unfairly, of misquoting and misrepresenting Hume.

Dennett is very clear, if not forthright to a fault, by saying he is offering his own speculation on what science may find in a study of religion as a natural phenomenon. Is he not explicit about doing so from the perspective of evolutionary (instrumental and functional) biology. Wieseltier seems to delight in uncovering Dennett's words on this, as if he has uncovered a secret, revealing passage, and hitting Dennett with a Gotcha!

Wieseltier dismisses Dennett's reasoning because Dennett's view presupposes human reason to be a natural phenomenon, based in biology. Then when Dennett uses the word 'transcend' to describe high levels of human reasoning, Wielseltier gives him another Gotcha!, and attaches the opprobrious label of 'animal' to Dennett's human reason. Wieseltier assumes an 'obvious truth' that human reason is a faculty that exists apart from its biology, a la Descartes. Well, here is where the discussion should begin. Instead, Wieseltier chose to end it, not prematurely, but before it even started.

Norman Costa

It is, in view of all the below, increasingly sad, or conducive to smirking, to hear the immaculate virtues of "Science" invoked so often everywhere, whenever anyone tries to stamp the scientific imprimatur on this or that pet thought of theirs.

A good progressive thinker named Francisco Gonzalez - whose ruminations on politics, race, and peak oil I follow on a couple of energy lists - posted the following set of notes on Cecelia Farber's article in the current issue of Harpers;

http://www.reviewingaids.org/awiki/index.php/Celia_Farber 

I got up early today, at a monk's hour, and took down some summary
notes on this terrific Harper's article (March 2006: Out of Control:
Aids and the corruption of medical science") that I mentioned
yesterday. I hope they decide to put it online soon so those who
don't get the magazine can read it.

The report can roughly be divided in three parts. The first deals with
the case of Joyce Ann Hafford, 33, in good health, showing none of the
markers associated with AIDS, who upon one single positive HIV test
result was put on a clinical trial to compare the "treatment-limiting
toxicities" of two anti-HIV drugs: nelfinavir vs. nevirapine, on
pregnant women. They told her these were very safe drugs (even thought
the trial was testing the very outer limits of bearable toxicity of
those drugs). In some arms of the study, other drugs were added (AZT
and lamivudine). She was given her first dose and became very sick
right away; her condition deteriorated ("pruritic rashes, nausea,
pain, vomiting"). The trial doctors told her to be brave and hold on.
She was motivated to stay on the study because she believed it would
help prevent her baby from contracting HIV. She eventually died as a
result of fulminant liver failure secondary to drug toxicity.

Notable in this first part is the eagerness of trial doctors to
recruit people (normally people with no health insurance, ready to be
experimented on by the promise of access to drugs -- and keep them on
the studies as long as possible). In this case, that she was put on
the study upon one single HIV test result, given the notorious
unreliability ("a majority of them, says the author, when retested,
come back indeterminate or negative, and in man cases different
results emerge from the same blood tested in different labs.")

Sad as that story is, the second part is where the true shocking
nature of this industry is revealed. This second part deals with the
flagship world trial to measure the ability of nevirapine to cut
mother-to-child HIV transmission, carried out by the Division of Aids
(DAIDS) of the National Institute of Health (NIH). This trial started
in Uganda in 1997, and it was called HIVNET 012. Much of what is now
known about the unbelievable mess this trial became, and its
subsequent cover-up by the NIH, is due to Jonathan Fishbein, who came
to DAIDS as director of Policy in Clinical Research Operations and was
from the start amazed by the chaotic way they were conducting trials.
The author notes that it was during the 90s that profits in medicine
shifted from patient care to clinical trials — a huge industry where
everybody who participates makes good money, except the experimental
subjects. By 2004, the NIH had 10,906 trials going in ninety
countries. The details of what is known of this trial in Uganda are
astonishing. For those familiar with the terminology, it was supposed
to be a randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind Phase III trial
and it quickly wound up being a "no-placebo, neither double, nor even
single-blind Phase II trial." All of the parameters initially outlined
for the study were eventually modified or eliminated, including the
elimination of the crucial placebo group. In the end, it was merely a
comparison of AZT and nevirapine. The Lancet published a set of
"preliminary results" in 1999, touting it had lowered the risk of HIV
transmission by 50%, and that the transmission rate in the nevirapine
group was 13%. (Later, a doctor from Perth wrote a letter to The
Lancet explaining that the study was done without placebo, which
rendered it rather useless, and that the rate of transmission (13%)
was above the 12% reported in a previous prospective study of 561
African women *without* antiretroviral treatment.)

By 2001 the drug manufacturer decided to apply for FDA licensing based
on the results of the study as published in The Lancet. The FDA
decided to go to Uganda to inspect the site.

The manufacturer (Boehringer Ingelheim) then decided to do their own
inspection of the Uganda site before the arrival of the FDA. That's
when they discovered the mess and "serious non-compliance with FDA
regulations". So they hired a private company, Westat, to go do
another pre-inspection. The findings about the nature of the mess were
even worse: a master log with follow-up data on adverse events
(including deaths) was missing.

"The records failed to make clear which mothers had gotten which drug,
when they'd gotten it, or even whether they were still alive at
various follow-up points after the study. Drugs were given to the
wrong babies, documents were altered, and there was infrequent
follow-up, even though one third of the mothers were marked "abnormal"
in their charts at discharge ... it was thought to be likely that
some, perhaps many of the infants had serious health problems [...]
the Westat auditors looked at a sample of forty-three such infants,
and all of them had "adverse events" at twelve months. Of these, only
11 were HIV positive. The study team had essentially downgraded all
serious adverse events several notches on a scale it had created to
adapt to "local" standards. The downgrade meant among other things
that even seemingly "life threatening" events were logged as not
serious. Deaths, unless they occurred within a certain time frame at
the beginning of the study, were not reported or were listed as
"serious adverse events" rather than deaths. A still-birth was
reported as a Grade 3 adverse event for the mother."

The study team cited ignorance. They said they were unaware of any
safety reporting regulations and that they had never attempted a Phase
III trial before.

Rather than face public rejection by the FDA, the manufacturer
withdrew the application for FDA approval. It now began a frantic
period of retrospective rehabilitation of the messed-up Uganda study
by minimizing or dismissing the Westat audit. The Westat inspectors
were described (says Farber with Chomskyan sarcasm) as "pedantic
saboteurs who could not grasp the necessary differences between U.S.
safety standards and the more lenient standards that a country like
Uganda deserved."

I almost forgot. A footnote (4) details the definition of AIDS applied
to Africa. I copy:

"Africa, as the news media never tires of telling us, has become
ground zero of the AIDS epidemic. The clinical definition of AIDS in
Africa, however, is stunningly broad and generic, and was seemingly
designed to be little other than a signal for funding. It is in no way
comparable to Western definitions [...] [it] requires neither a
positive HIV test nor a low T-cell count, as in the West, but only the
presence of chronic diarrhea, fever, significant weight loss, and
asthenia, as well as other minor symptoms. These happen to be the
symptoms of chronic malnutrition, malaria, parasitic infections, and
other common African illnesses. In 1994 the definition was updated to
*suggest* the use of HIV tests, but in practice they are prohibitively
expensive. Even when HIV tests are performed, many diseases that are
endemic to Africa, such as malaria and TB, are known to cause false
positives. The statistical picture of AIDS in Africa, consequently, is
a communal projection based on very rough estimates of HIV positives,
culled from select and small samples, which are extrapolated across
the continent using computer models and highly questionable
assumptions."

And at the end of the article, Duesberg is said to agree that, when it
comes to Africa, "AIDS in Africa is best understood as an umbrella
term for a number of old diseases, formerly known by other names, that
currently do not command high rates of international aid. The money
spent on antiretroviral drugs would be better spent on sanitation and
improving access to safe drinking water, the absence of which kills
1.4 million children a year." (It goes without saying that Garrett
Hardin and his disciple, Ron Patterson, with their potent foresight,
know that this would be the height of folly – water? sanitation? Hell
no. Let them die. Better 1 million dead now, than 5 million dead
later, such is the Hardinian core of the "New Ethics" and the "Circle
of Empathy").

But I digress. Back to the article. What follows is a bewitching saga
of cover-up efforts by the upper management of the NIH, disciplining
and attempts to silence whistleblowers like Fishbein. It is a
fascinating account. At some point they were even considering giving
the Uganda study team an *award* (yes, an award!!) for their
magnificent work. To this, one member of the management who worked
hard to fire and silence Fishbein, objected mildly, saying it might be
excessive. He says in an email:

"Ed – I've been meaning to respond on this – the bit about the award.
I think that's a bit over the top. I think that before we start
heaping praise on them, we should wait to see if the lessons stick. We
cannot lose sight of the fact that they screwed up big time. And you
bailed their asses out. I'm all for forgiveness, etc. I'm not for
punishing them. But it would be over the top to me to be proclaiming
them as heroes. Something to think about before pushing this award
thing…"

Well, I can't go through all the details, but this is an amazing
article. The third part shifts to a broader perspective of the
HIV/AIDS/pharmaceutical industry, and the fate of Peter Duesberg, of
UC Berkeley, a researcher in retrovirology who was on top of his field
in the 80s, so much so that, up to the moment of his fateful blunder
(political blunder, not scientific) had never been denied a research
grant. His faux pas was an article he published in Cancer Research in
1987 where he argued that retroviruses don't cause cancer, and ended
by detailing "how and why HIV cannot cause AIDS."

That was it. An uproar ensued. This is highly instructive of how
actual "science" works in the West, especially medical science and
especially in the US. He was summarily "taken out" almost overnight.
No more grants. The editor of Nature wrote a harangue against him and
declared he would be denied the standard right of response to the many
personal attacks he was subjected to. He lost the use of his labs at
UC Berkeley. He lost his graduate students, who were told they would
be stained for life if they came from his tutelage. He could not be
fired because he had tenure, but otherwise he became a total pariah;
he had to fight even for standard salary raises. This is very
instructive.

He has recently been partially rehabilitated, after a temporary return
to Germany, in the field of carcinogenesis, with new very promising
research on aneuploidy (a chromosomal malfunction to which he
attributes the genesis of cancer, rather than the established "mutant
gene" theory). Duesberg's weight can be gauged by the fact that Harvey
Bialy, the founding scientific editor of "Nature Biotechnology" spent
four years writing a scientific biography of him, because he is
persuaded that Duesberg "has found the genetic basis of cancer," and
he wants to make sure he gets his due recognition when aneuploidy
becomes the dominant theory of carcinogenesis. The reasons for
Duesberg's skepticism about the strength of the causality link between
HIV and AIDS sound pretty convincing.

Whether he is right or not about it, this article is instructive for
its overall lesson: the entrenched bunker like nature of much
mainstream in science, particularly the biological/medical sciences.
Of course hostility toward dissenters is not new. The author mentions
for example that few now remember the controversy over scurvy and
pellagra, which established medical science at some point attributed
to some vague infectious agents of unknown nature. Those who pointed
out at the time that this was unlikely, given that simple dietary
changes cured both diseases, were "dismissed as flat-earthers". But
what is new now is the amount of money involved and the total
dependence of scientist on grant money. The "scientific-medical"
complex is a 2 trillion industry. That kind of money, says the article
"can buy a tremendous amount of consensus".

Nobel laureate Kary Mullis, who discovered the polymerase chain
reaction, sums it up neatly to the author: "Look, there's no
sociological mystery here. It's just people's income and position
being threatened by the things Peter Duesberg is saying. That's why
they are so nasty. In the AIDS field there is widespread neurosis
among scientists, but the frenzy with which people approach the HIV
debate has slacked off, because there's just so much slowly
accumulating evidence against them. It's really hard for them to deal
with it. They made a really big mistake, and they're not ever going to
fix it. They're still poisoning people.

Which reminds me of words to similar effect by Lynn Margulis in an
article titled "Gaia Is a Tough Bitch", where she says that "the
neo-Darwinist population-genetics tradition is reminiscent of
phrenology …and is a kind of science that can expect exactly the same
fate. It will look ridiculous in retrospect, because it is
ridiculous." And then adds: "Most people don't like to hear that what
they have been doing all these years is barking up the wrong tree."

This may be one of the reasons why the biological sciences seem to be
comparatively resistant to shifting models, and become quickly
entrenched in orthodoxy, quickly developing huge vested interests. In
the case of the HIV -> AIDS model, this happened in just 3 or 4 years,
so that by 1987 a person like Duesberg could already be turned
instantly into a freak by questioning it.

It seems clear to many people that the classic genetic paradigm will
need to be thoroughly revamped, or even tossed entirely, that it does
not work. Some time ago I posted comments by two French molecular
biologists, Jean-Jacques Kupiec and Pierre Sonigo, who have said among
other things:

"Jean-Jacques Kupiec : Let's start by tackling the essential: probably
yes. Genetics today is no longer a scientific theory--it is an
ideology. It allows justifications of the social order and its force.
This problem is particular to genetics because it deals with humans.
You have to understand that genetics has been in a certain way
crippled since the 70's. Everything that questions genetics (for
example the impossibility of associating a certain inherited trait to
a particular gene) had already been described in the 30's, especially
by Thomas Morgan. Without going into detail, what we have since then
is a sort of technological escape forward--there is no longer a
theory, but the persistence of a genetic discourse. Thus, in genetics,
scientific praxis is not the same as in the other physical sciences,
as is well illustrated by the absence of a systematic questioning of
the models. The physical sciences questioned and reset their
theoretical models thirty-six times for problems much milder than the
ones genetics has been living with since the 30s. In biology, those
things are not done. So the biological discourse plays a very strong
ideological role in society. I am referring here to all the
socio-biological, social darwinism discourse. Today, we do not know
what a gene is! And we know it even *less* after the sequencing of the
human genome. A gene is no longer defined in relation to a theory
about heredity, but rather empirically: a gene is a piece of DNA that
codes a protein. But this definition does not allow any more an
understanding of the transmission of hereditary traits. So the Kuhn
model is difficult to apply, a shifting of the paradigm is difficult
to make, but I think it will be made. It is inevitable, even if we
cannot say when."

Similar remarks made by zoologist Stanley Salthe, mentioned by Don
Steehler in a post recently (thanks Don) in a paper on the state of
the current neo-darwinian theory. Salthe concludes:

"As to its (neo-Darwinian orthodoxy) ability to explain the evolution
of organisms (as opposed to the evolution of gene systems), it has
not, after some 60 years of development, delivered a very convincing
mechanism. It cannot explain origins, or the actual presence of forms
and behaviors. It can generally explain only the evolution of adaptive
differences as results of historical contingency, for only one or two
traits at a time. It is limited to historical explanations, as it
acknowledges no evolutionary tendencies that are not the result of
accident preserved in genetic information. History is the source of
everything in this theory, and that is just too simplistic to be
plausible in a complex material world. I think it could be said that,
were there another theory of organic evolution, the neoDarwinian one,
fraught with problems as it is, would have more trouble surviving than
it does. As it is, it is the "only game in town", largely because of
the competitive activities of the neoDarwinians themselves."

http://www.nbi.dk/~natphil/salthe/anacri.99.08.html

Still, there is hope. There are already more than 2,300 people, mostly
scientists, who have signed a petition calling for the "Scientific
Reappraisal of the HIV-AIDS Hypothesis". There are also 500 scientists
bold enough to sign that timid statement mentioned by me a few days
ago

http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/060220/sfm011.html?.v=39

even though they risk being branded as "creationists" or puppets for the
creationist puppeteers and so on.

When I was at MIT, Dennett was in full swing busily perpetrating sociobiological hokum.  There were a few good professors dedicated to the cause of helping students understand just how dangerous these sociobiologists are.   One that particularly stands out in my recollection was Steven Chorover - a genuine brain scientist -  and one who had studied and written extensively about the acute danger inherent in sociobiological pseudo-science

The Observer's Science Editor charts Dennett's central role in the long and bitter struggle of the 'Darwin Wars'

Daniel Dennett's main claim to fame is through his membership of a triumvirate of intellectual heavyweights who have waged war on behalf of Charles Darwin and his theories. The British zoologist Richard Dawkins, based at Oxford University, and the Harvard biologist and ant expert Edward O. Wilson make up the rest of this group. Each is committed, fiercely, to the idea that evolutionary theory is sufficient to explain our world, all living things and our own species. Call in any other force to elucidate our existence and you are indulging in sheer intellectual sloppiness, they argue.

All three are fierce debaters, particularly Dennett and Dawkins, and none has been known for taking prisoners on the battlefield of biology. Many is the bloodied academic who has crossed swords with them. Not surprisingly, this ungodly crew doesn't go down terribly well with the religious right of America. Thus, waged against Dennett, Dawkins and Wilson, are an alliance of creationists, religious fundamentalists, church-goers and rightwing politicians, as well as a rump of scientists who include the US biologist Richard Lewontin, the UK academic Steve Rose, of the Open University, and Stephen Jay Gould, the late palaeontologist and science populariser. The latter group accuse Dennett, Dawkins and Wilson of the heinous crime of genetic determinism, of believing we are all robot slaves operated by our genes. For their part, the Dennett triumvirate accuse their opponents of telling 'simple lies'. Welcome to the Darwin Wars.

Hostilities can be traced to the publication of Wilson's theory of sociobiology 30 years ago. In it, Wilson argues that the make-up of society has a strong genetic component, a controversial notion to say the least. Gould, Lewontin and Rose disagreed and mounted a fierce attack on Wilson. Dawkins took up cudgels on Wilson's behalf and over the years his support has been swelled by a number of hard-line Darwinians that include Matt Ridley, the writer and journalist, Steve Pinker, the MIT brain researcher, and Helena Cronin, of the London School of Economics centre for philosophy of natural and social science.

But the biggest hitter to join the club was Dennett, a man not averse to adopting some heavy tactics to back the cause. On one occasion he sent his students to a seminar being given by Gould who was then subjected to a distinctly rough time. Gould never forgave Dennett and later denounced him as a Darwinian fundamentalist. For his part, Dennett devoted a chapter of his book Darwin's Dangerous Idea, published in 1995, to Gould, ripping into his ideas with predatory lust.

The bitterness of the debate has dissipated in the last couple of years, however, with the death of Gould. In the latter's final years, the triumvirate took pains to try to bring some kind of graceful closure to the issue - though they have never relinquished their fierce commitment to their cause.