Bill Sweet, a volunteer for the AFSC in Cambridge MA sent me the following reaction to my article To heal or to patch? Military mental health workers in Iraq. He has kindly given me permission to post it:
I just finished reading your article on the mistreatment of traumitized soldiers in Iraq. As a person in recovery from trauma, I can’t think of a more damaging situation for a trauma patient than being “treated” by a “professional” therapist than dishonesty. The dishonesty of having an agenda other than the patients health and recovery as the goal of treament. These people rationilize a behavior that is more than cruel, unethical, and abusive. It is clearly criminal. This article points out the agenda of the military very clearly. It also proves that brainwashing and the breakdown of the humanity of soldiers can get them to do things, at least once, that are completely contrary to who they really are.
January 20th, 2006
The New York Times online Talking Points feature had a nice summary of issues in the Intelligent Design controversy on Wednesday. As this article is blocked by the Times Select, I’ve posted it here.
Excerpt:
In the case of whales, for example, “Pandas” asserts that while Darwinists generally believe that whales evolved from a land mammal, “there are no clear transitional fossils linking land mammals to whales.” But Kevin Padian, from the University of California at Berkeley, the only paleontologist who testified at the trial, described a series of fossil finds that most scientists would deem transitional. He showed slides of an extinct land animal whose ear features are found only in whales, not in other land creatures. He showed another land animal that had developed large and paddlelike limbs, a third with hips decoupled from the backbone, allowing the backbone to move up and down as in a whale’s swimming motion, and others with nostrils moving backward along the skull to mimic a whale’s blowhole. Many of these fossils were discovered after the publication of “Pandas” in 1993, but others were older. One had been known since the Civil War.
A central argument made on behalf of intelligent design is that some biochemical and molecular processes within the body - like the complex biochemical cascade that produces blood clotting, the multifaceted immune system and the whiplike structures known as flagella that propel bacteria through water - have so many interacting and essential parts that they could not have emerged gradually through slight modifications of precursor systems through the pressure of natural selection. Instead, the whole system must have been created in one fell swoop.
Yet expert testimony showed the fallacy of this reasoning. Structures and processes that look “irreducibly complex” at first may not look so on closer inspection, and biological processes that can’t be explained today may well be understood tomorrow as science advances. As the National Academy of Sciences has pointed out, natural selection can bring together biochemical components to make a system that serves one function initially and then later combine that system with other components to produce a complex system with an entirely different function.
The bacterial flagellum, for example, may have evolved from a simpler syringelike system that helps nasty bacteria inject their poisons into a human cell. The flagellum system has some 40 protein parts, and research has already shown that 10 of them match those used by nasty bacteria to make their molecular syringes. Presumably, as research continues, scientists will learn that many of the 30 other parts also had different uses in precursor systems. The flagella were not discussed in “Pandas” but have emerged as a staple argument for intelligent design. There are still sharp disputes over how the flagella might have developed, but in the end, science is likely to discover that the flagella were crafted gradually by natural selection instead of in one fell swoop by an intelligent designer.
January 20th, 2006