It has been called “the most fundamental change in human behavior” that ever occurred. About 50,000 years ago, human beings began to produce art and develop innovative new technologies that allowed them to master their environment as never before. Population increased and Homo sapiens spread rapidly around the globe displacing cousins such as Neanderthals. A significant evolutionary advance in human neurological capacity must have occurred. Yet the appearance of culturally modern humans is an event without an apparent cause.

Where did modern humans originate? The answer may be hidden underneath a cow pasture in Oklahoma. Abandoned for more than eighty years, what could be one of the most important archeological sites on earth lies neglected and forgotten.

In the 1920s A. H. Holloman operated a commercial gravel pit near the small town of Frederick, Oklahoma. Holloman began to find both animal fossils and human artifacts interspersed among the gravels. A friend of Holloman’s wrote to the editor of Scientific American concerning the finds. Subsequent visits by paleontologist Harold Cook and museum director J. D. Figgins resulted in publications describing both fossils and human artifacts from the Holloman Pit.

Almost immediately, the Holloman site became the subject of controversy. Fossils associated with the artifacts appeared to be from the Pleistoceneepoch, about 150,000 years before present. Found among the Pleistocene fauna were arrowheads that anthropologist Leslie Spier described as “resembling modern Indian forms.” Even in the 1920s, this was regarded as impossible. The archeological consensus was that humans had evolved in the Old World and only entered the Americas during the Holocene epoch starting about 10,000 years ago.

Every possible objection was raised as to why the artifacts from Holloman could not be of Pleistocene age. Without bothering to visit the Holloman site, Leslie Spier argued that the arrowheads must have fallen into the pit from the surface. Another critic speculated that the gravel deposits represented a recent reworking and mixing of Pleistocene fossils with Holocene artifacts.

All objections were met and defeated. In 1929 Mr. Holloman located an arrowhead cemented in place. A team of geologists from the University of Oklahoma led by Charles Gould visited the Holloman site and satisfied themselves as to the in situ nature of the artifact. Even critic Leslie Spier conceded that the human artifacts were of the same age as the fossil animals.

Yet the controversy continued. Tired of the contentious quarrelling, in 1932 Mr. Holloman closed the site. A 1955 retrospective published by the Oklahoma Geological Survey concluded “it is a scientific tragedy that the disagreement among observers and scientists caused all to cease collecting and observing the pit.” Despite its apparent promise, the Holloman site was never systematically excavated.

By 1965 North American archeologists had acceded to moving the date of first human occupation in America back to the late Pleistocene. Dating of a site near Clovis, New Mexico suggested that humans first entered the Western Hemisphere about 11,500 bp when an ice-free corridor opened up that would have allowed entry into the continental interior. The Clovis-first theory seemed to have extraordinary explanatory power and it remained the ruling theory for more than thirty years.

For US archeologists, Clovis-first became dogmatic truth. No one looked for an older human presence in the Americas because everyone knew that the Clovis culture was first. When archeological excavations reached the Clovis level, digging stopped. But Central and South American archeologists were unencumbered by preconceived notions. Not knowing that pre-Clovis occupation was impossible they went out and discovered it. Excavations in Brazil and Mexico uncovered evidence of a human presence in the Americas as early as 295,000 bp.

In 1997 US archeologists were finally forced to abandon their beloved Clovis-first theory. Excavations at Monte Verde, Chile, by Tom Dillehay and his colleagues definitively documented a human presence in South America during pre-Clovis times. Yet the accepted date of first entry into the Americas was barely nudged back from 11,500 bp to 15,000 bp.

Archeologists have yet to come to terms with the reams of evidence documenting a human presence in the Americas as early as 300,000 bp. It is likely that humans evolved initially in Africa. But they didn’t remain there very long. Homo is a highly mobile species. Hominids were in the Republic of Georgia by 1,800,000 bp and people occupied cold climates in northern Europe as early as 780,000 bp.

The Bering Land Bridge between Asia and Alaska was open for about 200,000 of the last 500,000 years. Yet we are supposed to believe that Homo sapiens only entered the Americas 15,000 years ago, even though Homo erectus was in east Asia as early as 1,500,000 bp. It is more likely that hominids moved back and forth over the Bering Land Bridge repeatedly.

The currently fashionable theory is that the modern humans evolved in Africa about 50,000 bp and then migrated throughout the world, displacing other forms of Homo such as Neanderthals. Yet there are numerous difficulties with this theory and little evidence in support.

The most significant problem with the Out-of-Africa theory is that evolution requires geographic isolation of a small population. Yet people living in Africa shared a common stone technology with hominids in Eurasia and surely would have interbred with them. Any evolutionary change would have been muted by gene flow.

Another problem with Out-of-Africa is that it implies that a species which evolved in tropical Africa rapidly displaced cold-adapted Neanderthals in northern Europe during the coldest part of the last Ice Age. Acceptance of Out-of-Africa also requires us to accept the bizarre corollary that modern humans managed to cross the ocean to Australia as early as 60,000 bp, yet failed to walk into Europe until 43,000 bp.

It is more likely that culturally modern humans originated in the Americas. This theory was first proposed by Jeff Goodman in 1981. Only in America do we find evidence of advanced stone technology at early times. Holloman is not the only site in the Western Hemisphere at which human artifacts of great age have been found. At the Hueyatlaco site in Mexico, Virginia Steen-McIntyre and her colleagues have found advanced stone technologies dating to 250,000 bp.

It is possible that the opening and closing of the Bering Land Bridge has functioned as the pacemaker of human evolution over the last several hundred thousand years. Archaic Homo sapiens from Africa could have walked into America from about 189,000 to 130,000 bp. The critical period for evolutionary change was the last interglacial. From about 130,000 to 75,000 bp the land bridge was closed. Isolated from the rest of humanity, a relatively small population of people in the Americas could have evolved the intellectual capabilities of modern humans. When the land bridge opened again at 75,000 bp, there likely were one or more migrations back into Asia, with humans moving down the coast of Asia into Australia, eventually reaching both Africa and Europe.

The key to understanding where modern humans originated may lie in an obscure location in rural Oklahoma. The Holloman Pit is only a small part of a broad ridge of Pleistocene gravels 800 meters wide that extends linearly more than 12 kilometers. This area has never been excavated, yet it has a vast potential for discovery. If we do not look we shall not find.

The Best of David Deming

Atlas Shrugged is the title of Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel in which the world grinds to a halt after the productive segment of society goes on strike. Tired of being demonized and exploited, the world’s innovators and entrepreneurs simply walk away.

What would happen to the US today if the fossil fuel industry went on a strike of indefinite duration? What would happen if we gave the environmentalists what they want? Instead of nibbling around the edges, what if we just went all the way? What would be the consequences if Atlas shrugged?

Within 24 hours there would be long lines at service stations as people sought to purchase remaining stocks of gasoline. The same people who denounce oil companies would be desperately scrounging the last drops of available fuel for their SUVs. By the third day, all the gasoline would be gone.

With no diesel fuel, the trucking industry would grind to a halt. Almost all retail goods in the US are delivered by trucks. Grocery shelves would begin to empty. Food production at the most basic levels would also stop. Without gasoline, no farm machinery would function, nor could pesticides or fertilizers be produced on an industrial scale. The US cannot feed 315 million people with an agricultural technology based on manure and horse-drawn plows. After two weeks mass starvation would begin.

Locomotives once ran on coal but today are powered by diesel engines. With no trains or trucks running there would be no way to deliver either raw materials or finished products. All industrial production and manufacturing would stop. Mass layoffs would ensue. At this point, it would hardly matter. With virtually all transportation systems out, the only people who could work would be those who owned horses or were capable of walking to their places of employment.

Owners of electric cars might smirk at first, but would soon be forced to the unpleasant reality that the vehicle they thought was “emission free” runs on coal. Forty-two percent of electric power in the US is produced by burning coal. With natural gas also out of the picture, we would lose another 25 percent. The environmentalist’s favorite power sources, wind and solar, could not fill the gap. Wind power currently generates about 3 percent of our electricity and solar power accounts for a scant 0.04 percent. The only reliable power sources left would be hydroelectric and nuclear. But together these two sources could only power the grid at 27 percent of its normal capacity. With two-thirds of the electric power gone, the grid would shut down entirely. No electricity also means no running water and no flush toilets. When the bottled water ran out, people would drink from streams and ponds and epidemic cholera would inevitably follow.

Hospitals could continue to function for a few days on backup generators. But with no diesel fuel being produced, the backups would also fail. Emergency surgeries would have to be conducted by daylight in rooms with windows. Because kerosene is a petroleum byproduct, lighting by kerosene lamps would not be an option. Even candles today are made of paraffin, another petroleum byproduct. It is doubtful if sufficient beeswax could be found to manufacture enough candles to light the 132 million homes in the US.

With no electricity, little to no fuel, and no way to transport either people or commodities, the US would revert to the eighteenth century within a matter of days to weeks. The industrial revolution would be reversed. The gross domestic product would shrink by more than 95 percent. Depending on the season and location, people would begin to either freeze or swelter in their homes. My academic colleagues who think human progress is an illusion would have to face the bitter reality of reverting to a time when life expectancy was less than half of what it is today.

But I’m wrong. Reversion to the eighteenth century is not what would happen. It would be much worse than that. In eighteenth-century America, about eighty percent of the population lived on family farms and were largely self-sufficient. They had horses and blacksmiths. People knew how to work and relied upon valued networks of family and neighbors. Today, less than two percent of our population is engaged in farming. And virtually all modern agriculture depends on machinery powered by petroleum. People today could not survive in a world that lacks fossil fuels.

The picture I paint is grim, but it is nothing less than what environmental activists want: to put all fossil fuel companies completely out of business. If you don’t understand or accept this, I can only suggest that you acquaint yourself with the philosophy of biocentrism. Groups of college students are now demanding that universities divest stock holdings in fossil fuel companies — as if the production of fossil fuels was the moral equivalent of apartheid. And every March environmentalists celebrate “Earth Hour,” an hour in which they literally turn off all the lights.

Our industrialized and technological civilization does not run on rainbows and moonbeams. Nor is it likely to at any time in the foreseeable future. Renewable energy sources such as wind and solar are not viable replacements for fossil fuels. It is not a question of politics, but limitations imposed by the laws of physics and chemistry. Instead of apologizing for the use of fossil fuels, we ought to be damn glad we have them.

David Deming [send him mail] is a geologist, professor of arts and sciences at the University of Oklahoma, and the author of the series Science and Technology in World History.

The Best of David Deming

The Second Amendment to the US Constitution reads “a well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

It’s time to take the Second Amendment seriously. You should not need government permission to exercise a fundamental right. The prohibition on the sale of new automatic weapons must be repealed. Import restrictions on arms and ammunition should be lifted. The First Amendment prohibits the licensing and regulation of publishers and booksellers. Why should gun dealers need a license? If you don’t need a background check to read or write a book, why should you need one to purchase a gun? How is it that the severe restrictions currently in place do not constitute “infringements?”

There should be no more compromise or capitulation on this issue! History offers no example of a people who obtained their rights by politely asking for them. We need to stop playing defense and demand unequivocally that our rights be respected and restored.

The common sense solution to gun violence is to have more guns in the hands of responsible, law-abiding citizens and fewer in the hands of criminals. People who misuse firearms should be prosecuted. There should be no “gun free” zones. Experience has shown that keeping guns out of schools only makes them stalking grounds for psychopaths.

We should not be cowed into surrendering our rights on the basis of hysterical emotionalism. Dianne Feinstein wants to ban semi-automatic rifles. Why? According to the FBI, in 2011 rifles of all types were used in 323 homicides. That same year, 1694 people were killed by knives and 726 by fists and feet. The UK essentially outlawed all private gun possession and it now has the highest rate of violent crime in Europe — a rate five times higher than the United States

Mass shootings publicized by the media remain rare. But defensive uses of firearms are commonplace and usually go unreported. Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck has found that guns are used about 2.5 million times each year in the US to prevent crimes. More guns in the hands of responsible people results in less crime, not more. For the last twenty years, gun sales in the US have surged even as the violent crime rate has fallen dramatically. According to data from the ATF and FBI, between 1992 and 2010, the number of firearms manufactured in the US increased by 31 percent while the violent crime rate fell by 47 percent.

In 1995, the violent crime rate in my home state of Oklahoma was 664 per 100,000 people. The following year Oklahoma adopted a “shall issue” concealed-carry law. By 2011, the violent crime rate in Oklahoma had fallen to 455. People who keep guns in their homes even protect those who don’t own guns by reducing the likelihood of home invasion.

Make no mistake about it. The people who hate guns will never quit until they confiscate every last one. They banned automatic rifles in 1986 and now they’re back for the semi-automatic guns. A recent Bill proposed in the State of Illinois would have outlawed all modern firearms including pump-action shotguns. New York governor Andrew Cuomo has openly spoken of gun confiscation. President Obama has stated that he wants a national database of gun owners. What for, if not to go door-to-door and pick them up? In an infamous 1995 interview, Dianne Feinstein confessed “If I could have gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States for an outright ban, picking up every one of them…I would have done it.”

If you are a responsible and law-abiding person who does not own a firearm, you should buy one. No, buy ten. If you already own ten guns, buy ten more. For each semi-automatic rifle you own, purchase at least a dozen high-capacity magazines and a thousand rounds of ammunition.

If you want to see what happens to people who are unarmed, review the video of Reginald Denny being beaten during the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Or read about the 1974 Hi Fi murders in Ogden, Utah. Defenseless people were tied up and tortured. A young woman was repeatedly raped. A man had a ballpoint pen kicked into his ear. The sadistic killers forced their victims to drink liquid drain cleaner. Criminals love it when people don’t have guns. So do tyrants.

Of course if you don’t mind being victimized by criminals, you don’t need a gun. And many people around the world live without guns. An armed citizenry is only necessary in a “free State.” People content to live in totalitarian slave States don’t need guns.

David Deming [send him mail] is professor of arts and sciences at the University of Oklahoma. His book, Black & White: Politically Incorrect Essays on Politics, Culture, Science, Religion, Energy and Environment, is available for purchase on Amazon.com.

Peak Oil is the theory that the production history of petroleum follows a symmetrical bell-shaped curve. Once the curve peaks, decline is inevitable. The theory is commonly invoked to justify the development of alternative energy sources that are allegedly renewable and sustainable.

Peak Oil theory was originated by American geologist M. King Hubbert. In 1956 Hubbert predicted that US oil production would peak between 1965 and 1970. When production peaked in 1970, it was interpreted as proof that Hubbert’s model was correct and that US oil production had entered a period of inexorable and irreversible decline. Unanswered was the question of whether or not US production had declined simply because it had become cheaper to purchase imported oil.

Peak Oil is a theory based upon assumptions. Like other scientific theories, it is subject to empirical corroboration or falsification. Although Hubbert correctly predicted the timing of peak US oil production, several of his other predictions based on Peak Oil theory were wrong.

Hubbert predicted that the maximum possible US oil production by 2011 would be one billion barrels. But actual production in 2011 was two billion barrels. Hubbert predicted that annual world oil production would peak in the year 2000 at 12.5 billion barrels. It didn’t. World oil production in 2011 was 26.5 billion barrels and continues to increase. Hubbert was grossly wrong about natural gas production. In 1956 he predicted that by 2010 US annual gas production would be 4 TCF. But in 2010, US wells produced more than 26 TCF of gas.

The flaw of Peak Oil theory is that it assumes the amount of a resource is a static number determined solely by geological factors. But the size of a exploitable resource also depends upon price and technology. These factors are very difficult to predict.

The US oil industry began in 1859 when Colonel Edwin Drake hired blacksmith Billy Smith to drill a 69-foot-deep well. Subsequent technological advances have opened up resources beyond the limits of our ancestors’ imaginations. We can drill offshore in water up to eight-thousand feet deep. We have enhanced recovery techniques, horizontal drilling, and four-dimensional seismic imaging. Oklahoma oilman Harold Hamm is turning North Dakota into Saudi Arabia by utilizing hydraulic fracturing technology. US oil production has reversed its forty-year long decline. By the year 2020, it is anticipated that the US will be the world’s top oil producer.

For at least a hundred years, people have repeatedly warned that the world is running out of oil. In 1920, the US Geological Survey estimated that the world contained only 60 billion barrels of recoverable oil. But to date we have produced more than 1000 billion barrels and currently have more than 1500 billion barrels in reserve. World petroleum reserves are at an all-time high. The world is awash in a glut of oil. Conventional oil resources are currently estimated to be in the neighborhood of ten trillion barrels. The resource base is growing faster than production can deplete it.

In addition to conventional oil, the US has huge amounts of unconventional oil resources that remain untouched. The western US alone has 2000 billion barrels of oil in the form of oil shales. At a current consumption rate of 7 billion barrels a year, that’s a 286-year supply.

Nine years ago, I predicted that “the age of petroleum has only just begun.” I was right. The Peak Oil theorists, the malthusians, and the environmentalists were all wrong. They have been proven wrong, over and over again, for decades. A tabulation of every failed prediction of resource exhaustion would fill a library.

Sustainability is a chimera. No energy source has been, or ever will be, sustainable. In the eleventh century, Europeans anticipated the industrial revolution by transforming their society from dependence on human and animal power to water power. In the eighteenth century, water power was superseded by steam engines fired by burning wood. Coal replaced wood, and oil and gas have now largely supplanted coal. In the far distant future we will probably utilize some type of nuclear power. But for at least the next hundred years, oil will remain our primary energy source because it is abundant, inexpensive, and reliable.

Petroleum is the lifeblood of our industrial economy. The US economy will remain stagnant and depressed until we begin to aggressively develop our native energy resources. As Harold Hamm has said, “we can do this.” What’s stopping us is not geology, but ignorance and bad public policy.

David Deming [send him mail] is associate professor of arts and sciences at the University of Oklahoma. His book, Black & White: Politically Incorrect Essays on Politics, Culture, Science, Religion, Energy and Environment, is available for purchase on Amazon.com.

The late Joseph Campbell maintained that civilizations are not based on science, but on myth. “Aspiration,” Campbell explained, “is the motivator, builder, and transformer of civilization.” Our technological society has been built on Francis Bacon’s myth of the New Atlantis. Bacon was the first person to unambiguously and explicitly advocate the practical application of scientific knowledge to human needs. “The true and lawful goal of the sciences,” he explained, “is that human life be endowed with new discoveries and powers.” Writing in the early seventeenth century, Francis Bacon predicted lasers, genetic engineering, airplanes, and submarines.

Competing with Bacon’s vision of a society based on science is the older and more persistent fable of the Noble Savage. The Noble Savage is not a person, but an idea. It is cultural primitivism, the belief of people living in complex and evolved societies that the simple and primitive life is better. The Noble Savage is the myth that man can live in harmony with nature, that technology is destructive, and that we would all be happier in a more primitive state.

Before Jesus Christ lived, the Noble Savage was known to the Hebrews as the Garden of Eden. The Greek poet Hesiod (c. 700 BC) called it the Golden Age. In the lost Golden Age, people lived in harmony with nature. There was no disease, pain, work, or conflict. Everyone lived in perfect peace. Insects didn’t bite you. There were no extremes of temperature, and you could wander naked through the fields. If you happened to be hungry, all you had to do to satisfy your craving was reach up and pick a sumptuous ripe fruit off a nearby tree.

In all the ages of the world, otherwise intelligent and learned persons have swooned to cultural primitivism. In the sixteenth century, French writer Michel de Montaigne described native Americans as so morally pure they had no words in their languages for lying, treachery, avarice, and envy. Montaigne portrayed the primitive life as so idyllic that American Indians did not have to work but could spend the whole day dancing.

When captain James Cook and other European explorers first encountered the native people of Polynesia in the late eighteenth century, they romanticized the primitive and ignorant state as a happier one, free of cares and anxieties. It was better, one European wrote, to be simple-minded and ignorant. “We must admit,” he explained, “that the child is happier than the man, and that we are losers by the perfection of our nature, the increase of our knowledge, and the enlargement of our views.”

The quintessential exposition of the Noble Savage myth is found in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s book Discourse on Inequality (1755). Rousseau argued that what appeared to be human progress was in fact decay. The best condition for human beings to live in was the “pure state of nature” in which savages existed. When men lived as hunters and gatherers, they were “free, healthy, honest and happy.” The downfall of man occurred when people started to live in cities, acquire private property, and practice agriculture and metallurgy. The acquisition of private property resulted in inequality, aroused the vice of envy, and led to perpetual conflict and unceasing warfare. According to Rousseau, civilization itself was the scourge of humanity. Rousseau went so far as to make the astonishing claim that the source of all human misery was what he termed our “faculty of improvement,” or the use of our minds to improve the human condition.

Rousseau sent a copy of his book to Voltaire. In a letter acknowledging receipt of the work, Voltaire made a pithy and devastating criticism. “I have received, monsieur, your new book against the human race. I thank you for it…no one has ever employed so much intellect in the attempt to prove us beasts. A desire seizes us to walk on four paws when we read your work. Nevertheless, as it is more than sixty years since I lost the habit, I feel, unfortunately, that it is impossible for me to resume it.”

Voltaire’s insight was immediate and inerrant: opposition to technology is opposition to the human race itself. Man lives by technology. The human race has never existed in a state of harmony with nature. Since Rousseau wrote, more than two hundred and fifty years of archeological and ethnographic research have shown that the imaginative conceptions associated with the Noble Savage are completely wrong. Before the advent of civilization people endured disease, violence, hunger, and profound poverty.

When I was growing up in the 1960s, the common notion was that humans are the only animal that conducts warfare. But research over the past few decades has shown that this is false. In Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence, Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson documented observations of chimpanzees in their natural habitat engaging in systematic planned violence. Humans and chimpanzees diverged from a common ancestor about four to six million years ago. The fact that chimpanzees make war suggests that our human ancestors also did. The roots of human violence thus lay deep in time.

Male chimps conduct raids with the intent of catching a lone male from another group. If the odds in their favor are greater than three-to-one, they will attack and kill or maim him. The attacks are vicious and merciless, “marked by a gratuitous cruelty.” The preferred procedure is for two chimps to hold a victim on the ground while a third pummels and bites the prey until he is dead or mortally wounded. The aggressors enjoy the violence. After the attack has concluded they exhibit their exuberance by branch-waving, screaming, hooting, and drumming.

Eliminating male rivals bestows a reproductive advantage on the members of the attacking group. Chimpanzee behavior is calculated and organized, not incidental, and reveals a high degree of intelligence. Chimpanzees have been known to rape their own sisters. Other human relatives also share a disposition to violence. Rape is commonplace among orangutans, and about one-seventh of gorilla babies perish from infanticide.

Before the advent of human civilization, conflict between bands of hunter-gatherers was universal and intense. In his book Constant Battles, Harvard archeologist Steven A. Leblanc documented that “warfare in the past was pervasive and deadly.” Cannibalism and infanticide were also common. Ethnographic studies of hunter-gatherer groups surviving in remote areas of the world during the twentieth century have found that about twenty-five percent of adult males perish in war. LeBlanc concluded “the common notion of humankind’s blissful past, populated with noble savages living in a pristine and peaceful world, is held by those who do not understand our past and who have failed to see the course of human history for what it is.”

Before the Industrial Revolution, disease and poverty were endemic, even in the most advanced societies. Infectious diseases, including typhus, smallpox, and malaria, were rampant. Intestinal worms and dysentery were common among all classes of people. In eighteenth century Europe, half of all children died before their tenth birthday. Life expectancy at birth was only about twenty-five years, virtually unchanged from the days of the Roman Empire. Filth and dirt were everywhere. In 1741, Samuel Johnson gave a speech in Parliament where he complained that the streets of London were “obstructed by mountains of filth.”

Neither did pre-industrial civilizations live in a state of ecological harmony with their environment. Their exploitation of nature was often destructive. The Mediterranean islands colonized by the ancient Greeks were transformed into barren rock by overgrazing and deforestation. The Bay of Troy, described in Homer’s Iliad, has been filled in by sediment eroded from hillsides destabilized by unsustainable agricultural practices.

Before Europeans arrive, American Indians managed the land aggressively by burning it. And they likely hunted several animals to extinction. The disappearance of the Pleistocene Megafauna in the Americas coincides with the expansion of human settlement about 10,000 years before present. The long list of animals hunted to extinction by American Indians include dire wolves, giant sloths, saber-toothed cats, giant beavers, mastodons, and mammoths.

Even the conception of primitive societies as egalitarian is flawed. In Sick Societies, anthropologist Robert Edgerton documented that all human societies make distinctions based on “sex, age, and ability.” Groups also tend to treat people differently based on distinctions of “wealth, power, or kinship.” It should not be surprising, for example, to find that the chief of a tribe will advance his own interests “at the expense of lower-status people.”

All of this would be of academic interest only, were it not the case that the modern environmental movement and many of our public policies are based implicitly on the myth of the Noble Savage. The fountainhead of modern environmentalism is Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. The first sentence in Silent Spring invoked the Noble Savage by claiming “there was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings.” But the town Carson described did not exist, and her polemic, Silent Spring, introduced us to environmental alarmism based on junk science. As the years passed, Rachel Carson was elevated to sainthood and the template laid for endless spasms of hysterical fear-mongering, from the population bomb, to nuclear winter, the Alar scare, and global warming.

Human beings have not, can not, and never will live in harmony with nature. Our prosperity and health depend on technology driven by energy. We exercise our intelligence to command nature, and were admonished by Francis Bacon to exercise our dominion with “sound reason and true religion.” When we are told that our primary energy source, oil, is “making us sick,” or that we are “addicted” to oil, these are only the latest examples of otherwise rational persons descending into gibberish after swooning to the lure of the Noble Savage. This ignorant exultation of the primitive can only lead us back to the Stone Age.

David Deming [send him mail] is associate professor of arts and sciences at the University of Oklahoma. His book, Black & White: Politically Incorrect Essays on Politics, Culture, Science, Religion, Energy and Environment, is available for purchase on Amazon.com.

Atheism is all the rage. Like Platonism in Renaissance Italy, it has become a lovely intellectual fashion embraced by all the snobs. Especially obnoxious is something called the New Atheism which seeks to draw God under the umbrella of science. Prominent among the new atheists is biologist Richard Dawkins. Dawkins has proclaimed that God does not exist and that theism is a delusion.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines an atheist as “one who denies or disbelieves the existence of a God.” Atheism is distinct from agnosticism. The agnostic professes no belief in God but does not deny the possibility of God’s existence.

The dictionary is of less help when it comes to defining God. God may be an entity, “the Creator and Ruler of the universe,” or an impersonal principle, “the supreme or ultimate reality.” There are as many definitions of God as there are religions. Cicero tells us that the opinions of men on this subject are “various and different.” For the purpose of this essay, I follow Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109 AD) in defining God as a Being, a reality, or an abstract spiritual principle of “which nothing greater can be conceived.” As a transcendent spiritual reality, God, by Its very definition, must be beyond human comprehension, although not entirely beyond human apprehension. I am aware, for example, of the existence of many fields of higher study in mathematics and physics that I barely comprehend. I do not have to fully understand these subjects to be aware that they exist.

I have said nothing of my own belief in this matter. I write not to profess or proselytize, but to critique and argue, to explore and learn. The person who can point out my mistakes “shall carry off the palm, not as an enemy, but as a friend.” I have no need to believe–it is better to understand than to believe. I confess only an affection for Pyrrhonian skepticism, the philosophical position that nothing can be known for certain. But certainly many things may be known with degrees of probability.

There is nothing new about either monotheism or atheism. Monotheism may have been known in Egypt and Babylonia as early as 1500 BC. The first of the Greek philosophers to reject polytheism and propose a type of monotheism was reportedly Xenophanes (c. 570-475 BC). Empedocles (c. 492-432 BC) described God as “only mind, sacred and ineffable mind, flashing through the whole universe with swift thoughts.” For Aristotle (384-322 BC), “the actuality of thought is life, and God is that actuality.”

There are scattered reports of atheists among the ancient Greeks. Methodological naturalism arose among the presocratic Ionians and Hippocratic physicians in the 5th and 6th centuries BC. Epicureans were atomists and materialists who rejected teleology in nature. Epicurus (341-270 BC) professed a belief in the gods, but his deities were abstract spiritual beings that never interacted with, or took an interest in, the affairs of human beings. It is a just inference to conclude that antiquity held many atheists who nursed their convictions in secret to avoid prosecution for impiety.

In Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, Diogenes Laërtius (3rd cent. AD) informs us that Theodorus (c. 340-250 BC) “utterly discarded all previous opinions about the gods.” In the 5th century BC, the poet Diagoras had to flee Athens to avoid prosecution on charges of atheism. Both Diagoras and Theodorus are also mentioned by Cicero (106-43 BC) as examples of philosophers who did not believe in the gods. From the scanty evidence it is not clear if Diagoras and Theodorus were atheists in the modern sense, or merely skeptics who mocked the popular polytheistic conception of anthropomorphic gods.

Western Civilization has become increasingly more secular for the last thousand years. The process began when Christian theologians in Europe were seduced by Greek logic. Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109 AD) sought to construct an argument for the existence of God that was based entirely on logic. Anselm’s approach was cemented by Thomas Aquinas, and Scholasticism became the predominant intellectual school in Europe for the next few centuries. Both Anselm and Aquinas claimed to place faith before reason. But in using reason to justify faith, they unwittingly acquiesced to the superiority of reason.

In 1543, Copernicus’ Revolutions, a technical work in astronomy, began the process of unraveling the unity of the medieval European world by removing the Earth from the center of the cosmos. Many of the icons of the Scientific Revolution were devout Christians and fervent theists. Johannes Kepler, Robert Boyle, and Isaac Newton all viewed experimental philosophy as entirely consistent with, and complementary to, Christianity. But the Scientific Revolution replaced revelation by observation and reason. Consideration of final purposes was excluded from experimental philosophy. The epistemological revolution was completed during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.

Newtonian physics explained the mechanical universe through the impersonal action of natural law. But scientists and philosophers still needed God to explain the origin of life. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, we find Richard Kirwan, the President of the Royal Irish Academy, maintaining that “geology graduates into religion.” In 1829, the Royal Society of England undertook the publication of the Bridgewater Treatises, works that were commissioned to illustrate “the power, wisdom, and goodness of God.”

In 1859 Darwin published Origin of Species. Darwin’s theory was proposed to explain the evolution of life, but was subsequently invoked to implicitly explain the origin of life. After Darwin, God was no longer necessary to answer scientific questions. By the end of the nineteenth century God had been expelled from the sciences. On April 8, 1966, Time Magazine published the infamous red-and-black cover that posed the question, “Is God Dead?” The secularization of Western society was not yet complete, but certainly substantial.

The atheist views this historical process as the inevitable triumph of human progress. “Science,” Carl Sagan assured us, is a “candle in the dark” that dispels the “demon-haunted world.” Religion and theism are to be extinguished the same way that the diseases of polio and smallpox were conquered. God is just another superstition that must be eradicated to further the march of human progress. “Imagine,” the songwriter says, a world with no religion. Then we will all live happily together in a peaceful communistic utopia.

To the atheist, religion, especially the Christian religion, is the spawning ground of horrors and atrocities. The Witch Mania and the Spanish Inquisition were perpetrated under the guise of Christianity. Before the Reformation, the Catholic Church and papacy were dens of iniquity and hypocrisy. In 1501, Pope Alexander VI presided over the infamous Banquet of the Chestnuts at which fifty naked prostitutes danced. After the Reformation, men had other men burned to death over disagreements on minor and obscure points of religious doctrine. Not only did Catholics fight with Protestants, the Protestant sects fought with each other. In 1553 John Calvin had Michael Servetus arrested and executed. Johannes Kepler was refused the sacrament of communion because he would not accept the Doctrine of Ubiquity. And there is much truth in the traditional view that religion and science are antagonistic systems of knowledge. Rational philosophy and the sciences were expelled from Islamic civilization in the twelfth century by religious fundamentalists.

I acknowledge the preceding, but because something has been at times abused or corrupted does not convince me that it should be altogether discarded. Intolerance is not so much the product of religion as it is the normal human condition. Religion, like science, can be both used and abused. Science tells us how to make both antibiotics and mustard gas. The science of chemistry informs the manufacture of explosives. Explosive chemicals can be fruitfully applied in mining and civil engineering, but they can also be used to murder. Science is inherently amoral. Perhaps we object more strenuously when religion is abused because religion has pretensions to moral authority.

The sciences complement our technologies and satisfy our intellectual curiosity. But science does not inform morality or tell us how to build and order human civilizations. Impressed by Isaac Newton’s physics, John Locke expressed the hope that morality could be made into an exact science. But like much Enlightenment rhetoric, Locke’s hope has proven to be chimerical. We have social sciences such as psychology, sociology, and anthropology. But these are not exact sciences. The extent to which they provide us with reliable information is constrained by inherent limitations. It is difficult to accurately and unambiguously define and measure psychological variables, or to have sufficient control as to separate the effects of multiple compounding variables. Controlled experiments with human beings usually cannot be conducted for ethical reasons. And the sciences can only tell us how people do act, not how they should act.

There is no science that addresses final causes or existential questions. It is religion that does these things. If atrocities have been perpetrated under the cloak of religion, it nonetheless must be admitted that religion and theism have had beneficial influences. What we call Western Civilization today is largely the result of grafting Christian charity onto Greek rationalism. Christianity provided the notion that all men are brothers. This is the ethic of a global-scale civilization. Christianity was instrumental in uniting the diverse tribes and cultures of Europe. It fostered unity, the growth of nations and commerce. Francis Bacon asserted that the progress of the sciences required mass cooperation. It therefore seems undeniable that Christianity and other religions have synergistically promoted scientific activity to the extent that they have encouraged people to get along peacefully.

We need both science and religion. Since Homo erectus walked the Earth, humanity has been defined by its use of technology. We are not the only animal that uses knowledge and tools to manipulate the natural environment, but we do so to such an exaggerated degree that it virtually defines us as a species. And we are a social animal that lives in groups. “Man,” Aristotle says, “is by nature a political animal.” Religion tells us what to do with our knowledge and technologies. It establishes rules of order, informs what is “right” and what is “wrong.” People are not born with the values that promote culture and civilization on a high level. Ethics and morality must be deliberately inculcated. Absent moral indoctrination, people revert to their animalistic instincts.

As a skeptic, I am sympathetic with agnosticism. But I skeptical of atheism. The atheist claims there is no God. How can he be so sure? One wonders if the motivation of the average atheist is anything more than base self-interest. After all, we live in the age of entitlement. Everyone is entitled to everything, free from all the constraints imposed by religion and morality. The death of God surely makes us judges in our own cases.

Many of the arguments advanced by atheists are puerile. Most common is the invocation of the straw-man fallacy. This is the well-known intellectual fallacy wherein one distorts a proposition into an absurd straw man that is easily knocked down.

In Medieval European art, God was invariably depicted as an old man with a white beard who lives in the clouds. The most infamous example of this was painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo. I am not aware of any better way to portray God in a painting. But is there anyone older than three who believes that God is an elderly gentleman who lives in the clouds? A common type of atheist is the eighteen-year-old college student who is shocked to discover what he should have figured out by the age of twelve: there is no anthropomorphic God. The eager youth, in his ignorance and vanity, immediately concludes that all conceptions of God are null and void. This, he declares to the world with the same impassioned fervor as a religious fanatic. One is reminded of Macaulay’s description of Thomas Aikenhead, the unfortunate youth who was hung for atheism in 1697. “He fancied that he had lighted upon a mine of wisdom which had been hidden from the rest of mankind, and, with the conceit from which half-educated lads of quick parts are seldom free, proclaimed his discoveries.”

I might be inclined to take atheists more seriously if they exhibited any familiarity with either theology or philosophy. Since the Dialogues of Plato were composed in the 4th century BC, philosophers have constructed a number of classical arguments for the existence of God. These include the Cosmological Argument, the Design Argument, and the Ontological Argument. There are problems with all of these arguments. The Design Argument, for example, never really recovered from the criticisms made by David Hume in his posthumous book Dialogues on Natural Religion (1779). Centuries of consideration have more-or-less caused philosophers to conclude that there is no argument based on reason or observation that can do more than suggest the existence of God. As early as the eleventh century AD, the Islamic philosopher al-Ghazali (1058-1111) showed that no logical argument could prove the existence of God. Nevertheless, one might reasonably expect a professed atheist to have done their homework. But it is more commonly the case that they have never heard of the pertinent arguments, much less thought about them.

The most common argument for atheism is that there is no evidence for the existence of God. One is initially taken aback by such a striking assertion. Is it really true that there is “no” evidence for the existence of God? None? Is it not striking that theism has been nearly universal, from the dawn of recorded history throughout most if not all human civilizations? That religion has been the greatest force in human history? That religion builds and transforms human civilizations, informs culture, morality, and law? Although not impossible, it would be surprising to find that all of the preceding had been constructed on a foundation for which there is no evidence.

When an atheist asserts that there is “no evidence” for the existence of God, they mean no evidence of the type they deem acceptable. That is, scientific evidence. Evidence based on observation and reason, capable of repeated corroboration. They rather expect to find God under a microscope, or observe Heaven through a telescope, or take photographs of God when It descends from the clouds in a chariot drawn by winged horses. They demand that God supply evidence on human terms. They demand natural evidence for the supernatural.

Ants live in ant hills and underground burrows. They furiously scurry around, carrying particles of dirt, excavating tunnels and generally keeping busy on all the business that pertains to the kingdom of ants. One ant tells another of the planet Jupiter. Whereupon he is met by the indignant protest that there is no evidence for such a thing. No ant has ever observed it. The only things that exist are those things immediately perceptible to the eyes and brain of an ant. The ant, like all creatures, is unable to fathom the depths of his ignorance. It never occurs to him that his failure to perceive a thing greater than himself might originate in his own frail and limited nature. It is truly impossible to be aware of what we are not aware of. We may only hope to be cognizant that there must be much of which we are ignorant.

There is evidence for the existence of God, but it is not scientific evidence based on the epistemologies of reason and observation. The touchstone of theism is revelation. Revelation is “the disclosure or communication of knowledge by divine or supernatural means.” It is the basis of religion, at least the Abrahamic faiths. When Saul was on the road to Damascus and fell off his horse, he tell us “I was taken up to heaven for a visit…and heard things so astounding that they are beyond a man’s power to describe or put in words.” The consequences of this incident were profound. Saul, the persecutor of the Christians, immediately converted to Christianity and became Paul, the person responsible for transforming Christianity from a Jewish sect into a new universal religion. Christianity is now the world’s largest religion and the single most important historical influence on Western Civilization.

On his “night of fire” the mathematician Blaise Pascal experienced a direct apprehension of God. God, Pascal wrote, “can only be found by the ways taught in the Gospels.” Saint Teresa of Avila described her ecstatic revelation as a pain “so great that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain that I could not wish to be rid of it. The soul is satisfied with nothing less than God.”

To al-Ghazali, revelation was the highest epistemology. It was above science. Knowledge of God was obtained only by “transport, ecstasy, and the transformation of the moral being.” al-Ghazali concluded that when a rationalist rejects what they have not experienced, it is merely “a proof of their profound ignorance.”

The atheist who demands scientific evidence for God’s existence has made the same mistake as the Biblical Fundamentalist who claims the Earth is only 6000 years old. The fundamentalist applies the epistemological criterion of revelation to answer a natural question that should be addressed by scientific means. In Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina (1615) Galileo explained “in the discussion of natural problems, we ought not to begin at the authority of places of scripture; but at sensible experiments and necessary demonstrations.” But the question of God’s existence is not a natural one. God, by definition, is supernatural. The only possible way It can be apprehended is through inspiration. To paraphrase Galileo, “in the discussion of supernatural problems, we ought not to begin with natural experiments.”

The atheist who demands to stuff God in a box where It can be studied and observed has made the metaphysical assumption that only the natural world revealed to him by his senses exists. This assumption cannot be verified or tested. Science is nested within metaphysics. Like other systems of knowledge it begins with implicit assumptions. Even geometry rests upon unprovable axioms. The atheist has only asserted what needs to be demonstrated. It is no triumph to trumpet a lack of material evidence for the immaterial. Galileo summed it up nicely. “A great ineptitude exists on the part of those who would have it that God made the universe more in proportion to the small capacity of their reason than to His immense, His infinite, power.”

And whence parsimony? Why do scientists still endorse Ockam’s Razor? Atheistic scientists nurse a secret hypocrisy. They endorse simplicity because they implicitly hold the teleological conviction that God constructed the cosmos with beauty. Physicist Paul Dirac (1902-1984) professed “it is more important to have beauty in one’s equations than to have them fit experiment.”

Like folly, human vanity is inexhaustible. In Genesis, it is claimed that man was made in the image of God. But if God is dead, human reason has become the light of the universe. In his insufferable vanity, Man has made himself into the image of God. The roles have been reversed, but the hubris remains.

George Sarton noted that works of art provide us with “an intuitive, synthetic, and immediate knowledge” of the “deepest aspirations” of a civilization. If the death of God has illuminated our hearts and minds, why is it that our fine arts are degraded beyond recognition? Our buildings are not as beautiful as the Gothic Cathedrals of the thirteenth century. Modern painters make monochrome paintings and call them art. Are these works equal to those of the Renaissance? Are our sculptures the equal of Michelangelo’s David? If Christian Europe before the Scientific Revolution was such a dark and ignorant age, how is it that such superlative art was made?

If God, by definition, is a spiritual principle beyond human comprehension, how can anyone be sure that It does not exist? Atheism is not only logically indefensible, but unintelligible.

David Deming [send him mail] is associate professor of arts and sciences at the University of Oklahoma. His book, Black & White: Politically Incorrect Essays on Politics, Culture, Science, Religion, Energy and Environment, is available for purchase on Amazon.com.

I’m a denier for several reasons. There is no substantive evidence that the planet has warmed significantly or that any significant warming will occur in the future. If any warming does occur, it likely will be concentrated at higher latitudes and therefore be beneficial. Climate research has largely degenerated into pathological science, and the coverage of global warming in the media is tendentious to the point of being fraudulent. Anyone who is an honest and competent scientist must be a denier.

Have you ever considered how difficult it is to take the temperature of the planet Earth? What temperature will you measure? The air? The surface of the Earth absorbs more than twice as much incident heat from the Sun than the air. But if you measure the temperature of the surface, what surface are you going to measure? The solid Earth or the oceans? There is twice as much water as land on Earth. If you decide to measure water temperature, at what depth will you take the measurements? How will the time scale on which the deep ocean mixes with the shallow affect your measurements? And how, pray tell, will you determine what the average water temperature was for the South Pacific Ocean a hundred years ago? How will you combine air, land, and sea temperature measurements? Even if you use only meteorological measurements of air temperature, how will you compensate for changes in latitude, elevation, and land use?

Determining a mean planetary temperature is not straightforward, but an extremely complicated problem. Even the best data are suspect. Anthony Watts and his colleagues have surveyed 82.5 percent of stations in the U.S. Historical Climatology Network. They have found — shockingly — that over 70 percent of these stations are likely to be contaminated by errors greater than 2 deg C [3.6 deg F]. Of the remaining stations, 21.5 percent have inherent errors greater than 1 deg C. The alleged degree of global warming over the past 150 years is less than 1 deg C. Yet even in a technologically advanced country like the US, the inherent error in over 90 percent of the surveyed meteorological stations is greater than the putative signal. And these errors are not random, but systematically reflect a warming bias related to urbanization. Watts has documented countless instances of air temperature sensors located next to air conditioning vents or in the middle of asphalt parking lots. A typical scenario is that a temperature sensor that was in the middle of a pasture a hundred years ago is now surrounded by a concrete jungle. Urbanization has been a unidirectional process. It is entirely plausible — even likely — that all of the temperature rise that has been inferred from the data is an artifact that reflects the growth of urban heat islands.

The “denier” is portrayed as a person who refuses to accept the plain evidence of his senses. But in fact it is the alarmist who doesn’t know what they are talking about. The temperature of the Earth and how it has varied over the past 150 years is poorly constrained. The person who thinks otherwise does so largely because they have no comprehension of the science. Most of these people have never done science or thought about the inherent difficulties and uncertainties involved.

And what is “global warming” anyway? As long ago as the fifth century BC, Socrates pointed out that intelligible definitions are a necessary precursor to meaningful discussions. The definition of the term “global warming” shifts with the context of the discussion. If you deny global warming, then you have denied the existence of the greenhouse effect, a reproducible phenomenon that can be studied analytically in the laboratory. But if you oppose political action, then global warming metamorphoses into a nightmarish and speculative planetary catastrophe. Coastal cities sink beneath a rising sea, species suffer from wholesale extinctions, and green pastures are turned into deserts of choking hot sand.

In fact, so-called “deniers” are not “deniers” but skeptics. Skeptics do not deny the existence of the greenhouse effect. Holding all other factors constant, the mean planetary air temperature ought to rise as the atmosphere accumulates more anthropogenic CO2. Christopher Monckton recently reviewed the pertinent science and concluded that a doubling of CO2 should result in a temperature increase of about 1 deg C. If this temperature increase mirrors those in the geologic past, most of it will occur at high latitudes. These areas will become more habitable for man, plants, and other animals. Biodiversity will increase. Growing seasons will lengthen. Why is this a bad thing?

Any temperature increase over 1 deg C for a doubling of CO2 must come from a positive feedback from water vapor. Water vapor is the dominant greenhouse gas in Earth’s atmosphere, and warm air holds more water than cold air. The theory is that an increased concentration of water vapor in the atmosphere will lead to a positive feedback that amplifies the warming from CO2 by as much as a factor of three to five. But this is nothing more that speculation. Water vapor also leads to cloud formation. Clouds have a cooling effect. At the current time, no one knows if the feedback from water vapor will be positive or negative.

Global warming predictions cannot be tested with mathematical models. It is impossible to validate computer models of complex natural systems. The only way to corroborate such models is to compare model predictions with what will happen in a hundred years. And one such result by itself won’t be significant because of the possible compounding effects of other variables in the climate system. The experiment will have to repeated over several one-hundred year cycles. In other words, the theory of catastrophic global warming cannot be tested or empirically corroborated in a human time frame.

It is hardly conclusive to argue that models are correct because they have reproduced past temperatures. I’m sure they have. General circulation models have so many degrees of freedom that it is possible to endlessly tweak them until the desired result is obtained. Hindsight is always 20-20. This tells us exactly nothing about a model’s ability to accurately predict what will happen in the future.

The entire field of climate science and its coverage in the media is tendentious to the point of being outright fraudulent. Why is it that every media report on CO2 — an invisible gas — is invariably accompanied by a photograph of a smokestack emitting particulate matter? Even the cover of Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, shows a smokestack. Could it be that its difficult to get people worked up about an invisible, odorless gas that is an integral component of the photosynthetic cycle? A gas that is essential to most animal and plant life on Earth? A gas that is emitted by their own bodies through respiration? So you have to deliberately mislead people by showing pictures of smoke to them. Showing one thing when you’re talking about another is fraud. If the case for global warming alarmism is so settled, so conclusive, so irrefutable…why is it necessary to repeatedly resort to fraud?

A few years ago it was widely reported that the increased concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would cause poison ivy to grow faster. But of course carbon dioxide causes almost all plants to grow faster. And nearly all of these plants have beneficial human uses. Carbon dioxide fertilizes hundreds or thousands of human food sources. More CO2 means trees grow faster. So carbon dioxide promotes reforestation and biodiversity. Its good for the environment. But none of this was reported. Instead, the media only reported that global warming makes poison ivy grow faster. And this is but one example of hundreds or thousands of such misleading reports. If sea ice in the Arctic diminishes, it is cited as irrefutable proof of global warming. But if sea ice in the Antarctic increases, it is ignored. Even cold weather events are commonly invoked as evidence for global warming. People living in the future will look back and wonder how we could have been so delusional.

For the past few years I have remained silent concerning the Climategate emails. But what they revealed is what many of us already knew was going on: global warming research has largely degenerated into what is known as pathological science, a “process of wishful data interpretation.” When I testified before the US Senate in 2006, I stated that a major climate researcher told me in 1995 that “we have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.” The existence and global nature of the Medieval Warm Period had been substantiated by literally hundreds of research articles published over decades. But it had to be erased from history for ideological reasons. A few years later the infamous “hockey stick” appeared. The “hockey stick” was a revisionist attempt to rewrite the temperature history of the last thousand years. It has been discredited as being deeply flawed.

In one Climategate email, a supposed climate scientist admitted to “hiding the decline.” In other words, hiding data that tended to disprove his ideological agenda. Another email described how alarmists would try to keep critical manuscripts from being published in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. One of them wrote, we’ll “keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!” Gee. If the climate science that validates global warming is so unequivocal, why is it necessary to work behind the scenes to suppress dissent? You “doth protest too much.”

As described in my book, Science and Technology in World History: The Ancient World and Classical Civilization, systematic science began with the invocation of naturalism by Greek philosophers and Hippocratic physicians c. 600-400 BC. But the critical attitude adopted by the Greeks was as important as naturalism. Students were not only allowed to criticize their teachers, but were encouraged to do so. From its beginnings in Greek natural philosophy, science has been an idealistic and dispassionate search for truth. As Plato explained, anyone who could point out a mistake “shall carry off the palm, not as an enemy, but as a friend.” This is one reason that scientists enjoy so much respect. The public assumes that a scientist’s pursuit of truth is unencumbered by political agendas.

But science does not come easy to men. “Science,” George Sarton reminded us, “is a joykiller.” The proper conduct of science requires a high degree of intellectual discipline and rigor. Scientists are supposed to use multiple working hypotheses and sort through these by the processes of corroboration and falsification. The most valuable evidence is that which tends to falsify or disprove a theory. A scientist, by the very definition of his activity, must be skeptical. A scientist engaged in a dispassionate search for truth elevates the critical — he does not suppress it. Knowledge begins with skepticism and ends with conceit.

Finally, I’m happy to be known as a “denier” because the label of “denier” says nothing about me, but everything about the person making the charge. Scientific theories are never denied or believed, they are only corroborated or falsified. Scientific knowledge, by its very nature, is provisional and subject to revision. The provisional nature of scientific knowledge is a necessary consequence of the epistemological basis of science. Science is based on observation. We never have all the data. As our body of data grows, our theories and ideas must necessarily evolve. Anyone who thinks scientific knowledge is final and complete must necessarily endorse as a corollary the absurd proposition that the process of history has stopped.

A scientific theory cannot be “denied.” Only a belief can be denied. The person who uses the word “denier” thus reveals that they hold global warming as a belief, not a scientific theory. Beliefs are the basis of revealed religion. Revelations cannot be corroborated or studied in the laboratory, so religions are based on dogmatic beliefs conservatively held. Religions tend to be closed systems of belief that reject criticism. But the sciences are open systems of knowledge that welcome criticism. I’m a scientist, and therefore I must happily confess to being a denier.

David Deming [send him mail] is a geophysicist, associate professor of arts and sciences at the University of Oklahoma, and author of the books Science and Technology in World History, Vols. 1 & 2.

Some time ago I received an email asking how, as a scientist and geologist, I could associate myself with the Discovery Institute by signing their Dissent from Darwinism statement. The statement reads, in toto, “We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.”

My critic seemed to think that anyone who would agree with this statement was necessarily a creationist, if not a Biblical fundamentalist that believed the Earth was 6,000 years old. On the contrary, I’m an evolutionist. I’m committed to naturalism in science, and I believe that radioactive dating and other evidence shows the Earth to be about 4.6 billion years old. The reason I’m an evolutionist is that science is based largely on empirical evidence. The fossil record shows progressive change in life through time. The farther back we go in time, the more that life diverges from present day forms. If we do nothing but look at the fossils, we see a process of natural change, or evolution.

There is no scientific reason that one-hundred percent of biologist and geologists should not sign the Dissent from Darwinism statement. Who can disagree that “careful examination of the evidence” is indicated for every scientific theory? And there is plenty of skepticism in the scientific literature regarding the ability of natural selection alone to account for the changes we infer from the fossil record. A 2009 paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science began with the words “I reject the Darwinian assumption…[of] a single common ancestor.” A 2005 review paper published in Trends in Ecology and Evolution noted that “the many intermediate forms hypothesized by Darwin” were “missing.” These are but two examples that illustrate a pervasive theme of skeptical deliberation.

With the possible exception of global warming, I am not aware of any other area in science where scientists can be so unscientific, close-minded, and dogmatic. Darwin is a sacred cow that cannot be questioned. Especially in the field of zoology, there is a fanatical core of atheists and materialists who have created a false dichotomy. One must either accept Darwinian evolution as dogma or risk being labeled as a Biblical fundamentalist. But in fact there are alternative theories of evolution that do not rely primarily upon natural selection.

The single largest problem with Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection is that it contradicts the fossil record. The theory predicts uniform, gradual, and continual change. If Darwin’s theory were correct, every fossil would be a transitional form. But transitional fossils are rare. As early as 1812, Georges Cuvier (1769–1832) documented that the fossil record shows stasis punctuated by rapid change. Organisms suddenly appear and disappear. Transitional fossils are not unknown, but they are scarce. A 2009 paper published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society noted “the relative rarity of truly informative fossil intermediates.”

If one should happen to mention that transitional fossils are uncommon, Darwinists typically respond that is it not true that there are no transitional fossils. But no one ever said that transitional fossils don’t exist, only that they are rare. Distorting an opponent’s position into a straw-man that is easily knocked down is a classic intellectual fallacy. Debating a dogmatic Darwinist can be frustrating, because it’s like arguing with a twelve-year-old child that has no critical thinking skills.

If Darwinists are oblivious to the empirical data, they’re only acting in the best tradition. It was Darwin himself who initiated the practice of explaining away the evidence. But in fact the story begins much earlier.

In the sixth century BC what we know today as science began when the Greek natural philosophers rejected supernatural explanations and invoked naturalism. The necessary corollary to naturalism is uniformity, the supposition that nature acts uniformly and predictably throughout both space and time. Without uniformity, naturalist explanations are no better than supernatural. Unless nature acts according to uniform and invariant law, its acts are as capricious as those of the gods. With naturalism and uniformity, the universe became a cosmos, an ordered place that could be understood through observation and reason.

In Principia Mathematica (1687) Isaac Newton characterized uniformity as the “foundation of all philosophy.” Newton was not only the greatest physicist of all time, he was also a Biblical fundamentalist who believed that the Earth was no more than a few thousand years old. Newton advocated intelligent design, and wrote that “the true God is a living, intelligent, and powerful Being,” not an abstract spiritual principle. But ironically, Newton was also the godfather of Charles Darwin.

The line of academic descent from Newton to Darwin is unmistakable. The Scottish mathematician, Colin Maclaurin (1698–1746), was a protg of Isaac Newton. At the University of Edinburgh, one of Maclaurin’s students was the geologist, James Hutton (1726–1797). In the English and American tradition, Hutton is recognized as the founder of the modern science of geology because he was the first to insist on uniformity.

But James Hutton had little contemporary influence because his writing was terribly prolix. The person who really founded uniformitarian geology was Charles Lyell (1797–1875). Lyell wrote Principles of Geology as an exposition of Hutton’s uniformitarian geology. The book was published in twelve editions from 1830 through 1875. Enormously influential, Lyell’s Principles virtually created the modern science of geology. Among Lyell’s readers was the young Charles Darwin. Darwin took a copy with him on the voyage of the Beagle, and later wrote “I studied [Principles] attentively; and the book was of the highest service to me in many ways.”

Lyell was the single largest influence on Darwin. Darwin dedicated his book, Voyage of the Beagle (1839), to Lyell. In his autobiography, Darwin confessed “I saw more of Lyell than any other man.” After Darwin published Origin of Species (1859) he was warmly congratulated by Lyell.

But Charles Lyell was largely a polemicist and scientific fraud. It was Lyell who taught Darwin to ignore evidence that contradicted theory. Lyell’s Principles was not so much a textbook on geology as a polemical argument for an extreme form of uniformity. Lyell went far beyond Newton and the ancient Greeks. He espoused a radical uniformitarianism that relied not just upon invariant natural law, but invoked, without justification, uniform causes, processes, and rates over geologic time. These were Lyell’s “principles” of geology.

In a letter written shortly before the first edition of Principles was published, Lyell admitted that “all my geology will come in as illustration of my views of those principles.” In other words, Lyell frankly admitted his intention to reverse the normal scientific process. Instead of collecting facts and inductively inferring a plausible and testable theory, Lyell intended to start with a theory and then selectively search for facts that supported his preconceived idea.

Lyell worked overtime at torturing the evidence to fit into his theoretical framework. If the geological facts appeared to contradict absolute uniformity, Lyell’s favorite trick was to dismiss the evidence as inconclusive. In the nineteenth century geologists found fossilized ferns on the frigid island of Sptizbergen, north of Iceland. If tropical plants once grew north of the Arctic Circle, it was evidence of dramatic or even catastrophic climate change. But such change was antithetical to Lyell’s rigid uniformitarianism. Confronted with apparently irrefutable evidence of climate change, Lyell confessed “I have tried in all my travels to persuade myself that the evidence was inconclusive.”

Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection is nothing but the uniformitarian geology of Hutton and Lyell applied to biology. No one questions natural selection. The fact that those organisms who are best adapted to their environment are the ones that survive and reproduce is a virtual tautology. But that doesn’t answer the critical question. Does natural selection have the creative power to account for the dramatic changes we see in the fossil record?

Darwin himself was aware of the problem. He characterized the lack of intermediate forms in the fossil record as “the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against the theory.” Following Lyell’s example, Darwin argued that if the geologic evidence failed to match his theory, it was because the fossil record was too fragmentary to be conclusive. He devoted an entire chapter of Origin of Species to what he termed the “imperfection of the geological record.”

The fossil or geological record is indeed incomplete. In the year 1859, Darwin’s argument was plausible. But more than a hundred and fifty years of fossil collecting has not produced the missing fossils or corroborated Darwin’s theory. Transitional fossils remain rare. Life on Earth for the last several hundred million years has been characterized by stasis punctuated by episodic and rapid change.

None of this is an argument for supernaturalism. There are many scientific alternatives to natural selection. Endosymbiotic theory proposes that multi-celled organisms arose not through natural selection, but through the interaction of single-celled bacteria. We beginning to become aware that horizontal gene transfer may have played an important role in evolution. We don’t know how life began, and we don’t understand all the mechanisms by which life evolved on Earth. And we most certainly are not aware of what we don’t know. It is relatively easy for us to assess the extent of our knowledge, but impossible to fathom the extent of our ignorance.

Instead of dogmatically insisting that we have all the answers, we ought to be highlighting gaps in our knowledge. And there are many. Thomas Kuhn wrote that discovery in science “commences with the awareness of anomaly.” By “anomaly,” Kuhn meant an area where facts do not match theory. We can’t make positive progress unless we first focus on the negative. This is the lesson that Socrates taught in the fifth century BC.

In 2008, I published a critique of intelligent design theory in the peer-reviewed journal Earth Science Reviews. I concluded that intelligent design cannot be construed as a scientific theory, and that the apparent goal of the intelligent design movement was to restore Christian theology as the queen of the sciences.

But I also argued that to the extent creationists were highlighting areas in which scientific theory was inadequate they were doing better science than biologists. We ought to stop pretending that science has all the answers. Science is an empirical system of knowledge, and we never have all the data. It is the fate of every scientific theory to be superseded. Even the invincible edifice of Newtonian mechanics crumbled before the onslaught of relativity theory.

And that’s why I signed the Discovery Institute’s Dissent from Darwinism. Not because I’m a creationist, but because I’m a scientist. Religion is conservative and dogmatic. But science is progressive and skeptical. We can’t save science by turning it into religion.

David Deming [send him mail] is associate professor of arts and sciences at the University of Oklahoma, and the author of Science and Technology in World History, Vols. 1 & 2.

The validity
of warming predictions depends upon the questionable reliability
of computer models of the climate system. But Earth’s climate system
is complex and poorly understood. And the integrity of the computer
models cannot be demonstrated or even tested. To anyone with an
awareness of the nature and limitations of scientific knowledge,
it must appear that the human race is repeating a foolish mistake
from the past. We have been down this road before, most notably
in the latter half of the nineteenth century when it appeared that
mathematics and physics had conclusively answered the question of
the Earth’s age. At that time, a science that had been definitely
“settled” fell apart in the space of a few years. The mathematical
models that appeared to be so certain proved to be completely, even
ridiculously wrong.

The age of
the Earth is one of the great questions that have puzzled people
for thousands of years. In Meteorologica,
Aristotle (384–322 BC) asserted that the world was eternal. But
with the advent of Christianity and Islam, scholars began to assume
that humanity was coeval with the Creation of the world. It followed
that the age of the Earth could be estimated from a careful examination
of sacred writings.

The first person
to make a quantitative estimate of the Earth’s age was the Islamic
scientist al-Biruni (c. 973–1050). al-Biruni based his chronology
on the Hindu, Jewish, and Christian religious scriptures. He divided
the history of the world into eras, and concluded that it had been
less than ten thousand years since the Creation.

Working in
the tradition begun by al-Biruni, Bishop James Ussher (1581–1686)
estimated the age of the Earth by meticulously studying the Bible
and other historical documents. In The Annals of the World Deduced
from the Origin of Time, Ussher pinpointed the date of Creation
as the “night preceding the 23rd of October, 4004 BC.” Ussher’s
scholarship was impressive, and his dates were accepted as the standard
chronology. Bible editors began to place Ussher’s dates in the margins
of their texts.

Isaac Newton
(1642–1727), the greatest scientist of the age, was also a Biblical
fundamentalist who believed in a young Earth. Newton explained to
his nephew, John Conduitt, that the Earth could not be old because
all human technology was of recent invention. Like Ussher, Newton
wrote his own universal history, Chronology
of Ancient Kingdoms Amended, that was published posthumously
in 1728.

The procedures
for establishing a scientific estimate of the age of the Earth were
laid out in the seventeenth century by the Danish anatomist, Nicolaus
Steno (1638–1686). Steno was the first person to state unequivocally
that the history of the Earth was not to be found in human chronicles,
but in the Earth itself. Steno’s principles of geologic investigation
became the basis for establishing the relative age of rock sequences
and the foundation of historical geology.

Armed with
Steno’s principles, eighteenth century naturalists began to seriously
consider the implications of the rock record. It became apparent
to them that an immense amount of time was required to deposit the
rock layers that covered the Earth’s surface.

One of the
first to recognize the scope of geologic time was the Scottish philosopher
James Hutton (1726–1797). In the year 1788, Hutton was accompanied
on a field trip by his friend, the mathematician, John Playfair
(1748–1819). They traveled up the coastline of Scotland to
Siccar Point, and Hutton described the history implied by the sequence
of rocks exposed there. After listening to Hutton’s exposition,
Playfair later wrote “the mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so
far into the abyss of time.”

By the time
Charles Darwin (1809–1882) published Origin
of Species
in 1859, geologists were of the opinion that the Earth was practically,
although not literally, of infinite age. With infinite time at this
disposal, Darwin was able to invoke the slow mechanism of natural
selection as an explanation for the organic evolution evidenced
in the fossil record.

To demonstrate
the vast extent of geologic time, Darwin offered the erosion of
the Weald, a seaside cliff in England, as an offhand example. Darwin
assumed an erosion rate of an inch a century, and then extrapolated
that some 300 million years were apparently necessary to explain
the total amount of erosion that had occurred.

But Darwin’s
estimated erosion rate of one inch per century was little more than
speculation. The number was unconstrained by any measurement or
scientific observation. Nineteenth-century geologists lacked any
quantitative method for establishing dates. The rocks of the Earth’s
crust might represent the passage of ten million years. But just
as easily, the amount of time could have been a hundred, a thousand,
or ten thousand million years.

Darwin and
his geological colleagues were soon taken to the woodshed by the
greatest physicist of the nineteenth century, William Thomson (1824–1907).
Better known as Lord Kelvin, Thomson was a man of prodigious gifts
who possessed enormous intellectual stature. He published his first
scientific paper at age sixteen, and had been appointed a chaired
professor at the University of Glasgow at the precocious age of
twenty-two.

In 1861, Lord
Kelvin began to seriously address the question of dating the Earth.
He was aware that the Earth radiated internal heat. This process
could not have been going on forever. By maintaining that the Earth
was infinitely old, the geologists in effect were postulating that
energy was not conserved. This violated the First Law of Thermodynamics,
and Kelvin was aroused to do battle.

In the nineteenth
century, the only known source for the internal heat of the Earth
was the original mechanical heat of accretion. Reasoning that the
Earth had been molten at the time of its formation, but cooling
ever since, Kelvin was able to construct an elegant mathematical
model that constrained the age of the Earth on the basis of its
measured geothermal gradient. Much the same method is used today
by coroners who estimate the time of death by taking the temperature
of a cadaver.

In 1862, Kelvin
published his analysis in a paper titled On
the Secular Cooling of the Earth. He arrived at a best estimate
for the age of the Earth of 100 million years. Kelvin’s estimate
was no idle speculation. It was based on a precise mathematical
model constrained by laboratory measurements and the laws of thermodynamics.

Kelvin attacked
Darwin directly. He raised the question: were the laboratory measurements
and mathematical calculations in error, or was it more likely “that
a stormy sea, with possibly channel tides of extreme violence, should
encroach on a chalk cliff 1,000 times more rapidly than Mr. Darwin’s
estimate of one inch per century?”

Darwin was
devastated. He wrote to his mentor, Charles Lyell, “for heaven’s
sake take care of your fingers; to burn them severely, as I have
done, is very unpleasant.” Geologists were left sputtering. They
had no effective rebuttal to Kelvin’s calculations. Within a few
years, the geological establishment began to line up with Lord Kelvin.
Among the influential converts was Archibald Geikie, President of
both the British Association for the Advancement of Science and
the Geological Society of London.

Researchers
began to look for evidence that would confirm Kelvin’s calculations.
In 1865, Geologist Samuel Haughton had estimated the age of the
Earth as 2300 million years, a number reasonably close to the modern
value of 4500 million years. But under the influence of Kelvin’s
authority, in 1878 Haughton drastically shortened his earlier calculation
to 153 million years.

A lone voice
of dissent was raised by the biologist, Thomas Huxley (1825–1895).
Huxley pointed out that there was a fundamental weakness in Kelvin’s
mathematical model. “Mathematics may be compared to a mill of exquisite
workmanship, which grinds you stuff of any degree of fineness; but,
nevertheless, what you get out depends on what you put in.” Put
in more modern terms, Huxley’s observation amounted to “garbage
in, garbage out.”

But as the
end of the nineteenth century approached, the scientific community
was beginning to regard Kelvin’s estimate of 100 million years as
a near certainty. Writing in the American Journal of Science
in 1893, geologist Warren Upham characterized Kelvin’s estimate
of the age of the Earth as the most “important conclusion in the
natural sciences…[that] has been reached during this century.”

The science
was definitely settled in 1899 by the Irish physicist, John Joly
(1857–1933). Joly hit upon a robust method for calculating the age
of the Earth that was entirely different from Kelvin’s. Joly’s calculation
was childishly simple, yet apparently foolproof. He estimated the
age of the Earth by dividing the total salt content of the oceans
by the rate at which salt was being carried to the sea by the rivers.
He found that it would take 80 to 90 million years for the ocean’s
salt to accumulate.

In consideration
of the uncertainties involved, Joly’s age estimate was essentially
identical to Thomson’s. With different methods yielding the same
result, it seemed evident that the result was conclusive: the Earth
was 100 million years old. It seemed that to deny this reality,
was to deny not only the authority of the scientific establishment
but the very laws of nature themselves.

The ingenious
calculations of Kelvin and Joly were soon to be overturned by an
improbable empiricism. In the thirteenth century, modern science
began when philosophers came to the realization that logic alone
could never uncover the secrets of the cosmos, no matter how seductive
its appeal. Contemplation of the mysterious properties of the magnet
convinced Roger Bacon and his contemporaries that nature contained
occult or hidden forces that could never be discerned or anticipated
rationally, only discovered experimentally.

In 1896, Henri
Becquerel accidentally discovered radioactivity when he found that
photographic plates were exposed when placed next to certain minerals.
By 1904, it became apparent that there were radioactive minerals
inside the Earth releasing heat. Lord Kelvin’s assumption of no
internal heat sources was wrong. At the beginning of the twentieth
century, it was not even clear if the Earth was cooling or heating.
Thomson’s calculations were precise, but he had no way of knowing
about radioactivity.

Radioactivity
also provided a rigorous way to calculate the age of the Earth.
The accepted modern estimate for the age of the Earth is 4500 million
years. The nineteenth-century estimate of 100 million years that
seemed so certain was wrong, not just by 20 or 30 percent, but by
a factor of 45. In retrospect, the reason that Thomson’s estimates
had been independently confirmed is that geologists looked for data
that would support Thomson’s physics. The consensus that had emerged
was the product of a human psychological process, not objective
science. The nature of science is such that people who look for
confirming evidence will always find it.

Compared to
modern climate models, William Thomson’s models were simple, and
contained only a few assumptions. In contrast, global warming models
are hideously complex, and contain numerous hidden assumptions,
many of which are highly uncertain. The most significant of these
is whether water vapor will exert a negative or positive feedback
on the warming induced by carbon dioxide. All the major climate
models assume the feedback will be positive, exaggerating any possible
warming. But recent research indicates the feedback may be negative.
We don’t know.

There is also
much we do not understand about why Earth’s climate changes. It
is possible that cosmic rays, modulated by the Sun’s magnetic field,
cool Earth by inducing the formation of clouds. We don’t know why
Ice Ages end so spectacularly and suddenly. Once they begin, Ice
Ages should continue indefinitely, as cooling is reinforced by a
number of positive feedbacks.

We ought to
be intelligent enough to acknowledge that we don’t know what we
don’t know. Science is never settled. We should keep in mind
Seneca’s admonition. “Nature does not reveal all her secrets at
once. We imagine we are initiated in her mysteries: we are, as yet,
but hanging around her outer courts.”

There has never
been a time when the need for understanding the limits and nature
of scientific knowledge is so compelling, or the ramifications of
ignorance so consequential. Those who ignore history are apt to
repeat its mistakes.

December
3, 2009

David
Deming [send him mail] is a
geologist and associate professor of arts and sciences at the University
of Oklahoma. His books on the history of science, Origin of Science
I and II, are scheduled to be published by McFarland in 2010.

As I write,
satellite data show that the mean
global temperature is the same that it was in 1979. The extent
of global
sea ice is also unchanged from 1979. Since the end of the last
Ice Age, sea level has risen more than a hundred meters. But for
the last three years, there has been no rise in sea
level. If the polar ice sheets are melting, why isn’t sea level
rising? Global warming is supposed to increase the severity and
frequency of tropical storms. But hurricane
and typhoon activity is at a record low.

Every year
in the US, more than forty thousand people are killed in traffic
accidents. But not one single person has ever been killed by global
warming. The number of species that have gone extinct from global
warming is exactly zero. Both the Antarctic and Greenland Ice Sheets
are stable. The polar bear population is increasing. There has been
no increase in infectious disease that can be attributed to climate
change. We are not currently experiencing more floods, droughts,
or forest fires.

In short, there
is no evidence of any type to support the idea that we are entering
an era when significant climate change is occurring and will cause
the deterioration of either the natural environment or the human
standard of living.

Why do people
think the planet is warming? One reason is that the temperature
data from weather stations appear to be hopelessly contaminated
by urban heat effects. A survey
of the 1221 temperature stations in the US by meteorologist
Anthony Watts and his colleagues is now more than 80 percent complete.
The magnitude of putative global warming over the last 150 years
is about 0.7 C. But only 9 percent of meteorological stations
in the US are likely to have temperature errors lower than 1 C.
More than two-thirds of temperature sensors used to estimate global
warming are located near artificial heating sources such as air
conditioning vents, asphalt paving, or buildings. These sources
are likely to introduce artifacts greater than 2 C into the
temperature record.

Another cause
of global warming hysteria is the infiltration of science by ideological
zealots who place politics above truth. Earlier this month, the
Obama administration issued a report
that concluded global warming would have a number of deleterious
effects on the US. In 1995, one of the lead authors of this report
told me that we had to alter the historical temperature record by
“getting rid” of the Medieval Warm Period.

The Obama report
refers to — six times — the work of a climate scientist named Stephen
H. Schneider. In 1989, Schneider told Discover magazine that
“we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic
statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have.”
Schneider concluded “each of us has to decide what the right balance
is between being effective and being honest.” Schneider’s position
is not unusual. In 2007, Mike Hulme, the founding director of the
Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research in Britain, told the
Guardian newspaper that “scientists and politicians must
trade truth for influence.”

While releasing
a politicized report that prostitutes science to politics, the Obama
administration simultaneously suppressed an internal EPA report
that concluded there were “glaring inconsistencies” between the
scientific data and the hypothesis that carbon dioxide emissions
were changing the climate.

If we had an
appreciation for history, we would not be fooled so easily. It has
all happened before, albeit on a smaller scale in an age where people
had more common sense. On May 19, 1912, the Washington Post
posed these questions: “Is the climate of the world changing? Is
it becoming warmer in the polar regions?” On November 2, 1922, the
Associated Press reported that “the Arctic Ocean is warming
up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are
finding the waters too hot.” On February 25, 1923, the New York
Times concluded that “the Arctic appears to be warming up.”
On December 21, 1930, the Times noted that “Alpine glaciers
are in full retreat.” A few months later the New York Times
concluded that there was “a radical change in climatic conditions
and hitherto unheard of warmth” in Greenland. About the only thing
that has changed at the Times since 1930 is that no one working
there today is literate enough to use the word “hitherto.”

After the warm
weather of the 1930s gave way to a cooling trend beginning in 1940,
the media began speculating on the imminent arrival of a new Ice
Age. We have now come full circle, mired in a hopeless cycle of
reincarnated ignorance. H. L. Mencken understood this process when
he explained “the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the
populace alarmed by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them
imaginary.”

June
29, 2009

David
Deming [send him mail] is a
geophysicist and associate professor of Arts and Sciences at the
University of Oklahoma.

In the early
nineteenth century, the British colonized Southeast Africa. The
native Xhosa resisted, but suffered repeated and humiliating defeats
at the hands of British military forces. The Xhosa lost their independence
and their native land became an English colony. The British adopted
a policy of westernizing the Xhosa. They were to be converted to
Christianity, and their native culture and religion was to be wiped
out. Under the stress of being confronted by a superior and irresistible
technology, the Xhosa developed feelings of inadequacy and inferiority.
In this climate, a prophet appeared.

In April of
1856, a fifteen-year-old girl named Nongqawuse heard a voice telling
her that the Xhosa must kill all their cattle, stop cultivating
their fields, and destroy their stores of grain and food. The voice
insisted that the Xhosa must also get rid of their hoes, cooking
pots, and every utensil necessary for the maintenance of life. Once
these things were accomplished, a new day would magically dawn.
Everything necessary for life would spring spontaneously from the
earth. The dead would be resurrected. The blind would see and the
old would have their youth restored. New food and livestock would
appear in abundance, spontaneously sprouting from the earth. The
British would be swept into the sea, and the Xhosa would be restored
to their former glory. What was promised was nothing less than the
establishment of paradise on earth.

Nongqawuse
told this story to her guardian and uncle, Mhlakaza. At first, the
uncle was skeptical. But he became a believer after accompanying
his niece to the spot where she heard the voices. Although Mhlakaza
heard nothing, he became convinced that Nongqawuse was hearing the
voice of her dead father, and that the instructions must be obeyed.
Mhlakaza became the chief prophet and leader of the cattle-killing
movement.

News of the
prophecy spread rapidly, and within a few weeks the Xhosa king,
Sarhili, became a convert. He ordered the Xhosa to slaughter their
cattle and, in a symbolic act, killed his favorite ox. As the hysteria
widened, other Xhosa began to have visions. Some saw shadows of
the resurrected dead arising from the sea, standing in rushes on
the river bank, or even floating in the air. Everywhere that people
looked, they found evidence to support what they desperately wanted
to be true.

The believers
began their work in earnest. Vast amounts of grain were taken out
of storage and scattered on the ground to rot. Cattle were killed
so quickly and on such an immense scale that vultures could not
entirely devour the rotting flesh. The ultimate number of cattle
that the Xhosa slaughtered was 400,000. After killing their livestock,
the Xhosa built new, larger kraals to hold the marvelous new beasts
that they anticipated would rise out of the earth. The impetus of
the movement became irresistible.

The resurrection
of the dead was predicted to occur on the full moon of June, 1856.
Nothing happened. The chief prophet of the cattle-killing movement,
Mhlakaza, moved the date to the full moon of August. But again the
prophecy was not fulfilled.

The cattle-killing
movement now began to enter a final, deadly phase, which its own
internal logic dictated as inevitable. The failure of the prophecies
was blamed on the fact that the cattle-killing had not been completed.
Most believers had retained a few cattle, chiefly consisting of
milk cows that provided an immediate and continuous food supply.
Worse yet, there was a minority community of skeptical non-believers
who refused to kill their livestock.

The fall planting
season came and went. Believers threw their spades into the rivers
and did not sow a single seed in the ground. By December of 1856,
the Xhosa began to feel the pangs of hunger. They scoured the fields
and woods for berries and roots, and attempted to eat bark stripped
from trees. Mhlakaza set a new date of December 11 for the fulfillment
of the prophecy. When the anticipated event did not occur, unbelievers
were blamed.

The resurrection
was rescheduled yet again for February 16, 1857, but the believers
were again disappointed. Even this late, the average believer still
had three or four head of livestock alive. The repeated failure
of the prophecies could only mean that the Xhosa had failed to fulfill
the necessary requirement of killing every last head of cattle.
Now, they finally began to complete the killing process. Not only
cattle were slaughtered, but also chickens and goats. Any viable
means of sustenance had to be destroyed. Any cattle that might have
escaped earlier killing were now slaughtered for food.

Serious famine
began in late spring of 1857. All the food was gone. The starving
population broke into stables and ate horse food. They gathered
bones that had lay bleaching in the sun for years and tried to make
soup. They ate grass. Maddened by hunger, some resorted to cannibalism.
Weakened by starvation, family members often had to lay and watch
dogs devour the corpses of their spouses and children. Those who
did not die directly from hunger fell prey to disease. To the end,
true believers never renounced their faith. They simply starved
to death, blaming the failure of the prophecy on the doubts of non-believers.

By the end
of 1858, the Xhosa population had dropped from 105,000 to 26,000.
Forty to fifty-thousand people starved to death, and the rest migrated.
With Xhosa civilization destroyed, the land was cleared for white
settlement. The British found that those Xhosa who survived proved
to be docile and useful servants. What the British Empire had been
unable to accomplish in more than fifty years of aggressive colonialism,
the Xhosa did to themselves in less than two years.

Western civilization
now stands on the brink of repeating the experience of the Xhosa.
Since the advent of the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth
century, Europe and North America have enjoyed the greatest prosperity
ever known on earth. Life expectancy has doubled. In a little more
than two hundred years, every objective measure of human welfare
has increased more than in all of previous human history.

But Western
Civilization is coasting on an impetus provided by our ancestors.
There is scarcely anyone alive in Europe or America today who believes
in the superiority of Western society. Guilt and shame hang around
our necks like millstones, dragging our emasculated culture to the
verge of self-immolation. Whatever faults the British Empire-builders
may have had, they were certain of themselves.

Our forefathers
built a technological civilization based on energy provided by carbon-based
fossil fuels. Without the inexpensive and reliable energy provided
by coal, oil, and gas, our civilization would quickly collapse.
The prophets of global warming now want us to do precisely that.

Like the prophet
Mhlakaza, Al Gore promises that if we stop using carbon-based energy,
new energy technologies will magically appear. The laws of physics
and chemistry will be repealed by political will power. We will
achieve prosperity by destroying the very means by which prosperity
is created.

While Western
Civilization sits confused, crippled with self-doubt and guilt,
the Chinese are rapidly building an energy-intensive technological
civilization. They have 2,000 coal-fired power plants, and are currently
constructing new ones at the rate of one a week. In China, more
people believe in free-market economics than in the US. Our Asian
friends are about to be nominated by history as the new torchbearers
of human progress.

May
13, 2009

David
Deming [send him mail] is associate
professor of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oklahoma.

DIGG THIS

It is apparent
that our country is tied in a knot. Bogged down in two foreign wars,
we now find ourselves with an economic crisis at home. I have some
modest proposals that I believe will solve many of our problems.

Like many people,
I’m baffled at the reluctance of the Iraqis to embrace the democratic
system we are seeking to impose on them. Admittedly, a western-style
liberal democracy is entirely foreign to their culture and religion.
But this is no reason to reject our assistance, especially when
we accompany our blessings with high explosives. What can you do
with unreasonable people? History provides the answer.

The person
who really knew how to deal with the Middle East was Alexander the
Great. Alexander had the funny idea that when you make war, you
should defeat your enemy, not yourself. He also expected to turn
a profit, and would accept nothing less than complete victory. When
the cities of Tyre and Gaza declined to be conquered, Alexander
besieged them, killed all who resisted, and sold the survivors into
slavery. Selling defeated enemies to the slave merchant was not
only profitable, but a humane alternative to their execution. Since
the Iraqis are being obstinate, I suggest we sell the entire population
of twenty-eight million – men, women, and children – into slavery.
Once Iraq has been emptied of its troublesome native population,
we can lease it to Exxon-Mobile with the understanding that they
are to provide the US with oil in return for a fair profit. Energy
crisis solved!

A minor impediment
to this plan is the regrettable fact there is currently no market
for slaves because no nation in the world today officially permits
slavery. However, I believe many third-world countries could be
intimidated into changing their policies by threat of nuclear bombardment.
The proper way to begin would probably be to make an example of
an especially obnoxious regime. I suggest detonating a small atomic
bomb on the site of the presidential palace in Zimbabwe. This would
have the desirable side effect of rewarding us with the undying
gratitude of the Zimbabwean people. Some people might express horror
at the prospect of using atomic weapons. But a little nuclear chastisement
never hurt anyone. Look at what it did for Japan. The angry militaristic
nation that bombed Pearl Harbor was turned into a productive and
peaceful country that supplies us with marvelous cameras.

When Iraqi
oil has been utterly depleted, the real estate could be sold to
Israel. The sale of slaves, oil, and land would thus turn an unprofitable
and ill-advised venture into a lucrative and happy enterprise.

Other opportunities
suggest themselves. When Ronald Reagan invaded Grenada in 1983,
the war was won handily in fifteen minutes. The hostile Grenadans
were successfully subdued, and have not bothered us since. By picking
a war he could win, Reagan proved himself smarter than George Bush.
But I think we could do better still by invading a country that
was not only pathetically weak, but rich.

Conquering
Canada would be a piece of cake. Technically, they have a military,
but realistically the only opposition will come from the Mounted
Police. There will be no problem with the population, because the
Canadians have disarmed themselves with gun-control policies. Certainly,
the element of surprise would be on our side. By the time the Canadians
woke to the tanks in their streets, it would be all over. The invasion
could be morally justified by the fact that in some places in Canada
there are people who (gasp) speak French.

Having quickly
subdued Canada, we could then turn it into a satrapy, letting the
Canadians do whatsoever they pleased, so long as they paid us a
stiff tax. The income from Canada could be used to provide all US
citizens with free medical services. Health care crisis solved!

I’m aware that
my modest proposals may rouse the indignation of the world, especially
that of our friends, the Europeans. But in fact I am only proposing
that we fulfill the expectations of our continental colleagues,
as they already consider Americans to be both barbarous and ignorant.
Europeans, in contrast, are the most moral and enlightened people
on earth. It is true that in past centuries they burned people alive
for having the wrong religion, or for the dastardly crime of thinking
the wrong thoughts. But our dear friends have made considerable
progress. In the last century, they set the standard by blessing
humanity with World War I, World War II, and the Holocaust. Can
we do any less?

October
14, 2008

David
Deming [send him mail]
is an associate professor of Arts and Sciences at the University
of Oklahoma, but his opinions do not necessarily represent those
of the University.