Adam Smith and Gordon Gekko

In the movie Wall Street, Gordon Gekko (played by Michael Douglas) is a wealthy, unscrupulous corporate raider. Gekko is driven by greed, and he is not ashamed to admit this. In one scene, Gekko delivers a speech that has become famous:

Greed, for the lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind.

This speech isn’t altogether unrealistic; some (many?) people think that Gordon Gekko was onto something. For example, during a commencement speech in 1986, stock trader Ivan Boesky said something similar: “Greed is all right, by the way. I want you to know that. I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself.” This comment was greeted with laughter and applause — at the University of California, Berkeley, no less!

Adam Smith — the 18th-century Scottish philosopher who is widely viewed as the father of capitalism — is often cited to justify the “greed is good” philosophy. For example, here is an article in The Economist characterizing Adam Smith as a proponent of greed:

Feminism and the Family

I have for quite some time considered myself a feminist, although I don’t think that I have seriously considered what that means. I suppose that I have subconsciously defined feminism in the same way as historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich: “A feminist is a person who believes in equality between the sexes, who recognizes discrimination against women and who is willing to work to overcome it.” Who could argue with that?

But many people whom I love and respect have negative feelings about feminism, sometimes intensely so. And feminism is also quite unpopular. A 2015 Vox poll found that only 18 percent of Americans call themselves feminists. In a 2016 YouGov poll, the percentage was only slightly higher (26 percent).

I read Mona Charen’s new book, Sex Matters: How Modern Feminism Lost Touch with Science, Love, and Common Sense, because I wanted to better understand why so many people are reluctant to support (or, in some cases, are highly critical of) feminism.

At its core, Sex Matters is a blistering critique of the dominant perspectives in our culture regarding various issues related to sex, sexuality, and the family (a critique with which I largely agree). To the extent that feminism has contributed to that perspective, Sex Matters is also a critique of feminism.

Doubting Materialism

Materialism is the theory that matter is all that exists. From a materialist’s perspective, all aspects of mind and consciousness — including our thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and intentions — are believed to result from nothing more than electrochemical impulses in our brains. A corollary of this perspective is that many aspects of our everyday human experience – including mental causation, free will, and our sense of self – are mere illusions, simple by-products of our neural and bodily machinery. The materialist viewpoint was articulated rather bluntly by Francis Crick (co-discoverer of the structure of DNA), who said: “‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.” Or, as Marvin Minsky (one of the pioneers in the field of artificial intelligence) put it: “The human brain is just a computer that happens to be made out of meat.”

The materialist perspective contrasts rather sharply with the religious belief that human beings are children of God. While different religions may teach different things about exactly what it means to be a child of God, I think it’s safe to say that most, if not all, religions agree that humans are much more than computers made of meat.

So it’s not surprising that a religious person like myself would be skeptical of materialism. It is, however, surprising that someone like NYU philosophy professor Thomas Nagel would be skeptical of materialism. Nagel, you see, is a committed atheist. He has expressed this rather forcefully, saying: “It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.” 

And yet, in his book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, Nagel confesses that

A Compelling Portrait of Jesus, Aided by Scholarship

When their daughter returned from studying abroad at the BYU Jerusalem Center, James and Judith McConkie found themselves wanting to learn more about the actual, historical Jesus — the man who lived in first-century Palestine. In response, they turned to something that is often overlooked by Mormons: biblical scholarship. And I don’t just mean books written by BYU professors; I mean works from respected non-LDS scholars like N.T. Wright, John Dominic Crossan, and Marcus Borg, and even secular scholars like Bart Ehrman.

What value did the McConkies see in biblical scholarship? They wanted to understand the historical context of Jesus’s life. They were concerned that, without understanding the historical context, they would run the risk of devising “a self-validating Jesus who just happened to agree with our view of things.” They remind us that

during the Civil War, the Confederate States often justified slavery by quoting the New Testament and the Apostle Paul. Mormons used the same sources to justify priesthood restrictions. If Jesus and his disciples could be commandeered to support such practices, there is no limit to what his name might be used to justify. … 

Genetics & Scripture

I was previously aware that there is genetic evidence indicating that humans descend from a population of several thousand individuals (probably about 10,000) rather than just two. In Adam and the Genome: Reading Scripture after Genetic Science, Dennis Venema (a biology professor and a Christian) explains this evidence in greater detail. The basic idea is that humans are so genetically diverse in the present day that a large ancestral population is needed to transmit that diversity to us. Venema describes a few of the methods scientists have used that support this conclusion:

• Allele diversity: With this method, scientists measure how many alleles (gene variants) are found in present-day humans. They then estimate the ancestral population size that would be needed to produce all those alleles given the human mutation rate and the mathematical probability of new mutations spreading in a population or being lost.
• Linkage disequilibrium: This method takes advantage of the fact that there is a well-characterized relationship between (a) the distance between two genes on a chromosome, and (b) the likelihood that “crossing over” (a process of chromosome breakage and rejoining) will occur between those genes. If two genes are located close to each other on the same chromosome, the alleles present at both locations tend to be inherited together (i.e., a crossing over event is unlikely to occur between them). So with this method, scientists look at the allele combinations that are found in present-day humans, and then they estimate the ancestral population size that would be needed to produce those combinations given the crossing-over frequency.
• Incomplete lineage sorting: This method exploits the fact that we expect the relatedness pattern of certain genes to sit at odds with what we expect on the basis of species relatedness. For example, although humans and chimpanzees are the closest living relatives of each other as species, we expect that some human genes will be closer matches to those of other great apes, such as gorillas. This allows scientists to infer what genetic variants were present in the common ancestral populations, which allows them to estimate population size.