The Boumediene Decision: SCOTUS Uncorks a Stinker

Vincent J. Curtis


19 June 08

On my return flight from Gitmo, I chanced to sit next to one of the “Habeas” lawyers, civilian lawyers who work pro-bono for the detainees.  With hours to kill and no other on-board entertainment, I struck up a conversation with him.  I wanted to understand why an American lawyer would work so hard on behalf of the enemy.

He didn’t want to talk to me at first, perceiving that I was a member of the media.  I pointed out that my tape recorder, pen, and notepad were packed away; that I hadn’t asked him his name, and that I just wanted to understand him.  He relented, and we discussed matters for over an hour before the conversation finally petered out.

By the end, I understood why he did not want to be identified or quoted.  In over an hour of conversation of trying to understand his motivation, he never once said, “Because I want justice for my client.”   He spent a lot of time arguing unfairness of process.  Now, process is not the same thing as justice, and for a while I thought that this lawyer was perhaps too fixated with the minutia of his profession and was missing the bigger picture.  By the end of the conversation, I believed that his motivation was two-fold: to strike a blow against the Bush Administration, and another for the interests of the legal profession.  The war on terrorism is a matter of major public policy, and the legal profession has been largely shut out of it.  That was his “big picture.”

In his dissent, Chief  Justice Roberts made these same points.

The Boumediene decision is the recent Supreme Court ruling that extended to the detainees held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the constitutional right to Habeas Corpus.  As a result of this decision, Osama bin Laden, if captured alive, now has the right to challenge his detention before a U.S. court as if he were an American citizen.  And the U.S. court has the authority under this decision to order his conditional release if it decides that he was unlawfully detained by the Bush Administration.  (The Boumediene decision failed to say how OBL’s conditional release would be handled administratively, or where he would go.  Like the other detainees, he would possess no passport, no money, and no place of residence.  Details like these are among the reasons why Justice Scalia, in his dissent, argued the case should be ruled ultra vires, that is, beyond the powers of the Court.)

            Except for that one provision denying detainees access to Habeas Corpus in the Military Commissions Act, 2006, the decision leaves intact all the provisions thought to provide the equivalent of Habeas that are contained in the Detainee Treatment Act of 2004.  The DTA was passed by Congress to address the concerns the Supreme Court expressed in its Rashul decision, and the DTA established the Combatant Status Review Tribunal and the Annual Review Tribunal which act as a Habeas equivalent, or so the Congress and the Administration thought.  On account of this, in his dissent, Chief Justice Roberts described the decision as a constitutional bait-and-switch.

            Captain Ted Fessel, USN, the Forward Director of the Office of Administrative Review of Detained Enemy Combatants, described these tribunals.  The CSRT and ART are administrative tribunals with legal underpinnings.  They are staffed by senior ranking military officers, one of whom is a military judge.  They are administrative, and therefore not adversarial.  No lawyers are allowed, except for the judge.  The job of the tribunal is to review all the evidence which justifies the continued detention of the individual under review, determine whether the individual continues to represent a military threat, and whether the individual possesses military intelligence of future value.

            If the detention of the individual can no longer be justified, his case is forwarded to the Pentagon where a Deputy Secretary of Defense renders a final decision on continued detention or release.  Under this process, over 500 detainees were released and another 60 or so are stuck in Gitmo because no country wants to accept them.  Only about 280 continue to be held as detainees, and of these about 80 will be charged with war crimes.

            In a Habeas hearing, the judge will hear nothing more or less than what the CRST/ART tribunals heard.  The judge would undoubtedly lack the military experience with which to assess the probity of the information before him, and he will have equally inexperienced lawyers before him arguing process.  If the judgment favors the plaintiff, that is if the decision runs contrary to that of the military tribunals, it would undoubtedly be on the grounds of process: the inadequacy, insufficiency, lack of probity of the material, and absence of witnesses.  Every release would stand as a condemnation of the Bush Administration; while every denial would testify to the uselessness of the Boumediene decision.

            The decision leaves in place the CSRT/ART process.  A Habeas hearing in civilian courts could to be in addition to those established by the DTA.  The Supreme Court blew up a port-a-potty and is leaving it to others to clean up the mess.

            In his dissent, Chief Justice Roberts pointed out that the detainees did not benefit from the decision, but lawyers did.  He wrote: “So who has won?  Not the detainees.  The Court’s analysis leaves them with only the prospect for further litigation to determine the content of their new habeas right, followed by further litigation to resolve their particular cases, followed by further litigation before the D.C. Circuit – where they could have started had they invoked the DTA procedure.”  The legal profession won because lawyers seized control of the release process and made it a matter of intense political interest.

            Justice Scalia, in his dissent, drew attention to the wider implications of the decision.  He wrote; “What drives today’s decision is….an inflated notion of judicial supremacy.”  Mocking the majority’s concern that “it would be possible for the political branches to govern without legal restraint,” he wrote, “[T]o put it more impartially, areas in which the legal determinations of the other branches will be (shudder!) supreme.”  Reversing the settled precedent of Eisentrager, this decision serves as precedent that nothing is ultra vires of the Supreme Court and that the Court now claims extra-territorial jurisdiction.  Aliens abroad have a right to ask the Supreme Court intervene on their behalf, and serves as precedent for claims to other constitutional rights.  “It sets our military commanders the impossible task of proving to a civilian court, under whatever standards this Court devises in the future, that evidence supports the confinement of each and every enemy prisoner.  The Nation will live to regret what the Court has done today.  I dissent.”

                                                                        -XXX-

 A version of this report was published in the Buffalo News.

The Strange World of Gitmo

Vincent J. Curtis


27 Feb 08
                                                                                               
 

 Situated on the south-east shore of Cuba, basking in a sub-tropical climate, justly called the “pearl of the Antilles,” Guantanamo Bay was the home of a quiet backwater of the US Navy.  Sure, refugees pouring out of Haiti were sheltered here in the mid-1990s, but the last of the important missions of the naval station had already decamped for the continental United States.  At the turn of the millennium, all that was going on at Gitmo was keeping the lights on.

            Then came 9/11.  The overthrow of the regime in Afghanistan produced a flood of al-Qaeda and Taliban captives, and a place to keep them was needed in a hurry.  A legacy of the Haitian refugee crisis was a camp for the criminal element named X-Ray.  Constructed of wire fencing and open to the elements, Camp X-Ray was pressed into service as a holding facility for the captives of the new global war on terrorism.

            X-Ray was no more than a stop-gap measure, and Camp Delta was set aside on the property of the Station as the place for the long-term detention facilities.  Camps One through Six were progressively assembled within Delta to incarcerate the unhappy guests of the US government.  Within six months, the detainee population was moved into Delta, and X-Ray now lies empty, abandoned, and overgrown with vines and grass.

            The detention facilities within Camp Delta resemble medium security and maximum security penitentiaries.  Camps 4, 5, and 6 are presently occupied, and the author was led to believe that Camps 2 and 3 are empty.  For security reasons, exact numbers of detainees in each camp are not released, but a total camp population of 277 was given at a recent press briefing.

            The detention camps are designed like penitentiaries because of the violence exhibited by the detainees.  Detainees routinely hurl feces, urine, semen, and spit at the guards, and many have physically attacked them.  Verbal assault is the norm.  The new detention facilities protect the guards from the detainees, and the detainees from each other.

            LTC Ed Bush of the Louisiana National Guard conducted me on a tour of three of the camps.  Bush is a little over six feet in height, trim and fit at about 200 pounds, appears to be in his middle 30s, has short blond hair, and is a friendly sort, unless you try to cross him.  He is a Public Affairs Officer for working for JFT-GTMO.  He has conducted many tours like mine before.

            Bush warned me that the service personnel in contact with the detainees wear nametags with job title or number on them but no name, most will not give me their names, and only a few will allow their faces to be photographed.  As we entered the camps, Bush himself pulled off his nametag, as did the other public affairs service personnel accompanying us.

This policy of anonymity is for two reasons, according to Bush.  First, fear of reprisal at home.  Al-Qaeda is known to monitor the web for any information they can gain and use against US service personnel, and no one wants his family threatened or hurt because of their duties in contact with the detainees.  And al-Qaeda has a long memory.

The second reason is that al-Qaeda personnel are trained to allege torture and abuse against their captors.  Bush drew my attention to the so-called “Manchester Document”, posted on the web, which is an al-Qaeda training manual found in Manchester, England.  If a detainee can read a nametag, he can allege that so-and-so abused him, with all the bad publicity and service inquiries that would ensue.  Easier to remain anonymous.

            We were joined at Camp 4 by “JTF XO.”  Camp 4 is operated like a medium security prison, and holds the “highly compliant” detainees.  Inmates are housed in barracks blocks, and are freely able to socialize with each other most of the time.  The detainees of Camp 4 enjoy a six thousand item library run by two professional librarians, according to one of the librarians, a civilian named Julie.  In addition, the detainees are taught to read and write in Arabic and English.  The classroom features a high definition TV, and the floor bears an arrow that points to Mecca.  A central yard features a small soccer pitch, and detainees are allowed up to twelve hours a day for recreation.  Detainees are kept informed of world events through a weekly newsletter that is posted in the recreation yard.  Laundry is seen hanging to dry on the fencing of the barracks blocks.

            Attached to Camp 4 is the Detention Hospital, which has a state of the art operating room and dental facility, a dispensary, six bed ward, and one hundred medical personnel.  The hospital is able to perform CAT scans and digital x-rays, send the data via the internet to medical experts stateside, and obtain a diagnosis, according to “DH SMO.”

“DH SMO” described himself as senior medical officer of the detention hospital. He would allow his picture to be taken, but would not give out his name.  He reported the median age of the detainee population to be in the upper thirties, and the medical problems he sees now are typical of men of that age: back pain, foot pain, diabetes, asthma, and hypertension.

              A Ph.D. psychologist, an army lieutenant who would not give me her name or allow me to take her picture, described the mental health of the detainee population.  The detainee population is in better mental condition than a comparable prison population in the United States.  Mental problems range from sleeping disorders, anxiety disorders, depression, to schizophrenia.  Only about five per cent of the detainees are on psychotropic medication such as Prozac, and none are currently symptomatic.

             Camps 5 and 6 are the maximum security holding facilities.  Detainees are kept in separate cells and are only allowed out for two hours per day for recreation.  Halal meals are prepared for them by the Delta kitchen, and they receive up to 4,800 calories a day.  Cells are eight feet by twelve feet in size, and have a bed, toilet, sink, desk, and seat.

             Each cell block in Camp 6 has an interrogation room.  The room is quite small: triangular in shape, probably eight feet on a side, and has a television and small fridge.  A small table separates the chair the detainee sits in from the three chairs the interrogators and translator sit in.  There are no klieg lights or rubber hoses, but there is an ankle shackle that is fixed to the floor.

           

Over 500 detainees have been released since 2004, according to Captain Theodore F. Fessel, USN.  The US Department of Defense established the Office for the Administrative Review of the Detention of Enemy Combatants, and Captain Fessel is the Forward Director.  He described the process.  The combatant status of each detainee was reviewed by a panel, and each year subsequent another review board hears reasons for continued detention.  

            Annually, a hearing is held to determine whether the detainee represents a continued threat, and whether the detainee possesses military intelligence of current value.  If the answer to either of these questions is yes, detention continues; if no, the detainee becomes a candidate for transfer or release.  The Deputy US Secretary of Defense, Gordon England, makes the final decision on whether the detainee is a candidate.  If a detainee is classed as a candidate for transfer or release, the matter is then turned over to the US State Department which must find a country that will accept the detainee, according to Fessel.

            These Annual Review Boards appear to operate like a three-member parole board rather than a court.  The process is non-adversarial, according to Fessel, and a detainee can attend his hearings if he wishes – not all of them do – and can make representations on his own behalf.

            Commissions trials will soon be in the news.  Military commissions were authorized by the US Congress and took the business of trying people like Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of 9/11, out of the hands of civilian US courts and placed it in the hands of the US military.  The commission of Canada’s Omar Khadr is already at the stage of preliminary defense motions.

            The Commissions are styled like a Court-Martial, and will be held in the secure but rustic facilities of Camp Justice on Guantanamo.

            To some observes, civilian US courts face an insuperable procedural dilemma in trying detainees because international terrorism is not an ordinary act of crime.  Possessing military intelligence, the detainees were not read Miranda rights or questioned with a lawyer present.  Three are known to have been waterboarded.  And it is not clear that enemy combatants captured in Afghanistan and held in Cuba possess Miranda or other rights under the US constitution. 

            Military courts-martial are less concerned with process than with getting at the truth.  US Congress believes the Commissions are a means of getting at the truth and of passing judgment in as fair a way as possible under the circumstances.  The process is rough and ready, but it is better than either raw “victor’s justice” and complete procedural deadlock.

            Many have called for Gitmo to be closed on account of bad publicity and allegations of abuse.  For abuse to take place there must be abusers.  At Gitmo, that finger can only point at members of the United States military, primarily sailors.  However, the most outstanding characteristic of the US military personnel on Gitmo is their high level of professionalism.  Nothing secret could be going on at Gitmo, and everybody there knows that the eyes of the world are upon them.  They know there is no margin for error.  Allegations of abuse ought to be viewed with skepticism.

            The budget for construction at Gitmo indicates that the facility will remain open and carrying on its mission for the duration of the Bush Administration and for a year into the next Administration.

-XXX –

A version of this report was published in the Kitchener-Waterloo Record.

Origin of the Universe and Origin of Life: the four postings below

Although I expend much of my writing on military affairs, I have occasionally ventured into commentating on areas of science.  The reason for this cross interest is not just my education as a scientist but because I believe that military theory can be organized into a rational science.

The four postings below are applications of scientific and philosophical rigor to two major scientific theories: the origin of the universe and Darwinian theory of the origins of life.

VJC.

Philosophical Problems with the Big Bang Theory

Vincent J. Curtis


30 October 2008

In its October 2rd 2008 issue, the National Post ran an article that covered the work of Sir Roger Penrose on the origins of the universe.  (“Big Bounce versus Big Bang, by Joseph Brean) The two major theories on the origin of the universe were the “Big Bang” theory and the “Pulsating Universe” theory (or “Big Bounce”), and Sir Roger subscribed to the latter.

Both theories are alike in that they hold that the universe we know today began as a singularity; that is, a single point which held all the matter/energy of the universe.  They differ in the ultimate fate of the universe: the pulsating theory holding that the universe will ultimately contract back into a singularity only to explode again; while the big bang theory is ambiguous as to whether the universe will continue to expand forever, or contract as the pulsating universe theory holds.

What was not discussed were the philosophical problems which both these theories have.  These problems are important because both the Big Bang and Pulsating Universe theories are as much about philosophy as they are about physics.  Both theories, in their own way, accept self-contradictory propositions in order to evade addressing what might be called “the God problem.”

The fundamental problem of both theories is that what they propose the universe began as - a singularity - makes it impossible for the universe we know today to exist.  Laymen, and physicists, should not ignore the fact that physics bases its principle theories of the origin of the universe on a set of propositions that are self-contradictory.

A singularity – a point – is indivisible and without volume.  If it had any size at all, even the size of the nucleus of an atom, a point would be infinitely divisible, as any segment of a line is infinitely divisible.  But a point is indivisible, and therefore without parts, for if it had parts, it would be divisible into those parts.

With a point, there is no up or down, no left or right, and no inwards or outwards.  If there were an inner and an outer to a point, then the point would be divisible into an inner and an outer, and a point is indivisible.  Hence, there is no in and out for a point.

Both theories propose that the universe began its expansion in a direction that did not exist and was meaningless at that moment.  Both theories require the universe to have done something that was physically impossible: move in an outwards direction at a time when “outwards” did not exist.  For an “outwards” to have existed, the universe would have had to have a finite, that is, a non-zero, volume: a contradiction to the proposition that the universe began as a singularity.  This is the first contradiction.

The second problem concerns motion.  The universe today is full of motion: galaxies, stars, planets, and molecules are all in motion.  But some things are at rest: the rock on the beach, for example.  Common experience, and Newton’s First Law of Motion, both confirm that dead matter does not self-initiate motion.  A thing at rest will stay at rest until acted upon by an outside force.  Only living things have a principle of self-initiated motion: the rock on the beach will stay on the beach until someone picks it up and skips it over the water.  So, lacking motion, what was it that caused the outward expansion and other motion of the universe?

The universe as a singularity could not be in motion.  Having no parts, there could be nothing internal moving that could initiate expansion.  Spontaneous nuclear fission is sometimes offered as the exception to the rule that dead matter cannot self-initiate motion.  Yet even within an atomic nucleus there is motion: protons, neutrons, and sub-nuclear particles do not remain in a state of rest with respect to each other.  But in a singularity, there are no parts and no internal motion, not even rotation.

So, what started motion?  Neither theory offers an explanation; only that it had to have happened, somehow.

The ancient Greek philosophers offered a theory that at the beginning of the universe all things were together and One.  Aristotle was familiar with it, and pointed out the problems inherent in the belief, which are not solved by either of the modern theories of physics.

To the problem of the origin of motion, Aristotle offered the theory of the Prime Mover, the Uncaused Cause, which is seen today as the beginnings of the philosophical proof of the existence of God.  Similar to the thrower who skips the stone across the water, a Prime Mover, an Uncaused Cause, which exists independent of the universe, had to be the initiator of the expansion of the universe, and be the origin of motion.

Aristotle was convinced of the existence of a Prime Mover not because of any religious beliefs, but because of his understanding of time and of the infinite.  There had to be a beginning to the sequence of events that led to the present time.  If there were no beginning because motion and the universe always had been, then, given the facts of the infinite, it would impossible to reach the present moment through an infinity of the past.  And since there had to be a beginning, there had to be a beginner of motion and a beginning cause in the chain of causation that leads from the beginning to today because the dead matter of the universe cannot cause itself to move out of a state of rest.

The idea that the universe began as a singularity is something of a dodge by modern physics.  If the universe began, not as a singularity, but as a thing of non-zero size, the size of a basketball or the size of the moon, the question would arise: how did this basketball, this moon-sized thing, come into being in the first place?  What caused its existence?  These “God-questions” are inconvenient to modern scientists for they are impossible to answer within the disciplines of science.  Somehow, starting the universe as exploding out of nothing seems satisfying enough to some to avoid having to confront the nature of a finite sized, pre-expansion universe.

The pulsating universe theory is also something of a dodge.  “Exploding out of nothing” has obvious philosophical problems that even a physicist cannot easily ignore.  By proposing that the universe always was and always will be, the pulsating universe theory evades having to ask how matter and energy came to be in the first place, because they had no origin: they always were.

It is here that the subtle difference in the handling of time between the two theories occurs.  With Big Bang, it is unclear whether time exists prior to expansion.  With Pulsating Universe, time must exist independently of the universe.

The Pulsating Universe theory falls afoul of science since it is inherently non-falsifiable.  There is no way to tell if a universe existed prior to our own, no more so than it is possible to tell what the shape of the bronze was prior to it being melted and cast into the form of a statue.  Having to pass through the condition of a singularity wipes away all trace of the prior character and even existence of the previous universe, as well as cause the extinction of all motion.  [This could represent a violation of the Law of Conservation of Angular Momentum of the present universe, though we cannot presume to know the laws of physics of a prior universe.]  Thus, insofar as science goes, Pulsating Universe theory is not science but a philosophical treatment of a weakness of the Big Bang theory: namely that of the cause of the origin of the singularity.  It also suffers from the problem concerning infinite time: the present cannot be reached through an infinity of the past.

One difference, that of whether this universe will expand forever or stop expanding and contract again, is not verifiable, and therefore places the question beyond the realm of science.  In the first place, the species of man, given the realities of evolution and of space travel, is unlikely to exist long enough to verify whether expansion will stop or not.  And given the mental gymnastics and self-contradiction needed to justify so-called “dark matter,” “dark energy,” and other dodges to “the God problem,” science may never be able to resolve definitively which of the two theories it prefers.

If one accepts a Big Bang with ultimate contraction, there is no principled reason to deny an infinite repetition of the phenomenon, with all the associated problems of reaching the present through an infinity of the past.  And if one holds that this universe is a one-off exception, then one is confronted with the major philosophical and scientific problem of “how come?”

Scientific disciplines have philosophical problems that lie at their origins.  The origin of the universe is the beginning of physics, and the origin of life is the beginning of biology.  Both these disciplines have issues with “the God problem” because they have within themselves no satisfactory explanation for the origin of their respective disciplines.  The Pulsating Universe theory of Sir Roger Penrose steps outside science in order to create a dodge for the fundamental problem of what, in the first place, caused the origin of the universe we know today, and neglects the problem of how one reaches the present through an infinity of the past.

Aristotle noted in his Metaphysics that sciences begin by assuming the existence of their sphere of knowledge, and only philosophy addresses the problem of what-is.  The origin of life and the origin of the universe are problems as much philosophical as they are scientific, and when Sir Roger Penrose speaks of the origin of the universe he speaks more as a philosopher than as a scientist.  As a committed scientist, he has a philosophical commitment against admitting to “the God problem.”

-          XXX –

“Origin of Life”: Status of the Theory

 
Vincent J. Curtis



16 May 11

Dr. David Deamer presented a lecture on May 10, 2011, entitled “Systems Biology, Synthetic Biology, and the Origin of Life” that was held in the Michael Degroote Center of Learning on the campus of McMaster University.

Dr. Deamer is a professor of biomolecular engineering at the University of California at Santa Cruz.  He is presently the Dr. Harry Lyman Hooker distinguished visiting professor at McMaster University, and presented this public lecture on behalf of the Origins Institute.  Dr. Deamer lists his research interests as the processes by which cellular life arose on the earth nearly four billion years ago.

The lecture was presented to approximately fifty people, most of whom were middle aged or older.  The lecture itself was presented in an elevated fashion appropriate for intelligent people somewhat knowledgeable on the subject.  It did not become a hard core technical presentation rich in jargon and digestible only by his doctoral students.  A pleasant and soft spoken gentleman, Dr. Deamer gave a lucid presentation that never attempted to hide or gloss over the weaknesses of the theory.  He allowed the listener to reach his own conclusions.

The current theory as presented by Dr. Deamer can be summarized briefly: after the formation of the earth, pre-formed organic matter fell from the heavens.  Then, after a succession of miracles, pre-biotic lipid-protein structures self-assembled, and these exhibited some of the properties of life.

The further step, from self-assembled lipid-protein structures to a cell which self-replicates and responds to stimuli, – another miracle - was not discussed in the lecture.

The present theory of the origin of life on earth does not hold that DNA came first, but rather that life began by the spontaneous creation of cell-like structures that included membranes as well as DNA.

The way Dr. Deamer used the term ‘self-assembled’ in his lecture was inaccurately suggestive.  Self-assembly is not the same thing as self-reproduction.  Water molecules could be said to self-assemble into the material we call ice, upon the removal of heat.  The example Dr. Deamer used was of soap bubbles being the product of ‘self-assembling’ soap molecules.  The phenomenon of soap bubbles, however, is well understood by the science of the thermodynamics of surfaces.  The molecules in the bubble assemble the way they do not from anything originating in ‘self’ but from the minimization of the Gibbs Free Energy of the system.  Though fun, there is nothing particularly wondrous about the formation of bubbles, for soap bubbles are not self-reproducing.  When he says that soap molecules are ‘self-assembling’, Deamer suggestively places the efficient cause of bubble formation in the wrong place.  Soap molecules are the material cause of soap bubbles; minimization of the Gibbs Free Energy is the efficient, and perhaps the final, cause.  Living things are the efficient cause of their own reproduction.

The current theory of the earth’s formation holds that it formed as an accretion of material from the cloud of matter that eventually condensed into the solar system we presently know, with a star at the center, and planets and asteroids orbiting around it.  Because of the early conditions of accretion, any organic matter on earth during this period would have been destroyed.  Thus it would have to be after the earth had substantially formed that pre-formed organic matter falling on meteors from space to the earth provided the necessary starting material for cells to form.

The reason why preformed organic matter is necessary to the formation of cells is that something is necessary to provide the vesicles in which the first primitive cells on earth could organize.  The example Dr. Deamer used was caprylic acid, an eight carbon, linear carboxylic acid.  On the surface of water this acid appears to form vesicle-like structures.  Dr. Deamer theorized that organic matter like that found on meteorites today fell to earth approximately four billion years ago and carried on them the precursor material necessary for the beginning of life on earth.

The word miracle is used here as a shorthand for a highly improbable event that needs to have occurred only once.

The problem with requiring the event to only occur once is that it removes the proposition from the realm of science.  Science is concerned with the reproducible, and something that only occurs once is not reproducible.  Yet to require an event to happen reproducibly raises the question of why is it not happening now?  Why is life not originating from dead matter now?  Thus the theory also requires that the process by which life originated, if it is reproducible, was destroyed by the present existence of life.

Experiments which attempt in five years to reproduce the origins of life that occurred over a span of 100 million years on earth raises the problem that the experimenter is acting as an “intelligent designer,” as was pointed out by one of the spectators.

These experiments which attempt to reproduce the beginning of life usually start with ammonia as part of the mix of precursor materials.  The trouble is that ammonia, or ‘fixed nitrogen’ as chemists call it, is the product of bacterial activity.  Mankind only figured out how to fix nitrogen at the beginning of the 20^th century, and so how an abundance of ammonia could be present before life began on earth is something that needs explaining.

Caprylic acid, which Dr. Deamer uses as an example of a molecule which self-assembles into vesicles under certain conditions, is also a product of biological activity.  A linear, eight carbon, terminal carboxylic acid does not occur in naturally when graphite, hydrogen, and oxygen are present together.  The organic matter that started life on earth had to come, according to the theory, from life that existed previously on other planets in other solar systems.  The theory of the origin of life on earth thus fails to answer the question of why life began at all.  It punts the question, saying it began somewhere else.

When asked if the theory he presented, however improbable, must be the way life originated on earth, Dr. Deamer said that there were other theories, one of which was that entire life forms were carried to earth on meteors, not just lifeless organic matter.  Thus the present theories of the original of life on earth fail the answer the more basic question of why life began at all.

Another scientific failing of the theories that life began elsewhere is that they set up an infinite regress even though the life of the universe is finite.  The universe is approximately 13 billion years old, and the life of the earth is 4.5 billion.  Because the elements carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulphur on earth are the products of a supernova, a star which formed these elements from hydrogen in the course of its life and then exploded, the earth is a second generation accretion of matter since the beginning of the universe.

A minimum of three solar generations are required to produce life on earth according to the theory: the first generation produced the carbon required for life, the second produced the first generation of living matter from that carbon of the first supernova, and then in the third generation the residual organic matter of the second generation fell to the earth four billion years ago after a second supernova destroyed the solar system containing the first life.  If the lifespan of a large star is six billion years, then the universe would have to be a minimum of 15 or 16 billion years old for this sequence to have occurred, not 13 billion.

The current theories on the origin of life on earth are highly unsatisfactory from the scientific point of view.  It would not be inaccurate to say that they merely put a scientific gloss to the concept of a miracle.

-          XXX –

Synthetic Life Claim causes Boost and Problems to Darwinism

Has Venter brought Frankenstein to life?

Vincent J. Curtis



24 May 2010

  

            Last month, scientists at the laboratories of genomics pioneer J. Craig Venter announced the creation of a “synthetic” bacteria.  Venter became renowned earlier this decade as the first man to completely map the human genome.   His research work lately has been attempting to decode the genomes of bacteria, and to synthesize them from base chemicals using the elaborate machinery and methods he developed in deciphering the entire human genome.

            The scientific news service SiliconRepublic.com report was typical, “beginning with information on a computer, four bottles of chemicals on a chemical synthesizer were used to construct the bacteria’s genes, Venter said, and the research has been deemed a landmark by many independent scientists and philosophers.”

            “The synthetic bacteria, which behaved like natural bacteria, have 14 ‘watermarks sequences’ attached to their genome – inert stretches of DNA added to distinguish them from their natural counterparts.”

            “We have passed through a critical psychological barrier,” Venter was quoted by the Financial Times, “It has changed my own thinking, both scientifically and philosophically, about life and how it works.”

            What the Ventor lab did was to decode the genome of a naturally occurring bacterium, replicate the genome synthetically in the laboratory from base chemicals, add several inert sequences to the manufactured DNA as markers, and then insert the manufactured genome into a living cell whose naturally occurring genome had been removed.  When the modified bacterium reproduced naturally, the reproductions contained the inert stretches of DNA that had originated in the laboratory.  Venter called the reproductions a “synthetic bacteria.”

            Venter did not go so far as to claim that he had created “synthetic life,” which would be untrue.  Although Venter said he created a “synthetic” cell, the word “hybrid” would be more accurate.  The claim of “synthetic” was bound to create the sensation it did, given the contention in biology today between Darwinism and the Intelligent Design schools of thought.

            “Synthetic life” is the holy grail of Darwinism and modern biology.  To manufacture life in the laboratory would establish philosophical materialism as the basis of biology, the same philosophical basis of modern physics.  Synthetically created life would establish that life could arise spontaneously from dead matter, and would lend credence to the belief of the Darwinist theory of the origin of life on earth.  That belief is that DNA, by sheer random chance, was produced in the primordial soup which was once the earth’s oceans, and began to reproduce.

            Previous to Sir Isaac Newton, the founder of modern physics, science was Aristotelian in outlook.  Before Newton, science looked for Final Causes, which answer to the question “for what purpose?”  Newton revolutionized the philosophical outlook of science.  By positing gravity as the cause for the planets orbiting the sun; and the moon, the earth; Newton directed science’s gaze at efficient causes.  Gravity, the efficient cause, explained why planets and moons moved as they did; science was not a method for answering the question of ‘the purpose’ of planetary motion.

            Implicitly, Newton placed the power of gravity in the matter, an arrangement philosophers call “materialism.”   Darwinism represents an attempt to place biology on the same philosophical footing of materialism as physics is.

            If whatever power the material possesses lies within the material itself, then life, in the materialist view, is nothing more than dead matter organized in such a way that the organization as a whole is capable of exhibiting such characteristics as growth, development, response to stimuli, and, under certain circumstances, reproduction.

            The father of biology was the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, who was not a materialist.  His views on biological life are set out in his works De Anima (On the Soul) and The Metaphysics. Aristotle conceived that a living thing constituted “substance,” which comprised matter and form.  The power of the substance lay within the form, while the matter was simply the thing in which the form manifested itself.  Substance required both matter and form to exist.

            Of the analytically separable components of the form, there was one element that Aristotle called the soul.  The presence of soul was what distinguished a living organism from that same organism, lifeless.  Aristotle believed that a living thing was not merely an assemblage of subcomponents; there existed a unity and function in the organism separate and apart from the assembly of components.  He called this the essence of the thing, and soul was the essence of the living thing.  Soul was incorporeal and existed everywhere within the body of the living thing, and its presence was essential to the life of the thing, whatever it was.  Soul was the efficient cause of life.  The immortality of the soul in the species was what drove the individual organism to reproduce; immortality was the final cause of soul and was the reason the organism attempted to reproduce.

            Soul was not something that could exist separate and apart from the body it gave life to.  There was a mutual dependency between body and soul; one could not exist without the other, and together they comprised the living thing.  When a thing died, its soul left it.

            Materialism has no answer to the question of what is the difference between a living thing, and that same thing, lifeless.  By rights, since the power of life existed in the matter, if the matter is in the proper configuration then the organization ought to exhibit the signs of life.  Frankenstein ought to be “alive” since his components are arranged properly.  If Frankenstein is too complex an organism, then certainly the DNA in the cells of the subcomponents of the lifeless thing ought to be able to function even if the total assemblage, the once living thing, is no longer able to continue as a living unity.  Yet, they do not.  Once dead, a ‘unity’ of the organism is gone, and body of the thing decays into other substances.

            Materialism also has no explanation as to why a living thing would want to reproduce.  Being concerned with efficient causes, materialism can explain the mechanism of reproduction; but having no view on final causes it has no explanation as to why the process of reproduction in a living thing ought to occur in the first place.

            Venter’s lab was careful to place the manufactured DNA into a living cell, one which had come into existence in the natural way.  The lab did not place the synthetic DNA into a primordial soup and watch the DNA reproduce itself, or generate a whole new cell around itself.  The lab did not kill the cell and then insert the manufactured DNA, expecting the DNA to bring the cell back to life.  Venter did not put his faith in materialism to that test.  If Venter’s DNA did those things, spontaneously reproduced in a primordial soup or bring a dead cell back to life, it would mean that DNA was life.  A strand of DNA in itself being life would raise all sorts of questions, inconvenient questions to the materialist view of life; that is, Darwinism.

            If DNA were in itself life, then DNA must itself be alive.  If DNA is alive, why would DNA synthesize a cell structure in which to encase itself?  If DNA came together in the primordial soup quite by accident, why did that molecule simply not begin to replicate itself out of the components naturally occurring in the soup?  Why was a cell structure necessary for replication; and how could a molecule with the capacity for self-replication conceive that a cell structure would be necessary for this process and include replication of the cell structure also in the business?  If DNA is alive, then the cell structure is to the DNA as the pond is to the frog.

If a cell structure is necessary to the survival of the DNA with its property of self-replication, did an entire cell have to come into existence also by accident in order to generate a thing capable of self-reproduction?  If both DNA and a cell structure are necessary for a self-reproducing thing, then DNA by itself is not “life” and it is not the DNA by itself which is “alive,” but the unity of the cell structure and the DNA which is alive.

            While most biologists are prepared to accept that under the right conditions DNA could have come into existence by accident, they are not prepared to accept that an entire cell structure complete with DNA came into existence by the action of random chance.  That is too far-fetched.

            For the Venter lab to produce truly synthetic life, it would have to synthesize not merely DNA, but an entire cell structure also; and this assembly would then have to spontaneously reproduce on its own.  Ventor’s lab did not do this, and that is why Ventor’s technical achievement did not amount to the creation of synthetic life.  What the lab created was a hybrid cell, and this technical achievement, as well as its limitations, on further review raise more challenges to philosophical materialism and Darwinism, rather than less.

            Such are the philosophical problems encountered when biology is placed entirely on the same philosophical footing as physics.

-          XXX –

Darwinism vs. Intelligent Design

  

Vincent J. Curtis, M.Sc.


5 August 2005

A question put to President Bush recently has reignited debate in the United States about the teaching of “Intelligent Design” in biology class.  The proposition is that ID (i.e. the intervention of God) be mentioned along side that of Darwinian theory as a competitive, or alternate, theory of evolution and the origin of life on earth .  Of course, we in Canada can laugh among ourselves in our apparent evolutionary superiority over those rubes to the south who refuse to acknowledge that man descended from apes, and who want, once again, to preach from the bible in science class.  However, the actual state of play is not as favorable to the Darwinists as most scientists and the liberal press would have you believe.

In the first place, two important principles of biology stand contrary to any theory of evolution and to the theory on the origins of life that most Darwinists adhere to.

The first principle of biology is that life only comes from life.  Dead meat does not all by itself produce maggots and flies, as was once believed.  The second principle of biology is that a species can only produce members of its own species.  A chicken will not lay an egg that hatches into a monkey, for example.  Chickens only produce chickens.

Taken together, these two fundamental principles of biology undercut any theory that suggests that life began spontaneously from dead matter and that one species evolved from another species, as for example that man evolved from apes.

There is yet another problem that the principles of biology present to evolutionists, and it is a corollary of the second principle quoted above.  It is that insofar as evolution does occur, the evolution of monkeys is toward a better monkey, not to evolve into man.  Thus, even if a tendency to evolve is granted, there is no support for the proposition that evolution would have led from a primitive ape to homo sapiens.  Evolution ought to have led to the descent of a modern ape.  If monkeys were disposed to evolve into men, then there ought to be second or third line of ape-men evolving even now; yet there are not.

The problem that scientists face and perhaps do not recognize is that theories on the origins of life and of evolution do not yet belong to the science of biology.   Biology is concerned with life that has existed, exists, or could exist; but nothing that we know as yet about life can tell us how life as such came to be in the first place.  Theories about how life on earth came to be are speculative philosophical opinions, some more

persuasive than others.

It is in the nature of science that speculative philosophical opinions concerning a science can one day be incorporated into the science once enough knowledge to support the speculation is gained.  But science is not able to shed light directly upon the existence or nature of God: science cannot invoke God and remain scientific.  Science, at best, can explain systematically the splendor of His handiwork.

Scientists, when they work scientifically, must therefore reject direct reference to God when they theorize and speculate about a scientific discipline.  But that limitation does not mean that ID adherents are necessarily wrong, they are just being unscientific when they so speculate.

A further problem that scientists face in presenting a theory of evolution concerns the philosophical problem of change itself.  We can with our own eyes observe the kinetic evolution of a body in motion: we can see it move and change direction under the forces acting on it.  But evolutionary change in a biological sense is not directly observable by our senses, and assigning a cause to such change is not so easy.  Changes occur between generations, not within a particular generation; and evolutionary changes are subtle.  It is not always clear and isolatable what precisely causes change in biological evolution, as we can see with our own eyes that a hockey puck changes direction upon impact with a stick or the glass.  Thus, even if evolution is granted, it cannot be disproved that an Intelligence guided biological matters to take the turn they did.

Here is where the weakness of the scientist’s position on the origin of life and evolution admits of an argument for Intelligent Design.  The theory on the origin of life is that out of the chemical soup that was the earth’s primitive oceans, self-reproducing chemicals spontaneously came together and thus began life.  Intelligent designers argue that that coming together was not as spontaneous as the scientist’s mechanism would have it.  The molecules and mechanism of life are far too complex to be an accident.  Moreover, if such a thing happened spontaneously, how does one explain that it does not happen now?  Dead matter ought to be spontaneously producing life out of sheer random chance.  Yet it does not happen.  Intelligent design a long time ago perhaps?

Similarly, the theory of evolution that holds that a whole series of biological accidents kicked out a line leading to homo sapiens from the line that led to modern apes is open to the challenge that the accidents were not accidental.  While one can accept that evolutionary accidents are rare, the scientist’s position fails to explain satisfactorily why these things were one time events.

The modern theories on evolution and the origin of life are not, strictly speaking, scientific statements of biology.  They are philosophical positions, theories and opinions.  Scientists are predisposed to present theories that are neat and self-contained.  They like random chance and mechanisms, not the hand of God.  A theory that requires the intervention of a superior outside power is decidedly not in the scientific style.

Intelligent design works as an explanation of the theories of the scientists: where scientists say spontaneous and accident, the ID adherents say only apparently spontaneous and only apparently accidental.  The scientists have nothing, as yet, to resolve the argument decisively in their favor, though many try heated indignation.  ID adherents make no attempt to bolster their side, for they cannot.  The weakness of ID is that it may be a non-disprovable statement, for it seems able to operate like a conspiracy theory: when confronted with apparent disproof, the conspiracy theorist merely alleges a bigger conspiracy than previously thought.  The rational weakness of ID theory is not that it cannot be proven, but that it cannot be disproven.

The Darwinist theories of evolution and the origins of life do not stand on as firm scientific ground as its adherents would have us believe, but it is the only ground they have.  Their theories may have greater scientific standing than Intelligent Design for they are more in the scientific style; but that doesn’t mean they are right.  Hence, there is nothing inherently wrong in a biology teacher mentioning ID as one of the competing theories explaining the operation of evolution and of the origin of life, for the competing theory – that of random chance – has its problems, and is itself not truly scientific either.  It must be made clear, however, that ID theory must forever stand outside of science and to use it as a non-disprovable argument offends against reason.

                                                                        -XXX-

A version of this was published in the Hamilton Spectator.

The Problem with Extra-Judicial Killing

Vincent J. Curtis



26 June 2007.

 

News Item: “NATO’s Civilian Death Toll Growing.  A day after President Hamid Karzai harshly criticized military operations in his country, the NATO-led force yesterday confirmed more civilians had been killed, this time in Pakistan.”  National Post 25 June 2007

News Item: “Brave Taliban Jihadis Use 6-Year Old Boy As Suicide Bomber.”  LGF 25 June 2007.

Politically, President Karzai positions himself on the right side of the issue, so far as he goes.  For forces of the state to kill civilians extra-judicially is potentially an extreme act of injustice, and extra-judicial killing creates tremendous resentment of the regime within the community.  Think Ruby Ridge.  Think Dudley George and Ipperwash.

But the discrepancy between these two news items goes a long way to explain why Western forces in Afghanistan face an uphill battle for hearts and minds.  The condemnation by the President of Afghanistan of the killing by Western forces of innocent civilians is reported in the major newspapers all over the world.  But the despicable things the Taliban do are found in paragraph 12, or on internet blogs; and for those reasons reports of atrocities are not taken as seriously and go unrecognized in the public conscience.  The ISAF powers need to address this problem.

It is a tactic of the Taliban and of other extremist movements to use innocents as human shields, and as targets.  Protecting rocket batteries with human shields was a tactic used by Hezbollah in its assault on Israel last summer.  Attacks on innocent civilians is the central tactic in the method of so-called “Fourth Generation Warfare.”  That is how terrorists fight.

Adding to the soldier’s difficulty on the ground is the problem of the definition of “innocent civilian.”  Not being members of the armed forces of a nation-state, the Taliban are themselves civilian.  So the statement often seen in press reports that so-many civilians were killed by Western forces is, at bottom, uninformative.  A dead Taliban is a dead civilian.  This fact doesn’t fit the neat categories and simple story lines the media have established for reporting wars of this kind.

The problem of classification is not unusual.  When would a Canadian reservist on Class ‘A’ service be considered a combatant, and when a civilian?  Hint: there is a legal and a practical answer.  Indigenous guerrilla forces act in a similar way to Class ‘A’ reservists.   Given that many Afghan men carry a weapon for protection, is the identifying mark of an innocent civilian the direction his weapon was pointed at the time he was killed in the firefight?  Our soldiers have to deal with the practical, and those away from the battlefield prefer to ask about the legal.

A scenario sometimes faced by soldiers on the ground in Afghanistan is that the head Taliban in the village, protected by bodyguards, is the only guy who goes around unarmed, and he lives with his wife and child.  If his bodyguards get into a shootout with Western forces, and he and his family are killed, are he and his family counted as “civilians killed?”  There is a practical answer and a legal answer.  Another problem: Are those who willingly shield combatants themselves combatants?

These unpleasant problems of categorization need to be addressed in a serious and thoughtful way by the politicians, senior commanders, and Public Affairs of ISAF if we are going to win hearts and minds.  It is not Canada’s policy and is contrary to our war aim to wantonly kill innocent civilians.  The blame for deaths of innocent civilians has to be shifted to the Taliban, for it is because the Taliban fight that there is this war.  Shifting the blame onto the shoulders truly responsible can only be done through a major program of public education.

Canada’s policy is to strictly follow the Geneva Convention.  The Geneva Convention states quite plainly that: “The Parties to the conflict shall not direct the movement of the civilian population or individual civilians in order to attempt to shield military objectives from attacks or to shield military operations.” [Part IV: Civilian Population, Protocol 1, 1977.]

The Geneva Convention places the guilt upon the Taliban for the deaths of innocent civilians when they hide among them.  The rules of war say that.  It is for that reason not contrary to law for our soldiers to kill innocents by accident in the course of attacking Taliban.  And it is contrary to law for Taliban to use civilians to hide behind.  Culpability in the public mind belongs on the Taliban. 

People in Afghanistan have to be advised of the law of armed conflict that we follow, and be told to stay away from the Taliban when Canadian troops are around and high noon is nigh.  The sooner people become aware of the law and of the guilt of the Taliban, the sooner human shielding will lose it’s effectiveness as a tactic against us.  Harsh as the law may be, following the law is not wrong.  And we shouldn’t act as if it were.  Karzai should have also damned the Taliban for cowardice, and we should not accept his criticism of us.

Civilians who are inclined to play the role of human shield, guerrillas without arms, have to believe that their death will avail their cause no advantage.  And the fish are gradually separated from the sea.

Wars are best won quickly.  The sooner we win, the sooner we can dissociate ourselves from the appalling practices of the Middle East.

-          XXX –