The road to the White House often intersects the path of rapidly moving projectiles.  Bravely volunteering to put themselves and their horses, naval vessels and airplanes into the way of arrows bullets , cannonballs torpedoes, and the odd destroyer launched Jackson, Tyler, Lincoln, Grant, Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Bush 41 into the Oval Office ,and Senator McCain’s close encounter with a SAM in Nam has placed him in hot pursuit.

This puts paid to the Churchillian chestnut that there is nothing more exhilarating than being fired upon without effect,  though as Dole and Kerry can testify, it is a political mystery why actually getting hit is nowhere near as effective.  As a general rule, the larger the platform or unit commanded when clobbered , the more memorable the presidency, a regiment or PT boat outweighing a platoon , flatboat or a river launch, though it is possible to over- or under-achieve .
Getting his destroyer sunk instead of using it to set some aspirant German politician floundering in the Med merely subjected Earl Mountbatten to the indignity of being the last viceroy of a vanished empire, and the mere rumor of Senator Clinton sharing a county with a Ruritanian sniper has not served her candidacy well.

Were the Vegas paintball industry to collude with military surplus dealers and demolition derby organizers between now and November , they might come up with an aquatic theme park for aspirant politicians on the shores of Lake Mead.  There. for a hefty fee, sensibly armored aspirants to high office might throw their Kevlar hats in the ring, and try to blow each other out of the air or water, After a few rounds , the fortunes of war would assure them all of the right to retire with slight bruising and well padded resumes, ready to enter the presidential lists at a cost smaller than a focus group directed TV campaign.

Russian,  Uzbekh , and possibly Transdnistrian submarines, made redundant by the evaporation of the Warsaw Pact and the Aral Sea can still be had for a scant million, and getting Jimmy Carter sunk in one might rejuvenate his chances of a second term if he upstages Al Gore at the convention.

Prime time naval battles between candidates might easily outdraw presidential debates, justifying production upgrades to SSN’s like the Graustarck,( formerly CCCP Red November) shown here smuggling Kosevar cigarettes into Murmansk
Bolting couches and cribbage and Lepanto boards to the foredeck of a former Whiskey class vessel would afford space for President Carter’s crew of former admirers and campaign workers to applaud the spectacle, while the freedom to re-arrange themselves in the deck chairs on the fantail would assure the transparency of their WIFi connections to the Weekly Standard ‘s Galley Slave blog. Who would not pay to to see Ambassador Keyes take oar to save the world from rising seas by ramming a Titanic lifeboat replica into a styrofoam iceberg ?

Ohio State political science professor John Mueller, whom I’ve known since he commented on “Weaker Than We Think” the assessment of al-Qaida’s diminished capacity for terror I wrote for The American Conservative in 2004.,  recently reported on Sargeman’s analysis in Canada’s National Post:

   ” Mr. Sageman sorts the enemy into three groups.

First, there is a cluster left over from the struggles in Afghanistan against the Soviets in the 1980s. Currently they are huddled around, and hiding out with, Mr. bin Laden somewhere in Afghanistan and/or Pakistan. This band, concludes Sageman, probably consists of a few dozen individuals.

Joining them in the area, although perhaps with more on the periphery, are 100 more fighters left over from al-Qaeda’s golden days in Afghanistan in the 1990s. These key portions of the enemy forces would total, then, less than 150 actual people. They may operate something resembling “training camps,” but these appear to be quite minor affairs. They also assist with the Taliban’s far larger and very troublesome insurgency in Afghanistan.

Beyond this, concludes Sageman, the third group consists of thousands of sympathizers and would-be jihadists spread around the globe who mainly connect in Internet chat rooms, engage in radicalizing conversations, and variously dare each other actually to do something.

All of these rather hapless, even pathetic, people, should of course be considered to be potentially dangerous. From time to time they may be able to coalesce enough to carry out acts of terrorist violence, and policing efforts to stop them before they can do so are fully justified. But the notion that they present an existential threat to just about anybody seems at least as fanciful as some of their schemes, and any notion that these characters could come up with nuclear weapons seems far fetched in the extreme.

The threat presented by these individuals is likely, concludes Sageman, simply to fade away in time. Unless, of course, the United States overreacts and does something to enhance their numbers, prestige, and determination—something that is, needless to say, entirely possible.

I’ve checked this remarkable and decidedly unconventional evaluation of the threat with three prominent experts who have spent years studying the issue. They generally agree with Sageman.

One of them is Fawaz Gerges of Sarah Lawrence College, whose brilliant book, The Far Enemy, based on hundreds of interviews in the Middle East, parses the jihadist enterprise. As an additional concern, he suggests that Sageman’s third group may also include a small, but possibly growing, underclass of disaffected and hopeless young men in the Middle East, many of them scarcely literate, who, outraged at Israel and at America’s war in Iraq, may provide cannon fodder for the jihad. However, these people would mainly present problems in the Middle East (including in Iraq), not elsewhere.

Another way to evaluate the threat presented by jihadist terrorists around the world is to focus on the actual amount of violence perpetrated by Muslim extremists since 9/11 outside of war zones. Included in the count would be terrorism of the much-publicized and fear-inducing sort that occurred in Bali in 2002, in Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Turkey in 2003, in the Philippines, Madrid, and Egypt in 2004, and in London and Jordan in 2005.

Two think-tank publications have independently provided lists of such incidents. Although these tallies make for grim reading, the total number of people killed comes to some 200 or 300 per year. That, of course, is 200 or 300 per year too many, but it hardly suggests that the perpetrators present a major threat, much less an existential one. For comparison: over the same period far more people have drowned in bathtubs in the United States alone.”

In 2004, I found that estimates of al-Qaeda’s potentially armed forces had fallen as low as 3,000 highly dispersed individuals, with a technical cadre far below the threshold of autonomous development of nuclear arms—the ‘existential threat ’ threshold, and reluctantly concluded that 9-11, like Pearl Harbor or the Trojan Horse, was intrinsically unique- its mastermind, and literal architect having self destructed along with the element of surprise.

I want to closely examine Sageman’s book,and invite readers to do likewise.   Because if OBL’s franchise has fallen below regimental strength,  the tempo of GWOT operations may stand in need of adjustment.  The nuclear genie remains a valid cold war metaphor, but predicating policy on mythology remains a risky business -Djinn are famously stingy in dispensing their favors, and rarely come in a refillable bottle. Little wonder Homeland Security’s latest effort at self justification extends to adding hand grenades to its list of   Weapons of Mass Destruction .

On the other hand, Syria does still lay claim to Antioch.

“Harith Ibn Al-Muhasibi told us what would happen when we meet the black-eyed virgin with her black hair and white face - praised be He who created night and day.

“What hair! What a chest! What a mouth! What cheeks! What a figure! What breasts! What thighs! What legs! What whiteness! What softness! Without any creams - no Nivea, no Vaseline. No nothing!”

“He said that faces would be soft that day. Even your own face will be soft without any powder or makeup. You yourself will be soft, so how soft will a black-eyed virgin be, when she comes to you so tall and with her beautiful face, her black hair and white face - praised be He who created night and day. “

“He said: How soft will a fingertip be, after being softened in paradise for thousands of years! There is no god but Allah. He told us that if you entered one of the palaces, you would find 10 black-eyed virgins sprawled on musk cushions.”

“When they see you, they will get up and run to you. Lucky is the one who gets to put her thumb in your hand. When they get hold of you, they will push you onto your back, on the musk cushions. They will push you onto your back, Jamal! Allah Akbar! I wish this on all people present here.

“He said that one of them would place her mouth on yours. Another one would press her cheek against yours, yet another would press her chest against yours, and the others would await their turn. There is no god but Allah.”

And now for the Commercial:

“He told us that one black-eyed virgin would give you a glass of wine. Wine in Paradise is a reward for your good deeds. The wine of this world is destructive, but not the wine of the world to come.”

But what’s it to be?

Shiraz from Shiraz? The amontillado of al Andalus?  Or that great Lebanese standby, the Roger Scruton and Auberon Waugh( Blessings and peace be upon them ) approved vin de garde of the Bekaa valley,

Bimini: Great news—no going back to Fort Lauderdale. The good ship Hegemonic has just been bought by some Greek tycoon who thinks we deserve a longer vacation! Eleuthera: Captain says the new owner has set a new itinerary including South Georgia—Savannah maybe? East of Grenada: Had consommé poolside with Fred Barnes. Bill Kristol had us in stitches with his imitation of Robert Maxwell walking the plank. The Equator: Our satellite link is toast. John Podhoretz dissed King Neptune’s people about Georgia being in the opposite direction, and had the NavSat card in his pocket when they keelhauled him. So much for real time blogging. Devil’s Island: Put Senator Craig and Congressman Foley ashore with the ship’s goat. South Georgia: Stopped to pick up sheep, put out more flags, and lay wreath at tomb of the unknown Daily Telegraph correspondent. Beagle Channel: Native canoes came alongside offering Inca Pisco, Vicuna coats, and a neat new powdered soft drink called Coca Coca. Cape Horn: Ambasador Bolton and Bill Kristol went ashore to pay a courtesy call on General Pinochet’s brain. Elephant Island: Locals in white tie crowded Bill Kristol’s gala dinner, but dove overboard during his speech, sticking Barnes with a whinging caviar bar bill . Pitcairn: Landed after 100 days at sea, but the newsstand here refuses to stock our mag until stocks of The American Mercury and Look are exhausted. Easter Island: Finished giant stone head of Rupert Murdoch this afternoon—damn white coral contact lenses kept falling out. East of Java: Bill Bennett broke the bank at chemmy last night, but lost the last of his Virtue sequel advance playing Hold Em. Bill Kristol and Fred Barnes put in irons after jumping ship on a raft made of Mai Tai umbrellas. Wiki Wiki: Pursued by proas flogging the pidgin edition of The Economist. Goldberg and Barnes beat them off by flinging remaindered copies of Liberal Fascism. Tanna island, Vanuatu: Cargo Cult here hailed David as John Frum’s long lost heir after he stopped the volcano erupting by tossing in Ann Coulter. Christmas Island: Tried out the Vanuatu Letters of Marque and Reprisal David got in exchange for poor Anne,  but The Nation Seminar at Sea aboard Oosterdam gave us the slip in the fog.  Demerara: The Pusser’s distillery gave the former Sec Def a 151 Rum salute while the AA crowd went inland to Jonestown to chill out with Pina Koolaidas. Bequia:  After practicing their harpooning skills on J-Pod, the recreational whaling seminar guys scored a humpback. Locals very impressed Guantanamo Bay: Camp X-Ray Commander nixed our landing to buy Cohibas, but Cuban pilot says we’re assured a warm reception down the coast. Bahia Cocinas: Some welcome. Venezuela’s Secretary Of The Navy For Life was waiting to offer his submarine for next years “Weekly Standard North Pole Cruise.” He offered to drop David off in Havana in exchange for his Canadian passport. Dry Tortugas: Free at last! Crude oil spiked again and the owner ordered Hegemonic converted to an oil tanker, and gave us this nifty trireme to row home. All we have to do is find the oars, and some Dramamine for the ship’s cat.

Bruce Chapman is now The Discovery Institute’s President, and George Gilder its preeminent Senior Fellow, together leading the Seattle group in a metaphysical assault on everything that smacks of “materialism.” Though founded with a Reaganite focus on cutting-edge technology policy and the electronic revolution, Discovery has morphed away from futurism and libertarian economics. What began as a spinoff of Herman Kahn’s Hudson Institute became the bane of scientific modernity, waging culture war on everything from Darwin to Einstein to stem-cell biotech and quantum indeterminacy, now even dark matter.

After becoming director of the Census Bureau in 1981, Chapman became Edwin Meese’s protégé, and soon his zeal in defending “traditional morality” led The New York Times to declare “a converging of the intellectual Left with the religious Right ... under the Reagan banner.” He also admired conservative legal guru Phillip Johnson, whose Darwin On Trial aspired to deconstruct evolution by applying legal standards of evidence to biology, the better to subordinate science to religion and protect Social Conservative norms from “moral relativism.” The fact that O.J. Simpson has been “proven” innocent in a court of law reminds us why legal scholars shouldn’t leave their jurisdiction. William Jennings Bryan did win the Scopes Trial after all.

How two Rockefeller Republicans evolved, or devolved, into recapitulating Bryan’s Populist denunciation of Darwin is a puzzlement. Democrat Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science, asserts the Discovery Institute’s original “vibe was forward-looking, futuristic, and intellectually contrarian.” From contemplating a Republican alternative to The Whole Earth Catalog to thinking the unthinkable slightly to the right of Cardinal Ratzinger is quite an intellectual odyssey.

Along the way, writes Mooney, Chapman and Gilder have “become everything they once criticized; their transformation highlights how ... the anti-intellectual disposition they so aptly diagnosed in 1966 still persists among modern conservatives, helping to fuel a full-fledged crisis today over the politicization of science and expertise.” This has crystallized in their promotion of ’ Intelligent Design,’  the body of pseudo-science Wired calls “Creationism 2.0.”

Though this odd construct exerts a powerful appeal for those educated in traditions of religious orthodoxy and Biblical literalism, whether Old Testament or New, it tends to repel minds trained to question ideological authority. It appeals to unreconstructed pietism in its aspiration to return metaphysics to precedence over science and win back a century’s loss of cultural turf to the Left, an erosion it blames on the rise of materialism. It focuses on the perverse Marxist use of the word, while playing down what it meant to Hume and Hegel. This is a strategic choice, for a defunct Evil Empire is easier to wrestle with than The Enlightenment as the Founders saw it.

This ambitious project is hardly Gilder and Chapman’s alone. They long ago realized that Culture War à la outrance takes more than the editorial enthusiasm of small magazines. Though Gilder is a frequent Forbes contributor, and former part-owner of The American Spectator, The Discovery Institute has forged alliances with like-minded souls at Heritage, AEI, The Bradley Foundation, and elsewhere in creating an ecumenical team that, though it produces none of its own, seeks to publicly discredit a broad spectrum of scientific research it finds metaphysically unattractive—and even to subject it to legislative and regulatory constraint.

A project that began with rearing academic objections to evolution in Commentary, First Things, and National Review has grown down-market into raising a village of religiously devout and politically reliable scientific idiots. Their enterprise has transformed Talk Radio and the No Spin Zone into engines of faith-based mis-and-disinformation that leave scientists of both parties gobsmacked by the sheer infantilism of it all. Pre-eminent among the tour guides to this alternative scientific universe is another Discovery Institute Senior Fellow, a writer of considerable gifts and Anglo-Catholic education named Tom Bethell. The original tagline to Bethell’s Politically Incorrect Guide to Science leaves no doubt as to his goal:

“Liberals have hijacked science for long enough. Now it’s our turn.”

Just as Discovery has redacted its statement of a “wedge strategy” for the religious re-enchantment of world of science and public policy, Bethell’s astute publisher has wisely removed this astounding blurb from the paperback edition. Little wonder John Derbyshire took Bethell’s book to task on National Review Online. Here Derbyshire focused on its misrepresentation of evolutionary biology, being that Bethell is the literary lion of The Discovery Institute, but what of the rest of his science?

On global warming, Bethell invokes the standard canon of uncertainties, but not how science has acted to reduce them. Bethell’s preference for his own cohort’s climate polemics over the peer reviewed science literature is evident in the book’s deadpan claim that satellites show no warming trend— the overthrow of that unsound view by authentically skeptical scientists was front page news months before his book went to press. What gives?

In 2004, Reason science correspondent Ron Bailey asked Irving Kristol whether or not he believed in God, and Kristol famously responded, “I don’t believe in God, I have faith in God.” Bailey continues,

Well, faith, as it says in Hebrews 11:1, ‘is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.’ But at the [2005] AEI lecture, journalist Ben Wattenberg asked him the same thing. Kristol responded that ‘that is a stupid question,’ and crisply restated his belief that religion is essential for maintaining social discipline. A much younger (and perhaps less circumspect) Kristol asserted in a 1949 essay that in order to prevent the social disarray that would occur if ordinary people lost their religious faith, ‘it would indeed become the duty of the wise publicly to defend and support religion.’”

Bethel seems driven by the same imperative, for The Politically Incorrect Guide is as rich in the urban myths of faith-based policy as it is scientifically impoverished. Bethell deceives himself and his readers on everything from relativity to AIDS to molecular biology, deploying tabloid science and patently political op-eds in preference to peer-reviewed papers available from the internet or any university library. Disrespect for science is one thing, disdain from scholarship quite another.  More aberrant than’ incorrect’ the Guide is less popularization than a catalog derangé of Bad Science assembled as an alternative catechism for Dittoheads who last cracked a science text in junior high.

Bethell is one of many comically anxious to lay the ideological horrors of the 20th century at science’s door, but the historical reality is anything but funny. When he wasn’t setting the stage for famine, Stalin’s pal Commissar Lysenko passed the time damning the Bourgeois Biology of the Darwinian Class Enemies, while Hitler’s guru Johannes Stark earned the right to oversee the implosion of Annalen der Physik by staging a monster rally denouncing the Decadent Relativism of the Einsteinists.

Tom Bethell writes,

“A criticism of intelligent design is that the claim, ‘God can do anything, therefore this critter was designed by God’ gets us nowhere. I agree that it doesn’t. But a very similar objection can be raised against Darwinism.” … [Darwinism’s] “partisans are at liberty to say of any organism whatever that it arose by mutation and natural selection—without having to produce any supporting evidence. In the end, it amounts to nothing more than the belief that supernaturalism must be avoided at all cost.”

Having winded his hobby horse , he hops back into the saddle to deliver the inevitable conclusion, “Darwinism is simply a deduction from a philosophy—the philosophy of materialism…” .

Yet if science has anything to teach about the material world, it is that laws at once impose limits on simple phenomena and give rise to complex ones. All critters great and small are, being made of matter, naturally subject to the laws of physics. Saying otherwise injects the supernatural into the discussion, which is exactly what Bethell did in the NRO exchange in which he accused John Derbyshire of being reluctant to do so. Gilder has likewise averred “the Darwinist materialist paradigm … is about to face the same revolution that Newtonian physics faced 100 years ago.”

This is 19th-century Vitalism warmed over. From the 21st-century perspective of the multi-billion-dollar enterprise of molecular biotechnology, Bethell and Gilder are less in denial than up the river without a paddle. Science is not a high-school debating tournament. The sophomoric invocation of statistical arguments about “insurmountable complexity” falls flat in the face of algorithmic sophistication, let alone the insights of quantum computation. Synthetic biology blithely ignores ID’s arguments as it goes about the business of building living organisms from scratch.

Its practitioners can only scratch their heads at a stem-cell debate as doomed to historical obscurity as wars fought over guano to assure the Victorian guncotton supply. But, in a display of metaphysical solipsism bordering on the miraculous, Bethel simply insists things he finds inconceivable simply cannot be. Robots were already roving Mars when he wrote in 2005:

“When it sinks in that genetic and stem-cell engineering is beyond our ken, the anticipated downloading of our minds will also be postponed—indefinitely. (By the way, don’t they know we haven’t even been able to get robots to move around the room without bumping into the furniture yet?)”

Really? Two years later, a cybertruck demonstrated downloaded horse sense enough to successfully negotiate the Mojave Desert, and the Ventner Institute uploaded a completely synthetic genome into an eviscerated bacterial corpse, in effect kick-starting Life Itself.  I hold no brief for machine consciousness, but in the light of what science gets up to nowadays, objections to the trend in artificial intelligence that fall much outside the realm of Moore’s Law seem increasingly, for lack of a better word, metaphysical. If the Politically Incorrect Guide’s author has never succeeded in adding a page to the scientific literature he so epically misconstrues, it may be because he evidently reads so little of it.

Some years ago, physicist John Baez devised The Crackpot Index—a simple method for rating potentially revolutionary contributions to science.” Bethell’s ID manifesto generates an exceptionally high score, as does his earlier polemic dismissal of Einstein’s work.

Baez assembled 17 criteria to aid science editors in separating claims of radical advances from the crackpot screeds major journals receive almost monthly, assigning points to the gambits cranks reflexively indulge. Since we all make mistakes, statements” widely agreed to be untrue” get just 1 demerit, but grandiosely “claiming that when your theory is finally appreciated, present-day science will be seen for the sham it truly is” will earn 40. Under the Baez system , a science journal editor is justified in returning without comment any screed that racksup more than 100 points , both to spare the author’s feelings, and the time of the experts who shoulder the burden of peer review.

If you think Baez’s idea facetious, you have never opened a Young Earth creationist journal, or seen the vanity press offerings that flow over the book review transom of flagship science journals like Nature. Forget Darwin and Einstein—not even Newton’s Law of Gravity is safe these days.

So be forewarned, here come some excerpts from Tom’s deadpan reply to Derbyshire in NRO, punctuated with Baez’s criteria for Crackpotdom as they apply. Commencing:

“I wonder why Mr. Derbyshire drags in so many red herrings. [A 5-point starting credit.]

“Let’s posit a libertarian triumph so that public schools have been abolished.”[1 point for every statement that is widely agreed on to be false]

“Now does JD look kindly upon the teaching of intelligent design? Of course not.”[2 points for every statement that is clearly vacuous.]

“His real desire is to de-legitimize any discussion of the subject by identifying ID as creationism. He positively longs for a return to the good old days when creationist Bible thumpers could so easily be ridiculed.[“20 points for defending yourself by bringing up (real or imagined) ridicule accorded to your past theories.]

“He doesn’t seem very eager to get into a discussion of science, either. He objects to ‘pseudoscience’ (but is big-hearted enough to be amused by it). He appeals to judicial authority; and to the ‘consensus’ of scientists. Science is not properly based on authority, however.” [40 points for claiming that the “scientific establishment” is engaged in a “conspiracy” to prevent your work from gaining its well-deserved fame, or suchlike.]

“Intelligent design is not creationism, and repeating that claim over and over will not make it so. [20 points for talking about how great your theory is, but never actually explaining it.”]

“Structures or signals of specified complexity permit an inference to design without any necessary recourse to the supernatural. There’s an institute in Mountain View, California, where scientists are involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.[30 points for claiming that your theories were developed by an extraterrestrial civilization.]

”No such signals have yet been detected, but they are not giving up any time soon. [40 points for claiming that when your theory is finally appreciated, present-day science will be seen for the sham it truly is.]

As Tom’s already past 100 points, let’s cut to the chase:

“If an organism exists, it is ‘fit,’ and therefore Darwinism accounts for it. But as Derbyshire may also have heard, a theory that explains everything, without any possibility of encountering a falsifying instance, is not really a scientific theory at all.” [10 points for arguing that a current well-established theory is “only a theory,” as if this were somehow a point against it. Plus 50 points for claiming you have a revolutionary theory but giving no concrete testable predictions.]

“A criticism of intelligent design is that the claim, ‘God can do anything, therefore this critter was designed by God’ gets us nowhere. I agree that it doesn’t. But a very similar objection can be raised against Darwinism. [10 points for arguing that while a current well-established theory predicts phenomena correctly, it doesn’t explain “why” they occur, or fails to provide a “mechanism.”]

Trespassing 10 of Baez’s crackpot criteria in 1000 words or less is a considerable achievement! And what of its impact on readers, including Derbyshire?

If the sin of scandal consists in conduct harmful to faith,  the fellowship of Christian apologetics may have cause to fear Bethell more than he fears Darwin. Mild mannered mathematician John Derbyshire entered the fray over The Politically Incorrect Guide To Science declaring:

“I am not a philosophical materialist, and I don’t know what grounds Tom has for supposing that I am. I have made this plain numerous times, on NRO and elsewhere. I even count myself a religious person, and have said that numerous times, too.”

He departed the controversy the following year declaring himself a convinced atheist.

Epistemology is about why we think we know things, and in studying Intelligent Design people of faith risk a perilous epiphany:  it is about being prepared to believe that what science already knows can never be discovered. Tautology rarely rises to the level of the sin of despair in human intelligence, but this Big Idea is clearly exceptional. Though consigned to a brief footnote in the history of science, The Discovery Institute may go down in the annals of theology for articulating the Third Millennium’s first insult to the honor of God.

Russell Seitz blogs at Adamant”>Adamant.

Which was as close as even photographers were allowed, in the event of a four kiloton misunderstanding. The countdown was delayed for hours, and   driven by some Plimptonesque pyrotechnic attraction, Bill availed himself of the final hold to venture from the air conditioned TV pavilion to get a few thousand feet closer to deploy his Leica for the launch itself.  Like some few others, I had wrangled credentials from Conde’- Nast to view Apollo, and offered him a magnified squint at the distant scene through the artillery sized telephoto I had aimed.

Two things stick in memory. The previous day, a business-suited Czech journalist had up and died of heat stroke while taking the NASA safari through its 20,000 acre reserve, but Bill was wearing his inevitable necktie, albeit on a gossamer pongee shirt. The other was his response to a TV crew after the rocket’s seismic ascent on an ear-shattering pillar of flame ,  like a video of 9-11 run backwards .  We were all still literally shaken- the shock waves had set the canal seething—when the TV guy stuck a microphone at his face and barked:

  “Mr. Buckley, have you anything to say about watching the first men depart for another world?”

He half turned to the man, raising his eyebrows in mock amazement at the question, and just shook his head.

The trouble this precocious paragon of Creationist thought poses for ID enthusiasts is that he was a developmental biologist famed for discovering things so basic and central to modern embryology that post-modern biologists simply take them for granted, the way 80% of Americans accept that the Earth revolves around the sun. Biology 101 stuff, like the blastula stage, the notochord, the mammalian ovum, and how the germ layer theory of development explaining these fundamental structures as layers of cells in sheets.

By the time of his death in 1876, his published and peer reviewed polymathy extended to taxonomy, entomology ichthyology anthropology, geology ecology, and arctic exploration, and his name live on in four fundamental principles that remain sound to this day in explaining development as a divergence into diverse forms, rather than adherence to a historical pattern. Today we recognize them as arising from DNA’s equally amazing capacity for information storage—and mutation:

         1. General characters appear earlier in development than specialized characters.
         2. Less general character appear later (and build on) the general framework of earlier stages.
         3. The embryo of any organism, rather than passing through the stages of other forms, tends to progressively differentiate itself from them.
         4. The embryo of one animal form never resembles the adult of another, but only its embryo.

     He used these strong and valid rules to argue strongly against Charles Darwin’s theory, even while accepting Darwin’s evidence. Which may be why the syndics of the Discovery Institute shun his memory This guileless Estonian nobleman’s reliance on rigorous and inclusive interpretation of actual evidence clashes baldly with the Neo-Creationist strategy of obfuscation and selective citation in the scientific arena and their encouragement and promulgation of ignorance in the public sphere

Von Baer’s thinking rested on belief in an archetype for each species, an ideal pattern from which only limited deviation could occur, but that never lead him to subordinate evidence to theory. On examining some unlabeled embryos of species unknown to him ,this is what he had to say:

“I am quite unable to say to what class they belong. They may be lizards, or small birds, or very young mammalia, so complete is the similarity in the mode of formation of the head and trunk in these animals. The extremities are still absent, but even if they had existed in the earliest stage of the development we should learn nothing, because all arise from the same fundamental form.”

The convergence of diversity into embryological similarity, stunningly evident before the developmental unfolding of the protean depth of information DNA conveys,   is something creationists abhor. That it was discovered by an unimpeachable anti-evolutionist can only amplify their discomfort, and their desire to conceal it. Small wonder some try to pin the observation on Haeckel, instead, and call it a “forgery.” or point to how various embryos differ in the earliest stages of meiosis - but Karl Ernst von Baer, who discovered the blastula stage, also described the earliest embryonic membranes and was perfectly was well aware of the early differences.

What he lacked was an inkling of what they meant, for Mendelian genetics, let alone DNA was unheard of in his day.Yet this Napoleonic warrior- as a volunteer army surgeon he resisted the little Emperor’s invasion of Prussia needs no apology. In contrast to the creationists’ criminal indifference to scientific evidence, von Baer is a worthy example of how ignorance of natural laws is a perfect excuse for incomplete understanding of Nature.

But that was two centuries ago- today molecular biology is an open book, and these who refuse to read it do so at authentic risk of the justified contempt of their scientific contemporaries. If the Discovery Institute can’t stand the heat, maybe The New Atlantis should devote an issue to the last grand old man who thought he had a better idea than Darwin.

The predictable response of the disinformed to a von Baer revival will be to field an argument they understand even less well - one ostensibly based on statistics- Michael Behe’s computerized variation on the Monkeys and Typewriters theme, to the effect that no way Jose, can random processes overcome the ten to the umpteenth power or higher odds against anything happening developmentally to molecular soup in so short a time as the age of the universe. I shall be thinking fondly of them as I engage in friendly disputation with Christopher Monckton next week,  over the gobstoppingly oversimplified excuse of a climate model he has adduced in an effort to derail the reality of climate change. 

His last 15 minutes of fame arose from posing a mathematical puzzle as seemingly daunting as the origin of emergent complexity in biology. In 1999 he offered a million pound reward to any who could assemble the 209 bewilderingly random pieces of his ’ Infinity Puzzle, ’ that goodly sum being guaranteed by some of his houses and lands- the greatest living Sudoku master is incidentally Viscount Monckton of Brenchley. He’s not the first old Harrovian to bump the Wykhamists in the run for mathematical gold- Lord Rayleigh of Blue Sky fame was another, though Monckton seems unaware of the hazards of applying his work on black body radiation to planets sporting such complications as clouds and oceans.  Not being of a mathematical bent, I’ll leave the details to John Derbyshire, but I infer the puzzle in question derived from the ‘complex tiling in the plane‘work of bona fide math whiz , Sir Roger Penrose FRS.

Alas for lord Monckton,  the plastic platter proved no match for a couple of spotty Cambridge ubergeeks, who took up the cryptic challenge, and demonstrated that ten to the ninety-fifth power is not what it used to be in the face of algorithms that learn from experience. They ended up with the puzzle in one piece and the money in several- contrary to web legend,  Viscount Monckton’s house never ended up in their greedy hands—in fact he’s back with a more insoluble puzzle, with a two million pound prize. If it sells well, and he perseveres in setting Sudoku for the generous editors of The Daily Telegraph, who have also published his vigorous dissent from the notion we’d notice a doubling of CO2,  a few thousand puzzles hence , who knows who might own Huthorn?