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Photo: Jordan Peterson, via YouTube.

Editors note: Welcome to anEvolution Newstradition: a countdown of our Top 10 favorite stories of the past year, concluding on New Years Day. Our staff are enjoying the holidays, as we hope that you are, too!Help keep the daily voice of intelligent design going strong. Please give whatever you can to support the Center for Science & Culture before the end of the year!

The following wasoriginallypublished on August 15, 2021.

Here atEvolution News, Ivewrittenabout the popular public intellectual Jordan Peterson, whose political controversies have unfortunately often overshadowed his fascinating contributions to the cultural discourse on religion, science, and psychology. Although Im unconvinced by his attempts to weave together an evolutionarily grounded unifying narrative of all these things, Ive always admired him and always learn something from his lectures.

When I interviewed Stephen Meyer for his new bookReturn of the God Hypothesis, we chatted a little about Peterson and various other public intellectuals who seem to stand on the shores of theism with one foot in and one foot out. Commentinghereon Jonathan Van Marensrecent surveyof these New New Atheists (which also included figures like Douglas Murray, Tom Holland, and Niall Ferguson), David Klinghoffer expressed his hope that this might be a new window of opportunity for intelligent design to gain a hearing in the public square.

That wish has now come true at least for the Canadian rock-star professor, whotweeted out his positive first impressionsof MeyersReturn of the God Hypothesisthis weekend. Its a difficult book, Peterson wrote, well-written, densely informative. He claims (p. 211) without functional criteria to guide a search through the vast space of possible sequences, random variation is probabilistically doomed. (This is in reference to the groundbreaking experimental work conducted by Douglas Axe.) Peterson followed up that tweet byasking his followersIs this an accurate claim? He makes the case very carefully. Its not often that I encounter a book that contains so much that I did not know

Its refreshing to see such intellectual humility from a figure with Petersons status. But not all his followers were thrilled. The more colorful replies dismissed Petersons quote from the book as intelligent design nonsense, gobbledygook, absolute rubbish, etc. Onethanked Petersonfor making it clearer once again that you are nought but a Christian zealot. How are we still having this discussion in 2021?one follower sniffed.

Others were more polite but still took issue with the claim, repeating well-worn objections. Even rare events can happen,replied one follower. You just have to play for long enough or simultaneously. Someone elseechoed this, saying the rare and improbable are happening all the time in the universe.due to its vastness. When a 1:1000000 event could happen any time and in a self propagating system you only need that one event to start the ball rolling.

Of course, its trivially true that rare eventscanhappen, but probabilistically speaking, when weighing likelihoods this is very thin gruel indeed, and thats precisely Meyers point. Someone elseobjected, Its not a scientific hypothesis, unless we can test it. To which someone elsecorrectly replied, Then you just got rid of history and the scientific method itself!

Some tried a slightly more clever tack, one followersuggestingthe quote is double-edged, since he could flip it to say without functional criteria to guide a search through the vast space of possible sequences, random variation is probabilistically the best option for success. He followed up that if you assume things like the many universes theory, or cyclic time, then random variation becomes probabilistically sound.

But as Meyer discusses in the book, those sorts of things are not insignificant ifs, to say the least! Indeed, they have the classic look ofad hocassumptions, like Ptolemys epicycles of old. Peterson agrees,retweeting with the reply, But those assumptions add immense complexity to what was once a theory typified by its elegance. If you have to posit whole universes to maintain the credibility of your assumptions is that not a problem?

Hmm!

Not all reactions were negative. One followersaidthat he had just seen a video about the immune system from Kurzgesagt and found it difficult to believe the complexity of this system is the result of random processes. While materialists insist science will find answers in time, he suggests maybe science will lean towards the creationist argument.

A European followeragreedthat straight forward evolution as developed from Charles Darwinis mathematically impossible, pointing other followers to the roundtable discussion on combinatorial explosion with Meyer, David Berlinski, and David Gelernter.

Peterson himself mentioned the combinatorial problem ina later followup tweet: Which neo-Darwinists effectively address critiques of neo-Darwinisms putative inability to deal with the problem of combinatorial explosion with regard to protein folding (to say nothing of DNA mutation)@StephenCMeyer?

Needless to say, hell have a long wait for the answer to that question! In reply, Meyer explained:

Neo-Darwinists largely ignored the combinatorial search problem associated w/ novel protein folds. As evolutionary biologist H. Allen Orr admitted this problem was almost entirely ignored for two decades by molecular evolutionists. But protein scientists like the late Dan Tawfik (Weizmann Institute) called protein fold origination close to a miracle. He showed protein folds loose thermodynamic stability after a few mutations & long before they can evolve new folds.

Of course, Peterson was trained with the same assumptions of naturalism and materialism shared by other evolutionary thinkers. This has tended to make him reach for naturalistic explanations of everything by default. He has shown respect for theists, but like Carl Jung before him, he generally frames their belief in psychological terms, where God is a product of our own collective unconscious rather than a distinct, personal, creative entity. Its not that he closes the door on traditional theism. He just hasnt yet felt comfortable opening it beyond a crack, at least not publicly.

Now that hes giving Meyers work a hearing, he may have invited a new barrage of flak. But the good doctor has already proven himself capable of taking more than a bit of heat. Inmy post analyzing his podcast with Lawrence Krauss, I said that it seemed Krauss was content to stop searching, while Petersons search didnt seem to be over. Im happy to have been proven right.

Link:
#7 Story of 2021: Peterson and God Hypothesis - Discovery Institute

Gerry Chidiac

BY GERRY CHIDIAC

Lessons in Learning

As we move into a new year, we see many problems in the world and much that needs to change. We often forget, however, that the most significant force for good looks back at us each time we gaze into the mirror.

We live in a capitalist society, and capitalism has brought us many good things. Private businesses, big and small, give employment to many of us. And we all enjoy the goods and services they provide.

The problem is that capitalists seem unclear in their purpose. Stephen Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, tells us that leaders in business and life will look for win-win scenarios where all parties are better off.

That being the case, does it make sense to produce vaccines and only share them with those who can pay our asking price while allowing billions of people to go unvaccinated? Is it good to produce weapons and propagate wars that will result in the deaths of children? Is it okay to lie about a product to make a sale?

It seems that many among the capitalist class dont agree with Covey.

What does this mean for those of us who are ordinary workers? Are we simply supposed to go along to get along? Are we supposed to simply put our heads down and do our jobs?

Given the current phenomenon of people walking away from their employment, many seem to be saying that earning a paycheque isnt worth the price of their integrity. Even when the job market is less forgiving for workers, we can do things to maintain a sense of peace and balance.

Psychologist Jordan Peterson advises that we be mindful of how we feel in our jobs. If youre being required to do things that make you weak and ashamed, then stop. Dont do them.

Peterson further advises that we prepare ourselves to make a lateral move in our employment. Seek constant personal improvement. Develop the skills and the character that will make you more valuable in your field.

His advice isnt surprising. Unhealthy workplaces, especially those that dont value employee input, tend to have high turnover rates. This is true in the public and private sectors. If employers want to attract and hold onto the best people, they need to treat them well.

Petersons suggestion empowers the common person. Unethical employers cant do anything if no one will work for them. Theyre limited if they cant attract and hold onto the best people in the field.

This is an incredibly empowering message for the ordinary citizen. Were the 99 per cent, and the unscrupulous portion of the one per cent is powerless without our co-operation. Even as consumers, we have the power to hold large corporations accountable.

The key for each of us is to be mindful of our character. Do we truly value human life, even among the poor and our neighbours on the other side of the world? Do we respect others and ourselves? Do we understand the life-giving power of integrity? Do we embrace truth, even when it makes us uncomfortable? Do we have the courage to do the right thing, or even to admit that we may have been wrong?

Were going on two years of a global pandemic, and 2022 will be a year full of challenges. Were all in this together, yet each of us must choose how to respond.

I recently came across a quote from an unknown source. It draws to mind the importance of the decisions each of us must make as we move into the new year and beyond: You come to Earth to get to know your soul, not to sell it.

Gerry Chidiac is an award-winning high school teacher specializing in languages, genocide studies and work with at-risk students.Check out his websitehere. Find him onFacebook. Or on Twitter @GerryChidiac

Link:
How ordinary people can survive the worst of capitalism - Prince George Daily News

There was a time when being a philosopher required years of scholarship, along with new ideas and rigorous research. In the age of social media, all you need is a startup that can raise a few millions, and lose them slowly until the next round of fundraising.

While Kunal Shah who has built his fintech startup CRED to be a $4.01 billion venture waits for profits, he has aced the game of sharing all his gyan (Hindi word for wisdom) on social media without telling us much about what the company is up to.

On the other hand, Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev, a spiritual leader whose primary job is to preach his wisdom, is reportedly making tons of money for his organisation, the Isha Foundation.

Read more here:
From Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos to Sundar Pichai heres Business Insiders new year roast of the worlds rich - Business Insider India

The Karl Marx of critical race theory was a bespectacled, mild-mannered man with a slightly whimsical voice. Born a year after Martin Luther King Jr, Derrick Bell became the first black American to be a tenured professor at Harvard Law School. It should never have happened: neither of his parents attended college, and Bell himself had studied at the relatively undistinguished Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. Today, his central argument, that racism is a permanent feature of American society, is now mainstream.

Critical race theory is now widely accepted by the liberal-Left media and much of academia. Its not just the bad laws of the Jim Crow south. And its not just a few racist people here and there. Racism is not some bad apples; it is as American as apple pie.

For Martin Luther King and, later, Barack Obama, American racism was the consequence of a liberal and egalitarian country failing to live up to its principles; for supporters of critical race theory, by contrast, these principles were predicated on the subjugation of black people. The American Dream is rotten to the core.

In critical race theory, then, the key historical moment is not the abolition of slavery or the passing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, which brought an end to segregation in public places but the 1954 Supreme Court ruling that separate but equal public schooling was unconstitutional. It violated the fourteenth amendment which, after former slaves were granted citizenship, had assured all citizens equal protection of the laws. If black Americans have separate schooling, they cant realise that equality: so concluded the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case.

This seems like a tremendous achievement. Indeed, in many standard textbooks on the history of the civil rights movement, Brown v. Board is seen as the first big crack in the edifice of Old Jim Crow. But the founding father of critical race theory was sceptical about its positive impact. In an article published in the Harvard Law Review in 1980, Bell argued that the decision was based on:

value to whites, not simply those concerned about the immorality of racial inequality, but also those whites in policymaking positions able to see the economic and political advances at home and abroad that would follow abandonment of segregation.

In other words, the decision was motivated not by principled idealism but cynical self-interest. Domestic legislation in the fifties was shadowed by the Cold War and in the battle against communism, America wanted to be seen as a moral exemplar.

But Bells critique of Brown v. Board runs deeper than this. Bell considered himself a realist, and viewed those who celebrated Supreme Court victories with bemusement. A few laws dont change 250 years of slavery followed by 100 years of segregation and terror. My position, he wrote in his 1992 Faces at the Bottom of the Well, is that the legal rules regarding racial discrimination have become not only reified (that is, ascribing material existence and power to what are really just ideas) but deified. This is because the worship of equality rules as having absolute power benefits whites by preserving a benevolent but fictional self-image, and such worship benefits blacks by preserving hope.

Hope was the very emotion, however, that animated the politics of King and Obama. (The latters second book was entitled: The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream.) But Bell is having none of this.

I think, he writes, weve arrived at a place in history where the harms of such worship outweigh its benefit. Those who persist in clinging on to the vision of the nation as a bastion of enlightened values are, according to him, at best naive.

This display of world-weariness, in contrast to doe-eyed idealism, is one shared by the most esteemed black American intellectual in the second term of Obamas presidency: Ta-Nehisi Coates. No one writes much about Coates anymore. Perhaps because he left Twitter. The last memorable thing he did was base a villain in a comic book on Jordan Peterson. But six years ago, after the publication of his book Between the World and Me, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction, he was anointed by Toni Morrison as James Baldwins successor the nations intellectual and moral conscience on matters of race.

Coates isnt a theoretician like Bell; he is a polemicist. In his writing, the realist attitude central to Bells critical race theory is expressed with piquant force. Racism is a constitutive part of Americas identity, Coates argues, and anyone who deviates from this fact is deluded, naive or malevolent. There is nothing, Coates writes about racists, uniquely evil in these destroyers or even in this moment. The destroyers are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy.

Coates is known for his essays in The Atlantic, which are stylish, personal, historical and very long. The overall mood is one of disenchantment. The American Dream is not for black people. Between the World and Me is written as a letter to his son, and it contains no consoling words for the future: I have no praise anthems, nor old Negro spirituals. The view that the moral arc of history bends towards justice is an illusion. America, Coates writes, understands itself as Gods handiwork, but the black body is the clearest evidence that America is the work of men. He is an atheist.

Bell was not; he was a Christian. And his detached pessimism was tempered by an aggressive moralism. In his book, Ethical Ambition, which mixes memoir and self-help, he emphasised that:

humanity at its essence is both an ongoing readiness to recognize wrongs and try to make things better, and the desire to help those in need of assistance without expecting reward or public recognition.

So there is a point in being human, and that point is to do good. The virtues that are most important to Bell are passion, courage, faith, relationships, inspiration and humility. He often reads less like a radical subversive than a hokey Grandpa, slipping you moral maxims rather than sweets. Which raises the question: how can someone with such piety end up conceiving an ideology characterised by doleful pessimism?

Bell is in truth an unlikely candidate for the godfather of critical race theory, an ideology sceptical about the positive impact of anti-racist legislation. When he was younger, he worked for the NAACP, the establishment anti-racism group that believed American society could be transformed through the legal system. He worked, in particular, as a civil rights lawyer in the fifties Deep South. But eventually the US Justice Departments Civil Rights division asked him to stop being a member of the NAACP: they thought he couldnt be objective. He quit his position in the department, but continued to work for the anti-racist organisation.

One plausible way to reconcile these two sides of Bell the moralist and the pessimist is to emphasise his Christianity. He believed in the permanence of racism just like any Christian believes in the inevitability of sin nevertheless, the inevitability of sin does not mean we shouldnt try to be better.

But perhaps a better way to account for this tension a way that explains the similarities between Bell and non-Christians like Coates is to view his conception of critical race theory as a case of thwarted idealism in the American Dream. America did not become a post-racial utopia after the civil rights revolution; therefore racism is a permanent feature of American society. Just like every passionate atheist is in some sense an inverted believer, people like Bell who are so antagonistic to American idealism belie their underlying attachment to it. This is true of critical race theory in general.

Although he is not a Christian, Coates is as profoundly American as Bell. His criticism of the nation is animated by his acceptance of American exceptionalism. One cannot, he writes, at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error. His proposal is this: to take our countrymens claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standard. In other words, he takes at face value the ideals of the American Dream (the very same American Dream that, he argues, is not for black people).

Meanwhile, the opponents of critical race theory see its ideas as hostile to or at least inconsistent with America (Fox News has mentioned it over 1,900 times in four months).In an exact inversion of critical race theorys contention that racism is present in every aspect of American life, many on the Right in this case, Christopher Rufo now complain that critical race theory has pervaded every aspect of the federal government and poses an existential threat to the United States. Rufo and his ilk arent opposed to, say, teaching the history of slavery and segregation in American schools; what they oppose is schoolchildren acknowledging their whiteness. Rufo calls it state-sanctioned racism.

The irony is that critical race theory is not, as it sees itself, a realists ideology. And it is not, as its main opponents view it, fundamentally un-American. Like many on the conservative American Right, it espouses an idealised view of the nations self-professed values: if they truly believed these values were fundamentally corrupt, then what would be the point, as Bell and Coates do, of holding America to them? The truly realist position is one like Coleman Hughess: he has shown, with evidence and dispassionate argumentation, that black Americans have made material progress in recent decades.

Although Rufo may deny this of himself, many on the conservative Right do cling on to a form of American idealism that is insensitive to the existence of racism. But critical race theorists cling on to their own idealism by concluding that, because America is not yet a post-racial society, racism is an inexorable feature of the country. The vision of the shining city on a hill becomes the sole means by which to judge the nation while the material realities of black people fade into the distance.

This piece was originally published in August.

More:
The Godfather of Critical Race Theory - UnHerd

Nov 1, 2020; Green Bay, Wisconsin, USA; Minnesota Vikings running back Dalvin Cook (33) celebrates with offensive tackle Ezra Cleveland (72) after scoring a touchdown in the third quarter during the game against the Green Bay Packers at Lambeau Field. Mandatory Credit: Benny Sieu-USA TODAY Sports

The Minnesota Vikings are 13-point underdogs on the road at the Green Bay Packers this weekend.

The Vikings must win their final two games and get help from the Philadelphia Eagles and New Orleans Saint to reach the postseason. Losing to Green Bay would send Minnesota to microscopic 3% playoff chances.

Also, here is the injury report Kirk Cousins is out on COVID reserve. Cameron Dantzler is doubtful. Michael Pierce, Chazz Surratt, and Tyler Conklin are questionable.

In addition, the Vikings will notably be without the services of Adam Thielen, Danielle Hunter, Everson Griffen, Mason Cole, Patrick Jones II (COVID), Nick Vigil (COVID), and Irv Smith Jr.

Heres the depth chart for Week 17:

QB1: Sean MannionQB2: Kellen MondQB3: Kyle Sloter

RB1: Dalvin CookRB2: Alexander MattisonRB3: Kene NwangwuRB4: Wayne Gallman

FB1: C.J. Ham

WR1: Justin JeffersonWR2: K.J. OsbornWR3: Dede WestbrookWR4: Ihmir Smith-MarsetteWR5: Dan Chisena

TE1: Tyler Conklin (Questionable)TE2: Chris HerndonTE3: Luke Stocker

LT1: Christian DarrisawLT2: Rashod Hill

RT1: Brian ONeillRT2: Blake Brandel

C1: Garrett Bradbury

LG1: Ezra Cleveland

RG1: Dakota DozierRG2: Wyatt Davis

**Oli Udoh is on COVID reserve but may return in time for Week 17.

LDE1: D.J. Wonnum

RDE1: Sheldon RichardsonRDE2: Tashawn Bower

NT1: Michael Pierce (Questionable)NT2: Armon WattsNT3: James Lynch

3DT1: Dalvin Tomlinson

SLB1: Anthony BarrSLB2: Blake Lynch

MLB1: Eric KendricksMLB2: Troy Dye

WLB1: Chazz Surratt (Questionable)

CB1: Patrick PetersonCB2: Cameron Dantzler (Doubtful)CB3: Mackensie AlexanderCB4: Kris BoydCB5: Harrison Hand** Tye Smith or Parry Nickerson could be activated from the practice squad.

SS1: Harrison SmithSS2: Camryn Bynum

FS1: Xavier WoodsFS2: Josh Metellus

K: Greg Joseph

P: Jordan Berry

LS: Andrew DePaola

KR1: Kene Nwangwu

PR1: Dede WestbrookPR2: K.J. Osborn

Dustin Baker is a political scientist who graduated from the University of Minnesota in 2007. He hosts a podcast with Bryant McKinnie, which airs every Wednesday with Raun Sawh and Sally from Minneapolis. His Viking fandom dates back to 1996. Listed guilty pleasures: Peanut Butter Ice Cream, The Sopranos, and The Doors (the band).

More:
Vikings Depth Chart Ahead of Week 17 at Packers - VikingsTerritory.com