Fire and Knowledge

The many imperfections of the human backbone which, regrettably, become increasingly apparent as we age, can hardly be attributed to intelligent design. They are easy to understand if we appreciate the fact that our upright posture is a recent evolutionary development. Evolution has taken a spinal column well adapted for horizontal, four-footed locomotion and pressed it into vertical, bi-pedal service. It works pretty well, but every now and then the stresses and strains of this new orientation are too much for the old structure. Intelligent design could have produced a trouble-free support for upright posture, but evolution was constrained by a structure that was already there. Chiropractors, of course, continue to reap the benefits.

–Kenneth R. Miller, Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution (orig. 1999; Harper Perennial, 2002), p. 101

Because taste is grounded in the sense of distinction, it follows that not everyone can have good taste. It is a conceptual impossibility (just as not all students can have above-average grades)…. Thus “good taste” shifts towards more inaccessible, less familiar styles.

–Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture (UK Edition, 2004), p. 125

Andrew Sullivan has endorsed Ron Paul for the 2008 election. Paul seems like the best candidate to me, too. Here’s an excerpt:

But the deeper reason to support Ron Paul is a simple one. The great forgotten principles of the current Republican party are freedom and toleration. Paul’s federalism, his deep suspicion of Washington power, his resistance to government spending, debt and inflation, his ability to grasp that not all human problems are soluble, least of all by government: these are principles that made me a conservative in the first place. No one in the current field articulates them as clearly and understands them as deeply as Paul. He is a man of faith who nonetheless sees a clear line between religion and politics. More than all this, he has somehow ignited a new movement of those who love freedom and want to rescue it from the do-gooding bromides of the left and the Christianist meddling of the right. The Paulites’ enthusiasm for liberty, their unapologetic defense of core conservative principles, their awareness that in the new millennium, these principles of small government, self-reliance, cultural pluralism, and a humble foreign policy are more necessary than ever - no lover of liberty can stand by and not join them.

He’s the real thing in a world of fakes and frauds. And in a primary campaign where the very future of conservatism is at stake, that cannot be ignored. In fact, it demands support.

Go Ron Paul!

(via Hynes)

[The agrarian mind] prefers the Creation itself to the powers and quantities to which it can be reduced. And this is a mind completely different from that which sees creatures as machines, minds as computers, soil fertility as chemistry, or agrarianism as an idea.

–Wendell Berry, “The Whole Horse” in Citizenship Papers (2003), p. 118

The blessing of the omnivore is that he can eat a great many different things in nature. The curse of the omnivore is that when it comes to figuring out which of those things are safe to eat, he’s pretty much on his own.

–Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), p. 287

What we learn from experience depends on the kind of philosophy we bring to experience. It is therefore useless to appeal to experience before we have settled, as well as we can, the philosophical question.

–C. S. Lewis, Miracles (1947, revised in 1960), p. 2.

Most first drafts can be cut by 50 percent without losing any information or losing the author’s voice.

–William Zinsser, On Writing Well, p. 17.

A reasonable person, eager to accept intelligent design as an explanation for [elephants], must therefore believe that the designer started more than 50 million years ago with a small organism quite unlike the Indian elephant. Then, over time, he crafted scores of new species, his designs gradually drifting closer and closer to the modern elephant. In the last few million years, he constructed in rapid succession nearly a dozen semifinal drafts until Elpehas maximus finally came off the drawing table.

–Kenneth R. Miller, Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution (orig. 1999; Harper Perennial, 2002), p. 97