Yes, the WSJ is a pro-capitalism-conservative-leaning newspaper, their specific motto is "Free Markets,Free People". Nothing to be ashamed of there. But to take the next big step and say that it is some christian-coalition talking point regurgitation means that one is simply not paying attention.
Case in point. Yesterdays right page WSJ editorial listed below is a major swing at those who pray at the altar of intelligent design/creationism. The simple fact that the bird-flu virus that people in Washington are so worried about is dangerous is BECAUSE IT IS EVOLVING. It is not necessarily evolving intelligently, nor with a "grand purpose", it simply is evolving, period.
I'm going to post the whole article and hope that the Dow Jones company decides not to sue me (because they could). The reason will be in bold at the end.
There's Something
Catching in Washington
By HOLMAN W. JENKINS JR.
October 12, 2005; Page A17
Be afraid. Be somewhat, slightly afraid.
Last week's panic over bird flu skipped right past the current fashion of intelligent design. Senate Major Leader Bill Frist minced no words in blaming natural selection for the impending deadly human contagion: "It's like pulling the lever on a Vegas slot machine over and over again. If you pull enough times, the reels will align and hit the jackpot. But in this case, the jackpot is a deadly virus to which humans have no natural immunity."
Well, yes. The virus would have to mutate in its animal host to develop the possibility of casual human-to-human transmission. It would have to survive and reproduce until it reached a human host. It would also have to retain the virulence of bird flu in the few humans that catch it today, yet somehow not snuff out its own spread by killing its carriers.
This does indeed amount to a giant long shot. Jeffrey Taubenberger, a civilian Army pathologist who recreated in a lab the 1918 Spanish flu, says today's bird flu would have to accumulate specific mutations on each of its eight RNA segments. Presumably a powerful selective pressure would be required to drive the virus down this path. If so, it's hard to imagine the virus not also discovering the adaptive benefit of less human lethality, which would aid its spread.
For this, we can give thanks to the Lord for a nature that operates on principles of unintelligent design.
How a catastrophe with low probability of occurring became a focus of Washington's attention can be explained in one word: Katrina. Unlike the universe, politicians operate on psychological principles. George Bush gave the press conference last week he wished he'd given in the year past about the danger of New Orleans being submerged in a hurricane. He even cited John Barry's book about the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic -- the same Mr. Barry whose earlier book on the 1927 Mississippi flood was widely cited in the aftermath of the New Orleans debacle.
You're seeing an administration more than usually needy to get its "I told you so" chits in hand. HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt has stated, quite accurately, that the U.S. is unprepared for a worst-case pandemic. But when pressed on the odds, he said, "From all I hear from scientists and physicians it is relatively low, but it is not zero."
Declared Julie Gerberding, head of the Centers for Disease Control, in more interviews than you can count last week: a global pandemic is "not a matter of 'if' but 'when.'" But note that she was speaking of any flu pandemic, not the mega-killer of recent Washington scenarios.
Her own experts say a medium-severity bird flu outbreak would kill, at most, 207,000 Americans. In a normal year, flu kills 36,000. The 1918 flu, which is now believed to have been derived from bird flu, killed nearly 700,000 in a population one-third the size of today's, but notice that many of its victims died of secondary bacterial pneumonia that now are treated with antibiotics.
Yes, it's just conceivable that a virus could evolve that spreads easily and kills in the tens of millions -- though it's far more likely that an easy-spreading virus would be one that had evolved not to kill. Bird flu, in the first place, is carried hither and yon in ducks because it doesn't make them sick. Cataclysms of many kinds are always possible. But the principle of unintelligent design gives us comfort that such cataclysms are vanishingly rare because otherwise we wouldn't be here. The universe defaults to order because non-order is too unstable to persist. Why don't the creationists give God for credit for that?
In his book "Catastrophe," Richard Posner, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals in Chicago, writes: "The number of extreme catastrophes that have a more than negligible probability of occurring in this century is alarmingly great and their variety startling."
This is a delicious invitation to worry about everything. In all likelihood, however, each of us will die of something mundane, and in any case we'll all die. Very few policies recommend themselves as the answer to worst-case disasters, except perhaps a policy of space exploration to make sure mankind is not forever dependent on this planet and this solar system.
Panic is certainly not a sustainable response. Mr. Bush didn't tell families to stock up on Dinty Moore and Parmalat, enough to hunker down for an eight-week flu siege. After the duct tape and plastic sheeting nuttiness in the wake of the al Qaeda attacks, this suggests he's learned a lesson about using signals to help Americans put given risks in a realistic perspective.
Instead, stuck for something to do, Washington is turning bird flu into an opportunity for overdue progress on the vaccine industry's lawsuit problem. And China is being pressured to cooperate on disease control. Its agricultural sector, wedged weirdly between peasant husbandry and agribusiness, has become a hothouse for virus mutation. Progress here really might someday stop a global plague.
Almost everything about last week's flu panic goes to show why "intelligent design" simply makes a bad argument -- because it relies on the baseless assumption that complexity is evidence of design, a notion belied by everyday experience. Our economy achieves its complexity precisely because no one is in charge. Our politics creates order for 300 million contentious citizens in ways more supple and efficient than any authoritarian could impose.
That's why we're likely to get a policy response to the flu panic that's more rational, and less extravagant, than the scary talk that gives rise to it.
To repeat-
Almost everything about last week's flu panic goes to show why "intelligent design" simply makes a bad argument -- because it relies on the baseless assumption that complexity is evidence of design, a notion belied by everyday experience. Our economy achieves its complexity precisely because no one is in charge. Our politics creates order for 300 million contentious citizens in ways more supple and efficient than any authoritarian could impose.
Free markets, Free people. Don't let anyone tell you that the WSJ is some uber-rightwing talking point memo. Show them this column for proof.
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