Men’s biological clock and IQ: much ado about nothing

“The men are getting really angry and the women are a little too gleeful,” wrote New York Times columnist Lisa Belkin commenting on the overwhelming response she got for an article on a new study that found that men, too, may have a “biological clock” ticking when it comes to having what biologists would call “high quality” offspring.

The headlines reporting the study make ominous pronouncements along the lines of “Older fathers may mean lower IQs in their children,” a conclusion that brings Belkin so far as “[to] hope that somehow it equalizes relationships of sexes.” Couples all over the world are reacting to the news the best they can. CNN reporter Jason Carroll quotes a couple in their late ‘30s saying “We’re having our first. If he is a little less intelligent maybe the world doesn’t need smarter people, doesn’t need more gifted people just deeper people. So hopefully he will be a deep person.” (Hmm, what does it mean to be “deep”? And where is the evidence that the world doesn’t need smarter people?) To this add the predictable commentary of experts like Dr. Harry Fisch (a professor of urology, quoted by CNN), who — while cautioning that the 33,000 children analyzed in the study are of age 7 and below — said that “what we’re seeing are real indications, we’re seeing real clues that as men get older there are problems.”

Oh really? To begin with, it turns out that the Australian study found a difference of only 6 points between children fathered by men in their ‘20s and those in their ‘50s. Moreover, when reading the not-so-fine print of the papers, one finds out that the difference dropped to a miserly 2 points as soon as socioeconomic factors where accounted for. Not exactly an earth shattering discovery, even if one were to think of IQ as a fixed measure of genetic potential. But of course IQ is anything but.

IQ testing was invented by the French psychologist Alfred Binet, originally with the intention of identifying children who may be encountering difficulties during their early education so that they could be given special attention. Of course, the test was soon used for all sorts of bizarre discriminatory practices, particularly against (legal) immigrants in the United States, as detailed in Stephen Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man (e.g., the tests were given in English to people who did not speak English, to “prove” that non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants were clearly stupid and should be kept out of the country).

Even though cognitive scientists are still not quite sure what exactly IQ measures, it is of course a quantitative assessment of some cognitive ability. As with any human trait, a component of it is “heritable” (meaning that there is a statistical covariance between parents and offsprings in terms of their respective IQ — this is far from the everyday meaning of the term heritability, we are not talking about a simple-minded concept of “intelligent genes”).

However, Richard Lewontin, in a classic paper published in 1974 (“The analysis of variance and the analysis of causes,” American Journal of Human Genetics, 26:400-411) has shown that the relationship between genetic and environmental effects in shaping IQ and similar traits in humans is exceedingly complex. Indeed, according to Lewontin, sampling a population with a different genetic constitution would dramatically alter the degree to which IQ responds to altered environmental (e.g., educational, socioeconomic) conditions, while changing the environment would paradoxically result in a different estimate of the supposedly genetically fixed quantity of “heritability” (for technical reasons that I cannot go into here, but see my book: Phenotypic Plasticity: Beyond Nature and Nurture. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press). Bottom line: estimates of IQ and its heritability in humans come with a high degree of uncertainty (much, much more than 2 points!) and change dramatically as a function of the environment.

How dramatic? A classic study by Cooper and Zubek in rats (“Effects of enriched and restricted early environments on the learning ability of bright and dull rats,” Canadian Journal of Psychology, 12(3):159-164, 1958) used two genetically selected lines that were respectively very good and very bad at solving maze problems. The authors then raised both “dull” and “bright” rats in very stimulating environments (cages enhanced by color and toys) and in very depressing ones (cages with no color or toys) and compared them again. The results were rather stunning: the environment had completely erased the genetically selected differences between the two lines: dull rats performed as well as the bright ones if grown in stimulating environmental conditions, and vice versa the bright rats did as poorly as the dull ones under deprived conditions. Conclusion: very strong, genetically “determined” differences in intelligence can be erased by a simple change in the environment. Alas, we can’t do the experiment with humans, for obvious logistical and ethical reasons. But there is no rationale to think that we would react much differently, at least qualitatively.

Given all of the above — about which of course you will find not a trace in either the CNN or the New York Times articles covering the aging fathers story — what is the import of an alleged difference of 2 points in the IQ of young children fathered by 20-somethings vs. 50-somethings? To put it bluntly, that difference is in fact completely insignificant (sorry, ladies), and there is no reason for anyone to lose any sleep over this, or worse, for men to rush into having babies in order to keep up their children’s chances of getting into Harvard. Besides, we all know that men aren’t very emotionally mature until they get into their 30’s, so why would a woman wish to have a child with someone who is still himself a baby? Now, there is something that requires serious study.

On torture

Nobody who pays even occasional attention to the news in the United States could possibly be unaware of the ongoing debate on torture as it was practiced by the US Government during the early years of the so-called war on terror, under the full knowledge and conscious endorsement of high-level officials in the Bush administration, beginning with former Vice President Dick Cheney and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. It seems to me astounding that we have to have a debate at all, instead of an open and speedy prosecution of the people responsible for the policy, up to and including former President W. (and let’s not get started on the even more obvious issue of the false pretenses under which the Iraq war was started). Still, if we have to have a debate, let’s have a rational one (see how naive I am after all these years?). There are three areas of dispute that have dominated the public discourse on water boarding and other “enhanced interrogation” techniques used by the US on terror suspects: legal, pragmatic, and moral. Let’s take a quick look at each in turn.

The legal question: it’s pretty simple, really. The United States ratified in October 1994 the United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (which was crafted ten years earlier). According to that radical organization, Amnesty International, the US is bound by its own Constitution not to engage in torture, since the Eighth Amendment clearly prohibits “cruel and unusual punishments.” Moreover, in 1994 the US Congress passed a law (18 U.S.C. § 2340) that extends US criminal jurisdiction to acts of torture committed by a US national outside of the country. It shouldn’t take the team on Law & Order to figure out that torture is illegal in the United States, and that it is illegal for Americans to engage in torture abroad (that includes Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib). Period.

Now for the pragmatic angle: Americans are the quintessential pragmatists, both in terms of national ethos and even in strictly technical philosophical terms (think of philosophers like Dewey, James and Peirce). So one may argue that despite the transparently obvious legal case outlined above, “we live in a post-9/11 world,” as the tired fear-mongering phrase goes, and so we should change the law to reflect such circumstances. It’s a new era in which our very existence is under assault (though that is a gross exaggeration, the US isn’t Palestine or Israel), and we need all the means of defense at our disposal. Except of course, that the experts who have spoken out about torture in the past several months, including members of the FBI, CIA and the military, have repeatedly pointed out that it doesn’t work, for the simple and well understood fact that a person under torture will eventually give information — any information, including the false variety — just to be at least temporarily relieved from the pain of torture. The infamous “ticking bomb” scenario mindlessly brought up by so many Republicans is fictional (see the infamous show “24,” which has been criticized even by the US Military), just like those weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein turned out not to have possessed.

One more thing on the pragmatic question: Dick Cheney has been repeating as recently as yesterday that torture is justifiable because it has kept terrorists from attacking the US. His “reasoning” seems to be: (premise 1) We practiced torture after 9/11; (premise 2) We have not been attacked after 9/11; therefore (conclusion) Torture impeded terrorist attacks. This is so stupid that it should be hardly necessary to point out why it doesn’t work. But here we go nonetheless: First, the above is an egregious example of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy (after that, therefore because of that). Plenty of other things have happened since 9/11, like the Red Sox winning the World Series, or ER going off the air. Maybe those are the real reasons we haven’t been attacked. Secondly, and more seriously, perhaps some of the other things we have been doing in terms of national defense since 9/11 are actually responsible for the lack of attacks on US soil, like two wars being fought on foreign soil, or billions spent in enhanced border security. Third, and most damning of all, the Bush administration (under Cheney) ceased the use of torture in 2004. Five years later, we still haven’t been attacked. So perhaps torture has nothing to do with it?

Finally, the moral issue, which really should trump all of the above, especially in a nation with such a high (and overblown) understanding of its own moral place in history (Americans keep thinking of themselves as a shining example for the rest of civilization, just like colonial Britain and the Roman empire did. Evidently they forget that their country got started with a combination of genocide and ethnic cleansing, prospered financially on the back of slaves, has had a history punctuated by an almost uninterrupted series of wars of aggression, and has been marred by ugly civil rights strife that is not over yet). Torture is immoral because it is precisely the kind of behavior that we do not want to have others do unto us, a straightforward application of the Kantian imperative. This isn’t just a hypothetical statement: the US prosecuted, convicted and either jailed or executed Japanese soldiers who waterboarded American soldiers during World War II.

The whole point of an open, democratic, and moral society is that we try to uphold certain moral standards. Such moral standards are understood to apply to everyone everywhere, that is that we maintain them to be universal across the broader human community (and perhaps beyond, if you accept the more controversial idea of animal rights). A good measure of the morality of a society is precisely how well it holds to its principles in times of hardship. It is easy to claim the moral high ground when we enjoy peace and economic prosperity. It is poverty and war that bring forth the ugliness in human beings, and it is then that we fight our moral wars against the worst possible enemy: ourselves.

The aim of terrorism is to undermine a society, to overthrow its values and replace them with others. The 9/11 attacks resulted in the direct death of 2,974 people (excluding the hijackers). At current count, 4,299 US soldiers have been killed in Iraq, and 31,285 have been wounded. And that doesn’t count the deaths in Afghanistan or, of course, the civilian casualties in both Iraq and Afghanistan, which are at least an order of magnitude greater. The combined wars in those two countries have cost us close to $860 billion dollars, and that doesn’t take into account the huge cost of homeland security. Why are we doing all this? Just so that we can keep ourselves alive? That would be insanely stupid, considering that an American is 225,409 times more likely to die in an auto accident than in a terrorist attack (it’s also twice as likely that you’ll die from being crushed by a vending machine). Hey, the debacle of the auto industry might actually save a lot more lives than waterboarding! But no, we are doing all of this because we want to preserve and improve our society, which in large part means improving our ever-evolving system of morality and expanding set of rights. Engaging in torture, or even defending the use of torture in the public forum kills that system from within. No need for further terrorist attacks.

Is Stanley Fish smarter than Richard Dawkins?

I could write a book refuting the nonsense regularly expounded by New York Time’s columnist Stanley Fish. Oh, wait, I almost have written a book about it! I already commented on this blog regarding Stanley’s thoughts concerning academic freedom, deconstructionism, and the New Atheism (part 1 and part 2). I was going to leave Fish alone for a while, but today three friends independently sent me his latest column and asked me to write about it, so here we go, again...

Fish apparently was shocked by an almost unanimously negative response his readers had to a particularly sloppy, positive, review he published of Terry Eagleton’s “Faith, Reason and Revolution,” where Fish endorses Eagleton’s blabber about god having “managed to forge such direct links between the most universal and absolute of truths and the everyday practices of countless millions of men and women” (no, we are not told what alleged universal and absolute truths Eagleton and Fish are referring to).

Fish dismisses his critics by deploying a standard postmodern technique which, interestingly, has been widely used also by creationists in their fight against evidence-based science: you see, if there are differences between science and religion, Fish maintains, they cannot be found in the simple claim that religion is about faith and science is concerned with facts. This, in turn, is somehow the result of the conclusion that there is no such thing as a “fact” independent of a theory. Let’s consider Fish’s example, which — tellingly — comes from literary criticism, not science.

Stanley invites us to consider a debate among literary critics about the authorship of a given book. People may marshal several sources of “evidence” to the effect that, say, Richard III was written by one William Shakespeare. But such so-called evidence would simply not move a postmodernist like Michel Foucault or Roland Barthes, for whom the very idea of an author is nonsense. Postmodernists reject the assumptions on the basis of whether the evidence gathered by their esteemed colleagues can, in fact, be considered evidence, and conclude instead (in the words of Bathes), that “writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin.”

Besides the fact that I haven’t the foggiest idea of what on earth the quote by Bathes actually means, I would love to know whether Bathes and Foucault ever got royalty checks. I suspect they did, which means that at the least their tax accountants believed in the concept of authorship.

Now, let us give Fish his due before we fry him (metaphorically, of course) in his own juices. He is absolutely right that facts are not “a matter simply of opening up your baby blues and taking note of the evidence that presents itself,” and that “evidence comes into view (or doesn’t) in the light of assumptions.” Indeed, not only is this point universally appreciated by (non-postmodernist) philosophers of science, but it was made a century and a half ago by none other than Charles Darwin. In a letter to his friend Henry Fawcett, Darwin wrote: “How odd it is that anyone should not see that all observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service!” That, however, didn’t stop Darwin from thinking that his theory of evolution dealt with facts, and that it most certainly was not a matter of faith.

Was Darwin a fool who had not understood the Foucaultian implications of his own realization of the complex relationship between facts and theories? No, the problem lies with Fish’s cheap rhetorical trick: Stanley seems to think that once one has refuted the naive logical positivist view that human beings can adopt a purely objective viewpoint and grasp reality for what it actually is (a position that in philosophy has been abandoned since the 1950s, by the way), voilà, all knowledge has ultimately been shown to be a matter of faith.

This is an almost comical example of a well known logical fallacy known as the false dichotomy, very popular in politics (remember “you are either with us or against us”?), but which Fish should really know how to avoid. It is simply not true, as our friend cavalierly maintains, that “once the act of simply reporting or simply observing is exposed as a fiction — as something that just can’t be done — the facile opposition between faith-thinking and thinking grounded in independent evidence cannot be maintained.” And the reason this is not the case is that there are more than two options on the table.

True, facts don’t speak for themselves, and evidence is such only within a particular conceptual framework, which itself depends on certain assumptions. But the framework and the assumptions don’t need to be arbitrary. In science, they are not (contrary to postmodern literary criticism). Science and reason are not like edifices built on a foundation, whereby one only has to show that the foundation is shaky for the whole edifice to come down. Rather, scientific knowledge is more like a web (indeed, the most popular online database of scientific papers is appropriately called the “Web of Knowledge”). In a web, one can examine a particular thread (a “fact,” or even an assumption), even pull it away, while still using the rest of the web for support. Reassured of the reliability of the first thread, one can then move on to examine another area of the web, this time using the previously examined fact/assumption as part of the new support, and so on.

To put it in other words, the web of scientific knowledge is reliable (while not being either perfect or absolutely objective) because it works: one can keep examining facts, and even questioning assumptions, while still discovering new things about the world, making the web both more self-consistent and a better reflection of the way the world (presumably) really is. It is because of the reliability of science and technology that people like Foucault and Bathes (and, I assume, Fish) can count on their bank account getting fatter with every royalty check. No “faith” needed.

As always in the case of postmodernism, a perfectly reasonable and potentially interesting idea (the non-independence of facts and theories, which was not discovered by postmodernists) gets blown out of proportion to justify an insane conclusion (that science is the same as religion, or that reason and faith are on the same epistemological level), a conclusion that very likely the author himself does not believe. A famous quip by philosopher Bertrand Russell comes to mind: I wish that all philosophers who do not believe in the existence of walls would get into a car and drive straight into a wall (any would do) at a speed proportional to their skepticism concerning the existence of the wall itself. We would at least get rid of a lot of bad philosophers, or literary critics.

One more thing: I owe my readers an explanation for the title of this column. Apparently, some commentator was upset at Fish’s continuous bashing of Richard Dawkins and the other “new atheists” (for whom, frankly, I don’t have much patience either, albeit for completely different reasons). Fish then couldn’t resist ending his column with this rather childish comment: “I refer you to a piece by syndicated columnist Paul Campos, which begins by asking, ‘Why is Stanley Fish so much smarter than Richard Dawkins?’” Oh Please, grow up, will you?

Rationally Speaking, the blog, now available on Kindle

The Kindle's march continues, with Amazon having just announced the release of the new Kindle DX (deluxe), which is larger than the Kindle2 and aimed more specifically at newspapers, magazines and other graphic-heavy readings. The two machines complement each other (think of them as the e-equivalent of a paperback and hard cover, respectively), and according to a recent New York Times article, the success of Amazon's venture is prompting a number of other big players, beginning with Apple, to release e-readers over the next few months (think Kindle with a touch screen!). Hopefully all players (including publishers) will eventually settle on a standard format so that users can read the same stuff on a variety of hardware platforms.

Meanwhile, I have just released the Rationally Speaking blog on Kindle, where you can get it for $1.99/month (I don't set the price, Amazon does). Why would you want to buy something that you can get for free? Well, that's what I do with the Slate and Huffington Post versions for Kindle, for instance because -- believe it or not -- I'm not always next to my computer, or because I like to read in bed or in the subway, where, frankly, bringing a laptop would be impractical or downright silly. At any rate, I just checked out how RS looks on the Kindle, and it's sleek and easy to navigate. Let me know what you think, should you happen to have a K-device handy. Or maybe you are reading this on the K. already?

Religion is atheists’ fault, study says

The success of religion may be the fault of non-believers (or, if you look at it the other way around, thank god for the atheists!). At least that is one interpretation of a recent individual-based simulation study of social evolution conducted by James Dow at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, and published in a recent issue of the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation (vol. 11, no. 2 2).

Dow built a simulation program (appropriately called evogod) that explored the question of how religion — i.e., a system based on passing along false or unverifiable information about the world — can spread in a society. There are, of course, several theories out there about the evolution of religion, falling into two broad categories: either religion is somehow advantageous and is therefore the result of natural selection, or it is a byproduct of other characteristics of the human brain and social organization. The first possibility comes in two main flavors: the advantage could accrue to religious individuals (standard individual-level natural selection) or groups (invoking the more controversial mechanism of group selection). Dow’s study explores the possibility that religious belief spread because of an individual advantage of some sort.

The first interesting result from the simulations is that under most tested scenarios religion actually does not survive! This is presumably because there is an obvious cost (in terms of sheer Darwinian fitness) to buying into fanciful notions about how the world works. How is it possible, then, that practically every human society has gotten the religious virus? The most surprising result of Dow’s study is that religion spreads only if non-religious people help it by supporting the religious! How is this possible?

The simulation’s structure was not designed to address the question of what mechanism could induce non-religious people to help religious ones, but some possibilities have been suggested nonetheless. According to Dow, “if a person is willing to sacrifice for an abstract god then people feel like they are willing to sacrifice for the community” (the so-called “greenbeard” effect). This is a social version of a well-established evolutionary idea known as the “handicap principle,” where males who can parade useless and costly attributes (be they peacock's feathers or Ferrari sports cars) are more likely to attract females because they are sending the indirect signal that their genes are so good that they can waste energy and resources just to please the female. It attempts to induce the female to imagine what sort of offspring they might be able to produce if only the female would consent to...

As bizarre and irrational as this sort of scenario may seem, there is independent empirical evidence, for instance from studies of Israeli kibbutzim, that religious people do tend to receive more assistance than less religious ones from the rest of the community, again perhaps because they inspire trust. Ironically, of course, this trust originates not because the religious provide more truthful information about the world, but precisely because they display a high degree of commitment to delivering non-verifiable information! Humans, you’ve got to love them.

Conservatives lack sense of humor, study finds

I have always thought that conservatives have a much less developed sense of humor than liberals. While it is easy to list a large number of liberal-leaning comedians, for instance, it is hard to come up with more than a handful of conservative ones (and even they, like Dennis Miller, are better characterized as libertarians). This, I think, is because it is difficult to come across as hilarious when you make fun of the poor, minorities and other obvious targets of conservative scorn. Attacking the rich and powerful, on the other hand, is an all time favorite and explains the success of the likes of Jon Stewart.

Then again, in my more sober moments I keep thinking that this can’t be right, and that surely it is simply my bias as a Daily Show regular watcher and leftist coming through loud and clear. Apparently, however, science backs up my admittedly less than neutral political intuition. A recent study published by Heather L. LaMarre, Kristen D. Landreville and Michael A. Beam of Ohio State University in the International Journal of Press/Politics examined how audiences of different political persuasions react to jokes made by Stephen Colbert. The results are quite astounding.

The authors used a respectable sample of 332 individuals, and found that personal political ideology is a good predictor of Colbert’s own political ideology. Here is the kicker: “conservatives were more likely to report that Colbert only pretends to be joking and genuinely meant what he said while liberals were more likely to report that Colbert used satire and was not serious when offering political statements. Conservatism also significantly predicted perceptions that Colbert disliked liberalism.” See? Conservative really do lack a sense of humor!

Moreover, the authors of the study in question also made sure to check whether the two groups thought Colbert is funny (i.e., regardless of how they interpret the comedian’s political leanings). There was no statistical difference in that case, implying that while liberals were laughing at the irony, conservatives were laughing at what they thought was a heartfelt description of the state of the world on Colbert’s part. One would be led to infer a certain degree of meanness on the part of the conservative viewers, which perhaps has something to do with the results of another recent study, showing that people who go to church more often (usually, conservative evangelical Christians) are much more likely to support torture of suspected terrorists. But that’s another, much less funny, story which I’ll leave for another time.

The study by LaMarre and colleagues, I venture to speculate, may also shed some light on a lingering mystery that has occasionally bothered my mind since 2006: what were the people in charge of that year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner thinking when they invited Stephen Colbert to talk, with Bush, Scalia and other big conservative whigs in attendance? If you watch the video, even as a liberal, you’ll cringe at what you see. I mean, Colbert was at his satirical best and very, very, funny, but you almost (and I underscore “almost”) feel sorry for poor W. being subjected to such obvious abuse to his face. But perhaps W. and company really didn’t understand that Stephen was making fun of them, thinking — like the conservative subjects of LaMarre’s research — that he was laughing with them, not at them.

Well, as Steve Martin once said, “Comedy is the art of making people laugh without making them puke.” Now, there is another good idea for a research project...

The unraveling of the GOP

Readers of this blog may have noticed that I have written little about politics since Obama’s election. The reason is that I’m still basking in the light of the new direction the country has been moving (which, of course, does not at all mean that I agree with all of Obama’s choices so far — he’s a bit too moderate for my taste). I’ve also been privately gloating about the seeming unraveling of the Grand Old Party and saw it as rather tacky to do so in public.

Still, I cannot help myself from commenting on a recent article by Christine Todd Whitman, former Republican Governor of New Jersey and former head of the Environmental Protection Agency under George W. Bush. Whitman is, by all accounts, a moderate Republican, and wrote this op-ed while mourning the recent switch of Senator Arlen Specter to the Democrats, a move that could put the Democratic Party in control of a super-majority in the Senate, when (not if) the courts in Minnesota finally declare Al Franken the winner of last year’s election.

Whitman worries “about the direction this country could go with a filibuster-proof Democratic majority” because “the United States needs two vibrant, competitive parties” especially given “the economic crisis, the war in Iraq.” Funny that the Republicans were not as concerned about wielding power with no regard for the minority for much of the last eight years, including a threat to use a "nuclear option" in the Senate to stifle debate. Of course a healthy democracy does need more than one vibrant party. Indeed, one of the main problems with American democracy is that there are only two parties wielding enough power to make a difference. Then again, the Republicans have managed to do so much damage to the Unites States, both internally and externally, that frankly a few years of “excesses” in the other direction are simply going to bring us back toward some sort of middle ground, if we are lucky.

It is much less funny that Whitman seems to be completely oblivious to the obvious fact that both the economic crisis and especially the Iraq war (she forgot “the other war,” apparently) are a result of the insane economic and foreign policies of her own party, policies to which she contributed to some extent, as a member of W.’s cabinet. Suffering from a severe deficiency in her short term memory, she wants to “remind the nation that our party is committed to such important values as fiscal restraint, less government interference in our everyday lives, environmental policies that promote a balanced approach between protection and economic interest, and a foreign policy that is engaged with the rest of the world.”

Really? This is classic Orwell-style newspeak. “Fiscal restraint” really means tax cuts for the rich and war spending that ran our economy into the ground; “less government interference with our lives” is a bit hard to reconcile with the strong religious prescriptionary bent of the Bush administration, not to mention its illegal secret wiretapping program to spy on Americans; “balanced environmental policies” are the very same policies that gutted Whitman’s own EPA (from which, to her credit, Whitman resigned in 2003, partly because of Cheney’s insistence in easing air pollution standards); and an “engaged foreign policy” obviously translates into bullying and bombing other countries so that we can have our way. Thanks for the offer, Christine, but I’d rather try Obama for a few years, if you don’t mind.

Whitman concludes by reminding her readers that “the Republican Party has a proud heritage and much to add to the current debates, but only if we can return to the principles that made us the party of Abraham Lincoln, Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan.” Except that those three people represent very different sorts of parties, becoming increasingly worse in an almost linear progression in time. Lincoln surely was one of the greatest presidents the US has ever had, remembered of course above all for his defense of the unity of the country and his fight against slavery. Eisenhower was almost a liberal, counting among his achievements the very socialist construction of the interstate highway system, the continuation and expansion of New Deal policies (social security, health, education and welfare), and two Civil Rights Acts (in 1957 and 1960). Heck, he even realized that it was not a good idea to intervene in Vietnam, though he then endorsed that scoundrel Richard Nixon as his successor (a plan postponed by a few years because of the unexpected victory by John F. Kennedy). As for Reagan, well don’t get me started, I have a list of complaints about him that would take a whole series of long posts to go into, and it wouldn’t be good for my inner spiritual balance. The point is that Reagan, and even more so the W.-Cheney pair, most certainly are not the same kind of GOP that Lincoln and even Eisenhower would have recognized, so let’s not pretend that these figures are all part of the same “proud tradition.”

Still, Whitman’s call to the few moderate Republicans left to organize and take back the agenda of the party is worthy of praise, and I wish her success. The irony is that her op-ed was published in that alleged bastion of journalistic liberalism, the New York Times. Will anyone in the GOP bother to read it?