Evolution and scientific thought - S Chipman

Preface

Many of you (my family, friends and associates) may be aware that I enjoy thinking and writing my thoughts. In fact, I am collecting those written thoughts in a “book” which I plan to entitle “Everyone Is Entitled to My Opinion”.  (The title is supposed to be funny.) In addition, you are likely aware that I was recently called as the Bishop of the 7th Ward. I need to make clear that my opinions are just that, opinions, and are not offered nor should they be considered doctrine or the opinions of The Church. I intend to keep writing and sharing my opinions and hope you enjoy them in the spirit in which they are offered. I also hope you will feel free to offer your ideas, comments, disagreements and suggestions on the topics. While on our 30th wedding anniversary trip to Fiji I read and wrote notes on this topic.

Evolution and Scientific Thought

Foreword

For some time I have had a curiosity about the subject of evolution and scientific thought and their relationship to my own beliefs. While at BYU I enrolled in a course entitled “Mormonism and Scientific Thought.” Although I must confess I don’t remember much of the specifics taught, I most likely have internalized some of what was discussed. In particular I remember hearing the comment that we don’t necessarily need to reconcile our religion with the views of science, and indeed trying to do so is likely to be a frustrating and possibly spiritually challenging event. I also remember studying the examples in history of the conflicts between religion and science and the negative impact of such attempts at reconciliation.

Generally I agree with that thinking. Our personal testimonies are built on personal spiritual experiences and our relationship with our God and with our Savior. My writing is not an attempt to reconcile the Gospel with science or science with the Gospel. Because much of who I am is directly related to my testimony, I would find it difficult to write on almost any subject (let alone a subject so intimately connected with our spirituality) without some references to my spiritual opinions.  Indeed, I must confess a bias at the start that I don’t think it was accidental that Darwin introduced his theory less than 30 years from the date of the restoration of the Church of Jesus Christ in 1830 and that primarily through the followers of Darwinian thought there became a significant rift between those who believe in God and publicized scientific thought on our existence. For me personally, either there is a God and a creator or there is Darwinian Evolution (DE) macro evolution. Both cannot be true and I will give my reasons in my conclusion.

Nevertheless, my purpose in writing is to clarify my own thoughts and personal research in an area of interest and to share this with others hoping to stimulate thought and dialogue. In the interest of time I am providing this as a work in progress. I am desirous that this should get into the hands of my friends now, and although I will continue to work and refine my ideas, I feel that an idea not expressed or shared has not fulfilled its potential. I hope you enjoy these thoughts and hope your own thoughts are stimulated and look forward to a dialogue with you.

Introduction

I must ask myself why I am interested in this subject. What is the purpose of my research? First, I consider myself a searcher for the truth. I believe even though not everything can be understood and there will always be mysteries, the truth is not obscure nor is it unobtainable generally.  Next, I believe we have some intuitive understanding of what is correct. We may call it a gut feeling, intuition, a thinning of the veil, basic common sense or instinct. In fact, when properly understood this “intuition” is most likely the light of Christ. Some concepts seem to ring true and some don’t. For me Darwinian evolution doesn’t ring true. Because so many people seem to take for granted a “fact” that doesn’t ring true to me, I’m interested in finding out more about why I don’t believe it and why others do.

Finally, I am old enough now (52) to have become aware of changes (some significant) in the thinking of our culture. One thought that has changed since I was a boy in high school studying biology relates to the theory of evolution. When I was in high school evolution was taught as a theory.  Prior to studying “the theory” we were introduced to the scientific process and what a theory is and how it is tested. Simply stated it goes like this:

1. Identify the problem or question which is the central point of your scientific investigation.
2. Develop a hypothesis. A hypothesis is an educated guess which is specific and testable.
3. Test the hypothesis. The procedure must be designed to answer the specific problem.
4. Evaluate the data. Once you have finished your experiment, you must determine if the data collected answers the hypothesis. Often the data is unconvincing or the hypothesis is disproved. When this happens you might need to think of a new procedure for your experiment.
5. Identify a new problem. Strong scientific inquiry often produces more questions than it answers! Many important scientific discoveries have been the result of questions raised in unrelated experiments.
6. If the hypothesis holds true then a model is developed. It may be visual, verbal, written or mathematical. The model may or may not become part of a theory. A theory is a broad generalization that explains a body of facts or phenomena.
7. If the theory is successful and accurate it will be able to predict the results of many new experiments.

In 1959, at the Centennial Celebration of the publication of Darwin’s The Origin of Species, several hundred scholars converged on the campus of the University of Chicago to pay homage to perhaps the greatest scientific revolution of all time. On this occasion Sir Julian Huxley, grandson of Darwin’s “bulldog”, T. H. Huxley, pronounced:

          This is one of the first public occasions on which it has been frankly faced that all aspects of reality are subject to evolution, from atoms and stars to fish and flowers, from fish and flowers to human societies and values-indeed, that all reality is a single process of evolution…

        In the evolutionary pattern of thought there is no longer either need or room for the supernatural. The earth was not created; it evolved.  So did all the animals and plants that inhabit it, including our human selves, mind and soul as well as brain and body. So did religion… Finally, the evolutionary vision is enabling us to discern, however incompletely, the lineaments of the new religion that we can be sure will arise to serve the needs of the coming era.

Sir Huxley leaves no doubt that he and many others, even in 1959, had determined that the theory had grown up into fact and was about to take its place as “the new religion.” And indeed 35 years later it has. My text books in 1966 may have been out of date but there is little doubt that the secular “scripture” of the new religion, the textbooks of our children and their friends, have been updated. Evolution has been presented as fact for so long it is no longer considered a theory by most people. It is fact. Or is it?

Darwinian Evolution

First, I should say what “it” is. “Evolution” is a word that is elastic and can and has been used to mean many things. This elasticity has become a tool in the arguments for “the theory of evolution”. “Evolution” may refer to many types of change. Evolution describes changes that occur within a species. (White moths, for example, may “evolve” into grey moths.) This process is called microevolution, which can be observed and described as fact. “Evolution” may also refer to the change of one living thing into another such as reptiles into birds. This process, called macroevolution, has never been observed.  “Evolution” can also refer to the belief that random, undirected forces produced a world of living things. Unless, otherwise indicated, I will refer to “evolution” as macroevolution, Darwinian Evolution (DE) or the current belief (I mean fact) that changes in the genetic composition of a population during successive generations, as a result of mutation and natural selection acting on the genetic variation among individuals have resulted in the development of new species and so, has been the source for all species on the earth. This is the theory in which I (and many others) have doubts. And it is important to know that there are many in the scientific community that also have doubts.

Intelligent Design

Over the last 30 years a movement has grown up among some of the foremost scientist in a variety of disciplines that has become known as the Intelligent Design (ID) movement. This movement has developed informally as a number of unconnected scientists from different disciplines from various places in the world have had their own doubts about DE and have expressed those doubts. As these individuals have become aware of each other they have corresponded and occasionally met and shared their thoughts and concerns and evidences that scientifically do not support DE.

Stated briefly, the ID movement believes there is little or no evidence to support macroevolution and that there is much evidence to support purposeful design and thus a designer.  The movement is careful not to argue in favor of God as the creator recognizing this is out of the realm of science. But these scientists site empirical evidences from their own studies that contradict the principles of DE and support the idea of a purposeful designer.

Unfortunately, many theists see the ID movement as a hope to introduce or reintroduce creationism into secular education and are quick to rationalize arguments for this by pointing to the writings of scientists in the ID movement for their support. This, more or less, internal threat may be the single biggest stumbling block to the general acceptance of the ID movement. Evolutionary scientists are quick to label anyone who does not believe in DE as a creationist. This is intended to immediately label and discredit the challenger in the minds of the evolutionists and because in our current culture Darwin is champion, society at large is quick to nod approval of this intentional low blow.

Evolution is a fact, Darwinists say, in that they know that evolution has occurred. It is a theory in that they are far from understanding the mechanisms by which evolution has occurred. In the eloquent words of evolutionist Stephen J. Gould:

“Evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas which explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away while scientists debate rival theories for explaining them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air pending the outcome. And human beings evolved from apelike ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other, yet to be discovered. (Evolution as Fact and Theory)”

There are numerous problems with this explanation. First, if evolution is a fact, then evolution is equivalent to data. This hardly seems appropriate. It is not data. Second, the comparison of evolution to gravity is misleading. We can go into any apple orchard and observe apples falling from trees. But where do we go to observe humans evolving from apelike ancestors? Apples falling from trees fits into the category of science we can term operations science which utilizes data that are repeatable and observable at any time. Humans evolving from apelike ancestors, however, would fall under the category of origins science. Origins science involves the study of historical events that occur just once and are not repeatable. We can only assemble what evidence we have and construct a plausible scenario, much like the forensic scientist Quincy did in the old television show. The so-called facts of human evolution, by Gould's own definition, are the fossils and the rock layers they are found in. That humans evolved from apelike ancestors is a theory that attempts to explain and interpret these facts.

Later in the same article Gould states the real definition of fact under which evolution fits. He begins by saying that fact does not necessarily mean absolute certainty. Then he says, "in science, fact' can only mean confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.'" In other words, evolution is a fact because a majority of scientists say so, and you are "perverse" if you do not agree. We quickly begin to see that evolution holds a privileged place in the scientific community, which will go to extraordinary lengths to preserve that status.

Some Key Critics and Their Evidences

Below I have summarized a few of the evidences and scientist who have criticized DE that have been of interest to me. I have listed them in chronological order. Some of these criticisms may be fairly old allowing plenty of time for responses and evidence to be gathered and presented to dispute the criticisms. No significant challenges or evidence have been produced. Although almost all Americans have been exposed to DE presented as fact, very few have heard much, if anything, of the criticisms. It is this imbalance in the presentation of the evidences that the Intelligent Design Community objects to most.

The Wistar Institute Symposium was a milestone meeting held in Philadelphia in July 1966 to discuss the statistical possibility of Darwinian evolution. In 1965 Murray Eden, a professor of electrical engineering at MIT, along with the French mathematician Marcel Schutzenberger and others had begun to model natural selection and random mutations using probability theory. By 1966, computers had progressed enough to determine statistically if random mutations alone could account for the level of evolution seen in organisms after five billion years. The group consistently arrived at negative results. After numerous attempts and communications their results became known to evolutionary biologists. To ward off a potential scientific controversy a meeting was arranged that attracted some well-known Darwinian scientists.

The conference was chaired by Sir Peter Medawar, whose work on graft rejection won him a Noble prize. The focus of the skeptic’s attack was against the proposition that “randomness” in mutations, the raw material of evolution, could result in the formation of complex systems. For example, the mathematician D. S. Ulam argued that it was highly improbable that the eye could have evolved as a result of a number of small mutations because the number of mutations would have to be so large and the time available was not nearly enough for them to appear.

Nobel laureate Sir Peter Medawar replied that the mathematicians had it backwards. The eye had evolved, according to him, so the plausibility problem must have arisen due to errors or oversights in the mathematician’s equations. Harvard biologist Ernst Mayr, a leading evolutionary theorist, said, “Somehow or other by adjusting these figures we will come out all right. We are comforted by the fact that evolution has occurred.

After a heated debate and several meetings, the Wistar Symposium deemed this statistically impossible.

Furthermore, many of the scientists at Wistar came forward to state that the fossil record did not support evolution. Few fossils showing transitional stages between species had been found. Arguments also came up about advanced organs such as the eye and that 5 billion years was not enough time for these organs to evolve.

Michael Denton, an agnostic medical researcher from Australia, caused quite a storm with his 1985 book, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis. Denton's point is that orthodox Darwinism has such a stranglehold on the biological sciences that contradictory evidences from fields such as paleontology, developmental biology, molecular biology, and taxonomy are passed off as intramural squabbles about the process of evolution. The "fact" of evolution is never really in question.

Denton points out that Darwinism is not a fact. It is a mechanistic theory that is still without a mechanism. While moths and fruit flies do respond to environmental stimuli, our observations of this process have been unable to shed any light on the means by which we have come to have horses and woodpeckers and wasps. The origin of complex adaptations has remained a mystery. The fossil record is pockmarked with gaps in the most embarrassing places. Darwin predicted innumerable transitional forms between major groups of organisms, yet the few transitions that are suggested are surrounded in controversy.

Another "fact" that fails to withstand Denton's scrutiny is the assumption that similar biological structures owe their similarity to a common ancestry. Homology, which studies these similarities, assumes for example that the forelimbs of amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals are similar in structure because they evolved from the same source. Denton reveals, however, that these same classes of vertebrates go through remarkably different stages of early embryological development. This was certainly not a prediction of Darwinian evolution.

Even more importantly, Denton reports that comparison of the sequences of proteins from different organisms actually supports the pre-Darwin system of classification, which was based on creationist principles.

Also, the many chemical evolution scenarios are caught in numerous intractable dilemmas that offer little hope of resolution (see Scientific American, Feb. 1991).

Michael Ruse, the renowned philosopher of science stunned his listeners at the 1993 annual American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Boston by  announcing that he had recently come to view evolution as ultimately based on several unproven philosophical assumptions.

Ruse, a professor of zoology and philosophy of science at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, was a key speaker at a seminar convened to debunk "The New Creationism." Ruse had specifically been asked to "refute Phillip Johnson's book, Darwin on Trial." (Intervarsity Press, 1991.) Instead, he shocked his colleagues by endorsing one of its key points: that Darwinian doctrines are ultimately based as much on "philosophical assumptions" as on scientific evidence.

Assuring his audience, "I'm no less of an evolutionist now than I ever was," Ruse nevertheless explained that he had given fresh consideration to Phillip Johnson's thesis that Ruse himself, as "an evolutionist, is metaphysically based at some level just as much as . . . some creationist. . . . I must confess, in the ten years since I . . . appeared in the Creationism Trial in Arkansas . . . I've been coming to this kind of position myself."

Ruse was referring to McLean v. Arkansas, in which Federal Judge William Overton ruled that Arkansas' "Balanced Treatment Act" was unconstitutional. At the trial, Ruse had testified that creation-science is not science at all. Invoking the fact/faith dichotomy, Ruse claimed that Darwinism was scientific because establishing its validity required no philosophical assumptions. All other views, he claimed, required such assumptions and were therefore unscientific. His testimony became the centerpiece of Judge Overton's ruling.

Ruse justified his change of heart by tracing a succession of leading Darwinist thinkers, including T. H. and Julian Huxley, who had viewed evolution as "something akin to a secular religion." At the end of his talk, Ruse opened the meeting for questions. Greeted by a moment of stunned silence, he leaned toward the microphone and asked, "State of shock?"

Phillip Johnson has become over the years a spokesman for ID. His books Darwin on Trial, Reason in the Balance, Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds and Objections Sustained have become rallying points for Christian scholars across the academic spectrum. Johnson has addressed university audiences around the country, sometimes on his own, often in debate with a leading proponent of evolution. He has even addressed in private session entire science, law, and philosophy departments at top universities.

Johnson was raised in a nominally Christian family, but he grew to become a convinced skeptic of the faith. This process was greatly aided by his education, first as an undergraduate at Harvard and then at the University of Chicago Law School where he graduated first in his class. Johnson became convinced that people were basically good, education would solve whatever problems you had, the stuff of Sunday school was okay but mythology and he could achieve success by thinking for himself and absorbing the culture around him. He served as law clerk for Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren and held a distinguished professorship of law at UC Berkeley.

Johnson is not a scientist. He is a law professor and as a law professor he came to the debate while on sabbatical at University College in London in 1987-88. While looking for a focus for his studies he wandered into the largest scientific bookstore in London and saw two books in the window on the topic of evolution. They were “The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design” by Richard Dawkins and “Evolution: A theory in crisis” by Michael Denton. After reading inside dust jacket blurbs he became aware that the two biologists were driving toward diametrically opposed conclusions.

As a lawyer he sensed a debate that has become a journey of sorts for him. This journey has developed into a project that has included many years of scientific study, seen him publish four books, deliver hundreds of lectures on college campuses, and become the leader of the fledgling Intelligent Design movement. Primarily through his study of evolution, Johnson learned that the academic community's primary intellectual commitment is to the philosophy of naturalism. If the "facts" contradict materialistic conclusions, then the "facts" are either explained away, ignored, or just plain wrong.

Therefore, evolutionists like Richard Dawkins can say things like "Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose," and actually say it with a straight face. The appearance of design is an illusion, you see, because we "know" that organisms evolved and the primary reason we "know" this is because naturalistic philosophy demands it.

Johnson's primary task seems to be continually provoking the scientific community into facing the reality of its naturalistic presuppositions. In earlier years, the scientific establishment was able to dismiss creationists and not officially respond. But when a tenured law professor from Berkeley starts messing with your head, people start answering back. The National Academy of Sciences has issued two publications in the last two years trying to stem the tide. The cracks in Darwinian evolution are beginning to show.

Michael J. Behe is Professor of Biological Sciences at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania and a fellow of the International Society for Complexity Information and Design. He received his Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of Pennsylvania in 1978. Behe's current research involves computer simulation of the evolution of protein binding sites.

Michael Behe graduated from Drexel University in 1974 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemistry. He did his graduate studies in biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania and was awarded the Ph.D. in 1978 for his dissertation research on sickle-cell disease. From 1978-1982 he did postdoctoral work on DNA structure at the National Institutes of Health. From 1982-85 he was Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Queens College in New York City, where he met his wife. In 1985 he moved to Lehigh University.

In addition to publishing over 35 articles in refereed biochemical journals, Michael Behe has also written editorial features in Boston Review, American Spectator, and The New York Times. His book, Darwin's Black Box discusses the implications for neo-Darwinism of what he calls "irreducibly complex" biochemical systems. The book was internationally reviewed in over one hundred publications and recently named by National Review and World magazine as one of the 100 most important books of the 20th century. Dr. Michael Behe has presented and debated his work at major universities throughout North America and England.

During years of study of the workings of the cell Mr. Behe often had concerns about the probability of complex systems being created through the incremental processes described by evolution. Early in his studies he figured the answers just had not presented themselves. As he matured he determined the answers were not forthcoming because they didn’t exist.

On the workings of the cell.  A typical cell has 10 million million atoms combined into 20 specific specialized sections, each section performing critical functions. These sections are like rooms with membranes between them as walls. If any of these functions did not perform properly the cell would die. Through his years of research and study Behe determined it was not likely that any process of incremental steps could result in this complex of systems let alone the hundreds or thousands of even more complex systems that are the basis of life on earth.

In 1996, Behe published his book on molecular complexity, Darwin’s Black Box with its now famous phrase “irreducible complexity”. This was the first time sophisticated skepticism of naturalistic evolution was brought to center stage in American society. Three years earlier Behe began to establish his own journalistic anti-Darwinism dialogue when he argued in the New York Times

Bellows lungs vs. circulatory respiratory system is one example of this complexity. It is interesting to hear time and again that birds have evolved from reptiles. The evidence of this is most often linked to bone structures (even though birds have bones that are perforated and hollow). However, an evidence that does not support this proposal is never mentioned in the texts. Reptiles have a respiratory system based on bellows lungs as mans. Birds have a circulatory respiratory. This system allows birds to the fly with improved breathing rather than becoming winded. It is difficult to imagine the incremental steps that would allow a respiratory system to evolve from bellows to circulatory and function properly all the while.

Jonathan Wells published Icons of Evolution Science or Myth? Why Much of What We Teach About Evolution Is Wrong in 2000. After spending 2 years in the US army from 1964 to 1966 he entered the University of California at Berkeley to become a science teacher. He subsequently earned a Ph.D. in religious studies at Yale where he wrote a book about the 19th century Darwinian Controversies. In 1989 he returned to Berkeley to earn a second Ph.D. in molecular and cell biology. His book finally formally exposed with stunning clarity that the textbook examples Darwinists themselves chose as the pillars of their theory are false and misleading. It shows how devotion to DE has led to textbooks that are full of misinformation.

Some of the icons Wells debunks include the Miller-Urey Experiment, Darwin’s Tree of Life, Haekel’s Embryos, Archaeopteryx as a missing link, Peppered Moths, Darwin’s finches, four-winged fruit flies, fossil horses and directed evolution and from ape to human: the ultimate icon. He also evaluates 10 recent biology textbooks and gives responses from publishers who knowingly continue to reproduce falsehoods.

Darwinist Religion

A frequent refrain from evolutionists is that the evolution/creation debate is actually a collision between science and religion. If creationists would just realize their view is inherently religious and that evolution is the scientific view, then there would be little to disagree about. Evolution belongs in the science classrooms and creation belongs only in the philosophy and religion classrooms. What gets left behind in this discussion, either intentionally or unintentionally, are the very firm religious implications of atheistic naturalism with evolution as its foundation.

We only need to look at a few sources to see the religious nature of evolution. The first source is the blatantly religious statements of certain evolutionists themselves. Philip Johnson quotes the evolutionist William Provine as stating quite categorically that:

1. Modern science, i.e., evolution, implies that there is no purpose, gods, or design in nature.
2. There are no absolute moral or ethical laws.
3. Heredity and environment determine all that man is.
4. When we die, we die, and that is all there is.
5. Evolution cannot produce a being that is truly free to make choices.

Statements such as these make it quite clear: the belief that science and religion are different spheres of knowledge is complete nonsense.

A second source that establishes the religious nature of evolution is the attacks of evolutionists on the God of the Bible using evolutionary principles. In his chapter on natural selection, Professor Johnson provides an example from evolutionist Douglas Futuyma. Futuyma states that a Creator would never create a bird such as the peacock, whose six feet of bulky feathers make it easy prey for leopards. Johnson turns the tables, however, by asking why natural selection would favor a peahen that lusts after males with life-threatening decorations. It has always amazed me that people who claim that there is no God sure seem to have an intimate knowledge of what He would be like if He did exist. At any rate, if evolution can be used to discredit certain notions about the character of God, then evolution is indeed making religious statements.

A third indication of the religious nature of evolution is the knee-jerk reaction of the evolutionary establishment against any statement that even hints that evolution is a tentative theory. In 1984, a group of scientists who are Christians but who do not identify themselves with creation scientists, published a booklet entitled Teaching Science in a Climate of Controversy and mailed it to thousands of school teachers. The general idea of the booklet was to encourage open-mindedness on certain issues and controversies regarding evolution. Evolutionists quickly chided the publication as a clever disguise of creationism. To quote Johnson, "The pervasive message was that the ASA [American Scientific Affiliation] is a deceitful creationist front which disguises its Biblical literalist agenda under a pretense of scientific objectivity."

In other words, anything that smells of God must be creationist and must be stamped out.

Some Books to Read

If you want to know more about the scientific evidence against DE or about the scientists who object to it being taught as it is now being presented you may want to read one or more of the following books:

Evolution a Theory In Crisis, Michael Denton, 1986

Darwin on Trial, Phillip E. Johnson, 1993

Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, Michael Behe, 1996

Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth?, Jonathon Wells, 2000

Doubts About Darwin: A History of Intelligent Design, Thomas Woodward, 2003

Where Do We Stand With Other Theists?

It appears to me that members of The Church may side with science on evolution in part to avoid being on the side of evangelical Christians in regards to the teachings of the Bible. This, I believe, is likely to be almost entirely the result of societal “peer pressure” in an attempt to be thought of as intelligent and educated people and not backward and especially not “fundamental” with respect to the bible. I am pleased to consider myself fundamental on this and many other subjects. That is, that there are fundamental principles that guide me and whenever new or additional information is received it is judged or compared to that which I believe to be fundamental.

As I informally survey church members and especially the youth of the church, I find very limited support for the teachings of the bible in regards to creation and, in particular, the flood with all that comes with it. “Noah couldn’t really put all the animals of the earth in a ship, even a big ship.” The creation is generally thought of as a summary of evolutionary processes and the flood and especially the concept that Noah and sons were able to build a ship of wood, collect, house and care for all the animals is to be considered a story or metaphor rather than an account.

The inclination toward science rather than to the scriptures should be examined. Could it be that scriptural phases such as “as far as it is translated correctly” or the “elimination of plain and precious truths” are subconsciously or consciously being used as a justification for this bias? Or is it that we consider ourselves at odds or in competition with “evangelicals for members that we more commonly align ourselves with scientists, agnostics and atheists on DE.  Perhaps accusations of the church being a cult or non-Christian coming from the evangelical camp have now become a justification for isolating ourselves from others with whom we obviously have much in common.

It is important to note that despite distancing ourselves from fundamentalist evangelicals we are not considered “separate” by the scientific evolutionists. For them, there are only two groups, scientists and creationists.

Some Conclusions

As summarized above, the questions and doubts about classical Darwinian Evolution, Neo Darwinian Evolution and indeed any form of macro evolution are numerous, varied and remain unanswered. The teetering dogma is now set atop a pile of rubble that is only stabilized by the shear number of those who have succumbed to years of propaganda and who have supported it for so long that they have become entrenched and have now become the fundamentalists of a bygone paradigm. The numbers who can no longer abide the hoax are growing and include foremost biologists, mathematicians, paleontologists, zoologists, scientific philosophers, cosmologists, chemists, taxonomists, etc. In addition, the arguments on both sides have been critiqued by law professors and theorists. At best, all that we know is inconclusive. At worst we are witnesses to the biggest hoax (whether intentional or unintentional) against mankind that has ever been perpetrated.

Now I am not for banning the teaching of Darwinian macro evolution. The problem is not that too much evolution is being taught. The real problem is that not enough is being taught. Schools should continue teaching about macroevolution but they should add a crucial new segment to such teaching-the legitimate scientific controversy over Darwinism. And those who are invested intellectually, financially and spiritually in DE need to face their fears and allow the teaching of all the scientific evidences for and against DE and Intelligent Design and let the people (students) decide for themselves.

Some may ask why can’t both God and DE exist in harmony? Many (even many if not most members of The Church) want to think that God has used Darwinian Evolution as a tool in the creation. They may think this allows them to be in the world and not of it. After all, they say, He works within the “Laws of Nature” to accomplish His work. I’m not sure where this thought has come from. It is supremely presumptuous of us to quantify or qualify the laws under which He works.  He has told us, “My ways are not your ways and my thoughts are not your thoughts. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isa. 55:8-10)

This debate goes to our very nature. Either we have a purpose or we don’t have a purpose. Either the earth was created for a purpose and there is a plan or there is no plan. Either we are children of God or we are chance incidents of chemistry and biology. In Genesis 2:1, “Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them.” God pronounced his work of the creation good and finished. If the whole of the universe or even the earth alone are subject to the principles of DE then neither is the work of the creation good nor is it finished. There has been and will be a continual improvement as species mutate are selected and evolve into new and “better” species. And the work will never be finished.

We (humans) are regularly compared in the world with animals. All indications by DE are that we have evolved from the animals and can find similarities and learn about ourselves from animal behavior. Yet when an appeal to our “humanity” is made it is being directed to our Godlike qualities; generosity, tenderness, altruism, beneficence, kindness, charity, philanthropy. There is no room or accounting for any of human and Godlike characteristics in DE.

If “by their fruits shall ye know them” (Matt 7:20) then we can judge the fruits of Darwinian Evolution to better know it. It is obvious that this philosophy has not brought people to a better understanding that they are children of God or even that there is a God. It has been used as an excuse to exclude God and demean those who believe in God. Only the greatest of rationalizations can reconcile this philosophy and the plan of God for His children and the principles that bring about our joy and happiness. But what is joy anyway? If God’s stated purpose is that we might have joy is there explanation of purpose behind Darwinian Evolution? Does that purpose compare to our finding joy? I have my doubts about that as well.

Scott Chipman

June 2004

Minor additions (November 2005)

Minor corrections and additions (December 2006)

                                                                              

Our miserable 21st century -- commentary magazine

On the morning of November 9, 2016, America’s elite—its talking and deciding classes—woke up to a country they did not know. To most privileged and well-educated Americans, especially those living in its bicoastal bastions, the election of Donald Trump had been a thing almost impossible even to imagine. What sort of country would go and elect someone like Trump as president? Certainly not one they were familiar with, or understood anything about.

Whatever else it may or may not have accomplished, the 2016 election was a sort of shock therapy for Americans living within what Charles Murray famously termed “the bubble” (the protective barrier of prosperity and self-selected associations that increasingly shield our best and brightest from contact with the rest of their society). The very fact of Trump’s election served as a truth broadcast about a reality that could no longer be denied: Things out there in America are a whole lot different from what you thought. 

Yes, things are very different indeed these days in the “real America” outside the bubble. In fact, things have been going badly wrong in America since the beginning of the 21st century.

It turns out that the year 2000 marks a grim historical milestone of sorts for our nation. For whatever reasons, the Great American Escalator, which had lifted successive generations of Americans to ever higher standards of living and levels of social well-being, broke down around then—and broke down very badly.

The warning lights have been flashing, and the klaxons sounding, for more than a decade and a half. But our pundits and prognosticators and professors and policymakers, ensconced as they generally are deep within the bubble, were for the most part too distant from the distress of the general population to see or hear it. (So much for the vaunted “information era” and “big-data revolution.”) Now that those signals are no longer possible to ignore, it is high time for experts and intellectuals to reacquaint themselves with the country in which they live and to begin the task of describing what has befallen the country in which we have lived since the dawn of the new century.

II

Consider the condition of the American economy. In some circles people still widely believe, as one recent New York Times business-section article cluelessly insisted before the inauguration, that “Mr. Trump will inherit an economy that is fundamentally solid.” But this is patent nonsense. By now it should be painfully obvious that the U.S. economy has been in the grip of deep dysfunction since the dawn of the new century. And in retrospect, it should also be apparent that America’s strange new economic maladies were almost perfectly designed to set the stage for a populist storm.

Ever since 2000, basic indicators have offered oddly inconsistent readings on America’s economic performance and prospects. It is curious and highly uncharacteristic to find such measures so very far out of alignment with one another. We are witnessing an ominous and growing divergence between three trends that should ordinarily move in tandem: wealth, output, and employment. Depending upon which of these three indicators you choose, America looks to be heading up, down, or more or less nowhere.

From the standpoint of wealth creation, the 21st century is off to a roaring start. By this yardstick, it looks as if Americans have never had it so good and as if the future is full of promise. Between early 2000 and late 2016, the estimated net worth of American households and nonprofit institutions more than doubled, from $44 trillion to $90 trillion. (SEE FIGURE 1.)

Although that wealth is not evenly distributed, it is still a fantastic sum of money—an average of over a million dollars for every notional family of four. This upsurge of wealth took place despite the crash of 2008—indeed, private wealth holdings are over $20 trillion higher now than they were at their pre-crash apogee. The value of American real-estate assets is near or at all-time highs, and America’s businesses appear to be thriving. Even before the “Trump rally” of late 2016 and early 2017, U.S. equities markets were hitting new highs—and since stock prices are strongly shaped by expectations of future profits, investors evidently are counting on the continuation of the current happy days for U.S. asset holders for some time to come.

A rather less cheering picture, though, emerges if we look instead at real trends for the macro-economy. Here, performance since the start of the century might charitably be described as mediocre, and prospects today are no better than guarded.

The recovery from the crash of 2008—which unleashed the worst recession since the Great Depression—has been singularly slow and weak. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), it took nearly four years for America’s gross domestic product (GDP) to re-attain its late 2007 level. As of late 2016, total value added to the U.S. economy was just 12 percent higher than in 2007. (SEE FIGURE 2.) The situation is even more sobering if we consider per capita growth. It took America six and a half years—until mid-2014—to get back to its late 2007 per capita production levels. And in late 2016, per capita output was just 4 percent higher than in late 2007—nine years earlier. By this reckoning, the American economy looks to have suffered something close to a lost decade.

But there was clearly trouble brewing in America’s macro-economy well before the 2008 crash, too. Between late 2000 and late 2007, per capita GDP growth averaged less than 1.5 percent per annum. That compares with the nation’s long-term postwar 1948–2000 per capita growth rate of almost 2.3 percent, which in turn can be compared to the “snap back” tempo of 1.1 percent per annum since per capita GDP bottomed out in 2009. Between 2000 and 2016, per capita growth in America has averaged less than 1 percent a year. To state it plainly: With postwar, pre-21st-century rates for the years 2000–2016, per capita GDP in America would be more than 20 percent higher than it is today.

The reasons for America’s newly fitful and halting macroeconomic performance are still a puzzlement to economists and a subject of considerable contention and debate.1Economists are generally in consensus, however, in one area: They have begun redefining the growth potential of the U.S. economy downwards. The U.S. Congressional Budget Office (CBO), for example, suggests that the “potential growth” rate for the U.S. economy at full employment of factors of production has now dropped below 1.7 percent a year, implying a sustainable long-term annual per capita economic growth rate for America today of well under 1 percent.

Then there is the employment situation. If 21st-century America’s GDP trends have been disappointing, labor-force trends have been utterly dismal. Work rates have fallen off a cliff since the year 2000 and are at their lowest levels in decades. We can see this by looking at the estimates by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) for the civilian employment rate, the jobs-to-population ratio for adult civilian men and women. (SEE FIGURE 3.) Between early 2000 and late 2016, America’s overall work rate for Americans age 20 and older underwent a drastic decline. It plunged by almost 5 percentage points (from 64.6 to 59.7). Unless you are a labor economist, you may not appreciate just how severe a falloff in employment such numbers attest to. Postwar America never experienced anything comparable.

From peak to trough, the collapse in work rates for U.S. adults between 2008 and 2010 was roughly twice the amplitude of what had previously been the country’s worst postwar recession, back in the early 1980s. In that previous steep recession, it took America five years to re-attain the adult work rates recorded at the start of 1980. This time, the U.S. job market has as yet, in early 2017, scarcely begun to claw its way back up to the work rates of 2007—much less back to the work rates from early 2000.

As may be seen in Figure 3, U.S. adult work rates never recovered entirely from the recession of 2001—much less the crash of ’08. And the work rates being measured here include people who are engaged in any paid employment—any job, at any wage, for any number of hours of work at all.

On Wall Street and in some parts of Washington these days, one hears that America has gotten back to “near full employment.” For Americans outside the bubble, such talk must seem nonsensical. It is true that the oft-cited “civilian unemployment rate” looked pretty good by the end of the Obama era—in December 2016, it was down to 4.7 percent, about the same as it had been back in 1965, at a time of genuine full employment. The problem here is that the unemployment rate only tracks joblessness for those still in the labor force; it takes no account of workforce dropouts. Alas, the exodus out of the workforce has been the big labor-market story for America’s new century. (At this writing, for every unemployed American man between 25 and 55 years of age, there are another three who are neither working nor looking for work.) Thus the “unemployment rate” increasingly looks like an antique index devised for some earlier and increasingly distant war: the economic equivalent of a musket inventory or a cavalry count.

By the criterion of adult work rates, by contrast, employment conditions in America remain remarkably bleak. From late 2009 through early 2014, the country’s work rates more or less flatlined. So far as can be told, this is the only “recovery” in U.S. economic history in which that basic labor-market indicator almost completely failed to respond.

Since 2014, there has finally been a measure of improvement in the work rate—but it would be unwise to exaggerate the dimensions of that turnaround. As of late 2016, the adult work rate in America was still at its lowest level in more than 30 years. To put things another way: If our nation’s work rate today were back up to its start-of-the-century highs, well over 10 million more Americans would currently have paying jobs.

There is no way to sugarcoat these awful numbers. They are not a statistical artifact that can be explained away by population aging, or by increased educational enrollment for adult students, or by any other genuine change in contemporary American society. The plain fact is that 21st-century America has witnessed a dreadful collapse of work.

For an apples-to-apples look at America’s 21st-century jobs problem, we can focus on the 25–54 population—known to labor economists for self-evident reasons as the “prime working age” group. For this key labor-force cohort, work rates in late 2016 were down almost 4 percentage points from their year-2000 highs. That is a jobs gap approaching 5 million for this group alone.

It is not only that work rates for prime-age males have fallen since the year 2000—they have, but the collapse of work for American men is a tale that goes back at least half a century. (I wrote a short book last year about this sad saga.2) What is perhaps more startling is the unexpected and largely unnoticed fall-off in work rates for prime-age women. In the U.S. and all other Western societies, postwar labor markets underwent an epochal transformation. After World War II, work rates for prime women surged, and continued to rise—until the year 2000. Since then, they too have declined. Current work rates for prime-age women are back to where they were a generation ago, in the late 1980s. The 21st-century U.S. economy has been brutal for male and female laborers alike—and the wreckage in the labor market has been sufficiently powerful to cancel, and even reverse, one of our society’s most distinctive postwar trends: the rise of paid work for women outside the household.

In our era of no more than indifferent economic growth, 21st–century America has somehow managed to produce markedly more wealth for its wealthholders even as it provided markedly less work for its workers. And trends for paid hours of work look even worse than the work rates themselves. Between 2000 and 2015, according to the BEA, total paid hours of work in America increased by just 4 percent (as against a 35 percent increase for 1985–2000, the 15-year period immediately preceding this one). Over the 2000–2015 period, however, the adult civilian population rose by almost 18 percent—meaning that paid hours of work per adult civilian have plummeted by a shocking 12 percent thus far in our new American century.

This is the terrible contradiction of economic life in what we might call America’s Second Gilded Age (2000—). It is a paradox that may help us understand a number of overarching features of our new century. These include the consistent findings that public trust in almost all U.S. institutions has sharply declined since 2000, even as growing majorities hold that America is “heading in the wrong direction.” It provides an immediate answer to why overwhelming majorities of respondents in public-opinion surveys continue to tell pollsters, year after year, that our ever-richer America is still stuck in the middle of a recession. The mounting economic woes of the “little people” may not have been generally recognized by those inside the bubble, or even by many bubble inhabitants who claimed to be economic specialists—but they proved to be potent fuel for the populist fire that raged through American politics in 2016.

III

So general economic conditions for many ordinary Americans—not least of these, Americans who did not fit within the academy’s designated victim classes—have been rather more insecure than those within the comfort of the bubble understood. But the anxiety, dissatisfaction, anger, and despair that range within our borders today are not wholly a reaction to the way our economy is misfiring. On the nonmaterial front, it is likewise clear that many things in our society are going wrong and yet seem beyond our powers to correct.

Some of these gnawing problems are by no means new: A number of them (such as family breakdown) can be traced back at least to the 1960s, while others are arguably as old as modernity itself (anomie and isolation in big anonymous communities, secularization and the decline of faith). But a number have roared down upon us by surprise since the turn of the century—and others have redoubled with fearsome new intensity since roughly the year 2000.

American health conditions seem to have taken a seriously wrong turn in the new century. It is not just that overall health progress has been shockingly slow, despite the trillions we devote to medical services each year. (Which “Cold War babies” among us would have predicted we’d live to see the day when life expectancy in East Germany was higher than in the United States, as is the case today?)

Alas, the problem is not just slowdowns in health progress—there also appears to have been positive retrogression for broad and heretofore seemingly untroubled segments of the national population. A short but electrifying 2015 paper by Anne Case and Nobel Economics Laureate Angus Deaton talked about a mortality trend that had gone almost unnoticed until then: rising death rates for middle-aged U.S. whites. By Case and Deaton’s reckoning, death rates rose somewhat slightly over the 1999–2013 period for all non-Hispanic white men and women 45–54 years of age—but they rose sharply for those with high-school degrees or less, and for this less-educated grouping most of the rise in death rates was accounted for by suicides, chronic liver cirrhosis, and poisonings (including drug overdoses).

Though some researchers, for highly technical reasons, suggested that the mortality spike might not have been quite as sharp as Case and Deaton reckoned, there is little doubt that the spike itself has taken place. Health has been deteriorating for a significant swath of white America in our new century, thanks in large part to drug and alcohol abuse. All this sounds a little too close for comfort to the story of modern Russia, with its devastating vodka- and drug-binging health setbacks. Yes: It can happen here, and it has. Welcome to our new America.

In December 2016, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that for the first time in decades, life expectancy at birth in the United States had dropped very slightly (to 78.8 years in 2015, from 78.9 years in 2014). Though the decline was small, it was statistically meaningful—rising death rates were characteristic of males and females alike; of blacks and whites and Latinos together. (Only black women avoided mortality increases—their death levels were stagnant.) A jump in “unintentional injuries” accounted for much of the overall uptick.

It would be unwarranted to place too much portent in a single year’s mortality changes; slight annual drops in U.S. life expectancy have occasionally been registered in the past, too, followed by continued improvements. But given other developments we are witnessing in our new America, we must wonder whether the 2015 decline in life expectancy is just a blip, or the start of a new trend. We will find out soon enough. It cannot be encouraging, though, that the Human Mortality Database, an international consortium of demographers who vet national data to improve comparability between countries, has suggested that health progress in America essentially ceased in 2012—that the U.S. gained on average only about a single day of life expectancy at birth between 2012 and 2014, before the 2015 turndown.

The opioid epidemic of pain pills and heroin that has been ravaging and shortening lives from coast to coast is a new plague for our new century. The terrifying novelty of this particular drug epidemic, of course, is that it has gone (so to speak) “mainstream” this time, effecting breakout from disadvantaged minority communities to Main Street White America. By 2013, according to a 2015 report by the Drug Enforcement Administration, more Americans died from drug overdoses (largely but not wholly opioid abuse) than from either traffic fatalities or guns. The dimensions of the opioid epidemic in the real America are still not fully appreciated within the bubble, where drug use tends to be more carefully limited and recreational. In Dreamland, his harrowing and magisterial account of modern America’s opioid explosion, the journalist Sam Quinones notes in passing that “in one three-month period” just a few years ago, according to the Ohio Department of Health, “fully 11 percent of all Ohioans were prescribed opiates.” And of course many Americans self-medicate with licit or illicit painkillers without doctors’ orders.

In the fall of 2016, Alan Krueger, former chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, released a study that further refined the picture of the real existing opioid epidemic in America: According to his work, nearly half of all prime working-age male labor-force dropouts—an army now totaling roughly 7 million men—currently take pain medication on a daily basis.

We already knew from other sources (such as BLS “time use” surveys) that the overwhelming majority of the prime-age men in this un-working army generally don’t “do civil society” (charitable work, religious activities, volunteering), or for that matter much in the way of child care or help for others in the home either, despite the abundance of time on their hands. Their routine, instead, typically centers on watching—watching TV, DVDs, Internet, hand-held devices, etc.—and indeed watching for an average of 2,000 hours a year, as if it were a full-time job. But Krueger’s study adds a poignant and immensely sad detail to this portrait of daily life in 21st-century America: In our mind’s eye we can now picture many millions of un-working men in the prime of life, out of work and not looking for jobs, sitting in front of screens—stoned.

But how did so many millions of un-working men, whose incomes are limited, manage en masse to afford a constant supply of pain medication? Oxycontin is not cheap. As Dreamland carefully explains, one main mechanism today has been the welfare state: more specifically, Medicaid, Uncle Sam’s means-tested health-benefits program. Here is how it works (we are with Quinones in Portsmouth, Ohio):

[The Medicaid card] pays for medicine—whatever pills a doctor deems that the insured patient needs. Among those who receive Medicaid cards are people on state welfare or on a federal disability program known as SSI. . . . If you could get a prescription from a willing doctor—and Portsmouth had plenty of them—Medicaid health-insurance cards paid for that prescription every month. For a three-dollar Medicaid co-pay, therefore, addicts got pills priced at thousands of dollars, with the difference paid for by U.S. and state taxpayers. A user could turn around and sell those pills, obtained for that three-dollar co-pay, for as much as ten thousand dollars on the street.

In 21st-century America, “dependence on government” has thus come to take on an entirely new meaning.

You may now wish to ask: What share of prime-working-age men these days are enrolled in Medicaid? According to the Census Bureau’s SIPP survey (Survey of Income and Program Participation), as of 2013, over one-fifth (21 percent) of all civilian men between 25 and 55 years of age were Medicaid beneficiaries. For prime-age people not in the labor force, the share was over half (53 percent). And for un-working Anglos (non-Hispanic white men not in the labor force) of prime working age, the share enrolled in Medicaid was 48 percent.

By the way: Of the entire un-working prime-age male Anglo population in 2013, nearly three-fifths (57 percent) were reportedly collecting disability benefits from one or more government disability program in 2013. Disability checks and means-tested benefits cannot support a lavish lifestyle. But they can offer a permanent alternative to paid employment, and for growing numbers of American men, they do. The rise of these programs has coincided with the death of work for larger and larger numbers of American men not yet of retirement age. We cannot say that these programs caused the death of work for millions upon millions of younger men: What is incontrovertible, however, is that they have financed it—just as Medicaid inadvertently helped finance America’s immense and increasing appetite for opioids in our new century.

It is intriguing to note that America’s nationwide opioid epidemic has not been accompanied by a nationwide crime wave (excepting of course the apparent explosion of illicit heroin use). Just the opposite: As best can be told, national victimization rates for violent crimes and property crimes have both reportedly dropped by about two-thirds over the past two decades.3 The drop in crime over the past generation has done great things for the general quality of life in much of America. There is one complication from this drama, however, that inhabitants of the bubble may not be aware of, even though it is all too well known to a great many residents of the real America. This is the extraordinary expansion of what some have termed America’s “criminal class”—the population sentenced to prison or convicted of felony offenses—in recent decades. This trend did not begin in our century, but it has taken on breathtaking enormity since the year 2000.

Most well-informed readers know that the U.S. currently has a higher share of its populace in jail or prison than almost any other country on earth, that Barack Obama and others talk of our criminal-justice process as “mass incarceration,” and know that well over 2 million men were in prison or jail in recent years.4 But only a tiny fraction of all living Americans ever convicted of a felony is actually incarcerated at this very moment. Quite the contrary: Maybe 90 percent of all sentenced felons today are out of confinement and living more or less among us. The reason: the basic arithmetic of sentencing and incarceration in America today. Correctional release and sentenced community supervision (probation and parole) guarantee a steady annual “flow” of convicted felons back into society to augment the very considerable “stock” of felons and ex-felons already there. And this “stock” is by now truly enormous.

One forthcoming demographic study by Sarah Shannon and five other researchers estimates that the cohort of current and former felons in America very nearly reached 20 million by the year 2010. If its estimates are roughly accurate, and if America’s felon population has continued to grow at more or less the same tempotraced out for the years leading up to 2010, we would expect it to surpass 23 million persons by the end of 2016 at the latest. Very rough calculations might therefore suggest that at this writing, America’s population of non-institutionalized adults with a felony conviction somewhere in their past has almost certainly broken the 20 million mark by the end of 2016. A little more rough arithmetic suggests that about 17 million men in our general population have a felony conviction somewhere in their CV. That works out to one of every eight adult males in America today.

We have to use rough estimates here, rather than precise official numbers, because the government does not collect any data at all on the size or socioeconomic circumstances of this population of 20 million, and never has. Amazing as this may sound and scandalous though it may be, America has, at least to date, effectively banished this huge group—a group roughly twice the total size of our illegal-immigrant population and an adult population larger than that in any state but California—to a near-total and seemingly unending statistical invisibility. Our ex-cons are, so to speak, statistical outcasts who live in a darkness our polity does not care enough to illuminate—beyond the scope or interest of public policy, unless and until they next run afoul of the law.

Thus we cannot describe with any precision or certainty what has become of those who make up our “criminal class” after their (latest) sentencing or release. In the most stylized terms, however, we might guess that their odds in the real America are not all that favorable. And when we consider some of the other trends we have already mentioned—employment, health, addiction, welfare dependence—we can see the emergence of a malign new nationwide undertow, pulling downward against social mobility.

Social mobility has always been the jewel in the crown of the American mythosand ethos. The idea (not without a measure of truth to back it up) was that people in America are free to achieve according to their merit and their grit—unlike in other places, where they are trapped by barriers of class or the misfortune of misrule. Nearly two decades into our new century, there are unmistakable signs that America’s fabled social mobility is in trouble—perhaps even in serious trouble.

Consider the following facts. First, according to the Census Bureau, geographical mobility in America has been on the decline for three decades, and in 2016 the annual movement of households from one location to the next was reportedly at an all-time (postwar) low. Second, as a study by three Federal Reserve economists and a Notre Dame colleague demonstrated last year, “labor market fluidity”—the churning between jobs that among other things allows people to get ahead—has been on the decline in the American labor market for decades, with no sign as yet of a turnaround. Finally, and not least important, a December 2016 report by the “Equal Opportunity Project,” a team led by the formidable Stanford economist Raj Chetty, calculated that the odds of a 30-year-old’s earning more than his parents at the same age was now just 51 percent: down from 86 percent 40 years ago. Other researchers who have examined the same data argue that the odds may not be quite as low as the Chetty team concludes, but agree that the chances of surpassing one’s parents’ real income have been on the downswing and are probably lower now than ever before in postwar America.

Thus the bittersweet reality of life for real Americans in the early 21st century: Even though the American economy still remains the world’s unrivaled engine of wealth generation, those outside the bubble may have less of a shot at the American Dream than has been the case for decades, maybe generations—possibly even since the Great Depression.

IV

The funny thing is, people inside the bubble are forever talking about “economic inequality,” that wonderful seminar construct, and forever virtue-signaling about how personally opposed they are to it. By contrast, “economic insecurity” is akin to a phrase from an unknown language. But if we were somehow to find a “Google Translate” function for communicating from real America into the bubble, an important message might be conveyed:

The abstraction of “inequality” doesn’t matter a lot to ordinary Americans. The reality of economic insecurity does. The Great American Escalator is broken—and it badly needs to be fixed.

With the election of 2016, Americans within the bubble finally learned that the 21st century has gotten off to a very bad start in America. Welcome to the reality. We have a lot of work to do together to turn this around.