New York City has shattered criminology’s central myth, but criminologists remain in denial. Policing, they still insist, can do little to lower crime. Economic inequality, demographic trends, changing drug-use patterns—these determine crime levels, they say, not police tactics. Nevertheless, since 1994, New York City has enjoyed a crime drop unmatched in the rest of the country—indeed, unparalleled in history—and only Gotham’s revolutionary style of policing can explain it. Yet rather than flooding the city to study this paradigm-breaking phenomenon, most criminologists are busy looking the other way.

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a visitor coming into a society from elsewhere often can see its character more clearly than those who live in it. Every few months, doctors from countries like the Philippines and India arrive fresh from the airport to work for a year’s stint at my hospital. It is fascinating to observe their evolving response to British squalor.
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Embryology textbooks and honest defenders of abortion like the philosopher and ethicist Peter Singer agree: it is an objective scientific fact that a fetus is a member of the species Homo sapiens. Morality only enters the issue once the scientific facts are on the table. However, most defenders of abortion are loathe to admit that they favor a system of morality that separates human beings into those that have a right to life and those that can be legally killed. Thus, abortion defenders consistently confuse the scientific issue of being a human with the moral issue of being a person.

Scientific Consensus

You are not committing the logical fallacy of appeal to authority when you appeal to legitimate authorities. This may not mean that you are right, but it is a legitimate form of evidence, so that is where we will start: with scientific consensus. There are several lines of evidence for this. The most important is that it is accepted scientific knowledge that a fetus is a distinctly new member of the species. Embryology textbooks recognize this. Many biologists are pro-choice, but because they grant less ethical weight to a fetus, not because they do not believe it is a human.

Here is an assortment of embryology textbooks that support this point:

• William Larson, Human Embryology, 3rd edition, page 1
• Keith Moore and T.V.N. Persaud, The Developing Human, 6th edition, page 18
• Ronan O’Rahilly and Fabiola Mueller, Human Embryology and Teratology, 3rd edition, page 8
• Scott F. Gilbert, Developmental Biology, 6th edition, page 185.

Honest defenders of abortion will also admit this. For example, see page 86 of Practical Ethics the utilitarian ethicst Peter Singer. He freely admits that a fetus is a member of the species Homo sapiens, but defends abortion on the grounds that granting Homo sapiens a special moral status is speciesist. And in the article When does life begin? An embryologist looks at the abortion debate, the embryologist Clifford Grobstein freely admits this as well (both Grobstein and Singer take the position that merely being a human is not sufficient to grant rights; this is defensible, but it does require the rejection of the doctrine of unalienable rights for all human beings).

Definition of Life

We do not have to accept the scientific consensus. Instead we can follow along with the evidence itself. Scientists have yet to create a fully satisfactory definition of life, which is why debate rages about the status of viruses. But luckily fetuses are not as difficult to classify. The famous mathematician John Von Neumann created the most elegent definition of life, here is a simplification. A living thing is anything with (1) an internal blueprint of itself (such as DNA), and (2) an intrinsic capacity to use that blueprint in self-creation.

Consider how some common objections raised by abortion defenders fail this test:

• Sperm and eggs do not have a complete internal blueprint because they only have half the necessary chromosomes.
• Toenail clippings and kidneys have the DNA, but lack the capacity to use the blueprint - most of the genes are switched off unavailable for use (this is not the case for lower lifeforms - if a part is removed it really can fully use the DNA to make a new version of the organism).
• Cloning machines applied to human genetic materials also fail the test because the building capacity is no longer intrinsic to the organism. Instead it relies on the external machine. An abortion defender might change the point of reference and claim that the combination of the cloning machine and the genetic materials are one organism. But that still fails because there is no blueprint (DNA) for the combination of human and machine.

But a fetus passes both tests. It has the DNA, and it has the capacity to fully utilize that DNA in self-creation. It is a unique organism.

“Two nations, between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy.” Benjamin Disraeli was speaking of the nations of the rich and the poor, but in his book The Marriage Problem, sociologist James Q. Wilson sees underlying causes. One nation is married, reasonably affluent, educated, and invests heavily in their children. The other nation is fatherless, poor, and does not invest in their children. On page 11 he quotes a study by William Galston, a former advisor to President Clinton. Galston shows that you only have to do three simple things to avoid being poor: finish high school, marry before having a child, and wait until age 20 to have a child. Only 8% of people who do these three things are poor, compared to 79% for those who do not.
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In his book Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches, Marvin Harris made a strong case for the beneficial role of the Hindu religion’s belief that cows are sacred. The reason is because male draft animals are needed to plow the fields for next year’s harvest, and cows are needed to breed the draft animals. Succumbing to temptation during a famine and killing your cow is like killing the goose that lays the golden egg.

Harris was not as convincing describing the “pig love” of the Maring tribe. They are a polygamous society in which women do all the work, both gardening and raising pigs. The pigs are beloved and wander freely. But after eight or ten years there are too many adult pigs. They cause too much destruction in the gardens, and they consume too much food. So the men agree to hold a grand feast, or kaiko, in which most of the pigs are slaughtered and eaten. Then the men go to war with the neighboring tribe.

This is a strange arrangement. If the Maring wanted to be efficient, they should pen the pigs. That way they won’t damage the gardens. They should also slaughter the pigs as soon as they reach their adult size. Continuing to feed them for another eight years after they’ve already reached their adult size is a waste of food. That is not adaptive! Of course, Harris has an explanation. The reason why the Maring behave in their seemingly counter-productive way is that by being inefficient they can keep their population in check. Maximizing their pig production would take them dangerously close to the carrying capacity of their environment. The ritual warfare after the periodic feasts and the female infanticide also contribute to keep the size of the Maring population in harmony with the environment.
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ON A sultry afternoon at the crossroads of life in Tehran, a mother in her 40s wistfully recalls the excitement of the revolution - how almost three decades ago she ran into the streets of the capital as raw people power knocked the despised Shah of Iran from his gilded throne. “Today, our children attack some of us for being so stupid,” says the woman, grinding the end of her cigarette into a glass ashtray.

She’s a little ashamed a few friends try to save face with their children - denying they had even been in the streets. She hesitates over another cigarette. And then she makes a pained admission: “I went to the Shah’s grave in Cairo and I told him it was all a big mistake.”

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In fact, according to a 1999 study by The Barna Group Christians were more likely than non-Christians to get a divorce in America….

For the record, the Barna study asked people their religion, and whether they had ever been divorced. They were then shocked, shocked! to find that religious and non-religious people are equally likely to be divorced. This is often held up as evidence that religion doesn’t make you any less likely to divorce, which is complete hogwash.

News flash: Religious people are far more likely to get married in the first place. This is particularly true of the more conservative denominations like Catholics and Evangelicals. So even if the same percent of Christians and atheists have been divorced, the fact that Christians are far more likely to marry means that fewer of their marriages end in divorce.

In any case, the benchmark study in this area is the City University of New York’s American Religious Identification Study (PDF file here). For starters, the CUNY survey is almost 15 times as large (Over 50,000 respondents versus 3,800).
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