Lauren Hall's Radical Moderation as a Response to Trump's Dictatorship: Evolutionary Ordoliberalism?

 

Recently, Lauren Hall appeared on the Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie.  She was asked to explain how her proposed "radical moderation" could overcome America's social and political polarization, which has become ever more destructive under Donald Trump's dictatorial rule.  Although she might not like the term, what she says here sounds to me like an evolutionary ordoliberalism.  

Hall is a professor of political science at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York.  She writes about her Radical Moderation at her Substack.  I know her as one of my very best graduate students at Northern Illinois University.

Hall says that her radical moderation is moderate in the fundamental sense of avoiding excessive or extreme ideas and behavior and more particularly rejecting binary thinking.  So she rejects the tribalism that forces a false binary choice of Blue or Red, Left or Right, Black or White, Black Lives Matter or Blue Lives Matter, and all the other zero-sum choices imposed on us.

But her moderation is radical because it goes beyond a one-dimensional moderation that would seek a middle ground between two extremes--a compromise in between Left and Right, black and white, either/or.  Instead, she says her radical moderation is a four-dimensional moderation that recognizes that human beings live in a complex four-dimensional world: the breadth of social networks, the depth of the deep challenges of life, the heights of human achievement, and the extended historical, developmental, and generational time in which life is lived.

In contrast to this messy complexity and contingency of real human life, America's social and political polarization simplifies life into a binary tribalism: it's us or them, friends or enemies, the real Americans or those Americans who are not real Americans.  This binary tribalism has created a hate-filled division not only in our political life (the vicious partisan rage that divides Republicans and Democrats) but also in our personal life (for example, families that cannot discuss politics at the Thanksgiving dinner table without fear of it becoming a mean-spirited fight).

To overcome this polarizing conflict that is tearing us apart, Hall suggests, we must first understand what it is in our human nature that has caused it.  And then we must search for a solution--some way to resolve or at least moderate the conflict.

First, we must understand the evolutionary psychology of tribalism as a propensity of our evolved human nature.  Hall explains how she studied the evolutionary biology of human behavior with David Sloan Wilson at Binghamton University where she was an undergraduate student.  She then continued those evolutionary studies in combination with political theory as a graduate student in political science.  When she was a student at NIU, the Department of Political Science had "Politics and the Life Sciences" as a graduate field of study, which combined behavioral political science, political theory, and biopolitical science.

Drawing on these biopolitical studies, Hall can explain polarized tribalism as a deep tendency of human nature.  Human beings have a natural desire for social membership--for belonging to a group, collaborating with others in that group, and deriving one's identity from that group.  We can belong to many different groups--our family, our neighborhood, our church, our school, our profession, our political party, our ethnic group, our nation.

There's a dark side to this social cohesion of a group, however, because we often cooperate within our group to compete with those outside our group.  This is the in-group/out-group psychology of tribalism.  I have written about this as the evolutionary psychology of "parochial altruism"--we have evolved to be nice to insiders but nasty to outsiders.  This explains why some MAGA intellectuals have embraced Carl Schmitt's argument that politics is all about the fight between friends and enemies as supporting Trump's politics of rewarding the loyalty of his friends and punishing the animosity of his enemies.

While it would be foolish and dangerous to try to suppress the tribalism of our nature, Hall argues, we can and should mitigate tribal conflict by bringing under the "big tent of liberal democratic institutions" that protect liberal pluralism without agreement on a particular way of life for America.  She describes her appreciation for pluralism as a product of her life in America's liberal social order.  She observes: "I grew up in a Zen Buddhist house in a Jewish town with evangelical and Mormon relatives.  After a childhood spent navigating different perspectives, I went off to graduate school and studied evolutionary psychology, political behavior, and political thought.  I've worked and studied with progressives, conservatives, libertarians, and everything in between and am all the better for it."

But then came Trump.  She has admitted "I Was Wrong About Trump."  After his first term, she thought Trump was "egotistical and uninterested in governance, but maybe not completely pathological," and therefore he would not be too dangerous in his second term.  But she was wrong because she did not foresee what he has done in the first year of his second term in his vicious attacks on the institutional foundations of liberal democracy.  She identifies the five most prominent examples of this: attacks on the rule of law and checks and balances, attacks on civil society institutions, undermining shared epistemological foundations (through misinformation and conspiracy theories), undermining respect for elections, and violent rhetoric and dehumanization of citizens.

America's two major political parties have allowed this to happen, Hall observes, and therefore we cannot expect the two parties to reverse this slide into dictatorial authoritarianism.  The one possible solution that she proposes is to have civil society institutions--charitable foundations, universities, media organizations, corporations, and prominent citizens--to form "A Coalition for America" that would protect the seven keystone institutions that secure liberal pluralism:

1. Separation of powers and checks and balances.

2. An independent judiciary.

3. Federalism that respects state and local governance.

4. Rule of law, not rule of men.

5. Free and independent media.

6. Academic freedom and independent universities.

7. Fair and transparent electoral processes.

The fundamental principle here is to establish institutions that put power against power.  Or as Madison said in Federalist 51: "This policy of supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives, might be traced through the whole system of human affairs, private as well as public."  This is what I have called the principle of institutional countervailance, which is deeply rooted in the evolutionary history of politics.

I have also identified this reliance on liberal institutions to secure liberal pluralism as ordoliberalism.  This idea of ordoliberalism originally came out of the University of Freiburg beginning in the 1930s.  The central concept of the Freiburg School was captured by the German word Ordnung or the Latin word Ordo.  Liberalism, the Freiburg theorists argued, requires a market order that is a constitutional order, and thus true liberalism must be an ordo-liberalism.  Some proponents of laissez-faire liberalism sometimes convey the impression that free markets can function best without any rules enforced by government, and indeed some of them (like Murray Rothbard, for example) have been anarchists.  But the Freiburg ordo-liberals have argued that a free-market order is not anarchistic, because it depends upon a constitutional framework that sets the rules of the game of free competition, in which all economic agents meet as legal equals and coordinate their activities through voluntary exchange and contract.  This constitutional order of liberty includes both the informal norms that arise through cultural evolution and the formal norms of legal and political design.  Friedrich Hayek showed the influence of ordoliberalism when he spoke about "the constitution of liberty" as an institutional framework of impartial rules that would check powerful rulers and special interests seeking unfair advantages from government and thus secure liberty in a pluralist society.

So I see Hall's argument for protecting the institutions of liberal democracy as ordoliberalism.  I also see it as an evolutionary ordoliberalism, because it is rooted in her understanding of how the evolution of human nature makes it necessary to have an institutional framework that constrains the pursuit of power and protects liberty.  This reminds me of her work as a graduate student.  She wrote a Master’s thesis arguing that evolutionary psychology supported Hayek’s argument for liberty under the rule of law against utopian conceptions of the centrally planned society.  She extended this line of thought in a dissertation arguing for what she called “evolutionary liberty,” which applied Darwinian science to support a classical liberal understanding of liberty.  She showed how a Darwinian conception of evolved human nature can sustain the arguments in the classical liberal tradition from Adam Smith to Hayek.  (I have written a lot about the evolutionary liberalism of Hayek and Smith.)

Reason magazine is a libertarian or classical liberal journal with the motto "Free Minds and Free Markets."  And so, as one would expect, the Reason Interview usually spotlights someone with libertarian leanings.  If I am right, then Hall's Radical Moderation might not exactly represent libertarianism, but it does suggest evolutionary ordoliberalism.

Monogamy, Polyamory, and the Primate Myth

That we can understand human nature by comparing ourselves with our closest living primate relatives--chimps and bonobos--has been a recurring theme in my blog posts over the years.  So it might seem that Jonathan Leaf's new book--The Primate Myth--is a powerful critique of my position, because Leaf argues that we cannot learn who we are by studying chimps and bonobos, assuming that the underlying patterns of their behavior are the same as ours, which is what Leaf calls the Primate Myth.  Even if we share some common genetic ancestry with primates--particularly, the great apes--we are radically different from apes, Leaf insists, in our genetic profile, in the configuration of our brains, in our anatomy, and in our social behavior.  To explain those differences, we need to see how our evolutionary adaptations for hunting and language made our earliest human ancestors less like apes and more like dolphins, dogs, rats, and elephants.  

Leaf stresses that human beings are unique in their extreme sociality--their social awareness and their capacity for social collaboration.  While primates are social animals, they are not as highly social as the animals that live in packs or herds.  Humans are more a herd or pack animal than a primate, because our earliest evolutionary ancestors depended on collaborative hunting in packs and herding together to repel predators.

Because of the Primate Myth, humans have been classified as belonging to the Order of Primates and the Family of Hominidae (humans and the other great apes--chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans).  But if we recognized how radically different human beings are from primates, Leaf argues, we would classify humans as belonging to their own order (Homo), or at least in their own family, separated from the great apes (245).

Leaf is certainly right in saying that to understand human evolution, it is not sufficient to look for human similarities to those other primates with whom we share common descent, because we must also see how humans differ radically from those primates.  By convergent evolution our human ancestors evolved adaptations for filling an evolutionary niche--collaborative hunting--that made them more like the herd or pack animals than like the other primates with whom they shared genetic ancestry.

But Leaf is wrong in saying that most evolutionary scientists today deny this because they are so committed to the Primate Myth that humans are most like primates--particularly, chimps and bonobos--in their behavioral and psychological propensities and unlike all non-primate animals.  The Primate Myth is a straw man, because in attacking the Primate Myth, Leaf distorts what most evolutionary scientists say about human evolution to make it easier to refute.

In a few places in his book, Leaf comes close to admitting this.  One example is a passage about Frans de Waal, who is the primary villain in Leaf's book (38-40). Leaf says that many readers of de Waal's first book--Chimpanzee Politics--mistakenly assumed that he was saying "that humans were almost exactly the same as chimps." In fact, Leaf observes, de Waal in that book points to "a number of critical differences" between humans and chimps. And in his later writings, de Waal "emphasized the kinship that humans bear to an array of non-primate animals." "In other words, what de Waal was thought to be arguing in his first and most influential book and what he was actually proposing aren't the same."  But then Leaf devotes most of his book to attacking what he here recognizes to be a mistaken interpretation of de Waal--the belief that humans are almost the same as chimps and other primates.

I can imagine, however, that Leaf could respond by saying no, this is not a straw man, because I point to good examples of people assuming the Primate Myth in explaining human evolution.  The best example might be the argument of Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha in their popular bestseller Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships (2010).  Under the influence of the Primate Myth--"the idea that human behavior is very much like ape behavior"--they say that since chimps and bonobos are sexually promiscuous, with no enduring pair-bonding of sexual mates, that must mean that our earliest human ancestors were just as promiscuous, and therefore monogamous pair-bonding is contrary to our evolved human nature.  Human beings would be happier, Ryan and Jetha insist, if married couples were "polyamorous"--if they felt free to have extramarital sexual affairs without feeling shame or fearing that this must break up their marriage: couples can happily live together and rear their children together but sleep around without harming themselves or their children, because primate promiscuity is natural for human beings.  

Leaf devotes over eight pages of his book to explaining and refuting their argument (168-177).  He has also taken excerpts from this part of his book for an article on "The Polyamory Delusion" for National Review that will be the cover story for the February 2026 issue.  His preoccupation with Sex at Dawn makes me think that his reading of this book some fifteen years ago was what originally motivated him to write The Primate Myth to counter the harmful consequences of teaching people that imitating the behavior of chimps and bonobos would make them happy.

Leaf is correct in criticizing Ryan and Jetha for their refusing to see that ape sexuality is different from human sexuality, because in contrast to ape promiscuity, the evolutionary function of human sexuality is to strengthen monogamous pair-bonds and the biparental care of children.  He is mistaken, however, in his claim that evolutionary biologists agree with Ryan and Jetha in their primate model of human sexuality as naturally inclined to polyamorous promiscuity.  The Primate Myth embraced by Ryan and Jetha is a fringe position that is outside the mainstream thinking of most evolutionary scientists, and that's why I say the Primate Myth is a straw man.

Previously, I have written about how the evolution of monogamous pair-bonding among our prehistoric foraging ancestors gave birth to the unique structure of human society that sets it apart from the social life of chimps and bonobos as based on sexual promiscuity in mating and reproduction.  Even in cultures that allow polygamy, most people are in monogamous marriages.  And there is plenty of evidence that polygamous marriages tend to be full of conflict: the cowives fight amongst themselves, men fight with one another over access to women, and children often suffer from parental neglect.

It is true, of course, that even in societies where monogamy is the norm, there is sexual promiscuity that can create some uncertainty about paternity.  But remarkably, recent research shows that the rate of "extra pair paternity"--where a woman bears offspring from a man other than her spouse--is usually below 3 percent (Larmuseau et al. 2013, 2019; Zimmer 2016).  By contrast, extra-pair fertilization in socially monogamous bird species can range as high as 20 percent (Brouwer and Griffith 2019; Griffith et al. 2002).

Leaf cites this kind of evidence as showing that while promiscuity is a problem for human beings, it is not as pervasive as it is for primates because human beings have an evolved natural desire for monogamous pair-bonding.  Leaf rightly concludes that this refutes Ryan and Jetha's primate model of human sexuality as naturally inclined to polyamorous promiscuity rather than sexual monogamy.

But Leaf is wrong when he says that evolutionary biologists agree with Ryan and Jetha (Leaf 2025, 171, 173).  In fact, Ryan and Jetha repeatedly insist that they are attacking the "standard narrative of human sexual evolution" that upholds monogamous pair-bonding as crucial for human evolution (Ryan and Jetha 2010, 7-8, 11, 25, 34-35, 38-39, 46-60, 99, 137, 142, 149, 223, 266, 300).  Leaf is silent about this.

For example, Ryan and Jetha criticize Frans de Waal for embracing the "standard narrative."  They quote various remarks by de Waal as illustrating the "standard narrative" of human sexual monogamy that they reject.  De Waal argued that the nuclear family is "intrinsically human," and the pair-bond is "the key to the incredible level of cooperation that marks our species," because "our success as a species is intimately tied to the abandonment of the bonobo lifestyle and to a tighter control over sexual expressions." He observed: "The intimate male-female relationship . . . which zoologists have dubbed a 'pair bond,' is bred into our bones.  I believe this is what sets us apart from the apes more than anything else."   He also said: "Both chimps and bonobos are far more promiscuous than we are. Our testicles reflect this: they are mere peanuts compared to our ape relatives' coconuts" (de Waal 2005, 108, 113, 124-25; Ryan and Jetha 2010, 76, 115, 225).

Leaf does not allow his readers to see this.  Because if his readers saw that the Primate Myth as embraced by Ryan and Jetha is rejected by de Waal and most other evolutionary scientists, they would see that when Leaf attacks the Primate Myth, he is attacking a straw man.

REFERENCES

Brouwer, Lyanne, and Simon Griffith. 2019. "Extra-Pair Paternity in Birds." Molecular Ecology. 28: 4864-4882.

de Waal, Frans. 2005. Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are. New York: Riverhead Books.

Griffith, Simon, Ian Owens, and Katherine Thuman. 2002. "Extra Pair Paternity in Birds: A Review of Interspecific Variation and Adaptive Function. Molecular Ecology 11: 2195-2212.

Larmuseau, M. H. D., et al. 2013. "Low Historical Rates of Cuckoldry in a Western European Human Population Traced by Y-chromosome and Genealogical Data." Proceedings of the Royal Society B. 280:20132400.

Leaf, Jonathan. 2025. The Primate Myth: Why the Latest Science Leads Us to a New Theory of Human Nature. New York: Bombardier Books.

Ryan, Christopher, and Cacilda Jetha. 2010. Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships. New York: Harper.

Zimmer, Carl. 2013. "Monogamy and Human Evolution." New York Times, August 2.

Zimmer, Carl. 2016. "Fathered by the Mailman? It's Mostly an Urban Legend." New York Times, April 8.

The Natural Desire for Social Bonding Through Music in the Movie "Song Sung Blue"

 

                                                           The Trailer for Song Sung Blue

While watching the new movie Song Sung Blue last night, I thought about what I have written about the natural desire for music and about social bonding as the original evolutionary function of music.  From the beginning to the end of this movie, music and musical storytelling provide the way to human social connection--for romantic lovers, for families, and for larger social groups.

If you haven't yet seen the movie, you might want to stop reading here to avoid spoiling the surprises that I will narrate in my brief scenario of the plot.

Song Sung Blue was written and directed by Craig Brewer based upon the 2008 documentary film of the same name by Greg Kohs.  It tells the true story of Mike and Claire Sardina who performed in the Milwaukee area as a Neil Diamond tribute band named Lightning & Thunder.  Hugh Jackman plays Mike.  Kate Hudson plays Claire.

Mike was a Vietnam War veteran who came back from the war with emotional scars from his experiences.  He became an alcoholic.  His abusive personality led to divorce from his first wife.  He struggled to support himself with part-time jobs as an auto mechanic.  But his passion was singing as an impersonator of pop singers at dive bars, casinos, and the Wisconsin State Fair.  It was not enough for him just to enjoy the music as a listener and singer.  He had to perform on stage before an audience with whom he could resonate.

He met Claire at the State Fair, where she was performing as a Patsy Cline impersonator.  Mike liked her singing, and he was attracted to her.  She was a divorced mother of two.  He introduced himself as someone celebrating the 20th year birthday of his sobriety.  Previously, we have seen him at his Alcoholics Anonymous meeting speaking about his hope that he will become a successful performer, and thus save something good out of his otherwise broken life.

Claire suggests that he should sing as a Neil Diamond interpreter.  They become romantically tied to one another.  And they agree to form a Neil Diamond impersonation duo as "Lightning" (Mike) and "Thunder" (Claire).  For both of them, singing as performers on stage who engage their audiences is their most exhilarating experience in life. 

When they introduce their children to one another--Mike's teenage daughter Angelina, Claire's teenage daughter Rachel, and Claire's young son Dayna--the two teenagers are wary of one another, but eventually they warm up to one another by sharing their experiences within broken families.

Lightning and Thunder do have some musical gigs with small audiences for a few years, but their financial earnings are meagre.  Finally, their big break comes when Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam--one of the hottest rock bands of the 1990s--asked them to perform as the opening act before a Pearl Jam performance.  From that point on, they were playing to larger audiences.

Then, one day, Claire is planting flowers in the front yard of their house, and a car swerves erratically off the street behind her and runs her over.  She has to have her left leg amputated at the knee.  She struggles with despair and mental confusion from the drugs she must take.  She and Mike begin to argue.  Finally, Mike and the children decide that the best thing for Claire is that she be put into a psychiatric hospital.  We see her at a therapy session with other patients, where she speaks about her love of the Lightning and Thunder performances as the only time when she feels joy.

Mike tries to find odd jobs, but he cannot perform as a singer without Claire.  Rachel admits to Mike that she is four months pregnant.  They talk about what should be done and decide it would be best for her to have the child and then give it up for adoption.  But she says she needs her mother to help her do this.

Claire begins walking again with a prosthetic leg.  And soon she is well enough to come home in time for Christmas.  She reconciles with Mike.  She urges Mike to join with her in going on Lightning and Thunder gigs again.  She helps Rachel through her pregnancy and in giving up her child to the adopting couple.

Mike and Claire return to performing.  Then, they are invited to perform at the Ritz Theatre in Milwaukee, where they will be the headliner the same night that Neil Diamond is performing in Milwaukee to a sold-out crowd.  This will allow fans of Neil Diamond who cannot get tickets for his show to enjoy his music at the Ritz.  The show at the Ritz is also sold out.  Mike and Claire learn that Diamond has heard about them, and he wants to meet them after his performance.

Mike has experienced many heart attacks in his life, but he has refused treatment.  Preparing for the Ritz performance, he has another heart attack in a bathroom, and as he collapses, he suffers a concussion when he hits his head on a sink.  He somehow manages to regain consciousness, and then he cleans the blood off his head, and combs his hair to hide the bruise.  He says nothing to Claire about what has happened, and she notices nothing wrong.  (This is the one part of the movie that is implausible.)

As they are going into the theatre, Mike tells Claire that none of this would have been possible without her--that she has been everything to him.  Claire does not realize that this is his farewell to her.

The concert is a great success.  Afterwards, they drive to diner where they are to meet Diamond.  But when they arrive, Mike is dead in the back seat of the car.

The next scene is the family preparing for Mike's funeral.  At the funeral, Claire sings with a band and chorus behind her, her last performance to celebrate Mike, which moves everyone at the funeral to tears.

Sometime later, we see the family at home.  The grieving has subsided, and there is even a slight feeling of serenity. We see Claire planting flowers again in the front garden of their home--"to add some beauty" she says.  

At the same time, Dayna plays a recording of his stepfather that, much earlier in the story, was prepared to be sent to his AI group meeting.  He tells them to try to make their lives better, and in doing so to make everything a little better.  He then sings to them Song Sung Blue, and that's the final scene of the movie.

This last scene with Jackman singing Diamond's song to his AI group is powerful in evoking the theme of social bonding through musical performance and in pointing the audience back to the beginning of the movie.  The movie as I and my wife saw it at the Celebration Theatre North in Grand Rapids began with Jackman appearing on the screen and speaking directly to us in the audience.  He thanked us for coming to see the movie at the Celebration Theatre Grand Rapids, and he named the manager of the theater.  The people in the theater were a little startled by this--as if Jackman were standing in front us and speaking to us. I assume this was done by an AI program to create a simulation of him speaking to us by name.  Finally, he said that he hoped that someday he could meet us in person.

Jackman is known for his performances on stage in live musical theatre.  So he was evoking that same experience of live performance by speaking to us in person, just as Mike and Claire performed their Neil Diamond singing before live audiences.  The suggestion was that Hugh Jackson the singing actor is doing the same thing as Mike Sardina the Neil Diamond performer in striving for ecstatic social connection through musical performance and communal singing.  At some parts of the movie, I heard some in the audience singing along with Lightning and Thunder. That's what I mean by saying that from beginning to end, this movie conveyed the feeling of social bonding between performers and audience through music. 

Moreover, in all of the successful performances by Lightning and Thunder, the audiences joined the performance by singing and dancing themselves.  Throughout most of the history of music, from our prehistoric ancestors to modern times, music was a collective activity of social bonding with no separation between active performers and passive audiences.  It is only in recent centuries that we have seen this separation in musical performance, where audiences sit in darkened theaters to see and hear musical performers on a lighted stage or screen.  In many classical music performances, audience members are expected to be completely silent except when they applaud.  But in most popular musical performances today--from Neil Diamond to Taylor Swift--the performers actively encourage the audience to sing and dance along with them.  That's a return to the original experience of music as a communal activity by which a social group created and affirmed its collective identity.

Social bonding through music occurred at multiple levels for multiple purposes in this movie.  Music brought Mike and Claire together for mating and marriage.  This is what Darwin called sexual selection through music, and he suspected that that was the original purpose of music.  

Music also brought the whole Sardina family together.  The movie makes a point of showing the Sardina children joyfully singing along with the rest of the audience at Mike and Clare's performances.

Music is important for funeral rituals, and we saw that in Claire's performance at Mike's funeral.

Music is also important for storytelling.  Every Neil Diamond song is a story.  And in this movie, the songs are selected for what they contribute to the story line of the movie.

Even in movies without singing in the story, there is a musical soundtrack--instrumental and vocal--that helps to tell the story that is visually enacted on the screen.  Like music generally, musical storytelling promotes social bonding by telling stories about the lives people share.

(Previously, I have written about the importance of Howard Shore's music in sustaining the story-telling of the "Lord of the Rings" movies.  Some people think the music make the movies even better than Tolkien's book.)

So in all these ways, Song Sung Blue helps us to think about the natural desire for social bonding through music.

The Darwinian Lockean Liberalism of Natural Religion

In this season of the year, our greetings of "Merry Christmas" and "Happy Holidays" acknowledge our natural human propensity to religious beliefs and rituals, while also acknowledging that in the modern liberal social orders in which many of us live today, we respect religious liberty and toleration.  "Merry Christmas" doesn't favor any one Christian tradition over any other.  And "Happy Holy Days" recognizes that there are some non-Christian religious observances during this season--particularly, the Jewish festival of Hanukkah.

The Darwinian Lockean Liberalism that I have defended explains the naturalness of religion as rooted in our evolved human nature.  It also explains why we need religious liberty and toleration so that all individuals have the equal liberty to pursue their natural desire for religious experience in their own way.

My position has provoked lots of criticisms, of which two are most prominent.  The first is that Darwinian Lockean Liberalism is incoherent insofar as Darwinian atheism denies the Christian foundations of Lockean Liberalism.  The second is that Lockean religious liberty and toleration denies the truth of Christian Integralism (Catholic or Protestant) that there is one true church--the true Christian Church established by Jesus Christ--and that this Christian Church can rightly use the secular authority of government to enforce the Orthodoxy of that Church.

I have previously responded to these two criticisms (here and here).  But after thinking more about these issues, I have decided to lay out a slightly revised version of my previous responses.

Various authors have countered my position with a syllogistic rebuttal (Dilley, 2013; Holloway, 2006; West, 2006).  I will call this “Dilley’s Syllogism” because Stephen Dilley formulated it in his Introduction to his edited book Darwinian Evolution and Classical Liberalism:

Classical (Lockean) liberalism is founded on Christianity.

Darwinism denies Christianity.

Therefore, Darwinism denies classical (Lockean) liberalism.

The conclusion of this syllogism is false, because the major premise is only partly true, and the minor premise is totally false.

The major premise has been asserted by those of my critics who are proponents of what they call “Christian classical liberalism” or “theistic classical liberalism” (Dilley, 2013, pp. 19, 23, 158-59).  I have inserted “Lockean” into the syllogism because these critics generally appeal to Locke as “the quintessential classical liberal” (Dilley, 2013, p. 198).  The only doctrinal teaching of Christianity that they mention as supporting Lockean classical liberalism is the idea of imago Dei: that all human beings have been created in the image of God (as declared in Genesis 1:26-27) seems to endow them with the equal moral dignity that supports the classical liberal teaching that all human beings are created equal in their moral dignity as equally endowed by God with natural rights (Dilley, 2013, p. 11). 

Locke seemed to adopt this idea in speaking about the law of nature as grounded in the nature of human beings as God’s “workmanship”:

Reason, which is that Law, teaches all Mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his Life, Health, Liberty, or Possessions.  For Men being all the Workmanship of one Omnipotent, and infinitely wise Maker; All the Servants of one Sovereign Master, sent into the World by his order and about his business, they are his Property, whose Workmanship they are, made to last during his, not one another’s Pleasure (ST, 6).

Locke identified this idea of men being God’s property because they are his workmanship with man being created in God’s image, in the sense that all members of the human species were created as “intellectual creatures,” which gave them dominion over the “inferior creatures,” but without giving any human being dominion over any other human being, because all men were equal in having a human mind that was a likeness to the Mind of God (FT, 30, 39, 52-54, 85-86; ST, 56).

But Locke also claimed that natural rights were rooted in every man’s self-ownership (ST, 27).  Now, as Peter Laslett (1970, p. 100) observed, this principle of human self-ownership “almost contradicts his principle that men belong to God, not themselves.”  “Almost”?  Can men both belong to themselves and belong to God?  I have argued that evolutionary neuroscience can explain the human experience of self-ownership as rooted in the interoceptive capacity of the embodied brain.  But the human experience of being owned by God might be harder to explain scientifically.

The apparent contradiction between Locke’s principle of self-ownership and his principle of divine ownership can be resolved by seeing that Locke made what Michael Zuckert has called a “two-track argument,” in which “one track is theistic, the workmanship argument, an argument of natural theology; the other track is the appeal to self-ownership” (Zuckert, 2002, pp. 4-5; 2005, p. 431).  Locke believed that the workmanship argument would require a rational theology that could prove the existence of God.  From “the idea of ourselves as understanding, rational creatures,” we would have to infer “the idea of a supreme Being, infinite in power, goodness, and wisdom, whose workmanship we are” (ECHU, IV.3.18).  Through an anthropomorphic analogy, we could project from the idea of our own minds and other human minds the idea of a Divine Mind.  Thus, man would create God in man’s image (ECHU, IV.3.27; IV.10.1).  But then Locke admitted that having the idea of God in one’s mind does not prove God’s real existence (ECHU, IV.10.7; IV.10.19; IV.11.1).

Since he doubted that reason could prove God’s existence in support of the workmanship argument, Locke developed the self-ownership argument that would provide a purely natural ground for his law of nature.  He wanted to appeal to a rational theology of divine workmanship, but if that failed, he could fall back onto his natural self-ownership argument.  These two tracks—God and nature--are suggested by Locke’s repeated appeals to “the Laws of God and Nature” (FT, 56, 124; ST, 60, 66, 90, 93, 142, 195).  The “fixed and permanent rule of morals” could be “firmly rooted in the soil of human nature,” and human nature could be understood as created by “nature or God” (1997, p. 125).  Notice that the creative source of human nature is nature or God.

Consequently, the major premise of Dilley’s Syllogism is only partly true.  Yes, Locke’s classical liberalism can be grounded in the Christian doctrine of creation in the image of God as supporting the workmanship argument.  But Locke suggested that reason can neither prove nor disprove creationist theology.  And that led him to appeal to the self-ownership principle as a purely naturalistic argument that did not require any theological assumptions.  Another way of saying this is that Locke left the Reason/Revelation debate open, believing that neither side can refute the other.  And so, he often invited his readers to consider both what “Reason” taught them by their natural experience and what “Revelation” taught them through their reading of the Bible (ST, 25).

The minor premise of Dilley’s Syllogism—Darwinism denies Christianity—assumes that the Darwinian scientist believes that scientific reason can refute Christian revelation and thus supports atheism.  But even if this is true for some Darwinian scientists, it is not true for all--not even for Darwin himself.  Moreover, Darwinian evolutionary science recognizes that there is a natural desire for religious understanding, and so atheism is contrary to our evolved human nature.  But even though religious belief is natural for most human beings, what they believe about the supernatural will be determined by faith rather than reason.  And since religious believers can never reach agreement about the content of their faith, they must accept the fact of religious pluralism and recognize how that religious pluralism dictates the religious toleration that secures religious liberty.

Of course, there are Darwinian atheists.  Richard Dawkins, for example, has said that “I could not imagine being an atheist at any time before 1859, when Darwin’s Origin of Species was published.”  He thinks the Argument from Design has always been the best of the arguments for the existence of God, because the complexity of the living world appears to be the work of an intelligent designer—just as William Paley’s watch implied the existence of a watchmaker—and so we might infer that God is the Intelligent Designer of the living world.  David Hume rightly criticized this reasoning as illogical because it rests on a false analogy between human intelligent design and divine intelligent design.  We have all seen human intelligent designers at work as part of our ordinary human experience.  But we have never seen a Divine Intelligent Designer creating everything out of nothing.  This is not part of our ordinary human experience.  It is fallacious, therefore, to use apparent design in nature as evidence for the existence of God.  But even if Hume was right about this, Dawkins has observed, Hume did not offer any alternative explanation for apparent design in nature.  It was only in 1859, when Darwin showed how evolution by natural selection could explain complex biological design, that “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist” (Dawkins, 1986, pp. 5-6).

And yet Darwin himself denied that his theory of evolution promoted atheism.  Consider what he said about “the Creator” in the last two paragraphs of The Origin of Species.  He rejected the common “view that each species has been independently created,” and he proposed instead that “it accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by the Creator, that the production and extinction of the past and present inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes, like those determining the birth and death of the individual.”  Then, in his famous last sentence, he spoke of the “grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one,” and that “from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved” (1936, pp. 373-74).

Here we see that Darwin adopted the medieval Scholastic metaphysics of “dual causality” in distinguishing supernatural primary causes and natural secondary causes (Maurer, 2004).  The Creator did not miraculously create each species of life separately.  But He did originally exercise primary causality in impressing the laws of nature on matter and breathing life into a few forms or into one.  Then, from that simple beginning, the Creator allowed all the forms of life to emerge through the secondary causes of the natural evolutionary process.

At this point in his life, Darwin was what today we would call a “theistic evolutionist” or “evolutionary creationist”—someone who believes that the existence of God as the Creator is compatible with evolutionary science.  Indeed, Darwin said that it was “absurd to doubt that a man may be an ardent Theist and an evolutionist.”  And even when, towards the end of his life, he became an agnostic, he insisted: “In my most extreme fluctuations, I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of God” (1879; 1969, pp. 92-96). 

In the creation/evolution debate among Christians today, many Christian thinkers—such as Francis Collins, Deborah Haarsma, Darrel Falk, Alvin Plantinga, and Justin Barrett—have defended evolutionary creationism in arguing that, just as Darwin said, one can be both a theist and an evolutionist (Collins, 2006; Stump, 2007).  Remarkably, even the “young-Earth creationists,” who believe in the literal six-days-creation story in Genesis and a 6,000-year-old Earth, concede that Darwin’s Origin of Species refuted the traditional belief that God specially created all species of life, because they agree that all species emerged through evolution by natural selection.  But they also insist that God had to specially create all the “kinds” of animals and plants, so that the evolution of species could unfold within the limits of those “kinds” (with “kinds” corresponding to the taxonomic level of “families”) (Wood, 2008, 2011; Wood and Murray, 2003; Ham, 2017, pp. 14-26).   This resembles what Darwin said about the Creator breathing life into “a few forms or into one,” from which all species could then evolve by natural selection.

Darwin and the evolutionary creationists agree with Locke that religious belief is natural for human beings because they are naturally inclined to infer from their knowledge of their own minds and the minds of others that there must be a divine mind that exercises a supernatural intelligent agency analogous to the natural intelligent agency of human minds.  Darwin observed that when “conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity of looking far backwards and far into futurity,” he “felt compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man,” which made him a theist (1969, pp. 92-93).  

Similarly, some evolutionary psychologists—such as Justin Barrett and Jesse Bering--have argued that the natural evolution of religious belief is rooted in the propensity of the human mind to detect rational agency in humans and other animals and then to infer a supernatural intelligent agency analogous to that of human minds (Barret, 2004; Bering, 2011).  But as we have seen, this anthropomorphic analogy between human and divine minds is dubious, and even if this explained the natural evolution of the idea of God in the human mind, that would not prove the existence of God.

This led Locke to conclude that believing in the existence of God is ultimately not a matter of reason but of faith.  And since “faith is not knowledge,” we cannot know what the true religion is (Locke, 1870, pp. 94-96; 1997, pp. 248-50; ECHU, IV.17-18).  Consequently, political rulers cannot coercively enforce belief in the religious orthodoxy of the true church, because religious believers cannot agree on what that orthodoxy is.  “Every man is orthodox to himself,” Locke observed in the Letter Concerning Toleration.  And “every church is orthodox to itself” (2010, pp. 7, 21, 38).  The simple fact of religious pluralism—that religious believers cannot agree on religious orthodoxy—supports Locke’s liberal argument for religious liberty and toleration of all religious sects that inflict no injury on others.  Religious liberty and religious pluralism create a free marketplace of religion in which religious movements must compete for adherents.  Those religious groups that succeed in satisfying the natural desire for religious understanding gain a larger share of the religious market (Seabright, 2024).

The mistake of the Christian Integralists (both Catholic and Protestant) in rejecting Lockean religious liberty and toleration and affirming Christian Theocracy (or Christian Nationalism) is their failure to see how any theocratic attempt to suppress religious pluralism must be oppressively unjust and also contrary to the religious voluntarism practiced by the early Christian Churches.

We can see then how a Darwinian Lockean Liberalism can explain natural religion and can secure the religious liberty and toleration that respect religious pluralism and allow every individual to satisfy his natural desire for religious understanding in his own way, while allowing all others the same religious liberty.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

REFERENCES

Barrett, J. 2004. Why Would Anyone Believe in God? Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

Bering, J. 2011. The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life. New York: W. W. Norton.

Collins, F. S. 2006. The Language of God. New York: Free Press.

Darwin, C. 1879. Letter to John Fordyce, May 7. Cambridge, UK: Darwin Correspondence Project, Letter No.: DCP-LETT-12041.

Darwin, C. 1936. The Origin of Species & The Descent of Man. New York: Random House, The Modern Library.

Darwin, C. 1969. The Autobiography of Charles Darwin. Ed. N. Barlow. New York: W. W. Norton.

Dilley, S., ed. 2013. Darwinian Evolution and Classical Liberalism: Theories in Tension. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Ham, K. 2017. "Young-Earth Creationism." In J. B. Stump, ed., Four Views on Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

Holloway, C. 2006. The Right Darwin? Evolution, Religion, and the Future of Democracy. Dallas: Spence Publishing.

Laslett, P. 1970. Introduction. In: John Locke, Two Treatises of Government: A Critical Edition with an Introduction and Apparatus Criticus, by Peter Laslett. Second edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 3-152.

Locke, J. 1870. Four Letters on Toleration. London: Ward, Lock, and Tyler.

Locke, J. 2010. A Letter Concerning Toleration and Other Writings, M. Goldie, ed. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.

Maurer, A. 2004. "Darwin, Thomists, and Secondary Causality." The Review of Metaphysics 57: 491-514.

Seabright, P. 2024. The Divine Economy: How Religions Compete for Wealth, Power, and People. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Stump, J. B., ed. 2017. Four Views on Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

West, J. G. 2006. Darwin's Conservatives: The Misguided Quest. Seattle, WA: Discovery Institute Press.

Wood, T. C. 2008. "Species Variability and Creationism." Origins Number 62: 6-24.

Wood, T. C., and M. J. Murray. 2003. Understanding the Pattern of Life: Origins and the Organization of the Species. Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman.

Zuckert, M. 2002. Launching Liberalism: On Lockean Political Philosophy. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.

Zuckert, M. 2005. "Locke-Religion-Equality." The Review of Politics 67: 419-431.

If Humans and Chimps Are 15 Percent Genetically Different, What Difference Does That Make?

Think about how often you've heard it said that the genetic difference between human beings and chimpanzees is only slightly more than 1 percent, and therefore humans are 99 percent similar to chimps.  It is also said that this proves that chimps--and also bonobos--are our closest living evolutionary relatives.  This seems to be confirmed by the fact that chimpanzees and bonobos are more genetically similar to humans than to gorillas.  This 1 percent difference between humans and chimps fits the evolutionary timeline of five to eight million years since humans and chimps diverged from their last common ancestor.

But now an article published last May in Nature (Yoo et al., 2025) reports that a complete sequencing of ape genomes shows that the genetic difference between humans and chimps is a lot greater than 1 percent--more like 15 percent!  And yet perhaps I shouldn't say this article "reports" this because if you read the main article, you won't see this claim of a 15 percent difference.  You have to go to the Nature website and print out the "Supplementary Data" for the article, and even then, you have to work through the technical jargon to find the 15 percent difference.  Casey Luskin has posted a helpful article at the Discovery Institute website that digs deep into the "Supplementary Data" to uncover this remarkable finding.  You would think that such a surprising discovery would be prominently announced in Nature and in press releases: "The Chimp-Human Genetic Difference Is Not 1% But 15%!"  I think Luskin is right to suggest that the editors at Nature must have worked hard to hide this finding because it refutes the popular claim about "only a 1% difference" separating humans and chimps.  

Luskin says this refutes one of the "icons of evolution," as Jonathan Wells called them--that is, widely believed assertions about evolution that the proponents of "intelligent design theory" and "young-Earth creationism" deny.  It's not surprising, therefore, that creationists like Ken Ham have cited Luskin's article as proving that the creationists are right to deny that there is any common evolutionary ancestry linking humans and apes.  Ham explains that Bible teaches us that God created the "ape kind" and the "humankind" separately and created humans as a unique kind made in the image of God.

And yet I don't see that this newly discovered "15% difference" provides any support for the intelligent design theorists or the creationists in their denial of evolutionary science.

But first we need to understand how this new research allows us to calculate genetic difference and similarity.  The title of the article in Nature is "Complete Sequency of Ape Genomes."  The emphasis is on "complete," because the first human and ape genome sequences were incomplete.  They excluded extremely repetitive sequences and large-scale structural differences such as inversions and duplications of genomic sequences.  So the first reports of only 1% differences between human and chimp genomes were based on incomplete drafts of the genomes.  But now the complete sequency in this article allows for a fuller comparison of similarities and differences in the sequences.

The authors found two kinds of differences--"gap divergence" and "single nucleotide variation" (SNV).

Luskin prepared this figure to illustrate the difference between "SNVs" and "Gaps" between two genomes.  Gaps represent nucleotides or segments of nucleotides that don't exist in one of the genomes.  SNVs represent places where the nucleotides are different for the two genomes.  In this illustration, we have 30 nucleotides of the target genome with 3 SNVs and 9 gaps relative to the query genome.  So SNV divergence is 10%, and gap divergence is 30%, which means a total divergence of 40%.

If you go to the Supplemental Data for the Yoo et al. article, you will see that Figure III.12 shows the SNVs in comparing the genomes for humans, chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans--the four "great ape" species who belong to the Hominidae family.  When the human genome is the "target" genome, the "gap divergence" for the gorilla genome is 27.3 percent, for the Sumatran orangutan it's 16.5 percent, for the bonobo it's 14.4 percent, and for the chimpanzee it's 13.3 percent. 

Figure III.11 shows the SNV divergences, which are 2 percent for the gorilla, 3.6 percent for the Sumatran orangutan, 1.6 percent for the bonobo, and 1.6 percent for the chimpanzee.

If we add the gap divergences to the SNV differences, we get these total degrees of difference between human and ape genomes: 29.3 percent for the gorilla, 20.1 percent for the Sumatran orangutan, 16 percent for the bonobo, and 14.9 percent for the chimpanzee.  That's how we get the estimate of almost 15 percent difference between the chimp and human genomes, which is a lot higher than the purported 1 percent difference.  

It should be noted that these comparisons are for the 44 non-sex chromosomes in the human genome--that is, excluding the X and Y chromosomes.  As compared with chimps, the human X chromosome has a 4.4 percent gap divergence and 1.1 percent SNV divergence, while the human Y chromosome has an amazing 56.6 percent gap divergence and 3.9 percent SNV divergence.

Although this new research shows that the genetic differences between humans and apes are greater than had been previously reported, this does not deny the evolutionary story of the common evolutionary ancestry of humans and apes.  The genetic similarity between humans and apes is still very great--85 percent!  And humans are more genetically similar to chimps and bonobos than they are to orangutans and gorillas, which supports the claim that chimps and bonobos really are our closest living evolutionary relatives.

ALL IN THE GENES?  OR FOUR DIMENSIONS OF EVOLUTION?

There is an obvious problem here, however.  All of us have seen chimpanzees in zoos.  And many of us have seen bonobos if we have gone to zoos in San Diego, Milwaukee, or Cincinnati that have bonobos.  Those zoos often have displays that say something about the 1 percent difference between humans and chimpanzees.  Now those displays might have to be changed to read 15 percent.  But even so, when we look at those apes and compare them with humans, it's very hard to believe that the difference is only 1 to 15 percent.  It's simply not true that humans and apes are 85 percent the same.  The gap between the mental achievements of human beings and those of the apes is staggering.

Most human beings don't believe that evolutionary genetics can fully explain that gap, and that's why so many people reject the science of evolution, and why so many believe that the superiority of the human mind over the ape mind can only be explained by the supernatural work of an Intelligent Designer or Divine Creator.

They are right to believe that evolutionary genetics cannot fully explain the achievements of the human mind.  But that's because genetics is only a small part of evolutionary science.  As I have indicated in some previous posts, there are four levels of evolutionary inheritance--genetics, epigenetics, culture, and symbolism (Jablonka and Lamb, 2005).

The genetic inheritance system is the foundation for the Neo-Darwinian theory of evolution. But genetic reductionism and determinism fail to see how gene action depends on the complexity of interacting causes within the genome, within cells, within organisms, within groups of organisms, and within ecological circumstances. Except for a few single-gene genetic disorders, "genetic astrology"--the idea that genes directly control specific traits--must be dismissed as foolish.

The epigenetic inheritance system is evident in the differences between specialized cells. Brain cells, liver cells, and skin cells are very different, although the nucleus of each cell has the same genome. Their differences are epigenetic, rather than genetic, because they have arisen through their developmental history in which there were different patterns of gene activation and interaction within the cell. This developmental information is passed on as these cells divide to produce more cells of the same kind. It is possible for evolution to occur through heritable epigenetic variation even without genetic variation. Just as a musical recording transmits interpretations in musical performances of a musical score, so does an epigenetic inheritance system transmit interpretations of the information in DNA, so that there is a Lamarkian inheritance of phenotypes instead of genotypes. One version of such inheritance that is now under active study is DNA methylation: strands of DNA are chemically modified during development, and these modifications can be transmitted through reproduction.  The chemical modification in epimutation is not in the DNA itself but in the chromatin marking. Methylated DNA has a small methyl group attached to some of its bases. The pattern of methylation influences which regions of DNA are expressed. The different kinds of cells in the human body have the same DNA, but the different patterns of methylation regulate the expression of DNA.

The behavioral inheritance system is the transmission of information among animals through social learning. For example, among some animals (including human beings) mothers transmit food preferences to their offspring, because information about what mother is eating is transmitted either in the womb or through suckling, so that the offspring inherits a preference for that food. More complex forms of social learning come through animal culture. For example, some chimpanzees can discover how to open nuts with a stone and then pass on this practice within their group so that it becomes a social tradition. Different communities of chimps in Africa have different cultures based on distinctive profiles of traditional practices transmitted by social learning. As opposed to genetic evolution, cultural evolution is not blind but targeted to functional change.

The symbolic inheritance system is uniquely human because it shows the qualitative leap that defines our humanity as based on our capacity for symbolic thought and communication. Other animals can communicate through signs. But only human beings can communicate through symbols. The evolution of human language was probably crucial for the evolution of symbolism. Symbolic systems allow us to think about abstractions that have little to do with concrete, immediate experiences. Symbolic systems allow human beings to construct a shared imagined reality. These symbolic constructions are often fictional and future-oriented. Art, religion, science, and philosophy are all manifestations of human symbolic evolution. 

To explain why humans are somewhat similar to the great apes and yet radically different from them, we have understand how all four levels of human evolution have shaped human beings to be the unique animals that they are.

COMMON DESCENT OR INTELLIGENT DESIGN?  OR BOTH?

Although Casey Luskin is an advocate of intelligent design theory as the best alternative to evolutionary science, he stresses that he is not pointing to the new estimate of 15 percent difference between humans and chimps as evidence that refutes evolution.  As long as the five to eight million years since humans and chimps diverged from their last common ancestor is enough time for this 15 percent difference to evolve, then the evolutionary story of common ancestry is still defensible.  

But still, Luskin suggests, intelligent design theory has a better explanation for this genetic similarity--85 percent--between chimps and humans:  "Functional genetic similarities between humans and chimps could be explained by common ancestry or by common design.  Common ancestry is not the only way to explain genetic similarities.  Intelligent agents can re-use functional code in different designs.  Common design can explain shared functional genetic similarities just as well as common descent can."

There are two mistakes in Luskin's reasoning, however.  First, he mistakenly assumes a dichotomy between common descent and common design, as if they were mutually exclusive.  As I have noted previously, one of the leading advocates of intelligent design theory--Michael Behe--argues (in The Edge of Evolution) that the genetic similarity between humans and chimps is evidence that human beings evolved from primate ancestors shared with chimpanzees.  He explains that intelligent design is required to explain the emergence of the higher taxonomic levels of life (kingdoms, phyla, classes) but not the lower levels (orders, families, genera, species).  This means that the evolution of species could be fully Darwinian.

Behe is an intelligent-design evolutionist, because he insists: "The possibility of intelligent design is quite compatible with common descent, which some religious people disdain.  What's more, although some religious thinkers envision active, continuing intervention in nature, intelligent design is quite compatible with the view that the universe operates by unbroken natural law, with the design of life perhaps packed into its initial set-up" (166).  Luskin refuses to recognize Behe's position.

Luskin is also mistaken, however, in assuming the plausibility of the arguments for intelligent design.  He thus ignores my objection that the arguments for intelligent design are fallacious in two respects.  First, intelligent design reasoning depends completely on the fallacy of negative argumentation from ignorance, in which intelligent design proponents argue that if evolutionary scientists cannot fully explain the step-by-step evolutionary process by which complex living forms arise, then this proves that these complex forms of life must be caused by the intelligent designer.  This is purely negative reasoning because the proponents of intelligent design can offer no positive explanation of their own as to exactly when, where, and how the intelligent designer caused these forms of life.  

The second fallacy is the subtle use of the fallacy of equivocation--in the equivocation between human intelligent design and supernatural intelligent design.  We have all had the experience of seeing how human intelligent agents create artificial products by intelligent design.  But it does not follow logically from this that we have all had the experience of seeing how supernatural intelligent agents create artificial products by intelligent design.

CREATED BY GOD IN HIS IMAGE?  OR EVOLVED IN THE IMAGE OF PRIMATES?  OR BOTH?

Ken Ham (2025) argues, on the contrary, that even if we have not seen with our own eyes God creating everything out of nothing, this has been revealed to us through the Bible; and part of that revelation is that God created all the "kinds" of plants and animals separately, and He created the "chimp kind" to be utterly different from the "humankind," which was created in His image.

But as I have said in my previous posts on Ham and his two museums in Kentucky--the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter--he mistakenly assumes that he is conveying the clear meaning of the Bible and that the Bible's clear teaching is incompatible with Darwinian evolution.

The Bible says nothing about God creating apes and humans as separate "kinds."  The Book of Genesis never mentions apes.  Actually, in the whole Bible, the Hebrew word for "ape" appears only twice (I Kings 10:22, 2 Chronicles 9:21), and never in the context of creation.  And while Genesis speaks of God creating plants and animals "after their kind," it never identifies human beings as a "kind."  Consider Genesis 1:26--"And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness."  The phrase "after our likeness" takes the place of "after their kind," suggesting that in being created in the likeness of God, man is not bound by a "kind."  So there is no Biblical basis for Ham to speak of "humankind."

Moreover, the Hebrew word min that is translated as kind in the King James Bible is ambiguous.  In the Latin translation of the Bible, min is translated as the Latin word species.  Consequently, for almost two thousand years, Biblical believers assumed that God's creating "kinds" meant that God created each "species" separately, and that each species was eternally fixed.  But then after Darwin published his Origin of Species in 1859, in which he argued against the "theory of special creation" that God had created each species separating, some Christians began to believe that the created "kinds" in the Bible referred not to "species" but to some higher level of taxonomy.  Then, in 1941, the Christian biologist Frank Marsh coined the word baramin (combining the Hebrew words for "created" and "kind") as the best term for "created kind."  He argued that a "created kind" was not at the taxonomic level of "species" but at or near the level of "family."  This allowed Biblical believers to accept Darwin's theory of the origin of "species" by natural selection while also believing that God had created the "families" of plants and animals to be fixed and separate.  So, for example, we could say that God originally created the "family" of the finches, but within the limits of that "family," the separate species of finches endemic to the Galapagos Islands evolved by natural selection to be adaptive to those islands.

Notice what this means for the taxonomic classification of human beings.  If the "kind" of human beings refers to their taxonomic "family," then in modern taxonomy, human beings belong to the "family" of Hominidae, which includes chimps, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutan.  Even the young-earth creationist Todd Wood (2010) accepts this Hominidae classification of humans with the great apes, although he identifies the "human holobaramin" as the genus Homo.

This idea of "created kinds" was crucial for Ham in solving an old problem with Noah's Ark.  If the Ark carried all the "kinds" of land-based plants and animals, how could the Ark be big enough to hold all of the land-based species--which could be numbered in the millions?

Ham's creationist researchers have solved this problem by calculating that among these land-dependent vertebrate species, there are fewer than 1,400 known living and extinct kinds (that is, families).  This allows them to estimate that Noah had to have fewer than 6,744 individual animals on the Ark.  Once these animals left the Ark, speciation by natural selection within kinds could create all the living and extinct species that we know today.  The Ham's Ark Encounter is designed to show how as many as 6,744 animals and 8 human beings (Noah and his extended family) could survive on the Ark for almost a year.  But notice that this is a speculative reading of the Bible that never defines "kind" in this way.  This is not the clear meaning of the Bible, as Ham claims.  Indeed, if you go to the Ark Encounter in Kentucky, you might notice one display that speaks of the need for "Arktistic license" in making up details in the story of the Ark that have no basis in the Bible.

Since the Bible is so obscure in its creation story, and since so much of that story sounds like a figurative folk tale that was not meant to be a literal account of natural history, many Christians (like C. S. Lewis, Francis Collins, and Deborah Haarsma) have decided that the Bible could be read as allowing for theistic evolution or evolutionary creation.  According to this conception, God created the universal laws of nature at the beginning of the Universe, but then He allowed all the forms of life to emerge by natural evolution.  God is the "primary cause" of everything.  But the evolutionary process unfolds through the "secondary causes" of nature.  Even Darwin himself accepted this metaphysical conception of "dual causality" that reconciles belief in God as First Cause with acceptance of evolutionary science.  At various points in the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter, there are displays that acknowledge that many if not most Christians accept some version of this theistic evolution.

But what about the creation of human beings in the image of God?  If the "image of God" refers to the God-like intellect of man, then we might argue that the extraordinary mental capacities of human beings could have evolved through the evolution of the primate brain.  I have argued that the evolution in the size and complexity of the primate brain passed over a critical threshold so that now there are 86 billion neurons in the human brain, and of that total, 16 billion are in the cerebral cortex, which includes 1.3 billion neurons in the prefrontal cortex.  That emergent evolution of the brain created the uniquely powerful human mind.  We were created in the image of the primate brain.

Even if we are only 15 percent genetically different from chimps, we are different in kind from chimps because we have the mental capacities for language, morality, and symbolic abstraction that they do not have at all.  That's the difference that makes all the difference.

REFERENCES

Behe, Michael. 2007. The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the  Limits of Darwinism. New York: The Free Press.

Ham, Ken. 2025. "Study Finds Chimp DNA Is Not '99% Identical' to Ours." Answers in Genesis. Ken Ham Blog. May 27. Online.

Jablonka, Eva, and Marion J. Lamb. 2014. Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life. Revised edition. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Luskin, Casey. 2025. "Fact Check: New 'Complete' Chimp Genome Shows 14.9 Percent Difference from Human Genome." Science and Culture Today, May 21, online.

Wood, Todd Charles. 2010. "Baraminological Analysis Places Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis, and Australopithecus sediba in the Human Holobaramin." Answers Research Journal 3: 71-90.

Yoo, Dong Ahn, et al. 2025. "Complete Sequencing of Ape Genomes." Nature 641: 401-418.

Hermann Goering's Natural Desire for Dominance: The Movie "Nuremberg"

 

                                                    The Trailer for the Movie "Nuremberg"

The movie "Nuremberg," based on Jack El-Hai's book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, is the story of how American psychiatrist Douglas Kelley studied the imprisoned Nazi leaders who were brought before the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal in 1945-1946, and how Kelley became particularly fascinated by Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering, who had been Hitler's designated successor until he fell from Hitler's grace near the end of the war.  The movie stars Russell Crowe as Goering and Rami Malek as Kelley.  All of the acting is superb, and it's a powerfully moving and intellectually stimulating movie.

The movie and the book have made me wonder how Goering would fit into the evolutionary psychology of political leadership that I have developed in this blog and in my books.  I have written about psychopaths in this blog and in Darwinian Natural Right.  And I can see that Goering and the other Nazi war leaders had some psychopathic traits.  But Goering was not a pure psychopath.  Goering was a grandiose narcissist who was driven by a natural desire for alpha-male dominance as described by Arnold Ludwig.  

Donald Trump shares those same traits, but his political situation differs from Goering's.  Goering pursued dominance in a totalitarian dictatorship that did not allow anyone to challenge Nazi Party rule.  Trump's desire for dominance has led him to establish a competitive authoritarianism in his second term, in which there is some weak countervailance to his dominance coming from the threat of electoral defeat.  If Trump were to cancel the midterm elections next year, that would turn America into a totalitarian dictatorship like Nazi Germany.

JUSTICE AT NUREMBERG

Just before the final collapse of Germany in the spring of 1945, Goering suggested that he should become the Fuhrer once Hitler was dead, which led to Hitler's order that he be killed.  Once it became clear that Germany would lose the Battle of Berlin, Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945.  That left Goering as the highest ranking Nazi leader left alive.  On the day before Germany's surrender on May 7, Goering sent a letter to U.S. military command offering to help the Allies form a new government for Germany with Goering himself as the new leader.  When Goering was captured by U.S. troops, he asked to meet General Dwight Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe, so that he and Eisenhower could arrange for the new government of Germany.  But instead, Goering was taken to a prison camp in Mondorf-les-Bains, Luxembourg, where he joined fifty-two other high-ranking German leaders.

In early August, Captain Douglas Kelley arrived at Mondorf.  He had worked in the medical service of the U.S. army, and his new assignment was to maintain the mental fitness of Goering and the other Nazi inmates.  Kelley wanted to find out if there was a "Nazi mind" that would account for their heinous deeds.  His great ambition was to write a book on this based on his studies of the captive Nazis, knowing that this would make him famous.  If the psychic flaws of the Nazi personality could be understood, then this might prevent the future emergence of another Nazi-like regime.

On August 8, the four Allied powers (France, Great Britain, the United States, and the USSR) agreed on a charter for an International Tribunal that would try the Nazi war leaders for war crimes.  Nothing like this had ever been done.  The U.S. took the leading role, and Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson agreed to head the prosecution.  Jackson targeted Goering as the top-ranking Nazi who need to be convicted.  The International Tribunal would meet in Nuremburg, Germany.  On August 12, the Nazi prisoners were moved to a prison in Nuremberg to await their trial.  Kelley moved there with them.  

Kelley spent hundreds of hours with all of the prisoners, but he was most interested in Goering.  They developed a strange personal relationship, perhaps even a friendship, based on mutual respect.  Kelley's primary psychiatric methodology with all the prisoners was the Rorschach ink blot test.

On October 20, the Allied prosecutors delivered their indictments against the prisoners to the tribunal.  That same day, Gustave Mark Gilbert arrived at the Nuremberg prison.  He was charged with maintaining the mental welfare of the prisoners so that they would be fit to stand trial.  But Gilbert was a psychologist who had the same ambition as Kelley--he wanted to write a book that would explain the psychology of the Nazis.  He was also like Kelley in that he relied on the Rorschach ink blot test for studying the minds of the Nazi prisoners.

Goering liked to brag about his heroic achievements as a military and political leader.  He had been a flying ace in World War I.  He was once shot down. He was credited with shooting down twenty-two enemy planes.  At the end of the war, he flew the unit of planes he commanded into Germany while refusing to surrender to the Allies.  He received his country's highest military award for his exploits.

Goering told Kelley how he first heard Adolf Hitler give a speech.  In the early 1920s, he heard Hitler in Munich speech shout: "You've got to have bayonets to back up your threats."  Goering explained: "Well, that was what I wanted to hear.  He wanted to build up a party that would make Germany strong and smash the Treaty of Versailles. 'Well,' I said to myself, 'that's the party for me! Down with the Treaty of Versailles, goddammit! That's my meat!" He saw that this young, small party was open to new members who could quickly rise to leadership positions--"that meant I could soon be a big man in it."  This desire for becoming a "big man" confirmed his mother's prediction: "Hermann will either be a great man or a great criminal!" (El-Hai, 11).

That he became a great man seemed clear by the long list of titles he had in World War II, which he was happy to rattle off to Kelley: President of the Reichstag, Hitler's deputy, Prime Minister of Prussia, Reich Minister of Aviation and Commander in Chief of the Luftwaffe, Minister of Economics, member of the Secret Cabinet Council, director of the massive Hermann Goering Works manufacturing combine, field marshal, chairman of the Reich Council for National Defense, and Reich Forestry and Hunting Master.  Goering was most proud of the title Reichsmarschall--a rank similar to a six-star general--held only once before, two hundred years earlier, by Prince Eugene of Savoy, who was the most distinguished field marshal in the Army of the Holy Roman Empire and of the Austrian Hapsburg dynasty.

Goering insisted to Kelley that he had become the supreme leader of Germany once Hitler died:

The people flocked to us, the old soldiers swore by us--and I became head of the nation. . . . Too late you would say?  But perhaps not.  Anyway, I made it. . . . You know I shall hang.  I am ready.  But I am determined to go down in German history as a great man.  If I cannot convince the court, I shall at least convince the German people that all I did was done for the Greater German Reich.  In fifty or sixty years, there will be statues of Hermann Goering all over Germany.  Little statues, maybe, but one in every German home (El-Hai, 114).

On the morning of November 20, 1945, the tribunal convened to begin its public trial.  "Goering entered first," El-Hai writes.  "He wore his pearl-gray, brass-buttoned Luftwaffe uniform, stripped of all insignia and symbols of rank, and he appeared energized to retake the world stage" (128).  Goering had had months to plan his defense, and he expected to speak eloquently of the glories of the Nazi German Reich.

But then, on the afternoon of November 29, Goering's plans for his defense were undercut when the prosecution showed filmed footage of the concentration camps shot by British and American troops less than a year earlier.  Everyone was transfixed by the images of emaciated camp inmates, stacks of corpses, and bulldozers pushing mounds of bodies into mass graves.  At least ten minutes of the movie were given over to these films.  And even though most of us in the theatre had seen some of these images previously, to see them again was as disturbing as it was for the courtroom audience in the movie.  Even Goering coughed nervously and leaned on the railing of the dock and covered his face with his right arm.

Later, Goering said to Kelley: "It was such a good afternoon, too, until they showed that film. They were reading my telephone conversations on the Austrian affair, and everybody was laughing with me.  And then they showed that awful film, and it just spoiled everything" (El-Hai, 136). 

By the end of December, Kelley decided that since he had not seen his wife in almost three years, it was time to go home.  When Goering learned that Kelley was leaving, he broke down and wept.  By late January of 1946, Kelley was reunited with his wife in Chattanooga.  This left Gilbert in Nuremberg to continue his psychological studies of the prisoners during the trial.  Here the movie changes the story.  In the movie, Kelley stays in Nuremberg for the whole trial.

And so, in the movie, Kelley was in the audience for Goering's dramatic jousting with prosecutor Robert Jackson in March of 1946.  When Jackson presented documents signed by Goering that referred to the "final solution" to the Jewish problem as evidence that Goering knew about the extermination of Jews in Germany, Goering responded by pointing out that these documents identified the "emigration" of Jews out of Germany as the "final solution," and nothing was said explicitly about exterminating millions of Jews.  

Goering argued that neither he nor Hitler himself knew anything about the deliberate killing of Jews in the camps.  If any Nazi leader was responsible for the Holocaust, Goering insisted, it was Heinrich Himmler, who had died by suicide at the end of the war.  Although most people in the audience probably did not find this persuasive, it did show that the Nazis had not left any documentary evidence that explicitly recognized mass killing of innocent Jews as a deliberate policy.

Goering used the witness chair as a stage for a powerfully assertive speech as if he were speaking at a Nazi Party Rally.  One series of speeches lasted twelve hours over two days.  Everyone saw that Goering was enjoying himself in his passionate display of mastery.  He declared: "The only motive which guided me was my ardent love for my people, their fortunes, their freedoms, their life, and for this I call on the Almighty and the German people as my witness."

Janet Flanner of the New Yorker reported: "When the former Reichsmarschall strode from the witness stand to the prisoner's box after his last session with Mr. Jackson, he was congratulated and smiled upon by his fell-Nazis there, like a gladiator who had just won his fight" (El-Hai, 145).  Indeed, the movie suggested this by filming the scene of Russell Crowe entering the courtroom, with the camera focused on his back and the wide courtroom audience before him, which replicates a scene in Gladiator, when Crowe enters the Coliseum, knowing that he will fight to a glorious death. 

At the end of September in 1946, the judges of the Tribunal delivered their verdicts.  Of the 21 prisoners, 3 were acquitted, and 18 were found guilty.  11 (including Goering) were sentenced to death by hanging. 7 were given prison sentences.  

Goering admitted to Gilbert that his attempt to affirm the glory of the Nazi years and win the admiration of the German people had failed. "You don't have to worry about the Hitler legend any more.  When the German people learn what has been revealed at the trial, it won't be necessary to condemn him.  He has condemned himself" (El-Hai, 150).

Wanting to escape the indignity of hanging, Goering asked that he be killed by a firing squad.  But his request was denied.  

The night before he was to be hanged, Goering bit into a capsule of potassium cyanide that he had somehow hidden from the guards.  His suicide was his final act of defiance.

Remarkably, as the movie indicates in its closing intertitles, Kelley also killed himself with cyanide in 1958.  This ended his own life-long struggle with his inner demons.

NAZIS INTERPRETING INKBLOTS

Both Kelley and Gilbert thought the only way to probe into the deepest recesses of the Nazi Mind was through the Rorschach Inkblot Test, which had been developed in 1921 by Hermann Rorschach, a Swiss psychiatrist.  Rorschach created a set of ten inkblots that were intentionally drawn to be ambiguous.  He thought that when patients were asked to describe what they saw in these inkblot drawings, they would reveal their mental disorders and personalities, even when this was beyond the patients' conscious awareness.  So, for example, if patients responded with lots of descriptions involving color, that indicated that they were emotional and impulsive.  Or if they described people engaged in cooperative activities, that indicated that the patients found social interactions to be pleasurable and helpful.

                                                      How the Rorschach Inkblot Test Works

Although the Rorschach test was popular among psychiatrists and psychologists in the 1940s and 1950s, there is now a general agreement that this test has very limited uses, and that for most purposes it is little more than a variation of astrology and palm reading (Wood, Nezworski, and Garb, 2023).  The test has some validity for detecting disorders such as schizophrenia that involve perceptual distortion and disorganized thinking.  And some of the Rorschach test scores are related to IQ.  But the Rorschach test scores have little validity for providing a general understanding of personality.  And it is certainly not a psychological x-ray that can detect mental realities of which the patient is unaware of.

The failure of the Rorschach test in evaluating the Nazi prisoners became evident when Kelley and Gilbert could not agree in their interpretations of their inkblot tests.  Kelley saw imagination, boldness, and even genius in Goering's responses.  Gilbert saw the mediocrity of Goering's intellect and a lack of originality.  Kelley thought the Rorschach tests of the Nazis revealed that there was no mentally disordered "Nazi mind," because they were ordinary mentally healthy people, which showed that many mentally healthy people could become Nazis in the right circumstances.  By contrast, Gilbert thought the Nazis were mentally disordered in having antisocial personalities with no sympathy for the suffering of others.  Gilbert identified Goering as an "amiable psychopath" with a sadistic aggressiveness (1948).

And yet Kelley and Gilbert could agree on one facet of Goering's personality--his restless desire for dominance and power (El-Hai, 10-11, 74, 113-14, 134, 140; Gilbert, 1948, 212, 220, 225).

DOMINANCE, DEFERENCE, AND RESISTANCE TO DOMINANCE

The political psychology of Nazi politics manifests the tense interaction of three natural propensities of our evolved human nature as political animals: dominance, deference, and resistance to dominance (or counter-dominance).  Dominance is the natural propensity of a few individuals to seek the power over others that comes from superior rank in a group.  Deference is the natural propensity of many individuals to submit to those few who are dominant.  Counter-dominance is the natural propensity of many individuals to resist being dominated.

The desire for dominance and the grandiose narcissism of a man like Goering are easily mistaken as signs of a psychopathic personality.  But as I said in Darwinian Natural Right, pure psychopaths--people who have all the psychopathic traits identified by Hervey Cleckley and Robert Hare--cannot be successful in the pursuit of dominance and power, because the behavior of pure psychopaths will always be self-defeating in that they cannot act prudently for any long-term goal.  As Cleckley said: "The psychopath shows a striking inability to follow any sort of life plan consistently, whether it be one regarded as good or evil.  He does not maintain an effort toward any far goal at all" (Arnhart, 1998, 222).  By contrast, Goering showed self-control and deliberate planning in his pursuit of dominance--in his quest to become the Big Man.

As Goering explained to Kelley and Gilbert, he and Hitler easily won the support of the German people because most people are easily persuaded to defer to the dominance of charismatic leaders.

Nazi Germany did not have a constitutional system of countervailing powers that would have allowed legal resistance to Nazi Party rule.  For example, the Nazi rulers could not be turned out of office through elections.  But Goering and Hitler did see illegal resistance--both armed and unarmed--to their dominance over Nazi Germany (Wikipedia, 2025a).  Over 800,000 Germans were arrested by the Gestapo for resistance activities.  Tens of thousands of Germans were executed by the Nazis.  And hundreds of thousands of Germans deserted from the Wehrmacht, and many defected to the Allies or to anti-Fascist resistance forces.  There were also at least 42 assassination plots to kill Hitler, and some of them came close to succeeding (Wikipedia, 2025b).  (Hitler would have benefited from reading the longest chapter in Machiavelli's Prince, which is about assassination plots as the greatest threat to the Prince who is hated by many of his people.)

All of these armed and unarmed ways of resisting the unjust dominance of rulers are expressions of what John Locke called "the executive power of the law of nature"--the natural right of all individuals to punish those who violated the natural law of individual liberty.

Of course, ultimately the most successful resistance movement was the military resistance of the Allied forces that defeated Germany.  As Leo Strauss (2007) observed in a lecture in New York in December of 1943, what really influenced the Germans who supported Nazi rule was not the silly Nazi doctrines like Aryan racial superiority but rather the Nazi promise that Nazi arms and diplomacy would bring "the solution of all German problems by a short and decisive war," which "convinced a substantial part of the German people that large scale and efficiently prepared and perpetrated crime pays."  Strauss believed that "this doctrine is subject to the test of sense-experience."  First, that this was not going to be a short and decisive victory for Germany became clear as early as 1940 when the British Spitfires blunted the attack of Goering's Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain (July to October of 1940).  By December of 1943, people had seen with their own eyes that the Allies were defeating Germany on the battlefield.  And Strauss foresaw that this "re-education of Germany" would be "consummated by a meeting of British-American and of Russian tanks" in Berlin, and "by the harmonious cooperation of the Western and Eastern occupying forces in bringing to trial the war criminals."  The Nuremberg Tribunal accomplished that.

LESSONS FOR AMERICA?

Many people who see "Nuremberg" will detect a subtext in the movie that suggests questions about America: Can a Nazi-like dictatorship arise in America?  And if so, can this American dictatorship be brought to trial for its crimes?  Can an American dictatorship be overthrown by a popular resistance movement? Is Trump driven by the same desire for dictatorial dominance that drove Hitler and Goering?

That the answer to this last question is yes should be evident once we remember some of Trump's most arrogant boasts about his power--such as "As president, I can do anything I want."

We can hope, however, that unlike Goering and Hitler, Trump will always face the limits on his power that come from a constitutional system of countervailing powers, in which, as Publius said in The Federalist: "Ambition counteracts ambition."  But Trump has been setting aside that constitutional system and replacing it with a competitive authoritarianism--a hybrid regime that combines elements of democracy and authoritarianism, which has emerged around the world over the past 35 years since the end of the Cold War (Levitsky and Way, 2002, 2010, 2025).  A competitive authoritarian regime has multiparty elections, but they are not completely free and fair, because the incumbent's abuse of power tilts the electoral playing field against the opposition, and basic civil liberties are restricted to make it hard for the opposition to challenge the ruling party.

A fully authoritarian regime (like Nazi Germany) allows little or no countervailing power.  A fully democratic regime (like the U.S. until recently) allows strong countervailance. A competitive authoritarian regime (like what Trump is establishing in his second term) allows weak countervailance.

Through various ways, the U.S. could become a fully authoritarian regime.  Trump could declare a state of national emergency that requires canceling the midterm elections next year.  Or the Supreme Court could adopt a version of the Unitary Executive Theory that means that there are no constitutional limits on the power of the President--and therefore Trump is right when he says that as President, he can do anything he wants.

If that were to happen, then we would have to hope that many Americans would join the resistance to dictatorial dominance that has started with the "No Kings" protests.  But these protestors will have to be willing to face imprisonment and violent suppression from the government.  We would also have to hope that military personnel and law enforcement officers would refuse to obey illegal orders from Trump.

It is a dark time in America.  But it could become much darker, perhaps even as dark as in Nazi Germany, 1933-1945.

 

REFERENCES

Arnhart, Larry. 1998. Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature. Albany: State University of New York Press.

El-Hai, Jack. 2013. The Nazi and the Psychiatrist: Herman Goering, Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, and the Fatal Meeting of Minds at the End of WW II. New York: MJF Books.

Gilbert, G. M. 1948. "Hermann Goerig, Amiable Psychopath." The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 43: 211-229.

Levitsky, Steven, and Lucan Way. 2002. "The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism." Journal of Democracy 13 (April): 51-65.

Levitsky, Steven, and Lucan Way. 2010. Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes After the Cold War. Cambrige: Cambridge University Press.

Levitsky, Steven, and Lucan Way. 2025. "The Path to American Authoritarianism." Foreign Affairs 104 (March/April): 36-51.

Strauss, Leo. 2007. "The Re-education of Axis Countries Concerning the Jews." The Review of Politics 69: 530-38.

Wikipedia. 2025a. "German Resistance to Nazism."

Wikipedia. 2025b. "Assassination Attempts on Adolf Hitler."

Wood, James M., M. Teresa Nezworski, and Howard N. Garb. 2023. "The Rorschach Inkblot Test: We See an Unsinkable Rubber Ducky." Skeptical Inquirer 47 (6): 39-45.