First, I think Vollman's strongest point was when he defined poverty as a kind of wretchedness. This echoed research I heard at the 2006 Brown Symposium, which addressed GNP vs. Gross National Well-Being. Economists and psychologists both showed that a seemingly essential aspect of well-being was a lack of poverty. But poverty here was seen as not only a state with very little monetary value, but a state of uncertainty about basic needs. So, a group of very poor people who cooperatively helped each other and knew they could turn to each other for shelter or food in a pinch were able to be joyful, whereas a group of people who might be worth more on paper but were under constant threat of loss of the basics of Maslow's hierarchy were almost guaranteed to be emotionally depressed. So we might say that wretchedness = poverty + uncertainty.

(I don't at all mean to say that wealthy people cannot be depressed. But the uncertain poor find happiness almost impossible; above that level, from poor to wealthy, the continuum of happiness to depression is found in about the same percentages.)

Second, social Darwinism has been effectively debunked for most scholars. Stephen Gould, possibly the pre-eminent Darwin scholar of the 20th century, laid it to rest along with many others. Here are the major flaws:

• Social Darwinism tends to rationalize success or its lack as somehow earned, and to view individual humans as competitors—it's a "dog eat dog" world. Yet research shows that the opposite is true, that humans who are altruistic, cooperative, and help others are more likely to be part of a successful group. Altruism is a success trait.
• Social Darwinists tend to see successful humans as progressing in some way. Evolution is not about progress, merely about suitability to a particular environment; there is not judgment of better or worse in being selected out. Significant "advantage" in size and strength did not help the dinosaurs; significant "advantage" in intelligence among humans may actually work to our detriment, as Kurt Vonnegut pointed out.

  In the classic example of the moths, there is no difference of superiority between gray and black moths of the same species. But in an area in which soot covers the trees and walls, the black moths will be "fitter" because more will survive, and in an area with normal gray-brown trees, the gray moth will be "fitter." If isolation and the pressures of selection last long enough, a new species may occur. This is not progress, just change.

• The randomness of evolution means that any social Darwinist with an agenda—any plan to promote the fit and limit the unfit in some way—is flawed from the start. No one can predict what future situation will occur. For example, certain things we regard as genetic disorders now have been shown to be survival traits in different situations. Haemochromatosis may have helped people survive the plagues of the medieval period.
• Social Darwinism applied to justify the current status of people does not take into account the extent to which people are out of control of our lives. For example, in 2001 many equally "fit" technology professionals vying for jobs were unable to get work because the jobs were simply no longer there. This had absolutely nothing to do with their skills, charm, intelligence, ability to reproduce (Darwin's only criteria for fitness, btw), credit, health, or any other standard of fitness you care to apply. There was one nut for several hundred squirrels, and unemployment was not an indicator of less fitness but of poor luck.

No, it's not surprising in the least the government acted as they did. I think he should have made a copy of the tape for himself and handed the original over. But on the other hand, if he felt the police were going to mine the tape for potential suspects, and felt the tape's content to be incomplete or misleading, he might be justified in refusing the tape on the principle of harm limitation. A journalist should not share data that could adversely affect another individual unfairly.

An example would be if a tape began by showing person A hitting person B, but didn't show person B hurting person A immediately beforehand. Or if it showed someone going through a broken store window, but not the fact that they came upon the window already broken, and went through it to follow/rescue a child who went through the broken window beforehand.

For this reason I think he was right to refuse to testify about his tape, if possibly wrong about not turning the tape over. I haven't seen the tape and wasn't at the event, so I can't make that call.

As I said in my initial post, I don't actually claim to know if he is or is not a journalist. I don't call myself an author, despite having bylines under my own name in a regularly published paper (back in the '80s) and a great deal of writing, because it's not how I pay the bills. So I probably wouldn't call him a journalist by that definition.

One interesting thing I discovered on journalism.org (the Project for Excellence in Journalism) is that there is no hard-and-fast rule about where lines should be drawn. As a principle, the PEJ writes that journalists "must be allowed to exercise their personal conscience." Being unable to read his mind, none of us can definitively say whether Wolf is doing that or not, but we should defend his right to do so.

If he believes himself to be a journalist and is genuinely doing his best ethically, he's probably doing more than most professionals in the field. I might not agree with his approach, but short of madness or deception or causing harm to others, I think he should have the right to pursue the work.