11.17.05

Re: C’mon Chomsky

Posted in you've got mail at 1:13 am by nemo

Reply to a post at Chaos Listserve, see below for original email.

I am not sure why you deflect the issue toward criticizing my eonic model, and what’s more for not being mainstream. What do you want from me? I stand by my work as being solid. I have not retracted a single part of my model, after repeated efforts by many to critique it (keep ‘em coming), because its foundations are thoroughly laid. More I can’t do. And I indulge in no hype about a Big Theory, every problem is laid out for all to see. And yet I hold the ace on evolution. Like or not. Not so simple to communicate that. I keep it at a high level of abstraction to protect it, until the right moment. As you can see from this list, I was nearly made into a rightwing proponent of the Fourth Great Awakening, which looks more to me like the Last Big Snooze, the Big Sleep.

Perhaps I misunderstood you, but why would you blame me for not have media exposure? I have no Ad budget, a publisher who doesn’t give a shit, and who submitted the wrong cover image to Amazon (and Amazon still hasn’t corrected the mistake, plus they immediately took away the discount, to keep the book overpriced, and suddenly allowed malicious reviewers, from Talk.origins), no distributor, no chance of reviews. The New York Public Library refuses so far to even list a free copy I sent them. They have 12 million books, but mine they won’t keep, trash can. I am flattered. They must be afraid of me.
Someone at Google has killed the rankings of my website and technorati has delisted my blog, so it won’t get crosslisted. Technorati lists twenty million blogs, but not mine. The week I announced my second edition, google hits stopped almost overnight, although googlebot visits my site five hundred times a month. I used to get two to three hundred hits a day from the term paper crowd, but suddenly nothing, one of two from overseas Google sites. I can do without google hits, but the point is to see what happens to Darwin critics, especially those who aren’t religious. Darwinists fear those the worst. They have a nice game going with creationist/ID. The more the Bible Belt attacks, the longer their paradigm can endure.
I started a dairy at Daily Kos, that was shut down. I am banned in advance from comment at Atrios, puzzling, I never tried to post there. I must be that notorious. Same for Panda’s Thumb. I have been banned from Anthro-l, Phil-lit and about ten other listservs. They shut down the old Kant-l to get rid of me.
So, you complain I am not mainstream. Have you never heard of censorship?
Do you actually think people have free speech on evolution?

So I don’t quite share your fear of the storming forces of anti-science. I could be wrong, but all the problems scientists have brought on themselves. They have no sense of anthropology.
I have a Buddhist friend who believes in science, and reincarnation, and holds a string of Buddhist beliefs. He worries, quite correctly, that his descendants will get caught by the science tide, and his legacy destroyed. His fears are not unrealistic. I cite this example because there are a lot people science has declared for ‘extermination by reconditioning’, and they are not all Bible Belt stupidos. Science is in trouble, because its agenda is mistuned, and has let loose a juggernaut that must sooner or later derail against its opposition.

I am not a proponent of ID, quite the contrary, my ‘tactics’ are to defend science from itself and find some post-reductionist line of thinking that won’t make current science vulnerable to ID tactics. That said, I don’t spend my life castigating ID thinking as stupid. Kant put it best, the argument by design deserves our great respect, BUT… He then proceeded to produce one of the most classic critiques of the physico-teleological proofs, essentially the argument by design. The current ID movement doesn’t really deserve our respect. But who does?
Vulgar Darwinists with their crypto-Social Darwinism, and value-free social science used to enforce capitalist economic logic?

There’s a funny law to life. If you plan to replace the ethical basis of social culture with something as stupid as the Darwinist theories of altruism religious counterattacks are your fate. Darwinists preen their feathers a lot, but they have made of mess of their social and cultural world view, and since they seem unable to grasp their position or correct their mistake someone with the clout to do so is going to fight back. OK? They did so in Bryan’s time, and they are doing so seventy five years later, and meanwhile scientists have learned nothing.

A figure like Paley is just pedestrian compared with this Kantian approach, which might help in the current situation since the ID folks, being ignorant, think they can get away with their little renewed ‘argument by design’ game, and Science folks, being ignorant, are in a panic because they have been caught with their pants down thinking they would get away with a reverse argument by design, the ’self-fulfilled atheist’ stuff.

However, I do also think ID is a threat, understand your concern, not on the level of ideas, but on the level of social domination movements that might well erode the educational system, and a host of other negative possibilities.
But the solution is for scientists to put their own house in order. They make themselves vulnerable to their own undoing. You know, Darwin on Trial, by Philip Johnson, never mentioned ID, nor was this yet his ‘wedge’ strategy. He proceeded to skewer Darwinism, and a figure like S. J. Gould was helpless and could only sputter with rage in his review of that book. I hold no brief for Johnson, but he pointed out how weak Darwin’s theory was. You can’t blame the religious right for being anti-science on that score. Still, they did succumb to temptation and attempted to pull a fast one here.
So it is no use calling ID people anti-scientific. Darwinists blew it, and left a disastrous weak flank in the chess game here. The pitiful thing is that educational system can’t correct this. It just produces more Dawkins idiots.

Now, what about Chomsky? Maybe I am unfair, but there was a point where he could have made Darwin criticism a viable University track, but instead we got his student Pinker and The Language Instinct, a bad book by a smart guy. Why is the system doing this?
Why this obsession with defending Darwin? It is just not good science to say that language evolved via adaptational scenarios or via selectionist evolution. Why is that such a stumbling block?
So I am puzzled by Chomsky. And being charged with abetting global warming for critiquing Darwin is pure crap.

Charges of antiscience may cut some ice in your circles, but not much in mine. It’s the other way around. Let me say my personal interest in science is basic, by my experience has led me through everything from New Age circles, to Buddhists, Sufis, and fifty other combinations of everything. By and large the attack on me has been for my interest in science. And the defense of modernity, which has made me persona non grata in a lot of New Age circles. That’s my experience, being charged with ’samsaric attachments’ to scientific mind games.
So the current political talking point about the Republican war on science is rather small potatoes in my view.

My real position on science is that it has not fulfilled its promise to lead from reductionist fundamentals to a comprehensive view on man. And the result is a very limited conception of things that drives people to revolt. It’s not surprising that should happen, but it good to be realistic.
You know, science could fail. Darwinism may destroy it. The Dalai Lama recently dropped a hint about Darwinism, and got attacked by George Johnson of the Times. So the Dalai Lama got it straight, while George Johnson apparently did not. So the main science editor of the
Times is either bluffing or got it wrong. I think it is part bluff, you know, he is cited in Kaufman’s At Home in the Universe, evidently as a ghostwriter. So the main science editor at the Times is a brazen liar. He wants us to believe, but he doesn’t believe. He has some duty to propaganda.

People notice these things, although the Darwin community does not. Science is still beyond the pale, technology apart, for a majority of humanity at this point.
So the problem is, not what you think, that I should be willing to support the losing side, due to my interest in real science. So give me a break, and I doubt the Republicans could make a dent in the position of science, specific cases, like funding for stem cell research, being quite a different matter.
The question of Creationists taking over school boards is a troubling one. But what is the right approach? Closing ranks around a failed strategy? Learning to lie about the faults of Darwinism? That strategy has simply empowered religious opponents, not defeated them.

I have no idea what you mean by a passworded obfuscated URL???

I will comment on this some more, enough for the moment.

In a message dated 11/16/2005 8:46:04 A.M. Eastern Standard Time, xxxx writes:
I’m sorry, I have to respond to this.

Aside from providing a passworded, obfuscated URL, and a message rendered
nearly unreadable, I have to say I think you are completely missing the
point here.

One line in this very brief article says it all:

“…the background of the current evolution/intelligent design controversy
is the widespread rejection of science, a phenomenon with deep roots in
American history that has been cynically exploited for narrow political
gain during the last 25 years.”

No amount of protestations about how your eonic model trumps everything
will successfully dispel this idea. Like it or not, perception is truth,
and politicians and religious zealots are very adept at exploiting this
simple fact. Your eonic ideas, aside from being largely inaccessible in
so many ways, are a long way from becoming embedded in the public
discourse in a way that makes it even remotely possible for that model to
become the perceived truth. Please spare me the sermon about Darwinians
and the like.

Fact: school boards adopt textbooks that may be centered on some crazy
ideas - this is really happening.

Fact: public understanding of science - be it Darwin or anything else - is
increasingly shaped and molded and controlled by a subset of persons who
honestly believe that dinosaurs walked alongside modern human beings -
THIS is really happening, and Chmosky is correct - it stems from a long
running hostility and rejection of science.

Fact: I would wager that there is not a single member of any school board
in the U.S. that has even heard of your eonic model.

I would suggest that instead of hiding your head in the academic and
post-postmodern stanzas of obscure language and distant theory, you make a
serious effort to look past your own enterprise, determine what is really
happening “out there” and move your work into a place where it can be a)
read and understood by more than a tiny handful of persons and b) be
critiqued in the very same way by those non-members-of-the-choir that you
so are so disparaging of in Darwinism.

YES - Chomsky is a bit off kilter. YES - he is admittedly more than a
little odd of late. YES - Darwinian models need careful scrutiny. YES -
Evolutionary biology is too often a “closed camp”. Get over it. Look
around. Pay attention. Put your ideas out in front of a larger audience.
If they have strengths, they will grow, perhaps flourish. If not, they
will wither.

But stop whining and throwing out all this obscure critique.

David Houston

John Landon
nemonemini@aol.com
jcl99@columbia.edu

Site for
World History
And The Eonic Effect
Second Edition
http://history-and-evolution.com
Darwiniana: An Evolution Blog
http://darwiniana.com

_______________

At a time when theories of evolution are under renewed controversy, discussion is hampered by the remoteness of the phenomenon of evolution, and the use of indirect inference to speculate about deep time. Adherents of Darwinism often defend dogmatic versions of the theory that have been questioned since the first reviewers of Origin of Species.

Now Darwinism is under siege from the Intelligent Design movement, threatening the school system. The attempt to hijack the debate using long discredited arguments by design tends to make Darwinists close ranks around their flawed science. The debate is deadlocked by the rigidity of both parties, evidence of fixed agendas, and metaphysical presumptions. A new approach is needed. The study of history itself holds the clue if we can find it.

We live in the first generations with enough historical data to detect a pattern of Universal History. The discovery of this pattern, the Eonic Effect, uncovers the evidence for a deep structure resembling punctuated equilibrium in world history itself. The study of history and evolution together shows us something we had missed and allows us to infer the existence of non-random evolution in the emergence of man. Darwinian theory suffers from low evidence density. The Eonic Effect is the only data we have at high evidence density of evolution as a process in real time, and this transforms our views completely.

We see the real evolution of man as the Great Transition, the human passage from evolution to history, in the chronicle of the once and future Origin of the Species, Man.

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