History, Evolution, and the Darwin Debate
Karen Armstrong on Aljazeera.net announces her new book on Axial Age. Life is not fair, someone who has made a complete bollocks of the question of the Axial Age writes a book that will sell due to her reputation.
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Gene Expression discussing transhumanism links to Wikipedia’s article on Axial Age, which is really quite dreadful. There is a note saying the page requires cleanup, and I wonder if they would go for my approach.
This kind of confusion over the Axial Age has been the object of several efforts on my part, check Was There an Axial Age?. There certainly was, but we ought to change the terminology, and in any case my ‘eonic model’ does the ‘clean up’ necessary, but because I take on Darwin, the correction gets shunted off.
The article makes one good point: the original word for ‘Axial’ having the meaning ‘pivotal’.
I got an email from someone who had read an amazon review of mine on Armstrong’s Battle For God. I had forgotten that I had reviewed it, but went to look, see below.
Armstrong’s idea of a second Axial Age doesn’t quite add up, as I have commented before on this blog, search ‘Axial Age’ in the search box.
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We are about to get bombarded with another round of fake science on religion in the sociobiology vein: Dennett’s Breaking the Spell is due out next week, and I find the question depressing because this type of material has an immense groupie following, and is ground out according to the Dawkins formula.
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Darksyde at Daily Kos interviews DR Wesley Elsberry who currently serves as the Information Project Director at the National Center for Science Education.
Terrific.
But what happened to my diary at Daily Kos?.
Censored, that’s what! The edit button quietly disappeared, and sending an email to anyone there to protest is hopeless.
That strategy here is digging its own grave, because the tide is against Neo-Darwinism over the long haul.
My innocent essays, e.g. Toward A Liberal Postdarwinism, might help here, but the Talk.Origins and NCSE gangs have taken over, I guess.
Have been reading Nadeau and Kafatos in The Non-local Universe, introduced a few posts back, with their commentary on the limits of Darwinism in light of non-locality. While the riddle is hardly solved, nor the relevance of quantum mechanics transparent, it is definitely true that we have missed something in Newtonian biology.
I have been so far reluctant to consider non-locality in relation to the eonic model but the authors have finally convinced me to reconsider the point.
The whole shebang to do with the Axial Age cries out for something along those lines, but idle speculations and egregious blunders of misapplied physics leave the terrain a minefield.
But the connection of Kant to the eonic model, and non-locality to Kant, shows the clue, if one can use it.
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There is said to be a Great Divide between Eastern and Western thought.
Cinema, literature and other aspects of western culture are increasingly open to Asian influence. Not so western philosophy, which remains almost entirely sealed off from eastern traditions. Why? Institutionalised parochialism on the part of western philosophers and a loss of nerve among Asian thinkers
In one way the charge is completely fair. The whole question of the mystical gets filtered out of standard discourses, and in the process Eastern philosophies suffer badly.
But a closer look shows the illusory boundary between East and West, and almost all the questions of Eastern philosophy present from the beginning in the West, starting with Classical Greece.
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A review of Desmond and Moore’s biography of Darwin: The Darwin Legend. The idea that Darwin explained the descent of man is a proposition quite outrageous, and yet in the rivers of Darwin promo Darwinists have actually gotten away with convincing the public.
Darwinists don’t have a single good scenario for any aspect of the descent of man. Everything is cockeyed speculation, except from the bare sequence of skeletal remains.
But if we turn from The Origin of Species to consider the pronouncements on human nature which Darwin included in The Descent of Man we will be struck not only by a drastic impoverishment in the quality of the arguments which are advanced but also by an equally drastic fall in the quantity of data which Darwin is prepared to consider. In his role as a naturalist Darwin regularly drew upon an extraordinary wealth of evidence. He had become, as he put it ‘a complete millionaire in odd and curious little facts’. ‘I am like Croesus,’ he said on another occasion, ‘overwhelmed with my riches in facts.’ Yet in his writings on human society and human history the millionaire suddenly becomes a pauper who, with only a few pennies of evidence in his pockets, fills them with prejudices instead.
Again and again in The Descent of Man theories are used not as hypotheses but as pathways to conduct the reader across abysses of missing evidence. Again and again conclusions hastily reached are laid one upon another in order that the habits and beliefs of Victorian society may be enclosed within the safe stronghold of science. Unconsciously, it would seem, Darwin feels himself driven to fortify with falsity the very ramparts of orthodoxy which he has attacked with truth.
Dennett is plaintively queried by a Times writer:Questions for Daniel Dennett.
It is a toss up as to who is being silliest here.
The first question is the only good one: how could a professor of philosophy be as brain dead on religion as Dennett is.
I am not a theist or atheist, belong to no religion, am critical of Christianity and Buddhism, so it is not religious bias that drives me to challenge the current Darwinian stupidity on religion, egged on by Dawkins and Dennett.
Dennett’s beliefs on religion would be of no concern to anyone save that his pronouncements somehow get the rubric of science, which is outrageous.
The scientific study of religion has never gotten off the ground and the completely wrongheaded approach of Darwian evolution has given a justifiable critique to traditionalists.
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Continuing with our series on World History and The Eonic Effect, we have concluded a brief critique of Darwinism and begin to move to the interesting pattern: the demonstration of historical coherence, a challenge to random evolution.
The Eonic Effect: Falsifying Darwinism
This study of the eonic effect, the evidence of a non-random pattern in world history, can usefully break the deadlock of the Darwin debate by looking at history in the light of ‘evolution’, taken in our extended sense, as the term goes into free fall. The one thing Darwinists don’t want to find is such a non-random pattern, anywhere. This pattern of three turning points breaks the sequence of historical continuity, and shows us a hidden dynamic in a display of coherence, directionality, and the emergence of values. The conclusion is inescapable: this structure demonstrates the existence of an evolutionary driver operating where least expected.
Visual Search and Quantum Mechanics: A Neuropsychological Basis of Kant’s Creative Imagination
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Molecular biologists don’t generally let on about all they know, suspect, or don’t wish to tell the public.
Lynn Helena Caporale lets the cat out of the bag in
Darwin in the Genome, Molecular Strategies in Biological Evolution (McGraw-Hill, 2003)
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