02.28.06
Posted in Evolution at 11:18 pm by nemo
Erasmus Darwin had the right idea, and is arguably deserving of the title, along with Lamarck, that his grandson got, stealing the credit by Wallace also.
Michael Ruse’s diatribe against evolutionism in his Evolution/Creation Struggle misses the point that all theories of evolution are evolutionism, but the necessity is to get the question of progress right. This Darwinism cannot do.
This is because of its inherent Social Darwinist confusion of biological and cultural evolution.
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02.27.06
Posted in Evolution at 9:57 pm by nemo
Here’s quote from Dennett’s article in the current instalment of Seed magazine. I would have to admit Dennett has shock value: his thinking is so silly you are taken aback, Can he be serious? Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in New Age at 8:54 pm by nemo
In the last post I cited a letter to Enlightenment magazine (wie.org) about the ’second Axial Age’, and in the process of reading up on it found a note on this guy, ‘Da Free John’, one of the more notorious of the New Age gurus. Many will not have heard of him. After the blowout of his ashram in the eighties, he escaped to a Pacific island with his harem.
Now he has returned to California and is back in business apparently.
I have an idea: why doesn’t Dennett try and study this guy and see why he is well named the Vampire. (Hint read, Rudranandra’s old book Spiritual Cannibalism).
This Da free John is a man to beware of, a truly nauseating case. I tangled with a number of these people in the seventies and was totally disillusioned by the degree of dishonestly, explotation, crypto-fascist anti-modernism, and everything else.
Gurus, of course, are completely written off in secular circles, but people rarely understand them. Just as well secular types stay away from such people.
My heart goes out to the innocent people who get hurt by vultures like this one. (I have no connection(s) whatever with such groups, but I am sensitive to these people from a distance, the worst are certain sufis, and some of the Tibetans)
This Da Free John actually stooped to making his disciples go sell plasma to make donations to his ashram. Since he’s got plenty of cash stashed you have to wonder at the need. Maybe the vampire symbolism, which he seems to enjoy. Get the point. You can suffer real harm from these people. They could care less about your spiritual path. They want your ‘grubstake’.
Take him at his word! Stay the hell away from such people. Don’t ever get involved in their orbit on the basis of consent. They have no authority whatsoever you are required to submit to. Don’t agree to anything. That’s what makes you vulnerable.
Gurus are supposed to help people on their spiritual path. Don’t believe it. Too many, as here, will do everything they can to keep you mesmerized and undeveloped.
In any case, note from below the dangerous lunacy he is proposing now: an eternal contract of some kind. Spit in his face, and walk out the door. This is not India, where a guru’s word is law, and a disciple’s dissent is a sentence of death.
Spit in his face and walk out the door.
There are a thousand sutras you can use to find your own way. Old Buddhism amply warned of the need to maintain you independence, although nowadays with all these Tibetans around the guru racket is rife among Buddhists too. Be ye lamps unto yourselves.
You MUST do the game alone. Like the Lord of the Rings they will find you, trying to do that, so be ready.
With the Da Free Johns out for blood, you have no choice in any case.
Religions prey on children, gurus on yound adults. You have to survive that early green period and find your way through to something real.
Dan Dennett, get to work on it.
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Posted in Evolution, New Age, The Axial Age at 8:12 pm by nemo
I have a previous post on Karen Armstrong’s notion of a ‘Second Axial Age’, a completely confused idea, see here. This was an interview at Enlightenment magazine. A letter to the editor in the next issue shows total confusion on the subject. Sit down and study the eonic effect, and the eonic model, and the fallacy of Armstrong’s thinking will become clear. My problem with this is the postmodern strategy of the gurus trying to promote these New Age anti-modern religious movements. That, in an off itself, would not be so problematical–apart from mere lunacy–if it weren’t for the concealed anti-democratic nature of the basic initiatives.
Armstrong has completely confused the Axial Age as a kind of era of spiritual movements, when its character is far more general. The birth of modern secularism occurs in the Axial Age. The rise of modernity is the only meaningful successor to the phenomenon seen in antiquity.
This situation is a pity because we are being deprived of correct knowledge of one of the critical datasets both for history and the question of evolution.
The letter to the editor below is full of so many inaccuracies and fallacies I can hardly deal with all of them: a separate post analyzing it would be helpful.
Beware of the list of sages and gurus the letter writer gives. If they have some wisdom, fine. But if they are going to be used as evidence of a second Axial Age, to the exclusion of all secularists, scientists, democrats, and the rest, then we are in for another New Age distortion.
Note one thing: People who call themselves ‘enlightened’ can’t afford to make such a simple set of mistakes. They should be able to claim they understand history. But clearly they don’t!!!
More on this some other time.
Since Armstrong’s book on this is about to come out, I will pursue this at length.
Getting the Axial Age straight is not so easy, as this sad letter makes clear.
These gurus are setting up such people with a New Age historicism to justify their authority.
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Posted in Evolution at 7:28 pm by nemo
Every time an ounce of evidence comes in favoring Darwinism, we suddenly hear that the theory has NOT been confirmed. Here is an interesting example: New evidence that natural selection is a general driving force behind the origin of species. What else, given their methodology, could they discover but natural selection? This completely begs the question of some more complex process also at work.
Interesting, nonetheless. See also Panda’s thumb
I am always wary of these new findings.
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02.26.06
Posted in Evolution at 10:26 pm by nemo
Judge Jones (that ‘notorious so and so, etc…) has spoken out on his decision: Philly.com.
To rule that ID is not science is one thing. But to imply therefore that Darwinian natural selection is science, then, is a subtle trap into which the Judge fell. For a biologist to go that route is one thing, he could be confused, opinionated, or lying.
But a judge….
Not a single real bit of the evidence or literature critiquing natural selection appeared at the trial. That was the fault of the ID people, really, who have coopted the old Darwin debate.
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Posted in Evolution at 10:05 pm by nemo
The use of the term ‘evolution’ is, of course, very general, and I was amused to come across this revealing snippet, here
p2p news view / p2pnet: The network providers say that a vibrant market will evolve if we just let them prioritize their networks.
But evolution requires feedback. The problem with the AT&T (say) model is that it controls an essential feedback mechanism of the network, and makes real feedback impossible.
We project the mechanism backward into deep time, leaving us free to believe without reality checks in the directionless nature of evolution by natural selection.
But the need for ‘feedback’ arises spontaneously in a discussion in a real situation using the term ‘evolution’.
The eonic effect, of course, shows how we can miss this ‘feedback’ aspect in the complexities of scale. But we can track it down historically.
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Posted in Evolution at 9:35 am by nemo
An excerpt from Robert Wesson’s
Beyond Natural Selection.
This book, almost never cited in the Darwin debate, is proof that it is possible for a biologist to indulge in an intelligent critique of Darwin’s theory, do biology, and not get entangled in religious arguments.
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02.25.06
Posted in Evolution at 8:29 pm by nemo
DarkSyde at Daily Kos skewers ID. But the problem is this critique is mostly cliche ridden Darwinian shibboleths. An attempt is made to play the ‘Darwinism as a term is a creationist ploy’, etc…
My objection here is that the considerable power of this high traffic blog is being used to promote the Darwin fallacy when it could be used to create a genuine liberal postdarwinism.
Is the whole democratic party supposed to be a bunch of Talk.origins idiots?
In any case, the polarization of the Darwin debate, as a conservative/liberal divide, is completely phony or contingently ad hoc. That makes all discussion the semi-duplicitous jargon of party line rhetoricians, and the question of evolution sinks into verbal abuse on both sides.
I think a critique of ID is entirely apt, but why stick the democratic contingent with a bad evolutionary theory?
It could lose another election.
My beef against Daily Kos is that I opened a diary to explore a liberal Darwin critique and ended up censored. I don’t forgive or forget.
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02.24.06
Posted in Evolution at 10:56 pm by nemo
At the beginning of Dennett’s Breaking the Spell he notes the title echoes Meera Nanda’s Breaking the Spell of Dharma. Below is a revealing essay on Sam Harris’ The End of Faith by the same author. Harris must be baffled by the flak he has taken for the ‘mystical’ overtones in his book. I would have thought such an effort to communicate with the secular/atheist crowd would have gone over without a hitch, but as Nanda’s remarks below reveal, you have to pass a fairly strong sniff test to past muster with the howler monkey set.
That’s the disastrous aspect of Dennett-style fundamentalism. It simply becomes tone-deaf on such questions. The Dennett’s should be held responsible for the immense misunderstandings they are creating in a new generation, witness the pathetic posturing of Nanda.
Let me say right out that I have my own critique of Eastern spiritualities, but confronting this type of unreasonable nitpicking instead of dealing with real issues is somehow sad, especially in someone from that tradition. Nanda’s reactions are against her own tradition, and sometimes that is healthy, and deal with the current reactionary Hindu nationalists, a group that might make anyone get restive with the Hindu tradition.
But the fact remains, why would the Dennett’s and their followers seriously use positivistic thinking to attack Advaita Vedanta? That’s beyond belief, ignorance at the hillbilly level, and I am no fan as such of Vedanta, and, by the way, put a webpage on Samkhya at my website, but I wouldn’t ever try to simply dismiss based on the kind of secularism you get at Skeptic’s mag or the Darwinian view of things at Talk.Origins or the NCSE.
It makes me sad, because modernity will fail at that level, as the subversive postmodern gurus chuckle under their breath, what to say of the Al Qaeda.
I merely indicate this example as direct proof of what I said in an earlier post on Dennett’s book that it is a series of abstractions to front the destruction by indirection of all the things he hates fanatically but won’t list in public.
But we can see that Hinduism is one of those on the hit list: Dennett is obviously fully aware of the issues here therefore.
You won’t beat such people with the intellectual routines now current in the Darwin debate.
Forget it, Mr. Dennett. The question of a critique of Hinduism, the New Age movement, and Eastern spiritual lore simply won’t happen right from the perspective of Darwinism.
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02.23.06
Posted in Evolution, Philosophy at 11:35 pm by nemo
Came across a good discussion of nihilism: The Banalization of Nihilism, by Karen Carr (Suny, 1992), dealing with the idea from Nietzsche through Barth, then Rorty.
The term ‘banalization’ is right, and it seems to be one part of the good cover for Darwin’s ‘nihilism’, miserable dunce that he was, with his cheerful incomprehension of his position. The bureaucratic Science mold that houses the nihilistic biologism of the current Synthesis is of course passed off as a triumph of method.
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Posted in General, Philosophy at 10:48 pm by nemo
The question of Strauss and his ‘esoteric’ fancies backs up into the question of Nietzsche and his liberal fan club. My problem with Nietzsche is simple: despite respect for his genius I don’t trust him, and wouldn’t know how to correct that short of reading him for a decade with a magnifying glass. He wouldn’t deserve my time.
Beware of this viper! The will to power? Maybe just an ‘exoteric’ doctrine to corrupt the liberal last men! Set him up for a fall.
These philosophers wish to play the esoteric card. Kant is out of fashion, but he had the main point: tell the truth. That must be one reason his popularity sags. Everyone, Darwinists included, wants phony ethical systems as cover for deception. A maxim of truth is inconvenient.
But you can’t do theory if you don’t tell the truth!
As the Darwin debate becomes politicized, we have to wonder if the Machiavellian admiration society will suddenly change gears in order to do science. Clearly not!
I have less respect
for Nietzsche now that we have seen his epigones reach their political fruition. And the influence of Darwin on Nietzsche, and then Nietzsche on Darwinists is a hopeless mess.
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Posted in Evolution at 8:50 pm by nemo
Have too many cooks spoiled the prebiotic soup?
Twenty-five years ago, Francis Crick, who co–discovered the structure of DNA, published a provocative book titled Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature. Crick speculated that early in Earth’s history a civilization from a distant planet had sent a spaceship to Earth bearing the seeds of life. Whether or not Crick was serious about his proposal, it dramatized the difficulties then plaguing the theory that life originated from chemical reactions on Earth.
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Posted in Evolution at 12:10 am by nemo
Kenneth Chang probes Discovery Institute claims and Panda’s Thumb discusses this.
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02.22.06
Posted in Evolution at 11:57 pm by nemo
Boston.com adds an article to the dreary discussion of Dennett’s Breaking the Spell with a short catalogue of some of the research on religion. But these kinds of studies–I am trying to be patient–have never amounted to much of anything. They are really assertions of a secular belief system and the presumption of some rational superiority on the part of the scientist. That tactic just won’t work. And as with Dennett researchers tend to do ’slumming’, restricting their focus to something they can condescend to, completely avoiding what they find threatening or beyond their comprehension. A systematic confusion arises as the surface of decayed religions is taken as its essence. But many spiritual traditions are constantly in a fight over just this ’spiritual entropy’. Many sufis (for whom I hold no brief) have quietly written off Islam long ago, and are sharper critics than these scientists.
Why are scientists so obtuse on this subject. The past generation has shown an immense New Age movement, full of a huge amount of hype, but at least five enlightened Buddhas appeared in the public space. You would think scientists would at least be able to respond in some fashion, but no they have concocted an ostrich syndrome and are going to figure it out with fragments of nineteenth century positivism, garbled functionalist or other remnants, and consider themselves objective external observers performing analysis on a new kind of bug.
Dennett wishes to study religion as a natural phenomenon. But that is hardly his intention. It is the ritual ostrich with its head in the ground. They need to ignore religion as much as possible if they myth of scientific omniscience is to be secure. Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in 1848+, Evolution, History at 9:54 pm by nemo
As a prelude to a consideration of postmodern history here is an essay by Windschuttle, the mongoose on the warpath for such things. If you are a postcolonialist, read no further.
Actually Windshuttle has a point. Postmodern historiography is part of the decay it is complaining about.
The interest for me here is merely to note the way the ‘eonic model’ casts Windschuttle’s point in the right mode without getting entangled in Eurocentrism.
Has Windschuttle never heard of globalization? Of course he has, but…
The offending concept at this point is, take a deep breath, ‘Western Civilization’. There is no such civilization.
Check out the eonic model for details.
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02.18.06
Posted in Evolution at 11:16 pm by nemo
There’s something fishy about human brain evolution
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Posted in Booknotes, Evolution, Science & Religion at 11:10 pm by nemo
The Times Book Review, tomorrow, has a review of Dennett’s Breaking the Spell:
The question of the place of science in human life is not a scientific question. It is a philosophical question. Scientism, the view that science can explain all human conditions and expressions, mental as well as physical, is a superstition, one of the dominant superstitions of our day; and it is not an insult to science to say so. For a sorry instance of present-day scientism, it would be hard to improve on Daniel C. Dennett’s book.
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Posted in Evolution, History, The Eonic Effect at 8:48 pm by nemo
One of the biggest fallacies in the Darwin debate-and this is not an endorsement of ID arguments–was Pennock’s argument in Tower of Babel about the evolution of language. Comparing linguistic and Darwinian evolution, as Pennock did in that book, is a complete non-starter. The superficial resemblance of the differentiation processes visible in human linguistic families leaves questions that are simply up in the air. Of course, Darwinists do not need such examples to justify natural selection. But the study of the eonic effect uncovers something relevant to the overall issue in so far as the data Pennock cites is put on the side of justifying microevolution. Thus it is assumed, as with biological evolution, that nothing like macroevolution exists.
Dead wrong, and this is the usefulness of the careful accounting visible in eonic periodization, where even in historical times we can observe highly complex macro processes associated with the emergence of whole literatures. A stunning realization.
Old Testament as Eonic Data. !!!
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02.16.06
Posted in Evolution at 11:24 pm by nemo
ID keeps getting denounced as not science. OK. But is Darwinism science then?
ID is a design argument. Darwinism, based on natural selection (design language), claims that this process does the designing. Ergo, it is a design argument.
Think about it, keeping in mind that ’supernatural design’ might be one thing, while ‘naturalistic design’ would be another.
The question is, if supernatural design is not science, can naturalistic design be science?
The statement makes no sense to currently trained scientists. Change the terminology to something like Kant’s analysis of organism, with their ‘natural teleology’, which he founds to be factor, but no really in the realm of knowledge. That is, no much different from the other ‘design’.
The point is that we have not science vs religion here, but two design arguments, neither one science.
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Posted in Evolution, The Axial Age, The Eonic Effect at 11:11 pm by nemo
The confusion over the term ‘Axial Age’ has found a successor in the idea of a Second Axial Age.
I recommend graduating from the idea of the ‘Axial Age’ to the total phenomenon called the ‘Eonic Effect’.
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Posted in New Age, Science & Religion at 10:17 pm by nemo
Dennett in Breaking the Spell passes himself off as some kind of persecuted enquirer after the truth of religion.
The spell that I say must be broken is the taboo against a forthright, scientific, no-holds-barred investigation of religion as one natural phenomenon among many.
Who on earth is stopping any scientist from doing any of this? Whose taboo? The scientists’? Otherwise, as always, noone is stopping anyone from supposed sacrilege in violating such a taboo (as the Danish cartoon incidents have shown). Scientists have complete free speech already, freedom to enquire, freedom to produce theories. The tremendous prestige and power of science puts the shoe on the other foot.
Obviously the real point is they are stymied by their own definition of naturalism, and in general can’t comprehend religion at all. I know, the ID people say the same thing, but I am not positing a naturalism/spiritualism duality, as such. It is simply the absurdity of the current definition of naturalism. It is obviously not absurd to scientists, but they have closed themselves in a box, and don’t consider the implications.
The result is the tactic of denying the existence of religious phenomena then concocting some silly Darwinian hypothesis for what is left after they have eliminated everything else.
Take Buddhism. Is enlightenment a naturalistic phenomenon? (the question, actually, is almost meaningless as stated.) Clearly the Dennetts are going to eliminate the phenomenon (by massive silence on the question, enforced by group ostracism, and/or charges of irrationality) from science and proceed to explain everything else but the crucial issue. Many Buddhists, themselves confused, would claim ‘enlightenment’ is a ’spiritual’ phenomenon. But such a statement is also confused, perhaps. I should hasten to add that noone can take anyone’s word for claims of Buddhists, as Buddha himself would have insisted.
There is, ironically, a way to look at religious phenomena as ‘naturalistic’, the classic Indian Samkhya, one of many parallel streams in Indian religion.
Part of the problem is that Western scientists have only encountered decayed monotheism, and confused that with religion in a clash amidst secularization.
But that is no excuse.
The phenomenon of ‘religion’ has to be understood as to its real core, then the question of science might be relevant.
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Posted in Evolution at 9:05 pm by nemo
Uncommon Descent on the case of John Davison. His manifesto is below Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in General, History at 8:22 pm by nemo
Current science makes a confused claim on the definition of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment, rarely studied by most scientists, is/is not 1. a time period, 2. several regions with different ‘enlightenments’ (e.g. Germany, Holland, England, France, America,…) 3. an atheist triumph against religion 4. in one-to-one concordance with science in the relevant time-period and/or anything any subsequent scientist claims is science, etc,…. 5. a pun on yogic enlightenment…. 6….
Clearly to equate Enlightenment rationality with agreeing on certain views on AI is close to irrational.
Note that the time-period, region, definition includes the romantic movement.
Note that a tremendous surge of art occurs in this period. Is that irrationalism?
What about German classical philosophy? Kant’s famous essay on the enlightenment, is that excluded?
Most scientists will automatically exclude the German Enlightenment.
The whole thing is silly, and, frankly, a betrayal of the Enlightenment.
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