11.30.06
G factor
Is the ‘g’ factor nothing more than a statistical construct? Read the rest of this entry »
Darwin’s doubts and delay
Darwin’s reluctance to publish is hardly so mysterious. It only seems so because people believe Darwin got it right. Darwin wasn’t so sure! When Wallace threatened to upstage him, he sensed his last chance for priority disappearing. This is not so distinguished. Darwin’s reluctance based on the idea of a challenge to ‘man’s godliness’ is mostly Darwinist rhetoric. That is not the issue, which is simply the real nature of man, whose potential, as Wallace realized, can’t be explained by natural selection. Read the rest of this entry »
Darfur
alternet@democracyinaction.org
The atrocities in Darfur have been going on for far too long and the violence continues to escalate. As a global community, we have a moral responsibility to do what we can to stop the brutality and help protect the millions of displaced people in the region. Please join AlterNet and the Save Darfur Coalition in signing a petition urging President Bush and UN Secretary-General Annan to take the steps necessary to protect the people of Darfur.
Don Hazen
Executive Editor, AlterNet
Eliminate altruism to give NS a free hand?
A Darwinian Just-So story.
The absurdity of Darwinian accounts here can be seen from the ambiguity: if natural selection produces altruism, then why not eliminate altruism, so that natural selection can operate with interference to produce—? altruism.
Note how incoherence enters into the explanation. Check out the Oedipus effect at the history-and-evolution website.
11.28.06
Do Darwinists respond to evidence?
New Knowledge: Will the Theory Change?: the record is clear. It won’t change.
11.27.06
Crazy wisdom garbage; breaking the power of sufi sheiks
Wikipedia article on E.J. Gold. Read the rest of this entry »
11.26.06
Help Wanted: occult private dicks
There are no such private dicks, so the victims will perish anonymously as missing persons. So who will track down Gold’s victims?
The previous post on Gold mentioned the Crazy Wisdon guru tradition, and here is the source, found via the Wikipedia article, a reference to G. Feuerstein. Read the rest of this entry »
11.21.06
Armstrong rewarded for brazen propaganda
Former Nun Receives Honorary Degree
By Natalie Lescroart
Special to The Hoya
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
The secularists and religionists both are so nervous about the implications of the Axial Age that Armstrong’s complete trashing of the subject in the name of scholarship was bound to win an award, along with distorted and untruthful depictions of Islamic history.
So it goes. This is what gets awards.
Lindsay Anderson/The Hoya
After receiving an honorary degree in ICC Auditorium on Friday for her religious writings, ex-nun Karen Armstrong encouraged her audience to find unity rather than divisions in inter-religious interactions.Acclaimed religious writer and ex-nun Karen Armstrong was lauded as a “voice of conscience†by University President John J. DeGioia in a ceremony last Friday in ICC Auditorium during which he conferred upon her an honorary degree.
Kauffman and self-organization
BEYOND REDUCTIONISM. In all the obsession with natural selection, Kauffman’s redirected focus toward self-organization has remained in the background. It is a reminder that in fact we don’t have a theory of evolution as yet.
While it may sound as if ‘order for free’ is a serious challenge to Darwinian evolution, it’s not so much that I want to challenge Darwinism and say that Darwin was wrong. I don’t think he was wrong at all. I have no doubt that natural selection is an overriding, brilliant idea and a major force in evolution, but there are parts of it that Darwin couldn’t have gotten right. One is that if there is order for free — if you have complex systems with powerfully ordered properties — you have to ask a question that evolutionary theories have never asked: Granting that selection is operating all the time, how do we build a theory that combines self-organization of complex systems — that is, this order for free — and natural selection? There’s no body of theory in science that does this. There’s nothing in physics that does this, because there’s no natural selection in physics — there’s self organization. Biology hasn’t done it, because although we have a theory of selection, we’ve never married it to ideas of self-organization. One thing we have to do is broaden evolutionary theory to describe what happens when selection acts on systems that already have robust self-organizing properties. This body of theory simply does not exist.” (Chapter 20, “Order for Free”, The Third Culture, 1995)
11.20.06
IQ and the puzzle of Darwin dummies
Antievolution.org spits out this gem of wisdom,
Numerous studies and meta-studies show that theistic belief is negatively correlated with IQ. I am fascinated by the causation aspect. Thick because they’re fundies? Fundies ’cause they’re thick. Shallow end of the gene pool? Does anyone have a hypothesis?
reply at UD.
This comment itself doesn’t strike me as particularly intelligent, whatever the IQ preening of feathers by the Darwin gang. Even the briefest study of religion would suggest that membership is by definition universal. Take it from there, ask if you will compare that to Olympic high jump elites, etc…
Haven’t you heard, there is a problem with the IQ question. People with high IQ’s are often the biggest of idiots, because they never study subjects where such measures have little meaning, like most of the humanities. It is my observation that people that I would venture are ‘high IQ’ and are dominant in promoting Darwinism are simply incapable of seeing the problems. Nor is there even a trace of awareness that there is a problem. The obvious reason for this must be that high IQ is really a measure of a relatively narrow set problem solving skills tested in academic set situations under extreme specialization. The educational system is filtering these people into high-reward Skinner boxes with booby prizes, as it subjects them to a very intensive kind of social conditioning. To be less polite, the price of admission to this technocratic elite is no doubt high IQ and a crippled intelligence.
11.16.06
Old Testament, Axial Age, and evolution
The problem with Intelligent Design.
The problem here can be seen by taking the same approach to the Old Testament. As we examine the eonic effect (Axial Age) we see that ‘historical evolution’ can’t be exempted from evolutionary dilemmas. But there we discover a non-random process that is neither Darwinian nor designed.
Why are there Orthodox Jews such as myself who are opposed to Intelligent Design? Isn’t it fundamental to Judaism that God – who is taken to be highly intelligent – designed the universe? How can we subscribe to the random, blind, meaningless universe of Darwinian evolution?
In order to understand the answers to these questions, it is necessary to clarify what evolution and Intelligent Design actually mean.
Evolution is simply a description of a biological process by which the complexities of the animal and plant kingdoms came about. It is no more necessarily godless than physics, which explains how the complexities of planets and their motion came about, or political history, which explains how the State of Israel came about.
To be sure, an atheist sees that these provide entirely satisfactory explanations that do not call for a Creator. But the religious person, on the other hand, looks at it differently. He looks at the majesty of the cosmos with its fortuitously arranged table of elements and realizes that the fundamental structure of the universe is uniquely suited for matter and life. He realizes that the unparalleled event of a people returning to its homeland after two millennia of exile and persecution reveals that, in a suitably deep and hidden way, God was pulling the strings.
Likewise, the religious evolutionist sees the tremendous diversity of the natural world and appreciates that, if there are laws of evolution that can produce such complexity, those laws must have been decreed by a lawmaker. The “randomness” of Darwinian evolution is no more antithetical to religion than the superficially chance events of the Book of Esther, which we ascribe to God’s salvation, or the randomness of a lottery, about which it states in Proverbs 16:33, “When the lot is cast in the lap, its entire verdict has been decided by God.”
Taking the eonic effect seriously
critics say they might begin to take ID seriously if ….
Several times over the years I’ve seen ID critics say they might begin to take ID seriously if supporters could show some prime number signatures in genomes (or other such stuff, mostly in response to Mike Gene’s perennial question: what would it take for you to take a serious look?).
But it is a big IF.
You might consider something different and better, the ‘coherence’ of the eonic effect, and, especialy, the remarkable facts of the ‘discrete freedom sequence’… cf. history-and-evolution.com
The coherence of the eonic effect, arrived at indirectly, leaves little doubt about its deep significance, although you have to work a bit to see it.
The point here is that ‘design evidence’ resembles claims of ‘penetrating the noumenal’ in the Kantian sense.
The study of the eonic effect provides ‘deductions’ that do not fall into that trap.
11.15.06
Designed for randomness?
Collins’ mixure of religion and science is unfortunately only proof that someone can do good research and still be confused. Colonizing the creationist world is a bit imperialistic.
Collins’ argument is still a design argument (tantamount to the ‘designed randomness’ of evolutionary algorithms and software).
Secular humanists and science supporters should look to Collins with envy and gratitude. He has accomplished what they could not. He has preached an evolutionary sermon to the fundamentalist community, and it is listening. Although humanists will discover that the Collins melody is often contradictory and inexplicable, they must admit it is the only music playing in creationist theaters. Humanists will realize that Collins has gone where no scientist has gone before, to colonize the creationist world with evolutionary science.
11.13.06
Darwin the Whig and his conservative coup
The IDM’s attempt to challenge Darwinian conservatism is a jolting reminder of the cockeyed politics lurking behind their movement. Condemning it to failure, one might note. Read the rest of this entry »
Orientalism and its discontents
Thirty years after Edward Said’s groundbreaking “Orientalism,” a British scholar responds..
Perhaps Said spoiled his case by implicitly inventing Occidentalism with an equal and opposite bias.
Here the study of the eonic effect can help: There is no inherent distinction between Orient and Occident. We speak of Western Civilization, but that is misleading and counterproductive. We can see that there is one Civilization emerging via a series of connected locations.
Further, after several generations of New Age movements, many people are so ‘orientalized’ that they have lost perspective on world history.
By Michael Dirda
Sunday, November 12, 2006; Page BW15DANGEROUS KNOWLEDGE
Orientalism and Its Discontents
By Robert IrwinNearly 30 years ago, the late Edward Said brought out his most famous book, Orientalism (1978). Till then, Orientalism had been regarded as simply the branch of European scholarship focusing on the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia. But Said argued that it was, in fact, a highly politicized concept, the umbrella term for a kind of intellectual — fostering racism, justifying Western interference in largely Muslim nations, and generally controlling how the West perceived the Middle East. It was, to use the now familiar academic catchphrase, a hegemonic discourse, reducing rich and vital cultures, peoples and religions to a set of patronizing stereotypes. As a scholarly discipline, Orientalism was rotten with bad faith or its students were the naive tools of a colonialist ideology.
11.11.06
Sufi hyenas in Londonistan
Article from–the Monthly Review. The current interjunction of Marxists, postmodernists, and the Moslem world is producing some odd things indeed. Given the hysteria of rightist Islamophobes as seen in the recent book, Londonistan ( a wretched text, which unfortunately had some good points), this interaction is not without interest, especially after a century plus of Feuerbachian cliches from the left. Read the rest of this entry »
Scifi sufis and Sirius aliens
The previous post referenced the Seti issue connecting that spontaneously with an earthbound ‘esoteric’ (a word to be banished from my vocab) sector. But this question is actually … Read the rest of this entry »