05.31.07
Popular posts
This comment on Gurdjieff beat out Marilyn Robinson’s essay (super popular for five months) here for this month in hits.
Strange! The underground interest in Gurdjieff is notable. I will try and pursue this further, perhaps.
Does Physicalism Entail Panpsychism?
Consciousness and Its Place in Nature
Does Physicalism Entail Panpsychism?
by Galen Strawson et al.
Imprint Academic, 2006
Review by Ed Brandon on May 22nd 2007
Volume: 11, Number: 21
Read the rest of this entry »
Onion piece
I Believe In Evolution, Except For The Whole Triassic Period
by The Onion, Stephen Jossler
Reposted from: Dawkins site
http://www.theonion.com/content/opinion/i_believe_in_evolution_except
Mr. Dawkins, someone else has to repair your damage
From Dawkins site we get the bestseller news.
THIS WEEK: The God Delusion is #1 on the Sunday Times non-fiction paperback bestseller list, and Christopher Hitchens’ God is Not Great is #1 in the New York Times Bestseller list!
Writing a bestseller, as Hitchens and Dawkins show clearly, requires a vulgar set of compromises with truth, integrity, and the basic dignity of readers who don’t realize the fraud going on in Darwinian thinking.
Don’t worry, their game with sink in the end.
What was the Enlightenment?
Evangelical Theologian Counters ‘Militant Atheists’
Does anybody ever study the Enlightenment? Most of the philosophes were not atheists. This rant is almost as bad as that of the New Atheists
Sen Brownback on evolution
What I Think About Evolution
By SAM BROWNBACK
Published: May 31, 2007
Washington
05.30.07
Comment: Dawkins gets all the airtime
Comment on Dawkins media access.
You are absolutely right, it is completely unfair. It is propaganda in action.
To nemo!
I am amazed, a poem to nemo!
http://emilysaintaubertis.blogspot.com/2007/05/talking-about-allen-ginsberg-
after.html
Hitchens, what if Dawkins is a fraud?
HItchens, sit down and read Dawkins’ Climbing Mt. Improbable, with its argument for incremental evolution? Do you buy it? You are supposed to be our smart public intellectual, what if you bit on the hook of a deception?
The whole ball game depends on this argument. And yet, looked at objectively, it is completely implausible.
It sells books, and made Dawkins’ game, big bucks, as a wishfulfilment for young kids entering science, a juicy market, but does it work as real science? The computer program argument is pure crap, as pointed out by many critics. So that’s a red flag warning. And in fact, over and over and over critics (none of them in academia or sci/orgs, you don’t get hired to think about such things) have warned this argument of Dawkins is weak to the point of failure.
You are smart, Hitchens, take a look, and tell us what you think. Maybe you can take a lie detector test so we can be sure your motives aren’t mixed up in the wishfulfilment market on natural selection.
How about it? Loudmouthing in the big media, without doing your homework, is getting tiresome.
The whole game is out of control, no? Bad science plus intimidated/brainwashed scientists vs Big Bucks. Big bucks has won out.
Waiting on your expert judgment. Depending on what you conclude you should give back the money.
It reminds me of the crystallization of Christianity: noone could stop the formation of mass belief, and the racket of its exploiters.
Trashing altruism with neuroscience
If It Feels Good to Be Good, It Might Be Only Natural
by Shankar Vedantam, Washington Post
Reposted from: Dawkins site
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/27/AR2007052701056.html
The closer scientists get, the farther off the mark they get. Altruism is the especial nemesis of science, why?, so this kind of research is determined to trash it.
The antidote
…The antidote to bad religion is good religion….
It is possible to argue, beyond Harris/Dawkins et al., that the religions as we know them have no capacity to provide ‘good religion’.
The essential stupidity of Darwinists
Christopher Hitchens on the Essential Stupidity of Religion
“Many people have been motivated to do grand, good things by faith, but why is that necessary?”
By DWAYNE BOOTH
Tuesday, May 29, 2007 - 6:00 pm
The issue is not religion but the way in which people give themselves something ‘essentially stupid’ to believe in, religion, or Darwinian pseudo-science.
Read the rest of this entry »
Evolution of animal personalities
Public release date: 30-May-2007
[ Print Article | E-mail Article | Close Window ]
Contact: Ginger Richardson
grr@santafe.edu
Santa Fe Institute
Evolution of animal personalities
Scientists provide an explanation
Darwin the eugenicist
Where did this modern “science” of eugenics come from? In Descent of Man, Darwin himself applied his theory of natural selection to the breeding of human beings:
…the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.
Eugenicists set out to realize Darwin’s dream — to take “random” evolution in hand, and to breed, selectively, from our “best stock.” In the first half of the 20th cenury, sixty thousand Americans who were judged to be of inferior stock were involuntarily sterilized. Recently, Darwinists have scrambled to distance themselves from the obvious connection between Darwinism and eugenics. But the historical record is clear. The founders and scientific leaders of the eugenics movement—Darwin himself (in Descent of Man), his cousin Francis Galton (who coined the word ‘eugenics’) and his admirer Herbert Spencer (who coined the term ’survival of the fittest’), and Darwin’s acolytes Karl Pearson, Ernst Haeckel, R.A. Fisher, Charles Davenport, and Harry Laughlin— were all fervent Darwinists.
Darwinists in denial
When I read about eugenics, I can’t help but wonder why “Darwinism” gets the blame. Natural selection (note the word natural) has nothing to do with selective breeding! I think Egnor is confused. This is Mendelianism at work!
Darwinists can’t escape their Social Darwinist origins, and the eugenic confusions that arose at the same time.
The problem persists because natural selection/selective breeding are not the total or real process of evolution, but if you think they are you put a premium on the manipulation of genetics.
More on Bloom/Weisberg nonsense
“Promiscuous Teleology” — Is This Why So Many Reject Evolution?. Read the rest of this entry »
05.29.07
Dawkins get imperialistic
Dawkins’ Christmas card list
by James Randerson, Guardian
Reposted from: Dawkins (selection)
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/james_randerson/2007/05/dawkins_christmas_card_list.html
Who is Dawkins referrring to, leftist relativists? They will have to speak for themselves.
To me, the correct ‘leftist’ critique of evolutionism/Darwinism, if not science, is that it has allowed an ideology of classical liberalism to enter and sow tares in the biological sciences.
Further, the issue is not relativism, but the presumption that science can (imperialistically) take over all knowledge. The fact is that it can’t even take over evolution, because evolution transcends physicalist forms of explanation.
But most of all the issue is failure to follow the right procedures of science, in the Darwinian speculative mode passed off as science.
Hitchens, you’ve got a problem: dirty money
Anyone who 1) supports science and 2) is tired of religious confusion (atheist, perhaps, or not) has to be worried that the stage act of Dawkins, Hitchens, et al. (worth a lot of money) is standard Darwinian/Talk.origins/howler monkey loudmouthing with the volume turned up: the style to hide the ‘problem’. At that decibel level all thought ceases and what we see is bad science mixed with wretchedly bad analysis of religion given media Miracle-Gro because powerful interests want to try a new way to brainwash their market sector. It is effective, therefore a temptation, it could go on forever….maybe. Maybe not. Sooner or later people are going to see they have been had.
Hitchens, you’ve got a problem: at the end of this comedy routine you are going to find that Dawkins on evolution is a fraud, that science let this go on and on, and that the religionists will end up stronger because they were able to blow the whistle on Darwin’s theory (the goof up themselves on ID), where the academic system produced young scientists with their thinking processes retarded by Darwinian dogma.
I suspect the whole thing is just cynical: scientists sense that once you have a paradigm in place it is easy to keep it in motion: steady decibel propaganda.
Great work, guys.
That’s the criminal thing, Hitchens: in the name of science, destroying the science for all these kids raised on Einstein.
Maybe give the money back, Hitchens, dirty money, no?
I don’t consider myself a theist, but after a year of these New Atheists, one has to bail out into some other category.
More Hitchens
Christopher Hitchens at Politics and Prose
Politics and Prose Bookstore
Reposted from: Dawkins site
http://fora.tv/fora/showthread.php?t=1055
Host: Politics and Prose Bookstore
Location: Washington, DC
Date: May 10, 2007
Running Time: 54:34
Read the rest of this entry »
Alliance with religion?
Scientists divided over alliance with religion
by Alok Jha, Guardian
Reposted from: Dawkins site
http://books.guardian.co.uk/hay2007/story/0,,2089947,00.html
· Rees sees main faiths as help in extremism fight
· Dawkins warns against ‘buying into fiction’
Alok Jha, science correspondent
Tuesday May 29, 2007
The Guardian
Read the rest of this entry »