Christopher Hitchens and Al Sharpton
Hardball with Chris Matthews
From Dawkins site
Clips:
#1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ml66q1SOLdY
#2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ychvyXQoqA
#3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJaLRSHGVCs
#4: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muPaTut9oXc
#5: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3ZddmYtfbM
OneGoodMove has quicktime versions:
http://onegoodmove.org/1gm/1gmarchive/2007/06/hitchens_sharpt.html
Eighteen months after the “monkey trial” in Dover, Pennsylvania,
a bumper crop of books puts the battle in perspective and asks, What’s next?
Bumper crop indeed. Darwinists are quite worried! There must have been a set of powows between Darwin writers: get out the drum beat.
But have they shot their bolt?
A perfect time for Darwin critics to produce another good critique of Darwin’s theory, no ID please.
That might remind frantic Darwinists that ‘one long arugment’ won’t stop just because of a bumper crop of books.
By Richard Milner
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The failed ideologies of the last century have come to an end. But a new one has risen to take their place. It is the ideology of Development—and it promises a solution to all the world’s ills. But like Communism, Fascism, and the others before it, Developmentalism is a dangerous and deadly failure.
Really? Incredible statement. What about neo-liberal ideology?
Prayer
A Neurological Inquiry
Still, many credulously believe that some people (especially so-called “psychics”) can read minds and that thoughts can be transmitted from one person to another by mental telepathy or “extrasensory perception” (ESP). Perhaps this belief has been fostered by the seemingly substantive and energetic presence of our thoughts. But numerous experiments during some 150 years of research have not validated ESP and have left a wake of spurious statistical analyses (Lilienfeld 1999; Paulos 1990).
It is not simply credulity to have beliefs about telepathy, and the methodology on ESP is so beside the point as to have established nothing.
The types of experiments created simply don’t create the context where telepathy is supposed to occur.
The question of prayer is complex (I am not a believer here), and takes in a host of circumstances. The hopeless confusion and decadence of prayer ought to be of concern to any student of religion, but the fact remains that the issue takes in so many different situations as to make generalization impossible.
Meanwhile, why is neurological examination (I have no objection to a ‘try and see’ experimental approach here, however) considered the answer? More of the God gene nonsense
It’s impossible to satisfy Rage Boy - and it’s stupid to try
It’s impossible to satisfy Rage Boy - and it’s stupid to try
If you visit http://www.snappedshot.com/archives/964-Professional-Protester,-Jiha di-style.html, you will be treated to some scenes from the strenuous life of a professional Muslim protester in the Kashmiri city of Srinagar. Over the last few years, there have been innumerable opportunities for him to demonstrate his piety and his pissed-offness. And the cameras have been there for him every time.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS, Freelance
Published: Saturday, June 30, 2007
Last month at a debate in Berkeley, Calif., Christopher Hitchens ranted for the better part of two hours with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges over the value of faith.
Shouting Hedges down and hurling profanities at audience members who chided him for his support for the Iraq war, the celebrated author reached his crescendo ahead of schedule and stalked off the stage.
Hitchens, 58, now has unleashed his mighty ego on a book tour plugging his latest opus, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.
He quietly confirmed that he has known religious people who exemplified their faith, like the Greek bishop in Albania whom he describes as “saintly.”
“I’ve asked myself, without religion would we be nicer?” he muses.
Pause 2-3-4.
Nah.
Master of creation?
A Nobel prize-winning scientist says he has discovered how human souls are made. It is an epic story of struggle and triumph in the womb - and it could end the worldwide rift over human-embryo experiments John Cornwell
I am amazed, solved the problem of the soul!
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Darwin Strikes Back (of molecules and men).
I would certainly grant that the ‘irreducible complexity’ has been abused for design arguments. But set aside the design conclusion and the issue is one that won’t go away.
To say that no evidence has been offered for IC is a bit absurd, has anyone on either side offered any evidence for anything. Read the rest of this entry »
We don’t have physics envy, but we still have to deal with physics snobbery.
Actually, Darwin’s theory of natural selection is so tenaciously defended because it is the only way that the sciences based on foundational physics can hope to comprehensively explain ‘everything’. And it is obvious that science, in fact, can’t explain everything, and is not an ultimate authority.
July 1, 2007
Inferior Design
By RICHARD DAWKINS
THE EDGE OF EVOLUTION
The Search for the Limits of Darwinism.
By Michael J. Behe.
Now why should the Times assign Richard Dawkins to review Behe’s new book? Did Dawkins get that kind of treament?
It is clear the Times wishes to avoid serious discussion of evolution, and with deadly serious intends to make sure Behe gets smeared. This review shows the typical Dawkins style: when you argument is empty, use the appearance of intelligent haughtiness to ridicule your opponent. Pile up the ad hominem, and sneer in every paragraph. The result will work fine on the Darwin consumer, and noone will quite realize propaganda when they see it. Dawkins talks a good game on science, but he has made a bundle over the years with his own brand of pseud0-science, and gets away with it because it serves the interests of the establishment. Read the rest of this entry »
The Darwin/New Atheist gang now wants to paint themselves as civil rights militants. I think the notion deserves a Bronx cheer. They have nothing but themselves to blame for their minority status, their world view being so unrealistic it cannot serve social needs, which default to the primitive substrate of out-dated religions. I don’t consider myself a theist, but I wouldn’t associate with this adolescent crew. They have made atheism an unacceptable intellectual thug’s game.
How is it that these ’science experts’ expect world culture to reformulate itself around the puerile garbage in books like those of Dennett, Dawkins, and Hitchens?
And behind the ‘minority’ status of the New Atheists lies the immense deception perpetrated in the name of science in the field of evolution. This has actually given fundamentalism its comeback. This technocratic domination side of Big Science now presents itself as a persecuted minority. Give me a break.
Given the power, as we saw with Tibet, entire religious cultures will be destroyed. And the veil of protest against violence from idiot idealists such as the ‘liberal Darwinists’ conceals the wish to dominate with one of the most potentially violent theories/ideologies ever proposed (with insufficient evidence): Darwin’s theory of natural selection.
Our Biotech Future
By Freeman Dyson
In the midst of all this biotechnology we have the persistence of nineteenth century Darwinism. Apparently intelligent physicists like Dyson are fooled by this. Should we be fooled by this?
Clearly, evolutionary theory is not science at all, but ideology, and the puzzle is how all these smart scientists could be fooled is solved.
Meanwhile, we can note, as pointed out last night, that Von Neuman was not fooled by Darwin, how about you, Mr. Dyson?
1.
It has become part of the accepted wisdom to say that the twentieth century was the century of physics and the twenty-first century will be the century of biology. Two facts about the coming century are agreed on by almost everyone. Biology is now bigger than physics, as measured by the size of budgets, by the size of the workforce, or by the output of major discoveries; and biology is likely to remain the biggest part of science through the twenty-first century. Biology is also more important than physics, as measured by its economic consequences, by its ethical implications, or by its effects on human welfare.These facts raise an interesting question. Will the domestication of high technology, which we have seen marching from triumph to triumph with the advent of personal computers and GPS receivers and digital cameras, soon be extended from physical technology to biotechnology? I believe that the answer to this question is yes. Here I am bold enough to make a definite prediction. I predict that the domestication of biotechnology will dominate our lives during the next fifty years at least as much as the domestication of computers has dominated our lives during the previous fifty years.
I see a close analogy between John von Neumann’s blinkered vision of computers as large centralized facilities and the public perception of genetic engineering today as an activity of large pharmaceutical and agribusiness corporations such as Monsanto. The public distrusts Monsanto because Monsanto likes to put genes for poisonous pesticides into food crops, just as we distrusted von Neumann because he liked to use his computer for designing hydrogen bombs secretly at midnight. It is likely that genetic engineering will remain unpopular and controversial so long as it remains a centralized activity in the hands of large corporations.
Observe, as pointed out many times on this blog, the blatant way the Darwin establishment is absorbing the ‘design’ challenge even as they denounce it.
We are told that Darwin was wrong, on the way to maintaining that he was right, and that evo-devo, highly organized and programmatic structures are now the answer, and the design people are stupid, wrong, etc….
I fault the design people for the way their excessive claims have spoiled the obvious point they were making.
Yoon’s article covers the remarkable discoveries supporting “evo-devo,” which is based on the idea that major turns in evolutionary history might have arisen from changes in developmental processes governed by a few regulatory genes. Rather than assuming that evolution of new forms requires the gradual accumulation of many small genetic mutations, evo-devo works on the thought that slight changes in the expression of a few regulatory genes could produce dramatic changes in form and even the emergence of new species. It has seemed to me for a long time that evo-devo is likely to answer many puzzles in evolutionary theory. In any case, this illustrates the remarkably rich research being done in evolutionary science today. By contrast, I am unaware of any comparable research being done by proponents of “intelligent design theory” or “scientific creationism.” The mere fact that neither ID nor Biblical creationism leads to any novel research to test alternatives to evolutionary science indicates the intellectual poverty of such positions.
We know how the establishment manipulates the public. Do we understand how scientists manipulate Darwin? Even the left, and probably Moore, is being fooled here.
It’s a little-studied chapter of Reagan’s career, but perhaps the most formative. As chronicled in Thomas Evans’s The Education of Ronald Reagan: The General Electric Years and the Untold Story of His Conversion to Conservatism, Reagan was employed by GE first as a spokesman and later as a kind of employer-to-employee ambassador. With management facing a restive labor force, an obscure PR guru named Lemuel Boulware hatched the idea of using the emerging techniques of public relations to turn factory-line workers against their own unions.
Modern brains have an ancient core
The marine ragworm Platynereis dumerilii uses similar hormones as secreted by the vertebrate brain.
Multifunctional neurons that sense the environment and release hormones are the evolutionary basis of our brains
By the way, as Behe points out, 10^20 is more than all the mammals that have ever lived (deep time is not the issue when it comes to evolution, but the number of individuals and generations), yet Darwinists would like us to believe that mutation and selection turned a primitive simian ancestor into Chopin, when this process hasn’t been demonstrated to have the power to produce a novel protein-protein interaction with 10^20 chances.
Cats, Humans Share Ancient Bond
THURSDAY, June 28 (HealthDay News) — Painstaking genetic research shows that the cat first became domesticated soon after humans began farming and building the first civilizations, somewhere in the ancient Near East.
And, in typical feline fashion, the decision to take up residence was theirs.“Cats weren’t domesticated on purpose, they just kind of invited themselves in,” said study lead author Carlos Driscoll, a doctoral fellow at Oxford University in the United Kingdom. He conducted the research while at the U.S. National Cancer Institute’s Laboratory of Genomic Diversity, in Frederick, Md.
Scientists Transplant Genome of Bacteria
By NICHOLAS WADE
Published: June 29, 2007
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New atheists, ancient argument
An incompletely evolved human is quite visible in the propensity to metaphysical views, on either side of the issues of divinity, soul, free will.
Hitchens blames the persistence of religion on what he regards as the fact that human beings belong to an incompletely evolved species. But both Hitchens and Dawkins find plenty of other villains to blame as well. They condemn everyone from religious moderates, who lend a cloak of respectability to religious fundamentalists, to left-wing “post-modernists,” who undercut the “modernist” assumptions essential to the religious views of the new atheists.
Yes, the universe looks like a fix. But that doesn’t mean that a god fixed it
We will never explain the cosmos by taking on faith either divinity or physical laws. True meaning is to be found within nature
Paul Davies
Tuesday June 26, 2007
The Guardian
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More Evidence of a Changing Paradigm
Why do we need to wait decades? The whole paradigm game is a rigged concept that allows scientists to play with their own metascience.
We need new outside referees to judge the state of the evidence. Darwinists are at no point trustworthy.
It is worth reading the embryologist Soren Lovtrup’s Darwinism: Refutation of A Myth. It has been decades since his book, now more decades again are required.
It has gone on long enough.
Today’s New York Times carries a story in its ’science’ section by Carol Kaesuk Yoon entitled From a Few Genes, Life’s Myriad Shapes.
It’s a story about Evo-Devo, with strong allusions to what we are familiar with around TT as Front-Loading. Some pertinent quotes from the article seem to speak obliquely to challenges Evo-Devo has presented to the standard Neo-Darwinian story line since it took off in the 1980s, a clear indication that it can take decades for new ideas and new evidence to rise to a level where the implications are marketed to a public universally taught the standard RM-NS pablum that still maintains its hegemony in public education by force of law…
Thus, I’m pleased to announce that ARN has just recently loaded 62 video clips available on YouTube. Feel free to check out these 62 wonderful ID clips.
Visit:
http://www.youtube.com/user/AccessResearchMy personal favorite is Privileged Planet
I also recommend, The Incorrigible Dr. Berlinski (part 1) [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGAAQfZ0AwE ]where Berlinski describes how the great scientist von Neumann laughed and hooted at Darwinian theory.
Lecture on Sex Ratio Theory and Sexual Selection
Richard Dawkins
Reposted from: Dawkins site
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8712792765758299597
Richard Dawkins gives an overview of sex ratio theory and sexual selection using examples found in the Galapagos. Q&A is mixed-in near the end.
This lecture was given on a recent trip to the Galapagos with the Center for Inquiry.
Your comment is no answer whatsoever. Someone perpetrates immense harm with a fascist gesture, and you pass it off. I still have nightmares about it, because it destroyed my trust in Buddhas. A wrenching shock. And my mistrust, at least, was prophetic.
On top of that, you pass off the psychosis at the core of the Rajneesh movement. The chief disciple and head of the ashram turns out to be a criminal and you say it happened many years ago, now things are better, with Rajneesh dead. Rajneesh said to drop the whole thing when he died, so your position is untenable.
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