How the Public Resolves Conflicts Between Faith and Science
On Subjects such as Evolution, Many Americans Are Aware of — but Reject — the Scientific Consensus
by David Masci, Senior Research Fellow, Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life
August 27, 200
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Free will and agency are not merely the creation of nerve endings in the human brain. So while neuroscience can tell us a lot, it does not hold the key to understanding human uniqueness.
‘Immortalists’ exposes Achilles’ heel of two famous figures
Here are two alternative subtitles for David Friedman’s fascinating new book, The Immortalists: “Geniuses Do the Creepiest Things.” Or “Brains Aren’t Everything.”
Friedman’s non-fiction account, in stores Tuesday, describes the long collaboration between American aviator Charles Lindbergh and French scientist Alexis Carrel, who won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1912. It examines the two men’s shared dream: to defeat death and pursue immortality.
Darwin’s Angel: An Angelic Response to the God Delusion
THIS BOOK IS A PIECE of sheer heaven. It kicks Richard Dawkins’s self-aggrandising polemic, The God Delusion, into touch with featherlight footwork and is deliciously wise, witty and intellectually sharp into the bargain.
John Cornwell’s mouthpiece is a likeable seraph, who follows the dictum of G. K. Chesterton that angels fly “because they take themselves lightly”. Cornwell clearly believes, as I do, that angels are not wispy, winged beings in ethereal nightgowns, but something far more subtle and profound: archetypal images that dramatise the invisible realities. As such, they can act as symbols for the formless elements of physics; but also for the creative imagination.
Hitchens in God is Not Great says ‘human species is, biologically, only partly rational’
Two extravagancies: to exclude reason, to admit only reason. Pascal
Religion man-made? Yes, but… It’s not that simple. If we look at the question of religion in the context of the eonic effect, we see its connection to historical evolution, with a macro component a that.
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Fruit fly parasite’s gene invasion raises questions over evolution
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Biologists find evidence supporting controversial genetic theory
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State Board will not back the teaching of intelligent design
Texans who believe that public school classrooms should teach science and not religion should be bolstered by the majority of the State Board of Education who, according to a survey taken by the Dallas Morning News, says they won’t back teaching of intelligent design to Texas schoolchildren.
Unmoved mover
In a nutshell, without the Aristotle
This, in a nutshell, is the insuperable problem with random mutation, and natural selection, so far as they are taken not as factors in an evolutionary development, but as the determinants of it. There is simply more to nature than that. You may grasp this by looking into the eyes of any animal (Redmond O’Hanlon advises against trying this with a gorilla), or at the lilies of the field, that neither toil nor spin. They are purposeful. They are not purposeless.
Time and again it is said that the “God thesis” is not proven, while Darwin’s thesis is supported by an immense accumulation of biological research. But read almost any current biology text, and you will find that after ritual obeisance to Darwin and Darwinism in prefatory remarks, the rest of the book hardly mentions them, and the author(s) will keep slipping into the irresistible vocabulary of design, while trying to communicate how an organism works. Res ipsa loquitur, as we say in Latin. (“The thing speaks for itself.”)
The Forgotten Holocaust
by Robert Fisk
August 30, 2007
The Independent Read the rest of this entry »
You’re on your own, Richard Dawkins
What does that Richard Dawkins really know about “the enemies of reason”? Has he met my friends? I sat watching his programme with two mates. One is a professor but still has at least ten extrasensory perceptions a day; the other is Scandinavian and was brought up by theosophists. Say no more.
A Suffering Servant
Must be testing the waters for the atheist market
For the first time in more than 30 years, Mother Teresa graces the cover of Time magazine. But unlike the 1975 cover that hailed her as a living saint, this week’s cover titillatingly trumpets, “The Secret Life of Mother Teresa.” The subtitle declares, “Newly published letters reveal a beloved icon’s 50-year crisis of faith.” NBC led the TV pack with serious questions about her faith.
Microorganisms such as bacteria enjoy swapping genes, and the trades have made a big difference in how they’ve evolved. Now new research suggests that bacteria are also easygoing about passing genes on to more complex organisms. The findings have researchers rethinking the prevalence of interspecies gene transfer and its role in evolution; they may also change the way geneticists filter out bacterial “contamination” when they sequence a new genome.
Divinity, or ‘nature’ as scientists call the foreign hand, zaps genes in all living beings to create mutants. This is the basis of evolution and the ones that are unpalatable are what we call freaks. Now scientists are zapping genetic material in plants so that the vegetables that the plants will eventually become, follow the management grid — maximised on utility, optimised on resources. It’s called radiation breeding and has been around for ages.
From Spoof: Insects Contribute DNA to Human Evolution
Don’t eat me - I’m a superior being! Murphy, North Carolina (IP) - University of Murphy’s Law scientists reported an astounding discovery to the rest of the world this morning. They claim that insects contribute DNA to human evolution via saliva donations. The “donations” take place when cockroaches nibble on a piece of food left out on the counter over night and thus leave a small deposit of their own saliva and other body fluids on the food.
Another method is when roaches crawl in and out of a person’s mouth while they sleep with their mouth open. This is said to occur to everyone at least 88 times during their life times. We all will accidentally swallow a number of flies and gnats during our life times.
Wolbachia is a prolific parasite, having carved out a niche for itself in some 70 percent of all invertebrate animals. But it’s doing more than living in their cells: it’s changing their very DNA in a way that could affect how scientists study genetics and evolution across the animal kingdom.
While analyzing genetic material taken from fruitflies, scientists at the University of Rochester and the J. Craig Venter Institute noticed that quite a few Wolbachia genes awere mixed in.
Evolution in Texas — On the Death Penalty
The Nation — There are many Americans who do not believe in evolution. And it is probably fair to say that a disproportionate number of them reside in Texas.
But it is from Texas that we gain confirmation of the absolute certainty that human evolution is a reality.When George Bush was governor of Texas in the 1990s, he approved executions with impunity, sending to death those who might have been innocent and those who might have been guilty, those who had repented and those who had not, those who had adequate representation and those whose lawyers slept through the trials, those who had the mental capacity to understand their crimes, those whose mental state would have barred even a trial in more civilized jurisdictions.
Study: Evolution may have increased speed
REHOVOT, Israel, Aug. 30 (UPI) — A complex Israeli study has determined the pace of evolution increases when evolutionary goals are continuously changed.
Rural School Board Candidate Hasn’t Been Forthcoming About His “Intelligent Design” Agenda
By Nina Shapiro
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What if we DID find irreducibly complex biological features?. Read the rest of this entry »
From Rad Green
The Predicted Financial Storm Has Arrived August 29, 2007
By Gabriel Kolko
James Sherwood on links.
Thanks for pointing out the link, but this blog is proceeding nicely after its own fashion, and I have many clues to the fact that it is having an effect on discussion, so the attempts to enforce the ‘reign of silence’ are not really working. Getting somewhere requires the middle way of exposing two opposing propaganda systems operating almost as if in tandem. That makes it doubly difficult to engage in real debate or critique, since everything is just posturing.
I find it hard to believe that a smart fellow like Hitchens doesn’t harbor secret doubts about Darwinism. After a spell of enthusiastic conversion it suddenly dawns on people that Dawkins is either deluded or a con man, but one able to pied piper adolescent minds. As years go by…
Hasn’t disillusion reached Hitchens yet?
Christopher Hitchens and Bill Donohue on Mother Teresa
Hardball with Chris MatthewsReposted from:Dawkins site
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tz8GTs1MISY