11.30.07
Posted in links at 8:01 pm by nemo
One of our closest ancestors had more in common with gorillas than
previously thought, with males of the species taking far longer to
reach maturity than females, scientists said on Thursday.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20071129/sc_nm/humans_gorillas_dc
Will the secular left soon attack the religious right for being
pro-science?
http://www.opinionjournal.com/federation/feature/?id=110010915
Remember biology class where you learned that children inherit one
copy of a gene from mom and a second from dad? There’s a twist: Some
of those genes arrive switched off, so there is no backup if the other
copy goes bad, making you more vulnerable to disorders from obesity to
cancer.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071130/ap_on_sc/silenced_genes;_ylt=AjhQhhAAcEoo7xMSB3MnGI1vieAA
Genetic tests to assess disease risk are proliferating but many are a
waste of money and tell people little more than they would know from
studying family history, medical experts said on Friday.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20071130/hl_nm/genes_testing_dc;_ylt=Ag5BiFgTYrB1ZYT.USF9obIQ.3QA
Some people are more prone to infection than others. One answer could
be to dose them with the molecules that their immune systems cannot make
http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10205154
New evidence our canine friends are able to form abstract concepts.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2007/11/28/scidogs128.xml
An underwater archaeologist has found what may be an etching of a
mastodon at the bottom of Grand Traverse Bay in Lake Michigan. Members
of a local tribe believe that there is a spear in the mastodon, which
would be hard evidence that humans hunted the prehistoric
elephant-like animals. Tom Kramer of Interlochen Public Radio reports.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16655750
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Posted in Science & Religion at 4:50 pm by nemo
Practical atheism
Denials of God can be so quiet that they are easy to miss | Joel Belz
Actually theists in the great religions have made it impossible to reference divinity, sad.
Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in Evolution at 4:40 pm by nemo
Daniel Dennett’s Darwinian Fundamentalism
Talking point for D’Souza: since Gould is so brilliant, why not bring in his punk eek as a political ‘dynamic’.
Or is D’Souza too ‘conservative’ to find the evolutionary angle in the sans-culottes? You are not a conservative, are you, Mr. D’Souza?
Meanwhile Gould’s acquaintance with the evidence wasn’t enough to dislodge him from the selectionist myth.
In preparation for my debate with Daniel Dennett on Friday evening, I went back and read the late Stephen Jay Gould’s review-essay on Dennett in the June 12, 1997 New York Review of Books. Unlike Dennett, who is a philosopher, Gould was one of the world’s leading authorities on evolution. One can feel safe in saying that he knew a lot more about the biological evidence for Darwinism than Dennett.
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11.29.07
Posted in In the News at 10:00 pm by nemo
I can’t vouch for this interpretation of Darfur, but…From Alternet
If stopping genocide in Africa really was on the agenda, why the focus on Sudan with 200,000 to 400,000 dead rather than Congo with five million dead?
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Posted in Science, Critique of Evolutionary Economy at 9:05 pm by nemo
Selections: The Squandering of America.
Beside The Shock Doctrine, Robert Kuttner’s The Squandering of America was a surprise ‘good read’ on the subject of economics. It is so easy to be subtly manipulated by economic jargon. Behind that lies the immense swindle of the past generation, all of it couched in hi-tech jargon. Kuttner has been good at exposing economic theory for what it too often is.
In light of the Davies’ OpEd debate in the blogosphere, it is worth asking if all these indignant scientitsts protesting the imputation of faith to the basic framework of science could ever manage to help the public out with anything like an objective view of the subject of economics. The public needs help when a determined gang exploits mathematical abstraction and the mystique of science for social exploitation.
And yet all we have is silence here from the brightest and best in science.
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Posted in 1848+ at 5:12 pm by nemo
Klein: In war on terror, are you next?
“We think we don’t fit the profile,” she said. “If we feel safe, we are banking on the racism of our government.”
Klein, author of current New York Times bestseller “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,” visited the Silver Center last night to participate in the panel “Torture and Democracy,” along with Lisa Hajjar, chair of the law and society program at the University of California at Santa Barbara and author of “Courting Conflict: The Israeli Military Court System in the West Bank and Gaza.”
“We’re here to talk about the relationship between torture and democracy,” Klein said. “The thesis of the book is that the central claim of our time that the free market and democracy go hand in hand is a fairy tale.”
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Posted in Science & Religion at 5:03 pm by nemo
James comment brings a Buddhist perspective to Davies OpEd debate
James said,
November 29, 2007 at 3:40 pm · Edit
Why not take a pragmatic Buddhist approach instead of worrying about ontological questions:
Read the rest of this entry »
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