01.29.08
Confused by Nietzsche
A not very good article on Atheism and Violence quotes Nietzsche. It is a seeming ‘clever trick’ to cite Nietzsche against the current New Atheists, but the attempted put-down doesn’t really work.
Nietzsche’s views show the sudden influence of Darwinism/positivism, as much as Nietzsche would attempt to deny it.
Much of his rhetoric is based on a series of beliefs that don’t quite jel: to say that life, nature and history are ‘not moral’ misses the point. Morality emerges in history/evolution in concert with freedom, an evolutionary process that Darwinism simply cannot analyze properly. So Nietzsche is wrong here. And the religionists have no monopoly on such questions. Read the rest of this entry »
From Schopenhauer to Freud
Review of: Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis
By THEODORE DALRYMPLE
January 16, 2008
What, if anything, did Sigmund Freud actually discover? What concrete human knowledge would be lacking if he, or someone very like him, had never lived?
It is worth backtracking via Nietzsche to Schopenhauer, looking at the context of Freud’s generation, conveniently forgotten by those who still buy into his theories.
Schopenhauer’s ‘discovery’ of the unconscious did the job right, and remains still the real mccoy.
Population growth
SciftP
Population growth is a threat. But it pales against the greed of the rich
It’s easy to blame the poor for growing pressure on the world’s resources. But still the wealthy west takes the lion’s share
Read the rest of this entry »
Big History, but check out the eonic effect first
A grand lesson in humility
Brown weaves a compelling narrative about civilization, showing us where we really fit in the true scheme of things
Jan 20, 2008 04:30 AM
Hans Werner
Big History:
From the Big Bang to the Present
by Cynthia Stokes Brown
New Press,
288 pages, $32.50
Read the rest of this entry »
Tea and tobacco
Painting the World
How a hunger for tea and tobacco created global trade.
By Michael Dirda
VERMEER’S HAT
The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World
By Timothy Brook
Bloomsbury. 272 pp. $27.95
Read the rest of this entry »
Potatos
Using DNA, scientists hunt for the roots of the modern potato
Jan. 28, 2008
by Nicole Miller
More than 99 percent of all modern potato varieties planted today are the direct descendents of varieties that once grew in the lowlands of south-central Chile. How Chilean germplasm came to dominate the modern potato-which spread worldwide from Europe-has been the subject of a long, contentious debate among scientists.
Open letter to Venter
An Open Letter to the J. Craig Venter Institute
By Brandon Keim
Dear Dr. Venter,
Read the rest of this entry »
New essay from talk.reason
Casey Luskin abuses what little credibility he has
By Timothy Sandefur
http://www.talkreason.org/articles/?http://sandefur.typepad.com/freespace/2008/01/casey-luskin-ab.html
Timothy Sandefur points to another ridiculous escapade by Casey Luskin, a lawyer employed by the Discovery Institute. (Off-site link.)
published: Jan 29, 2008
Suharto
ZNet Commentary
Suharto, The Model Killer, And His Friends In High Places January 28,
2008
By John Pilger
Making of a Tropical Disease
How colonialism & imperialism spread malaria
WW book review, part 1
Read the rest of this entry »
Wikipedia, Ubuntu founders back ‘open education’
Wikipedia, Ubuntu founders back ‘open education’
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39292324,00.htm?r=4
Andrew Donoghue ZDNet.co.uk
Read the rest of this entry »
Has global warming really stopped?
From R-G
Mark Lynas responds to a controversial article on newstatesman.com
which argued global warming has stopped
Read the rest of this entry »
01.28.08
Rethinking the Meat Guzzler
SciftP
Rethinking the Meat Guzzler
By Mark Bittman
Sunday 27 January 2008
A sea change in the consumption of a resource that Americans take for granted may be in store – something cheap, plentiful, widely enjoyed and a part of daily life. And it isn’t oil.
It’s meat.
Read the rest of this entry »
The eonic effect and the myth of spontaneous order
Michael Shermer on The Market As An Evolutionary Process
Michael Shermer of Scientific American fame has a new book out (which will be arriving in the mail soon, I hope) about evolution and economics, called The Mind of The Market: Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans, And Other Tales from Evolutionary Economics. His theme is how the market, like evolution, is a process of spontaneous order—a “self-organized emergent order.â€
Shermer is peddling an undiluted ideology, much of his thinking derivative from Hayek and Mises. The question of ‘spontaneous order’ (Hayek) is a Darwinian spinoff, and as a thesis it is clearly false. There is nothing spontaneous about the emergence of order in world history and the development of civilization.
A careful look at the eonic effect shows a complex directionality in the developmental sequence of human historical culture.
But the Darwin fetish is almost beyond correction in these market fanatics, with their mythology of Darwinism as backup.
Brain circuits
Harvard scientists have embarked upon an ambitious program to create a
circuit diagram of the human brain, with the help of new machines that
automatically turn brain tissue into high-resolution neural maps.
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/01/connectomics
01.27.08
The evolution of religion
at The Evolution of Religion: Studies, Theories, and Critiques, edited by Joseph Bulbulia et al.
This volume at least asks a good set of questions about the adaptationist scenarios attempting to fix religion into the Darwin paradigm. But none of it will work, as a number of authors suspect. I can think of no approach more cockeyed and wrong-headed than the selectionist obsession applied to religion. It just didn’t work that way.
Even a cursory glance at the phenomenon of the Axial Age suggests just how far off Darwinists are in their analyses, which are really ostrich behavior concealed behind ‘reseach’ gestures.
It is painful to observe this phenomenon of an entire research tradition frozen in a series of errors, totally incapable of even looking at the real data of the history of religion.
A marxism class??? Do Marxists ever study their history?
Louis Proyect at The Unrepentant Marxist has an Introduction to Marxism class. Is there any way to rescue Marx from his history?
The current Marxist left has a severe credibility problem. How can anyone familiar with the history of the Russian revolution still speak of ‘straight’ Leninism? It is not reactionary to say so. Read the rest of this entry »
New Joomla
I have just downloaded and installed the New Joomla 1.5 (Stable) CMS system, interesting.
From Panspermia
The latest morphological studies with nearly exhaustive sampling of Cretaceous fossils… have all shown significant gaps in the ‘younger’ fossil record compared to the much ‘older’ molecular dating of the marsupial and placental lineages, a phenomenon with which molecular evolutionists also agree. The Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History makes this observation in a major review article incorporating the latest data, in Nature. (The review is part of a series commemorating Carl Linnaeus, “the Father of Taxonomy.”) Nowadays, almost no one disputes the evidence for genetic programs that are significantly older than they should be — a jarring anomaly for darwinism.
Common dreams
Common dreams
Sunday 01.27.08
Headlines…
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Calling the kettle black
In Texas, Here Comes the Rain Again
I don’t much care for the ID thesis, but comparisons to Nazis are a bit much. This from the preeminent (unwitting) crypto-defenders of Social Darwinism.
Meanwhile, the trumpet for science omits the fact that Darwinism is bad science, and that students raised in the Darwinian legacy have lost a major set of marbles, leaving them with a crippled capacity to think. Read the rest of this entry »
Billary Road to Republican Victory
Times via Common Dreams
The Billary Road to Republican Victory
by Frank Rich
In the wake of George W. Bush, even a miracle might not be enough for the Republicans to hold on to the White House in 2008. But what about two miracles? The new year’s twin resurrections of Bill Clinton and John McCain, should they not evaporate, at last give the G.O.P. a highly plausible route to victory.
Read the rest of this entry »
Social Darwinist lifestyles
Oliver James: Despite ourselves, we are all Gordon Gekkos now
Selfishness and greed are thriving – and are more culturally accepted than we may like to admit
Whatever the French is for “gutted”, it’s safe to assume that is how junior broker Jérôme Kerviel, 31, felt last week after having gambled and lost £3.6bn on European stocks rising. The sum was astonishing but so was the premise – in a world dominated by feral herd tendencies, to have supposed those stocks would go up at that moment was bizarrely aberrant.