History, Evolution, and the Darwin Debate
From Dawkins site
Leaving the Faith
BigThink.com, Ayaan Hirsi Ali
See many more videos like this at:
http://bigthink.com
Leaving the Faith: Ayaan Hirsi Ali went from political Islam to apostasy. How has her attitude toward the religion changed?
http://www.bigthink.com/features/284
More videos by Ayaan:
http://www.bigthink.com/user/ayaan-hirsi-ali
Videos by Sam Harris:
http://www.bigthink.com/user/sam-harris
via Common Dreams
Friday 02.29.08
Headlines…
Veterans Break Silence on US War Crimes
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/02/29/7368/
Hucklebird revies The Design Matrix:
The following is my Amazon review of Mike Gene’s “The Design Matrix.” Enjoy!
Sincerely, Stephen
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The Middle Way
Is there a middle way between the design inference and natural causation? Between teleology and non-teleological evolution? Mike Gene’s “The Design Matrix” gives an affirmative answer to these questions.
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From David Sloan Wilson: Atheism as a Stealth Religion V: Ineffective, Silly, and Worse
Sacred texts such as the Bible say so many things that almost any position can be supported by selecting the right passages. So it is with scientific hypotheses. In Stealth III, I listed six plausible scientific hypotheses about the nature of religion. If we are allowed to pick and choose among them, we can support almost any position. If we regard religion as destructive, we can call it a delusion or like the flame that fatally attracts the moth. If we admire religion, we can call it a group-level adaptation that in its purest form promotes universal brotherhood.
The Evolution Of The Monkey Gene That Blocks AIDS
There is a gene in Asian monkeys that could have evolved as protection against lentiviruses such as HIV, according to an article written by researchers at Harvard Medical School that is published in the open-access journal PLoS Pathogens.
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How a ‘just so’ story turns into just ‘so?’– HIV and the failures of Intelligent Design
By SA Smith
http://www.talkreason.org/articles/just-so-story.cfm
Abigail Smith, the graduate student conducting research with HIV viruses who recently forced Michael Behe to grudgingly admit error in his book “Edge of Evolution” (to our knowledge it was the first ever occurrence of a leading advocate of intelligent design admitting an error) tells in this post the exciting story of a new development in virusology. This is a vivid example of the fertility of the genuine science being so much in contrast with the abject futility of intelligent design “theory.” It also is another devastating hit upon Behe’s erroneous position as evinced in his latest book so highly praised by the Discovery Institute’s pseudo-scientists.
published: Feb 27, 2008
A Neanderthal-eat-Neanderthal world may have spread a mad cow-like
disease that weakened and reduced populations of the large Eurasian
human, thereby contributing to its extinction
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/02/27/neanderthal-cannibalism.html
Comment on Weikart’s book.
The claimed connection between Darwin and the subsequent spread of Social Darwinism, thence all the way to Hitler is on one level obvious, on another a spurious assertion of causality. The case for the connection requires care, and Weikart tends to let his argument slip a little.
That said, we suffer from amnesia here, and any study of the late nineteenth century up to the First World War shows the way the strains of Social Darwinism in various guises produced a catastrophic effect on many thinkers, beginning with Nietzsche, who concealed the influence of Darwin.
comment from author of “Save Our Selves from Science Gone Wrongâ€, at self-evolved.com
Shaun Johnston said,
February 28, 2008 at 11:05 am · Edit
If Miller’s take on evolution becomes adopted, then what is one say about science’s previous refusal to admit there’s design in nature? “It’s because we’ve changed what “design†means� “We were mistaken about there being no design�
The timing is perfect. “Expelled…†looms, and science backpedals. “Ok, we’ll agree there’s design, now it’s OK to say so. See, we’re not suppressing anythingâ€
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Who could replace Dawkins? – February 28, 2008
The Official Richard Dawkins website tells us that the (in)famous evolutionary biologist / aetheist and campaigner for ‘reason in science’ will be retiring from his post at Oxford in September (having reached the Chair’s mandatory retirement age).
Cuba: Fidel Surpasses Darwin in Humanism
By Pastor Guzmán Castro
The humanism of Fidel Castro, obvious in a variety of forms during the last 50 years of Cuban, American and world history, are a total contrast to the social Darwinism sponsored by his ideological enemies in the United States and its fellow neo-liberals.
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Presenting ‘the scientific theory of’ evolution
February 28, 2008
Ironically, the Wedge strategy forced the issue on opposition to ID.
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Taxi to the Dark Side
by Amy Goodman
On the Sunday following Sept. 11, 2001, Vice President Dick Cheney told the truth. On NBC’s “Meet the Press,†he said regarding plans to pursue the perpetrators of that attack: “We have to work the dark side, if you will. We’re going to spend time in the shadows.†The grim, deadly consequences of his promise have, in the intervening six years, become the shame of our nation and have outraged millions around the world. President George Bush and Cheney, many argue, have overseen a massive global campaign of kidnapping, illegal detentions, harsh interrogations, torture and kangaroo courts where the accused face the death penalty, confronted by secret evidence obtained by torture, without legal representation.
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Published on Thursday, February 28, 2008 by CommonDreams.org
October 2002 Speech: Against Going to War With Iraq
by Barack Obama
October 2, 2002
Good afternoon. Let me begin by saying that although this has been billed as an anti-war rally, I stand before you as someone who is not opposed to war in all circumstances. The Civil War was one of the bloodiest in history, and yet it was only through the crucible of the sword, the sacrifice of multitudes, that we could begin to perfect this union, and drive the scourge of slavery from our soil. I don’t oppose all wars.
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Scientists have developed a new tool for tracking a person’s movements —
hair analysis. Researchers have discovered the link between drinking
water, which varies from one region to another, and human hair, which
acts as a geographic marker.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=19357324
Karl Ernst Ritter von Baer, Edler von Huthorn (1792-1876).
Myers’ account is smothering von Baer, damnation with (faint) praise.
The early embryologists had a hard time embracing Darwin because they saw that his theory wouldn’t work.
The tradition of embryologists dissenting in the underground includes the more recent Soren Lovtrup, and his
classic Read the rest of this entry »
Fossil Doesn’t Support Bat Evolution!
A picture questioning the validity of evolution.
Here we go again! Recently evolutionists have discovered a fossil of a bat which which they claim indicates that bats learned to fly before they developed the ability of echolocation (i.e. sonar ability).
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The Three Trillion Dollar War
By Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, The Times of London UK. Posted February 25, 2008.
The cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts have grown to staggering proportions.
Capitalism in an Apocalyptic Mood
By Walden Bello, Foreign Policy in Focus. Posted February 25, 2008.
Yes, global capitalism may be resilient. But it looks like its options are increasingly limited.
by Ha-Joon Chang
Independent.co.uk (July 23 2007)
I have a six-year-old son. His name is Jin-Gyu. He lives off me, yet he
is quite capable of making a living. After all, millions of children of
his age already have jobs in poor countries.
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_______________________________
UPDATE FROM THE
ELECTRONIC INTIFADA
http://electronicIntifada.net
_______________________________
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Zimmer excerpt from Descent of Man.
Is Darwin’s Descent of Man overrated? Even as he wrote this book, his codiscoverer Alfred Wallace had already put the pretensions of Darwinism on human emergence in their place. If Darwin’s book was a turning point it ought to be in the history of scientism, leaving behind the naive hope in a simplistic explanation of man fulfilling the ambitions and pretensions of reductionists. Read the rest of this entry »
SK creates a comment thread, good:re: mysticism…. We can leapfrog with a series of topics here. As I said, the mystical path can prove most unpromising, while the historical survey of such can help to get the subject grounded. You express disinterest in Schopenhauer, but he at least points to the sudden perception of spiritual psychology done right, that is free from all the jargon and clicheed misunderstood profundity that leaves people with their head tied in knots. Read the rest of this entry »
Evolution: What The Fossils Say And Why it Matters.
Fossils are crucial, I agree, but haven’t they turned Darwinism into a theory fossil? As far as the evolution of man is concerned, the list of fossils does not constitute a theory of evolution. And the thinness of the record tells us very little about how evolution really happened. Read the rest of this entry »
Debunking Christopher Hitchens
By Kaveh L. Afrasiabi
In a sheer exercise of futility that makes a mockery of his penchant for (George) Orwellian critique of power and domination, Christopher Hitchens, a darling of mainstream American media, has penned a letter to President George W. Bush in the Wall Street Journal on the subject of Iran that purports to provide a novel solution to the puzzling question of how the US should deal with Iran.
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Science meets belief as couple put evolution in a sacred context
Some say you can tell a lot about people from the cars they drive. The Rev. Michael Dowd drives a camper van with drawings of two fish, one labeled “Jesus†and the other “Darwin,†who are kissing each other with red hearts above them.
For nearly six years, Dowd, a former United Church of Christ minister, and his wife, science writer Connie Barlow, have traveled the country preaching the gospel of evolution with evangelistic zeal.It’s time to declare an end to the war between science and faith, he argues. He says the facts are indisputable: Earth and its inhabitants evolved over billions of years. But that’s OK, he adds, because God, or whatever name you want to give to a higher power, was and is still involved.
Brown professor says beliefs in Darwin, God can co-exist
Kenneth R. Miller has debated William F. Buckley Jr., testified as an expert witness in federal court and traded one-liners with Stephen Colbert. Just be careful about getting him started on evolution.
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Protein ‘Shocks’ Evolution Into Action
ScienceDaily (Feb. 23, 2008) — Heat shock protein 90 (HSP90) has a greater impact on the appearance of new traits than previously expected, according to two articles published on February 26 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) by researchers in Whitehead Member Susan Lindquist’s lab and their colleagues in Christine Queitsch’s lab at Harvard University’s FAS Center for Systems Biology.
Wired Magazine Makes Biological Design Inference
We are often told by Darwinists that design cannot be detected in biology. But an article entitled “Wired Science Reveals Secret Codes in Craig Venter’s Artificial Genome” reports that “Wired Science has ferreted out the secret amino acid messages contained in ‘watermarks’ that were embedded in the world’s first manmade bacterial genome, announced last week by the J. Craig Venter Institute.” In biochemical jargon, each amino acid is ascribed a letter.