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/
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Hucklebird revies The Design Matrix:
The following is my Amazon review of Mike Gene’s “The Design Matrix.” Enjoy!
Sincerely, Stephen
—————–
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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The Language of God: Francis Collins Speaks at Stanford
On Tuesday February 5, students and staff packed Memorial Auditorium to hear Dr. Francis Collins, the renowned head of the Human Genome Project and author of The Language of God, discuss his views on science, faith, and the ease with which the two can be reconciled.
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Re-examining the Darwin-Hitler Link
Editor’s Note: This special post comes to us courtesy of CSC Fellow Dr. Richard Weikart, author of From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany.
In the heated struggle over the teaching of evolution in the state of Florida, some have suggested that Darwinism is dangerous. They claim it has produced odious ideologies, most prominently, Nazism. Michael Ruse has castigated those trying to connect Darwinism and Nazism in his op-ed piece for the Tallahassee Democrat, “Darwin and Hitler: A Not-Very-Intelligent Link” (February 6). Read the rest of this entry »
Podcast series on evolution-intelligent design controversy
Submitted by greenmue on Fri, 2008-02-29 07:40. Topic: bioscience and medicine education and outreach
The Missing Link - a monthly podcast on the history of science, medicine and technology - has just launched a three-episode series on the fascinating history behind the evolution-intelligent design controversy.
Episode 8, just posted at http://missinglinkpodcast.com, begins the series with an investigation into how the nature of scientific method has changed over the centuries. Discover at just what point science invented rules that creationism could not follow.
Future episodes will consider topics like Jewish and Catholic responses to the evolution-ID controversy, why the creationism movement waned in the immediate postwar period in America, and how the very word “evolution” might be inadvertently fueling the controversy.
Find more information at http://missinglinkpodcast.com
SciftP
February 29, 2008
The Origins of the Cholesterol Con, Part II
Last week, I wrote about the “cholesterol con,” the widespread belief that “bad Cholesterol” (LDL cholesterol) is a major factor driving heart disease, and that cholesterol-lowering drugs like Lipitor and Crestor can protect us against fatal heart attacks. These drugs, which are called “statins,” are the most widely-prescribed pills in the history of human medicine. In 2007 world-wide sales totaled $33 billion. They are particularly popular in the U.S., where 18 million Americans take them.
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February 20, 2008
The Cholesterol Con–Where Were the Doctors? Part I
After the stock market bubble burst, the New York Times asked: “Where were the analysts? Why didn’t they warn us?”
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Key To Life Before Its Origin On Earth May Have Been Discovered
ScienceDaily (Feb. 29, 2008) — An important discovery has been made with respect to the mystery of “handedness” in biomolecules. Researchers led by Sandra Pizzarello, a research professor at Arizona State University, found that some of the possible abiotic precursors to the origin of life on Earth have been shown to carry “handedness” in a larger number than previously thought.
Chimps May Have A ‘Language-ready’ Brain
ScienceDaily (Feb. 29, 2008) — An area of the brain involved in the planning and production of spoken and signed language in humans plays a similar role in chimpanzee communication, researchers report.
Could Our Democracy Withstand Another 9/11?
By David T. Z. Mindich, AlterNet. Posted February 29, 2008.
The Reichstag fire helped transform Germany from a democracy to a dictatorship. What can we do to avoid a similar outcome? Read the rest of this entry »
From R-G
Haaretz February 28, 2008
An invention called ‘the Jewish people’
By Tom Segev
Read the rest of this entry »
From R-G
Israel warns of invasion of Gaza
Israel’s deputy defence minister has said it will be left with “no
choice” but to invade Gaza, if Palestinian militants step up rocket
attacks.
Read the rest of this entry »
_______________________________
UPDATE FROM THE
ELECTRONIC INTIFADA
http://electronicIntifada.net
_______________________________
__
EI’s ongoing coverage of the Gaza siege: http://electronicintifada.net/bytopic/685.shtml
——————————————————– Read the rest of this entry »
Via Common Dreams
Thursday 02.28.08
Headlines…
Price Tag for Iraq, Afghan Wars: Three Trillion Dollars
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/02/28/7342/
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by John Michael Greer
The Archdruid Report (February 21 2008)
Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society
The Druid order I head hosts an email list for its members and friends,
and the conversations there cover a dizzying range of topics. Some
months ago, as I recall, composting became the subject du jour. In the
course of the discussion, one listmember reminisced about the day she
decided to marry the man who is now her husband. It was Valentine’s day,
romantically enough, and he arrived with a very special gift: a new
compost bin. Anyone might have brought flowers or chocolates, she
explained, but the fact that he realized how much a compost bin would
mean to her defined him, in her eyes, as Mr Right.
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The battle of the Darwin paradigm has gone on so long, it seems frozen in time, and with little result for critics, but this fact is in itself a grave danger for science. Because the end must come sometime. In fact, the opposition has gone on equally long, and simply waits for what will be the crash of science itself. Defeating the critics is a disaster. The idiots take control.
Check out Science Blogs: PH/D’s who haven’t a clue.
Best to do something about it!
This situation is morbid, because when the end comes, people will ask how it was possible that so many experts couldn’t deal with the issues, were frozen.
Are you a Darwinist? The burden is on YOU to figure why Darwinism is false. Apply a dialectical method, the same as the debate method, but one in which you take both sides of the argument. Let us grant the fact of evolution. We are talking about the theories of natural selection.
We can deal out design arguments. They are as problematical as the Darwinian.
We are not talking about a substitute. Merely withdrawing a claim to the explanation of evolution.
Are you a Darwinist? The burden is on YOU to figure why Darwinism is false.
Open a file: the problems with Darwinian theory. The conclusive issues that make non-religious critics with no agenda to promote religion certain the theory can’t work.
150 years ago Alfred Russel Wallace sent a letter to Charles Darwin, describing natural selection.
This notorious episode is the permanent blight on the integrity of biological Darwinism, and shows how the whole game is a Big Cheat.
There have been many posts here on this.
If Wallace had prevailed
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 Wrong”, 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 anything”
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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).