History, Evolution, and the Darwin Debate
Obama and Global Trade
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
Unique among the contenders for the presidential nominations, Barack Obama has raised the issue of US job loss from US corporations moving operations abroad in order to lower their labor costs and, thereby, boost profits. As reported by the Financial Times, Obama proposed a lower tax rate for US companies that maintain or increase their US workforce relative to their overseas workforce.
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Behavioral economist Dan Ariely studies the way people make economic
decisions. In his book, Predictably Irrational, he explains how the
reasoning behind these decisions is often flawed due to invisible
forces at work in people’s brains.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=19231906
Biology invades a field philosophers thought was safely theirs
http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10717915
DNA study supports African origin of man
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Comment form Sillykitty to Note to SK: Sufi hyenas, poets beware
Note: Sillykitty has been a frequent contributor here, and this blog pursued the ‘deprogramming’ option with respect to the shadowy ‘sufi’ school of the ‘notorious rogue sufi’ e. j. gold. This issue and sk’s case actually made it into Wikipedia in the entry on Mr. Gold. The later is masquerading as the ‘successor’ to Gurdjieff, the original shadowy ‘rogue sufi’. If you are competing with Gurdjieff you must be in the big devil business. Caveat emptor. I called such people ‘sufi hyenas’, a spontaneous act of revulsion that seems to have stuck.
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James comments on Natural selection not an obstacle to religious faith??
James said,
February 17, 2008 at 3:25 pm
Rosenhouse on the incoherence of theistic evolutionists:
http://scienceblogs.com/evolutionblog/2007/10/in_which_i_agree_with_michael.php
Granted we can’t recreate the events leading to human evolution in a laboratory but we can certainly test hypotheses related to even human evolution. Besides if your definition of science is so strict that only laboratory tests make the cut then you leave out huge areas of science beyond evolution. For instance you leave out much of modern astronomy.
Part of the confusion lies in the concept of ‘species’, and the ‘evolution’ of such. This is most probably a wrongly defined category, leading to false generations across all cases.
John Glisch: An evolutionary dead end
No place for intelligent design in science
Let’s see if I’ve got this straight:
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Pollan’s Eater’s Manifesto
What’s so bad about convenience food?, I asked Michael Pollan – his new book, “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto,” has been the number one best-seller nationally for the last few weeks.
“I need to eat in a hurry,” I told him, “so I can rush back to checking my email. What I really need is food I can eat WHILE I’m checking my email.”
“Why don’t you just hook yourself up to an IV?” he replied. “You’re missing something. Eating should be a source of pleasure.” He said the stuff I had for lunch at my computer was not food, but rather something he called “edible food-like substances.”
Via Common Dreams
Poverty Is Poison
by Paul Krugman
“Poverty in early childhood poisons the brain.†That was the opening of an article in Saturday’s Financial Times, summarizing research presented last week at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
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Many Earth-like planets may exist in Milky Way
17:44 18 February 2008
NewScientist.com news service
Phil McKenna, Boston
As many as 60% of Sun-like stars in the Milky Way may form rocky planets similar to Earth, according to recent findings from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. The findings suggest that other worlds with potential for life might be more common than previously thought.
What Do We Stand For?
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
Americans traditionally thought of their country as a “city upon a hill,” a “light unto the world.” Today only the deluded think that. Polls show that the rest of the world regards the US and Israel as the two greatest threats to peace.
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Socrates in the 21st Century
Is the endlessly examined life still worth a look?
Given the choice between Socrates dead or alive, Western thinkers have preferred him dead. At least as a symbol. A symbol of what? That’s where it gets complicated.
The Dumbing Of America
Call Me a Snob, but Really, We’re a Nation of Dunces
By Susan Jacoby
Sunday, February 17, 2008; B01
“The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself.” Ralph Waldo Emerson offered that observation in 1837, but his words echo with painful prescience in today’s very different United States. Americans are in serious intellectual trouble — in danger of losing our hard-won cultural capital to a virulent mixture of anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism and low expectations.
American farmers want to change the way they make sugar. This spring,
a huge number of growers plan to switch to genetically modified sugar
beets. But some groups have asked a federal court to stop them.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=18817571
Evo-News on brain science….
It gets hard to read these articles on otherwise important issues of dissent when they are cast in their rants against ‘atheism/materialism’.
I am struck over and over again by the way that scientism and Darwinian paradigm control has unwittingly polarized the debate over, not only evolution, but a host of other issues, here the mind-brain problem.
Take a bunch of loud-mouth Darwinians, half-educated science experts, and single-focus geeks, shout down all forms of liberal dialectic in favor of technocratic reductionism with a liberal face-rouge, and the only people left are conservative fundamentalists to carry the load of opposition. That is, of course, the secret to the ‘design’ debate: the calculated effort to destroy the middle ground, obscure the secular origins of Darwin critique, and set up the proponents of scientism for an inevitable fall by tweaking their hatred of religion.
It’s a set of tactics most scientists seem incapable of grasping, and, worse, it is working.
The same is the case with the New Atheism debate. Denounce religion in a fashion so completely stupid and narrow that previous atheist critics of religion have to evacuate their positions, and change their labels.
One of the key problems is the bad education scientists are getting as they over-specialize from the time they are teenagers through to their PhD’s, with no serious exposure to anything but technical science. The result is the striking idiocy of the the ‘IQ meritocracy’ processed like ‘smart cattle’ through the Big Science culture.
James and Hucklebird comment on ID only about rejecting evolution?
In theory the ID movement is only challenging natural selection theories, but in practice their arguments seem designed to be ambiguous, playing to several audiences. Read the rest of this entry »
I was clearing out an old cabin in back today and came across some long lost sonnets written years ago, as I roamed the country, the penniless scholar of Greek. Here’s a nemo piece rescued from the gnawing mice. I had forgotten all about it.
Nemo (an Indian prince) surfaces in the South Pacific and broods on the First Noble Truth, and man’s powerlessness and egoic pseudo-will, indeed as if confronted by the sea. See also Mysterious Islands at H&E.com
What could will be if choice is barren wish
That asks the parrot’s cracker for its sup.
I have self bounds, no oozer like the fish,
My plans are set, my projects up and up.What could will be if futures cast the dice,
That this plusperfect live as one possessed?
We zoom these eyes, to jig a small device,
It woofers all our songs in love obsessed.What might will be if thrust and action feud,
And rust the finish in the upstart plan?
We could be choiceless in a trackless mood
That is tack-sail if blow oppose the man.I am the crew and helm, gale from a cat’s paw,
No pirate save to self, where seas inherit law.
Panda’s Thumb distortion on Wistar Institute
The famous seminar at the Wistar institute, and the resulting book (which, not surprisingly, is absent from most university libraries), was not the work of Bible Belt creationists but of some top scientists and mathematicians.
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On this episode of ID the Future, Casey Luskin interviews Fred Cutting, a member of the Framers’ Committee for Florida’s new science standards who recently submitted a minority report suggesting that the new standards encourage students to “learn why some scientists give scientific critiques of standard models of neo-Darwinian evolution.”
From R-G
Ha’aretz 05/02/2008
Haredi sect brands Chief Rabbi Metzger ‘Zionist stooge,’ wicked
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Hucklebird comments on Theologians reject ID
Stephen P. Smith said,
February 7, 2008 at 5:29 pm
There seems to be a natural unwillingness to recognize that ID is only about rejecting evolution driven by natural selection and random mutation. There does seem to be a natural unwillingness to recognize ID (or irreducuble complexity) is not really saying anything about a hypothetical designer, and if you see some of Dembski’s writing you will see that he leave intelligent causation undeclared. Therefore, there does seem to be a natural unwillingness to recognize that ID does not say much about theology, and that ID has more to say about science; in which case the said theologians have no bussiness in this debate about science.
Nemo: maybe you are right, but there is a kind of sly double entendre in the usage of design language.
The distinction of N-design (natural teleology) and G-design (intelligent designer?) has frequently been made here on this blog. The ID-ers don’t really define that difference.
Good piece from UD
From UD:
Does evolution destroy CSI?
idnet.com.au
Portraits of Darwin created by a computer model of evolution acting on
the painting top left.
NATURE today published a piece by Kevin Padian entitled “Darwin’s
enduring legacyâ€. The title page of the essay has this picture.
Richard Dawkins’ Follow-Up to God Delusion Sold to Free Press for $3.5 Million
British biologist Richard Dawkins has sold a follow-up to his incendiary 2006 book The God Delusion to Hilary Redmon at Free Press. According to one source with knowledge of the deal, Mr. Dawkins’ literary agent John Brockman told some underbidders at the end of the auction that Free Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, is paying $3.5 million for the book.
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