06.30.08
Reply to comment, who are the liars?
I reply to a comment from DarkSyde from Daily Kos
New Age evolutionism
A Brief History of Evolutionary Spirituality
Three centuries of progressive thinkers reveal that evolution has always been a fundamentally spiritual concept.
Is this really true? Out of context New Agers will make mincemeat of the statement, even as the sausage of Kant, Schelling, Hegel under the misleading label ‘idealism’ is connected to the new ‘evolutionary ideology’ of the gurus.
Another liability is the hopeless confusion of ‘involution’ and ‘evolution’ in New Age circles. This distinction has never been clarified. To use the term ‘evolution’ threatens still another piece of dead meat in that sausage. Maybe let German idealists alone, unless you care to study them, or create a consistent evolutionary theory that is practical and sorts out the various usages, a task, I can assure you, that is completely beyond the capacity of systematically muddled New Agers.
Study of the eonic effect can help here: a genuine depiction of ‘evolution’ in terms of history and the evolution of man, that has some empircal and practical aspects, and which can create a context for the study of the evolution of religion, and yet give some meaning to the sense desired, but mislabeled ‘evolution’ as ’spiritual practice’.
The term ‘evolution’ has been botched by Darwinists, but the New Agers have done no better, and it is false that these gurus are ‘evolutionary guides’.
Darwin’s non-atheism
Charles Darwin was not the father of atheism
By George Pitcher
One of one of the greatest landmarks in the history of science. Tomorrow we commemorate the great day, exactly 150 years ago, that Charles Darwin unveiled his theory of evolution by natural selection, the most authoritative scientific challenge to Biblical accounts of our origins in, well, the history of the universe.
Shaven ape
Shaven ape: the origin of a very big stink
‘Is man an ape or an angel?’ A century and a half after Darwin put forward the theory of natural selection, Steve Jones explains the power of his idea - and the furore it caused.
Canines
Canine Tooth Strength Provides Clues To Behavior Of Early Human Ancestors
ScienceDaily (June 30, 2008) — Measuring and testing the teeth of living primates could provide a window into the behavior of the earliest human ancestors, based on their fossilized remains. Research funded by the National Science Foundation and led by University of Arkansas anthropologist Michael Plavcan takes us one step closer to understanding the relationship between canine teeth, body size and the lives of primates.
Evolution of maize
Maize (Corn) May Have Been Domesticated In Mexico As Early As 10,000 Years Ago
ScienceDaily (June 30, 2008) — The ancestors of maize originally grew wild in Mexico and were radically different from the plant that is now one of the most important crops in the world. While the evidence is clear that maize was first domesticated in Mexico, the time and location of the earliest domestication and dispersal events are still in dispute.
Downturn and environmental awareness
The World’s Will to Tackle Climate Change Is Irresistible
Far from stymying the environmental cause, the downturn in the world’s economies highlights just how pressing it is
Read the rest of this entry »
Sea of plastic
Bobbing in Poison Soup
Two men set sail to call attention to the 100 million tons of plastic flotsam fouling the world’s oceans.
by Margaux Wexberg Sanchez
On the first of June, two men and a rabbit set sail from the port of Long Beach, bound for Hawaii, on a raft made of junk. Their cabin is the cockpit of a Cessna 310, white with a blue racing stripe, salvaged from the desert. It floats on a system of handmade pontoons — 15,000 plastic bottles held together with recycled nets — propelled by currents and wind. If it sounds dangerous and makeshift, that’s the point. The pilots of Junk, as the vessel is called, want to get your attention.
Obama & FDR?
Progressive Obama Critics Should Study FDR
by Randy Shaw
Last week, some progressives expressed betrayal at Barack Obama’s support for a “compromised” FISA bill. Read the rest of this entry »
“Making A Billion Hindus Glow in the Dark”
Did A Plutonium Generator End Up in the Ganges?
By PETER LEE
For the U.S. intelligence establishment, the Cold War was a time of certainties: Communism had to be stopped; no cost was too great, no technological obstacle was insurmountable. And, in the case of gaining information on China’s missile program, no mountain was too high.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tunguska
Tunguska: The day the sky exploded, subscription
I’M PEERING out the window of a Soviet-era Mi-8 cargo helicopter that’s hovering 50 metres above Lake Cheko, deep in the heart of the Siberian taiga. Read the rest of this entry »
MyBo and FISA
Obama Supporters Organize to Protest Candidate’s Stance on Spying
Posted by Ari Melber at 9:39 AM on June 30, 2008.
Concerned netizens taking the fight to campaign’s official website.
EI update
_______________________________
UPDATE FROM THE
ELECTRONIC INTIFADA
http://electronicIntifada.net
_______________________________ Read the rest of this entry »
Good news from Iraq
Tomgram: The Urge to Surge
[Note for TomDispatch readers: The following piece offers a picture of the Bush administration’s 18-month “surge” in Iraq that, I believe, you’ll find nowhere else. Read the rest of this entry »
The great migration
gnxp
Why humans left their African homeland 80,000 years ago to colonize
the world
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/human-migration.html
Medicated soldiers
by Mark Thompson
Seven months after Sergeant Christopher LeJeune started scouting
Baghdad’s dangerous roads - acting as bait to lure insurgents into the
open so his Army unit could kill them - he found himself growing
increasingly despondent. “We’d been doing some heavy missions, and
things were starting to bother me”, LeJeune says. His unit had been
protecting Iraqi police stations targeted by rocket-propelled grenades,
hunting down mortars hidden in dark Baghdad basements and cleaning up
its own messes. He recalls the order his unit got after a nighttime
firefight to roll back out and collect the enemy dead. When LeJeune and
his buddies arrived, they discovered that some of the bodies were still
alive. “You don’t always know who the bad guys are”, he says. “When you
search someone’s house, you have it built up in your mind that these
guys are terrorists, but when you go in, there’s little bitty tiny shoes
and toys on the floor - things like that started affecting me a lot more
than I thought they would”.
So LeJeune visited a military doctor in Iraq, who, after a quick
session, diagnosed depression. The doctor sent him back to war armed
with the antidepressant Zoloft and the antianxiety drug clonazepam.
“It’s not easy for soldiers to admit the problems that they’re having
over there for a variety of reasons”, LeJeune says. “If they do admit
it, then the only solution given is pills”. Read the rest of this entry »
The Evolution Controversy And The Eonic Effect
There is a new essay on The Evolution Controversy And The Eonic Effect up at eonic-effect.net. This is an introductory piece for those interested in reading World History And The Eonic Effect, Third Edition, which is now out. Check out the website for details.
David Christian’s ‘Big History’ and the eonic effect
Arnhart takes on David Christian’s Maps Of Time and the idea of Big History.
Despite the interest of Christian’s mega-history, from the Big Bang, it is, predictably, vitiated by his embrace of the Darwinian view of evolution. There is a Big History of another kind, which would revolve around a framework that can deal with evolutionary directionality and resolve the paradoxes of Darwinian fundamentalism.
One problem with the idea of Big History is that we will attempt to homogenize everything around a set of ideas too limited to encompass such a vast entity. Further, by taking in huge vistas of time, we are likely to miss the fact that significant evolutionary processes are not continuous and appear, for whatever reason, in brief episodes of rapid change. What is the real scale required to study human evolution? The same as that of history! And that requires data at the level of millennia, more, of centuries. Claims for evolution in deep time have insufficient data in this regard, and thus we ought to be wary that we can get it right.
Guess what! The Eonic Effect foots the bill here. It shows us a way to interpret world history in the light of evolution, recalibrated to grasp its real meaning which is not purely genetic. We can see processes that operate at high speed at the level of centuries, demonstrating a macro dynamic that is invisible on the scale of Christian’s Big History.
Further we can easily unlock the clues to, among other things, the political evolution interior to civilization that Darwinism can only reduce to social darwinist accounts (despite denials).
Best to get started on the eonic effect then.
Was Huxley really a Darwinist?
Huxley did indeed debate creationists, but he wasn’t a Darwinist of the type now current. He warned Darwin on the eve of the publication of Origin of the problem he would have overemphasizing natural selection.
He wouldn’t be considered a straight Darwinist today/
Daily Kos and the evolution confusion
They Can Never Take Our FREEDOM!!!
by DarkSyde
I wish Daily Kos, and DarkSyde, its principal evolution blogger, would get with it on the question of Darwinism and its serious failings as a theory of evolution. Keep in mind that Daily Kos is a political blog, and that the politics of evolution requires something more than talk.origins boilerplate.
Granted, the evolution issue has drifted into left/right polarization, to its complete stultification, and confronted with the Louisiana bill it is hard to expect more than kneejerk commentary.
DarkSyde’s commentary here forgets a few things, first that we aren’t in Dover, and the law in question, whatever the views of creationists in the background, is not about intelligent design or creationism. And those on the creationist right are not the only ones who would like their ‘freedom’ on this question. In general the secular public has been well-behaved on this issue (brainwashed) and it is very easy to score points with Dawkins-style indignation over the ‘idiots’ who don’t buy the party line on Darwinism.
Actually, this bill could be an opportunity for liberals to actually improve education! It could be made clear to students that the fact of evolution is very secure, and that would challenge creationists, while the theory of its mechanism is insufficiently scientific, too ideological, and prone to Social Darwinists interpretations, and that would be a challenge to the right.
When the liberal left starts to mock the idea of ‘FREEDOM!!’ we should pause and reflect.
Critiquing Darwinism should be a progressive issue, as it was in the days of Jennings Bryan. This progressive critique could all too easily upgrade itself beyond Bryan’s confusions and create a perspectrive on history that might actually serve the liberal/let better than the regime of technological scientism they are reduced to defending without realizing its severe limits.