History, Evolution, and the Darwin Debate
The server was down today, and much of yesterday’s posting was blocked: so I have cut short today’s articles so you can scroll down to the lower half of the today’s page to get at the ‘good stuff’.
Evo-News takes on Weinberg in ‘Without God’ (NYRB)
…the worldview of science is rather chilling. Not only do we not find any point to life laid out for us in nature, no objective basis for our moral principles, no correspondence between what we think is the moral law and the laws of nature, of the sort imagined by philosophers from Anaximander and Plato to Emerson. We even learn that the emotions that we most treasure, our love for our wives and husbands and children, are made possible by chemical processes in our brains that are what they are as a result of natural selection acting on chance mutations over millions of years. And yet we must not sink into nihilism or stifle our emotions. At our best we live on a knife-edge, between wishful thinking on one hand and, on the other, despair.
What, then, can we do?
Weinberg throws the Discovery folks a softball pitch, and remarkably they miss. The reason, perhaps, is that the obsession over god, symmetric between monotheists and scientists, produces an arid debate.
Of more concern is the rank scientism of Weinberg’s pronouncement, whose implications are not how we should live to learn as scientific sadsacks but how science got itself into the position of actually believing the absurdities their reductionist views seem to imply. Surely the problem is the tool being used, reductionist methodology, and its limits when it is taken from the laboratory and applied metaphysically to ‘reality’ questions.
Meat-eating Dinosaur From Argentina Had Bird-like Breathing System
ScienceDaily (Sep. 30, 2008) — The remains of a 30-foot-long predatory dinosaur discovered along the banks of Argentina’s Rio Colorado is helping to unravel how birds evolved their unusual breathing system.
Mass Extinctions And The Evolution Of Dinosaurs
ScienceDaily (Sep. 30, 2008) — Dinosaurs survived two mass extinctions and 50 million years before taking over the world and dominating ecosystems, according to new research published this week
by Guardian
From Dawkins site
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/sep/30/pressandpublishing.religion
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Scientists unite for science curriculum
By KELLEY SHANNON Associated Press Writer © 2008 The Associated Press
Sept. 30, 2008, 4:54PM
— Scientists from Texas universities on Tuesday denounced what they called supernatural and religious teaching in public school science classrooms and voiced opposition to attempts to water down evolution instruction.
Congress Didn’t Dare Say Yes
What Wall Street Hoped to Win
By PAM MARTENS
“I got a lot of Ph.D. types and smart people around me who come into the Oval Office and say, ‘Mr. President, here’s what’s on my mind.’ And I listen carefully to their advice. But having gathered the device (sic), I decide, you know, I say, ‘This is what we’re going to do.’ And it’s ‘Yes, sir, Mr. President.’ And then we get after it, implement policy.”
– President George W. Bush, October 3, 2007
Pity poor President Bush. He’s been pushed aside as The Decider. The Decider’s strut and press entourage, along with the coffers of the United States, were to be handed to Henry M. (Hank) Paulson, U.S. Treasury Secretary, who was to have sweeping authority to share newly augmented plunder with his cronies on Wall Street and set up a vast new bailout bureaucracy, all at taxpayer expense.
Glenn Greenwald | The Simultaneous Rejection of the Bailout and a Corrupt Ruling Class
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2008/09/30-8
William Greider | Political Turmoil as House Rejects Bailout
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2008/09/30-2
No Bailout for World’s Poorest
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2008/09/30
gnxp
Researchers have proposed a new model for how populations migrate from
one country to another, which they say could improve population
projections for countries worldwide.
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/09/29/human-migration.html
gnxp
Sugar is still pleasurable even when it isn’t sweet—an important clue
to the rise of obesity
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=why-calories-are-delicious
gnxp
The “stress hormone” cortisol may be responsible for aggressive
antisocial behaviour in delinquent males, research suggests
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14844-bad-boys-can-blame-behaviour-on-their-hormones.html
Palin Claimed Dinosaurs and People Coexisted
“I need to know if she really thinks that dinosaurs were here 4000 years ago … because she’s gonna have the nuclear codes.”
Let’s Play “Wall Street bailout” U.S. Representative Marcy Kaptur
[1]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S27yitK32ds….
The Subprime Primer
[2]www.codepinkaction.org/downloads/subprime_mess_explained.pps
References
1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S27yitK32ds
2. http://www.codepinkaction.org/downloads/subprime_mess_explained.pps
We cited Cosmic Ancestry today on the Altenberg Conference. On the same page there is a quote from Massimo Pigliucci:
If there is one thing we don’t want it’s that there’s a bunch of theories out there, and they’re all equal
Massimo Pigliucci
I fear that it has already happened, and about to get worse. In fact it was always that way. The Altenberg conference is showing us how the Paradigm is starting to erode rapidly, but it is hard to see a new consensus arising in the way the Synthesis did, and somehow got ‘enforced’ for so long with so much obstruction of innovative thinking.
In a way it is better to do without an enforced evoluton Paradigm: it stultifies thought, and corrupts science with ideology. Historians don’t have a master paradigm for historical theory, why should evolution be any different?
The fact remains that the Darwinian Synthesis was bogus from beginning to end. Even on its own terms as biology it was false. Beyond the biology its misapplication to culture has been horrendous, and has discredited science.
Darwinism claimed a kind of metaphysical hegemony over reality, and that claim has always been laughable. There are so many things missing one has to wonder how the smartest scientists could be so naive. The problem has been extensively studied, in the context of Positivism. But somehow this never applied to biological positivism.
In the meantime, an entire generation of students raised in the style of arrogant Dawkins/Talk.origins Darwin jargon is at risk of being a cadre of reactionary deadbeats, as the world attempts to move.
Instead of a chaos of rival theories, I can recommend the method and conclusions of the study of the eonic effect, where the question of theory shows a connection to the noumenal/phenomenal issue, which amounts to saying that there are limits to our knowledge. This Kantian limit should be the referee for the rival fanaticisms, Darwinian and design, by reminding us that when these debates arise they are prima facie evidence of reaching Kantian metaphysical limits.
So there’s no next Synthesis. Nor will scientists be able to play priesthood on universal questions of reality.
Best to get used to it.
The previous post illustrates the possible difficulty in getting the knack of seeing the eonic effect. After so much Darwinian conditioning we aren’t prepared for the shock of seeing that evolution is something different from what we thought it was. The confusion arises because we project backwards onto unseen times a set of generalizations, like natural selection, without documenting the short term intervals closely enough to really see how evolution happened. The only data set we have to do that, actually, is world history itself, and a careful study given some basic giveaway clues like the Axial Age that have been sitting around for over a century shows the resolution of many of the riddles that haunt evolutionary thinking.
But the eonic effect shows some very exotic evolutionary processes. The theories of civilizations from figures like Spengler and Toynbee are too clumsy. We have to think in terms of differential ‘time-slices’ of civilizations, and short intervals of relative transformation….Confer the text of WHEE!
Evolution at the level of fossils is relatively obvious, but evolutionary dynamics is not what you think it is, and once you realize that, then you realize that evolution is not what you think it is.
The debate over design vs Darwinism is false. Neither side has the real clue and end up bickering over their respective metaphysical positions.
Comment from Larry Arnhart on post on language and evolution
Larry Arnhart said,
September 29, 2008 at 2:39 pm ·
I say that the English language has evolved–and continues to evolve–through the utterances of millions of English speakers over centuries of linguistic behavior.
You say, No, it has all been designed by a “macro driver.”
Huh?
Thanks for the comment. It is not surprising you are not sure what I am saying. I didn’t say that ‘it’ (language) has “all been designed by a macro driver”. Since I might be misunderstood let me state the point in the terminology of World History And The Eonic Effect.
What I did say is that in the category of the ‘eonic evolution of civilization’, whose characteristics are that of an ‘eonic sequence’ or drumbeat alternator (’macro’ driver) in a frequency beat of 2400 years and drumbeat transitions about three centuries in length, the very late (relative to earlier forms stage of language and its evolution(s)) phenomena of poetic art show an evolution (as defined in the model of the eonic effect). The sudden flowering of poetic art sequences is thus strongly correlated with the eonic sequence (I never use design or causal language). This kind of analysis is on two levels, micro and macro. Systems don’t do art, people do. But in the mainline of the eonic sequence, there is a demonstrable correlation with a macro driver, which has its fingers in a lot more pies than the poetic, which is merely a side effect of a much larger transformation.
My point then is that if there is an evolutionary macro correlation at this late stage for the highest forms of art/language, my confidence in Darwinian explanations of earlier language plummet without recovery.
Note that I don’t claim anything like the eonic effect for earlier evolution (except as a possible suggestion in a footnote), because I don’t have the evidence. But there is something peculiar about the ‘evolution’ we see in world history, and it doesn’t square with Darwinian accounts, which, on consideration, are found to be without the proper documentation.
It is pure speculation to say that Darwin’s theory explains language evolution. Darwin suffers a typical confusion: linguistic differentiation is the same process as the ‘evolution’ of language as such. As with everything else the micro/macro aspects are confused, because the macro aspects aren’t observed.
Suddenly, with the eonic effect we observe some macro factor.
20 September 2008
Woodstock of evolution? That’s how Nature descibes a meeting among sixteen leading biologists at the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research in Altenberg, Austria, 10-13 July 2008. The purpose of the meeting was to go beyond the modern synthesis that has held evolutionary theory together for more than sixty years. This is necessary because the existing theory leaves much unexplained —“When the public thinks about evolution, they think about the origin of wings and the invasion of the land,” says Graham Budd, a palaeobiologist at the University of Uppsala, Sweden. “But these are things that evolutionary theory has told us little about.”
Scott Gilbert, an evo-devo researcher at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania comments, “The modern synthesis is remarkably good at modelling the survival of the fittest, but not good at modelling the arrival of the fittest.”
The participants agreed that such shortcomongs must be carefully downplayed (see right), because “creationists seize on any hint of splits in evolutionary theory or dissatisfaction with Darwinism.” Apparently darwinism is still gridlocked and real reform is not imminent. Meanwhile, we noticed a couple of reported comments that are consistent with cosmic ancestry —
Stuart Newman, a developmental biologist at New York Medical College, comments “You can’t deny the force of selection in genetic evolution, but in my view this is stabilizing and fine-tuning forms that originate due to other processes.”
To explain the sudden appearance of turtles, Scott Gilbert suggested, “all the genes are probably there already….”
by Guardian
from Dawkins
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/sep/28/religion
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by Star News Online
from Dawkins site
http://www.starnewsonline.com/article/20080916/ARTICLES/809160338/1018/letters
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Richard Dawkins at the Edinburgh Book Festival
Edinburgh International Book Festival, Richard Dawkins
Wired.com: Can science replace religion without falling into the trap of, say, Nazi science or social Darwinism?
The church has enough problems without backing fads of science
By Rev Kevin Logan
My Church has gone a bit potty. Fancy apologising to Charles Darwin for not immediately embracing his idea that all our intelligence, complexity and beauty have inexplicably evolved from a non-intelligent, simple blob of what!-we’re-not-quite-sure.