10.31.08
Posted in Critique of Evolutionary Economy, Evolution at 5:59 pm by nemo
The Triumph of Ignorance: How Morons Succeed in U.S. Politics
Obama has a lot to offer, but until our education system is fixed or religious fundamentalism withers, anti-intellectuals will flaunt their ignorance.
By George Monbiot, Monbiot.com. Posted October 31, 2008. Quote below flap.
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Critiques of American anti-intellectualism are important, but Monbiot, via Jacoby, falls in the trap of Darwinian confusion, and the confusion over Social Darwinism. Monbiot actually notes that Americans had good reason in the wake of Darwin to criticize the theory of natural selection.
But how has anything changed? It hasn’t changed at all, and the stark fact of the matter is that the ’stupid’ fundamentalists, carrying on the tradition of the progressive William Jennings Bryan (without his progressive views), have proven themselves smarter, on this question at least, than the liberal elites, who, along with the left, should have long since shucked off the Darwin paradigm. And the next stark reality is that the fundamentalist/ID-ists, armed with purloined critiques of Darwinism of secular scientific critics who have been suppressed, are in the vanguard of that critique of natural selection, save only that they got too ambitious and tried to ’steal bases’ by turning the critique of selectionism into a case for intelligent design.
It is time for the liberal/left sector to recover the original distancing stance on the issue of natural selection and to give the same critique of ideology to Darwinism that they give to classical liberalism.
There is no excuse anymore for this liberal ’stupidity’, even as they point to this flaw in Bible Belt Christians.
Liberalism is not a scientific subject but an ideology of action in a universal history of freedom. It need not apologize for its lack of science as it lives under the umbrella of the philosophy of history.
An age of science, or scientism, beggars religion for its metaphysical worldview, but the basis for liberalism itself, the idea of freedom, is, to press the point to the wall, ‘unscientically’ metaphysical, hence a superstition. Therefore, in strict logic, liberalism has no basis in science.
Nor need it have one, as it came into existence in parallel with the scientific revolution as an independent component of modernism. Trying to abrogate this by applying universal Darwinism to all secular subjects will backfire, and merely feed the resurgence of religion.
This calamity of reductionist science was carefully addressed by the founders of liberal philosophy of history, such as Kant, attempting to harmonize the liberal and scientific projects in tandem.
This was a done job long before the degenerate scientism of Darwinism came into fashion and confused the issues completely.
In the final analysis, if you adopt Darwin’s theory, you suggest to millions that if they imitate the law of natural selection they will advance evolution, a runaway fallacy that automatically produces Social Darwinism in a context of publicly embraced Darwinism. Nothing has changed, save that the Social Darwinists hire better public relations teams, and that so-called liberals have been systematically conditioned to think around the basic fallacy of their embrace of Darwinism, genuine dummies, beside their dummy Christian brethren, whose archaic philosophies of history detected the problem in Darwinism, while the generations educated in scientism could not.
For some notes on a postdarwinian politics, cf The Politics Of Evolution
Jacoby shows that there was once a certain logic to its anti-rationalism. During the first few decades after the publication of Origin of Species, for example, Americans had good reason to reject the theory of natural selection and to treat public intellectuals with suspicion. From the beginning, Darwin’s theory was mixed up in the United States with the brutal philosophy — now known as Social Darwinism — of the British writer Herbert Spencer. Spencer’s doctrine, promoted in the popular press with the help of funding from Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller and Thomas Edison, suggested that millionaires stood at the top of a scala natura established by evolution. By preventing unfit people from being weeded out, government intervention weakened the nation, according to the doctrine; gross economic inequalities were both justifiable and necessary.
Darwinism, in other words, became indistinguishable to the public from the most bestial form of laissez-faire economics. Many Christians responded with revulsion. It is profoundly ironic that the doctrine rejected a century ago by such prominent fundamentalists as William Jennings Bryan is now central to the economic thinking of the Christian Right. Modern fundamentalists reject the science of Darwinian evolution and accept the pseudoscience of Social Darwinism.
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Posted in Science & Religion at 3:06 pm by nemo
Christians and Dawkins unite, almost
Christians who hate the Harry Potter books (CWHHPB) have a new friend: Richard Dawkins. Of course, CWHHPB hate them for one of three reasons: because the books are 1) full of evil and menace or 2) forgettable pop literature or 3) both. Dawkins hates them because they promote “mythical thinking.” Which actually sounds like a good thing to me, since the word mythos means story, and since the world is made of stories. But to Dawkins, it means simply “unscientific.”
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Posted in History at 3:02 pm by nemo
‘Iceman’ Mummy Has No Modern Kin
THURSDAY, Oct. 30 (HealthDay News) — Sparking a new mystery about early man, Italian scientists have unraveled the DNA of the 5,300-year-old “Iceman” mummy, only to discover that he doesn’t appear to have modern descendants anywhere near where he was found in Europe.
The findings add to evidence that humans were constantly going from place to place, even fairly recently in terms of human development, said Jeffrey T. Laitman, director of anatomy and functional morphology at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, in New York City. This is in contrast to theories that suggest humans remained in one place for thousands of years.
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Posted in Evolution at 2:51 pm by nemo
One In 17 Men In Mediterranean Basin May Have A Phoenician As Direct Male-line Ancestor
ScienceDaily (Oct. 31, 2008) — The Phoenicians gave the world the alphabet and a love of the color purple, and a research study published today by Genographic scientists in the American Journal of Human Genetics shows that they left some people their genes as well. The study finds that as many as one in 17 men in the Mediterranean basin may have a Phoenician as a direct male-line ancestor.
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Posted in Evolution at 2:50 pm by nemo
‘Living Fossil’ Tree Contains Genetic Imprints Of Rain Forests Under Climate Change
ScienceDaily (Oct. 31, 2008) — A “living fossil” tree species is helping a University of Michigan researcher understand how tropical forests responded to past climate change and how they may react to global warming in the future.
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Posted in you've got mail at 2:39 pm by nemo
RG mail
National Post Election chaos feared in U.S.
Perfect storm brewing as record voter turnout predicted
Peter Goodspeed, National Post
The ghost of Floridas hanging chads may return to haunt U. S. voters.
The pending presidential election, just days away, is already filled
with allegations of voter fraud, intimidation and flawed voting
machines. Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in In the News at 2:32 pm by nemo
A Last Push To Deregulate
White House to Ease Many Rules
by R. Jeffrey Smith
WASHINGTON - The White House is working to enact a wide array of federal regulations, many of which would weaken government rules aimed at protecting consumers and the environment, before President Bush leaves office in January.
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Posted in you've got mail at 2:30 pm by nemo
‘The End of America’
Naomi Wolf’s ‘The End of America,’ a searing indictment of George Bush’s ‘fascist tactics,’ has been made into an equally uncompromising documentary
by Naomi Wolf
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Posted in global warming at 2:28 pm by nemo
Wanted: A Climate Bailout
by Mark Hertsgaard
What a difference an emergency makes. Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in you've got mail at 2:04 pm by nemo
The Bailout: Bush’s Final Pillage
by Naomi Klein
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2008/10/31-1
Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in Critique of Evolutionary Economy at 2:01 pm by nemo
Counterpunch
Is the Global Economy a Mistake?
By IGNACY NOWOPOLSKI
Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in you've got mail at 1:53 pm by nemo
RG mail
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/JJ29Ak01.html
Asia Times October 29, 2008
A third Palestinian Intifada in the making
By Ramzy Baroud Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in you've got mail at 1:51 pm by nemo
Sciftp
Gene Screen: Will We Vote Against a Candidate’s DNA? Office Seekers May One Day Be
In the coming era of personal genomics — when we all can decode our genes cheaply and easily — political candidates may be pressed to disclose their own DNA,
Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in you've got mail at 12:40 pm by nemo
Beware the unwinding of the yen carry trade
By David Pilling Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in you've got mail at 12:33 pm by nemo
_______________________________
UPDATE FROM THE
ELECTRONIC INTIFADA
http://electronicIntifada.net
__________________________ Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in you've got mail at 12:31 pm by nemo
RG mail
October 29, 2008
Two Parties, One Imperial Mission: The US Empire will Survive Bush
By ARNO MAYER
http://www.counterpunch.org/mayer10292008.html
The United States may emerge from the Iraq fiasco almost unscathed.
Though momentarily disconcerted, the American empire will continue on
its way, under bipartisan direction and mega-corporate pressure, and
with evangelical blessings.
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Posted in you've got mail at 12:25 pm by nemo
sciftp
http://socialistworker.org/2008/10/31/fable-of-clean-coal
Analysis: Lance Newman
The fable of “clean” coal
There are plenty of reasons to be suspicious of the candidates’ calls for investment in “clean coal” technology, says Lance Newman.
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10.30.08
Posted in History, The Axial Age, The Eonic Effect at 9:49 pm by nemo
Many of the confusions of religion and secularism clarify if we expand the scale to include the whole of world history.
And I can only recommend a study of the eonic effect to get a grip on the way evolution is undergoing its strange transformations in the evolution of civilization. The Axial Age is at first baffling, but the key to many issues, seen rightly.
We can see that the impulse to proceed beyond religion in a secular modernity, as discussed in the previous two posts, is an historic impulse with a sound foundation, save only that you must graduate from the evelenth grade to go to the twelfth. Ay, there’s the rub. You can’t skip grades.
Science, instead, is producing something like technical experts, who are hillbillies.
Secularists need to transcend religion, and not regress to something less.
Modern secularism, in the fashion many take it, is based on amnesia about the past, and simple negation. The problem with transcending religion is that you must understand what you are transcending and go to something higher and better. And, by and large, secular society is doing that. But…
But it seems that now we are getting sidetracked in the Dawkins-style atheism crusade. OK, up to a point, if that’s what you feel like doing. But keep in mind that religion is not about ‘god’, or ‘no god’. The question of god, relative to secular society, is not the issue. Yak, yak, yak, god, no god. It is a game Kant exposed completely. What not just change terminology and start over.
Kant, it should be noted, spoke of ‘religion within the limits of reason alone’. That formulation seems antique now, but the point was that in the context of the Enlightenment the difficulties of religion could be addressed philosophically in a secular context.
It helps to really study the modern transition, to see what really happened, so that the false equation of the enlightenment with fundamentalist science and Darwinism is seen to be false. It is a dangerous dumbing down that is feeding the resurgence of religion.
And it is critical to broaden education. Scientists should stop setting themselves as spokesman for ultimate reality based on physics training, or half-baked talking points based on Darwinian biology.
The road to historical understanding of religion is long, and there aren’t any shortcuts.
The modern scientific cadre, let’s face it, is ignorant at all points save the technical details of science specialties. Let specialists be specialists. But the grasp of what real secularism is requires a much broader study of modernity. And that’s the irony of the situation. Too many secularists champion their freedom from religion in the name of secularism. But they don’t even understand their own secularism, or its history.
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Posted in religion at 6:59 pm by nemo
With reference to the previous post today, on the ‘demise of religion’, it is interesting to study the history of Buddhism in India. Check out a bit of scanned text from a rare and interesting history of the collision of Buddhism with Brahminism in ancient India, Guide to scanned text: Role Of Bhagavad Gita In Indian History.
We speak of ‘religion’, in contrast with secularism, but the dualities are misleading. Buddhism was like a relative degree of rationalist secularism as religion (as we see it much later) poised in relation to the inherited labyrinth of confusion called (perhaps falsely) Hinduism (as such, whatever it was over two millennia ago). An observer of ‘Buddhism’ (no ism) in the centuries after the rough Axial interval (-600 to 0) might well have had the secularist’s type of confidence, that the demise of Hinduism was at hand as the new and relatively rationalized Buddhism swept the field.
And yet, within centuries neo-brahminism made a comeback, Buddhists were driven from India, and the legacy of Hinduism was resurgent, enduring in stronger force even to this day. And likely to outlast the currently disintegrating Buddhism.
It is thus not safe to predict the future on the issue of religion. And the immediate question is if Christianity resurgent will do the same to our current (much reduced) brand of secularism?
Frankly, I doubt it, but it ought to scare those who pronounce the demise of ‘religion’ (which usually means Christianity).
Part of the problem is that secularism is no longer robust. Too much reductionist scientism, and too little cultural breadth, and, in fact, amnesia as to the meaning of secularism. Secularism is not a movement for Dawkins groupies plying humanist cult consciousness. It just won’t hack it as a replacement.
More, lots, to say here, but the case of Buddhism is telling. Buddhism had all the elements to settle the question of religion for the global future of humanity, but it too became a ‘religion’, and ended up wiped out even in the land of its origin.
And the modern humanist won’t even know what he is missing.
Religion always gets reborn. How about Alfred Wallace with his table rapping, leaving Darwinists the mindbender, ghosts, and also the realization that Darwinism couldn’t explain man’s deep evolutionary potential.
So maybe a future post-Darwinian cult of the Wallace-ites will once again ‘roll the wheel of dharma’.
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Posted in religion at 5:51 pm by nemo
A slow but certain demise
by Terry Sanderson, Guardian
Reposted from: Dawkins site
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2008/oct/30/atheism-religion
All the signs are there: religion will die. I’m just sorry I won’t be around to see it
It is provocative, and a bit hasty, to make predictions about religion. Many include Darwinism in the list of such, and, however debatable that point, it is in fact debatable for some. The point being that to speak in general about ‘religion’ is pointless. Does that include, say, Buddhism. Will humanity reach such a degree of ‘religious’, no, Buddhist, amnesia that the culture of meditation will disappear? What is proposed in these absurd generalizations? That the classic samadhis of yoga cease to occur, and that anyone who even mentions the subject will get denounced as a loon by P.Z. Myers and his cohorts?
Or is it the case that the fans of reductionist Darwinian scientism, among them the faddish followers of Mr. Dawkins, are simply confused about the diversity that lurks under the banner ‘religion’.
It should be noted then that the term ‘religion’ is almost meaningless, and that many, e.g. New Agers, are in the forefront of the critique of ancient religions, as the tide moves to their putative reinvention, under new categories beyond the conceptual catergory of religion.
Much of the decline of religion is part of the tide, not just of secularism, but of the waning of the Axial period’s religions. This effect was long predicted by various religionists themselves, because the ‘essence’ of religion is man’s self-consciousness, while religion’s entropic outcomes tend to lose that quality in mechanization.
In any case, those who propose the passing of religion (as large bodies of cultural allegiance) can become destructive, and what they propose in its place is clearly worse. Are we going to be Darwin worshippers for the next millennia. Religion was not worse.
Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in religion at 5:32 pm by nemo
Portrayal of Religion in the Media: Religion is Political
by Azar Majedi
Reposted from: Dawkins site
http://www.iheu.org/node/3150
Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in Evolution at 3:44 pm by nemo
Oldest Malarial Mummies Shed Light on Disease EvolutionAndrew Bossone in Cairo
for National Geographic News
October 30, 2008
The oldest known cases of malaria have been discovered in two 3,500-year-old Egyptian mummies, scientists announced.
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Posted in Evolution at 3:43 pm by nemo
During the first few decades after the publication of The Origin of Species, for example, Americans had good reason to reject the theory of natural selection and to treat public intellectuals with suspicion. From the beginning, Darwin’s theory was mixed up in the US with the brutal philosophy - now known as Social Darwinism - of the British writer Herbert Spencer. Spencer’s doctrine, promoted in the popular press with the help of funding from Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller and Thomas Edison, suggested that millionaires stood at the top of a scala natura established by evolution. By preventing unfit people from being weeded out, government intervention weakened the nation. Gross economic inequalities were both justifiable and necessary(4).
Darwinism, in other words, became indistinguishable to the public from the most bestial form of laissez-faire economics. Many Christians responded with revulsion. It is profoundly ironic that the doctrine rejected a century ago by such prominent fundamentalists as William Jennings Bryan is now central to the economic thinking of the Christian right. Modern fundamentalists reject the science of Darwinian evolution and accept the pseudoscience of Social Darwinism. The Triumph Of Ignorance By George Monbiot
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