11.29.08
Anti-terror law
From Dawkins sitte
Anti-terror law requires God be acknowledged
by John Cheves, Lexington Herald-Leader
Under state law, God is Kentucky’s first line of defense against terrorism.
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Texad Ed. leaders vs scientists
Texas education leaders at odds with scientists over the origin of life
by Kelly Flynn | The Flint Journal
It appears that everything really is bigger in Texas, including the size and scope of their mistakes.
That’s my conclusion after watching the Texas State Board of Education try to wrangle creationism, or intelligent design, into their state science curriculum.
At issue is the wording of the science education standards that currently require coverage of both the strengths and weaknesses of the theory of evolution.
A majority of board members support the current language, but the science community does not. They argue that it gives creationists a toehold to push a biblical explanation for the origin of humans.
Climate agenda and water
Access to Water Must be High on Climate Agenda: Group
by Svetlana Kovalyova
MILAN (Reuters) – Access to water is a basic human right and should be high on the agenda of climate change talks in Poland next week, the head of an Italian advocacy group said on Friday.
Israel’s critics
RG mail
The Independent 8 May 2008
The loathsome smearing of Israel’s critics
Johann Hari Read the rest of this entry »
Microbes: terrestrial origins
gnxp
More than two-thirds of bacteria may have descended from a
land-dwelling ancestor
http://www.nature.com/news/2008/081128/full/news.2008.1265.html
Anthropological divide
gnxp
The discipline of anthropology has split firmly into two factions -
social anthropologists and evolutionary anthropologists. Hannah Fearn
asks whether or not the warring sides can be reconciled
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=404341&c=1
Iran…
RG mail
NOVEMBER 29, 2008
Germany Loves Iran
Obama has his work cut out on tougher Iran sanctions.
The recent U.N. report that Iran may have enough nuclear material to
build an atomic bomb is causing concern in Germany — not over an
Islamic bomb, but over the risk of tougher U.N. sanctions.
Between Israel and India
RG mail
November 29, 2008
On Religion
Between Israel and India, a Link Based on Culture and, Now, Terrorism
By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
Midway through Wednesday afternoon, Ani Anighotri was doing his
multitasking thing, cruising the Internet while chatting with a friend
about a recent business trip to his homeland, India, from his home in
Georgia. Then an e-mail message popped onto his screen and ended the
jocular conversation. The subject line said, “Attack in Mumbai.”
Terror in Mumbai
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Maximum Terror in Mumbai: Confusion Reigns
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Terrorists target Mumbai Jewish centre
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Terrorists target Mumbai Jewish centre
By Amy Kazmin
Published: November 27 2008 09:09 | Last updated: November 27 2008 09:09
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Mumbai analysis
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National
Karkare’s family spurns Modi’s monetary help
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Buccaneers Incorporated
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From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 5, Issue 48, Dated Dec 06, 2008
Buccaneers Incorporated
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11.28.08
Popper was wrong: history has meaning
As noted in the previous post from today, the eonic effect suggests a further level beyond either the physical or the biological.
Whatever the case we see a dynamic at work that is completely beyond the level of genetics.
The study of universal history has been falsely criticized by Karl Popper, in his critique of historicism, and his assertion that history has no meaning is simply disproved by the evidence of the eonic effect.
Popper Was Wrong, History Has Meaning
The eonic effect is, or was to begin with, first a discovery about history, and only after that a discourse about evolution. Attempts to discover a science of history, or, at the opposite pole, to devise ‘philosophies of universal history’ have a checkered history and have generally suffered from metaphysical overreach, leading to their discredit, and their supposed demise at the hands of science, or biology, or economics. Karl Popper, in his classic attack on Marxism, thought he had skewered the genre of the philosophy of history, dismissed as historicism, to use his somewhat distorted term. But Popper, we should note, was as well a critic of the claims for a science of history. But Popper missed something in the process of an acute insight, and ended up declaring that history had no meaning. Popper was wrong, history has meaning.
More on Revinventing The Sacred
We should see the ceaseless creativity of nature as sacred, argues biologist Stuart Kauffman, despite what Richard Dawkins might say.
By Steve Paulson
We haven’t done justice here at Darwiniana to Stuart Kauffman’s Revinventing the Sacred, partly due to paranoia at OK’ing another science ideology, post-Darwin. James, a frequent commentator here, has been critical, as have I, but in broad strokes the book is not bad, this work will help to get past the Darwin obsession, maybe. It was not intended for James or I. There is much that is reasonable in this medley of analysis, and a few foibles that will prove problematical, e.g. the bias toward free markets.
My original gripe was that in ‘reinventing the sacred’ there wasn’t any mention of Buddhism (the absolute classic of the ‘reinventing the sacred’, for its time, not necessarily ours), but in fact at the end there is, an open door to the history of that splendid instance of somesuch self-organization over a millennium starting with the Axial Age. So it helps to read the book! I hold no brief for Buddhism, as an ism, but merely note the danger of using science to eliminate all of religion, then having to reinvent the wheel. The field of general culture would not profit from such a total denaturing of its content.
Buddhism reminds us that future scienceman, like a Neanderthal, is going to be a regression, not an advance. There doesn’t have to be a problem here, but with Murphy’s Law there will be, maybe.
Actually his earlier book should have done the job, but didn’t, since mainstream scientists pretend he doesn’t exist. They pretend that a lot of people don’t exist, from Wallace, to Soren Lovtrup to…
In fact, the Darwin bunch is a species of ostrichs. They certainly pretend this blog doesn’t exist, it is amusing to watch the Scienceboobs, sorry, Scienceblogs, go into panic mode if you even comment there.
But I think that once you challenge reductionism on one level you begin to think: what’s the next level after that?
The level of physics and biology, and, I think there is still another level: it’s hard to say where that level it will start.
(I should note in passing that J.G.Bennett, occasionally cited here, in his The Dramatic Universe partioned things into three such levels, the hyponomic, autonomic, hypernomic, or material, life, and trans-life, domains.
Bennett is a kind of brilliant trainwreck, interesting as reverse-reductionism, losing your grip as you ascend the scale from reductionsit modes, a sort of papermoney of non-reductionist thinking. But his thinking remains to be reckoned with.
Our problem with ‘reinventing the sacred’ is in those terms a question of man’s encounter, at the boundary of the autonomic zone, of the hypernomic zone. The problem is that we don’t properly observe it.
The stance of Bennett was very odd in many ways. Consciousness, in his scheme of things, is the lowest of the hypernomic modes, and a cosmic energy. It is an odd notion indeed, but explains a few things (like why we can’t make hide no hare of it), which doesn’t mean I agree with Bennett (my task in life seems to be to dismantle this book for confused New Agers).
I cite Bennett (watch out, you can rot your brains reading his books, but he was also very brilliant with General Relativity under his belt in the early thirties) because he is in many ways at the other extreme from the reductionist, and either a guiding thought or a temptation for those like Kauffman stepping beyond the hyponomic realm.
Stepping beyond the hyponomic realm!
And part of our problem is that we tend to collate the autonomic and hypernomic realms.
Enough Bennett.
Try the eonic effect: it looks like ‘self-organization’ of some kind, but doesn’t reduce to biology alone. It shows history, with its own dynamics, flagrantly doing its own thing quite beyond the dynamics of biological evolution.
Human culture doesn’t arise from, and is not explained by, the standard biological/Darwinian framework.
I don’t know how long it is going to take scientists to realize this, but it had better be sometime soon.
Perhaps Kauffman’s book, and the Altenberg 16 can push the game along a bit.
In a way, scientists don’t deserve a paradigm shift. A century and a half of this violent Darwinian pseudo-theory, rigidly maintained as ideology, and still they don’t get it. We really don’t need the scientific cadre to teach us religion. We need them to be fired on the spot. Instead we will be stuck with the pretensions of these devotees of scientism until we find some external means to sweep away science bullshitters.
We need a whole new crew.
There’s more to say here. anon.
From the past few days…
http://darwiniana.com/2008/11/28/world-history-the-clue-to-evolution/
http://darwiniana.com/2008/11/28/anthropology-at-war-with-itself/
http://darwiniana.com/2008/11/28/the-evolution-controversy-4/
http://darwiniana.com/2008/11/27/a-science-of-history-3/
http://darwiniana.com/2008/11/26/paradigms-and-paradigms-self-organization-and-beyond/
http://darwiniana.com/2008/11/25/posts-this-week/
World history: the clue to evolution
Theories of evolution are enforcing a permanent crisis of culture: the key to extricating oneself from the debate is to see that neither science, in its current form so stuck on Darwinism, nor religion, especially in a culture dominated by Biblical mythology, is able to resolve the issue of evolution.
We need to face the facts of scientism: it can give us a useful set of facts about evolutionary history, but it has failed to explain evolution. In fact that is a simple question of scientific methodology: Darwinian natural selection is an improperly observed process, one that has downshifted scientific thought into such a lowgrade form of explanation that it is false on the spot on such issues as ethics and consciousness. And it is doubtful if there is an easy way to correct this, although there are a number of theories in the wings, such as self-organization. But these suffer many of the flaws of Darwinism, despite being considerable advances on Darwinian fundamentalism.
The religious mythology of the Old Testament is a huge obstacle in the way of understanding. But in a strange irony it reflects something we need to understand: the presence of ‘evolution’ in some sense in world history itself.
And it is the study of history that is the only way out of this dilemma. We must be able to open our thinking to see what evolution really is, what is really about, and this the eonic effect grants up to a point, a glimpse.
Scientists have no monopoly over the explication of evolution. Worse, their tactics of using Darwinism as a universal talisman of explanation and of obstruction of any attempt to correct the distortion they have created, throw severe doubt on the current conduct of science. That is a hard truth we have to face.
This is from the third edition to World History And The Eonic Effect:
It is world history itself that shows us the clue to evolution. Darwinists, by distracting attention to times unseen, have confused us completely. We are ready to examine the phenomenon of the eonic effect, the evidence of a non-random pattern in world history. And this will uncover evolution behind history, the real meaning of evolution as a macro process, in an extended sense that is more than genetic. The one thing Darwinists don’t want to find is such a non-random pattern, anywhere. The data for seeing such a pattern has reached critical mass only in our own times, and can be highlighted by simple inspection using careful periodization. The conclusion is inescapable: this structure demonstrates the existence of an evolutionary driver operating where least expected.
Darwinists claim that evolution is random, and that this applies to history also. Has anyone bothered to check the data? Against this, we discover, since the invention of writing, a rich patterning, a definite derandomized structure. So Darwinized thinking is wrong about history. That’s that. The eonic effect is a warning that the whole project of selectionist theory fails with history.
Ayala’s brand of apologetics
Darwin’s Gift to Science and Religion
By Francisco J. Ayala
Joseph Henry Press
ISBN 978 0 309 10231 5
A$40.99
256 pages
Francisco J. Ayala argues that Darwinian evolutionary theory is a gift not only to science, but also to theology. According to Ayala, it absolves God of responsibility for the cruelty, misery, destruction and poor functional design in the natural world. He also claims that evolution is consistent with orthodox Christian belief in an omnipotent, benevolent deity while creationism and intelligent design are not, because evolution accounts for these natural evils with clumsy adaptation, rather than the specific design of a creator.
What a truly worthless argument! ‘God’ interferes in history, is the object of myriad prayers, but with evolution he didn’t interfere.
These hybrids are holding up the progress of social thought to a more reasonable view of evolution and theology.
Anthropology at war with itself
The great divide
20 November 2008
By Hannah Fearn
The discipline of anthropology has split firmly into two factions – social anthropologists and evolutionary anthropologists. Hannah Fearn asks whether or not the warring sides can be reconciled
The social anthropologists need some support against the Darwinization of their field (a look at the eonic effect shows pretty clearly how Darwinism goes wrong on issues of cultural evolution). The simplest self-defense is to realize that Darwin’s theory of natural selection is the problem. Attempts to have a debate without rejecting Darwinism are defensive manoeuvers that wont’ work. Go on the offensive with these Darwinian obsessives: human evolution is something far beyond what Darwin’s theory could resolve.
Don’t be intimidated: selectionist Darwnism is a house of cards behind the loudmouthing of the Darwin bigots.
The Evolution Controversy
The controversy over evolution has persisted since the publication of Darwin’s Origin to the point of becoming almost a liability for secular society itself. The relentless abuse of the evolution question in the pursuit of agendas, religious or scientific, is the principal culprit. But the ultimate source of the endless debate lies in the claims for natural selection made by Darwin, and the metaphysical character of his original theory. The claims for natural selection exceed the limits of correct observation and the result is the reductionist character of Darwinian attempts to explain the whole scope of biological phenomena in terms of scenarios of adaptation. We are left with the distorted world view characteristic of the era of positivistic scientism in which Darwin lived. The original critics of Darwin were not all motivated by religious beliefs and many of the first objections to the selectionist theory came from scientists themselves who saw at once that Darwin had overextended his claims for natural selection. T. H. Huxley himself, the principal champion of Darwin, said as much and thought the emphasis on natural selection would prove a problem. The later emergence of fundamentalist creationism has further confused the whole question. Lately, this has become the renewed challenge of the Intelligent Design movement, a more sophisticated version of the views of Paley. These claims for design simply compound the metaphysical burden of the debate and the result is the deadlock that we see in our own time as the question of evolution seems irresolvable.
Confessions of an Untamed Molecular Structure
PRAISE OF CHROMOSOME “FOLLY”
Confessions of an Untamed Molecular Structure
Antonio Lima-de-Faria
Darwin cult and its propaganda
Darwin’s Birthday as Propaganda
Browne points out that “much of what we know about Darwin and Darwinism, including his celebrity status, is the result of the 1959 celebration in Chicago.” This created the illusion of a consensus among biologists, but the reality is that many have serious doubts about the efficacy of natural selection to do what Darwinism claims for it. Many also doubt that gradualism is the way evolution proceeds. But the consensus means that doubting Darwin becomes a serious academic crime, for which the guilty get expelled from positions of influence and sometimes expelled even from being able to pursue a career in science.
Browne asks: “Will [the 2009] activities have a veiled agenda, as did those of the past?” The answer to this question must be an emphatic yes! If you don’t want your mind to be manipulated, you had better develop your critical thinking skills. For more on Darwin as an icon, go here.
NSS protest Dawkins ban
NSS provokes protest about Turkey’s internet ban on Dawkins
The National Secular Society has joined with a Dutch MEP to complain to the EU Enlargement Commissioner about a Turkish ban on the internet site of Richard Dawkins.
Devolution of a good idea
Charles Darwin’s imagination, as well as his powers of observation and deduction, put him in a class of his own, writes Miriam Cosic
Actually Lamarck, the true founder of evolution, had a better idea than Darwin, with evolution on two levels. (not to be confused with his theory of adaptation)
ADVANCES in thinking rarely happen by those aha! leaps beloved of popular culture. Great scientists build on the work of predecessors, tinkering and testing, sometimes advancing, sometimes consolidating the body of knowledge.
By the time Charles Darwin proclaimed human kinship with apes, the product of amoral natural selection rather than an aha! moment of God’s, the ground had been well prepared. Since the Renaissance, and even more so since the Enlightenment, philosophers had been discovering — and rediscovering from early thinkers eclipsed by Christianity — human-scaled explanations for many of the mysteries of the world.
Theories of evolution had been around for some time. In the 18th century Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck had traced the similarities between not only humans and animals but animals and plants, and Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, had considered evolution in his medical treatise Zoonomia. Even Aristotle, one of the foremost among the clear-thinking Greeks of the distant classical era, had noted the similarities between skeletons of apes and humans.
Did Britain Just Sell Tibet?
Did Britain Just Sell Tibet?
By ROBERT BARNETT
Published: November 24, 2008
THE financial crisis is going to do more than increase unemployment, bankruptcy and homelessness. It is also likely to reshape international alignments, sometimes in ways that we would not expect.
As Western powers struggle with the huge scale of the measures needed to revive their economies, they have turned increasingly to China. Last month, for example, Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, asked China to give money to the International Monetary Fund, in return for which Beijing would expect an increase in its voting share.
Now there is speculation that a trade-off for this arrangement involved a major shift in the British position on Tibet, whose leading representatives in exile this weekend called on their leader, the Dalai Lama, to stop sending envoys to Beijing — bringing the faltering talks between China and the exiles to a standstill.
‘Buy Nothing Day’
Published on Friday, November 28, 2008 by the Chicago Tribune
‘Buy Nothing Day’ Protests Planned
by Tara Malone
Early-bird shoppers might find a few other zombies in their midst this Black Friday – protesters dressed as zombies, that is.
People choose winter coats for themselves donated as part the ‘Buy Nothing Day’ coat exchange, on ‘Black Friday’ in Pawtucket, Rhode Island November 28, 2008. (Brian Snyder/Reuters)”Buy Nothing Day” activists plan to don the ghoulish get-ups as they parade past shops along Chicago’s Magnificent Mile. The zombies reportedly will gather just after 7 a.m. to greet shoppers hoping to get a jump on the holiday discounts.
Organizers say their aim is simple: to promote a day of non-spending in the face of the traditional holiday shopping splurge.
Indigenous people & climate talks
Published on Friday, November 28, 2008 by OneWorld.net
Indigenous People Demand Voice in Climate Talks
by Haider Rizvi
UNITED NATIONS – Calls for greater participation of the world’s indigenous leaders are on the rise as another round of talks on global climate change opens in the Polish city of Poznan next week.
At the banquet on the first evening of the 2008 World Summit of Indigenous Cultures in Taipei. (flickr photo by davidreid) “It is incomprehensible how governments believe they can discuss the effects of climate change and agree targets without the input of those who already face [its] impacts,” said Mark Lattimer of the London-based Minority Rights Group International (MRG).
Global warming and soil
Global Warming Is Changing Organic Matter In Soil: Atmosphere Could Change As A Result
ScienceDaily (Nov. 28, 2008) — New research shows that we should be looking to the ground, not the sky, to see where climate change could have its most perilous impact on life on Earth.
New enviro threat in Great Lakes
Biologists Find New Environmental Threat In North American Lakes
ScienceDaily (Nov. 28, 2008) — A new and insidious environmental threat has been detected in North American lakes by researchers from Queen’s and York universities.
Along with scientists from several Canadian government laboratories, the team has documented biological damage caused by declining levels of calcium in many temperate, soft-water lakes.
Calling the phenomenon “aquatic osteoporosis,” Queen’s PhD candidate Adam Jeziorski, lead author of the study, notes that calcium is an essential nutrient for many lake-dwelling organisms. “Once calcium declines below a certain threshold, some keystone species can no longer reproduce,” he says. “These species and other organisms that feed on them are endangered.”
Slow-Motion Genocide
RG mail
Countercurrents.org 26 November 2008
Israels Slow-Motion Genocide In Occupied Palestine
By Stephen Lendman Read the rest of this entry »
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