01.31.09
Posted in Booknotes, Evolution, The Eonic Effect at 5:32 pm by nemo
Darwin the abolitionist
The theory of evolution is regarded as a triumph of disinterested scientific reason. Yet, on the 150th anniversary of “On the Origin of Species,” new research reveals that Darwin was driven to the idea of common descent by a great moral cause Adrian Desmond
I was at first a little suspicious that this new book by Desmond and Moore, authors of a good bio of Darwin, would be some sort of new brand of Darwin propaganda, but as this selection shows (below) the critical tone of the previous book seems to have entered the depiction.
Although Social Darwinism is blamed on Spencer, Darwin remains equally culpable, as Desmond points out here. As he puts it, “Darwinism,” then, was never distinct from “social Darwinism.”
There is a kind of urgency getting past the pseudo-science spawned by Darwinists, and in looking at new forms of post-theory on the evolution question, theories that don’t suffer the Oedipus Paradox, or generate violent unconscious ‘applied evolutionist scenarios’ in those who confuse theory and action.
The study of the eonic effect foots the bill here, first by showing how ‘evolution’ actually occurs in world history, and by producing a new kind of post-theory, where the ‘observer’ and his ‘theory’ are immersed in the ‘evolution’ being described. The depiction is on two levels, to keep the confusions of teleology at bay, and the description of evolution is always bound up in a special kind of ‘eonic sequence’, which can never act in the observer’s present, thus preventing the kind of confusion we see in Social Darwinism.
Resolving the Oedipus Paradox As we discover the eonic effect, we will see this problem resolved by creating a new kind of historical model that unites in tandem the definitions of ‘evolution and history’, the one emerging from the other. ‘Evolution’ is always seen looking backwards, and never applies directly to the free potential of the present, and the agent acting out history. In the interaction of these two we see the direct appearance of ethical evolution/behavior, induced and ‘free’, or on the way to being free, its evolution and self-evolution (i.e. history) connected yet separate. It’s pretty obvious, with this new model, an ethical override arrives to induce a ‘should’ about murder and botched theories with their inducements of mayhem.
Here’s the selection from Desmond:
There is, also, a sadder irony. Darwin’s was a blinkered humanism. It reflected the conflicted nature of British society, where half the nation was trying to free slaves, while their expatriate peers in Australia and elsewhere were busy exterminating nomadic aborigines in the name of economic progress. In the economic depression that began in the late 1830s, some 400,000 unemployed were shipped from Britain to the colonies annually. The boatloads devastated local cultures to the extent that the annihilation of all aboriginal peoples was projected within a century.
Darwin himself had witnessed ethnic-cleansing on a world scale: the pampas Indians in Argentina butchered by General Rosas’s gauchos to clear the ground for cattle; the last Tasmanians herded into camps. The Beagle arrived amid the Xhosa wars in the Cape, at the start of the Boers “great trek.” Such events prefigured a darker side to Darwinism; and Darwin’s own vision became bleaker after he read Malthus on the wars and famine stemming from population pressures. He used Malthusian ideas to normalise and naturalise the colonial genocide, making it part of the evolutionary process, suggesting how such conflict was not only “natural,” but beneficial (inasmuch as the “fitter” survivors carried the human race forward). The uncivilised peoples of the plains were going the way of the megafauna he found fossilised under their feet. But Darwin took colonial conflict as an inevitability to be explained, not a policy choice to be challenged. It is a supreme irony that the gentle, squeamish abolitionist should end up justifying colonial eradication.
He didn’t see the incongruity. And as the years passed he adopted more of the attitudes of his gentlemanly class about the “higher” moral, technological and intellectual order achieved by white Europeans. Sixty-two by the time he announced his views on human evolution, in The Descent of Man (1871), he was now mired in his contemporaries’ “ladder” image of world cultures, with whites on the top civilisational rung and blacks at the bottom. The notion of a unilinear “higher” and “lower,” denounced in his old notebooks as meaningless, was effectively reinstated in cultural terms. He was following the trend, but in shifting the emphasis from a biological racial kinship to a single cultural yardstick for all races, standardised on western achievements, his science failed to live up to its early emancipatory promise.
“Darwinism,” then, was never distinct from “social Darwinism.” It is traditional to deflect blame away from Darwin himself for all the unpleasant social implications of this phrase, keeping his theory of natural selection scientific and ideologically untainted—the blame is conveniently shunted off on to his young contemporary Herbert Spencer. But this attempt to protect the purity of Darwinism won’t wash. Indeed, Darwin, who thought Spencer a windbag, would not have recognised a separate category of “social Darwinism”—for him, the “social” was integral to his system. He dealt with race, slavery, genocide and colonial conflict from the first: his theory of evolution was intended to explain society.
So one has to live with Darwin warts and all. He was a man of his time, a mirror to his culture; racist while also race-saving, distressed by cruelty as he naturalised genocide, able to pass the blame to nature, rather than man. History is messy and Darwin was always a paradoxical thinker, the more so as he began to bend with the breeze late in life.
To celebrate historical figures we have first to understand them. In 2009, 200 years after his birth, it is time to switch the spotlight onto the younger Darwin—the man whose belief in human brotherhood transmuted into an evolutionary theory of common descent. Rather than being morally subversive, as his Christian critics claim, Darwin’s achievement was morally grounded. Rather than being a dispassionate practice, his science had a humanitarian drive. It made brothers and sisters not only of all human races, but of all life.
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Posted in Science & Religion, The Eonic Effect at 4:50 pm by nemo
Why Do People Believe in God? By Larry Beinhart, AlterNet. Posted January 31, 2009.
Many people continue to clutch to their belief in God, even though there’s no evidence of a higher power. Why?
The harm done by Darwinism, and the New Atheists, on the issue of religion is fully in evidence here in this Alternet article. Alternet is a great site for leftist news, but I wish they would skip the monthly dose of trying to convert us to atheism, and publish some more realistic articles on the subject of religion. I was an atheist once, almost, but after Dawkins’ The God Delusion I was forced to evacuate ‘atheism’ for something under another label. Dawkins has made life difficult for atheists! (Actually I am neither an atheist, theist or agnostic)
Trying to explain belief in God using reductionist explanations, or evolutionary Just So Stories is stupid, and not helpful in the current cultural mix, where the confusions of religion are muddled further by the false secularism of the age of scientism.
Beinart tells us we have no evidence of a higher power. Note that those who use this term use it instead of the term ‘god’, significant.
Let us consider the term then in and of itself: a higher power. It is false to say we have no evidence of such a thing.
The eonic effect, or, to start, very clearly the data of the Axial Age shows very clearly the evidence for some kind of ‘higher power’ at work in history.
I must interject that this ‘higher power’ is very doubtfully ‘god’, but simply a macro process of some kind that is involved in the evolutionary emergence of civilization.
Since this was observed by the ancient Israelites (who didn’t use the term ‘god’ either) who innocently confused it with the action of divinity (confusing issue) in history, it would seem that the Israelites believed in a higher power of some kind because they had powerful evidence for that.
So much for the evidence.
In a cultural environment controlled by the most idiotic science obsessives a fair evaluation of the question will prove impossible, and the Dawkins atheists will end up as one-dimensional as the religious fanatics.
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Posted in Evolution, selections, World History and The Eonic Effect at 4:29 pm by nemo
The most beautiful part of the eonic model is the way it resolves a question latent in Kant’s essay on history.
And this journey throughout the realm of so-called ‘transcendental idealism’ shows us why it is that the evolution question is so intractable: we are never really seeing evolution, only its outer representation.
The term itself is a problem: don’t confuse Kant’s ‘transcendental’ with ‘transcendent’ or supernatural.
Transcendental idealism is really well-matched with Newtonian physics, and basic science as an extension or commentary.
See also: Visions Of A Ghostseer
4.4 Kant’s Challenge
Our framework is complete, but it is useful, and appropriate, seeing the resemblance to transcendental idealism, to connect our model with a classic theme of the philosophy of history, in the title of this chapter, in the process solving one of the classic difficulties in this subject. One of the deepest currents of modern thought, beside the rise of theories of evolution, lies in the heritage of the philosophy of history, whose existence is justified by default in the failure to find a ‘science of history’. No use complaining that science has replaced philosophy or that Darwin explains everything. Our simple model with its eonic mainline and discrete freedom sequence stages a lightweight transition through this terrain. Strictly speaking our model based on a stream and sequence contrast, but then in this chapter has annexed the ideas of ‘causality and freedom’ as an adjunct, which requires explanation in the imperfect match. It is also empirical and can’t be used for complex secondary deductions, but we can manage a few hunches with our historical black box, and the embedded freedom sequence tweaks the issues very directly.
4.4.1 The Challenge Resolved And A Kant Fix
Within two centuries the necessary data is emerging for the first time to resolve Kant’s Challenge in unexpected fashion. But we must fix the confusion over asocial sociability that flows into the vacuum of archaeological data, data only now showing a way out of the trap. The great irony here is that we will see Kant caught up most beguilingly in the very turning point that constitutes one aspect of his problem’s solution. The answer needs just a bit more time and perspective. It is a beautiful prophecy and proof of the power of his system of critiques. [i]
Kant’s essay, as a ‘minor’ work, is actually one of the most influential of modern history, for it enters on cat’s paws into the whole struggle of modern philosophy of history and ideology. It seems to foretell the next two critiques, and is a deceptive work in the sense of giving consideration to what Kant calls ‘asocial sociability’, but is really pursuing a different issue, in the process asking a question. Many have answers to questions of history, Kant, with a curious brilliance, had the presence of mind to but ask, and leave some answer to the future, for he must have sensed that he was given inadequate data. The essay arises just after the first critique, and yet seems to foretell the next two.
The unsuspected significance of this work shows us something very elegant about our understanding of history, if we can manage the dangers of historical directionality, and its teleological implications, which we can successfully evade with our ‘discrete-continuous’ model. Kant created a critical system, yet was so curiously wry as to propose not a Critique of Historical Reason, the curious lot of his successor Dilthey (Karl Popper’s The Poverty of Historicism being one attempt at this book), but an Idea for a Universal History. We shall have to hope the first book, still unwritten, appears in the attempt at the second.[ii]
Our treatment of Kant’s Challenge will emerge over the course of the text, but at the same time let us note that we have already resolved the question, in essence, almost without trying. We can say that the eonic pattern satisfies, to a fuzzy first approximation of the Universal Historian, a different but related question to that which Kant posed, as we see in broadest scope that the solution is within the range of the cycl ical driver of an evolutionary emergentism. Note Kant’s wording. It is very similar to our distinction of historical determination and free action, macro and micro.
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Posted in Evolution at 3:57 pm by nemo
Some links for today on evolution
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Saving Darwin’s Soul: Does His 21st Century Fate Rest on Fighting 19th Century Battles?
Steve Fuller
This week marks the publication of the Darwin book that has so far received the most advance publicity in the UK, Darwin’s Sacred Cause: Race, Slavery and the Quest for Human Origins, by Adrian Desmond and James Moore (Allen Lane). Desmond and Moore, both together and separately, have written some of the best histories of the Victorian life sciences, including a best-selling biography of Darwin. You can get a sense of the book from this excerpt currently featured in Prospect Magazine.
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David Attenborough on Darwin
Nature Video, David Attenborough
Reposted from: Dawkins site
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uz7U4k522Pg (HD version available)
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Let’s talk sense about our origins
by Simon Barnes, Times Online
Reposted from: Dawkins site
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/simon_barnes/article5621593.ece
Any time someone discusses evolution without speaking nonsense, it is a triumph of the human spirit
Dinosaurs are not extinct. I know, I saw plenty this week. I went dinosaur-watching, and saw Circus aeruginosus, Recurvirostra avosetta and Tyto alba. I didn’t even have to travel too far to find them: they are part of the landscape of East Suffolk. They stem from the maniraptors, which include Tyrannosaurus rex (below), but only one line still survives and that is the Neornithes. You can find it today represented by creatures better known as birds. Feathered dinosaurs.
Ah yes, evolution. You will hear a good deal about evolution over the coming week as the BBC celebrates the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin. This year is also the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species, the book that changed the world. The high spot will be Sir David Attenborough’s Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life, on BBC One tomorrow.
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Dennett:http://asunews.asu.edu/20090130_dennett
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First Chapter
‘Darwin’s Sacred Cause’
By ADRIAN DESMOND and JAMES MOORE
Published: January 30, 2009
Introduction
Unshackling Creation
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‘Banquet at DelMonico’s’
Evolution arguments raged in Darwin’s time, and continue today
Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species came out in 1859, the definitive and most convincing statement of the doctrine known then and today as evolution. Though Darwin was a biologist, a number of other 19th-century thinkers picked up the concept and ran with it to other fields, notably economics and sociology.
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Well-Informed: Dr. Robert Marks and the Evolutionary Informatics Lab
Anika Smith
Editor’s Note: After this podcast first aired, Dr. Marks’ website, originally hosted by Baylor University, was taken down in an act of censorship. You can read the story here and watch part of it in Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.
In today’s episode of ID The Future, Casey Luskin interviews Dr. Robert Marks about his work in evolutionary informatics at Baylor University. Marks explains that evolutionary informatics seeks to emulate evolution on a computer, allowing for new engineering designs to be developed. Unlike Darwinian evolution, this process does not advance gradually, and requires a certain amount of external information to be fed into the computer before the process can begin; in other words, the systems must be designed before the evolution can begin. This contrast fueled Marks’ interest in intelligent design, and has led him to critically analyze a number of evolutionary computer programs that claim to prove Darwin’s theories.
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Preparing For Climate Change: Analyzing Genome Of Heat And Drought Resistant Cereal Plant
ScienceDaily (Jan. 30, 2009) — The global climate is changing, and this change is already impacting food supply and security. People living in regions already affected by aridity need plants that can thrive / grow under dry conditions.
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Gene’s Past Could Improve The Future Of Rice
ScienceDaily (Jan. 30, 2009) — In an effort to improve rice varieties, a Purdue University researcher was part of a team that traced the evolutionary history of domesticated rice by using a process that focuses on one gene.
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Dinosaur Fossils Fit Perfectly Into The Evolutionary Tree Of Life, Study Finds
ScienceDaily (Jan. 30, 2009) — A recent study by researchers at the University of Bath and London’s Natural History Museum has found that scientists’ knowledge of the evolution of dinosaurs is remarkably complete.
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Bird Song Discoveries May Lead To Refinement Of Darwinian Theory
ScienceDaily (Jan. 31, 2009) — For Williams College biology professor Heather Williams, the songs birds sing are more than a pleasant part of a spring day. They are a window into how communication works in the natural world. A birdsong is more than just an encapsulated package of information, it is “a behavior frozen in time.”
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Posted in In the News at 3:28 pm by nemo
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Most effective climate engineering solutions revealed
For similar stories, visit the Climate Change Topic Guide
Many scenarios have been proposed to help us engineer our way out of potential climate disaster, and now a new study could point us towards the ones that are most effective.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16495-most-effective-climate-engineering-solutions-revealed.html
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The cost of rapidly reducing greenhouse gas emissions over the next decade to slow the progress of global warming could be less than 1% of world domestic product by 2030, according to a new report.
“Pathways to a Low Carbon Economy,” a detailed report by McKinsey & Co, lists more than 200 opportunities, spread across ten sectors and twenty-one geographical regions, that have the potential to cut global greenhouse gas emissions by 35% below 1990 levels by 2030, a reduction of 70% from the business as usual scenario.
http://www.sustainablebusiness.com/index.cfm/go/news.display/id/17555
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Just What Is a Green Job Anyway?
President Obama’s call for “green jobs” has created both general confusion and competing interpretations of the term.
http://www.alternet.org/environment/123819/just_what_is_a_green_job_anyway_/
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You Decide
Freedom Fighters, Terrorists or Schlemiels?
By SAUL LANDAU
Condi Rice: “What we’re seeing here, in a sense, is the growing birth pangs of a new Middle East.â€
Jon Stewart: “Birth pangs? Yes, I believe today’s contraction took out a city block.â€
On January 21, President Obama telephoned the King of Jordan, the Prime Minister of Israel, the President of Egypt and Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian National Authority, before dispatching former Senator George Mitchell to spearhead peace negotiations. He excluded Hamas leaders from his phone tree, although they had won the 2006 election to represent the people of Gaza. Obviously, Hamas has also won the label “terrorist†and, as Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni proudly if not smugly assured members of the National Press Club in Washington DC, Israel would not talk with Hamas. “We do not negotiate with terrorists,†she asserted, moral indignation dripping from her words. (January 16)
http://www.counterpunch.org/landau01302009.html
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Published on Saturday, January 31, 2009 by Reuters
Oxfam Says New US Strategy Needed in Afghanistan
by Jonathon Burch
KABUL – The United States must change its strategy in Afghanistan if it is to avoid a humanitarian crisis, with millions of Afghans struggling to survive and violence at its worst levels since 2001, an aid group said on Saturday.
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/01/31
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Published on Saturday, January 31, 2009 by CommonDreams.org
Wither Wall Street
by Ralph Nader
Soon after the passage in 1999 of the Clinton-Rubin-Summers-P. Graham deregulation of the financial industry, I boarded a US Air flight to Boston and discovered none other than then-Secretary of the Treasury Lawrence Summers a few seats away. He was speaking loudly and constantly on his cell phone. When the plane took off he invited me to sit by him and talk.
After reviewing the contents of this Citibank-friendly new law called the Financial Modernization Act—I asked him: “Do you think the big banks have too much power?”
He paused for a few seconds and replied: “Not Yet.” Intrigued by his two word answer, I noted the rejection of modest pro-consumer provisions, adding that now that the banks had had their round, wasn’t it time for the consumers to have their own round soon?
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/01/31
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Published on Saturday, January 31, 2009 by the Portland Press Herald
Final Piece in Our Economic Collapse
Letting the health care market segment wither by lack of public support will do no one any good.
by John Rockefeller
Having campaigned on a broadly sketched platform of hope for those on the fringes of economic and physical viability, President Obama is watching the ticker line expand to the point where half of the U.S. population considers itself either underemployed or underserved.
An expanding percentage of this group — 43.6 million by the Centers for Disease Control’s 2006 pre-recession count — are without health care.
This number has certainly burgeoned well beyond the 50 million mark given the fresh round of layoffs, financial failures and re-budgeting by the recently unemployed.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/01/31-6
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Interpress service
World Economic Forum: Davos Under Fire
Public Eye Awards 2009
by Gustavo Capdevila
DAVOS, Switzerland – One of the few indicators on the rise at this time of economic and financial crisis is the level of repudiation expressed about those responsible for the disaster, and about the institutions sponsoring them.
This became apparent at this eastern Swiss tourist resort, the venue for the annual sessions of the World Economic Forum (WEF), one of the arenas which has supported the deregulation policies blamed for causing the crisis.
Socialist Swiss lawmaker Susanne Leutenegger was outspoken in linking the WEF with the crisis. The Davos Forum has been one of the ideological agencies behind these policies, as finance, industry and politics mingled at the Forum sessions, which started 39 years ago, she said.
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/01/31-0
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Posted in you've got mail at 3:06 pm by nemo
RG mail
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/afghanistan/4388351/Barack-Obama-abandons-Afghan-President-Hamid-Karzai.html
Barack Obama abandons Afghan President Hamid Karzai
The Barack Obama administration has abandoned Afghan President Hamid Karzai and now believes he is a major obstacle to defeating the Taliban-led insurgency.
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Ha’aretz January 30, 2009
Netanyahu: I’m not bound by Olmert pledges, won’t evacuate settlements
His guidelines – no division of Jerusalem, no return to 1967 borders .
By Mazal Mualem
Likud Party Chairman Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday said he would not be bound by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s commitments to evacuate West Bank settlements and withdraw from the territories.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/29/spain-israel-gaza-crimes-humanity
Spain investigates claims of Israeli crimes against humanity in Gaza
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http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/01/26/stiglitz.finance.crisis/index.html
CNN January 26, 2009
How to rescue the Bank Bailout
· Joseph E. Stiglitz: The bank bailout has failed to restart prudent lending by banks
· Stiglitz says banks made reckless loans and were burned as a result
· Stiglitz: They borrowed so much money that they couldn’t handle a downturn
· Economist says it’s time to consider government takeovers of weaker banks
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A Timeline of the Mortgage Crisis: A field guide to the loan sharks and
politicos who got us into the predatory lending mess.
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2008/07/where-credit-is-due-timeline.html
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http://www.straight.com/article-198462/gwynne-dyer-will-afghanistan-be-obama%3F%3Fs-vietnam Georgia Straight January 29, 2009
Will Afghanistan be Obama’s Vietnam?
By Gwynne Dyer
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http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m51394&hd=&size=1&l=e
Israeli military refuses water filtration system for Gaza
Saed Bannoura – IMEM
Saturday January 31, 2009
The Israeli government has blocked the entry of a much-needed water filtration system into the ravaged Gaza Strip.
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http://usa.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/59000
Media Monitors January 25, 2009
An interview with Gilad Atzmon
by Kourosh Ziabari
“While in the European Ghetto the Jews were intimidated by their surrounding reality, in the Israeli Ghetto the Jews intimidate others. They insist that the entire Middle East must be kept in a state of constant anxiety.”
Gilad Atzmon is unique in his stance, unprecedented in his voice and unequivocal in his statements. As an Israel-born jazz musician and anti-Zionist activist, he propagates and chants his anti-Israeli contemplations explicitly and once he finds the opportunity.
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Group: Settlement Info Implicates Israeli Gov’t
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/01/30-4
Close Torture Loopholes, Physicians’ Group Urges
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/01/30-1
Turkish PM Greeted by Cheers After Israel Debate Clash
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/01/30-5
Homelessness Surges as Funding Falters
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/01/30-0
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01.30.09
Posted in selections, World History and The Eonic Effect at 8:47 pm by nemo
Are there really any scientific theories of evolution? Too bad, but maybe not.
Alfred Wallace began to realize the problem. Duncehead Darwin never became the wiser.
Scientists have little understanding of the way that scientific theories begin to lose their objectivity as they ascend from physics through biology into the the realm of history. The Oedipus Paradox, outlined by Popper in his critique of Marxism (it works just as well with any sociological/historical theory, including those that purport to be ‘biological’ and deal with human evolution), shows us that ‘theories’ don’t really apply to historical situations (in the sense of scientific laws along the lines of physics), something new is needed.
In the study of the eonic effect we discover the significant fact that ‘theories’, and science, are historically dependent, and inside history, and more than that inside the ‘eonic sequence’, hence ‘output’ of the system under study. No objectivity is possible in that sense!
The implication is that we should be wary of the claims of scientific objectivity in theories of evolution, especially in the case of man.
The question of the Oedipus Paradox makes this issue explicit.
Another passage from World History And The Eonic Effect on the Oedipus Paradox (not online, but I am putting it up here).
The other passage is here: The Oedipus Paradox, along with Botched Theories And The Coefficient Of Murder
4.2.1 Ideology and Theory: The Oedipus Paradox
We confront one of the paradoxes of evolutionary theory, one in which the observer is himself immersed in evolution, where he is constructing theories that might cause his own behavior to change in the present. This paradox is relatively unimportant with respect to the vistas of deep time, but assumes greater and greater importance as ‘evolution’, albeit transforming into history by our definition, closes on the present. This results in the ‘non-linear’ self-interaction of agent and theory in the present. Consider the difference in your behavior if you believe, or disbelieve, in Darwin’s theory. Popper also indicated one aspect of this in what he called the Oedipus paradox:
The idea that a prediction may have influence upon the predicted event is a very old one. Oedipus, in the legend, killed his father whom he had never seen before; and this was the direct result of the prophecy, which had caused his father to abandon him. This is why I suggest the name ‘Oedipus effect’ for the influence of the prediction upon the predicted event.
Our beliefs about natural selection contain a subtle prediction about what will happen if we ‘act out the theory’. We can see from the eonic effect that no higher culture will be the result! Quite the contrary. If the rules of the game were survival of the fittest the long term trend toward empire would go unchecked, and democracy and equalization, connected with freedom induction, would be superfluous.
If we assume that natural selection is ‘how things are’, the source of all higher complexity, we put a premium on its ‘mechanism’, e.g. competition, and the ‘acting out’ of selectionist presumption as a curiously inverted ethic. We should be wary that something is missing in our understanding! Clearly the generalization about selection must be false, somewhere. We can see this if we consider this paradox: if survival of the fittest produces altruism, then won’t more competition produce greater altruism? Shouldn’t we disregard ethics and altruistic action long enough to produce more ethically altruistic men? This contradiction takes many forms, and strongly suggests, independently of the evidence (which isn’t provided in any case) that natural selection is a false generalization, and that a ‘boundary present’ issue must be taken into consideration in theories of evolution, as opposed to theories of physics.
There would seem to be many evolutions at work, natural selection, and whatever produced its antithetical constructs, viz. altruism. This is the blunder that causes Social Darwinism. The only solution is to remember that theory itself is historically embedded. We have no external observers doing objective theories of evolution. This is why the religionists tend to see the paradox sooner, and so disconcertingly tweak the Darwinist, to his befuddlement. His hi-tech smart theory was supposed to override the issues of religion. But we can see that religion, however primitive, is a series of injunctions, ‘shoulds’, statements about what the ‘observer’ should do in the future, agree or not. Not a theory at all, it nonetheless respects the transition from past to present, to future. It wishes to script the action of the agent, from the present to the future. It is a statement about potential. We need to distinguish then these ‘free action’ scripts, from theories or generalizations taken to be universally valid. And that, with grim finality, is the end of simplistic theories of evolution. The problem is that theories of physics, in their spectacular success, defined from the start the meaning we give to science, but we can see that this definition starts to break down almost at once, and that theories of evolution are going to be an order of magnitude more difficult, confronted with this stubborn non-linear effect.
Note: Popper on Marx We can’t forget the context of Popper’s critique of historicism. Popper’s statement was a scolding challenge to Karl Marx whose ‘predictions’ of a future social state according to some ‘law’ of history collided with the ‘free agency’ of those arriving in the wake of the prediction. Some will protest that Lenin never made such claims in that form, but the example in the abstract is illuminating. And it must be admitted that history records the paradoxical behavior of those successors to Marx who attempted at once to either wait for the prediction to take effect, idling and content to do nothing, or else by some sophistry of theory and ‘praxis’ intent on bringing the prediction about. However, we should note that any historical generalization, even, or especially, the tacit version of Darwin’s selectionist theory, conceals some version of the historical inevitability objection, and that critiques of Marx, on this issue, suddenly fall silent as to the similar charge against ‘laws of economics’ seen in neo-classical economics.
The confusion arose from attempting to imitate the record of past revolutions, e.g. the French Revolution, and their connection to the emergence of freedom. We will examine this point later. The fallacy lies in false ascription of some ‘law’ to the future. The only solution is to be wary of all theories of evolution that do not define the special status of the observer’s present. We may speak of ‘historical determination’ in the past, but we must be wary of such generalizations if they intrude on the boundary of the present.
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Posted in selections, World History and The Eonic Effect at 4:53 pm by nemo
Freedom Evolves! Huxley’s Evolution #2
We have discovered Huxley ’s evolution #2, and we are in the strange position of trying to disprove Darwin in practice, the effect Huxley noted. And we should begin to share Huxley’s sense of alarm, for we see that the self-interaction of selectionist theory, as a belief system, with history is producing wrong results. We end up needing to oppose the theory in practice (hopefully!), a built-in falsification, a jamming process so to speak. The whole scenario is cockeyed.
In fact, we have produced an empirical counterexample to the claim that freedom in any sense evolves through an adaptionist scenario.
Freedom evolves The evidence of the discrete freedom sequence, and, indeed, the whole pattern of eonic data, clearly demonstrates that something larger is involved in anything we might call the ‘evolution of freedom’. In the process we detect something remarkable: a macro component to this ‘freedom evolution’.
The factor of macro-action in the emergence of freedom is discovered unexpectedly, and generates a paradox of the Kantian type. And that a cautionary tale as we proceed to examine the ‘realizations of freedom’, the factor of micro-action. Our data gives us two such moments, both at the point of the divide in successive transitions: post-Solonic Greece, and the emergent democratic streams at the divide following the French and American Revolutions.
Huxley’s Evolution # 2 Problems arise with Darwin’s theory and we have seen some crucial ones, among a host of others:
1. Selectionist theory claims that agency or even ‘free will’ in some sense arises in an adaptive scenario. Yet we can see from the eonic data that there is a macro component to the question of freedom. In general, we must demand to see empirical data demonstrating the evolutionary process in action, on the scale of our hurricane argument.
2. Darwinists often speak of the ‘gene for religion’, and would have to claim that religion arises as an adaptive formation. Yet we can see in historical times the way in which religions arise. There is an explicit process of ‘distributed evolution’ that proceeds beyond local adaptation toward a global result.
3. Sociobiologists seem to claim that ‘human nature’ is a given from the selectionist evolution of the Paleolithic. But this is pure speculation, and we see in history something far more complex. We can barely define human nature at all, and can see that historical evolution might be changing that human nature as it goes along.
4. Natural selection is most certainly not the driving force of world history. Survivors often need special help in the eonic sequence, and the ‘survival of the fittest’ produces huge obstracles to a genuine advance, which often does an end run around the ‘survivors’.
There are endless other problems arising with this runaway usage of selectionist thinking. Adaptation is not the issue. It is time to be finished with Darwinian fantasies. Survival of the fittest, and competition, and economic action, are not the laws of macroevolution. All of the advances we see come from high performance intervals of seminal innovation. And these appear in a developmental sequence.
One problem is that we are so used to a different concept of evolution that it is hard to change our semantic and verbal habits. And yet we should persist in our usage, leaving open the option of a completely revised terminology. The reason is that Darwinists, after denying that their theory applies to history, cleverly or unconsciously apply it anyway, and in any case the work of sociobiologists now wishes to Darwinize history.
But we can already sense the disastrous consequences of Darwinian thinking It puts a premium on social conflict, competition, and misleads those who are confronted with the ethical potential in all situations.
Thus the problem is the exact connection to man in the Paleolithic. In general, there are several possibilities. Our eonic sequence is continuous all the way back, and involves all stages of man’s evolution. Or else it is itself discontinuous and switches on at crucial stages in man’s evolution (how would it do that?). We can take the matter no further without more evidence. By showing that more data is required, we must at once caution Darwinists against the abuse of their theory based on theoretical hallucination, and the dangers of theoretical tragedy.
But one thing we can say is that the visible eonic effect gives us a snapshot of ‘evolution of some kind’ and that we see this in history. There is no other possibility, granted our way of defining the sliding scale (evolution to history). The process we see has its finger in too many pies for any other type of evolutionary explanation to work. We can only fit one elephant in a room this size.
We would do well to forget Darwin applied to history, given this broader perspective, since the issue of ethical action is retabled with great vigor and takes the immediate form of the question of qualitative action. Not the winner take all of survival of the fittest, but the high performance levels required to advance the system, is the key. We must take the gifts of nature and render them at the level of the highest motive, lest we degrade our chances in the spectacle of hallucinatory evolutions. We may not easily state the canon of this ethic, but it makes no difference to the fact that this is a system of generated potential, and it requires more than mechanized principles of predator/prey nonsense. The great irony is that the great religions were the fittest survivors, and our eonic system must leapfrog the Eurasian inertia to reseed political freedoms, and indeed a renewal of science, which did not survive the Darwinian thinning out of Axial antiquity.
We have an ingrained tendency to blame history for our own faults. We can see that the eonic sequence is operating on a minimum principle and is always benign, while the realizations in its wake rapidly turn into something else. If, for example, democracy is an eonic emergent, then anything less loses it status by comparison. As our emergent source areas proceed toward a new liberal civilization they also tend to imperialism in their exteriors, spoiling the outcome, one not benefited at all by wrong-headed theories of the Darwinists.
It never occurs to anyone that ‘nature red in tooth and claw’, as a depiction of nature, can be as anthropomorphic as anything from religion. Even a cursory glance at the eonic sequence shows an organized and benign process that is waiting on man to respond with something more than the usual carnivorous logic. It creates a potential for political freedom, for example, but man takes millennia to respond, and even then the realization is inadequate. Best to be forgetting Darwin at this point. It seems to be man that is ‘red in tooth and claw’, projecting his nature onto the universe.
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Here’s the original post and book selection discussing ‘Huxley and evolution #2′:
http://darwiniana.com/2009/01/25/huxley-and-evolution-2/
Here’s a selection from World History And The Eonic Effect that I didn’t put online: on Huxley’s belated realization that something was wrong with Darwin’s theory.
He stumbled on the basic gap in Darwinism: it doesn’t really answer the question as to how many evolved. We can see that something else is required to explain the man that we see, the photo finish argument that arises to cast doubt on Darwinian claims about the descent of man.
Huxley and Social Darwinism
It wasT. H. Huxley himself who spotted the flaw in the theory of natural selection in his work, Evolution and Ethics, and in the process unwittingly exposed a paradox in the theory he had so long defended. His perception was that there must be something else beside the ‘law of evolution’, survival of the fittest, at work, for man was condemned to oppose its effects in practice, on ethical grounds. Whence, if we accept this dualism, comes this evolution # 2? Here the data of the eonic effect shows us at once two levels of evolutionary action.
Here the effects of Darwin’s theory here were ideological, and misleading, if not disastrous. It is not adequate to point out that Darwin was himself at pains to distance himself from the misinterpretation of his own theory, in the confusion with the views of such thinkers as Herbert Spencer who is blamed for everything. Like software with a glitch, the consequences were immediate. This refers to the controversies of so-called Social Darwinism in this ambiguity of ‘evolutions’. Here ‘theory’ confronts its own effect of the theory itself on history, after it enters this history. For the first unconscious suggestion, in this case, is that unlimited social competition in the immediate present will improve genetic structure in the far future, a gross misunderstanding of a theory taken to be true at all times.
This ‘survival of the fittest’ aspect is, in any case, demonstrably false of man’s social experience, as the mechanism of cultural evolution. Thus extreme competition is met by the response of social law in the evolution of civilization, if not economy. And the place of Adam Smith here is entirely complex and misleading, this philosopher being a de facto source of a new ethics, even as his work is polarized between an economic and moral dimension. Survival of the fittest business firm is simply another process, as is the tonic of Olympiad sports competition. The issue of evolutionary causality in the study of the evolution of civilization has been so confused by assumptions of material causative motive, as in the imputation of economic determinism, that the real evolution of social cooperation seems to have been forgotten. In general, theories of evolution must themselves interact with the near future of all free action, in a confusion of external observer, and temporal participant, ‘acting out theory’. Amoebas had never read Darwin, but after the publication of his book cultural evolution underwent clear changes. We see the danger of factoring the fact-value distinction out of the statement of evolutionary ‘laws’. The record of civilization shows something very different and reveals clear evidence of centuries of ‘idle time’, dark Assyrian centuries, between interrupts as the ‘winners’ of social competition gain control.
These issues invoke the field of original meanings of the term ‘evolutionism’ as they were born from ideas of progress and passed into the radicalism of the period of revolutionary modernism and thence into the conservatizing theme of social competition, and survival of the fittest, in the rise of a new form of economy. We are left suspicious the radical ‘shoulds’ of social justice passed into the ‘musts’ of ‘scientific’ counsel as determinism in a reversed conservative vein, although the later socialists of the nineteenth century, by and large, were adherents to the Darwinian theory. Darwin’s theory was hopelessly compromised by ideology and economic thinking. It is the issue of the inability of Darwin’s theory to set the boundary between history and evolution.
The rise of technological civilization has created a new confusion, theories applied to self-realization. But we can see their limitations, especially in the realm of ethics. And none of them explain the emergence of an ethical agent. In the final analysis, theories of evolution must invoke, not this or that principle of ethical behavior, but the full potential of all of them.
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Posted in links at 4:46 pm by nemo
Posts from the last ten days or so:
http://darwiniana.com/2009/01/29/the-eonic-effect-self-consciousness-and-freedomcausality/
http://darwiniana.com/2009/01/29/reviews-of-mrs-critique-of-intelligent-design/
http://darwiniana.com/2009/01/29/desmondmoore-on-darwin-and-slavery/
http://darwiniana.com/2009/01/29/coyne-review-on-sciencereligion/
http://darwiniana.com/2009/01/28/position-of-science-in-society/
http://darwiniana.com/2009/01/28/in-search-of-history-crossing-a-threshold-of-observability/
http://darwiniana.com/2009/01/28/more-on-quantum-enigma/
http://darwiniana.com/2009/01/27/talking-about-spirituality/
http://darwiniana.com/2009/01/27/a-frequency-hypothesis-selections-from-whee/
http://darwiniana.com/2009/01/27/history-and-punctuated-equilibrium/
http://darwiniana.com/2009/01/26/is-there-a-science-of-history/
http://darwiniana.com/2009/01/26/unanimity-of-scientists-on-evolution/
http://darwiniana.com/2009/01/26/the-endless-debate/
http://darwiniana.com/2009/01/25/huxley-and-evolution-2/
http://darwiniana.com/2009/01/25/evolution-and-aesthetic-judgment/
http://darwiniana.com/2009/01/24/evolution-and-systems-in-long-range-frequencies/
http://darwiniana.com/2009/01/24/evolution-kant-and-the-noumenal/
http://darwiniana.com/2009/01/24/was-darwin-wrong-getting-news-from-anyone-but-scientists/
The previous log is here:
http://darwiniana.com/2009/01/23/log-of-recent-posts/
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Posted in Evolution at 4:25 pm by nemo
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http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090127112043.htm
‘Fishy’ Clue Helps Establish How Proteins Evolve
ScienceDaily (Jan. 29, 2009) — Three billion years ago, a “new” amino acid was added to the alphabet of 20 that commonly make up proteins in organisms today. Now researchers at Yale and the University of Tokyo have demonstrated how this rare amino acid — and, by example, other amino acids — made its way into the menu for protein synthesis.
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http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090127090723.htm
Billion-year Revision Of Plant Evolution Timeline May Stem From Discovery Of Lignin In Seaweed
ScienceDaily (Jan. 29, 2009) — Land plants’ ability to sprout upward through the air, unsupported except by their own woody tissues, has long been considered one of the characteristics separating them from aquatic plants, which rely on water to support them.
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http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/did-charles-darwin-believe-in-racial-inequality-1519874.html
Did Charles Darwin believe in racial inequality?
His anniversary has thrown a fresh spotlight on ideas about race that still excite his friends and foes. Marek Kohn looks at a troublesome legacy
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http://blog.beliefnet.com/cityofbrass/2009/01/is-evolution-sufficient.html
Partly because I just went to Africa and flew over (but did not have a chance to actually visit) the Great Rift Valley (also known as the Cradle of Mankind), I’ve been thinking a bit about evolutionary theory of late. I am a scientist, but not a biologist – my field is medical physics. Still, my background makes me biased towards the scientific establishment and I am an ardent believer in the scientific method. While technically as a deeply religious person I do believe in “intelligent design” (in the abstract) I don’t believe in Intelligent Design as promoted by the various evolution-denialists in the political arena. I am quite strictly against introducing religious theories such as ID into the science curriculum.
All that said, I still am unable to accept the blind assertion that genetic mutation is the sole source of speciation. Note that I am not talking about the origins of life, but rather the evolution of life afterwards from species to species. It strikes me that the evolutionary dogma can be reduced to the idea that DNA is “read-only”. Contrast this with the (discredited) ideas of Lamarck who argued that the environment can introduce changes to an organism that are then heritable by its progeny; given that DNA is indisputably the mechanism by which species reproduce, that implies that DNA is “read/write”.
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Reviewing Jerry Coyne
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2009/01/reviewing_jerry_coyne.html
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gnxp mail
A study of wildfires after the last ice age has cast doubt on the
theory that a giant comet impact wiped out woolly mammoths and
prehistoric humans
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7854348.stm
Blushing is the biggest gap in evolutionary theory, say scientists who
admit they can’t explain why people turn red when they are embarrassed
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/4372231/Blushing-biggest-gap-in-evolutionary-theory.html
In our legal system, judges and juries have to assign responsibility
for crimes and decide on appropriate punishments. A new imaging study
reveals which area of the brain plays a key role in these cognitive
processes
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=brain-judgments-about-crimes
Epigenetic changes to plant DNA preserved through successive generations
http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090129/full/news.2009.67.html
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Posted in Evolution at 3:48 pm by nemo
I am reposting this from a few days ago.
A few more days….A new system is on the way!
1-3 pageviews/visit???
As explained yesterday I am a victim of this blog’s own success and am having a high-traffic crisis at my shared hosting service, and may be forced to find a new host process, perhaps a VPS (virtual private server). Til then I need to keep pageviews per visit down: if you a frequent visitor you can help if you feel like it by sticking to about two to three max pageviews per day/
I will try to arrange it so you can read the relevant new material in one pageload.
I have reduced the frontpage to about ten posts, and will consolidate the large number of news posts into one, or skip them altogether.
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Posted in In the News at 3:43 pm by nemo
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/davos-notes-contrition-pa_b_162290.html
Day Two in Davos and some dominant themes are taking hold: contrition, paralysis, and the embrace of faith and philanthropy.
Yesterday, I wrote about the aura of contrition surrounding the financial types here, wafting off them like cheap cologne on a disco Lothario.
Today, at an off-the-record gathering of international editors and reporters, the contrition had spread to financial journalists. There was the sense that many had missed the boat, failing to ask the tough questions — and, even when they did, failing to stay on the story until it broke through the static.
That sense dominated discussions even after the session had ended. The mainstream media’s ADD — the desire to always look for the new hot story, instead of digging deeper into a complex one — was deemed partly responsible for the failure.
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http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/01/29-0
Solving the Global Food Crisis: The Case for a “Poverty Czar”
by Bruce Friedrich
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http://www.alternet.org/workplace/123539/
stop_rearranging_deck_chairs_on_the_titanic
_and_nationalize_the_damn_banks/
Stop Rearranging Deck Chairs on the Titanic and Nationalize the Damn Banks
By Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted January 30, 2009.
It’s the best possible course to rescue our economy at this point; all the other options would be disastrous.
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http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/01/30-1
Close Torture Loopholes, Physicians’ Group Urges
by William Fisher
NEW YORK – While applauding President Barack Obama’s recent executive orders banning torture and other harsh interrogation practices, medical authorities are calling attention to a little-reported section of the Army’s Field Manual on Interrogation that they say still allows the use of tactics that can constitute torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment under U.S. and international law.
The suspect section of the Manual is known as Annex M, which allows the use of sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, and isolation, termed “separation” in the Manual. Obama’s executive orders directed all government agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), to follow the manual for interrogations.
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http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/01/30-1
George Bush’s Gift To The World: The End of American Imperialism
by David Michael Green
George W. Bush was unquestionably the worst American president in the two and a quarter centuries of the country’s existence.
After all, James Buchanan, the previous aspirant to the title, merely did nothing while the South seceded. Hah! You’ll have to do better than that, Jimmy, if you want to wear this crown!
Bush did far better, of course. It would appear to be the one thing in his entire life he actually worked hard at, and the one challenge he was able to meet successfully. This was an astonishingly destructive presidency, that’s true even despite the fact that we don’t really know much about his administration, because in addition to being the worst, it was also the most secretive ever. (I’m sure that’s just a coincidence, too.) Moreover, that’s also even considering that most Americans still vastly underestimate the depravity of Team Bush. As I have argued previously, if you think they were ‘merely’ arrogant bunglers with exceptionally bad politics, you’ve grossly underestimated them. In fact, they were predators who launched their class warfare agenda behind the smoke-screen of national security, faux patriotism and secret government.
Does this record of unparalleled devastation mean that Bush never did anything right in eight years? No, though it’s pretty much the case that he never did anything right on purpose.
Unquestionably, however, Bush did make some positive contributions to American life, even if they were completely inadvertent, and even if they were dwarfed by the swath of destruction he left all across the landscape. Put simply, George W. Bush’s greatest success was that he gave a very bad name to very bad things.
Like the Republican Party, for example. Or conservative ideology. Or theocracy. Or presidents with the last name of Bush. Or emotional midgets who seek the White House as a salve for their personal psychological neediness.
We can be grateful for all these contributions, and I certainly am – though “thanks” is not likely what I would say if I had the pleasure of relating my assessment of Mr. Bush to him directly. More likely it would be something closer to the gracious words Dick “Dick” Cheney had for Patrick Leahy early on in the administration, when the two bumped into each other on the Senate floor. Those remarks were not, shall we say, fit for print in a family newspaper.
But I digress.
George Bush left us many gifts, but perhaps the greatest of them is that he has ruined the sport of imperialism in America, maybe forever.
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http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/01/30-10
Rebuilding Green: The Next Revolution
by Erica Gies
When a tornado flattened Greensburg, Kan., in May 2008, the city vowed to rebuild — with a twist. All new municipal structures would be built “green,” with businesses and homeowners encouraged to follow suit. Likewise, in New Orleans, where Brad Pitt’s Make It Right foundation is constructing new, affordable green homes for Ninth Ward residents displaced by Hurricane Katrina. Such projects have decisively moved green building from the exclusive realm of the wealthy into the affordable mainstream. But you don’t have to see your home flattened by a natural disaster or be part of a community-wide initiative to build green.
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The American Economy is Not Coming Back
The Ugly Truth
By DAVE LINDORFF
What we are now seeing is the beginning of an inevitable downward adjustment in American living standards to conform with our actual place in the world. As a nation of consumers, and not producers, with little to offer to the rest of the world except raw materials, food crops, military hardware and bad films (none of which industries employ many people), we are headed to a recovery that will not feel like a recovery at all. Eventually, productive capacity will be restored, as lowered US wages make it again profitable for some things to be made here at home again, but like people in the 1930s looking back at the Roaring 20s of yore, we are going to look back at the last two decades as some kind of dream.
Permalink
Posted in you've got mail at 3:11 pm by nemo
RG mail
On the Celebration of King’s Birth: Israel in Gaza: “A Time Comes When
Silence is Betrayal”
January 20th, 2009 by michael Jews, Martin Luther King, Gaza, Palestine, Israel
On the celebration of King’s birth I often read or listen to the
anti-war speech that he gave at Riverside Church on April 4, 1967—A
Time to Break the Silence. It was a powerful statement of his
opposition to the Vietnam War. He spoke of how he was told to not
oppose the war because his opposition would anger President Johnson
and harm the civil rights movement. He was warned that “Peace and
Civil rights don’t mix.” King admitted he held back because of this
possible consequence for too long and failed to speak out earlier.
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‘American Counterinsurgency’
University of Chicago Press
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/01/29/humanterrain
The Human Terrain System, a program which embeds social scientists
with brigades in Iraq and Afghanistan, is billed as a mechanism for
improving the U.S. military’s knowledge of culture and local
populations — heretofore perceived as sorely lacking. “It’s a chance
to change the military; it’s a chance to change the Army,†one HTS
member said at the American Anthropological Association’s annual
meeting in November. The HTS Web site states that the program “does
not collect intelligence or have a role in targeting.†However, AAA’s
executive board has formally opposed the program, citing a number of
ethical issues including the potential misuse of anthropological
information for targeting purposes — which would violate the bedrock
principle that those studied should not be harmed.
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Last update – 08:45 29/01/2009
For first time, U.S. professors call for academic and cultural boycott of Israel
In the wake of Operation Cast Lead, a group of American university
professors has for the first time launched a national campaign calling
for an academic and cultural boycott of Israel.
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http://www.latimes.com/news/la-fg-mitchell29-2009jan29,0,3142086.story
Los Angeles Times January 29, 2009
U.S. peace envoy rolls up his sleeves in Israel
George Mitchell arrives with a can-do attitude challenged by the no-way mentality of the feuding parties.
By Richard Boudreaux
Reporting from Jerusalem — George J. Mitchell, the new U.S. envoy to the Middle East, arrived in Israel on Wednesday to begin testing his axiom that there’s no such thing as a conflict that cannot be ended.
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http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090209/falk
The Nation January 22, 2009
Winning and Losing in Gaza
Despite a horrific price in lives and suffering, the Palestinians may be slowly winning the ‘second war’, the legitimacy war, whose battlefield has become global. Also, Hamas may have won a major battle for Palestinian hearts and minds, notes Richard Falk.
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/business/davos/7859417.stm
BBC 2009/01/29
Turkish PM storms off in Gaza row
Turkey’s prime minister has stormed off the stage at the World Economic Forum in Davos after a heated debate on Gaza with Israel’s president.
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http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/business/story.html?id=7a763434-b75c-4b2a-be1c-8923a3aaa534&k=42244
Vancouver Sun January 29, 2009
Economic forecast warns of global depression risk
Government stimulus packages may not be enough to stop job losses, expert says
Kevin Dougherty
There is a risk a global depression could start in 2011 if stimulus efforts in the United States fall short and there are no more resources to pump up the economy, says Robert Ward, director of global forecasting at the Economist Intelligence Unit, a sister organization to the Economist magazine.
But if the recovery works by 2011, Ward said Wednesday it would not be a return to “the party days,” rather a more subdued state of “things not getting worse.”
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http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/480fd936-e691-11dd-8e4f-0000779fd2ac.html
by Christopher Wood
Financial Times FT.com (January 20 2009)
As newspaper headlines are full of stories about more forced capital
injections by governments into leading American and British banks, it
has surely become time to end the present ad hoc approach to the
intensifying banking crisis.
In the US and Britain most of the big banks have now become a weird
hybrid of public and private sector, given growing government equity
stakes in these banks. This raises the issue of the deeply flawed policy
response to the crisis. This is that if the authorities are not prepared
to let insolvent financial institutions go bust, which would be the
quickest, most effective way to correct excesses, as the Lehman
precedent demonstrates, the next best way is to nationalise the, in
effect bust, banks outright. This remains the opposite of what is
happening in the US and the other country most vulnerable to an
imploding financial services sector, namely Britain. Rather, what is
happening is nationalisation by stealth.
This approach reached its ludicrous extreme in the November bail-out of
Citigroup, where the US government put more money in than the entire
market capitalisation of the company on the day the deal was announced.
But the taxpayer ended up with only a 7.8 per cent equity stake while
incumbent management was left in place! Yet now, just two months later,
still more taxpayer money looks as if it is about to be poured into
Citigroup, while a similar sweetheart deal has been done with Bank of
America.
This approach is a recipe for gross conflicts of interest. It means the
institutions receiving taxpayer money are encouraged to continue to
avoid ultimately necessary writedowns because of the hope of yet more
bail-outs. Yet the reality is that there is an established template for
what to do in banking crises if governments remain determined, as they
do, not to allow bank failures. That is the Swedish model of the early
1990s.
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01.29.09
Posted in selections, World History and The Eonic Effect at 8:40 pm by nemo
The previous post discussed the issue of a Marxist critique of ID, but Marx’s philosophy of history was the object of a classic critique by Karl Popper, on the gournds of being an ‘historicism’. Laws Of History And Popper On Historicism.
We should note the way that the eonic effect enters this terrain and survives because it is based on a higher and more subtle synthesis of causality and freedom ideas. And this succeeds because the data of the eonic effect shows us how to do this: we distinguish ‘system action’ and the ‘free action’ of individuals inside that system.
4.3 Man Makes Himself
We need to pursue further our discussion of questions of freedom and necessity. It takes time to get the knack of distinguishing a system of macro-action and the free action that makes it up, microaction, especially if changes of consciousness are the only clue. And yet we make this distinction all the time. The eonic effect gives us such a massive wallop that we get a clue to structure we didn’t expect, but only over the long range, millennia. Yet we do this all the time with economies. We speak of free agents, then speak of the ‘behavior’ of an economic system.
The basic issue is very simple, and should be taken empirically by looking at world history with one simple (theoretical) question, Does man make himself? Thus we can restate the whole issue in intuitive form, using the title of a book by Gordon Childe, Man Makes Himself. To say that ‘man makes himself’ implies that ‘freedom to do so has already evolved’. But questioning that was one of our starting points, and we can see already from superficial inspection of our turning points that emergent civilization has a hidden driver, and that otherwise it tends to sandbank, slow to a crawl, medievalize, drift from initial states of high advance, degenerate into empire, lose its initial advances. Man enslaves man, while we will see that our discrete freedom sequence (the double emergence of democracy) comes to the rescue twice in a row, and also includes the emergent ‘abolitionism’ by correlation in its ‘eonic effects’.
Notice that science and democracy are born in ancient Greece, then die out until our next turning point. The Roman Republic goes from bad to worse as libertas becomes imperium, and then everything seems to collapse in a Dark Age. There is even a tendency to think decline a form of advance. So the issue is complicated, and we see that while man is the only candidate to self-create his own freedom, make himself, and civilization, there is a helper-driver visible by looking backwards at the globally interconnected way in which advance seems to alternate intermittently. This is a limit on the idea of freedom, and we must be wary not to ‘alienate’ ourselves in a system of determinism in the name of evolving freedom. The answer is simple. Such a system must terminate, and leave man on his own, evolution must become history. That point must come as we begin to observe it, ready or not. And our model will automatically take care of that, in the short term. It switches off in the recent past, as theory goes out the window and is replaced by free action, free or not.
Reverse engineering the eonic effect The pattern we have discovered is one of three turning points taken empirically. It’s obvious, but does it make any sense? A close look shows us that we can try to produce a deduction for this after the fact. And that follows our question, does man make himself? Note that determinism could not produce freedom, while the absence of any ‘determination’ at all would leave only static doldrums among helplessly passive creatures. Thus we need a middle ground process that operates on different degrees of freedom, preferably one that alternates between higher and lower determination, completed by an ‘end of evolution’ turning into ‘history as freedom’. Thus, one way to do this would be intermittent action, switching between system determination at a higher degree of (induced) freedom (or self-consciousness) and simple free action without any interference at all. In some amazement we discover that this is almost exactly what the eonic pattern shows.
That’s a fair description of what we see in the eonic effect. And it produces a characteristic ‘eonic sequence’ as the mainline of emergent civilization.
Upon reflection, we realize that ‘evolution’ on the surface of a planet is not something simple, and that the eonic effect shows one of ways this can happen, one of the simplest and most plausible, however extraordinary. Darwinists just snap their fingers, things just happen. We see that a driver is needed, and a very delicate one that does not overdetermine or underdetermine what emerges. And at some point, like a jump-start process applied to car, that determination process has to yield to a completed or ‘free’ process, i.e. the cars starting, of our evolution turning into history. The gist of it is that the whole can efficiently evolve through the parts, which show intervals of ‘system action’ or eonic determination.
The majestic solution to the antinomy of causality/freedom seen in the factor of self-consciousness resolves all the issues of ‘historicism’ that were Popper’s complaint.
4.1.2 Causality, Freedom And Self-consciousness
We began with a critique of theories of history using Popper’s idea of historicism. But we have found empirically that there is such a thing as macro-history, and our data shows us how to reconcile the contradiction of freedom and causality. The resolution of the paradox of historicism is empirically given by the eonic data, and lies before us in something like the electronic ‘on-off’ switch, to match our intermittent or ‘eonic’ data. That’s crude thinking, but sufficient for large-scale periodization analysis. We have a mixed situation, free agent, and (causal) mechanism. Choice and mechanism operate in tandem. We see our mysterious drumbeat switches on over a brief time scale of centuries relative to millennia in non-contingent evolutionary event-regions. Instead of an on-off switch we see something like ‘switched on’ periods with relative degrees of freedom in the appearance of less conditioned periods able to innovate rapidly. How to proceed with such a strange set of facts? But there is a simple explanation here: change can occur in the agent’s self-consciousness, in the middle ground between determinism and freedom. Look at the eonic effect. Higher degrees of freedom show both deterministic and free influence overlaid. We call that ‘creative action’, in most cases. Note that creativity creates a sense of freedom, but isn’t controlled by its agent. Thus, confusing the question is the fact that ‘free agency’ and ‘freedom’ are not the same necessarily. ‘Choice’ is an observational given, however we explain it. We need not decide about free will to recount the history of ‘choices’, branches of potential outcomes becoming realized. We have the clue to proceed.
Further, as we will see as this logic unfolds, the ‘causal agency’ is trying to ‘cause freedom’. The eonic effect is itself like an ‘evolution of freedom’. This crosses the tripwire into a classic ‘contradiction’ as our subject transforms into something else, that something being somewhere in the vicinity of the philosophy of history. We will see that the eonic effect straddles the twin domains of the deterministic and the emergence of man as a ‘free agent’ with potential freedom. The problem of historicism disappears if we renounce causal laws and predictions of the future, and look only toward patterns of creative action, in the past, taking care to define the transition from this past to the open present. We don’t need a proof of man’s free will, or some scheme of historical laws, and will complete our eonic model without deciding these issues. But we do need a model that shows some kind of ‘determination’ in our pattern, and yet switches off in the present, for the evolution of freedom must have a free future. Such seemingly bizarre properties are in fact everyday occurrences, and will form the basis of a model. That’s very strange, and only an example will help, make it transparent. The eonic effect is such an example.
The issue of self-consciousness can be grounded in nothing more complex than the power of attention, contrasted with states of consciousness that are more mechanized. We don’t need to commit on any psychological theory to consider it this way, although collating creativity and self-consciousness is an oversimplification. No theory of evolution has ever properly accounted for the emergence of the power of attention (which clearly antedates man’s emergence). But we must assume, as an example of our issue of relative beginnings, the man we find, a creature with a complex power of attention, which he can control to some extent. The point is that there is nothing mystical in the issue of self-consciousness.
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Posted in Booknotes, Evolution, The Eonic Effect at 8:19 pm by nemo
Steve Fuller has an amusing review of Critique of Intelligent Design, at Uncommon Descent.
In any case, I rather doubt that Marx and Engels would have had any reason to believe in a planned anything (revolution, economy, etc.), if their materialism entailed the level of chance entailed by, say, Gould’s replayed tape of natural history. In that respect, the book under review represents a very decadent form of Marxism – one that has been abstracted from any sense of purpose that it might have once had.
Decadent Marxism, poor fellows. Fuller’s point is on the mark: Marx’s universal history was a concealed teleological model (forever denied) of historical sequencing, witness Popper and Isaiah Berlin’s strictures against ‘historical inevitability’.
Meanwhile, here is
my Amazon review of the book:
The history of Marxism begins with the critique of ideology. However, for reasons historians of the left must make clear the Marxists of the Second Internationale became converts to Darwinism, despite the clear ideological character of that theory and its resemblance to the classical liberalism of the age. John Bellamy Foster himself, in his book Marx and Ecology depicts the moment when Marx himself challenged the theory of natural selection, based on a now forgotten theorist. This moment however should remind us that Marx’s first reaction to Darwinism, beyond the myths, was a direct insight into its ideological character, whatever else happened later.
This book then toes the ‘party line’ on Darwinism as it has been for much too long, as if the left were incapable of carrying out its task of ideological analysis of social/economic/biological theories.
Nonetheless this critique has an interesting history of the design argument, tracing the debate all the way back to the ancient Greeks. That context helps to put the current Darwin debate in context, but fails to consider that Marx’s macrohistorical theories were themselves a form of concealed non-theistic design argument latent in universal histories. (Check out Alan Megill’s Karl Marx, The Burden Of Reason, chapter 1, ‘Marx’s Rationalism’).
That the Marxist left should be so stuck on the Darwin question makes a mockery of its vaunted challenge to ideology.
The history of the design argument is a two-edged sword. Fundamentalists proposing Intelligent Design fail to convince us, but one of the original critics of the early Greek evolutionists was none other than Socrates, a reminder that the design argument, whatever its merits, has an honorable lineage, and, while it might fail to convince, is poorly refuted by the claims of Darwinists for natural selection.
The first chapter of Megill’s book is worth reading for its placement of Marx in the context of post-Hegelianism, but with the basic framework of universal history still in place.
Understood thus, Marx is a poor critic of Darwin, or of ID.
Meanwhile, a study of the eonic effect will show that those, like Epicurus, making the claims for the random are themselves part of the strictly non-random pattern of their own emergence in the Axial Age. So miuch for that.
Archaic Greece: The Clue
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Posted in Evolution, The Eonic Effect, you've got mail at 4:49 pm by nemo
This is the Darwin bicentennial year, and, despite my respect for Desmond and Moore’s earlier book on Darwin, I find myself suspicious of their new effort.
What drove Charles Darwin to his extraordinary ideas on evolution and human origins? Adrian Desmond, with co-author James Moore, argue in a new book that the great scientist had a “sacred cause”: the abolition of slavery.
Since final judgment will have to wait on reading the book, I can only refer to a suspicion.
The effect of Darwin’s theory was to open the royal road to reductionist scientism, and the resulting elimination of ethical issues from evolutionary theory. So this effort to assure us Darwin’s abolitionist views were a influence on his work on evolution is both trivial and generally unconvincing.
Being an abolitionist, for this old whig, wasn’t much of an achievement, if this is an effort to blindside us to the real Darwin. It was in any case a family viewpoint. The source of Social Darwinism is solidly a function of this theory of natural selection, with, to be sure, the constant implied application of this to social realities, a la Spencer. Darwin produced the confusion, all the while remaining tight-lipped, when he adopted the term ‘survival of the fittest’.
Is this a desperation tactic to whitewash Darwin.
I would recommend Desmond/Moore’s earlier book on Darwin, which ‘told it like it was’, the whiggish Darwin, and the conservative ‘classical liberalism’ of his class.
As noted, it is necessary to read their book, despite these suspicions of subtle propaganda at work.
We should note, by the way (!!!), that the study of the eonic effect throws an especial light on this question of freedom emergence in world history:
Check out the material on the ‘discrete freedom sequence’, considering that the emergence of abolitionism is itself an aspect of the ‘eonic evolution of civilization’.
Freedom Evolves: The Discrete Freedom Sequence:
http://history-and-evolution.com/whee/chap3_6_1.htm
Desmond/Moore have stumbled on the basic flaw in Darwinism (and scientism in general): the inability to explain the ‘evolution of freedom’, in its several meanings.
The eonic effect shows the direct significance of this empirically in the context of the emergence/evolution of civilization.
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sciftp
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/7856157.stm
Published: 2009/01/29 09:42:28 GMT
Darwin’s twin track: ‘Evolution and emancipation’
What drove Charles Darwin to his extraordinary ideas on evolution and human origins? Adrian Desmond, with co-author James Moore, argue in a new book that the great scientist had a “sacred cause”: the abolition of slavery.
“It makes one’s blood boil,” said Charles Darwin.
Not much outraged the gentle recluse, but the horrors of slavery could cost him a night’s sleep.
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Posted in Evolution, Science & Religion at 4:00 pm by nemo
Seeing and Believing
The never-ending attempt to reconcile science and religion, and why it is doomed to fail.
Jerry A. Coyne
I have already discussed this essay of Coyne here:
Reconciling Science and Religion
In one way, I agree with Coyne that reconciling science and religion is not straightforward. Actually, the real issue seems to degenerate into reconciling Darwinism with Christianity, and/or Dawkins’ New Atheism with monotheism, with the two confused in debate, and the result is counterproductive.
Despite an in principle support, very generally, of the science side, the current environment of scientism is doomed to lose the argument in the end, the reason perhaps for the obstinate resurgence/persistence of the religious opponents of Darwinism.
Scientists seem strangely incapable on this question. The reason is the nature of the training they receive, and the way it has become a set of narrow methodological dogmas, with no general background in cultural study, or the history of religions. The type of the scientist in that sense is a failure, and the cultural prospect therefore is ominous. One has to ask why it happened that way. The first issue is the failure to really do science on the subject of evolution. At the point where scientists should be acknowledging the limits of their understanding here, without having to yield an inch to religious fanatics, instead we see a contrary near-religious fanaticism in maintaining the ‘scientific’ pipe-dream of Darwinian natural selection theory. Why did it have to happen that way? Why did science/biology get stuck in second gear on this issue, unable to resist the temptation of metaphysical presumption created by the abuse of Darwin’s pet obsession, now the unthinking faith of most scientists?
Quite apart from anything else, the opinions of scientists on the subject of religion, especially given the pervasive Darwinian prejudice, are almost invariably misinformed. A basic confusion is with religion in general, and the cultural context of Christianity. It is inexcusable to flunk such a basic test, and to rant and rail against religion in general, on the basis of the very confusing case of Christianity. It is strange to say, but true, but scientists simply mouth off absurdities when they attempt to discuss religion, even as they take potshots are the Bible Belt, which most religionists also do, somewhat better. It is all about the surface theology of mass belief, an easy target. But the larger question of religion is much more elusive and doesn’t yield so easily to the tactics of skeptics.
If scientists can’t see the flaw in natural selection theory, they can’t even do their own science, let alone deal with the issue of religion.
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Here are my remarks, linked to above, from a previous post on this review:
I tend to be critical of attempts to ‘reconcile religion and science’, but this applies only to science as current and religion in the form we find in much Christianity.
There are lots of ways of unifying the science/religion duality, but the current debate between Darwinists and creationists is almost completely barren.
Thus Coyne’s article seems somehow pointless if it can’t bring itself to see the limits of Darwinism. Coyne is clearly listed in association with the Altenberg 16, and the movement beyond the Darwin dogmas that can only be reconciled with religion by propagandists like Miller.
He must be aware that there is something problematical with Darwinian explanations.
The reconciliation of science and religion has been performed (badly perhaps) in dozen of ways from the Samkhya philosophy of ancient India with its universal materialism, to the multiple New Age versions, stretching between the absurd to the profound.
The philosophies of Kant and Schopenhauer show the most promising avenue for the modern mind, predisposed to science.
But first and foremost is to give up this obsessive Darwinian scientism whose form of explanation is as bad as anything in Creationism.
Note: the debate is not between science and ‘faith’. the latter is a specialized and highly corrupted theological belief of Christians. Many discuss religion and faith as if they were synonyms, which they are not. There are many religious viewpoints, e.g. the Buddhist, that would reject faith as the basis of religion. And this in general raises the question, what is religion, and are what religionists call their religions really religion? Many spiritual sages have denounced the forms of ‘religion’ as spurious.
Scientists seem oblivious to this fact, and generally focus on the most decayed or corrupted forms of religion in decline in their attacks.
A religion such as Buddhism they would leave untouched, probably because they sense they do not understand it, or have the categories ready to approach such religions in intelligible fashion.
Note: Scientists are adamant that science can never deal with the ’supernatural’. Fine, but is this more than an obsession with words? It would appear to be an insoluble paradox in the inadequate way that scientists approach the question.
A close reading of Kant, for example, will suggest that the issue is intractable, if not undecidable.
It is one thing to posit the supernaturalism of religious myth in its extravagance, but quite another to imply that reality must submit to universal causal explanation in the form promoted by basic science. This attitude, as Kant clearly demonstrated, makes the whole substance of human psychology a study in the supernatural, disallowing the concept of freedom, and free will, as unscientific ideas. Small wonder scientists lowball out, and end up in their batty routines attacking the Bible Belt.
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Seeing and Believing
The never-ending attempt to reconcile science and religion, and why it is doomed to fail.
Jerry A. Coyne, The New Republic Published: Wednesday, February 04, 2009
Saving Darwin: How to be a Christian and Believe in Evolution
By Karl W. Giberson
(HarperOne, 248 pp., $24.95)
Only A Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America’s Soul
By Kenneth R. Miller
(Viking, 244 pp., $25.95)
I.
Charles Darwin was born on February 12, 1809–the same day as Abraham Lincoln–and published his magnum opus, On the Origin of Species, fifty years later. Every half century, then, a Darwin Year comes around: an occasion to honor his theory of evolution by natural selection, which is surely the most important concept in biology, and perhaps the most revolutionary scientific idea in history. 2009 is such a year, and we biologists are preparing to fan out across the land, giving talks and attending a multitude of DarwinFests. The melancholy part is that we will be speaking more to other scientists than to the American public. For in this country, Darwin is a man of low repute. The ideas that made Darwin’s theory so revolutionary are precisely the ones that repel much of religious America, for they imply that, far from having a divinely scripted role in the drama of life, our species is the accidental and contingent result of a purely natural process.
And so the culture wars continue between science and religion. On one side we have a scientific establishment and a court system determined to let children learn evolution rather than religious mythology, and on the other side the many Americans who passionately resist those efforts. It is a depressing fact that while 74 percent of Americans believe that angels exist, only 25 percent accept that we evolved from apelike ancestors. Just one in eight of us think that evolution should be taught in the biology classroom without including a creationist alternative. Among thirty-four Western countries surveyed for the acceptance of evolution, the United States ranked a dismal thirty-third, just above Turkey. Throughout our country, school boards are trying to water down the teaching of evolution or sneak creationism in beside it. And the opponents of Darwinism are not limited to snake-handlers from the Bible Belt; they include some people you know. As Karl Giberson notes in Saving Darwin, “Most people in America have a neighbor who thinks the Earth is ten thousand years old.”
The cultural polarization of America has been aggravated by attacks on religion from the “new atheists,” writers such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, who are die-hard Darwinists. Outraged religious leaders, associating evolutionary biology with atheism, counterattacked. This schism has distressed liberal theologians and religious scientists, who have renewed their efforts to reconcile religion and science. The “science” is nearly always evolutionary biology, which is far more controversial than any area of chemistry or physics. Francis Collins, director of the Human Genome Project, wrote The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief; the philosopher Michael Ruse produced Can a Darwinian Be a Christian? (his answer is yes); and there are high-profile books by theologians such as John Haught and John Polkinghorne. The Templeton Foundation gives sizeable grants to projects for reconciling science and religion, and awards a yearly prize of two million dollars to a philosopher or scientist whose work highlights the “spiritual dimension of scientific progress.” The National Academy of Sciences, America’s most prestigious scientific body, issued a pamphlet assuring us that we can have our faith and Darwin, too:
Science and religion address separate aspects of human experience. Many scientists have written eloquently about how their scientific studies of biological evolution have enhanced rather than lessened their religious faith. And many religious people and denominations accept the scientific evidence for evolution.
Would that it were that easy! True, there are religious scientists and Darwinian churchgoers. But this does not mean that faith and science are compatible, except in the trivial sense that both attitudes can be simultaneously embraced by a single human mind. (It is like saying that marriage and adultery are compatible because some married people are adulterers. ) It is also true that some of the tensions disappear when the literal reading of the Bible is renounced, as it is by all but the most primitive of JudeoChristian sensibilities. But tension remains. The real question is whether there is a philosophical incompatibility between religion and science. Does the empirical nature of science contradict the revelatory nature of faith? Are the gaps between them so great that the two institutions must be considered essentially antagonistic? The incessant stream of books dealing with this question suggests that the answer is not straightforward.
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Posted in Evolution at 2:52 pm by nemo
Evolution today: links
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/7856157.stm
Published: 2009/01/29 09:42:28 GMT
Darwin’s twin track: ‘Evolution and emancipation’
What drove Charles Darwin to his extraordinary ideas on evolution and human origins? Adrian Desmond, with co-author James Moore, argue in a new book that the great scientist had a “sacred cause”: the abolition of slavery.
“It makes one’s blood boil,” said Charles Darwin.
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http://scienceblogs.com/
Context By Seed
ScienceBloggers are up in arms about the cover article of New Scientist which boldly proclaims “Darwin was Wrong.” The article, authored by Graham Lawton, explains that occurrences such as horizontal gene transfer and hybridization transform the shape of Darwin’s famous tree into something more like a thicket with criss-crossing branches. But some argue that new information in genetics doesn’t render Darwin’s model obsolete, and, moreover, that the headline is misleading and could be used as a tool for Creationists. “Very few readers will read your article. But everyone will see the cover,” ScienceBlogger Bora from A Blog Around the Clock wrote in a post addressing Lawton.
The Conversation
New Scientist says Darwin was wrong
Pharyngula January 28, 2009
We’re already seeing that cover abused by creationists who see it as a tool and I expect we’re going to have to face the headache of many school board meetings where that cover is flaunted as evidence that students ought to be taught about how weak Darwinism is.
Graham Lawton Was Wronge
A Blog Around the Clock January 25, 2009
Very few people will read this post to the end, especially the links on the bottom that really contain the meat of the argument. But everyone will see this post title in their feeds.
Darwin was wrong, but he’s not the only one
The Island of Doubt January 26, 2009
I understand the reaction among those who live, eat and and breathe evolutionary biology — perhaps Lawton’s interpretation of a few issues is questionable — but stand back and take a deep one, folks. This is journalism we’re talking about.
Darwin was wrong…ish
Evolving Thoughts January 23, 2009
Notice that he allows for multiple speciation to occur in a single event? It’s not hybridisation, but the topology is roughly the same. So does this undercut the very idea of a tree of life? I think it does not.
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http://www.evolutionnews.org/2009/01/materialism_of_the_gaps.html
Materialism of the Gaps
Michael Egnor
I must say that I’ve never understood the rhetorical force of the ‘God of the Gaps’ argument. The God of the Gaps sneer is invoked to imply the inexorability of materialism as a complete explanation in natural science. Any critique of materialist dogma in science from a design or immaterial perspective is derided as a ‘God of the Gaps’ argument. But the real issue is the gaps, which are plentiful and very wide.
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http://www.uncommondescent.com/evolution/just-because-marxism-has-lost-its-sense-of-purpose-it-doesn%e2%80%99t-mean-that-id-must-as-well/
Just because Marxism has lost its sense of purpose, it doesn’t mean that ID must as well
Steve Fuller
A Book Review of John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark and Richard York, Critique of Intelligent Design: Materialism versus Creationism from Antiquity to the Present (Monthly Review Press, 2008).
There are many interesting features of this book, authored by academic Marxists (or at least people who used to be Marxists) and published by a historically Marxist press. The argument is presented as a critical intellectual history, which, while clearly written from a committed ‘materialist’ standpoint, is quite nuanced. But from the standpoint of ID defenders, the book’s most interesting feature is that the authors gladly embrace ID’s demonised image of its opponents. So those who remain sceptical of ID rhetoric that connects Epicurus, Darwin, Marx and Freud as part of a vast ‘materialist’ conspiracy should be silenced by what transpires in these pages: Yes, such scary two-dimensional materialists do really seem to exist – and they write books like this.
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Evolution: The next 200 years
by New Scientist
Reposted from: Dawkins site
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126932.600-evolution-the-next-200-years.html?full=true
Richard Dawkins
Which facts about evolution had to be true, and which just happen to be true? Did the genetic code have to be digital in order for natural selection to work? Could any other class of molecules have substituted for proteins? How inevitable was the evolution of sex? Eyes? Intelligence? Language? Consciousness? Was the origin of life itself a probable event, and therefore is life common in the universe?
Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oxford
Kenneth Miller
I don’t think there are basic “gaps” in the theory of evolution, which has proven to be a remarkably flexible scientific framework, brilliantly accommodating new data and even new fields of science, like molecular genetics. However, the most profound unsolved problem in biology is the origin of life itself. We know a great deal about the creative chemistry of the early Earth, but not yet enough to solve this problem.
Kenneth Miller is professor of biology at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/susan-smalley/line-budgers-and-the-biol_b_162144.html
Biology of selfishness
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http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126935.300-ancient-creature-points-to-parallel-evolution.html
Ancient creature points to parallel evolution
28 January 2009
Magazine issue 2693. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.
AN UPDATED family tree of the animal kingdom could radically change the way we think about the evolution of species.
According to conventional thinking, simple animals, including sponges, jellyfish and corals, evolved step-by-step in a linear fashion into those with more complex bodies, such as mammals.
Now Rob DeSalle of the American Museum of Natural History in New York and his colleagues have challenged this way of thinking.
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http://www.themuslimzone.com/civil-comparative-religion/1847-darwinism-materialism.html
The Real Ideological Root of Terrorism:
Darwinism and Materialism
Most people think the theory of evolution was first proposed by Charles Darwin, and rests on scientific evidence, observations and experiments. However, the truth is that Darwin was not its originator, and neither does the theory rest on scientific proof. The theory consists of an adaptation to nature of the ancient dogma of materialist philosophy. Although it is not backed up by scientific discoveries, the theory is blindly supported in the name of materialist philosophy.
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http://post-darwinist.blogspot.com/2009/01/darwinism-and-popular-culture-newsweek.html
Darwinism and popular culture: Newsweek columnist fronts anti-Darwin inheritance theory
No one in recent memory has ever questioned Darwinism and got away without attacks by hordes of Darwinbots.
Remember that when you read Sharon Begley’s “The Sins of the Fathers, Take 2 At tributes to Darwin, Lamarckism—inheritance of acquired traits—will be the skunk at the party” (Newsweek, Jan 17, 2009):
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http://newswire.ascribe.org/cgi-bin/behold.pl?ascribeid=20090129.083128&time=10%2059%20PST&year=2009&public=0
Darwin’s 200th Birthday: Evolutionary Biology Experts Available
MADISON, Wis., Jan. 29 (AScribe Newswire) — With Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday coming up in February, several University of Wisconsin-Madison experts are available to talk about the evolutionary biologist and related research.
Humans: Still evolving, only faster
When many people think about evolution, they may think about ancient apes morphing into humans, or perhaps Darwin’s famous Galapagos finches. But modern humans are just as subject to the pressures of natural selection and, in fact, human evolution has accelerated during the past 5,000 years, according to UW-Madison anthropologist John Hawks. Hawks uses modern-day variation among human populations to understand and reconstruct our evolutionary history. Though people from around the world are genetically very similar, with individuals differing by only around 0.1 percent of their DNA, a handful of genes are very highly variable. The present distribution of such genes provides a living record of our evolutionary past.
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http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/opinion/darwin-versus-creationism–the-great-debate-14159695.html
Just weeks before naturalists prepare to commemorate the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Darwin, it was reported that a third of science teachers believed creationism should be taught in their lessons.
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http://www.teachermagazine.org/login.html?source=http://www.teachermagazine.org/tm/articles
/2009/01/28/firstperson_stolp.html&destination=http://www.teachermagazine.org/tm/articles/2009/01/28/
firstperson_stolp.html&levelId=1000
Intelligent Design: Evolution’s Foil
By Derek Stolp
“I’ll be your foil, Laertes: in mine ignorance
Your skill shall, like a star i’ th’ darkest night,
Stick fiery off indeed.”
-Hamlet, Act V, Scene 2
When federal Judge John E. Jones III handed down his decision in Kitzmiller v. Dover in December, 2005, I experienced a considerable sense of relief, if not jubilation, that a challenge to the scientific method, perhaps even to reason itself, had been turned back. Having taught mathematics for nearly forty years, I was not affected directly by the outcome of the case but, as a citizen, I was and continue to be concerned about American views on evolution.
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http://www.intelligentdesign.biz/intelligent-design-outwits-evolution-again
Intelligent Design – Are you smart enough to recognize Intelligence?
Are you smart enough to recognize Intelligent Design?
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Posted in In the News, you've got mail at 2:22 pm by nemo
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/01/29-9
Published on Thursday, January 29, 2009 by Huffington Post
We’ve Arrived at a Moment of Decision
by Al Gore
Al Gore’s opening statement before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday, January 28th, 2009:
We are here today to talk about how we as Americans and how the United States of America as part of the global community should address the dangerous and growing threat of the climate crisis.
We have arrived at a moment of decision. Our home – Earth – is in grave danger. What is at risk of being destroyed is not the planet itself, of course, but the conditions that have made it hospitable for human beings.
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http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/01/29-3
Published on Thursday, January 29, 2009 by American Forum
Better Nutrition Equals Better Education
by Kathleen Rogers
Cafeteria food has always been the brunt of kids’ jokes. Many of us remember the grilled cheese sandwich that stuck to the plate when you turned it upside down, and the egg soufflé that jiggled when you poked it. But even that is a far cry from what’s served now.
In the midst of a growing childhood obesity crisis, school food now means federally subsidized chicken nuggets, low-grade hamburgers, french fries, hot dogs and pizza. “Cooking” usually involves a centralized kitchen similar to a fast food assembly line.
According to Ron Haskins, senior fellow of Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution, “behind the overcooked vegetables and steam-table pizza that American children confront each school day is an industry that rivals defense contractors and media giants in its ability to bring home the federal bacon.” That industry is agribusiness — and, via the National School Lunch Program, it has a chokehold on our kids.
The commodities-driven National School Lunch Program, meant to feed 60 million children healthy food, has instead turned into a major public health threat. The most vulnerable in our society are suffering the most severe consequences, including epidemic levels of obesity, diabetes, heart disease and other illnesses. While we need to be able to include more children in the School Lunch Program, we also need to be able to feed them higher-quality, more nutritious food, or else we are defeating the purpose of the program.
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http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/01/29-4
Published on Thursday, January 29, 2009 by Inter Press Service
Poverty Safety Nets Fraying Nationwide
by Adrianne Appel
BOSTON – The global economy is barely showing a pulse, and the world’s poor are especially at risk, the International Monetary Fund declared Wednesday.
“We now expect the global economy to come to a virtual halt,” in 2009, said IMF Chief Economist Olivier Blanchard.
The IMF released its latest report as leaders of the world’s richest companies and nations were meeting in Davos, Switzerland for the annual and exclusive World Economic Forum, and activists, indigenous peoples and progressive NGOs gathered in northern Brazil at the World Social Forum, to brainstorm about alternative economies.
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http://www.counterpunch.org/khan01292009.html
An Interview with Jimmy Carter
The Future of Gaza
By RIZ KHAN
RIZ KHAN (Al Jazeera): Hello and welcome. Could Hamas be a key to peace between the Israelis and Palestinians? In spite of the U.S. condemning the democratically elected organization as terrorists and Israel launching a prolonged military campaign against Hamas in Gaza, there are those who feel there cannot be a solution without Hamas in peace talks. The argument for dialogue gains weight with the backing of a former U.S. president who’s been willing to take on the critics and controversy as he continues to staunchly campaign for peace in the region. In his book, “We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land: A Plan That Will Work,” former President Jimmy Carter argues that, despite the recent violence between Israel and Hamas, the conditions are right for a peace deal.
Well, for more than 30 years, Jimmy Carter has worked on building peace in the Middle East. The 1978 Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel paved the way for later agreements with Jordan and the Palestinians. So as a new U.S. president takes on the challenge of finding a resolution, what advice does President Carter offer, will it be received willingly and why is he hopeful now, when the two sides seem further apart than ever? President Carter, it’s an honor to speak with you again.
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http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts01292009.html
The financial damage inflicted on Americans by their own government is as great as would be expected from foreign conquest. While Washington “protected†us from terrorists by fighting pointless wars abroad, the US economy collapsed.
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http://www.counterpunch.org/avnery01262009.html
As the US Leans Left, Israel Lurches Right
On the Wrong Side of History
By URI AVNERY
Of all the beautiful phrases in Barack Obama’s inauguration speech, these are the words that stuck in my mind: “You are on the wrong side of history.â€
He was talking about the tyrannical regimes of the world. But we, too, should ponder these words
In the last few days I have heard a lot of declarations from Ehud Barak, Tzipi Livni, Binyamin Netanyahu and Ehud Olmert. And every time, these eight words came back to haunt me: “You are on the wrong side of history!â€
Permalink
Posted in you've got mail at 1:51 pm by nemo
RG mail
http://www.alternet.org/story/122810/
AlterNet January 28, 2009
Controversial Bestseller Shakes the Foundation of the Israeli State
By Joshua Holland
What if the Palestinian Arabs who have lived for decades under the heel of the modern Israeli state are in fact descended from the very same “children of Israel” described in the Old Testament?
And what if most modern Israelis aren’t descended from the ancient Israelites at all, but are actually a mix of Europeans, North Africans and others who didn’t “return” to the scrap of land we now call Israel and establish a new state following the attempt to exterminate them during World War II, but came in and forcefully displaced people whose ancestors had lived there for millennia?
What if the entire tale of the Jewish Diaspora — the story recounted at Passover tables by Jews around the world every year detailing the ancient Jews’ exile from Judea, the years spent wandering through the desert, their escape from the Pharaoh’s clutches — is all wrong?
That’s the explosive thesis of When and How Was the Jewish People Invented? , a book by Tel Aviv University scholar Shlomo Zand (or Sand) that sent shockwaves across Israeli society when it was published last year. After 19 weeks on the Israeli best-seller list, the book is being translated into a dozen languages and will be published in the United States this year by Verso.
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http://michaelratner.com/blog/
January 19, 2009
On the Celebration of King’s Birth: Israel in Gaza: “A Time Comes When Silence is Betrayal”
By Michael Ratner
On the celebration of King’s birth I often read or listen to the anti-war speech that he gave at Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 – A Time to Break the Silence. It was a powerful statement of his opposition to the Vietnam War. He spoke of how he was told to not oppose the war because his opposition would anger President Johnson and harm the civil rights movement. He was warned that “Peace and Civil rights don’t mix.” King admitted he held back because of this possible consequence for too long and failed to speak out earlier.
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http://www.truthout.org/012609R
Truthout January 26, 2008
Forty-Four Years Later, LBJ’s Ghost Hovers Over the 44th President
By Norman Solomon
A few days after the inauguration, in a piece celebrating the arrival of the Obama administration, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert wrote that the new president has clearly signaled “No more crazy wars.”
I wish.
Last week – and 44 years ago – there were many reasons to celebrate the inauguration of a president after the defeat of a right-wing Republican opponent. But in the midst of numerous delightful fragrances in the air, a bad political odor is apt to be almost ineffable.
Right now, on the subject of the Afghan war, what dominates the discourse in Washington is narrowness of political vision – while news outlets are reporting that the number of US forces in Afghanistan is expected to “as much as double this year to 60,000 troops.”
It’s heartbreaking now to read the admixture of profound humanity and nascent war madness in the inaIugural address of Lyndon Johnson. “In a land of great wealth, families must not live in hopeless poverty,” he proclaimed. “In a land rich in harvest, children just must not go hungry. In a land of healing miracles, neighbors must not suffer and die unattended.” And that wasn’t just rhetoric. LBJ went on to launch Great Society programs with great effects and far greater promise.
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World’s Glaciers Shrink for 18th Year in Alps, Andes (Update1)
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601082&sid=a9lFzLUK0Y28&refer=canada
By Jeremy van Loon
Jan. 29 (Bloomberg) — Glaciers from the Andes to Alaska and across
the Alps shrank almost 3 meters (10 feet), the 18th consecutive year
of glacial melting, as warmer temperatures and less snow reduced an
important supply of the world’s water.
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http://www.alternet.org/story/122822/
Is America on the Brink of a Food Crisis?
By Robert Jensen, AlterNet
Posted on January 29, 2009
As everyone scrambles for a solution to the crises in the nation’s economy, Wes Jackson suggests we look to nature’s economy for some of the answers. With everyone focused on a stimulus package in the short term, he counsels that we pay more attention to the soil over the long haul.
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http://www.allannairn.com/2009/01/torture-ban-that-doesnt-ban-torture.html
News and Comment January 26, 2009
The Torture Ban that Doesn’t Ban Torture
Obama’s Rules mark a return to the torture regime of Ford through Clinton, which often produced more US-backed torture than was produced during the Bush/Cheney years.
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CTV News 28/01/2009
Opportunity for Mideast peace is now, Carter says
Though prospects for peace in the Middle East appear grim to many, former U.S. president Jimmy Carter says there is been no better opportunity to achieve a lasting solution in the region:
Video interview:
http://news.sympatico.msn.ctv.ca/abc/home/contentposting.aspx?isfa=1&feedname=CTV-TOPSTORIES_V3&showbyline=True&date=true&newsitemid=CTVNews%2f20090128%2fjimmy_carter_AM_090128
or
http://tinyurl.com/aradx8
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01.28.09
Posted in Evolution, Science at 7:13 pm by nemo
Elevating Science, Elevating Democracy
Trying to assess the position of science in society requires more than a one line answer, that is, like a dialectical question, the yes and the no come inexorably to answer the question multidimensionally, and with more than the adherence enthusiasm of believers.
That dialectical moment (whatever we mean by ‘dialectic’) came in the Enlightenment, or in one aspect of it, beginning with Rousseau, proceeding to Kant, the German Enlightenment, and a host of developments from that.
And the simplest of critiques, in essence, emerges from that interaction, the discourse on the dialectic of the idea of freedom in relation to legacy of physicalism. The point is in one way completely obvious, yet in another consistently eliminated in the swift downshifting of science in the coming of science, prophesied, because already observed, by figures such as Kant.
The point is that as a public philosophy, science is insufficient, it needs an extended analysis of a fuller set of conepts to make itself ready for action as more than an experimental methodology, as a public philosophy.
Beyond that, yet illustrative of the issues raised in Kantian critique, lies the question of Darwinism, and the failure of modern science to produce an adequate theory of evolution, or of the relation of such theories to social action. The inability of modern science to see the limits of their evolutionary generalizations seems to show the way in which reductionism has crashlanded far short of an account of the larger dimension of man and society. The inability of science in its current form to deal with this, or even see the existence of a problem, must enter somewhat ominously into this discourse on the place of science in society.
The knock on science from its cultural and religious critics is that it is arrogant and materialistic. It tells us wondrous things about nature and how to manipulate it, but not what we should do with this knowledge and power. The Big Bang doesn’t tell us how to live, or whether God loves us, or whether there is any God at all. It provides scant counsel on same-sex marriage or eating meat. It is silent on the desirability of mutual assured destruction as a strategy for deterring nuclear war.
Einstein seemed to echo this thought when he said, “I have never obtained any ethical values from my scientific work.†Science teaches facts, not values, the story goes.
Worse, not only does it not provide any values of its own, say its detractors, it also undermines the ones we already have, devaluing anything it can’t measure, reducing sunsets to wavelengths and romance to jiggly hormones. It destroys myths and robs the universe of its magic and mystery.
So the story goes.
But this is balderdash. Science is not a monument of received Truth but something that people do to look for truth.
That endeavor, which has transformed the world in the last few centuries, does indeed teach values. Those values, among others, are honesty, doubt, respect for evidence, openness, accountability and tolerance and indeed hunger for opposing points of view. These are the unabashedly pragmatic working principles that guide the buzzing, testing, poking, probing, argumentative, gossiping, gadgety, joking, dreaming and tendentious cloud of activity — the writer and biologist Lewis Thomas once likened it to an anthill — that is slowly and thoroughly penetrating every nook and cranny of the world.
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Posted in selections, World History and The Eonic Effect at 6:17 pm by nemo
We can braid together selections from World History And The Eonic Effect to clarify the basic arguments, beyond the divergent extra material.
Our views of history are still based on a narrow set of facts beginning with the sources of our traditions. But the facts have long since exploded that, and produced a picture of the emergence of civilization that still doesn’t register in public narratives. And that expansion of our knowledge has crossed a threshold: we have enough to see that a long-range dynamism is at work, something we couldn’t quite infer before, but which suddenly illuminates the significance of the Axial Age, so-called, for the first time.
1.1.1 In Search Of History
Historical research has greatly expanded our knowledge of world history, and the result is an unexpected discovery: that of a process of universal history in the action of a mysterious dynamic generating a non-random pattern. We call this the eonic effect. Further, the scale of this process is such that we can only call it ‘evolution’. Thus, for the first time we can detect the unmistakable evidence of non-random evolution, and this in world history itself. This leaves us with the question, What is evolution? And this forces another, long overdue, What is the relationship between history and evolution? This could be recast as the paradoxical question, When did evolution stop and history begin?
A moment’s reflection will tell us that no instantaneous passage between the two is plausible and that our terms have been left ragged. We must, by this logic, be able to detect a Transition between evolution and history. Can we find evidence to match this deduction? Indeed, we can, our non-random pattern, the eonic effect. In fact we can say more: if we apply that same logic to our Transition we should expect it to take the form of a series of transitions in an alternation between evolution and history, as if overlayed, the one emerging from the other. The eonic effect shows just this property of transitions in a series. Have we reached the end of the Great Transition? If not, then our evolution still constitutes our present and future. We should ask who man is, with such wisdom as would constitute achievement of the title, homo sapiens.
Our thinking is conditioned by Darwinism, which throws ‘evolution’ into the past, with a tacit set of assumptions about random evolution. The result is an enforced incoherence. This is often matched with a prejudice against any consideration of a science of history in the large, and/or any attempt using the philosophy of history to seek historical meaning. A further critique of the idea of universal history comes from the postmodern rejection of the Grand Narrative .
In this context the status of a science of history is ambiguous, as the philosopher Karl Popper in his critique of historicism insisted, with his rejection of the idea that history has meaning. Yet as the labors of archaeological research proceed a falsification of this perspective emerges. Karl Popper was wrong: history has meaning, and we can discover large-scale coherence in its unfolding. It is hard to break the habit of thinking universal histories have all been discredited. Suddenly we see the existence of a world system, but this requires looking beyond individual civilizations to the whole phenomenon of Civilization since the Neolithic.[i]
As we proceed in search of history we will discover an irony, which is that we will find evolution in history, and then history in evolution, and this will give us an insight into the descent of man. We must move beyond the myth of purely genetic evolution, and the fixation on natural selection. We can recalibrate our definition of ‘evolution’ to include man’s past, present, and future, with a new kind of model that can carefully define the nature of our evolving freedom.
The evolution of man is, and remains, a complete mystery. There is something almost mythological in the projection of Darwinian scenarios of natural selection onto the Paleolithic. Such evidence as we have is mostly that of skeletal remains, highly incomplete, of a series of hominids stretched over millions of years. Dogmatism in such a situation takes on an almost religious character in Darwinists. In the midst of this void of hard information we are to believe that all the complex functions of the human advance are to be ascribed to processes of natural selection and adaptation. Such claims, pressed into service for metaphysical conclusions, are weak in their evidentiary basis. In contradiction to this, flagrantly out in the open, is the evidence of a Great Explosion in the period around 50,000 B.C. As if crossing a threshold homo sapiens suddenly begins to leave traces of all the forms of higher culture that are characteristic of man as we find him in history. The suddenness and depth of this rapid passage, if we can trust the data, call out for explanation beyond the standard and very vague claims of mysterious mutations. This is really a question of what we mean by ‘macroevolution’, as opposed to ‘microevolution’. Is not Darwin’s theory really one of microevolution? The problem is that observing anything that resembles macroevolution demands a very detailed record of evolutionary sequences, and this invokes a crisis of correct observation.
We are ready to take a look at the evidence for non-random evolution in history itself, mindful of the distinctions we think we should or should not make between cultural and biological evolution. There is an irony to our views of evolution. We look to deep time to find the answers to our quest to understand evolution, and yet we have very little data to conclude anything. We then apply that thinking to history, and yet here we have what is really a far more detailed record, seen at close range. We fail to suspect the fallacy here, or that history itself shows the direct evidence of evolution.
—
And the evidence for the non-random patterning in world history:
Mysterious Drumbeat
Looking backward, world history since the invention of writing reveals the evidence, contradicting Darwinian assumptions, of non-random evolution, an image of nature climbing Mt. Improbable. We assume the flow of world history follows random logic, conditioned as we are by Darwinism . The rapid growth of archaeological knowledge since the nineteenth century has greatly expanded our views of the emergence of civilization and, significantly, crossed a threshold of five thousand years, the bare minimum interval, we are about to see, for grasping the logic of historical evolution. A non-random pattern on this scale shows us something missing in Darwinian thinking and falls into the category of ‘evolution’, ‘evolution of some kind’, with a question, ‘What is the meaning of evolution?’. This pattern can be seen from two perspectives…
And then the attempt to find the meaning of this ‘mysterious drumbeat’:
A Frequency Hypothesis,
but we soon discovery the elusive character of this outer appearance of the eonic sequence, as we stumble on its deeper aspect, beyond observation:
A certain strangeness: beyond space and time?
Permalink
Posted in physics at 5:52 pm by nemo
Commentary on Quantum Enigma
http://darwiniana.com/2009/01/26/quantum-enigma/comment-page-1/#comment-324202
James said,
January 28, 2009 at 2:43 am ·
It’s a good book, but I don’t think it takes Bohm’s and Hiley’s critique seriously:
“M.P.: You say that the wave function is not a state function. Why not?
HILEY: All problems with the interpretation of QM arise because of the attitude that people adopt to the wave-function. If you regard it as a state of something, we have all the paradoxes – the “Schroedinger cat†paradox, the collapse of the wave-function etc. If I adopt an ontological standpoint, I will say that psi is really something I can attach to the object I am looking at. But it does not describe the object completely – it is the most complete description of the state of the system we can find.
What surprised me is that Bohr never mentions a measurement problem in any of his writings. If you read him carefully, he does not regard psi as a state-function. For him it is merely a part of an algorithm from which we can calculate the probable outcomes of given experiments. You see why he did not want to associate wave-function with the state of the system, because he said, you cannot separate the observed system from the observer. What does it mean to attach the label to something which you cannot distinguish from a background? If you then say that this is merely a part of an algorithm, then there is no collapse problem, because there is no STATE-function. That is why I said earlier that Niels Bohr has the most consistent interpretation of QM. But there are problems with Bohr, because he assumes that classical world exists. In modern cosmological theories, where the cosmos was created in a quantum event, there is no classical world. Therefore a reexamination of what QM really means is necessary.
In Bohm’s ontological interpretation there is a different attitude adopted towards psi. There it is considered to be a REAL field or two coupled real fields. In this case all the quantum paradoxes disappear! You do not get the measurement problem, you do not get the “Schroedinger cat†paradox etc. Each of these three interpretations has its own sets of problems. Which is the correct one? Are any of them correct? All three are inadequate in some way and we will have to go beyond them. We have not got right categories in which to understand quantum phenomena and we should all be searching for new categories. One proposal is through implicate order.â€
http://www.goertzel.org/dynapsyc/1997/interview.html
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Posted in Evolution at 3:33 pm by nemo
Birds Survived Mass Extinction That Wiped Out Dinosaurs Because Of Their Larger Brains
ScienceDaily (Jan. 28, 2009) — The Cretaceous–Tertiary mass extinction 65 million years ago may have wiped out the dinosaurs, but those that survived – the ancestors of today’s birds – may have done so because of their bird brains.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090127165505.htm
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Extending Darwinism
Is there more to heredity, natural selection, and evolution than genes and DNA?
I and several other biologists believe the MS is in need of serious revision. Growing evidence indicates there is more to heredity than DNA, that heritable non-DNA variations can take place during development, sometimes in response to an organism’s environment. The notion of soft inheritance is returning to reputable scientific inquiry. Moreover, there seem to be cellular mechanisms activated during periods of extreme stress that trigger bursts of genetic and non-genetic heritable variations, inducing rapid evolutionary change. These realizations promise to profoundly alter our view of evolutionary dynamics.
Collectively, the processes that we believe have been neglected in evolutionary studies are known as epigenetic mechanisms. Epigenetics is a term that includes all the processes underlying developmental flexibility and stability, and epigenetic inheritance is part of this. Epigenetic inheritance is the transmission of developmental variations that have nothing to do with changes in DNA base sequences. In its broad sense, it covers the transmission of any differences that do not depend on gene differences, so it encompasses the cultural inheritance of different religious beliefs in humans and song dialects in birds. It even includes the developmental legacies that a young mammal may receive from its mother through her placenta or milk &mdash transmitted antibodies, for example, or chemical traces that tell the youngsters what the mother has been eating and, therefore, what they should eat. But epigenetic inheritance is commonly associated with cellular heredity, in which differences that arise among genetically identical cells are transmitted to daughter cells.
Biologists have long suspected that mechanisms for epigenetic cell heredity must exist. Take, for example, our own embryonic development, when cells assume different roles. Some become kidney cells, others liver cells, and so on. Although they have the same DNA, liver cells and kidney cells look different and have different functions. In biologist jargon, they have the same genotype but different phenotypes. Moreover, they “breed true”: Kidney cells generate more kidney cells, and liver cells generate more liver cells, even though the stimuli that induced the different phenotypes in embryonic precursor cells are long gone. There must be some epigenetic mechanisms to ensure that a cell “remembers” what it was induced to be and transmit this “memory” of its altered state to daughter cells. This much is obvious. But surprisingly, we now know that cellular epigenetic variations are transmitted not only within organisms, but sometimes also between generations of organisms, via their sperm and eggs.
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On the evolution of Darwin
Among a glut of new works on the great naturalist, Philip Ball finds the claim that a hatred of slavery motivated his studies
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jan/25/evolution-charles-darwin
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New Scientist says Darwin was wrong
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/01/new_scientist_says_darwin_was.php
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Creationism to be taught in La. public schools
“Evolution is not a science. It’s as much a science as Christianity is. The majority of America is Christian, and we should acknowledge that in school,†said Sam Huff, LSU geography freshman.
Apparently, lawmakers in Louisiana agree with Huff.
According to local reports, the state’s top school board approved a policy on Jan. 15 to aid in teacher compliance with a new state law concerning the teaching of evolution in Louisiana’s public schools. The Louisiana Science Education Act, which was overwhelmingly passed by the state legislature last June without serious debate, claims to promote “students’ critical thinking skills and open discussion of scientific theories.â€
The Act expressly allows teachers to provide supplemental reading material for their students, outside of state-approved textbooks, for the purpose of critiquing established scientific theories.
http://tigerweekly.com/article/01-28-2009/10156
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Natural Selection Not The Only Process That Drives Evolution?
ScienceDaily (Jan. 28, 2009) — Why have some of our genes evolved rapidly? It is widely believed that Darwinian natural selection is responsible, but research led by a group at Uppsala University, suggests that a separate neutral (nonadaptive) process has made a significant contribution to human evolution.
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Ancient Wounds Reveal Triceratops Battles
ScienceDaily (Jan. 28, 2009) — How did the dinosaur Triceratops use its three horns? A new study led by Andrew Farke, curator at the Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology, located on the campus of The Webb Schools, shows that the headgear was not just for looks. Battle scars on the skulls of Triceratops preserve rare evidence of Cretaceous-era combat.
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Newborn Infants Detect The Beat In Music
ScienceDaily (Jan. 27, 2009) — Researchers at the Institute for Psychology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation of the University of Amsterdam demonstrated that two to three day old babies can detect the beat in music.
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Posted in In the News, you've got mail at 2:40 pm by nemo
As indicated, I am aggregating the news items on one page.
RG mail
Scientific American Magazine – February 4, 2009
How Meat Contributes to Global Warming
Producing beef for the table has a surprising environmental cost: it releases prodigious amounts of heat-trapping greenhouse gases
By Katherine Harmon
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Why should I respect these oppressive religions?
by Johann Hari
Thanks to Frank for the link.
Reposted from: Dawkins site
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-why-should-i-respect-these-oppressive-religions-1517789.html
Whenever a religious belief is criticised, its adherents say they’re victims of ‘prejudice’
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Behind the Bloodbath in Gaza
Foiling Another Palestinian “Peace Offensive”
By NORMAN FINKELSTEIN
http://www.counterpunch.org/finkelstein01282009.html
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Emperor Penguin ‘Marching to Extinction by End of the Century’
by Steve Connor
The Emperor penguin is marching towards extinction because the Antarctic sea ice on which it depends for survival is shrinking at a faster rate than the bird is able evolve if it is to avoid disaster, a study has found.
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‘Wake Up, World!’ – SOS From the Amazon
by Mario Osava
BELÉM, Brazil – A human banner made up of more than 1,000 people, seen and photographed from the air, sent the message “SOS Amazon” to the world, in the first action taken by indigenous people hours before the opening in northern Brazil on Tuesday of the 2009 World Social Forum (WSF).
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/01/28-8
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Israel’s leaders are frantically trying to prevent war crimes proceedings for their Gaza atrocities
By Jonathan Cook, AlterNet
Posted on January 26, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/122875/
Mounting fear in Israel that the country’s leaders face war crimes charges over their involvement in the recent Gaza offensive pushed officials into a frenzy of activity at the weekend to forestall legal actions abroad.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jan/27/obama-white-house-foreign-policy
Obama the imperialist
Change? In foreign policy, hardly. The new president is in the classic
liberal interventionist mould
* Richard Seymour
* The Guardian, Tuesday 27 January 2009
The first Democratic president in the modern era to be elected on an
anti-war ticket is also, to the relief of neocons and the liberal
belligerati, a hawk. Committed to escalation in Afghanistan, his
foreign policy selections also indicate bellicosity towards Sudan and
Iran. During his first week in office he sanctioned two missile
attacks in Pakistan, killing 22 people, including women and children.
And his stance on Gaza is remarkably close to that of the outgoing
administration. The question now is how Obama will convince his
supporters to back that stance. Bush could rely on a core constituency
whose commitment to peace and human rights is, at the very least,
questionable. Obama has no such luxury. In making his case, he will
need the support of those “liberal hawks” who gave Bush such vocal
support.
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sciftp
Chemtrails in the Sky Are Evidence of Nefarious Activities for Broad-Based Conspiracy Theorists
By Alexander Zaitchik, AlterNet
Posted on January 27, 2009, Printed on January 28, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/122849/
Anyone living near a major metropolitan airport has gazed up at the sky and seen them: patchworks of crisscrossing contrails left by passing jetliners. Most of us don’t give a second thought to this common sight of a scratched-up sky. If we do, it’s likely to reflect on the explosion in air traffic and its growing contribution to air pollution.
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gnxp
Scientists are systematically following children exposed to cocaine
before birth and the findings suggest that the long-term effects may
be relatively small
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/27/health/27coca.html
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Reducing what you eat by nearly a third may improve memory, according
to German researchers
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7847174.stm
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Are you a social butterfly, or do you prefer being at the edge of a
group of friends? Either way, your genes and evolution may play a
major role, U.S. researchers reported on Monday
http://www.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/idUSTRE50P6Y120090127?feedType=RSS&feedName=scienceNews
——————–
Using tissue from retired NFL athletes culled posthumously, the Center
for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy (CSTE), at the Boston
University School of Medicine, is shedding light on what concussions
look like in the brain
http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/01/26/athlete.brains/index.html
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EI update
The shortcut to peace
By Hasan Abu Nimah, The Electronic Intifada, 28 January 2009
It is utterly misleading and dishonest to pretend — as so
many now do — that the sum total of the
Palestinian-Israeli conflict is a confrontation over what
expired Palestinian Authority President and Israeli puppet
Mahmoud Abbas himself referred to as “silly rockets.” To
pretend that stopping the supply of rockets will make any
difference to the course of a conflict that results from
the historic dispossession — the Nakba — of an entire
nation, and its replacement with a racist rogue state that
has exiled, occupied and massacred the survivors for 61
years is the height of delusion. Hasan Abu Nimah comments.
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10248.shtml
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PALESTINE : OPINION/EDITORIAL:
THE INDIAN EXAMPLE
By Radhika Sainath, The Electronic Intifada, 26 January 2009
In Gaza, Palestinians have once again been blamed for
their own deaths. The British made a similar argument 151
years ago when they killed thousands of Indian civilians
– 1,200 in a single village — in response to the largest
anti-colonial uprising of the 19th century. If Israel
truly desires peace with the Palestinians and safety for
its citizens, it should look back to one of the greatest,
and misunderstood, independence movements in history.
Radhika Sainath comments for The Electronic Intifada.
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10245.shtml
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PALESTINE : ACTIVISM NEWS:
SURGE OF DIRECT ACTION AT UK UNIVERSITIES IN SUPPORT OF PALESTINE
By Abigail Humphries, The Electronic Intifada, 28 January 2009
Students from at least 17 universities in the United
Kingdom have staged sit-ins, as part of an unprecedented
increase in British activism in support of the
Palestinians. These university “occupations” have been
launched to compel administrators to meet demands ranging
from official condemnation of the Israeli action to
establishing scholarships for Palestinian students to
study in the UK.
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10252.shtml
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PALESTINE : MULTIMEDIA:
ALI ABUNIMAH DISCUSSES OBAMA’S PRESIDENCY WITH “PROGRESSIVES”
Video, GRITtv, 28 January 2009
From closing Guantanamo to lifting the gag rule Bush era
policies are coming to an end. But is it a new era of
progressive government? Katrina vanden Heuvel editor and
publisher of The Nation, Mark Green President of Air
America Radio, Andrea Batista Schlesinger Executive
Director of the Drum Major Institute, and Ali Abunimah
Co-Founder of The Electronic Intifada discuss Obama’s
first week in office and whether a new era of government
has been inaugurated. They spoke on the program GRITtv
hosted by Laura Flanders.
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10251.shtml
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PALESTINE : HUMAN RIGHTS:
CEASEFIRE BROKEN FROM DAY ONE
By Eva Bartlett, The Electronic Intifada, 27 January 2009
GAZA CITY, occupied Gaza Strip (IPS) – At 7:30am 22
January, five days after Israeli authorities declared a
“ceasefire” following their 22-day air, land and sea
bombardment of the Gaza Strip, Israeli gunboats renewed
shelling off the Gaza city coast, injuring at least six,
including four children. Muawiyah Hassanain, director of
Ambulance and Emergency Services, reported more shelling
in the northwestern coastal area al-Sudaniya the same
morning. Five fishermen were injured in the attacks, he
said.
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10247.shtml
————————————————————
PALESTINE : BUSINESS & ECONOMY:
PALESTINIAN ECONOMY: FOUNDATION OF A STATE OR COMMON BURDEN?
Sami Halabi, The Electronic Intifada, 27 January 2009
Perhaps the most nuanced aspect of Palestinian suffering
that goes more or less unnoticed is the abominable state
of the Palestinian economy. The systemic and perpetual
economic hindrances imposed upon the Palestinian economy
by the Israeli occupation are viewed by most experts to be
the primary impediment to allowing the Palestinian economy
to reach its full potential. Sami Halabi analyzes for The
Electronic Intifada.
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10249.shtml
————————————————————
LEBANON : OPINION/EDITORIAL:
REFUGEES TO PRIME MINISTER: END MILITARY SIEGE OF OUR CAMP
Open letter, Residents of Nahr al-Bared refugee camp, 27 January 2009
While Lebanese officials were publicly denouncing Israel’s
war on the Palestinians of Gaza, the Lebanese cabinet was
busy making sure the Palestinians of Nahr al-Bared refugee
camp in Lebanon never recover from the war waged on their
community more than a year ago. On 16 January 2009, the
cabinet approved a decision to build a naval base in the
area. The decision was met with stern opposition by the
people of Nahr al-Bared who wrote a letter of protest
addressed to Prime Minister Fouad Siniora and his
ministers.
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10246.shtml
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01.27.09
Posted in neuroscience, Science & Religion at 9:16 pm by nemo
http://darwiniana.com/2009/01/27/booknotes-the-constant-fire/comment-page-1/#comment-323682
James said,
January 27, 2009 at 7:25 pm
“When you start talking about “spirituality,†people are going to take you to mean something that goes beyond the laws of nature, in the sense of being incompatible with them, not just “hard to understand in terms of them†— something supernatural.â€
Many thanks to Sean Carroll for informing us that we can close the coffin on the Kantian Antinomies.
Actually I rarely (perhaps ‘you’ didn’t refer to ‘me’) use the term ‘spirituality’, the reason for my continued interest in the classic Samkhya of India, the system that expounds a consistent materialism, from low to high. Most of what we call ‘spiritual’ is really, for Samkhya, higher grades of the material. It does, of course, posit a state (purusha vs prakriti, the material) which is different from its opposite, I won’t call it spiritual. Note that spiritual experiences are thus material, while a certain something is beyond all those. It is a frame of mind comprehensible only to those who have followed ‘spiritual’ paths ad infinitum, and are able to stand beyond them, into something else. This is something quite different from being ‘religious’, rather one stands beyond religiousness, even. This viewpoint is reflected in the later Buddhism where states of spirituality, so-called, are distinguished from ‘enlightenment’. Another way to this is to drop the term ‘spiritual’ and refer to ‘self-consciousness’ as the transformation of consciousness, and ‘the fourth state’, turiya, as the transformation of self-consciousness. No reference to the ‘spiritual’ arises.
This line of thinking is also present in a writer we have discussed here a few times, J.G. Bennett. Contemporary thought, religious and scientific, is unable to resolve this issue, and the result is the mutual incoherence of those religious types who find the ‘spiritual’ some extension to the brain, as ghost stuff, or those scientific types who simply deny the existence of anything that isn’t reducible to chockablock mass.
The situation is, as you note, well depicted by the philosopher Kant who points to the basic dilemma in trying to deal with divinity, soul, and free will.
I think that the issue of freedom is the point of focus, rather than the debate over divinity. For, with the idea of freedom, we are between a rock and a hard place. The place of freedom in relation to causal systems is unresolved, even as the reality of freedom, as Kant would put it, confronts us from the viewpoint of, not theoretical reason, but practical reason.
That is clearly visible in our behavior, where, e.g. in a court case, as part of the legal system, we must adopt the stance of Kant in ascribing responsibility, hence freedom, to acts under lawful judgments.
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Posted in selections, World History and The Eonic Effect at 7:52 pm by nemo
From yesterday: brought up to today:
As promised over the weekend, the third chapter of World History And The Eonic Effect is now online: 3.1 AN EONIC SEQUENCE, AND A FREQUENCY DEDUCTION The first section tries to deduce the reason for this strange cyclical pattern. Maybe skim through it, and read through the whole chapter briefly first.
The chapter is designed to be short: move backwards from the present in stages to the Neolithic, to get a bird’s eye view of the elegant and simple patterning of major historical blocks, almost like clockwork.
You can see the point which is not speculative in any way by considering the sequence we unconsciously accept already:
Classical Age starting point (Greece, time of Buddha, Confucius, Old Testament)
Mediaeval interval (or middle interval)
Modern Age (from ca. sixteenth century to eighteenth) starting point.
Wait, the same thing happened just before that:
Rise of high civilization (Egypt, Sumer ca. 3000 BCE)
Mediaeval interval (or middle interval)
Onset of classical period (ca. 900 BCE to 600 BCE).
This pattern is as simple as it is provocative, and we are moved to keep on going backwards, but the data starts to thin rapidly, so, while we can clearly see that this process is present in the whole Neolithic, we can’t quite document it in the earlier intervals starting about 8000 BCE, although remarkably the data falls very roughly into place in the two earlier cases.
So what is the meaning of this simple, yet quite amazing regularity in world history?
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Posted in General at 7:09 pm by nemo
Some blog visitors may have noted a shutdown today, the second in a few weeks: I seem to be getting too much traffic, and may be sent away, to find a new site, or a virtual private server set up. The latter would be very desirable, but has cost issues.
Meanwhile, beside various other measures, I am reducing the number of posts on the front page, and using a cache system. The number of posts on the front page is now set at fifteen, and may go down again, which means some posts may be on the second page (cf. link at bottom of page). A lot of the news posts in the early part of the day are superfluous, and can be consolidated or whatever.
We keep on trucking.
Update: the number of posts on the front page is now ten. I am going to try and reduce the number of pageviews, by making most visits click on the front page, read the content, and conclude a session, instead of the previous situation where each visit generated four to six pageviews, driving the database crazy.
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Posted in selections, World History and The Eonic Effect at 4:41 pm by nemo
Continuing with the selection series form World History And The Eonic Effect, the chapter on the ‘frequency hypothesis’, has a discussion of the resemblance of the eonic effect to what we can only call ‘punctuated equilibrium’. The resemblance is uncanny to something that ‘punctuates an equilibrium’, 3.5 The Eonic Effect: Punctuated Equilibrium
The problem is that the term is already tied down with Darwinian debates and controversies, so we have to imagine that we are coining the phrase as if for the first time.
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Posted in History at 4:30 pm by nemo
Danube Delta Holds Answers To ‘Noah’s Flood’ Debate
ScienceDaily (Jan. 27, 2009) — Did a catastrophic flood of biblical proportions drown the shores of the Black Sea 9,500 years ago, wiping out early Neolithic settlements around its perimeter? A geologist with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and two Romanian colleagues report in the January issue of Quaternary Science Reviews that, if the flood occurred at all, it was much smaller than previously proposed by other researchers.
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