01.26.09
SW inbox
Interview: Haidar Eid
THE TRAUMA ETCHED ON EVERY FACE IN GAZA Read the rest of this entry »
Israel admits using white phosphorous
sciftp
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2009\01\26\story_26-1-2009_pg7_41
Israel admits using white phosphorous in Gaza
Daily Times Monitor
LAHORE: Israel has finally admitted that white phosphorus was deployed in its offensive on the heavily-populated Gaza Strip, a report in The Times said on Sunday.
EI update
_______________________________
UPDATE FROM THE
ELECTRONIC INTIFADA
http://electronicIntifada.net
________________________ Read the rest of this entry »
01.25.09
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. Read the rest of this entry »
Evolution and aesthetic judgment
Review Of A New Book on Haeckel, The Tragic Sense Of Life.
This review raises too many questions to consider all at once, but here’s an interesting quote:
But what is Romanticism? An aesthetic appreciation of nature and a love of travel, painting and poetry are some common denominators among Richards’s Romantics. Most of them also have a certain pantheistic tendency to see God in or as nature. But more important to Richards is the Romantic notion that aesthetic judgment is required in the study of life. Animal forms are diverse and changeable, but beneath the unstable appearances, the Romantic expects to find underlying unity, purpose, and ideal forms or archetypes. These, the Romantic holds, cannot be seen directly or inferred logically but must be envisioned by the mind’s creative faculties. Similarly, organic change and progress must also be envisioned in terms of archetypal sequences.
The problems with Romantic biology are not inconsiderable, but the proposition that Darwin rendered all of that obsolete is false.
The rediscovery of evolution (after the original of the Greeks) in the Enlightenment spawned a whole spectrum of perspectives on its meaning, and the fiction that Darwin solved the problem once and for all is one of the greatest distortions in the history of science, and of modern thought.
Much of the Romantic Naturephilosophie derailed in its own metaphysics, but the passage cited above shows that the issues won’t go away: “the Romantic notion that aesthetic judgment is required in the study of life” echoes down to our own time as a challenge to the gross oversimplifications of Darwinism.
It should be noted that the study of the eonic effect almost automatically summons up this history of Romantic biology, but then seizes high ground with an austere Kantian perspective that can avoid some of the confusions of later mystical biology.
Check out the material here: Kant’s Challenge, along with related essays in that chapter of World History And The Eonic Effect.
The study of the eonic effect provokes the crisis of contradictions that leads to the examination of transcendental idealism, and this suggests that biologists are in trouble with their reductionist definition of the organism: isn’t an organism an entity that might transcend space and time?
This devastating possibility remains to haunt the simplificities (?? nice neologism, I meant ‘simplicities’) of Darwinian rejection of essentialism.
As to the question of aesthetic judgment, the eonic effect shows examples of the way that historical entities connected with dynamical processes require ‘aesthetic judgments’ to assess their place in those evolutionary processes. Consider, Art, Evolution, And The Tragic Genre, and the almost devastating correlation of the tragic genre in the Axial Age, and instantaneous waning in its wake. Aethetic jugment is thus connected directly to historical/evolutionary reasoning.
Darwinism just can’t follow into that realm.
Online refuge
Atheism 2.0 – Indonesia’s nonbelievers find refuge online
by AFP
From Dawkins site
JAKARTA (AFP) — Chain-smoking at a trendy coffee shop while studiously ignoring the mosque’s evening call to prayer, Indonesian atheists Didi and Dewi have little patience for the beliefs of most of their countrymen.
The two young women are defiant unbelievers in the world’s largest Muslim-majority country, but they let few people in the real world know it.
Instead, the women have joined scores of young Indonesian atheists who have found refuge on the Internet, using web tools such as social networking sites, mailing lists, blogs and wikis to communicate with like-minded people in a country where declaring there is no God can turn someone into an outcast.
A false debate
Truth and Reconciliation for Group Selection V: The Patriotic History of Individual Selection Theory
Wilson’s essay continues the false debate over group selection/individual selection, one that makes it look like the ‘paradigm’ is progressing when it is not going anywhere.
The real issue is the false basis in selectionist Darwinism that leads to these false theories of the evolution of ethics.
Rewrite the textbooks…
Rewrite the textbooks: Transcription is bidirectional
A genome-wide study of transcription in yeast redefines the concept of promoters
Genes that contain instructions for making proteins make up less than 2% of the human genome. Yet, for unknown reasons, most of our genome is transcribed into RNA. The same is true for many other organisms that are easier to study than humans. Researchers in the groups of Lars Steinmetz at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, and Wolfgang Huber at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) in Hinxton, UK, have now unravelled how yeast generates its transcripts and have come a step closer to understanding their function. The study, published online in Nature, redefines the concept of promoters (the start sites of transcription) contradicting the established notion that they support transcription in one direction only. The results are also representative of transcription in humans.
Investigating all transcripts produced in a yeast cell, the scientists found that most regions of the yeast genome produce several transcripts starting at the same promoter. These transcripts are interleaved and overlapping on the DNA. In contrast to what was previously thought, the vast majority of promoters seem to initiate transcription in both directions.
Not all of the produced transcripts are stable, many are degraded rapidly making it difficult to observe what they do. While some of the RNA molecules might be ‘transcriptional noise’ without function, other transcripts control the expression of genes and production of proteins. The act of transcription itself is also likely to play an important role in regulation of gene expression. Transcribing one stretch of DNA might either help or in other cases interfere with the transcription of a gene close by. Moreover, transcripts without a current purpose can serve as ‘raw material for evolution’ and acquire new functions over time.
The results shed light on the complex organisation of the yeast genome and the insights gained extend to transcription in humans. A better understanding of transcription mechanisms could find application in new technologies to tune gene regulation in the future.
###
Tracking Melanesian migration
Scientists use intestinal bacterium to track human migration to Melanesia
DNA from the H. pylori in modern human stomachs indicates that prehistoric humans lived in Australia and New Guinea for about 25,000 years first.
Why natural selection is false
‘Why Evolution Is True’ by Jerry A. Coyne: Author confronts creationism and intelligent design
In book publishing, timing and controversy are everything. So it is no surprise to see University of Chicago professor and evolutionary geneticist Jerry A. Coyne’s new book, Why Evolution Is True, appearing just in time for Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday. (He is probably just lucky that the book arrives amid a fresh battle on how the subject should be taught in Texas.)
The issue is not whether evolution is true, but what evolution is really like, and what is the problem with the explanation by natural selection
Louisiana evo debate
Analysis: Science-Religion Debate Will Continue
By KEVIN McGILL / Associated Press Writer
There are disagreements on what exactly will result from policy language the Louisiana state education board recently adopted for teaching science in Louisiana public schools, but one thing looks pretty clear: sooner or later Louisiana is going back to court in a case that will look like a descendant of the 1987 argument over “scientific creationism.â€
Barbara Forrest, staunch opponent of anything that might bring the religious-based concept into science classes, thinks such a fight is just what some supporters of the new state policy have in mind. She points fingers at the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, a think tank that backs, among other things, the idea of intelligent design – the concept that there is scientific evidence that living organisms were designed.
An institute spokesman denies any desire for a court fight over the issue and points to its public position in support of intelligent design but against requiring its teaching in public schools.
“We’re certainly not looking for a test case and we’re not trying to legislate the instruction of intelligent design,†said John West of the Discovery Institute.
So, what has Forrest worried?
Global capitalism
A Revolution in Spirit
by Benjamin R. Barber
Read the rest of this entry »
Americans viewing Al-Jazeera
American Viewership of Al-Jazeera Rises Dramatically
by Barbara Surk and Adam Schreck
DOHA, Qatar – American viewership of Al-Jazeera English rose dramatically during the Israel-Hamas war, partly because the channel had what CNN and other international networks didn’t have: reporters inside Gaza.
Uri Avnery: On the wrong side of history
mxmail
> Source
On The Wrong Side
24/01/09
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.”
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!”
Obama was speaking as a man of the 21st century. Our leaders speak the
language of the 19th century. They resemble the dinosaurs which once
terrorized their neighborhood and were quite unaware of the fact that their
time had already passed.
Holtzman: holding Bush accountable
RG mail
http://www.alternet.org/rights/120530/?page=1
The Nation January 16, 2009
Obama Has to Hold Bush Accountable for the Laws He Broke
By Elizabeth Holtzman
Obama cannot let former Bush administration officials get away with breaking
the law without violating his own oath of office.
Vitamin D
gnxp
Vitamin D, found in fish and produced by sun exposure, can help stave
off the mental decline that can affect people in old age, a study has
suggested
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7845703.stm
New essay at talk.reason
Seeing and Believing
By Jerry Coyne
http://www.talkreason.org/articles/?http://www.tnr.com/story_print.html?id=1e3851a3-bdf7-438a-ac2a-a5e381a70472
Reviewing the recently published books by Karl Giberson and Kenneth Miller, professor Jerry Coyne discusses whether or not religion and science are compatible (in his view, they are not). (Off-site link.)
published: Jan 25, 2009
If the Hamas rockets are so lethal…
RG mail
The Independent 21 January 2009
Now we’ve all seen through the Israeli government’s excuses
If the Hamas rockets are so lethal, why doesn’t Israel swap an F-16 for some? Read the rest of this entry »
Six decades
RG mail
Al Jazeera English – WITNESS – Journey Home
The troubled past of Israel’s birth as a nation and the devastating consequences it has had in the region frequently make headlines around the world and fill our screens with images of political turmoil. Witness
– Watch more documentaries online But the reality of what six decades of displacement has meant for the day to day lives of those who have lived there rarely makes the news.
Al Jazeera’s news editor, Awad Joumaa went on a journey spanning two continents and three countries to bring that reality to life.
In his moving and deeply personal film Journey Home, Awad took his father from Denmark back to the place he was born, but has never known.
http://english.aljazeera.net/programmes/witness/2009/01/200912313103333652.html
Gaza doctors
RG mail
Ajazeera TV:
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2009/01/2009123192033971765.html
Gaza doctors struggle to treat victims
Doctors in Gaza say the war-related injuries they are treating are making them question what weapons were used in Israel’s 22-day offensive.
Al Jazeera’s Todd Baer reports from Khan Younis where doctors suspect that chemical weapons may be behind some of the injuries.
Pilger: a criminal’s medal
RG mail
The New Statesman 22 January 2009 A criminal’s medal
As deserving as Blair, Howard and Uribe are of the Bush freedom medal, others cry out for a place in their company. For its assault on Gaza, I nominate the state of Israel
John Pilger
On 13 January, George W Bush presented presidential “medals of freedomâ€, Read the rest of this entry »
Unseen Gaza
RG mail
Link to .avi file containing 1st three installments of this strongly
recommended doco below…
‘In this Dispatches special, Jon Snow examines the difficulties that
news organisations around the world have faced in reporting the
conflict in Gaza. Who is getting the true picture of events as they
happen?’
http://www.channel4.com/programmes/unseen-gaza
http://snipr.com/ap8bz
01.24.09
Evolution and systems in long-range frequencies
Have fun with chapter three, A Frequency Hypothesis, after reading Chapter two.
Chapter three, quite apart from anything else solves the problem of cyclical theories and their myths, that have haunted humanity for ages, to no avail.
The reason is the insufficient data to solve the riddle, which the eonic pattern solves at once. It is amazing to consider that a mainline in world history shows a macro system operating in a long frequency. Stunning. But entirely apt, once the point is seen clearly (and you must study the data of each of the cultures).
Strictly speaking, we don’t draw this as a conclusion (that would require much more data, about ten thousand years of fine-grain history), instead we simply note that world history since the invention of writing shows strong correlated intermittency along a special mainline. As described in the text. The basic data is very robust, so we are confronted with a strange set of possible implications, but with three beats for a sequence, we can only wonder. The strategy is to make the issue an hypothesis, and get back to work on the data that we have, without speculations. But we can see why so many in antiquity were rightly suspecting something like that, but unable to fully make sense of the simple question.
The implication of this for evolution is that a macro process in a long sequence of transition operates on populations over the long-range of many millennia in an organized directional evolutionary process.
Follow the backward progression in the chapter, which is kept very short to keep the pattern comprehensible as one mental snapshot. A remarkable pattern indeed.
If I were a Darwinist defending Darwin’s Descent Of Man I would be worried.
Technical note
To decrease the load on the database for the blog I have reduced the number of posts on the front page to twenty (and may go lower).
Since I have often had up to twenty-five posts a day, some will now be on the previous page ( see link at bottom of main page). Mostly these are news items. The main posts with evolution material will always be on the front page, and near the top, usually the first ten posts.
Evolution, Kant and the noumenal
The confusion over evolution theories makes sense if we see them in terms of metaphysical approaches to what Kant calls the ‘noumenal’. That is, a barrier to our knowledge.
The material on the eonic effect explores this and makes the point clear. We may have to face the reality that the dynamic of evolution in any given case is inaccessible to observation. We can’t generalize in all cases, but the point is clear from the subject of world history in light of the eonic effect.
From Chapter 4 of World History And The Eonic Effect online.
A noumenal mystery Our eonic model almost automatically produces a structure isomorphic to Kant’s distinction of noumenon and phenomenon, and it does so deftly using different concepts and without any of the complications that haunt the original. Isomorphic, but in a different context, large-scale history. Since this was serendipitous, and unasked for, we are left to wonder what this means. The problem is that history is all of a piece, phenomenon, including our eonic sequence. And yet this sequence stages the hard evidence of the ‘uncaused freedom emergence factor’ inside a temporal oscillation. All we can do is notice this isomorphism, and proceed on our own way with our self-sufficient model, which exploits a dualism of levels for purely practical system model reasons. So what is the relationship of our eonic sequence to this enigma of Kant? Since our transitions are phenomenon yet noumenally tuned, we must consider that in some fashion our eonic sequence oscillates near the limits of manifestation (a statement bordering on a kind of metaphysics we haven’t allowed), and at the limits of our representations we see the inexplicable appearance of the freedom generator. The long lost mediating factor between the phenomenon and the noumenon suddenly appears, where least expected, in history itself. We must suspect that the ‘teleological’ aspect is beyond the limits of our representations, noumenal, as all that we see is phenomenon, directionality, a stupendous oscillation in the degrees of freedom of the system execution.
See also this section in the same chapter:
A certain strangeness: beyond space and time
We can’t be sure in general, but I have a bad feeling about it: the riddle of evolution may be beyond space-time observability.
Small wonder that everyone is in a metaphysical overdrive mode claiming science. We need a Kantian discipline to know what we know, and don’t know.
(note that the design argument is very much a metaphysical, illegitimate, attempt at the noumenal, so we are already in this debate)
Danger of compromise pseudo-paradigm shift
Nation Geographic also has a cover story this month: “What Darwin did not know.â€
I did not read the article, but it will be interesting to see if there are more cracks in Darwin’s armor.
I think it is sinking in that Darwinism, and Darwinists, have a problem. The Altenberg conference also had an effect, despite the efforts to smother it and/or work the new ideas into a compromise with the old.
We need to be vigilant to the possibility that a compromise paradigm will get concocted, without any real critique of the old entering public consciousness. These scientists don’t want anyone to think or know that they have been wrong for so long.
We need a complete break with the past.
Selections from WHEE
I have put selections from World History And The Eonic Effect, chapters 3 and 4, online, and will introduce them starting Monday, after checking/proofing the webpages. But you can sneak preview them this weekend:
A Frequency Hypothesis,
After that I will only put up a thinner set of selections, so buy the book!
New Scientist: Darwin was wrong
Here is another selection from an important artice this week: Why Darwin was wrong about the tree of life
it is clear that the Darwinian tree is no longer an adequate description of how evolution in general works. “If you don’t have a tree of life, what does it mean for evolutionary biology?” asks Bapteste. “At first it’s very scary… but in the past couple of years people have begun to free their minds.” Both he and Doolittle are at pains to stress that downgrading the tree of life doesn’t mean that the theory of evolution is wrong – just that evolution is not as tidy as we would like to believe. Some evolutionary relationships are tree-like; many others are not. “We should relax a bit on this,” says Doolittle. “We understand evolution pretty well – it’s just that it is more complex than Darwin imagined. The tree isn’t the only pattern.”
Others, however, don’t think it is time to relax. Instead, they see the uprooting of the tree of life as the start of something bigger. “It’s part of a revolutionary change in biology,” says Dupré. “Our standard model of evolution is under enormous pressure. We’re clearly going to see evolution as much more about mergers and collaboration than change within isolated lineages.”Rose goes even further. “The tree of life is being politely buried, we all know that,” he says. “What’s less accepted is that our whole fundamental view of biology needs to change.” Biology is vastly more complex than we thought, he says, and facing up to this complexity will be as scary as the conceptual upheavals physicists had to take on board in the early 20th century.
If he is right, the tree concept could become biology’s equivalent of Newtonian mechanics: revolutionary and hugely successful in its time, but ultimately too simplistic to deal with the messy real world. “The tree of life was useful,” says Bapteste. “It helped us to understand that evolution was real. But now we know more about evolution, it’s time to move on.”
The usual attempt to shoot down new insight here, with protest from UD
Trade secret of paleontology
UD has a good quote from Gould at Google books, 24 January 2009
Texas Mandates Teaching “The Trade Secret of Paleontologyâ€,
the relevant section is here:
The Episodic Nature of Evolutionary Change
Was Darwin wrong? Getting news from anyone but scientists
The Sins of the Fathers, Take 2
At tributes to Darwin, Lamarckism—inheritance of acquired traits—will be the skunk at the party.
Thanks to Newsweek for some genuine news on evolution.
Do you think anyone in the science communication network would inform us of these developments?
Inheriting a DNA-silencing mark that your mom acquired is not as dramatic as giraffes passing on elongated necks to their kids. And the new Lamarckism doesn’t mean that human moms who work out will pass along toned abs to their children, or that human dads who dye their hair red will have red-haired children. But preliminary evidence suggests that Lamarckism acts in people, too. In 2005, scientists in London found that the grandsons of men who had abundant food when they were boys (the study was done on men in a small town in northern Sweden) were much more likely to have diabetes and to die an early death than were the grandsons of men who suffered food shortages as boys. A 2006 study by the same scientists found that when fathers smoked as young boys, their sons tended to be more obese than did the sons of men who did not smoke as boys. Similar to the lab mice, the experience of the parents is visited upon the children and even the grandchildren. If the results hold up, says Whitelaw, “it would signal a paradigm shift in the way we think about the inheritance” of traits.
The existence of this parallel means of inheritance, in which something a parent experiences alters the DNA he or she passes on to children, suggests that evolution might happen much faster than the Darwinian model implies. “Darwinian evolution is quite slow,” says Whitelaw. But if children can inherit DNA that bears the physical marks of their parents’ experiences, they are likely to be much better adapted to the world they’re born into, all in a single generation. Water fleas pop out helmets immediately if mom lived in a world of predators; by Darwin’s lights, a population of helmeted fleas would take many generations to emerge through random variation and natural selection. The new Lamarckism promises to “reveal how the environment affects the genome to determine the ultimate traits of an individual,” says Whitelaw.
Some of these studies will not hold up, as is typical with revolutionary new science. And resistance to what is being dubbed “the renaissance of heresy” is firm; one scientist called a paper on this stuff “a misguided attempt at scientific humor.” But evidence for the new Lamarckism is strong enough to say the last word on inheritance and evolution has not been written.
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