History, Evolution, and the Darwin Debate
How to survive the coming century
ALLIGATORS basking off the English coast; a vast Brazilian desert; the mythical lost cities of Saigon, New Orleans, Venice and Mumbai; and 90 per cent of humanity vanished. Welcome to the world warmed by 4 °C.
Published on Friday, February 27, 2009 by Inter Press Service
The Heat Is on Washington
by Stephen Leahy
A boiling point over government inaction on climate change may have been reached in the United States.
More than 12,000 mainly young people are planning to gather in Washington on Monday, Mar. 2, to insist that their elected officials legislate immediate and deep cuts in U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide, just as scientists revealed this week that the global climate is more sensitive to rising temperatures than expected.
And on the same Monday, at least 2,000 people led by eminent scientist James Hansen of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) plan to close the coal/oil powered Capitol Power Plant that supplies heat to government buildings on Capitol Hill, breaking the law if necessary.
Nation’s Food System Nearly Broke
by John Kinsman
As our government enacts a stimulus package and President Barack Obama announces bold initiatives to stem home mortgage foreclosures, disaster threatens family farmers and their communities.
Read the rest of this entry »
Jewish Leaders Blast Clinton Over Israel Criticism
Zuckerman, Lawmakers, Local Jews Say Secretary of State Not the Hillary Clinton They Used to Know; Hillary Pressuring Israel to Speed up Aid to Gaza
by Marcia Kramer
NEW YORK – In a swift about face from her views as New York’s senator, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is now hammering Israel over its treatment of Palestinians in Gaza.
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http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=477k3d8mh2wmtpc4b6h07p4hy9z83x18
The Chronicle Review (October 17 2008)
The depression of 1929 is the wrong model for the current economic crisis
by Scott Reynolds Nelson
As a historian who works on the 19th century, I have been reading my
newspaper with a considerable sense of dread. While many commentators on
the recent mortgage and banking crisis have drawn parallels to the Great
Depression of 1929, that comparison is not particularly apt. Two years
ago, I began research on the Panic of 1873, an event of some interest to
my colleagues in American business and labor history but probably
unknown to everyone else. But as I turn the crank on the microfilm
reader, I have been hearing weird echoes of recent events.
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From Bush to Obama
Seven Years of Wartime Propaganda
By ANTHONY DiMAGGIO
sciftp
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090316/deresiewicz
Lab Test: Who Profits From Scientific Research?
By William Deresiewicz
The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation
by Steven Shapin
The most striking thing about the way we talk about science these days is just how little we talk about it at all. No large fundamental question focuses our attention on the adventure of discovery; no grand public project stirs our reflection on the perils of technological control. Nothing for decades has approached the imaginative impact of relativity or the double helix, the moon landing or the bomb. Even genetic research, which generates so much attention in the media, is understood more as a medical issue–news you can use–than an issue of science as such. And if we talk about science very little, we talk about the scientist even less. The old stereotypes, once so evocative–the genius, the benefactor, the madman–have lost their potency. No Einstein or Pasteur anymore, no Frankenstein or Strangelove. Scientific research has become so highly collaborative, so much a group endeavor, that the investigators have been eclipsed by the explainers–the Sagans and Pinkers and Gladwells. Science has become so pervasive a part of the way things run that, like the servants in a Victorian household, the people who actually make it happen have disappeared into the wallpaper.
sciftp
http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2009/226/2?etoc
Drink Up, Energy Hogs
By Jackie Grom
ScienceNOW Daily News
26 February 2009
Talk about an energy drink. The first comprehensive and peer-reviewed energy analysis of a bottle of water confirms what many environmentalists have charged. From start to finish, bottled water consumes between 1100 and 2000 times more energy on average than does tap water.
Why the Dark Secrets of the First Gulf War Are Still Haunting Us
By Nora Eisenberg, AlterNet. Posted February 27, 2009.
Americans, and our leaders, would do well to take a hard look at the war that we continue to love only because we never got to see it. Tools
With rare exceptions, American politicians seem incapable of opposing an American war without befriending another in a different place or time.
Barack Obama, an early and ardent enemy of the Iraq War, quickly declared his affinity for a war in Afghanistan and/or Pakistan. And like so many Democratic leaders, he has commended Bush 41′s Gulf War over Bush 43′s, for its justifiable cause, clear goals, quick execution and admirable leadership.
It’s difficult to determine the proportion of expedience to ignorance that allows politicians and pundits to advance the theory of the good and trouble-free Gulf War. What’s clear, though, is that for close to 20 years, the 42-day war, in which we dropped more bombs than were dropped in all wars combined in the history of the world, maintains a special place in American hearts.
But as John R. MacArthur amply demonstrates in The Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War, the real 1991 war was kept from the American public. This week, as we commemorate the 18th anniversary of the Gulf War’s end, and opportunities for new hostilities beckon, Americans, and our leaders, would do well to take a hard look at the war that we continue to love only because we never got to see it.
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The lessons of Haiti
By Yves Engler
| February 27, 2009
http://rabble.ca/news/lessons-haiti
Haiti can teach you a lot about the harsh reality of social affairs.
From the grips of the most barbaric form of plantation economy sprung
probably the greatest example of liberation in the history of humanity.
The 1791-1804 Haitian Revolution was simultaneously a struggle against
slavery, colonialism and white supremacy. Defeating the French,
British and Spanish empires, it led to freedom for all people
regardless of colour, decades before this idea found traction in
Europe or North America.
Unfortunately, Haiti’s history also demonstrates how fluidly Europe
(and North America) moved from formal colonialism to neo-imperialism.
Technically “independent” for more than two centuries, outsiders have
long shaped the country’s affairs.
Yesterday’s post on Secularism and the eonic effect might profit from looking at one of the strange yet inevitable properties of the eonic effect: the way in which we begin to dissolve the ‘eonic sequence’ as we begin to observe its action, in the past. Or else, it is the case that we have reached the end of this phase of ‘evolution’ and wake up to its action, looking backward. Here is a selection from World History And The Eonic Effect on this point.
End Of The Eonic Sequence
The study of the ‘evolution’ in the eonic effect can be confusing at first because it is not morphological evolution, or organismic development, but the ‘evolution of freedom’, speaking formally.
In fact, another selection from earlier in the book might illustrate the point (don’t worry too much about the ‘deduction’, just look at the paradox of ‘evolving freedom’ versus ‘self-evolving freedom’.
An Eonic Sequence, And A Frequency Deduction
A frequency deduction A system ‘evolving freedom’ cannot cause freedom directly, since the over-determination would be causally closed. But such a system cannot leave action alone, since under-determination would not evolve freedom. Therefore, to evolve freedom such a system might alternate between higher and lower degrees of freedom, in cycles of macro-action, and micro-action left to its own devices. All at once we see that this corresponds to the eonic pattern. Thus, for example, the Axial Age shows a higher degree of freedom, but under eonic determination, while the mideonic intervals show the potential for freedom without the action of the system, ‘real freedom’, or not. The frequency system might terminate at some point to allow the realization of this potential. At the end we will suspect that we are at the end of the eonic sequence since observing the eonic effect probably preempts its future action.
In general the simplicity of the eonic effect is challenged by the need to distinguish between the ‘degrees of freedom’, almost in alternation, during the transitions and at other times. It seems obscure, but the point is absolutely vital.
If we look at the brilliance of the Axial Age and the declines and loss of quality in the continuation after the period of massive innovation we can see that there is an obvious difference, for a reason we can suddly see.
We must therefore be on the lookout in our own time for this phenomenon.
You can see the problem is difficult is you ask yourself why the great achievements of the early modern are hard to match, e.g. the sudden correlated flowering of ‘classical’ music from the seventeenth century to the period of Beethoven. We can see, stunned by the strangeness of the eonic sequence, that these phenomena are not chance developments.
But the ‘end of the eonic sequence’ is a challenge to realize a greater freedom, not the submission to some spurious Spenglerian decline.
My review of The Darwin Conspiracy has come online. The book itself is only available from amazon.co.uk (it is not out of print).
We have to make sure the Darwin wiseacres don’t deflect our attention again from the sordid facts of the case.
I fail to see how the Darwin establishment can go through with a whole year of this sickening Darwin worship under the circumstances. It will merely prove that people we had thought confused are really mendacious.
Darwinist Opposition to Academic Freedom Bills Demonstrates the Need for Legislation to Protect Academic Freedom
Much to the chagrin of those who wish to prevent students from learning about science that challenges neo-Darwinism, academic freedom bills have been submitted to the legislatures of five states so far this year. The arguments from critics against these bills are utterly predictable — but they unwittingly demonstrate the need for academic freedom legislation.
Before the Oklahoma Academic Freedom Bill died in committee last week, two Oklahoma Darwinists created a scare-FAQ to lobby Oklahoma legislators, stating: “This bill is designed to cast doubt on science as a valid way of understanding the world and to promote ideas based on religious faith. … This is a ‘Trojan horse’ bill intended to open the door for the teaching of religious concepts in school science classes.” Similar arguments were made by Iowa Darwinists, who signed a petition stating that “’academic freedom’ for alternative theories is simply a mechanism to introduce religious or non-scientific doctrines into our science curriculum.”
These arguments are difficult to take seriously, because the actual text of the Oklahoma bill, for example, says precisely the opposite:
This act only protects the teaching of scientific information, and this act shall not be construed to promote any religious or non-religious doctrine, promote discrimination for or against a particular set of religious beliefs or non-beliefs, or promote discrimination for or against religion or non-religion. On the contrary, the intent is to create an environment in which both the teacher and students can openly and objectively discuss the facts and observations of science, and the assumptions that underlie their interpretation.
Speaking with a purpose
by Lawrence Cosentino
Reposted from: Dawkins site
http://www.lansingcitypulse.com/lansing/article-2657-speaking-with-a-purpose.html
Winds of change are putting fresh blood into British biologist Richard Dawkins’ cheeks.
Or did a puff from his cheeks produce the wind? It figures — Dawkins has given us one more chicken-and egg biology problem.
Two years ago, the distinguished Oxford don wrote “The God Delusion,” pivoting toward polemics after a career spent researching and explaining the evolution of life.
In recent years, half a shelf of new atheist books, including Dawkins’ cheeky entry, climbed the best-seller lists, raising a long-dormant question: Are people ready to jettison, or at least question, religious faith as a way to explain and manage the world?
Heretics and humility
The idea that earth’s astounding array of life may owe itself to something other than the random mutation of species into others – a metamorphosis never reproduced in any laboratory – is a forbidden thought. Imagining “a biological Einstein,” to borrow Verlyn Klinkenborg’s phrase, has become heresy.
Thus, efforts to permit open discussion of Darwinism are derided as a “war on science.” And a leading scientific group is boycotting Louisiana because a law there permits teachers to use supplemental texts to “help students critique and review scientific theories.” And the Texas Board of Education is being petitioned to amend the state curriculum so that students are no longer encouraged to explore “the strengths and weaknesses” of all scientific theories – words, the petitioners say, that dangerously suggest that Darwinism could be wrong.
BUT THERE ARE indeed weaknesses in the theory of macro-evolution, noted by scores of intrepid biologists, mathematicians, chemists and geneticists. It is telling how those heretics are treated by the evolution-evangelicals. Celebrated Darwinist Richard Dawkins, for instance, pronounces that anyone who does not believe in evolution is perforce “ignorant, stupid or insane.” If American public schools aim to foster critical thinking, it is hard to imagine how ridiculing, much less banning, different points of view serves that goal. The heretic-hunters would do well to consult Darwin himself. “A fair result,” he wrote, “can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of a question.”
What makes so many so certain that the current scientific orthodoxy is the final word? The answer is hubris, the monkey wrench in many a human machine. The merest modicum of modesty would compel the scientifically sure to recall that their counterparts in centuries past were no less confident in their own times’ scientific certainties. And to consider how, centuries hence, people will likely look with pity on the limited understanding of 21st century science.
War of the Irrationals
Contributed by Bill Blocher – Posted: February 26, 2009 12:00:00 PM
Let the battle begin.
Or continue, in this case.
The battle is Evolution vs. Creationism, er, Intelligent Design.
The strange evolution of “intelligent design”
Scott Johnson reviews a new book that traces the debate over intelligent design–and its anti-materialist roots.
Fossilized Pregnant Fish One Of First Animals To Have Sex
ScienceDaily (Feb. 26, 2009) — A pregnant fossil fish at the Natural History Museum in London has shed light on the possible origin of sex, according to a study published today in the journal Nature by an international team including Museum scientists.
Clovis-era Tool Cache 13,000 Years Old Shows Evidence Of Camel, Horse Butchering
ScienceDaily (Feb. 26, 2009) — More than 80 stone implements were discovered together in Boulder city limits by landscapers. A biochemical analysis of a rare Clovis-era stone tool cache recently unearthed in the city limits of Boulder, Colo., indicates some of the implements were used to butcher ice-age camels and horses that roamed North America until their extinction about 13,000 years ago, according to a University of Colorado at Boulder study.
Ice Declining Faster Than Expected In Both Arctic And Antarctic Glaciers
ScienceDaily (Feb. 26, 2009) — Multidisciplinary research from the International Polar Year (IPY) 2007-2008 provides new evidence of the widespread effects of global warming in the polar regions. Snow and ice are declining in both polar regions, affecting human livelihoods as well as local plant and animal life in the Arctic, as well as global ocean and atmospheric circulation and sea level.
DNA Evidence Is In, Psychedelic Looking Bouncing Fish Is A New Species, Dubbed ‘Psychedilica’
ScienceDaily (Feb. 25, 2009) — “Psychedelica” seems the perfect name for a species of fish that is a wild swirl of tan and peach zebra stripes and behaves in ways contrary to its brethren. So says University of Washington’s Ted Pietsch, who is the first to describe the new species in the scientific literature and thus the one to select the name.
Prints Are Evidence of Modern Foot in Prehumans
Footprints uncovered in Kenya show that as early as 1.5 million years ago an ancestral species, almost certainly Homo erectus, had already evolved the feet and walking gait of modern humans.
Published on Thursday, February 26, 2009 by the Guardian/UK
Greenwash: Why ‘Clean Coal’ is the Ultimate Climate Change Oxymoron
The people who told us for years that climate change was a myth now say it’s all true – but something called ‘clean coal’ can fix it. This is pure and utter greenwash.
by Fred Pearce
Next week, Americans are being invited to take part in what could become the largest act of civil disobedience against global warming in the country’s history. People are protesting at the coal-fired power plant that powers legislators on Capitol Hill in Washington DC.
No clean-coal plant that buries carbon has yet been built. Photograph: Robert Nickelsberg/Getty ImagesCynics may say it’s about time Americans joined the action. The fact is that too many Americans have been bamboozled for too long by a campaign of disinformation about the science of climate change. Many still think the whole question of mankind’s role in global warming is disputed in scientific circles (I expect the comments beneath this blog will soon demonstrate this point).
New Report Shows Explosive Growth in Climate Change Lobby
by Kim McGuire
The number of lobbyists seeking to influence federal policy on climate change has grown more than 300 percent in five years, according to a new report by the Center for Public Integrity.
Published on Thursday, February 26, 2009 by Inter Press Service
Amazon Teetering on the Edge
by Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO – The Amazon Basin captures 12,000 to 16,000 square kilometres of water per year, and just 40 percent of that flows through the rivers. The rest returns to the atmosphere through evapotranspiration of the forests and is distributed throughout South America.
Deforestation is reducing the humidity that, carried by the winds, contributes to the water equilibrium of vast parts of the continent. Deforestation also intensifies erosion and surface drainage, which diverts water not only away from the natural irrigation of the Amazon, but also from faraway farmland.
We’ll Fix Those Uppity Talibs Just Like We Did the Iraqi Shi’a
Did the US Learn Anything in Iraq?
By PATRICK COCKBURN
President Obama is likely to announce in the coming days that he will withdraw all US combat troops from Iraq by August 2010. Many of these soldiers will end up in Afghanistan where the Taliban is getting stronger and the US-backed government weaker by the day. How much has the US learnt from its debacle in Iraq?
One lesson not learnt in Washington is that it is a bad idea to become involved in a war in any so-called “failed state”. This patronizing term suggests that if a state has failed, foreign intervention is justified and will face limited resistance. But the greatest US foreign policy disasters over the last generation have all been in places where organised government had largely collapsed.
A Planet at the Brink
Will Economic Brushfires Prove Too Virulent to Contain?
By Michael T. Klare
The global economic meltdown has already caused bank failures,
bankruptcies, plant closings, and foreclosures and will, in the coming
year, leave many tens of millions unemployed across the planet. But
another perilous consequence of the crash of 2008 has only recently made
its appearance: increased civil unrest and ethnic strife. Someday,
perhaps, war may follow. Read the rest of this entry »
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The Haitian Coup: An Unresolved Injustice After Five Years
by Bill Fletcher, Jr
NNPA Columnist
Originally posted 2/25/2009
http://www.seattlemedium.com/news/Article/Article.asp?NewsID=94686&sID=34&ItemSource=L
On the morning of 29 February 2004 I was asleep in Oakland, Calif.,
having gone to that city to deliver a speech. My cell phone went off
around 6am and a voice announced herself as a journalist from a major
media outlet. She asked me, in my then capacity as President of
TransAfrica Forum, whether I could confirm that Haitian President Jean-
Bertrand Aristide had stepped down from office. Needless to say I was
stunned and, having no new information, could neither confirm nor deny
the rumor.
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Obama’s very own quagmire
February 25, 2009
Thomas Walkom
http://www.thestar.com/printArticle/592577
Will Barack Obama provide a way out of Afghanistan? Perhaps. But I’m
not optimistic. The new U.S. president talks about the importance of
diplomacy and development. However, his actions so far have focused on
extending the war.
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