02.26.09
Cashing in on Climate Change
Cashing in on Climate Change: Industry Lobbyists Descend
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/02/25-7
Afghan drug trade
RG mail
by John W. Warnock
Global Research, February 25, 2009
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=12460
It is common knowledge that Afghanistan remains the primary source of
the world’s supply of opium and heroin. A recent United Nations’
report claims that three quarters of the world’s heroin comes from the
provinces of Helmand and Kandahar. But there is also recognition that
poppies are grown in almost all of the country’s 34 provinces.
02.25.09
More on secularism, and the eonic effect
The question of the ‘eonic effect’ can seem confusing at first, but in essence it is very simple. There isn’t anything mystical or uncertain about it: it is simply a set of facts that are true of world history, speaking of geographical regions, in a strange pattern.
The problem is that we tend to collate an ‘observation’ with ‘explanation’ and the result seems like some weird theory, hence controversial or unbelievable.
It might help to simply look at the pattern (called the eonic effect, but forget that name if it confuses the issue) of regions on a globe, as bare empiricism.
Then suddenly, like pieces in a puzzle that make sense together, the significance of that pattern will emerge.
Thus in fact the ‘eonic effect’ is simply a pattern of events stretched across world history. That pattern is a set of short intervals in particular areas and cultures, and this pattern shows a series of rapid advances and innovations, which seem to ‘drive’ the whole of civilization through a series of parts.
It is a little like crossing a stream: you don’t have a bridge, so you use stepping stones. These stones are not in a straight line: they might go slightly sideways or zigzag to get across. The stones must show general progression across the stream and be relatively close to each other, but can otherwise be arbitrary to do the job of setting a path across the stream.
The eonic effect is like that: we have a very odd pattern, not of civilizations, but of stepping stone intervals or transitions in particular areas and cultures that generate a set of new beginnings that then generate finally a global development pattern. We don’t see the beginning of the pattern and we can’t see its ending, if any.
Strangely enough, we can see that this pattern probably follows a kind of minimum principle: what is the minimum number of generated regions and what is their placement, to generate global implosion of development on the surface of a planet, and this planet in particular?
Seen in that way the eonic effect is a mysterious wonder indeed, and suddenly obvious in its meaning.
The last ‘stepping stone’ in the eonic sequence, then, is the rise of the modern. A short stepping stone, most remarkably from the three century interval Reformation to Enlightenment, starts to generate the last phases of globalization with an explosive send-off, and a confusing Eurocentric red herring. In each case of the eonic effect we have this tension of the localized transition (stepping stone) and the culture through which it acts.
That tension is inevitable: the modern transition is three centuries, plus two more just after it completes, and it seems like a European cultural thing when in fact the scale of the whole process is far larger than that three/five centuries and the larger system, with exact timing, is finished with its stepping stone and moving on toward a global cultural culture. The examples from the past give us an exact picture of the fate of the ‘European’ aspect of the transition (which had nothing to do with Europe, or its sidekick, North America).
It is that that we call the ‘secular’ age, but the question of religion still isn’t settled yet, so we can’t say whether this new era will pass beyond religion, or generate new religions, or get stuck going backwards (falling into the creek by slipping on a stepping stone, etc,… perhaps enough of the analogy). I don’t quite wish to bend the objectivity, such as it is, of the description of the eonic effect, by making a prediction about the future here, especially as to religion. The pattern is not a prophecy of the future.
On the basis on the meaning of ‘secularism’ I would say, pace Kant speaking of man’s autonomy, that man seems to be graduating from religions of the past in order to better realize his individuality. But on the basis of past history and its momentum, I would not easily predict the passing away or beyond religion anytime soon. Religion has been a clear companion to civilization since the Neolithic (look at the massive temple complexes in pre-Sumer five thousand years BCE, for example, two millennia before even the rise of state civilizations in Egypt and Sumer) and it seems unlikely that it will simply roll up the carpet and go away. So I don’t know.
Many of the issues are restated in Kant: it is appropriate to consider the various issues of religion in a critique of reason, and man’s propensity, and chronic confusion, over the classic Idea of Reason, with their tendency toward antinomies, e.g. the classic three, self (or soul?), divinity (or cosmic totality, or as in the second and fourth antinomies), and free will, or self-consciousness pressed into service as a free will surrogate, etc…
Note that those three Ideas of Reason, to use Kant’s language, each generate one type of religion visible in world history, although we might not know where to look for the third.
The point is that we could produce a secular rendition of religion in purely secular dress. But is man intelligent enough as yet to do that for himself, and each for himself?
After what Nietzsche did to Kant I kind of doubt, the irony of that philosopher’s nihilism: it just might force a rebirth of old style religions.
Read Nietzsche’s fine print: it doesn’t seem like the way to go.
There are endless possibilities. Some once thought that Marxism was to be the next religion of the new age, but that is a faded apparition. The record of Buddhism suggests many facets of the question. The legacy of Christianity is not so easily dismissed as it routinely is by some secularists.
We can challenge that religion on the basis of its outer distortions, but unless we can understand the strange and almost magical way in which gnostic conspiracies were at work in its generation and outcomes we can hardly hope to do a Dawkins on it and simply walk away free of its two thousand year svengali. It will pursue us like a phantom.
So the keynote of Kantian autonomy is a great hope, but still not a democratic reality.
And there’s one resolution of the question: the emergence of modern freedom represents the realization of the third type of religion, that of secular man in a new type of post-religious society!! So there we have it: secularism, as historical fact, has already produced the seeds of its resolution of the ‘religious’ question, but in its own way and in its own age.
A secular age, and the eonic effect
Comment on Taylor’s A Secular Age
James said,
February 25, 2009 at 2:41 pm ·
I’m not trying to do justice to your book, but one gets a sense after reading it that neither side really understands the meaning of “secularism.” Taylor is just as confused as the Darwinists.
And a comment from me:
nemo said,
February 25, 2009 at 3:17 pm
Did you mean WHEE?
The issue of secularism, as I approach it from several angles, is ironically seen in its verbal history, saeculum, age period.
The rise of the modern produced a ‘new age’, and, like the Axial Age, religions pass away as new religions, indeed ’secularism’, come into existence.
World History And The Eonic Effect is probably the book you need if you are uncertain about the issue of secularism. It is a question, more broadly, of the rise of the new age of modernity, or the modern transition, with the ‘secular’ age that follows that transition.
For a depiction, all too brief, of the modern transition, 1500 to 1800 (roughly) check out the online selections from WHEE, chapter 5, “Transition And Modernity”, and this section:
6.2 From Reformation To Revolution
I should note that the eonic effect is an historical pattern, and a vast one, transcends my interpretation(s), and indicates several, or many, interpretations. Thus it is unwise to be dogmatic on what we mean by secularism.
As to religion, the effect of the Protestant Reformation is revolutionary, although the point is no longer intuitive to many now. Protestantism triggered the modern transition, and broke the power of the medieval imperialism of the Catholic Church. The issue is confusing, because Protestantism gave birth to its own post-protestant future. Furthermore, the distinction between Catholicism and Protestantism is meaningless now, almost: Catholicism is now essentially a very large Protestant sect (i.e. it acknowledges a host of modern beliefs and cultural modernities, something it didn’t do in the sixteenth century).
Secularism now seems to mean the new religion of the Dawkins/Darwinists/New Atheists/ members of the scientism cult, and demands the adherence to a set of beliefs about reality that are so narrow that if they ever became generally held would provoke the Taliban to take over New York City, and the Buddhists to egg them on.
Look at the modern transition: it sows the seeds of the ‘secular’ New Age, and it is a massive dose of parallel synchronous opposites in tandem, from science to Protestantism, to democratic emergentism, to a new philosphy from Descartes to Kant/Hegel, thousands of complex entities undergoing rapid sudden development, especially after the seventeenth century.
The sense of the secular didn’t quite come out as post-religion the way it does now: it meant many things, among them the sudden sense (seen in the Battle of the Ancients And Moderns) that a new era of history (saeculum, latin) had come into existence, and that this had begun to progress beyond or surpass the achievements of the ancients.
Part of the problem is that the modern age produced a set of potential outcomes or emergentist phenomena that are too complex for easy understanding, and we tend to fall back into oversimplifications, like scientism, or the cliche that ‘modernity= scientism’.
This emphasis on Protestantism (purely historical in my case) is excoriated by the later ‘secularists’, and they are free to create the society beyond religion they aspire to, but as we can see they are incapable of doing that.
However, the eonic effect shows the way that modernity, so far from being over in the face of the postmodern, is barely underway, and therefore the definition of its meaning remains up in the air, remains to be realized.
It can help to look at Stage 2 of the eonic effect, the Axial Age, and the period that followed the Axial Age: the past died, and the future was born, but it took many centuries after the Axial Age for that to happen.
It is also essential to study the complexities of the Enlightenment, and the several such ‘enlightenments’ occuring in tandem, along with the history of music, the Industrial Revolution, and the Romantic Movement, plus much else.
From the eonic model we can see why this period at the end of the eighteenth century is one of the most innovative in world history, and a look at the The Great Divide can be helpful.
It can be useful, if you are wary of his confusing thinking, to consider Hegel’s point: it is the ‘dialectic’ that is at the heart of modernity, or history.
Well, maybe, or maybe not, but his point, taken more generally, is acutely insightful: modernity is a set of opposites in conjunction, and any attempt to reduce that to a set of cliches will not do it justice.
As I noted, we study an immense phenomenon in which we are immersed, and it is necessary to be wary of too narrow defintions of what we mean by modernity or secularism.
Wallace and the limits of selectionism
Stephen Smith on Why Darwin Shouldn’t Be In Schools
Stephen P. Smith said,
February 25, 2009 at 3:43 pm ·
One could argue that Wallace’s passivity was a result of the apparent limits of natural selection that Darwin was clueless about. The theory goes to Wallace because Wallace understood these limits better, and hence had a better account of evolution. Darwin never stole Wallace’s theory, because Darwin got the theory wrong.
Fascinating point, although I think one should read Davies’ book to see it demonstrated that Darwin was simply out in left field until very late in the game. I think Wallace was the one who really produced the natural selection/divergence core of the Darwin paradigm, and then moved on from it. His native intelligence clearly was able to produce what Darwin was unable to produce.
You are right, wouldn’t we have been better off with Wallace’s perspective, which quicly moved on from what we call ‘darwinism’, as he realized that it couldn’t deal with human evolution.
Review of The Darwin Conspiracy
Here’s my Amazon review of The Darwin Conspiracy, by Roy Davies. I put it here for the record (it may never appear), and also plan to post it at Amazon.co.uk also (if you wish to buy the book, go to the English Amazon site, it is not available in the USA).
Five Stars: A must-read book for all students of evolution, February 25, 2009
By John C. Landon “nemonemini” (New York City) –This is an important book, and a must read for anyone involved in the attempt to evaluate the history of Darwinism, and evolutionary theories in general. We are currently living through the Darwin bicentennial flush with paeans to Darwin, and the idea that Darwin was plagiarist and took key ideas from Wallace is either unbelievable at first, or disorienting, given the evidence,to those brought up in the ‘standard paradigm’. But this book by Davies is a pretty close shave for those who wish to dismiss these charges, charges that have been around for some time, and subject to many knee-jerk dismissals and false refutations.
Davies starts getting the issues straight, and his book is also a crucial update of the previous literature on this subject.
After several attempts and many books, many of them with flaws that Darwinists quickly pointed to, Davies corrects those mistakes, and produces a truly devastating portrait of Darwin’s dishonest ripoff of Wallace. Right down to the shipping schedules for the British postal system, which generates the clear proof that Darwin was manipulating the record here to conceal each stage of his theft of Wallace’s theory, as it arrived by letter in stages, climaxing in the Ternate letter.
To catch a thief, it takes time, but Davies, it seems, has nailed the bloke.Some might say this is circumstantial evidence. But even by the most generous evaluation of this evidence in favor of Darwin, he comes across as dishonest, and untruthful, to say the least. And that leaves the issue of whether and to what degree we should trust what we read in Darwin’s books.
Davies goes through all of the complex pieces of the issue, and the scholars who stumbled on something awry in the Darwin legacy, from Loren Eiseley, to Gruber, McKinney, Ospovat, Bedall, Brooks and others.
This expose was prefigured in part already by Arnold Brackman in his The Delicate Arrangement, in 1980, but somehow Darwinists have managed to deflect the criticism, and confuse the issues, and keep Darwin afloat. No doubt they will do so again, and that is unfortunate. The confusion/deception has gone on too long.
That deflection of attention from the issues happened to me, as I was long ago a close reader of Brackman, until the counter literature confused me.
Davies’ book is most useful here, and goes over the whole literature starting with figures such as Loren Eiseley et al a long time ago.It is incredible to discover that every stage of Darwin’s career is suffused in deceptive cover-ups. And that he really had no real theory of evolution of the kind that appeared in Origin in the mid fifties when the Wallace letters began arriving. All the basic pieces were taken from the unsuspecting Wallace.
Whatever the case here, the book should be given a decent public airing in this egregious year of Darwin hagiography. The cult of Darwin is not science, and the question of evolution should and can free itself from the shadowy ambiguities of Darwin, and the half-truths and propaganda that has been inflicted on countless young students of evolution.
Wallace’s letters, and suspicious changes in Darwin’s views on evolution
I have scanned two short passages from The Darwin Conspiracy, to make it clear how it happened that Darwin plagiarized from Wallace. It requires studying the development of Darwin’s thinking, beyond the standard versions, and then comparing the sudden changes to the times and dates of the letters Darwin received from Wallace (with the arrival times changed in Darwin’s accounts). All the nonsense about the 1844 paper has given everyone a bum steer for decades. Ospovat and Beddall are twentieth century scholars.
Chapter 18: Changing course
WORKING through the papers in the black box at Cambridge, Dov Ospovat noticed that as 1856 ended and 1857 began, Darwin’s ideas about species variation began to change. They no longer depended on the natural theological structure of the 1844 essay. Darwin was no longer claiming that variation only ever happened in newly formed and isolated environments where perfect adaptation did not yet apply. Instead, he now claimed that variation could occur at any time, with or without changes in external conditions. It was a complete reversal, and Ospovat was puzzled. Read the rest of this entry »
Why Darwin shouldn’t be in schools
Yesterday we had a post on The Darwin Conspiracy
Copy (finally) of Davies’ The Darwin Conspiracy arrives,
and a comment here, and also an email exchange (anonymized):
In a message dated xxxx, in response to yesterday’s post sent to an email group, x@x.com writes:
IN this book, on pages 111 to 114, you can read Wallace’s public statement in which He gave full credit to Darwin
for being the FIRST to discover the Theory of Natural Selection.
The date that Wallace gave was 1838 for Darwin’s discovery.
I have also read other letters written by Alfred Russel Wallace in
which he has stated that Darwin was the original discoverer.
It was to Wallace’s credit that he never disageed with Darwin on
this issue.
Reply:
That’s an outrageous statement indeed.
Wallace never figured out how he had been ripped off.
If you cite this book, I recommend everyone read the whole book.
These deceptive quotes, with a hard to obtain book, are effective in perpetrating the lie.
Wallace yielded to Darwin because Darwin’s rigged papers made it look
like Darwin had known all along what he actually got from Wallace. It’s so outrageous it makes you sick to your stomach.
It’s time to call it off, guys. 150 years of Darwin fraud is enough.
Do we have to deceive kids on this question, or worse, teach them to lie?
And that is what is happening, because a lot of smart Darwin groupies suddenly see what happened, and yet elect to join the deception.
I have been watching this over time in some of the debates on the issue, such as they are.
Darwinists get away with this because people are too intimidated to protest.
I strongly recommend everyone read the whole book, to see how it is meaningless to cite Wallace’s passivity and good graces here.
Darwin’s was nearly a perfect crime.
Wallace was also a powerless lower class individual ‘manipulated into his place by the chance to obtain public recognition in Darwin’s shadow.
He sent, with wretchedly misplaced trust, his famous Ternate letter to Darwin, perhaps out of partial desperation, or whatever reason, although he could easily have had it published elsewhere, with the result that we would speak of Wallaceism today, instead of Darwinism.
His motives were complex, and in any case based on genuine confusion
over the way he was used.
As The Darwin Conspiracy points out, this deception has been known to scholars for a while, and should have been exposed forty years ago (consider Brackman’s A Delicate Arrangement), but still the Darwin estab gets away with this, in many cases through the sheerest of brazen lying.
This shouldn’t go on like this. Evolution should be celebrity-independent, and free of the cult of a founder. The world needs to move on, and bypass this idiotic Darwinist fanaticism that will make a cult founder out of a dishonest cheat.
In the end the reputation of science is going to crash badly.
Small wonder religious orgs are in a swelling undertow of opposition.
They smell a rat, and have smelled a rat all along.
Darwin shouldn’t be in schools. Evolution yes, but not this sickening cult of the chicanery of its interloper, who contributed nothing to the theory of evolution, and parasitically expropriated Lamarck, his grandfather, Blyth, Mathews (as Samuel Butler well knew), and finally Alfred Wallace.
Enough’s enough. It is time to call off this Darwin bicentennial celebration.
Rome evolution conference
Abstracts of the STOQ Evolution Conference, 2009
Wednesday, 25 February 2009, 4:10 pm
Press Release: III STOQ International Conference
Collection of Abstracts
Lectures to be given at the
III STOQ International Conference
Biological Evolution
Facts and Theories
A Critical Appraisal 150 Years After
“The Origin of Species”
Rome, March 3-7 2009
with the collaboration of
University of Notre Dame (Indiana)
Under the High Patronage of the
Pontifical Council for Culture
First Day of the Conference
Tuesday 3 March 2009
LECTURES SCHEDULE…(follows at link)
Darwinism oversold
National Academy Scientist Says Darwin’s Theory of Evolution is Being Oversold
A robust debate about Darwinian evolution has been taking place over at Forbes.com recently. The venerable techonomy site published over 20 articles in honor of Darwin’s birthday, four of which were from ID proponents. As usual, having any articles skeptical of Darwinism is a bridge too far for some, namely Darwin defender Jerry Coyne who attacked not just the authors, but Forbes itself for the temerity to discuss such views publicly.
No less than a member of the National Academy has responded. Forbes.com has just posted a piece by Philip S. Skell, The Dangers Of Overselling Evolution. Skell argues that …
From Malta, the debate
Evolving beyond belief
150 years after the publication of The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection remains an intensely divisive issue. Is evolution incompatible with Christian faith? Raphael Vassallo on the great Darwin dilemma
Sci-fi author Isaac Asimov once quipped: “I’d let them teach creationism in the schools, if they let us teach evolution in the churches.”
He was of course joking, but the underlying reference was to a very serious debate that erupted in the American Midwest in the late 1990s… when the State of Kansas attempted to formally ban evolution from science classes, to replace it with creationism: i.e., that the Biblical account of creation is to be taken literally.
The attempt has since been repeated, with varying degrees of success, in other parts of the USA and beyond… prompting the Council of Europe to pass resolution 1580, which urges EU member states to “to firmly oppose the teaching of creationism as a scientific discipline on an equal footing with the theory of evolution.”
This advice appears to have fallen on deaf ears here in Malta, where creationism has found its way into at least one licensed school.
European creationists
European Creationists Take On Darwin
By Jens Lubbadeh
The US isn’t the only place with heated debates about Darwin’s theory of evolution: Europe has its own hardcore creationists and intelligent design backers, too. Increasingly, they are making their voices heard.
Charles Darwin continues to have his fair share of opponents in Europe, too.
He hesitated because he knew full well that his findings would have dramatic consequences on established notions of the world. For 20 years, Charles Darwin kept his revolutionary ideas about evolution to himself. “It’s like confessing to a murder,” he wrote to a friend.
Atheist bus ads
U.S. agency refuses atheist ads in Ontario
by The London Free Press
Reposed from: Dawkins site
http://lfpress.ca/newsstand/News/Local/2009/02/25/8522801-sun.html
An American agency has refused to allow ads promoting atheism on London (Ontario, Canada) transit buses, insisting yesterday it is arbiter on what advertising can be shown on the buses.
The rejection by Lamar Advertising has put London on a possible collision course with an atheist group whose signs, already on Toronto public buses, read: “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”
The rejection has also raised questions about who should have the final word on London transit ads — transit administrators, the political appointees who oversee the system or a company, Lamar, based in Baton Rouge, La., that maintains 170,000 U.S. billboards.
Taylor’s A Secular Age
Naked Strong Evaluation
By Andrew Koppelman
A Secular Age
by Charles Taylor
Harvard University Press, 2007 874 pp $39.95
RELIGIOUS FAITH today is one option among others. Many people—call them secularists—live without any transcendent source of value. Some, but not all, are militant atheists. A millennium ago, this would have been unimaginable. Everyone believed in God and oriented their lives in reference to that belief.
Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age offers an invaluable map of how the modern religious-secular divide came into being. He concludes that modern Western secularism has its roots in Christian theology and that secularism and Christianity reveal a common ancestry in their shared commitment to human rights—a commitment that does not follow from atheism as such.
Gravitational lensing
Gravitational Lensing: Astronomers Harness Einstein’s Telescope
ScienceDaily (Feb. 24, 2009) — Scientists are harnessing the cosmos as a scientific “instrument” in their quest to determine the makeup of the universe.
Tracking the fallout
Tracking the Fallout
Of the Arctic’s Vanishing Sea Ice
Julienne Stroeve, a research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado, has been closely monitoring the rapid loss of sea ice in the Arctic. In an interview with Yale Environment 360, she explains how the repercussions of that disappearance will be felt throughout the far north and, eventually, the entire hemisphere.
The precipitous loss of Arctic sea ice has been well documented — and well publicized. Now, an increasing number of scientists are turning their attention to a vital question: Once the Arctic Ocean’s summer sea ice disappears — which many scientists say could happen in roughly 20 years — what comes next?
Polar ice melt
Published on Wednesday, February 25, 2009 by Agence France Presse
Scientists Find Bigger than Expected Polar Ice Melt
GENEVA – Icecaps around the North and South Poles are melting faster and in a more widespread manner than expected, raising sea levels and fuelling climate change, a major scientific survey showed Wednesday.
Non-Withdrawal Withdrawal Plan
Orwell in Babylon
Obama’s Non-Withdrawal Withdrawal Plan
By CHRIS FLOYD
It would be superfluous in us to point out that a plan to “end” a war which includes the continued garrisoning of up to 50,000 troops in a hostile land is, in reality, a continuation of that war, not its cessation. To produce such a plan and claim that it “ends” a war is the precise equivalent of, say, relieving one’s bladder on the back of one’s neighbor and telling him that the liquid is actually life-giving rain.
Poised for Expansion
Israel in 1948
By M. SHAHID ALAM Read the rest of this entry »
EI update
_______________________________
UPDATE FROM THE
ELECTRONIC INTIFADA
http://electronicIntifada.net
_____________________ Read the rest of this entry »
Iraq withdrawal
RG mail
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090224/ap_on_go_pr_wh/iraq_withdrawal/print
Officials: Most troops out of Iraq in 18 months
WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama plans to remove all U.S. combat
troops from Iraq by August 2010, administration officials said
Tuesday, ending the war three months later than he had promised during
his presidential campaign.
CO2 emissions
RG mail
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/226/story/62735.html
Posted on Tue, Feb. 24, 2009
Expert; Carbon dioxide emissions could last millenniums
WASHINGTON – Until now, most discussion of climate change has been about what scientific evidence shows is likely to happen between now and 2100. However, scientific research shows that the carbon dioxide gas released from burning fossil fuels lasts in the atmosphere much longer than mere decades.
Deadly ‘secret’
RG mail
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-montana-asbestos-trial24-2009feb24,0,5879847.story
From the Los Angeles Times
‘Secret’ was deadly for Montana town saturated in asbestos, prosecutors say
Trial begins in the case of W.R. Grace company, accused of knowingly exposing Libby, Mont., residents to asbestos. About 1,200 have sickened or died. The defense says there was no conspiracy.
02.24.09
Copy (finally) of Davies’ The Darwin Conspiracy arrives
Just got a copy of The Darwin Conspiracy: Origins of a Scientific Crime by Roy Davies
straight from the publisher (Amazon seems unwilling to stock the book????).
This is a great book, must read. Davies starts getting the issues straight. After several attempts, many of them with flaws that Darwinists quickly pointed to. Davies corrects those mistakes and produces a truly devastating portrait of Darwin’s dishonest ripoff of Wallace. Right down to the shipping schedules for the British postal system, which generates the clear proof that Darwin was manipulating the record here to conceal each stage of his theft of Wallace’s theory, as it arrived by letter in stages, climaxing in the Ternate letter.
To catch a thief, it takes time, but Davies has nailed the bloke.
This was done in part once already by Arnold Brackman in his The Delicate Arrangement, in 1980, but somehow Darwinists have managed to deflect the criticism, and confuse the issues. That happened to me, as I was long ago a close reader of Brackman, until the counter literature confused me.
Davies’ book is most useful here, and goes over the whole literature starting with figures such as Loren Eiseley et al a long time ago.
It is incredible to discover that every stage of Darwin’s career is suffused in deceptive cover ups. And that he really had no real theory of evolution of the kind that appeared in Origin in the mid fifties when the Wallace letters began arriving. All the basic pieces were taken from the unsuspecting Wallace.
Nauseating.
Evolution, Amazon.com, and author-intimidation
I am relinking to yesterday’s post, Amazon Review of WHEE, since the commentary at my Amazon blog raises some important issues, in relation to the book, and in general.
We can see in action the tactics of author-intimidation that have succeeded in making critiques of Darwin an endangered authorial species.
Most athors are genuinely afraid of this system, and write their books to conform, and to not offend the Darwin groupies, including those now at Amazon who can wreck havoc very easily with this silly review system.
A self-published book is a way to survive this, with one of the counter-tactics of last resort here: get the book in print without business managers killing the chance or editors rewriting the material to stay in line, put the text online, and get the message out.
That infuriates Darwinists all the more, because it bypasses their control system.
Acutally I think this review backfires, and discredits thie ‘professor’ who behavior is totally unprofessional. Such reviews, one paragraph, citation of Martin Gardner, no reference to book content, are a cliche of Amazon reviews (on evolution) and a strong sign the reviewer hasn’t read the book, and has no intention of bothering.
Made in USA
RG mail
February 24, 2009
Amnesty International: Gaza white phosphorus shells were US made
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article5792182.ece
Sheera Frenkel in Jerusalem
White phosphorus bombs used by Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip were
produced and supplied by American arms manufacturers, according to an
Amnesty International report that called for a comprehensive arms
embargo on Israel.
“You will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family”
Darwinism Must Die So That Evolution May Live
By CARL SAFINA
Published: February 9, 2009
“You care for nothing but shooting, dogs and rat-catching,” Robert Darwin told his son, “and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.” Yet the feckless boy is everywhere. Charles Darwin gets so much credit, we can’t distinguish evolution from him.
Equating evolution with Charles Darwin ignores 150 years of discoveries, including most of what scientists understand about evolution. Such as: Gregor Mendel’s patterns of heredity (which gave Darwin’s idea of natural selection a mechanism — genetics — by which it could work); the discovery of DNA (which gave genetics a mechanism and lets us see evolutionary lineages); developmental biology (which gives DNA a mechanism); studies documenting evolution in nature (which converted the hypothetical to observable fact); evolution’s role in medicine and disease (bringing immediate relevance to the topic); and more.By propounding “Darwinism,” even scientists and science writers perpetuate an impression that evolution is about one man, one book, one “theory.” The ninth-century Buddhist master Lin Chi said, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” The point is that making a master teacher into a sacred fetish misses the essence of his teaching. So let us now kill Darwin.
Two comments on this article:
James said,
February 24, 2009 at 1:14 am ·
“Credit Darwin’s towering genius. No mind ran so freely, so widely or so freshly over the hills and vales of existence.”
One has to wonder how these people can be so ignorant about intellectual history. This is just as preposterous as claiming that natural selection represents the pinnacle of modern scientific thought.
——————
Stephen P. Smith said,
February 24, 2009 at 12:12 pm ·
People want their theories to explain, but at best we only reap what we sow. Natural selection represents a type of reaping, but the theory is not an explanation that is now free of life’s ability to sow and reap. Rather, natural selection is now revealed to carry a precondition: that we must live in a world where we reap and sow.If you want a deeper theory, then there is no easy way to avoid the hard work of sowing. Otherwise, you will confuse yourself and reinvent another theory like natural selection that only pretends to explain its precondition. Marx’s theory of redistribution of the wealth is another example of trying to create something from nothing. And even working harder, the theory we end up with must hold the stark precondition that we reap what we sow: we would have entered into the acausal.
It is worse than we think: I just got a copy of Davies’ The Darwin Conspiracy. Darwin’s ripoff of Wallace is finally documented in detail.
It is going to be hard for the Darwin estab to whitewash this one.
Overselling evolution
The Dangers Of Overselling Evolution
Philip S. Skell, 02.23.09, 01:47 PM EST
Focusing on Darwin and his theory doesn’t further scientific progress.
Read the rest of this entry »
‘Unproven belief system’
Darwinism is an ‘unproven belief system’
Monday 23 February 2009
A leaflet describing Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution as unproven and therefore a belief system like creationism will drop through 6.6 million letterboxes nationwide this week.
The leaflet Evolution or Creation, what do you believe? has been produced by a group of orthodox religious organisations to coincide with the Darwin bicentenary celebrations.
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