04.28.09
Posted in Evolution, The Eonic Effect at 4:12 pm by nemo
Punctuated equilibrium
The confusion over fossils and gaps in the evolutionary record can be clarified by looking at the eonic effect, and one might start with this short essay from World History And The Eonic Effect.
If we look at the eonic effect most of the puzzles disappear, and we can see what a ‘gap’ argument should really be. Unfortunately this isn’t about fossils or genetics in this case, but we do see what is best called ‘punctuated equilibrium’, albeit applied to a portrait of historical evolution.
There are certainly gaps to be seen in the eonic effect. But the gap is about the spontaneity of the periods of transition, their lack of causal antecedents in the sociological periods prior to the period of rapid emergentism. Thus these ‘gaps’ aren’t really gaps, more like fullnesses. The intervals of fast transition show complete continuity in an historical sense, and yet innovations appear in strong clusters. The result gives a perception of historical discontinuity.
The essay cited invokes the analog of acceleration vs velocity.
If you are in a car that accelerates, you feel the force causing a change in velocity. Although velocity is continuous, the acceleration shows a net discontinuity in the sense that it moves from zero to a peak of force back to zero. The ‘history’ of the car’s motions thus shows continuity at all points in the sense that each moment connects with the previous, and yet a descriptive account might well portray the ‘discontinuous’ interval during which accelaration changed the velocity of motion.
Thus we see that continuity is never violated, and yet a concept of discontinuity also applies.
This can’t exactly resolve the situation with fossils, but the basic overall logic is, we suspect, something similar.
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Posted in General at 3:52 pm by nemo
James comments on Bruce Bawer
James said,
April 28, 2009 at 2:49 pm ·
“To name another: Timbro, a Swedish think tank, found in 2004 that Sweden was poorer than all but five U.S. states and Denmark poorer than all but nine.”
I don’t know what criteria they are using, but it still looks like they are better off than we are:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Development_Index
Good point, and link. Bruce Bawer is the author of While Europe Slept, next to a whole series of books of its type, castigated as Islamophobic by the left.
I think the debate here has derailed and just like the Darwin debate has become nutty due to its political polarization.
Bawer et al. are advancing a standard right wing argument against the Social Democratic State, while the left with knee-jerk consistency fails to see any of the points of truth in those who are watching the confusion created by the massive migration. It can’t go on forever as is, and I fail to see why the left can’t be the ones to make some intelligent criticisms.
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Posted in In the News at 2:05 pm by nemo
New Guinea Tribe Sues The ‘New Yorker’ For $10 Million
They challenge a story depicting them as rapists, murderers and pig thieves.
In an April 21, 2008, New Yorker story, “Vengeance Is Ours,” Pulitzer Prize-winning geography scholar Jared Diamond describes blood feuds that rage for decades among tribes in the Highlands of New Guinea. Diamond tells the story using a central protagonist: Daniel Wemp, member of the Handa clan, a blood-thirsty warrior bent on avenging his uncle’s death. That quest, writes Diamond, touched off six years of warfare leading to the slaughter of 47 people and the theft of 300 pigs.
Now Diamond’s protagonist is fighting Diamond. A two-page complaint filed in New York State Supreme Court on April 20 seeks $10 million from the New Yorker’s publisher, Advance Publications, claiming Diamond’s story falsely accused Wemp and fellow tribesman Isum Mandigo of “serious criminal activity” and “murder.”
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Posted in Evolution at 1:34 pm by nemo
Michael Shermer: Why Darwin Matters
by UCSD April 2 – YouTube
Reposted from Dawkins site
http://www.atheistmedia.com/2009/04/michael-shermer-why-darwin-matters.html
Michael Shermer, the founding publisher of Skeptic Magazine, argues Why Darwin Matters: Evolution, Intelligent Design and the Battle for Science and Religion in this talk presented by the Division of Biological Sciences and the Helen Edison Lecture Series at the University of California, San Diego.
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Posted in atheism, Science & Religion at 1:32 pm by nemo
More discussion – PZ and Jerry Coyne on the positions of nantional science organizations and ‘accomodationism’
by Posts from Jerry Coyne and PZ Myers today
Jerry Coyne post from today
Reposted from Dawkins site
http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2009/04/28/the-dust-settles-a-little-at-pandas-thumb/
The dust settles (a little) at Panda’s Thumb
Over at Panda’s Thumb, Richard Hoppe has had second thoughts about his rather strong post attacking P. Z. Myers and myself for criticizing scientific organiations like the AAAS and NCSE for their accommodationist stance toward faith and science. (See also P. Z.’s reply.) Hoppe still asserts that the NCSE is acting appropriately when pointing out that many religious people and ministers see no conflict between the two magisteria:
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Posted in atheism at 1:29 pm by nemo
Are atheists becoming the hot new political force?
by Johanna Neuman – LA Times
Reposted from Dawkins site
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2009/04/are-athiests-becoming-the-hot-new-political-force.html
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Posted in Science & Religion at 1:26 pm by nemo
tsn – thesciencenetwork – ASU Symposium
Reposted from Dakwins site
http://thesciencenetwork.org/programs/origins-symposium/science-society-and-the-merchants-of-light
A conversation between Roger Bingham and Richard Dawkins, AC Grayling, Brian Greene, Lawrence Krauss and Steven Pinker
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Posted in atheism at 1:24 pm by nemo
Those ignorant atheists
In this witty book, Terry Eagleton argues that Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and their ilk are shockingly ill-informed about the Christian faith.
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Posted in Science & Religion at 1:22 pm by nemo
Richard Dawkins Britain’s biggest bigot?
Richard Dawkins is supposed to be a clever chap.
Richard Dawkin’s ‘Lying for Jesus’ comment on his website
He was Professor for Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University after all.
However, there are signs that he may be cracking up.
The first indication that he was losing it came in an interview with Rod Liddle in the Spectator in which the vacuity of one of his most famous theories was exposed.
Faced with an example of how his selfish-gene theory can be “perfectly counter-Darwinian” all he could muster was: “Yes. But it happens to be true.”
Er, not one of the best thought-out defences it has to be said.
Shown up by Liddle, who, as far as I’m aware, hasn’t even got a science degree let alone a professorship, Dawkins’s latest comments suggest that Darwin’s rottweiler has gone barking.
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Posted in Evolution at 1:17 pm by nemo
Swine Flu Is Evolution in Action
By Robert Roy Britt, Editorial Director
Surely this is a fallacy, the failure to distinguish microevolution and a larger framework for real evolution.
Anyone who thinks evolution is for the birds should not be afraid of swine flu. Because if there’s no such thing as evolution, then there’s no such thing as a new strain of swine flu infecting people.
For the rest of the population, concern is justified.
The rapid evolution of the influenza virus is an example of Nature at her most opportunistic. Viruses evolve by the same means as humans, plus they use tricks such as stealing genetic code from other viruses.
The strategy is what makes the flu so virulent and often keeps the microbes one step ahead of scientists who would destroy or neutralize them.
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Posted in Evolution at 1:14 pm by nemo
Analysis: Caution, not panic is best approach to outbreaks
WE DO not yet know what exactly the colours of this virus are. The worst-case scenario is that it is already a pandemic strain and it is spreading.
It has not done this yet. We have seen just a few thousand cases in Mexico city with a population of 25 million people. Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in Evolution at 1:08 pm by nemo
Fossils Don’t Lie: Why Darwinism Is False
Note: This is Part 3 in a series reviewing Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution Is True. Coyne goes on to discuss several “transitional” forms. “One of our best examples of an evolutionary transition,” he writes, is the fossil record of whales, “since we have a chronologically ordered series of fossils, perhaps a lineage of ancestors and descendants, showing their movement from land to water.”9
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Posted in Evolution, Science & Religion at 1:06 pm by nemo
A.N. Wilson on the Darwin-Hitler Connection
Monday April 27, 2009
A.N. Wilson goes into more fascinating detail about his return to religious faith from atheism in an essay in the New Statesman. Now isn’t this interesting: the literary critic, biographer and historian credits his gradual re-conversion in no small part to a counter-reaction to the “superstitious” materialism of Darwinian evolution and, yes, the dreaded Darwin-Hitler connection.
The latter in particular drives the Darwin Lobby bonkers — not least the always charming propagandist P.Z. Myers at Pharyngula, who alludes today to the “fallacious claim that Hitler’s crimes were built on a foundation of godless Darwinism.” It’s supposed to be only slow-witted “creationists” who swallow that claim.
I guess that makes Wilson a creationist. Excerpt:
One thing that finally put the tin hat on any aspirations to be an unbeliever was writing a book about the Wagner family and Nazi Germany, and realising how utterly incoherent were Hitler’s neo-Darwinian ravings, and how potent was the opposition, much of it from Christians; paid for, not with clear intellectual victory, but in blood.
Also this:
Watching a whole cluster of friends, and my own mother, die over quite a short space of time convinced me that purely materialist “explanations” for our mysterious human existence simply won’t do — on an intellectual level. The phenomenon of language alone should give us pause. A materialist Darwinian was having dinner with me a few years ago and we laughingly alluded to how, as years go by, one forgets names. Eager, as committed Darwinians often are, to testify on any occasion, my friend asserted: “It is because when we were simply anthropoid apes, there was no need to distinguish between one another by giving names.”
This credal confession struck me as just as superstitious as believing in the historicity of Noah’s Ark. More so, really.
Do materialists really think that language just “evolved”, like finches’ beaks, or have they simply never thought about the matter rationally? Where’s the evidence? How could it come about that human beings all agreed that particular grunts carried particular connotations? How could it have come about that groups of anthropoid apes developed the amazing morphological complexity of a single sentence, let alone the whole grammatical mystery which has engaged Chomsky and others in our lifetime and linguists for time out of mind? No, the existence of language is one of the many phenomena — of which love and music are the two strongest — which suggest that human beings are very much more than collections of meat.
And so what if Hitler’s worldview was shaped by Darwinism?
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Posted in Evolution at 1:03 pm by nemo
John G. Stackhouse: Celebrating Darwin … sort ofPosted: April 28, 2009, 1:36 PM by Yoni Goldstein
John Stackhouse
As the bicentennial celebration of Charles Darwin’s birth continues, people of various religious outlooks can raise a couple of cheers for his contributions to science. First, we can all cheer Darwin’s work in bringing microevolution — the phenomenon of small-scale changes happening within species as they adapt to their environment — into focus. Even “creation science” proponents grant the reality of evolution on this scale. Second, most of us will cheer Darwin’s work in helping us understand macroevolution, a comprehensive theory of how all species have arisen in the complex history of life on Earth.
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Posted in Evolution at 12:56 pm by nemo
New Blow Against Dinosaur-killing Asteroid Theory, Geologists Find
ScienceDaily (Apr. 28, 2009) — The enduringly popular theory that the Chicxulub crater holds the clue to the demise of the dinosaurs, along with some 65 percent of all species 65 million years ago, is challenged in a paper to be published in the Journal of the Geological Society on April 27, 2009.
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Posted in Evolution at 12:54 pm by nemo
Biological Basis For The Eight-hour Workday?
ScienceDaily (Apr. 27, 2009) — The circadian clock coordinates physiological and behavioral processes on a 24-hour rhythm, allowing animals to anticipate changes in their environment and prepare accordingly. Scientists already know that some genes are controlled by the clock and are turned on only one time during each 24-hour cycle.
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Posted in global warming at 12:53 pm by nemo
‘Super Reefs’ Fend Off Climate Change, Study Says
ScienceDaily (Apr. 27, 2009) — The Wildlife Conservation Society announced today a study showing that some coral reefs off East Africa are unusually resilient to climate change due to improved fisheries management and a combination of geophysical factors. WCS announced the results of the study at the International Coral Reef Initiative (ICRI), which is meeting this week in Phuket, Thailand.
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Posted in In the News at 12:49 pm by nemo
Published on Tuesday, April 28, 2009 by The New York Times
How ’07 ABC Interview Tilted a Torture Debate
by Brian Stelter
[]
In late 2007, there was the first crack of daylight into the government’s use of waterboarding during interrogations of Al Qaeda detainees. On Dec. 10, John Kiriakou, a former C.I.A. officer who had participated in the capture of the suspected terrorist Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan in 2002, appeared on ABC News to say that while he considered waterboarding a form of torture, the technique worked and yielded results very quickly.
Mr. Zubaydah started to cooperate after being waterboarded for “probably 30, 35 seconds,” Mr. Kiriakou told the ABC reporter Brian Ross. “From that day on he answered every question.”
His claims – unverified at the time, but repeated by dozens of broadcasts, blogs and newspapers – have been sharply contradicted by a newly declassified Justice Department memo that said waterboarding had been used on Mr. Zubaydah “at least 83 times.”
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Posted in environment at 12:44 pm by nemo
Published on Tuesday, April 28, 2009 by The Telegraph/UK
Poaching, Human Encroachment Force Elephants to Abandon Troubled Zimbabwe
Growing pressure from poaching and human encroachment in Zimbabwe has driven hundreds of elephants to migrate from the country, conservationists have said.
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Posted in 1848+ at 12:41 pm by nemo
Published on Tuesday, April 28, 2009 by The Guardian/UK
We Are All Torturers in America
by Naomi Wolf
As citizens’ outrage over the torture memos heats up, and the US Congress is barraged with calls to appoint a special prosecutor, Americans may be about to commit an egregious miscarriage of justice. Republicans have now accused Democrats in Congress of having “blood on your hands too” in relation to the escalating calls to investigate. I would go further: not only do Congressional Democrats have blood on their hands – but so do we, the American people. And CIA agents may be about to be sacrificed to assuage their – and our – actual and associative guilt.
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Posted in global warming at 12:38 pm by nemo
Published on Tuesday, April 28, 2009 by The Guardian/UK
Climate Change Hitting Entire Arctic Ecosystem, Says Report
Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme study tells of profound changes to sea ice and permafrost, among others
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Posted in In the News at 12:34 pm by nemo
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Obama’s Iraq
By JEREMY SCAHILL
Remember when Barack Obama made that big announcement at Camp Lejeune about how all US combat troops were going to be withdrawn from Iraqi cities by June 30? Liberals jumped around with joy, praising Obama for ending the war so that they could focus on their “good war” in Afghanistan.
Of course, the celebrations were and remain unwarranted. Obama’s Iraq plan is virtually identical to the one on Bush’s table on January 19, 2009. Obama has just rebranded the occupation, sold it to liberals and dropped the term “Global War on Terror” while, for all practical purposes, continuing the Bush era policy (that’s why leading Republicans praised Obama’s plan). In the real world, US military commanders have said they are preparing for an Iraq presence for another 15-20 years, the US embassy is the size of Vatican City, there is no official plan for the withdrawal of contractors and new corporate mercenary contracts are being awarded. The SoFA Agreement between the US and Iraq gives the US the right to extend the occupation indefinitely and to continue intervening militarily in Iraq ad infinitum. All it takes is for the puppets in Baghdad to ask nicely…
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Posted in In the News at 12:32 pm by nemo
On Israeli Fascism
A Little Red Light
By URI AVNERY
Perhaps Avigdor Lieberman is only a passing episode in the annals of the State of Israel. Perhaps the fire he is trying to ignite will flicker briefly and go out by itself. Or perhaps the police investigations into the grave corruption affair of which he is suspected will lead to his removal from the public sphere.
But the opposite is also possible. Last week he promised his acolytes that the next elections would bring him to power.
Perhaps Lieberman will prove to be an “Israbluff”’ (a term he himself likes to use), and be revealed, behind the frightful façade, as nothing more than a run of the mill impostor.
Perhaps this Lieberman will indeed disappear, to be replaced by another, even worse Lieberman.
Either way, we should candidly confront the phenomenon he represents. If one believes that his utterances sound fascist, one has to ask oneself: is there a possibility that a fascist regime might come to power in Israel?
* * *
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Posted in you've got mail at 12:11 pm by nemo
RG mail
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090426.wpirate_king27/BNStory/International/
Globe and Mail April 26, 2009
The pirate king of Somalia
“If the international community ever pays us our rightful compensation for the illegal fishing, attacks will stop within 48 hours.”
– Somali pirate leader Garaad
Jay Bahadur
Bosasso, Somalia — When Gilbert and Sullivan composed their melodies about the pirate king, it was doubtful they had a Somali like Garaad in mind. Yet this former fisherman, the man behind many of the recent hijackings in the Gulf of Aden and Indian Ocean, is as close as it comes to pirate royalty in the modern world.
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Posted in you've got mail at 12:07 pm by nemo
sciftp
http://www.grist.org/article/2009-04-25-swine-flu-smithfield/
When pigs flu
Swine-flu outbreak could be linked to Smithfield factory farms 22
Posted 11:06 AM on 25 Apr 2009
by Tom Philpott
One flu east, one flu westThe outbreak of a new flu strain—a nasty mash-up of swine, avian, and human viruses—has infected 1,000 people in Mexico and the U.S., killing 68. The World Health Organization warned Saturday that the outbreak could reach global pandemic levels.
Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in 1848+ at 12:00 pm by nemo
RG mail
Toronto Star April 15, 2009
Opinion
Unionism’s last stand
John R. MacArthur
Barack Obama’s commitment to helping labour has always been suspect, but handing over the American car business to the investment banker Steven Rattner might well turn the president into the last great union buster.
To be sure, we’re already long past the point where industrial unions have any real clout in our so-called service economy – this thanks to “free trade” (that is, guaranteed cheap labour in foreign locales and low import tariffs on foreign-made goods). Franklin Roosevelt’s old party of labour is now almost entirely the party of Wall Street and only a severe depression might alter this political reality. When Obama sent economist Austen Goolsbee to reassure the Canadian government that the candidate’s criticism of the North American Free Trade Agreement during the Ohio primary didn’t mean anything, he meant it.
But this isn’t to say there aren’t a few remaining pockets of working class resistance to the money power that Wall Street would like to crush. And right now, Rattner and the treasury department task force’s biggest target is not the overpaid executive staff at General Motors, but the United Auto Workers Union, the United States’ best and traditionally most honest mass labour organization. Just wait a few weeks, and the demands for concessions from the allegedly overpaid and cosseted UAW members will rise to levels of shrillness far greater than the very brief – and ineffective – outcry over the AIG bonuses.
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Posted in Evolution at 11:53 am by nemo
sciftp
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/28/science/28hobbit.html
April 28, 2009
A Tiny Hominid With No Place on the Family Tree
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
STONY BROOK, N.Y. – Six years after their discovery, the extinct little people nicknamed hobbits who once occupied the Indonesian island of Flores remain mystifying anomalies in human evolution, out of place in time and geography, their ancestry unknown. Recent research has only widened their challenge to conventional thinking about the origins, transformations and migrations of the early human family.
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