History, Evolution, and the Darwin Debate
RG mail
http://sb4af.wordpress.com/2009/04/28/scholars-condemn-attack-on-academic-freedom-at-uc-santa-barbara/#more-383
Scholars condemn attack on academic freedom at UC-Santa Barbara
Noam Chomsky and international scholars demand dismissal of “anti-
Semitism” charges against sociology professor
In the previous two posts we have discussed Kant, The Matrix, and seen the way that Kant’s thinking applies, but that we are looking at long-term history, which we don’t observe. Revolutions per second
However, there is a most ironic partial exception to this, the period of the French Revolution straddles the most sensitive and significant sub-interval of the modern transition as seen in the eonic effect, and has a direct significance both to the question of historical dynamics, and to the issues of the way that Kantian concepts of the philosophy of history impinge on the realm of facts. We can’t see history in large intervals, but we can experience short periods over a generation and if these are a moment of high-speed transition and ‘eonic’ changing of gears, we do (if we were there!) get a sense of something almost noumenal leaving its aroma of mystery in an historical moment.
You need to study the whole model to get a feeling for this, but the facts are clear: people were spooked by the French Revolution, and felt as if no movement they had experienced before in their lives could match this unexpected burst of change, and they could not pinpoint the mysterious reason for this the sudden eruption, as if epochs in succession were in motion by a different law of life. Kant is notable for such a reaction to the French Revolution, as were many others. He was seeing the resolution of his own Kant’s Challenge in history, but his immersion in events was still too great to be able to see this. And yet he sensed that we was close to something extraordinary, and we now see that he was correct. Radicals saw it as a kind of sacred parade of manifesting freedom, reactionaries thought it as an eruption of the demonic and took fright for good. It is clear from the eonic analysis that the whole set of episodes in the large correspond to a Kantian analysis in the large.
It is the same effect that left those caught in the period and generations from Josaiah to Exekiel spooked by the strangeness of an historical transition, leaving them to consider, in a pre-Kantian era, the supernatural acting on the realm of nature (to the disconbobulation of our thinking perhaps). The point is that the dynamics of the eonic model, without explaining it, isolate the dynamics of why that ‘spooked’ feeling arises as a sense of awe in those who lived that transitional moment, recording the experience in the Old Testament.
Kant’s Challenge
Kant raises the issue of history perfectly in the opening paragraph to his essay on history:
Whatever concept one may hold, from a metaphysical point of view, concerning the freedom of the will, certainly its appearances, which are human actions, like every other natural event, are determined by universal laws. However obscure their causes, history, which is concerned with narrating these appearances, permits us to hope that if we attend to the play of freedom of the human will in the large, we may be able to discern a regular movement in it, and that what seems complex and chaotic in the single individual may be seen from the standpoint of the human race as a whole to be a steady and progressive though slow evolution of its original endowment.
This passage contains a latent question, and also shows the connection between the individual and his freedom and the dynamics of larger history.
The eonic effect resolves this contradiction beautifully. But it doesn’t directly address the issue of the individual and his will. Rather it finds ‘freedom factors’ in History, that is ‘uncaused historical intervals’.
A commenter in reference to the film The Matrix asks what book about it I was referring to. Here: The Matrix And Philosophy
This film made quite a stir when it came out because of its striking philosophic subtext in the background. Two books showing the connection to philosophy are known to me.
I just watched the film for the first time yesterday and found it quite interesting, despite its violent action-pic style.
And the book has an interesting chapter on Kant, and this, remarkably, raises an issue that is related to the eonic effect and model: with Kant the idea of the ‘matrix’ arises in the way the mind constructs, as it were, a priori the principles of science in the way it perceives the outer world.
This raises the question related to the matrix as to whether the issue is one of the external world or the interior world of the experiencer. I am not sure the movie quite distinguishes these two (I could be wrong, I didn’t quite grasp this strange film in the distractions of plot, action-pic style, and philosophy).
To state the issue in terms of the eonic effect: we see that the eonic effect is an actual historical pattern. Close examination shows its relationship to Kant’s system, with a huge difference: Kant speaks of the mind’s constructions a priori, while the eonic effect finds something Kantian about ‘Big History’ in the exterior world, with no reference as such to the a priori constructs of the experiencer of history.
I need to come back on this issue again in a slightly different way.
In any case, I learned something from this film and the book, or, at least, they pointed to something that has long been a somewhat confusing aspect of the eonic model. Does it refer to the external world (yes) or to the constructs a priori of the historical experiencer (yes, also, but…)
The eonic effect is strange in the sense that its structure resembles a Kantian analysis, but this is applied to ‘history’ which is not a person.
There isn’t actually any contradiction, or a problem on these grounds, but it is at first a strange variant of Kantian thinking.
The connection to history arises from the way that Kant’s Third Antinomy expresses the seeming clash of freedom and causality, making contradictory the idea of ‘laws of history’, and this can’t be resolved except via the hypothesis of (an historical version of ) ‘transcendental idealism’, i.e. the appearance of uncaused events in punctuated discontinuities, resulting in the extension of the analysis beyond space and time. The phenomenal/noumenal distinction suddenly appears in the way in which the ‘uncaused event’ (e.g. the Axial Age) might actually have some ‘determination’ (but not stricly a causal factor in space and time) outside of time and space. All this says nothing about the constructs a priori of the experiencer. The problem here is that we don’t ‘see’ history, we read about it in books, and construct mental data processing on curious phantoms in our minds about the past.
But in fact that, as far as I know, doesn’t change the issue. It is as if we were seeing the past. But we have transposed beyond ‘perception’ to ‘large intervals of history’ which we certainly don’t see, so the Kantian perceptual mechanism doesn’t apply.
In fact the same analysis does apply, and we discover this in a surprise: the data of the Axial period, just as one example.
Something simply appears in space and time, and the usual rules of causal antecedence are violated. So how to proceed?
But in fact, it hardly matters since we merely detected that transcendental idealism is once again a better explanation of our ‘bookish’ perceptions so-called, than realism. We see that our experience of history arises in the way we analyze the problem of history. It seems like an issue of empirical realism, but all of a sudden we have a Copernican revolution applied to the appearances of history and we detect by indirect inference the incomplete character of our perceptions of history and the reality of something behind those appearances.
A post on the division of PIE into three branches, as seen in their consonantal stop systems, from a discussion in a fascianting new book, Empires of the Silk Road.
At the point where the Aryan invasion theory, discussed here several times, begins to become so controversial as to induce a new form of the politically correct, the details, and they are complex, of the PIE reconstruction linguistics needs to enter with a dose of reality.
Scholars at odds over mysterious Indus script
More on the Indus script question.
An as yet undeciphered script found on relics from the Indus valley constitutes a genuine written language, a new mathematical analysis suggests.
The finding is the latest chapter in a bitter dispute over the interpretation of “Indus script”. This is the name given to a collection of symbols found on artefacts from the Indus valley civilisation, which flourished in what is now eastern Pakistan and western India between 2500 and 1900 BC.
In 2002, a team of linguists and historians argued that the script did not represent language at all, but religious or political imagery.
From Dawkins site
Foot soldiers who lack vision
by PZ Myers, Pharyngula
The NCSE is an excellent organization, and I’ve frequently urged people at my talks to join it. However, it’s also a limited organization, and this post by Richard Hoppe at the Panda’s Thumb exposes their flaws. http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/04/foot_soldiers_who_lack_vision.php
I find this remarkable: the Darwin hard-core is actually unable to handle the NCSE, mostly because they are aren’t fanatic enough atheists, ‘accomodationists’.
Let’s hope the whole Darwin group splinters further, and we can proceed to mopping up
Reanimating Extinct Genes
By Michael Schirber
The movie Jurassic Park was a lesson in how resurrecting extinct organisms can go awry. A new project plans to take a safer route: resurrect a single gene from an extinct species of bacteria. This tiny snippet of DNA will be implanted in modern-day bacteria, with the goal of seeing whether evolution can be replayed in the lab.
Against Darwinism
26 Apr 09, 11:05 PM Jerry Foder, one of the most distinguished analytic philosophers in the world today, is an intellectual maverick, and a serious thinker. In the past few years, he has challenged the intellectual coherence of natural selection as an explanatory mechanism within evolution.
Single-molecule Nano-vehicles Synthesized: ‘Fantastic Voyage’ Not So Far-Fetched
ScienceDaily (Apr. 27, 2009) — Imagine producing vehicles so small they would be about the size of a molecule and powered by engines that run on sugar. To top it off, a penny would buy a million of them.
Scientists Give A Hand(edness) To The Search For Alien Life
ScienceDaily (Apr. 27, 2009) — Visiting aliens may be the stuff of legend, but if a scientific team working at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is right, we may be able to find extraterrestrial life even before it leaves its home planet—by looking for left- (or right-) handed light.
More ice, flat temperatures – what does it all mean?
Simple messages, which make headlines and create doubt amongst the laity, are an easy sell in the pseudo-sceptical world of climate science contrarianism. Many sound (kind of) plausible, and so gain an undue amount of traction among the general public and non-science decision-makers.
sciftp
http://socialistworker.org/2009/04/27/capitalism-and-the-flu
Capitalism and the flu
Mike Davis, whose 2006 book The Monster at Our Door [1] warned of the threat of a global bird flu pandemic, explains how globalized agribusiness set the stage for a frightening outbreak of the swine flu in Mexico.
The Dawn of Robot Wars
April 27, 2009 By Eric Stoner
Source: Indypendent.org
With little public scrutiny, robotics is quickly revolutionizing not only how war is fought, but who fights in war. While the U.S. military first began to experiment with remote-controlled weapons during World War I, the Pentagon had no robots on the ground when it invaded Iraq in 2003, and only a handful of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the air. Today, according to P.W. Singer, author of Wired for War and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, the U.S. military has some 7,000 UAVs in operation — more than double the number of manned aircraft in its arsenal — and more than 12,000 robots on the ground in Iraq alone.
The Predator State
April 27, 2009 By Jim Miles
Source: Palestine Chronicle
The Predator State – How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too. James K. Galbraith. Free Press, New York, 2008.
Not too many economists make much clarity these days, and the general run of the mill economists that populate the majority of political and business positions seem to be mired in their own illusions and myths about what the economy actually is. James Galbraith stands out in contrast to that group and is able to see through the myths of the “free market” and provide well conceived, simple, and effective solutions to the problems of our current economy. In The Predator State, Galbraith follows in his father’s footsteps (whom I had the pleasure of reading and understanding many years ago) with a well structured, well argued, and clearly written examination of the supposed free market.
gnxp
Researchers in South Korea have identified genes that are linked to key indicators such as blood pressure and bone density that have a bearing on chronic diseases such as hypertension and osteoporosis
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090426/sc_nm/us_genetics_skorea;_ylt=AkG63YcNIFU8VJs8Ivh3SVghANEA
gnxp
New research may help unlock vegetative and minimally conscious patients
http://www.slate.com/id/2216595/
Published on Monday, April 27, 2009 by Salon.com
Put Wealth on Trial
Congress needs to investigate the reasons behind the economic collapse — the way Ferdinand Pecora probed the ’29 market crash, and made tycoons confess their financial sins.
Published on Monday, April 27, 2009 by The Guardian/UK
Non-Violent Protests Against West Bank Barrier Turn Increasingly Dangerous
Palestinian demonstrations intended to be peaceful met with Israeli teargas, stun grenades and sometimes live ammunition
“Anarcho Capitalists” Backed by $25 Billion Corporate Giant
The Far Right’s Plot to Capture New Hampshire
By PAM MARTENS
One of the most audacious and cynical corporate-backed social experiments in living memory, the Free State Project in New Hampshire, has now shifted into damage control mode. Free State operatives learned this past week of my article that appears in the current subscription edition of CounterPunch, taking the first in-depth look at their plan to entice 20,000 out-of-state ultra libertarians and anarchists to move to New Hampshire and implant an extremist brand of free market capitalism: a brand the corporate backers hope will lead to a gutting of business regulations, environmental laws, and return the state to the right wing of the Republican fold. (Currently, all three branches in New Hampshire, known for its pivotal first primary status, are controlled by Democrats.)
RG mail
Welcome to Pipelineistan
by Pepe Escobar
Asia Times Online (March 26 2009)
What happens on the immense battlefield for the control of Eurasia will
provide the ultimate plot line in the tumultuous rush towards a new,
polycentric world order, also known as the New Great Game.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/KC26Ag01.html
RG mail
by David Sirota
Truthdig (March 26 2009)
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090326_newspapers_self-inflicted_wounds/
RG mail
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/8020039.stm
Plan to monitor all internet use
By Dominic Casciani
BBC News home affairs reporter
Communications firms are being asked to record all internet contacts
between people as part of a modernisation in UK police surveillance
tactics.
The home secretary scrapped plans for a database but wants details to
be held and organised for security services.
The new system would track all e-mails, phone calls and internet use,
including visits to social network sites.
How to Understand the Disaster
By Robert M. Solow
A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of ’08 and the Descent into Depression
by Richard A. Posner
Harvard University Press, 346 pp., $23.95
Read the rest of this entry »
Sex Reversal
Child quotas, abortion, and China’s missing girls.
By William Saletan
Posted Wednesday, April 15, 2009, at 10:34 AM ET
Sixteen million girls are missing in China. And now we know what happened to them: They were aborted because they weren’t boys.
A study published last week in the British Medical Journal, based on a survey of nearly 5 million Chinese children and teenagers, bares the gruesome numbers. Worldwide, the number of boys born per 100 girls ranges from 103 to 107. (The numbers later equalize due to higher male mortality.) Among Chinese children born from 1985 to 1989, the number of boys per 100 girls was 108, close to normal. But among those born from 2000 to 2004, the number rose to 124. The authors conclude that as of 2005, “males under the age of 20 exceeded females by more than 32 million.”
John Cornwell
MYSTERIES OF THE SOUL
Why Us? How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves
By James Le Fanu (Harper Press 303pp £18.99)
At the midpoint of the 1990s, the much-hyped Decade of the Brain, Peter Brook directed a stage version of Oliver Sacks’s book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat at the Cottesloe in London. At one point a patient was presented to a neurologist with a condition known as visual agnosia. The patient watched a screen on which a video of a seashore was depicted. He could describe moving white and blue lines and a strip of yellow: but he could not put it together to say what it was. At the end of the play, all the cast of patients and neurologists came on stage to watch another video: it depicted a PET scan showing the map of a brain gently pulsing in vivid colours. Brook meant his audience to grasp that brain imaging, as a way of understanding the mind, is as empty of meaning as impressions on a patient with visual agnosia.
James Le Fanu, like Brook, and indeed Oliver Sacks, passionately believes that the human genome and contemporary neuroscience (the study of the brain and central nervous system) are ultimately futile as explanations of human nature. Le Fanu, a medical doctor by profession, is a very fine and thoughtful writer, a contributor on science and medicine to many periodicals, and author of the magisterial The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine, arguably the best history of public medicine written to date. In this book, a strongly philosophical and historical critique of recent science, he stands out against the tide of effervescent scientific optimism that proclaims imminent explication of what it means to be human. It takes courage to resist that tide.
Darwinists are so full of themselves and yet their failure to explain the evolution of man stands out as almost incredible given their overconfident dogmatism.
The Great Explosion
The eonic effect does not solve the problem, as far as we know, but what it does suggest is the scale of the real mechanism behind human evolution, and the completely primitive nature of current biological theory. It is unfair for scientists to let loose this cohort of Darwinian true believers on the public with a theory that is crackpot from the beginning.
« Previous Page — « Previous entries « Previous Page · Next Page » Next entries » — Next Page »