06.30.09
Posted in Evolution, Science & Religion at 5:33 pm by nemo
I am often puzzled by the tenacity of the Darwin debate, and the unthinking monomania of the defenders of Darwin. No other science has this characteristic. Physicists routinely allow dissenting views, within the spectrum of mathematical theory, and have had multiple upgrades/revisions of basic views. This is a sign of a real science, and a thriving one.
But with Darwinism we are stuck forever in the nineteenth century, with the deliberate distortion of the record, the deliberate squelching of dissent, the constant and repetitive promotion of boilerplate Darwinism to condition the public. The final sordid joke is that we now supect Darwin of plagiarism from Wallace, who was the real source of the theory of natural selection, and who soon moved beyond his original views.
A host of critics met at Altenberg last year, to suggest moving on. They have simply been deep-sixed already by the establishment.
This rigidity is itself direct evidence that we are not dealing with a real science. More like a belief system that can be defended rhetorically and ideologically.
This sterile activity is destroying science. Who can trust scientists anymore as they succumb to this deluded segment of the real scientific world?
The problem is obvious to a student of Kant: a concealed metaphysics takes hold of the mind, and creates a kind of metaphysical delusion, here based on the magical abuse of the idea of natural selection.
There is the clear obsession with the religious debate, now the ID debate. But scientists are too paranoid here. People can argue ID all they wish, but without hard proof, so what? Instead of intelligent reserve, scientists, so-called, become all the more obsessed with the claims of natural selection, which seems to guarantee all their beliefs. It is the wrong strategy altogether. Admitting your ignorance will disarm religious critics.
But, whatever the case, these religious critics already understand the flaws in Darwinism better than the scientists. Disaster!
The question is fairly simple: natural selection is not a properly founded basis for evolutionary theory. So why not drop it and simply proceed on the basis of what is known, and refrain from trying to force the public into an ideological creed?
I have some advice for the science/Darwin establishment: don’t delegate a job you can do for yourself to the Al Qaeda.
Moral: there are a lot of people out there who want to destroy this civilization. The frustration with this useless question has disillusioned them beyond recovery as they confront the sheer stupidity of scientists.
What are the options beyond living with our ignorance? There are none.
What do we know? We observe evolution in deep time. Noone can quite fathom how evolutionary dynamics achieves this. Sterile metaphysical generalizations based on natural selection have distorted the reality of our ignorance. So why not be truthful about it?
The thugs love the natural selection paradigm. You get free violence, free economic greed, all kinds of freebies based on theory. So, natch, you have to protect the ‘scientific credentials’ to preserve those ideologies.
It’s all crap, and to call it science will destroy science.
It could end badly.
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Posted in Evolution at 4:55 pm by nemo
Epigenetics and evolution
James said,
June 30, 2009 at 4:12 pm ·
Great work guys!! At this rate, in about 2000 years, you will finally figure out that Darwin wasn’t the Newton of biology.
You express the frustration here very well. But we don’t have two thousand years. If our form of culture is so stuck on Darwinism, it will be the object of violent destruction, sooner than we think.
That’s why I urge people involved in evolution to claim only what they know as hard knowledge, e.g. the fact of evolution.
This obsession with Darwinism is not necessary for that, and has been a religious fixation in certain scientists. That is unnecessary and dangerous.
You know, we don’t even know if Darwin was the source of this theory, given the suspected plagiarism of the the whole thing from Wallace.
The whole thing is outrageous. It can’t go on forever.
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Posted in Evolution at 4:50 pm by nemo
The Never-Ending Misconceptions About Evolutionary Psychology
Wilson at Huffpost (see previous post) cites some of the counterattacks against the Newsweek expose of evolutionary psychology.
We have seen this game before. When the critics attack, accuse them of not understanding the subject.
That’s a lame argument at this point.
I think Begley’s article is quite to the point, save that attacking evo-psych, but not Darwinism, is misleading.
Evolutionary psychologists are so confused on the subject of evolution even as they flaunt ‘expertise’ that to claim someone doesn’t understand your subject is probably a sign of incipient sanity. Evo-psych fanatics cannot extricate themselves from the ideological fixation of the subject.
But, whatever the case, differentiating evolutionary psychology from Darwinism is part of the game of the Darwin illusion.
The real issue is the false claims made for natural selection in Darwin’s original theory. Given that the question of evolutionary psychology is irrelevant, a sideline that collapses with the main paradigm.
David Sloan Wilson, btw, attended the Altenberg 16 conference, and is more than aware of the of the paradigm in motion, and the failure of standard Darwinism.
Sharon Begley has just written an article in Newsweek wherein she castigates the field of evolutionary psychology (EP) using the same antiquated and perfectly erroneous set of criticisms that have been addressed by evolutionary psychologists on endless occasions. If cats have nine lives then critics of evolutionary psychology à la Ms. Begley have infinite lives. The anti-EP dragon is slain repeatedly and yet it always resurfaces, emboldened by its blind and prideful ignorance of the facts. Unfortunately, it would take several posts for me to provide a point-by-point retort to the endless number of falsehoods that appear in her article. Instead, I will focus on a few key ones that were central to her critique.
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Posted in Evolution at 4:34 pm by nemo
Evolutionary Psychology and the Public Media: Rekindling the Romance
Don’t fall for this sophistical nonsense.
No sooner does the public start to get straight on evolutionary psychology than the permanent converts start to revive its ghost. And what is this nonsense about rekindling the romance?? It is sly psychological manipulation. Only the hard core have any romance with this junk science.
Attacking sociobiology/evo-psych is often an escape valve for saving the general paradigm. We have seen this on the left for a whole generation.
We need to be clear that evolutionary psychology is not essentially different from general Darwinism. So they both collapse together.
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Posted in you've got mail at 12:53 pm by nemo
gnxp
A visual illusion has provided clues about how monkeys recognise faces
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8119028.stm
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Posted in you've got mail at 12:52 pm by nemo
gnxp
As they evolve, religions promote greater tolerance and peace
http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2009/06/28/8216evolution_of_god8217_make\
s_case_for_cooperative_monotheism/
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Posted in you've got mail at 12:50 pm by nemo
gnxp
Scientists are beginning to find a connection between bizarre deformities in water animals and abnormalities in humans
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/opinion/28kristof.html
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Posted in you've got mail at 12:49 pm by nemo
gnxp
There’s a revolution sweeping biology today—begrudged by a few, but accepted by more and more biologists—this revolution is called epigenetics
http://www.newsweek.com/id/204233
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Posted in Evolution, you've got mail at 12:47 pm by nemo
sciftp
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-sloan-wilson/evolutionary-psychology-a_b_220545.html
David Sloan Wilson
Posted: June 25, 2009 12:13 AM
Evolutionary Psychology and the Public Media: Rekindling the Romance
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Posted in you've got mail at 12:42 pm by nemo
RG mail
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/30/arts/television/30nova.html
June 30, 2009
Television Review | ‘Nova: Musical Minds’
Our Brains on Music: The Science
By MIKE HALE
“Musical Minds,” the season premiere of “Nova” on PBS, is based on the neurologist Oliver Sacks’s most recent book, “Musicophilia,” a collection of case studies of people whose brains have unusual relationships to music, cases in which, as Dr. Sacks puts it, “music gets them going to an extraordinary degree.” A one-hour program can’t approach the depth and texture of Dr. Sacks’s book, but it does get at one question that nags the reader: What do these musical savants sound like? Or put another way: Are they really as amazing as they’re cracked up to be?
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Posted in you've got mail at 12:39 pm by nemo
RG mail
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jun2009/heal-j26.shtml
White House health care forum: Obama’s plan for “evidence-based” medical cuts
By Kate Randall
26 June 2009
A White House forum on health care provided some insight into the Obama administration’s vision for a reform of the system. In the ABC News program “Questions for the President: Prescription for America,” broadcast Wednesday night, Obama outlined proposals for a revamped health care system in which medical services would be subject to “evidence-based” analysis and the profits of the insurance giants would remain intact.
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Posted in you've got mail at 12:37 pm by nemo
RG mail
http://socialistworker.org/2009/06/30/will-health-care-bosses-get-their-way
Editorials [1]
Will the health care bosses get their way?
The Democrats are letting the health care industry dictate the terms of “reform.”
June 30, 2009
WARNING: THE federal government is poised to commit robbery. And the poor, defenseless victim is…the health insurance industry.
Say what?
That’s what top executives of the health care industry and the politicians who represent them want you to believe about the Obama administration’s health care reform proposal–because the White House is promoting (with a lot of qualifications) the so-called “public option”: a government-run program that the uninsured could choose in order to get coverage.
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06.29.09
Posted in Evolution at 6:42 pm by nemo
The Great Explosion
As with previous post, note the huge discrepancy between what Darwinists claim and what the facts of human evolution actually show.
Whenever you are confronted with this complex question of man’s evolution, be sure to check out the question mark issue created by juxtaposing the eonic effect with this so-called ‘great explosion’ in the evolution of man, granting that we can make no direct comparison, nor be sure exactly what the facts are.
Rapid advance appears out of the blue in high-speed transformations stretching over precisely coordianted series over many millennia, and potentially over separated regions.
How that might apply to these sudden transformations in Africa we don’t know, but we have to be suspicious.
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Posted in Evolution at 6:34 pm by nemo
Human History Written in Stone and Blood
Two bursts of human innovation in southern Africa during the Middle Stone Age may be linked to population growth and early migration off the continent
This is an interesting article on the double series innovative periods in the emergence of modern man.
Note that natural selection is hardly mentioned, since this isn’t a question of slow evolution.
Despite pro forma attempts to produce hypotheses that can explain all this the clear tone is a veiled agnosticism (as it should be).
Catalysts of Creativity
Answers about the ages of these artifacts, of course, lead only to more questions. What stimulated the Still Bay and Howieson’s Poort industries? Why did they last so briefly and end so abruptly? And what was responsible for their—in archaeological terms—instantaneous appearance and subsequent disappearance across a vast expanse of southern Africa? Human responses to environmental change have long intrigued archaeologists, so climate change must top the list of suspects. The last interglacial/glacial cycle stretched from about 130,000 to 12,000 years ago, which includes the time span of the Still Bay and Howieson’s Poort. During this period, southern Africa experienced marked changes in temperature and precipitation associated with global changes in ice volume, sea level and patterns of oceanic and atmospheric circulation. The timing and magnitude of these climatic fluctuations have been detected by international climate research groups in the pattern of change in the ratio of oxygen isotopes (and the concentration of atmospheric greenhouse gases) in ice cores retrieved from Greenland and Antarctica. These records share many general features, but the Southern Hemisphere climatic records from Antarctica are the most relevant to southern Africa.
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Posted in atheism, Science & Religion at 4:00 pm by nemo
God and Science Don’t Mix
A scientist can be a believer. But professionally, at least, he can’t act like one.
——-
My practice as a scientist is atheistic. That is to say, when I set up an experiment I assume that no god, angel or devil is going to interfere with its course; and this assumption has been justified by such success as I have achieved in my professional career. I should therefore be intellectually dishonest if I were not also atheistic in the affairs of the world.
UD responds
You can’t solve this issue by simple negation of theism, to ‘atheism’. What is that?
To be an ‘atheist’ is as biased as being a theist.
In fact, this kind of bias has thrown evolutionism completely out of whack. I am not advocating theism or atheism.
But i challenge the idea that an atheist is without bias. The study of physics instills indifference here, but the situation of the other sciences, e.g. cultural sciences, is not so clear.
J.B.S. Haldane, an evolutionary biologist and a founder of population genetics, understood that science is by necessity an atheistic discipline. As Haldane so aptly described it, one cannot proceed with the process of scientific discovery if one assumes a “god, angel, or devil” will interfere with one’s experiments. God is, of necessity, irrelevant in science.
Faced with the remarkable success of science to explain the workings of the physical world, many, indeed probably most, scientists understandably react as Haldane did. Namely, they extrapolate the atheism of science to a more general atheism.
Krauss ought to read Pharyngula blog for a while: this is without bias?
This is the new science bigot in action.
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Posted in you've got mail at 2:27 pm by nemo
Rg mail
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/10/globalisation-monbiot-stiglitz
The Guardian 10 June 2009
The globalisation illusion
Like past imperialism, the idea of globalisation is unsustainable and kept unchallenged to insulate us from reality
Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in Kant at 2:24 pm by nemo
Comment on Ethics and Freedom
Comments are closed on this post (two week limit for spam prevention), so I will post up Danny’s comment, despite its being somewhat opaque (the result of trying to fathom Kant).
It is supremely difficult to get straight the structure of ‘ethics and psychology’, the reason people get fed up and slide down hill on a greased pig using Nietzschean ‘fuck it, who cares about ethics’.
Here I think the best straight is to follow Kant by the book for a while, and, ignoring the critics, try to get his perspective straight in one’s mind.
dandy said,
June 28, 2009 at 5:23 pm · Does the principle of right in accordance with which we direct our actions also require a matching inner motivation? That is, is it necessary to act rightly from an inner directing force? The answer is yes and no at the same time. From the point of view of RIGHT it is not necessary, the inner motivation does not count as a determinate consequence in the field of right, all that is necessary is that actions does not violate the external right of people. However, from the point of view of VIRTUE it is necessary that each man choose to act rightly from an internal correct disposition, that his motivation to act the way he acts (rightly) comes from proper ground.
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Posted in Evolution, Science & Religion at 1:53 pm by nemo
The Time book review has a review of Wright’s The Evolution of God by Paul Bloom. The signal is that the Darwin block heads at the Times approve of Wright’s trashy effort.
We have exposed Wright’s book several times here, but you can’t do much if the Times gives the thumbs up.
Search box on Robert Wright’s Evolution of God
Being behind the eightball when the haute bourgeoisie wants to reprogram your religious beliefs is disgusting, especially to the degree they can get away with it, but why get upset. In a few months, Wright’s book will join the graveyard of second-rate Darwin books, however influential for the next few years.
In all fairness, the right-wing creationist Bible Belt is worse. But the Darwinization of religion was the only way science could compete with the bad taste of fundamentalists. It is a miracle, but they are now par.
My first reaction to Wright’s book was to suggest Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit. I am by no means a Hegel fan, but if you really want to consider the ‘evolution of god’, Hegel’s biography of ‘god’ is the most interesting take on that.
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Posted in In the News, Tibet at 1:14 pm by nemo
The New Left Review has an article with the usual trashy lies about
Tibet.
http://www.newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=2720
The vintage Tibet political economy was a bit medieval and exposing New Age sentimentality is inevitable, but the basic message of the fake Left is that the best Buddhist is a dead Buddhist.
In a few more years, that will be the case.
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Posted in Evolution at 1:02 pm by nemo
Forgotten evolutionist rediscovered at lastDarwin’s contemporary, Alfred Russel Wallace, gets his due after 150 years
Equal billing for Wallace?
Unlike Wallace, Darwin spent two decades developing his theory of natural selection and had far more evidence to back it up, as presented in his defining work, “The Origin of Species,” published 150 years ago. But Wallace reached the same conclusion before Darwin published his findings, and Beccaloni contends that Wallace deserves equal billing.
“The Darwin industry is what has distorted the whole of history,” Beccaloni said. “People have just concentrated on Darwin and his life and work, but they fail to see Darwin wasn’t alone and he fits into a wider picture.”
These attempts to be fair to Wallace are completely tiresome. They are part of the deceptionl.
To say that Darwin had more evidence than Wallace is pure bullshit. Darwin didn’t have the right theory, and plagiarized it from Wallace.
Check out Roy Davies’ The Darwin Conspiracy.
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Posted in Evolution at 12:54 pm by nemo
Evolution: rationality vs randomness
An M.I.T. trained scientist takes a look at Darwin, the fossil record, and the likelihood of random evolution.
by Dr. Gerald Schroeder At the basis of the theory of neo-Darwinian evolution lie two basic assumptions: that changes in morphologies are induced by random mutations on the genome, and that these changes in the morphology of plant or animal make the life form either more or less successful in the competition to survive. With nature doing the selection, evolutionists claim to remove the theory of evolution from that of a random process. We are told that the selection is in no way random. It is a function of the environment. The randomness, however, remains as the basic driving force that produces the varied mutations from among which the selection by survival takes place.
The question is: Can random mutations produce the evolution of life?
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Posted in Evolution at 12:50 pm by nemo
Forgotten evolutionist lives in Darwin’s shadow
By MICHAEL CASEY – 13 hours ago
SANTUBONG, Malaysia (AP) — As he trudges past chest-high ferns and butterflies the size of saucers, George Beccaloni scours a jungle hilltop overlooking the South China Sea for signs of a long-forgotten Victorian-era scientist.
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Posted in you've got mail at 12:16 pm by nemo
gnxp
The genome’s bounty is further off than expected, but it may yet yield deeper and wider insights
http://www.newsweek.com/id/204236
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Posted in you've got mail at 12:14 pm by nemo
gnxp
From cell phones and texting to religion and manners, younger and older Americans see the world differently, creating the largest generation gap since the tumultuous years of the 1960s and the culture clashes over Vietnam, civil rights and women’s liberation
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090629/ap_on_re_us/us_generation_gap
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Posted in you've got mail at 12:12 pm by nemo
_______________________________
UPDATE FROM THE
ELECTRONIC INTIFADA
http://electronicIntifada.net
____________________________ Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in you've got mail at 12:08 pm by nemo
RG mail
Why the anti-war movement has to confront Israel and its Lobby
(Presentation by Sid Shniad, co-chair of Independent Jewish Voices Canada , to the May 30 Annual General Meeting of the StopWar.ca Coalition in Vancouver, BC.)
Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lW0Rt9qUIVk&feature=related
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3-A22GIdic
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Posted in you've got mail at 12:07 pm by nemo
RG mail
http://www.philly.com/inquirer/opinion/20090624_Cap-and-trade_does_more_harm_than_good.html
Philadelphia Inquirer June 25, 2009 Cap-and-Trade Does More Harm than Good
Bill offers incentives for businesses that pollute. Carbon fees or taxation would be better for the economy and the Earth
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Posted in you've got mail at 12:05 pm by nemo
RG mail
Honduran FM Urges People to Resist Coup
Escrito por Raquel Maria Garcia Alvarez
http://www.prensa-latina.cu/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=95885&Itemid=1
Jun 28 (Prensa Latina) Honduran Foreign Minister Patricia Rodas called
on the people to take to the streets to resist the coup perpetrated
early Sunday against President Manuel Zelaya.
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Posted in you've got mail at 12:04 pm by nemo
tomdispatch.com
June 28, 2009
Tomgram: Dilip Hiro, The Weeks of Living Dangerously Read the rest of this entry »
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