06.29.09
Posted in you've got mail at 11:59 am by nemo
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/29/opinion/29krugman.html
June 29, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Betraying the Planet
By PAUL KRUGMAN
So the House passed the Waxman-Markey climate-change bill. In political terms, it was a remarkable achievement.
But 212 representatives voted no. A handful of these no votes came from representatives who considered the bill too weak, but most rejected the bill because they rejected the whole notion that we have to do something about greenhouse gases.
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06.28.09
Posted in Evolution at 3:11 pm by nemo
Why Do We Rape, Kill and Sleep Around?
The fault, dear Darwin, lies not in our ancestors, but in ourselves.
Sharon Begley at Newsweek takes on sociobiology, …evolutionary psychology.
Evolutionary seem unable to shake the rape thesis as it resurfaces in the limited conceptual mindset.
The question is simple: the rape factor can generate microevolution, and microevolutionary deviation, but not evolution.
This simple point is apparently too complicated for sociobiologists, and certainly their theory cannot handle the issue/.
This is a classic example of the Oedipus factor: tell the public that rape is a factor in evolution, and the rape factor enters into non-linear interaction with the theory.
Idiot!
Among scientists at the university of New Mexico that spring, rape was in the air. One of the professors, biologist Randy Thornhill, had just coauthored A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion, which argued that rape is (in the vernacular of evolutionary biology) an adaptation, a trait encoded by genes that confers an advantage on anyone who possesses them. Back in the late Pleistocene epoch 100,000 years ago, the 2000 book contended, men who carried rape genes had a reproductive and evolutionary edge over men who did not: they sired children not only with willing mates, but also with unwilling ones, allowing them to leave more offspring (also carrying rape genes) who were similarly more likely to survive and reproduce, unto the nth generation. That would be us. And that is why we carry rape genes today. The family trees of prehistoric men lacking rape genes petered out.
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Posted in you've got mail at 2:05 pm by nemo
gnxp
In his careful yet provocative contemplation of religious history, Robert Wright sees continuous positive moral change over time but denies the specialness of any individual faith
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/books/review/Bloom-t.html
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Posted in you've got mail at 2:04 pm by nemo
gnxp
Everyone’s a critic: several birds have learned to tell the difference between well-executed and crude paintings as judged by a human panel
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17383-pigeons-make-the-grade-at-art-appreciation.html
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Posted in you've got mail at 2:02 pm by nemo
gnxp
How can a hypnotist paralyze your hand just with words? By making a part of your brain butt in on the process that normally makes your hand move, a study says. So the brain region that’s ready to move your hand ignores its usual inputs and listens to this interloper, which says, “Don’t even bother,” the research concluded
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090624/ap_on_sc/us_sci_paralyzed_by_hypnosis
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Posted in you've got mail at 2:00 pm by nemo
gnxp
A new understanding of the genes that make muscle cells may change the way researchers think about stem cell transplants for muscular dystrophy and muscle injuries, U.S. researchers said on Wednesday
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090625/hl_nm/us_muscle_cells
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Posted in you've got mail at 1:59 pm by nemo
gnxp
In The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature,
Steven Pinker challenged the assumption that people are moulded by society and their upbringing, raising awkward questions about race and intelligence, aggression, greed and free will
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/jun/18/iq-steven-pinker-blank-slate
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Posted in you've got mail at 1:57 pm by nemo
gnxp
Standing in the way is the blood-brain barrier, a formidable defense system that keeps out pathogens and toxins but also bars many potential therapies from reaching the seat of maladies such as brain cancer or Alzheimer’s disease
http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2009/06/22/trying_to_breach_the_blood_brain_barrier/
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Posted in you've got mail at 1:55 pm by nemo
gnxp
A skeptic’s journey for truth in science
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=what-skepticism-reveals
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Posted in In the News at 1:53 pm by nemo
RG mail
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2009/06/2009628124715921328.html
Al J has a correspondent there. Demonstrators at the Palace
http://www.livestation.com/
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Posted in you've got mail at 1:49 pm by nemo
RG mail
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/health/research/28cancer.html
Forty Years’ War
Playing It Safe in Cancer Research
By GINA KOLATA
Published: June 27, 2009
Among the recent research grants awarded by the National Cancer Institute is one for a study asking whether people who are especially responsive to good-tasting food have the most difficulty staying on a diet. Another study will assess a Web-based program that encourages families to choose more healthful foods.
Many other grants involve biological research unlikely to break new ground. For example, one project asks whether a laboratory discovery involving colon cancer also applies to breast cancer. But even if it does apply, there is no treatment yet that exploits it.
The cancer institute has spent $105 billion since President Richard M. Nixon declared war on the disease in 1971. The American Cancer Society, the largest private financer of cancer research, has spent about $3.4 billion on research grants since 1946.
Yet the fight against cancer is going slower than most had hoped, with only small changes in the death rate in the almost 40 years since it began.
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06.27.09
Posted in Booknotes, Evolution at 7:27 pm by nemo
Beyond Natural Selection
(Bradford Books) (Paperback)
by Robert Wesson
In terms of today’s discussion of the end of the Darwin paradigm and what comes next, Robert Wesson’s book is worth reading.
He gives us the answer to what comes next: nothing.
We have to learn to live without an overarching evolution narrative. They can be misleading at best, totally false at worst, and dangerous ideological instruments.
As Wesson notes, there is not likely to be another explanation like Darwin’s NS. That’s not surprising: as an oversimplication it is irreplaceable!
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Posted in History at 7:13 pm by nemo
Borne on a Black Current
For thousands of years, the Pacific Ocean’s strong currents have swept shipwrecked Japanese sailors onto American shores
By Curtis Ebbesmeyer and Eric Scigliano
Smithsonian.com, June 16, 2009
One of the issues of the ‘eonic model’ is the unlikelihood of isolated civilizations appearing diffusion free. This was once a prolonged debate.
But the facts of diffusion from the Old World to the New now bear this out.
Similar currents exist between West Africa and the Caribbean.
The seas are full of the cast-offs of humanity, from tub toys that have fallen off container ships to boats swept away in storms to bottled messages deliberately set adrift. That flotsam has given oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer insight into marine currents and how they have influenced the course of history. In this excerpt from his new book with writer Eric Scigliano, Flotsametrics and the Floating World: How One Man’s Obsession with Runaway Sneakers and Rubber Ducks Revolutionized Ocean Science, the authors explain how a vicious current has swept sailors from Japan all the way to the Americas many times over many millennia.
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Posted in Evolution at 6:07 pm by nemo
The question of evolution is on the move, and we can see the tremendous resistance in many quarters to anything of the kind. Enforcing the paradigm
I don’t know if it is still possible for a paradigm shift to occur, but we have seen the way the ‘Synthesis’ was produced and enforced in the forties of the last century, so it could happen again.
Meanwhile subtract your case from the Darwin game. It is a form of propagandized public consensus, an ugly thing, and we can see that behind the veneer certain bigwigs of biology are trying to gain traction.
Unfortunately ‘self-organization’ theory is likely to end up in the same rut as natural selection, should it take the pedestal for the next public hype on evolution.
Be skeptical, and accept the ‘fact’ of evolution as enough.
Noone is likely to ever solve the evolution mystery. Don’t let religious or scientific mullahs sell you on some fake that serves their purposes.
Check out the eonic effect: if you think evolution is simple or that some clever theory is going to explain the facts of history will show you otherwise.
The point of the eonic effect is that you can only detect in fact the only, ‘evolution’ if you have really solid data. World history is one candidate,, and, surely enough, close-range data suddenly shows us something unexpected.
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Posted in Evolution, you've got mail at 12:13 pm by nemo
gnxp
David Brooks: Evolutionary psychology has had a good run. But now there is growing pushback. Critics say the theory is being used to try to explain more than it can bear
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/26/opinion/26brooks.html
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Posted in you've got mail at 12:11 pm by nemo
gnxp
P. Murali Doraiswamy discusses recent breakthroughs in diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease and what everyone can do to postpone the onset of memory loss
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=can-alzheimers-be-cured
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Posted in you've got mail at 11:59 am by nemo
RG mail
Links and forum to comment on this and other columns at:
June 17, 2009
The Good, the Bad, the Ugly: Financial Sector Reform
By Robert Weissman
There are major gaps and shortcomings in the Obama administration’s
financial regulatory proposals, formally released today, and the
proposals alone leave the financial sector vulnerable to future crisis.
Still, it’s nice to be able to say that the proposal does contain
meaningful reforms.
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Posted in you've got mail at 11:57 am by nemo
Greenpeace meets Bill McKibben: Fighting Climate Change in the Obame Age
http://www.commondreams.org/video/2009/06/26-1
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Posted in Booknotes, you've got mail at 11:55 am by nemo
RG mail
by Donald MacKenzie
London Review of Books (June 25 2009)
Fool’s Gold: How Unrestrained Greed Corrupted a Dream, Shattered Global
Markets and Unleashed a Catastrophe by Gillian Tett (2009)
Few people’s reputations have been improved by the credit crisis. One is
the BBC’s Robert Peston; another is Vince Cable. A third is Gillian Tett,
capital markets editor of the Financial Times. Prior to the crisis, she
and her team were the only mainstream journalists who covered in any
detail the arcane world of ‘credit derivatives’. Tett saw – however
imperfectly – the huge risks that were accumulating unnoticed within that
world, and spoke out about them.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n12/mack01_.html
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Posted in you've got mail at 11:47 am by nemo
RG mail
‘Rafsanjani, Mousavi vow support to end unrest’
Thu, 25 Jun 2009 02:06:13 GMT
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Posted in you've got mail at 11:44 am by nemo
RG mail
Iran’s Business Elite, Too, Is a “Dissident”
by Rostam Pourzal
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06.26.09
Posted in biology at 6:21 pm by nemo
The Evolution of House Cats
Genetic and archaeological findings hint that wildcats became house cats earlier–and in a different place–than previously thought
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Posted in Evolution at 6:06 pm by nemo
How Evolution’s Co-Discoverer Discovered Intelligent Design, Part I
Wallace is close to suffering a tragedy, being embraced by the Discovery Institute. His views, which closely resemble the design argument, are not really the same, and are part of a complex of views.
The ID gang will make it sound like Wallace really agrees with the conservative and religious views of the degenerate religiosity of the Bible Belt.
Wallace saw through the problems with natural selection, to his credit, but couldn’t quite escape the conditioning of his time which left with a misleading ‘spiritual’/material distinction.
In any case, Wallace’s abilities reached their limit at this point, and his confusions over design show him floundering after the great honesty in seeing the limits of natural selection, a theory he pioneered, and which Darwin plagiarized.
So Wallace’s insight into NS is a plus, and his wanderings into design thinking are a minus.
So don’t let these Discovery propagandists make Wallace seem like advertisement for their game. Remind them, and everyone else, that Wallace as a socialist sympathizer. The Discovery Institute gang will change the subejct pretty quickly.
Further, it is important to remind these ID fanatics that you can bend the design argument out of shape.
Further, design thinking flunks the most obvious test: the Old Testament doesn’t show much support for the design argument.
The Discovery institute has made the design argument unusuable by most of the public.
Let’s hope they don’t do the same with Wallace.
On the contrary, Wallace reasoned from what he knew about life’s history to a belief that an “Overruling Intelligence” guided life’s development, much as intelligent design (ID) does today. Science historian Michael A. Flannery calls Wallace’s evolutionary thinking a “preamble” to ID.
An opportunity to evaluate this provocative claim is now before us in the form of Flannery’s new edition of Wallace’s great work, A World of Life (1910), which slims the dense and massive volume down to a manageable size and includes an illuminating introduction by Flannery. His book is Alfred Russel Wallace’s Theory of Intelligent Evolution: How Wallace’s World of Life Challenged Darwinism (Erasmus Press).
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Posted in Evolution, The Eonic Effect at 5:09 pm by nemo
Much of the debate over evolution is simply hot air, on both sides, and all too obviously a set of positions that fulfill the agendas of either religious or scientific groups.
We need to blow both sides out of the water, once and for all, and accept a world where we don’t know the full story about how evolution happens. No more hard-sell paradigms.
It is probably the case that the evolution question is beyond the capacity of the human mind, with the result that people begin to mythologize against the blank wall of the limits of knowledge.
A look at the eonic effect should convince you that scientific (as current) and religious thinking both can never arrive at a resolution of the evolution question:
Climbing Mt. Improbable: the eonic effect
We can see an evolutionary process behind an historical process, it is global in scope, directional in its action, and capable of remorping entire cultural time-slices.
But we also note that we never see ‘evolution’ directly, only the indirect, invisible action detected in the elusive evidence of the eonic sequence.
We can show the connection with a Kantian critique of the limits of knowledge.
Then we realize why the Darwin debate is so prolonged. Darwinists, and religionists, are indulging in a metaphysical gambit against the limits of knowledge, and permanently futile results.
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Posted in you've got mail at 4:50 pm by nemo
RG mail
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/25/opinion/25kristof.ready.html?th&emc=th
New York Times June 24, 2009
Op-Ed
The Prescription From Obama’s Own Doctor
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
As a society, we trust doctors to be more concerned with the pulse of their
patients than the pulse of commerce. Yet the American Medical Association is using that trust to try to block a robust public insurance option as part of
health reform.
In fact the A.M.A. now represents only 19 percent of practicing physicians
(that’s my calculation, which the A.M.A. neither confirms nor contests). Its
membership has declined in part because of its embarrassing historical
record: the A.M.A. supported segregation, opposed President Harry Truman’s
plans for national health insurance, backed tobacco, denounced Medicare and opposed President Bill Clinton’s health reform plan.
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Posted in you've got mail at 2:07 pm by nemo
Nettime inbox
Subject: Zizek on Iran
Date: 6/26/2009 2:47:11 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time
From: x@desk.nl
Reply To:
To: nettime-l@x.org
Here’s an article by Zizek that was turned down by the NY Times and is
now making the rounds:
WILL THE CAT ABOVE THE PRECIPICE FALL DOWN?
Slavoj Zizek
Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in Evolution, The Eonic Effect at 1:39 pm by nemo
I should say that I also have had problems with self-organization theories.
I wonder a bit the next dogmatic paradigm will be self-organizationt theory, a la Kauffman’s recent book. A sort of Spinozistic cult, with capitalist economics getting its Darwin replacement in self-org propaganda.
But the problem with self-org theories is not they are wrong, but only that the greater field of evolution probably doesn’t even register in standard sciences. Yes, cf. the eonic effect. Evolution suddenly emerges in the finished organismic state of man, for further evolution, non-genetic, at the level of civilizations or higher.
I linked to the Mazur pieces for a long time, then it became question of whether I actually endorsed them, so I took down the links for a while.
No big deal. I will put them back up for a while. Check out Newman’s video. Time to wonder when the book is coming out by the Altenberg 16.
The public deserves to know that the whole Darwin paradigm is FINITO>
And no half-baked compromises with Darwinism for the next paradigm.
In the end, however, this blog is about the issues of history and evolution described in World History And The Eonic Effect.
I have a small advantage here: I never took a course in biochemistry. If ‘evolution’ is actually meta-genetic, that’s a plus.
The only form of evolutionary thinking I endorse is my own in the eonic model (on human evolution in history). Period.
You can describe the eonic effect as self-organization, but that is not a theory about dynamics. You can’t really say the Axial Age is a form of self-organization, dynamically, although it works fine to a first approximation to describe it that way.
As far as I know self-organization still can’t handle consciousness issues, or the evolution of ethics, etc,…
Given this history, and the current situation, you would do well to NEVER trust biologists again. Study them, but you are on your own. Look at how easy it is for a specialist to persuade you evo-devo doesn’t conflict with Darwinism.
The next paradigm will be the next fraud if you are a passive consumer of crap from these dishonest specialists.
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Posted in Evolution at 1:17 pm by nemo
Here’s a new article from Mazur on Vincent Fleury On Origin Of Form (And PZ Myers)
Friday, 26 June 2009, 11:24 am
Article: Suzan Mazur
This is the second this week, on the origin of form, we linked to Pivar’s new website on the topology of self-organization.
This work of Fleury, which was mindlessly attacked by P.Z. Myers, along with a lot of other attempts at self-organization theory, is a reminder that once you give up the crackpot obsession with natural selection, everything gets hard, and final results are hard to come by. Noone really understands how evolution works. Don’t let P.Z. Myers make a popery out of enforcing natural selection screeds.
Anyway, let the article speak for itself.
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Posted in Evolution, In the News at 1:03 pm by nemo
Here are the links on this blog to posts on the Alternberg 16 conference, as reported by Suzan Mazur. I am putting them back up after this egregious attack from Myers on Mazur. I know nothing about Mazur, but these articles are an attempt at investigative journalism applied to the deceptions of the Darwin establishment. You need to realize that when someone who does this is called a ‘crackpot journalist’ we are in the midst of a censorship regime of some kind.
At least, it is important for the public to be aware that a conference of Darwin critics was held last year, and the result, I am told, is to be a book on this, when???
The Woodstock of Evolution?
Richard Dawkins Renounces Darwinism As Religion
Stuart Newman’s High Tea
Piattelli-Palmarini: Ostracism W/out Nat Selection
Suzan Mazur: The Altenberg 16
Introduction to Mazur’s The Altenberg 16 series
An expose of the evolution industry
Mazur’s Evo Expose
New material from Mazur on Altenberg 16
Suzan Mazur on Lewontin
SWAMPOODLE REPORT: WHEN SCIENCE, POLITICS, RELIGION & JOURNALISM MEET
Suzan Mazur on Altenberg: Stuart Newman interview
Where Darwinism Fails
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