History, Evolution, and the Darwin Debate
Wildlife Faces Cancer Threat
ScienceDaily (June 24, 2009) — While cancer touches the lives of many humans, it is also a major threat to wild animal populations as well, according to a recent study by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS).
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/zarafshan210408p.html
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The Third Side Also Exists: Regarding the Likely American Attack on Iran
by Nasser Zarafshan
In the current conflict over Iran, the most important question is what America’s real goal in Iran and the Middle East is. Why? Because, as long as we don’t have a certain and reliable answer to this question, as long as we don’t know what the opponent’s hidden real purpose in this crisis is, we are incapable of figuring out what is to be done, in other words, incapable of collectively taking the correct position on this situation.
The previous post cites an article asking for a moratorium….
What is needed is a moratorium on the theory of natural selection, and urgently. This endless debate, promoted by all the most stupid Darwinists, has become an obsession, and threatens to discredit secularism itself. Secular culture has been enriched by the discovery of evolution, and as soon impoverished by the stupidity of Darwin and his followers who somehow got ambitious and thought naively to rewrite metaphysics around an inadequate theory.
It would help to simply declare a moratorium on the natural selection theory, and stop promoting it as a proven construct.
This is a reasonable demand, since it is good for science to be untangled from the hyped science of the Darwin obsesseives and the Dawkins cult.
All science needs here is the fact of evolution. The complex enquiry into its mechanisms doesn’t require a religion based on that stupido, Darwin.
Comments on Wright Review post
James said,
June 24, 2009 at 2:50 pm ·
“But aren’t Eastern religions like Buddhism and Hinduism actually more open to the idea that other religions can also be the path to truth and salvation? ”That’s laughable. Clearly, these two idiots are unaware of the long history of friction between Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism. The supposed “tolerance” and “pluralism” of Hinduism is really a tactic to absorb attacks against the religion: why else would they construct a story about the Buddha being an avatar of Vishnu who deliberately preached a false doctrine to the enemies of Hinduism in an effort to destroy them? It strikes me as a bit absurd to project the New Agey eclectic “Eastern” religions that developed in the 20th century on the earlier periods.
James said,
June 24, 2009 at 3:01 pm ·
…and that doesn’t even get into the rivalries between Buddhists, Jains, Samkhyans, etc. in the Axial period.
Wright’s book focussed on the evolution of God, when the important question is the larger evolution of religion. You can’t just add on some electic comments on Buddhism later.
Mouse With ‘Humanized Version’ Of Human Language Gene Provides Clues To Language Development
ScienceDaily (June 24, 2009) — Scientists of the German Mouse Clinic at Helmholtz Zentrum München have made a major contribution to understanding human language development. Using a comprehensive screening method, they studied a mouse model carrying a “humanized version” of a key gene associated with human language.
In an interview with something to offend everyone, Robert Wright explains why religion has given us a fickle deity
Still another Wright review. We have lambasted him enough here already. No, one more time won’t much matter.
These fashionable mag/web portals reflex on such books because they make good copy.
Since Wright intersected with World History And The Eonic Effect in 1999 and this influenced his book Non Zero for the worse, why not consider the ‘evolution of religion’ as portrayed in that book?
You cannot figure out the Old Testament without the methods given there, period.
The alternative is Wright’s half-baked muddling around with ‘materialist’ assumptions trying to make sense of the confusing complexity of Israelite religion with nary a mention of one of the keys: the phenomenon of the Axial Age.
First, I don’t find this book offensive, but repulsive, or maybe just stupid.
Darwinists have put themselves last in line behind even fundamentalists in their lead-footed tromp through religion-land, oblivious to the phenomena they really wish to do a Dawkins on.
Intellectuals and scholars need to be wary of evolutionary psychology. Its false assumptions will vitiate any attempt to study culture or religion. I think Wright is getting suspicious himself here. It doesn’s add up to try and debunk religion with Darwinian analyses. You end up wronger than the wrong, and stuck with all the superficial cliches of the New Atheists and Dawkins groupies.
Wright seems to hover between the New Atheist perspective and a latent strain, or wish to be a Karen Armstrong, knowing he closed himself out of that market.
Wright’s Non Zero is also crap historical theory, and my beef with him was over the way he trashed (without mentioning my book) my Kant theme in the first edition of WHEE. That’s a dangerous tactic: you can read WHEE and see exactly where sociobiological history is simply delusional.
I pursued him over the Internet for two years in anger. So my comments are ‘biased’. My point is not an accusation of anything anymore, unless it is celebrity arrogance in the book market (and stupidity), and the illusion they can solve the problems of society, but a reminder that almost all the secondary Darwin literature like this is wrong, yet gets a strong currency.
All I asked for was equal time, but these people know that without the backdrop of the social domination of the Paradigm, all their work collapses. The seeming exception is the religious critics, but these are the best possible foil to maintain the Darwin illusion.
This review actually gets into Buddhism, and we learn that Wright has done a Buddhist meditation retreat. Pack him off to the caves of Almora, and pulp his books:
1. The Moral Animal
2. Non Zero
3. The Evolution of God
What a waste
Strike three and you’re out.
Inside Nature’s Giants: A gory attempt to disprove ‘intelligent design’ theories
by Ajesh Patalay – Telegraph.co.uk
from Dawkins site
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/5613900/Inside-Natures-Giants-A-gory-attempt-to-disprove-intelligent-design-theories.html
Of the many extraordinary sights revealed in Channel 4’s upcoming four-part series Inside Nature’s Giants, which uses dissection to take us inside the bodies of an elephant, giraffe and crocodile, the most remarkable is surely afforded by an autopsy carried out on a 65-foot long, 60-ton fin whale (a species second only in size to the blue whale) beached off the coast of Ireland.
from Dawkins site
RDF TV – The Baloney Detection Kit
Michael Shermer, The Richard Dawkins Foundation, Josh Timonen
The first video from RDF TV!
Download Quicktime version: Small (640×360, 122.4 MB)
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Download mp3 version (13.4 MB)
With a sea of information coming at us from all directions, how do we sift out the misinformation and bogus claims, and get to the truth? Michael Shermer of Skeptic Magazine lays out a “Baloney Detection Kit,” ten questions we should ask when encountering a claim.
Genomes, Evolution, and the K-T Boundary
June 24, 2009
Adaptive Complexity’s Michael White points out a new journal, called Genome Biology and Evolution. The journal editors say in an introduction that “advances in genomic technologies are revolutionizing our perspectives on evolution once again” and that “GBE aims to nurture the highest standard of evolutionary genomic research, with the help of the molecular evolutionary and population genetic expertise.” White also says to take a look at one of the journal’s first papers, from Indiana University’s Michael Lynch. That paper says that there were “widespread reductions in genome size” in mammalian lineages after the Cretaceous–Tertiary boundary, though “there is no evidence for such changes in other vertebrate, invertebrate, or land plant lineage.”
On the origin of the Darwin myths
Ever been told by a ruthless boss that, “as Charles Darwin said, it’s survival of the fittest”?
Rather than answering that it was actually a one-time sub editor for The Economist magazine, Herbert Spencer, who coined the phrase, or fighting back with an equally wrong comment about someone being descended from monkeys, Darwin academics are calling for a moratorium on the everyday use and abuse of the great naturalist.
Two-hundred years after he was born, and 150 years after he published “On the Origin of Species”, it’s time to check the facts, as “most of what most people think they know about him is not true,” according to Darwin scholar John van Wyhe, a historian of science at the University of Cambridge
Are these ‘academics’ kidding? Are they misinformed, or just lying. It is true that there is an influence of Spencer on the Social Darwinism that arose in Darwin’s wake. But in the end Darwin’s obsession with natural selection was/is what generated that confusion. It is the implications of the mechanism proposed, and not Spencer’s terminology, that is finally responsible.
And the darker side of Darwin simply can’t be written off. We don’t even know if he is the real source of this theory, as Roy Davies makes clear in The Darwin Conspiracy.
These hagiographic obsessions are harmful and quite unnecessary. It is a cultic, not a scientific phenomenon.
No moratorium, then. Time to finish off this phony scientist.
Large 2009 Gulf Of Mexico ‘Dead Zone’ Predicted
ScienceDaily (June 24, 2009) — University of Michigan aquatic ecologist Donald Scavia and his colleagues say this year’s Gulf of Mexico “dead zone” could be one of the largest on record, continuing a decades-long trend that threatens the health of a half-billion-dollar fishery.
Published on Wednesday, June 24, 2009 by Inter Press Service
UN Launches ‘Seal the Deal’ Campaign
by Haider Rizvi
UNITED NATIONS – Growing U.S. support for U.N. initiatives is raising hopes among those who want to see the world community take immediate and concrete action to tackle climate change, although their optimism is also tinged with scepticism.
Published on Wednesday, June 24, 2009 by Talking Points Memo
Moment of Truth for Obama and the Democrats
by Theda Skocpol
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/06/24-8
Fellow Americans, and fellow Democrats and Obama supporters, we are at a moment of truth, a pivotal turning point — in the form of what happens in the next days and weeks with robust, universal health reform. A fork in the road socially, economically — and politically. It could go either way depending on Obama and the Democratic officeholders many of us worked so hard to elect. They have the power to act, but will they use it — or lose it?
The Obama Adminstration is Helping to Upgrade Pakistan’s Nuclear Weapons
How the U.S. Has Secretly Backed Pakistan’s Nuclear Program From Day One
By ANDREW COCKBURN
“If the worst, the unthinkable, were to happen,” Hillary Clinton recently told Fox News, “and this advancing Taliban encouraged and supported by Al Qaeda and other extremists were to essentially topple the government … then they would have keys to the nuclear arsenal of Pakistan.” Many will note that the extremists posing this unthinkable prospect were set up in business by the U.S. in the first place. Very well buried is the fact that the nuclear arsenal that must not be allowed to fall into the hands of our former allies has been itself the object of U.S. encouragement over the years and is to this very day in receipt of crucial U.S. financial assistance and technical support.
http://www.counterpunch.org/andrew06242009.html
gnxp
It may not have had a trunk or Dumbo ears, but the 60-million-year-old elephant ancestor with proto-tusks looms large in mammalian history, a new study says
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/06/090623-rabbit-elephant-oldest.html
Babies born at 37 or 38 weeks are considered to be full term, but new research has found that they have slightly lower IQs and a modestly higher chance of dying in early infancy than those who arrive after closer to 40 weeks in the womb
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/babies-iqs-suffer-with-fewer-than-br39-weeks-in-womb-study-finds/article1194308/
gnxp
Alzheimer’s disease and milder forms of dementia are associated with an increased risk of death, but contrary to some earlier reports, the risks are similar for blacks and whites, according to findings in the Archives of Neurology
http://in.reuters.com/article/health/idINTRE55M6TE20090623
gnxp
In ways that researchers are just beginning to appreciate, we humans are beholden to our ears
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/23/science/23angi.html
gnxp
A 54-million-year-old fossil suggests that certain early primate activities did not necessarily trigger the explosion in brain size
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=low-brainer-ancient-skull
gnxp
Academics have claimed that moving away from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle was ‘the worst mistake in history’. But are they right?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/science/sciencenews/5604296/Is-farming-the-root-of-all-evil.html
UPDATE FROM THE
ELECTRONIC INTIFADA
http://electronicIntifada.net
________________________ Read the rest of this entry »
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http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/06/16/iran/index.html
Salon.com June 16, 2009
The “Bomb Iran” contingent’s newfound concern for The Iranian People
Glenn Greenwald
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http://jewssansfrontieres.blogspot.com/2009/06/iran-gucci-anti-imperialism-and.html
June 21, 2009
Iran, Gucci anti-imperialism and movement anti-intellectuals
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http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/b31c06a2-5a7a-11de-8c14-00144feabdc0.html?nclick_check=1
Financial Times June 16 2009
The recession tracks the Great Depression
By Martin Wolf
Green shoots are bursting out. Or so we are told. But before concluding that the recession will soon be over, we must ask what history tells us. It is one of the guides we have to our present predicament. Fortunately, we do have the data. Unfortunately, the story they tell is an unhappy one.
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http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2009/952/op3.htm
Al-Ahram Weekly 18 – 24 June 2009
Iran’s democratic upsurge
Regardless of their integrity, Iran’s elections — and even their aftermath — are the fundamental democratic and collective expression US hawks and Zionists fear most, writes Hamid Dabashi *
“A messianic apocalyptic cult…”
– Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Iran and Iranians
By design or serendipity, the Israeli claim to be “the only democracy in the Middle East” has suddenly been globally exposed for the ludicrous joke that it is.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/jun/21/iraq-inquiry-tony-blair-bush
The Observer 21 June 2009
Confidential memo reveals US plan to provoke an invasion of Iraq
As Bush and Blair became increasingly aware that UN inspectors wouldn’t find weapons of mass destruction (WMD), they began to contemplate alternative scenarios that could trigger a second UN resolution that would legitimise their planned military action.
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Obama’s Military Commission and International Law
JURIST Contributing Editor Jordan Paust of the University of Houston Law Center says that a reconstituted military commission at Guantanamo Bay set up to only prosecute aliens would necessarily violate bilateral treaties, create a “denial of justice” for aliens under customary international law, and violate principles of human rights law established by treaty and custom….
http://www.amnesty.ca/blog_post2.php?id=959
Lawyers Against the War
From Reformation to Revolution
The question of revolution has been reified in a way that tends to end up in incoherence. That’s sad. The modern transition gave birth, almost for the first time in history, the revolution of freedom. Millennia of slavery was overcome, the very nature of the state was finally given some definition in terms of democracy, etc…
But somehow the term ‘revolution’ has become a source of confusion. That reason is that the incomplete character of the liberal revolutions that arose in the democratic tide left them vulnerable to subtle distortions, to say nothing of their botched external relations (globalization as imperialism). That lead to the Marxist redefinition of ‘revolution’, but the theory never worked, and has addled leftist brains ever since, as whole cadres wring their hands even as they suffer Hegelian brain damage.
Marx was good at insight, less good at theory. Marx exposed the relationships of ideology,theory, and economic distortions of democracy. But somehow in the passage to theory the whole thing became another ideology of its own. That’s tragic. We should have state of the art leftist critiques that work at all stages of the evolution of capitalist economies. Instead the left is basically in the way of any real change.
It helps to study the modern transition in its complex diversity as a complex phenomenon no ‘revolution’ can easily mimic. Revolutions are evidence of the dynamic, but not the dynamic as such.
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