History, Evolution, and the Darwin Debate
The Human Spark – Running and Big Brains?
PBS – YouTube
from dawkins site
Alan Alda talks to scientist Dan Lieberman about why the human ability to run could be an important prerequisite for the evolution of our bigger brains — and the emergence of our human spark.
India’s caste system ‘is thousands of years old’, DNA shows
by Telegraph.co.uk
from dawkins site
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/india/6224560/Indias-caste-system-is-thousands-of-years-old-DNA-shows.html
Researchers analysed the DNA of 132 individuals with wide-ranging backgrounds from 25 diverse groups around India.
They found evidence of strong inbreeding leading to genetic groups that had been isolated from each other for thousands of years.
Most people had a mixture of genes from two ancient populations representing traditionally upper-caste individuals and everyone else.
The first was genetically close to people from the Middle East, Central Asia and Europe, while the second had an ‘Ancestral South Indian’ lineage confined to the subcontinent.
The research challenges the notion that India’s notorious rigid caste system, with its priestly Brahmans and low-status ‘untouchables’, was largely manufactured by the British.
…
Continue reading
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/india/6224560/Indias-caste-system-is-thousands-of-years-old-DNA-shows.html
Scandinavians Are Descended From Stone Age Immigrants, Ancient DNA Reveals
ScienceDaily (Sep. 25, 2009) — Today’s Scandinavians are not descended from the people who came to Scandinavia at the conclusion of the last ice age but, apparently, from a population that arrived later, concurrently with the introduction of agriculture.
Thinning glaciers driving polar ice loss, satellite survey finds
Satellite survey of Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets reveals extensive network of rapidly thinning glaciers that is driving ice loss in the regions
Published on Saturday, September 26, 2009 by Mother Jones
Obama Adviser Signals White House Giving Up on Climate Change Treaty
Is Copenhagen Dead?
by David Corn
How Goldman Backed Moore’s ‘Capitalism’ Movie
http://www.futureofcapitalism.com/2009/09/how-goldman-backed-moores-capitalism-movie
Michael Moore’s new movie, “Capitalism: A Love Story” opened today.
The first thing that must be said is that it isn’t really a love story. Capitalism, Mr. Moore tells us, is “evil,” and if his word isn’t enough, he quotes two Catholic priests who say that capitalism is sinful and immoral, as well as Bishop Gumbleton of Detroit, who says that capitalism runs counter to the teaching of Jesus.
gnxp
Tectonics seem to fuel the appearance of new species
http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090925/full/news.2009.952.html
gnxp
Neanderthals had long ring fingers, suggesting they were a promiscuous bunch
http://tinyurl.com/ydme8kz
gnxp
The stunning remains of a “four-winged” dinosaur have confirmed that birds owe their ancestry to two-footed dinosaurs that lived millions of years ago, the world’s most famous fossil-hunter said
http://tinyurl.com/ydwk22q
gnxp
Non-native animals and plants get a poor press, but this often has more to do with prejudice than science, says biologist Mark Davis
http://tinyurl.com/yb4vu3g
gnxp
A study in mice suggests lack of sleep may play a role in the development of Alzheimer’s disease, U.S. researchers said on Thursday
http://tinyurl.com/yabnmk9
RG mail
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1116933.html
Ha’aretz 25/09/2009
By Gideon Levy
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu cheapened the memory of the Holocaust in his speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday. He did so twice. Once, when he brandished proof of the very existence of the Holocaust, as if it needed any, and again when he compared Hamas to the Nazis.
RG mail
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/19/AR2009091900112_pf.html
Washington Post September 20, 2009
You Have No Idea What Health Costs
If You Did, You Might Just Want Real Reform
By Ezra Klein
The most important health-care document released this week was not Sen. Max
Baucus’s Healthy Future Act. It was the Kaiser Family Foundation’s 2009
Employer Benefits Survey.
RG mail
http://www.thestar.com/comment/article/699407
Toronto Star September 23, 2009
Chest deep in Afghan quagmire
Thomas Walkom
The Afghan war was a mistake from the beginning. Its justification was flawed, its intent confused, its implementation half-hearted.
That’s why the bleak picture painted by U.S. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the man in charge of NATO forces in Afghanistan should come as no surprise.
RG mail
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/KI25Aa01.html
Asia Times September 14, 2009
THE ROVING EYE
The president is in the trunk
For Obama, the ambiguous US stance on Honduras is a dagger pointing to his heart. It leaves his lofty promise of a new relationship between the US and Latin America in tatters. Worse still, it unveils how helpless he is facing his – in theory – subordinates at the Pentagon and the State Department, no to mention vast reactionary forces across the US for whom multilateralism means a surrender to “socialism” and to America’s enemies.
By Pepe Escobar
http://www.counterpunch.org/avnery09232009.html
RG mail
Counterpunch September 23, 2009
The Drama and the Farce
The Waldorf-Astoria Summit
By URI AVNERY
NO POINT denying it: in the first round of the match between Barack Obama
and Binyamin Netanyahu, Obama was beaten.
Obama had demanded a freeze of all settlement activity, including East
Jerusalem, as a condition for convening a tripartite summit meeting, in the
wake of which accelerated peace negotiations were to start, leading to peace
between two states – Israel and Palestine.
In the words of the ancient proverb, a journey of a thousand miles starts
with a single step. Netanyahu has tripped Obama on his first step. The
President of the United States has stumbled.
RG mail
Garfield High among 12 schools available to outside bidders
By Howard Blume
The Los Angeles Times
September 25, 2009
Garfield High, which became nationally known as the real-life setting for the film “Stand and Deliver,” will be among the first group of local schools eligible for takeover because of persistent academic failure, a high-level district source has told The Times.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2009/09/garfield-high-which-became-nationally-known-as-the-real-life-setting-for-the-film-stand-and-deliver-will-be-among-the.html
I am reading Dawkins’ The Greatest Show on Earth, without much enthusiasm, since, as noted a few days ago, this is really between Dawkins and those who reject evolution outright.
So this is another evidence for evolution book, with pleading for natural selection in diminuendo, but still there in various sly references. Actually I think the declared motive by Dawkins is suspect: I think he is slightly on the defensive, after people like me have counseled this approach for years. Is this a slight retreat?
I support evolution taken as a factual reality, but even here I fear there is a problem for Dawkins (et al.).
The problem is that observing evolution is not possible in deep time, and our inference never really produces the full-bodied evidence needed to perceive what evolution is like, even is we can legitimately infer ‘evolution of some kind’
If we examine the eonic effect, that is a sequential pattern in world history, open to direct inspection by archaeological/historical reconstruction (which, however limited, is light years ahead of Darwinian speculations in deep time) we discover the facts of evolution in a new sense, the ‘evidence of evolution’ in the emergence of civilization, and this must almost certainly tell us something about the earlier evolution of man. We see a macro process operating in a dirctional pattern over many millennia. Stunning.
So when Dawkins tells us that he is producing the ‘evidence of evolution’, well, maybe, but it might only be the superficial perception of fossils in a sequence in time.
The eonic effect shows us what we might be missing.
The Limits Of Observation
The Original WEASEL(s) — Part II
William Dembski
‘Christopher Hitchens’ on Q TV
Qtv – YouTube
from dawkins site
Writer, political commentator and author of ‘god is not Great’ sits down with host Jian Ghomeshi to kick around the idea of adding three new commandments to the ten commandments.
from dakwins site
A creationist edition of The Origin
by Jerry Coyne – Why Evolution is True
http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2009/09/23/a-creationist-edition-of-the-origin/
The Angry Evolutionist
More Americans believe in angels than in evolution—and Richard Dawkins isn’t going to take it anymore.
By Richard Dawkins | NEWSWEEK
Film about Charles Darwin lands U.S. distributor
Two weeks ago we posted an item on the producer of Creation, a film about Charles Darwin, who said he had not been able to secure a U.S. distributor because the evolution theory is too controversial for American audiences.
Now comes word from The Hollywood Reporter that the independent distributor Newmarket has now picked up the film, which was produced by BBC Films and Ocean Pictures
http://www.christianpost.com/article/20090924/-signature-in-the-cell/index.html
Getting A Leg Up On Whale And Dolphin Evolution: New Comprehensive Analysis Sheds Light On The Origin Of Cetaceans
ScienceDaily (Sep. 25, 2009) — When the ancestors of living cetaceans—whales, dolphins and porpoises—first dipped their toes into water, a series of evolutionary changes were sparked that ultimately nestled these swimming mammals into the larger hoofed animal group. But what happened first, a change from a plant-based diet to a carnivorous diet, or the loss of their ability to walk?
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