History, Evolution, and the Darwin Debate
Scientists are incapable of seeing that with the coming of history (and the evolution reaching that) are about the human capacity for freedom and this contradicts the ordinary stance of science. It shouldn’t be a problem, but in current state of science education, it is.
A strange rumination from the right: Are Liberals Smarter Than Conservatives?
Since the author virtually cedes to liberals, there isn’t much to say, except….
Liberals should be in a state of alarm at their own ‘dumbing down’ at the hands of reductionist scientism, whose misdefinition of intelligence as the clever high-IQ routines of narrow technical subjects is leading to a slide in general culture behind a veneer of sophistication.
A close look shows a great deal of technocratic scientism to be a dumber oversimplication that inhibits the education of thought.
Real intelligence can be harmed by bad science education.
3 Silly Religious Beliefs Held By Non-Silly People
By Greta Christina, Greta Christina’s Blog. Posted October 30, 2009.
Many of the beliefs held by religious moderates — smart people who respect science and the separation of church and state — are as untenable as the dogma of fundamentalists.
And I want to point out that even these beliefs are in direct contradiction of the vast preponderance of available evidence — almost as much as the obscure cults and the rigid fundamentalist dogma.
So let’s go! Today’s beliefs on the chopping block are:
1: Evolution guided by God.
2: An immaterial soul that animates human consciousness.
3: A sentient universe.
These strategies by left to debunk religion tend to get absolutely nowhere, because they are based on a kind of Feuerbachian/Marxist tradition of anti-religion that is stuck in the nineteenth century.
This particular effort here is odd in including the proposition about a sentient universe as one of its targets. I would not wish to defend the thesis of a sentient universe. But I would not wish to defend its antithesis.
That issue apart, the question of evolution, and soul, however confused by religionists, are almost never properly addressed by followers of reductionist scientism or leftist anti-religion.
The issue of evolution guided by god is mis-stated: the real issue is whether Darwin’s theory of natural selection is really science, or whether natural teleology is an aspect of a real scientific theory.
The question of soul is also mis-stated: a Kantian perspective on the question will suggest that the overall framework of consciousness is larger than its space-time perceptual function.
We arrive instantly, if not at soul belief, then a complexification of standard scientism.
To call beliefs in the field of religion silly is ill-advised. I can think of nothing sillier than the reductionist scientism of Darwinists, turned into dogma. Small wonder ‘silly’ religionists refuse to budge.
The debate over evolution endures as one of the most intractable of modern civilization. In part this is due to the built-in metaphysical and political agendas of the scientific and religious groups ambitious to control the defining ideology of human origins. Although the idea of evolution is as old as philosophy itself, its reappearance in the modern Enlightenment arose in the wake of the discovery of deep time, and produced a broad spectrum of speculative, but still controversial, beginnings of theory. But it was the Darwinian interpretation, almost a popularization, in the era of Positivism that defined, or contracted, the idea in terms of reductionist science.
Darwin’s theory of natural selection collated with the sudden public realization of the fact of evolution produced the revolution of thought we associate with the idea of evolution. But this also produced the oversimplification of Darwin’s theory of natural selection, thence the confusion that has never gone away. If the basis of science is its empiricism, then the claims for evolution are overwhelming while those for natural selection are insufficiently documented by data. This simple point tends to be lost in the immense noise produced by religious and Darwinian diehards quibbling over the ‘fact’ and the ‘theory’. The result is the classic metaphysical deadlock of the Darwin debate, effectively depriving the public of any clarity or viable options on the subject of evolution.
The debate over accomodationism is, I must agree, a bit silly: because? Why try to compromise together two sets of errors? They both should be thrown out.
Darwinism is a strange kind of faith, and faith-based religions distort real religion, which doesn’t demand any faith.
It is a strange case, it seems, where the religious mentality, in becoming secular, applied its religious mentality to science.
In his book, Darwin Day in America, West examines the experiments that Italian scientist Giovanni Aldini conducted on human corpses. His gruesome experiments provided the inspiration for Frankenstein and foreshadowed the rise of a virulent strain of materialism that attempted to use science to reduce human beings to mere matter in motion.
3 Silly Religious Beliefs Held By Non-Silly People
by Greta Christina – alternet.org
from dawkins site
http://www.alternet.org/story/143551/3_silly_religious_beliefs_held_by_non-silly_people?page=entire
Bioengineers Speed Up Evolution to Make Better Bacteria
Bacteria are prolific replicators, and some species can replicate into the millions in number in just a few hours. Bacteria, in the functioning of their cellular and biochemical machinery, also just happen to manufacture some very useful chemicals and bio-active molecules. The microbes also have a relatively high rate of mutation which can confer adaptive features, over time, onto the newer, variant population.
Can Christianity Warm Up to Darwin?
A growing movement supports the idea that we can have faith in both God and evolution.
Evolution: A Theory Headed for Extinction?
Friday, October 30, 2009
By Guy Berthault
Charles Darwin Why in this year of the anniversary of Darwin’s birth and the publication of his Origin of Species is Darwinism coming to an end? Of course, it should have come to an end over a century ago when its flaws were first being brought to the attention of the scientific community. But too many philosophical interests were at play.
New Analyses Of Dinosaur Growth May Wipe Out One-third Of Species
ScienceDaily (Oct. 31, 2009) — Paleontologists from the University of California, Berkeley, and the Museum of the Rockies have wiped out two species of dome-headed dinosaur, one of them named three years ago — with great fanfare — after Hogwarts, the school attended by Harry Potter.
Regeneration Can Be Achieved After Chronic Spinal Cord Injury
ScienceDaily (Oct. 31, 2009) — Scientists at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine report that regeneration of central nervous system axons can be achieved in rats
HIV Tamed By Designer ‘Leash’
ScienceDaily (Oct. 30, 2009) — Researchers have shown how an antiviral protein produced by the immune system, dubbed tetherin, tames HIV and other viruses by literally putting them on a leash, to prevent their escape from infected cells.
Published on Saturday, October 31, 2009 by CommonDreams.org
Kipling Haunts Obama’s Afghan War
by Ray McGovern
The White Man’s Burden, a phrase immortalized by English poet Rudyard Kipling as an excuse for European-American imperialism, was front and center Thursday morning at a RAND-sponsored discussion of Afghanistan in the Russell Senate Office Building.
Published on Saturday, October 31, 2009 by The Herald-News (Illinois)
Activist’s Message at USF: End Needless Waste of Food
JOLIET — Vandana Shiva is giving new meaning to the old metaphor, “You reap what you sow.”
Shiva, a world-renowned environmental thinker and activist, urged more than 225 people to consider the food and ecological crisis as one in the same during her speech at the University of St. Francis.
“We have mastered the art of wasting the planet,” she said. “Land and water are being misused, polluted and disintegrated by nonsustainable agriculture. We need to reclaim the ethics of the gift of food.”
gnxp
Italian court reduces jail term after tests identify genes linked to violent behaviour
http://www.nature.com/news/2009/091030/full/news.2009.1050.html
gnxp
Does running a marathon push the body further than it is meant to go?
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/27/health/27well.html
gnxp
Vaccinating more children might help slow the evolution of the constantly changing flu virus, government scientists reported Thursday
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jVZeORscGcbvFihgSIKSOB0jm8XQD9BKTGH80
gnxp
In a study published recently in the journal Cerebral Cortex, researcher Steven Cramer found that people with a certain gene variant performed more than 30 percent worse on a driving test than people without it
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/science/10/29/bad.driver.gene/
RG mail
http://www.truthout.org/1026096
*People Power Matters: The Public Option Lives!*
by: Dean Baker,
t r u t h o u t : 26 October 2009
In spite of the best efforts of the insurance industry and their
followers in Congress and the media, it is still very possible that the
health reform bill passed by Congress will include a robust public plan.
This is a case where the simple facts and persistent grassroots pressure may
overcome the political power of a major industry.
RG mail
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1124560.html
Ha’aretz 29/10/2009
*Poll: Anti-Semitic views in the U.S. at a historic low
*By Reuters
Anti-Semitic attitudes in the United States are at a historic low, with 12
percent of Americans prejudiced toward Jews, an Anti-Defamation League
survey found on Thursday.
RG mail
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1124190.html
Haaretz
28/10/2009
*Who decided to go to war in Gaza and why?*
By Aluf Benn, Haaretz Correspondent
I want to know how and why it was decided to embark on Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip and to expand it into a ground offensive.
A pickpocket always wants to divert your attention: Darwinists make you look into deep time, where nothing can really be proven or disproven.
But if we look at history, which strangely noone wants to look at, we see that the clues to evolution are in plain sight, and the result is something totally different from what we are made to believe.
http://history-and-evolution.com/whee/chap2_1.htm
Newly Discovered Ankylosaur Dinosaur Is ‘Biological Version Of An Army Tank’
ScienceDaily (Oct. 30, 2009) — A husband and wife team of American paleontologists has discovered a new species of dinosaur that lived 112 million years ago during the early Cretaceous of central Montana.
Lewontin at Chicago Darwin Day
Lewontin and Gould both were snide critics of Darwinism, indirectly, yet give/gave their support to the reigning paradigm, thus perpetuating the whole game.
Why can’t Lewontin just come out and denoucne Darwinian selectinism as an ideology?
Lewontin, who has turned down every invitation this year to speak at Darwin celebratory events, accepted the University of Chicago invitation, Read the rest of this entry »
13 Design and autonomy
Kant’s critique of teleological judgment in the second half of the Critique of Judgment has an even more complicated agenda than his aesthetic theory. The work has roots in both eighteenth-century biology Read the rest of this entry »
Lionel Tiger at Forbes: the Darwin establishment clearly is uncomfortable with the implications of the Ardi fossil.
Shrug. Too bad for the evo-psych squad.
Hmmm./
Freedom Evolves? The Discrete Freedom Sequence
The previous post was about inequality in historical systems.
In fact, Darwinism is a subtle promotion of the ideology of inequality, in disguise. It is disguised behind the false claims for natural selection.
If we examine the eonic effect, we see that historical evolution has an explicit equalizing function in its macro aspect!
The Darwin establishment, behind its front of liberal dummies, won’t like that at all.