History, Evolution, and the Darwin Debate
RG mail
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6931573.ece
From The Sunday Times November 29, 2009
In the Ecuadorean Amazon basin our thirst for oil has triggered an eco-disaster: wholesale pollution and catastrophic cancer rates. And a bloody turf war has broken out. Ecuador is taking a survival plan to the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference. But will western governments listen?
‘Temple of the mind’ unlocked
Map of fundamental brain receptor opens doors to treatments.
The full structure of a fiendishly complicated and important brain protein has been determined by researchers, potentially enabling the development of new treatments for a wealth of neurological disorders.
Eric Gouaux and his colleagues undertook the difficult task of mapping the structure of a glutamate receptor, a protein that mediates signalling between neurons in the brain and elsewhere in the nervous system. The receptor is also thought to be crucial to processes such as memory and learning.
The resulting picture “tells us things about the organization of the receptor that were just completely unanticipated” says Gouaux, a protein crystallographer at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland. The work appears online today in Nature1.
from gnxp
Alfred Russel Wallace was Darwin’s colleague, a globe-trotting naturalist who helped shape the theory of evolution. Thirty years ago, an antique shopper wandered into a modest antique shop in Arlington, Va., looking for Chinese carpets and wound up buying a magnificent rosewood cabinet. It contained Wallace’s personal collection of 1,600 butterflies and insects
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120793257
I think it would be easy for the folks at NPR to consider, from Roy Davies’ The Darwin Conspiracy, that Wallace, with his beetles and butterflies was the real discoverer of what we call Darwinism.
Kant’s ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim’
A Critical Guide
Series: Cambridge Critical Guides
Edited by Amélie Oksenberg Rorty
Harvard University, Massachusetts
James Schmidt
Boston University
I notice that Cambridge has come out with an book of essays on Kant’s essay on history. I can feel sure they are trying to neutralize my interpretation of Kant’s essay in World History And The Eonic Effect. This essay is unmentionable in polite scholarly circles where the issue of Darwinism is too hot to handle and the dangers of dissent on evolution make something awfully close to lying, really really bad for Kant scholars, the case here.
My interpretation is open to confusion itself, since I am not a Kantian interpreting Kant, but attempting, with the use of the first paragraph of his famous essay to demonstrate the real significance of Kant and transcendental idealism for the study of history and evolution.
Kant’s essay is ambiguous, and his perspective contradicts itself as he throws the question into the future, and yet seems to answer his own question with another wrongheaded idea, asocial sociability.
I think that the correct meaning of what Kant said is illustrated by a study of the eonic effect. But try telling that to the cadre of brain dead academics, among others Kantians. I will have to review this book at Amazon and expose the situation, with a plug for my own book.
Check out:
Kant’s Challenge
It is amusing to google on the ‘teleomechanists’, only to find that I am the main commenter on this subject, and the book by Lenoir on this: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=teleomechanists
Kant scholarship is, I fearfully suspect, being devious on this issue for the simple reason that they don’t want to bring the Darwin establishment down on their necks, and thus are deep-sixing the fact that Kant could not have been a Darwinist, and in fact produced what is nearly a critique in advance of Darwin’s idiocy.
We live in a stupid society that has lost the use of Kant, as the endless round of academic bookdealing continues, to no avail.
Interview with William Dembski: The End of Christianity
My main work has been in the field of intelligent design. The problem of evil looms large there because if the world and life are designed, the question arises what sort of designer would allow all the malevolent designs that we find in nature. In referring such evil designs to the Fall, however, one runs into a problem if they predate the Fall, as is required with an old earth: How can future events influence past events? So this question is at the heart of the debate between young and old earth creationists.
This bit from the interview poses the issue admirably. Are there really any answers here?
How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities (Hardcover)
~ John Cassidy
Just finished (in a rapid browse) this book on the economic collapse. I found it unusually helpful because of the pocket size history of economic theory from Walras to Arrow-Debreu and later, with an unintended portrait of the struggle of economists with their own (lack of ) understanding of the so-called science they have created for themselves, enidng with the ‘brilliant’ idiocy of Greenspan et al. at the current endgame of financial mystification.
The question of the theory of markets requires more histories like this, because the deceptions of the subject are rife, and finally calamitous.
If Arrow-Debreu’s famous result doesn’t generalize to the overconfidence in markets that drives the ideological mesmerization of the current culture we need to know that, and this book is to be commended for tackling the byways of economics that never show up in popular discussions. Most discussion of the question of markets by its ideologues is mental muddle, where not deception.
Clearly we have learned in the last two years that something is awry in the neverneverland of mathematical economics.
http://darwiniana.com/2009/11/28/who-is-calling-who-an-idiot/comment-page-1/#comment-342730
reece sullivan said,
November 29, 2009 at 1:52 pm ·
nemo or others,
I have a simple question that I’ve been wondering about the last few days: is there any speculation on what the first cell consumed? Ate, in other words? It’s a fun thing to imagine the first cell forming, but it seems to come with these very natural questions, too. Another question would involve the fact that we take for granted that cells can replicate themselves, as though this weren’t even worth mentioning . . . but it seems to me that the highly unlikely scenario of life forming on earth in the first billion years coupled with the fact that that first cell actually survived long enough to replicate itself is quite a feat, indeed. Then, after picturing this, I arrive at the first question: what the hell did they live off of?I ask it in earnest, knowing that someone else must’ve surely speculated on this.
Anyone have any answers?
Comment on Evolution as a metaphysical enterprise
John A. Davison said,
November 28, 2009 at 6:51 pm ·
The reason I believe, that evolution cannot be observed, is because it is no longer in progress. I am not the first to question contemporary evolution.“The period of great fecundity is over: present biological evolution appears as a weakened process, declining or near its end. Aren’t we witnessing the the remains of an immense phenomenon close to extinction. Aren’t the small variations which are being recorded everywhere the tail end, the last oscillations of the evolutionary movement? Aren’t our plants, our animals lacking some mechanisms which were present in the early flora and fauna?
Pierre Grasse, Evolution of Living Organisms, page 71.I answer yes to each of Grasse’s three questions. We should also remember that long before Grasse, Julian Huxley, who somehow remained a Darwinian selectionist, stated in no uncertain language that evolution was finished long ago a conclusion the Darwinians still pretend he never reached.
“But all in the long run have TERMINATED blindly. That of the echinoderms, for instance, reached its CLIMAX before the end of the mesozoic. For the arthropods, represented by their highest group, the insects, the FULL STOP seems to have come in the early Cenozoic: even the ants and bees have made NO ADVANCE since the Oligocene. For the birds, the Miocene marked THE END; for the mammals, the Pliocene.”
.Julian Huxley, Evolution: The Modern Synthesis, page 571, only seven pages from the end, my emphasis in Caps.When the Darwinists must ignore one of their own, you know something is fundamentally flawed in their purposeless view of the great mystery of phylogeny. They also ignored Theodosius Dobzhansky when he failed through intensive selection to transform Drosophila melanogaster into a new species in the same Genus, a failure he publicly acknowledged! He too, like Huxley, failed to come to grips with his own conclusions, thereby illustrating the triumph of blind ideology over hard cold facts. As I say so often on my weblog –
“It is hard to believe isn’t it?
jadavison.wordpress.com
Atheism is the new fundamentalism
by Debate – Intelligence Squared
http://events.intelligencesquared.com/current-events.php?event=EVT0204
Live Streaming available at
Come to this page at 6:45 pm GMT on Sunday November 29th to participate in the first Live Online Intelligence Squared debate:
http://www.intelligencesquared.com/live
“Atheism is the new fundamentalism” – including Richard Dawkins
The New Inquisition: Ideology’s Corruption of Science
Charging science with ideology is a significant critique, but why fritter away credibility on the subject with this ill-advised global warming confusion. It would seem that the corruption of science with ideology is a work done by ExxonMobile.
by Patrick Barkham – guardian.co.uk
from dawkins site
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/28/christian-brothers-ireland-child-abuse
Darwin’s notebooks go online on 150th anniversary of ‘Origin of the Species’
Biological Basis of ‘Bacterial Immune System’ Discovered
ScienceDaily (Nov. 28, 2009) — Bacteria don’t have easy lives. In addition to mammalian immune systems that besiege the bugs, they have natural enemies called bacteriophages, viruses that kill half the bacteria on Earth every two days.
Solar Power from Your Windows, Awnings, Even Clothing?
ScienceDaily (Nov. 29, 2009) — On a 104-degree Friday in July when sunlight bathed The University of Arizona campus, doctoral student Dio Placencia sat before a noisy vacuum chamber in the Chemical Sciences Building trying to advance the renewable energy revolution.
Published on Sunday, November 29, 2009 by Reuters
US Forces Missed Chance to Get bin Laden: Report
WASHINGTON – The U.S. military could have captured or killed Osama bin Laden in 2001 if it had launched a concerted attack on his hideout in Afghanistan, according to a report prepared for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Published on Sunday, November 29, 2009 by The Observer/UK
Western Lifestyle Unsustainable, Says Climate Expert Rajendra Pachauri
Ahead of the Copenhagen summit, leading scientist and IPCC chair Rajendra Pachauri warns of radical charges and regulation if global disaster is to be avoided
by James Randerson
Hotel guests should have their electricity monitored; hefty aviation taxes should be introduced to deter people from flying; and iced water in restaurants should be curtailed, the world’s leading climate scientist has told the Observer.
Dead Birds, Soiled Beaches
By SAUL LANDAU
From my window in Alameda overlooking San Francisco Bay, I watch hundreds of men and women in white suits, some with masks, busily uprooting slimy sea plants and gently grabbing birds with feathers coated in black grease. Abutting the public beach, this “bird preserve” became a disaster for the very creatures it was designed to protect. On October 30, a line broke during a fuel transfer, the Panamanian-flagged Dubai Star. Some 800 gallons poured into the Bay.
Dubai miracle
““This is another wave of the credit crunch,” said Christopher
Davidson, an expert in Gulf politics at Durham University in Britain.
“Dubai was fairly much the worst example of overextension. It had the
worst debt per capita in the world by far. I would like to put it down
as a really enormous white elephant that doesn’t have much in common
with the regular economy of a regular state.”” Christopher has been right all along on this. Read his piece on Dubai
in Al-Akhbar more than two months ago. Dubai is lost, I think. Mark my
words. The skyline will soon show empty buildings. It will be a
backdrop for movies. For Egyptian movies. For B Egyptian movies. No,
for cheap B Egyptian movies that could not afford shooting elsewhere in
the Middle East. Sheikh Mo may have to go back being a chief of police
in the city of Dubai. Books on Dubai will not be a books on the history
of Dubai.
http://angryarab.blogspot.com/2009/11/dubai-miracle.html
RG mail
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/8370388.stm
Tough lessons for Obama on Mid-East peace
*The BBC’s Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen considers how the conflict
between Israelis and Palestinians has taught US President Barack Obama hard
and humiliating lessons.*
The land between the river Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea has great
sunsets.
RG mail
*American Casino: *
An edgy, fast-paced documentary on the financial meltdown
*By Mike Whitney*
*November 24, 2009 “Information Clearing
House
– Andrew* and Leslie Cockburn have produced the best movie of the year.
American Casino tells the story of the financial crisis, which started with
the meltdown in subprime lending and ended up triggering the deepest slump
since the Great Depression. The Cockburn’s skillfully uncover the truth
behind the headlines, shining a light on the negligent regulators, the
colluding Fed, the unscrupulous ratings agencies, the mercenary banks, the
venal mortgage lenders, and the long daisy-chain of opportunists and
fraudsters who gorged themselves on the spoils from the biggest swindle in
history. This is this generation’s big story and it is deftly conveyed by
master narrators, Mr. and Mrs. Cockburn.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24038.htm
RG mail
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091005/cockburn
The Nation
October 5, 2009 edition
Beat the Devil
By Alexander Cockburn
Was there ever a society so saturated with lunacy as ours? One expects
modulated nuttiness from the better element, particularly those inhabiting
the corporate and legislative spheres. But these days insanity is pervasive,
spreading through all classes and walks of life. For years we have been
treated to pinstriped fugitives from the asylum like Pete Peterson urging
the nation into ruin by slashing the deficit; but on September 12 in
Washington by tens of thousands were the sans-culottes screaming for fiscal
propriety as though channeling the ruinous orthodoxies of Montagu Norman or
Andrew Mellon. Many among these Glenn Beck legions were surely one stroke or
tumor away from financial ruin yet were still ready to tear any advocates of
publicly funded health insurance into tiny pieces as though they were
hawking The Communist Manifesto at a revival meeting. Inspiring, was it not,
to see such self-abnegation on the part of so many people prepared to die in
the name of free enterprise!
Google and the New Digital Future
By Robert Darnton
November 9 is one of those strange dates haunted by history. On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, signaling the collapse of the Soviet empire. The Nazis organized Kristallnacht on November 9, 1938, beginning their all-out campaign against Jews. On November 9, 1923, Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch was crushed in Munich, and on November 9, 1918, Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated and Germany was declared a republic. The date especially hovers over the history of Germany, but it marks great events in other countries as well: the Meiji Restoration in Japan, November 9, 1867; Bonaparte’s coup effectively ending the French Revolution, November 9, 1799; and the first sighting of land by the Pilgrims on the Mayflower, November 9, 1620.
On November 9, 2009, in the district court for the Southern District of New York, the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers were scheduled to file a settlement to resolve their suit against Google for alleged breach of copyright in its program to digitize millions of books from research libraries and to make them available, for a fee, online. Not comparable to the fall of the Berlin Wall, you might say. True, but for several months, all eyes in the world of books—authors, publishers, librarians, and a great many readers—were trained on the court and its judge, Denny Chin, because this seemingly small-scale squabble over copyright looked likely to determine the digital future for all of us.
Is Science Just a New Religion?
The question might also be, Is Darwinism just a new science religion?
And the answer is obvious, yes, we can see the crystallization around atheism in the Dawkins cult.
Are we doing ourselves a disservice when we speak about our “belief” in evolution? Should we find a new way to talk about the “theories” that underlie our ideas? What about when we talk about the “design” of human anatomy? Why are we always finding ourselves on the defensive? Doesn’t all of the natural evidence that the universe has to offer support the conclusions that scientists have drawn (and modified) over the past five centuries? I’ve had religious friends confront me about my passion for neuroscience, noting that my excitement often sounds suspiciously like religious fervor. And, very matter-of-factly, I must explain that there are two enormous differences between science and religion: doubt and faith.
Study Pits Man Versus Machine in Piecing Together 425-Million-Year-Old Jigsaw
ScienceDaily (Nov. 27, 2009) — A new study pitting academic expertise against a computer in recreating a 425 million-year old jigsaw puzzle has discovered that there is no substitute for wisdom born out of experience.
Ecologists Sound out New Solution for Monitoring Cryptic Species
ScienceDaily (Nov. 28, 2009) — Ecologists have at last worked out a way of using recordings of birdsong to accurately measure the size of bird populations. This is the first time sound recordings from a microphone array have been translated into accurate estimates of bird species’ populations. Because the new technique, reported in the British Ecological Society’s Journal of Applied Ecology, will also work with whale song, it could lead to a major advance in our ability to monitor whale and dolphin numbers.
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