11.28.09
Posted in General at 1:29 pm by nemo
History and evolution
The strangest thing about Darwinism is that it has gotten the basic meaning of ‘evolution’ wrong.
This leaves us with the question, What is evolution? And this forces another, long overdue, What is the relationship between history and evolution? This could be recast as the paradoxical question, When did evolution stop and history begin?
A moment’s reflection will tell us that no instantaneous passage between the two is plausible and that our terms have been left ragged. We must, by this logic, be able to detect a Transition between evolution and history. Can we find evidence to match this deduction? Indeed, we can, our non-random pattern, the eonic effect. In fact we can say more: if we apply that same logic to our Transition we should expect it to take the form of a series of transitions in an alternation between evolution and history, as if overlayed, the one emerging from the other. The eonic effect shows just this property of transitions in a series. Have we reached the end of the Great Transition? If not, then our evolution still constitutes our present and future. We should ask who man is, with such wisdom as would constitute achievement of the title, homo sapiens.
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Posted in atheism at 1:16 pm by nemo
In the Spirit of Hegel (Paperback)
~ Robert C. Solomon
I was just looking again at Solomon’s older book on Hegel. I hold no brief for particular veins of Hegel interpretation, this work adopted a novel and ‘shocking’ argument that Hegel was really an atheist in disguise.
It is hard to arrive at the truth of the matter, but his thesis makes another point: one that the New Atheists might consider.
While most Hegel scholars would theistically condemn this book I think that Solomon stumbled on something, even if he is perhaps wrong aboujt Hegel.
Hegel is neither a theist or an atheist: he is moving to transcend the whole game, and speaks only of ‘sprit’, a dangerous term that will cause him perhaps to slide back into the morass of the bad dialectic of divinity. But the point is clear.
I mention this because the position of the New Atheists is merely a dialectical reversal of a given notion, and proceeds to its own errors.
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Posted in Evolution at 12:56 pm by nemo
http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/25/a-truce-in-the-religious-wars/
What is mistaken for a truce is the fact that all sides are so confused that it doesn’t matter who wins the argument they can’t win.
A Truce in the Religious Wars?
By NICHOLAS KRISTOF
My Thursday column looks at the literary battles over God in recent years, focusing on recent books such as Karen Armstrong’s “The Case for God” and Robert Wright’s “The Evolution of God.” I found Wright’s particularly provocative, although it’s more popular than scholarly. Then my colleague Nicholas Wade’s new book, “The Faith Instinct,” doesn’t focus on God so much as on the evolutionary advantages conferred by faith, creating a genetic predisposition to believe in divinity — but it’s just as fascinating.
A fourth book that I didn’t have space to mention, and which came out earlier this year, is “God is Back,” by John Micklethewait and Adrian Wooldridge. It argues that a resurgence of faith around the world is reshaping politics around the world, particularly in developing countries like China.
Let me know what you think. But, particularly on Thanksgiving, let’s try to be polite to each other. And Happy Thanksgiving!
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Posted in Evolution at 12:53 pm by nemo
Dawkins: Evangelist an ‘idiot’ on evolution
Who is calling who an idiot?
I think that Dawkins here is retreating from his new strategy in his recent book of emphasizing the fact of evolution, without claiming that the mechanism is natural selection.
You can’t call anyone an idiot who rejects the Darwinian formulation
London, England (CNN) — A Christian evangelist branded an idiot by atheist biologist Richard Dawkins for trying to refute Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution has brushed off the criticism.
Speaking to CNN on the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin’s seminal work “On the Origin of Species,” Dawkins said the evidence to support the theory that life on earth came about through natural selection, and not design by God, was “now massively buttressed by molecular evidence.”
And referring to U.S.-based evangelist Ray Comfort, who argues that the universe and life is the result of an intelligent creator, Dawkins said: “There is no refutation of Darwinian evolution in existence. If a refutation ever were to come about, it would come from a scientist, and not an idiot.
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Posted in Evolution, General at 12:47 pm by nemo
Evolutionary thinking is basically a metaphysical enterprise attempting to generalize about what it cannot properly observe: Limits of Observation
The ID argument is a giveaway: a prime metaphysical gambit, that can never be verified directly.
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Posted in In the News at 12:34 pm by nemo
U.S. Still Running Secret Prison in Afghanistan
Published: November 28, 2009
KABUL, Afghanistan — An American military detention camp in Afghanistan is still holding inmates for sometimes weeks at a time and without access to the International Committee of the Red Cross, according to human rights researchers and former detainees held at the site on the Bagram Air Base.
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Posted in global warming at 12:15 pm by nemo
Climategate: a Word of Advice to the Scientists
I am consistently puzzled at the stance of the ID group on global warming. It is possible that the claims for global warming are wrong, but at this point to claim the science is wrong in the shrill tones of indignation simply backfires and throws the evolution critique under a cloud, something the stance on ID already did.
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Posted in General at 12:09 pm by nemo
Let’s get it straight: Irish child abuse was perpetrated by the trendy, modern post-Vatican II Catholic Church
by Gerald Warner – Telegraph.co.uk
from dawkins site
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/geraldwarner/100018182/lets-get-it-straight-irish-child-abuse-was-perpetrated-by-the-trendy-modern-post-vatican-ii-catholic-church/
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Posted in General at 11:40 am by nemo
Evidence of life on Mars lurks beneath surface of meteorite, Nasa experts claim
by Hannah Devlin – TimesOnline
from dawkins site
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/space/article6934078.ece
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Posted in General at 11:39 am by nemo
An Open Letter to Alliance Boots
by The Merseyside Skeptics Society
from dawkins site
http://www.merseysideskeptics.org.uk/
The Boots brand is synonymous with health care in the United Kingdom. Your website speaks proudly about your role as a health care provider and your commitment to deliver exceptional patient care. For many people, you are their first resource for medical advice; and their chosen dispensary for prescription and non-prescription medicines. The British public trusts Boots.
However, in evidence given recently to the Commons Science and Technology Committee, you admitted that you do not believe homeopathy to be efficacious. Despite this, homeopathic products are offered for sale in Boots pharmacies – many of them bearing the trusted Boots brand.
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Posted in Evolution at 11:31 am by nemo
RNA Network Seen in Live Bacterial Cells for First Time
ScienceDaily (Nov. 28, 2009) — Scientists who study RNA have faced a formidable roadblock: trying to examine RNA’s movements in a living cell when they can’t see the RNA. Now, a new technology has given scientists the first look ever at RNA in a live bacteria cell — a sight that could offer new information about how the molecule moves and works.
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Posted in Evolution at 11:29 am by nemo
Mass Extinction: Why Did Half of N. America’s Large Mammals Disappear 40,000 to 10,000 Years Ago?
ScienceDaily (Nov. 27, 2009) — Years of scientific debate over the extinction of ancient species in North America have yielded many theories. However, new findings from J. Tyler Faith, GW Ph.D. candidate in the hominid paleobiology doctoral program, and Todd Surovell, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Wyoming, reveal that a mass extinction occurred in a geological instant.
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Posted in you've got mail at 11:25 am by nemo
gnxp
Study finds link between outdoor living and immune health
http://www.nature.com/news/2009/091127/full/news.2009.1111.html
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Posted in you've got mail at 11:23 am by nemo
gnxp
When you can’t brush, have a drink
http://news.discovery.com/human/red-wine-teeth-health.html
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Posted in you've got mail at 11:22 am by nemo
gnxp
Why do hammerhead sharks have such a famously strange-shaped head?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8376000/8376740.stm
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Posted in you've got mail at 11:21 am by nemo
gnxp
How do people learn complex new skills, such as juggling and reading?
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=watching-the-brain-learn
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Posted in you've got mail at 11:20 am by nemo
Published on Saturday, November 28, 2009 by The Guardian/UK
The Truth of UK’s Guilt Over Iraq
Until Chilcot hears UN weapons inspectors’ testimony, the fiction of Britain honestly seeking a WMD smoking gun prevails
by Scott Ritter
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Posted in General at 11:17 am by nemo
Medical Group Condemns Coal in Critical Report
Coal Kills
By JOSHUA FRANK
So you thought smoking cigarettes was bad for your health? Try living next to a coal-fired power plant.
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Posted in you've got mail at 11:12 am by nemo
NY Times, November 28, 2009
Dubai’s Investment Troubles Leave Markets Unsteady
By BETTINA WASSENER
European markets calmed Friday after falling more than 3 percent the day
before when investors were spooked by news that Dubai World, the
emirate’s investment vehicle, was seeking to suspend repayments on all
or part of its $59 billion in debt.
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Posted in you've got mail at 11:08 am by nemo
Our Lives Are Filled With Worthless Crap That’s Destroying the Earth: Here’s What You Can Do
By Sharon Bloyd-Peshkin, In These Times. Posted November 28, 2009.
The way to lower the quantity of energy required to make and distribute short-lived consumer goods is to make them durable, repairable and upgradable.
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Posted in you've got mail at 7:36 pm by nemo
RG mail
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=49450
CLIMATE CHANGE: Angry Greenhouse Gas Victims Demand Action
By Paul Virgo
Climate change witnesses Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in General at 7:24 pm by nemo
The well-known question that starts the last chapter of The Black Book of Communism, a book every leftist needs to read. I have scanned a few pages below.
Why? Why did modern Communism, when it appeared in
1917, almost immediately turn into a system of bloody dictatorship and into a
criminal regime? Was it really the case that its aims could be attained only
~rough such extreme violence?
I have commented twice in the past few weeks on the books of Slavoj Zizek, whose uncritical regurgitations of Marxist ideology without apology deserves a full stop challenge. A sort of in your face Staliinism still creeping along, twenty years after the fall of Communism
Zizek is full of tough-guy leftism telling us that Leninist tactics are somehow necessary, and that we should embrace the legacy of Stalinism to be on the left. Come again, you mean that after murdering eighty million people, the left should start all over and kill another eighty million? Obviously, despite being a scholar, Zizek is unfamiliar with Bolshevik history, and you can tell immediately that someone is still recycling old propaganda unaware of how grotesque it all sounds at this point.
I dislike capitalist depradations and fascist rightists as much as any marxist, but the details of the Bolshevik fiasco are so extreme, when told rightly, that they at all points surpass the record of capitalism at its most dismal.
The moral indignation of leftist critics sounds false at this point for that reason. It is crippling all efforts at a moment when a challenge to a economic mad zone is needed. A rightist can always point to the sad truth that nothing short of Hitlerism could ever be worse than the Bolshevik legacy of political insanity.
I think the Marxists who run these internet mailing lists have been raised on a diet of fake history, and are genuinely unaware of the legacy of Lenin.
As the Black Box asks at the end, you have to wonder ‘why’.
After Lenin the Marxist left is essentially dead, and it is important to move on. But the current left with cheering from the peanut gallery by the likes of Zizek will delay that reckoning for still another generation.
We can cut to the chase by noting that Lenin destested the working class, and declared war on it as a class, and that therefore any leftist in the line of Marx can reject him on those grounds.
More than that the extreme and egregious violence, crime and mass murder of Lenin and his camp makes citation of his legacy completely embarrassing to anyone who really wishes to see some kind of post-capitalist social change. The irony is that diehard Leninists guarantee a stillborn left.
In any case, the left needs to consider this book, and its horrifying mass of details.
This book has attempted to look beyond blind spots, partisan passions, and voluntary amnesia to paint a true picture of all the criminal aspects of the Communist world, from individual assassinations to mass murder. It is part of a more general process of reflection on the phenomenon of Communism in the twentieth century, and it is only one stage, but it comes at a key Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in biology at 3:43 pm by nemo
Penguins and Sea Lions Help Produce New Atlas
ScienceDaily (Nov. 27, 2009) — Recording hundreds of thousands of individual uplinks from satellite transmitters fitted on penguins, albatrosses, sea lions, and other marine animals, the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and BirdLife International have released the first-ever atlas of the Patagonian Sea — a globally important but poorly understood South American marine ecosystem.
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Posted in global warming at 3:00 pm by nemo
Oceans Absorbing Carbon Dioxide More Slowly, Scientist Finds
ScienceDaily (Nov. 27, 2009) — The world’s oceans are absorbing less carbon dioxide (CO2), a Yale geophysicist has found after pooling data taken over the past 50 years. With the oceans currently absorbing over 40 percent of the CO2 emitted by human activity, this could quicken the pace of climate change
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Posted in Evolution at 2:58 pm by nemo
Wide Heads Give Hammerhead Sharks Exceptional Stereo View
ScienceDaily (Nov. 27, 2009) — Hammerhead sharks are some of the Ocean’s most distinctive residents. “Everyone wants to understand why they have this strange head shape,” says Michelle McComb from Florida Atlantic University. One possible reason is the shark’s vision.
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Posted in Evolution at 2:54 pm by nemo
Comment on Alfred Wallace
John A. Davison said,
November 26, 2009 at 4:24 pm ·
Alfred Russel Wallace was ten times the naturalist and scientist as was Darwin. He eventually completely rejected the hypothesis he had shared with Darwin as a young man. Consider the title of his last book -
“The World of Life: A Manifestation of of Creative Power, Directive Mind and Ultimate Purpose.” (1911)
His earlier “Man’s Place in the Universe” (1905) demonstrates his command of the science of his day. A pioneer environmentalist, he recognized the dangers of the atmospheric pollution associated with the Industrial Age and correctly identified CO2 (carbonic acid) as the culprit.
“Remember! We claim to be people of high civilization, of advanced science, of geat humanity, of enormous wealth! For very shame do not let us say “We CANNOT arrange matters so that our people may all breathe unpolluted, unpoisoned air.”
page 257 caps in italics in the original.
Wallace is vastly underestimated as Darwin is even more vastly overestimated.
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