James said,
November 26, 2009 at 3:43 pm ·
It’s amazing that a third-rate thinker such as Karen Armstrong is getting this amount of air time. I’ve never read anyone who can just spew out bad idea after bad idea. Amazing…she makes Dawkins and Friends look like geniuses.
I feel sorry for her, she has been captured for for religious propaganda and can’t retain a coherent stance, a telling symptom: I suspect sufistic black arts (as usual): consider her books on Islam, Islam in general, and the timing of it all.
This is more Gurdjieff Con material.
Moral: don’t reject the enlightenment, declare your autonomy, before you start promoting religion.
(CNN) — Tuesday marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” on November 24, 1859. All 1,250 copies of the initial print run of the book were scooped up by readers eager to see the British naturalist going rogue with his radical new theory of evolution, “By Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life,” in the book’s full title.
How important is this book? Thomas Henry Huxley (“Darwin’s bulldog”) proclaimed that “On the Origin of Species” was “the most potent instrument for the extension of the realm of knowledge which has come into man’s hands since Newton’s ‘Principia,’ ” and lamented to himself: “How extremely stupid not to have thought of that.”
The Harvard biologist Ernst Mayr, arguably the greatest evolutionary theorist since Darwin, asserted: “It would be difficult to refute the claim that the Darwinian revolution was the greatest of all intellectual revolutions in the history of mankind.” The Harvard paleontologist and historian of science Stephen Jay Gould called the theory of evolution one of the half dozen most important ideas in the entire history of Western thought.
Why, then, do so many Americans not accept the theory of evolution? A 2001 Gallup Poll found that 45 percent of Americans agree with the statement “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so,” while 37 percent preferred a blended belief that “Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process,” and a paltry 12 percent accepted the standard scientific theory that “Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process.”
First-Ever Blueprint of ‘Minimal Cell’ Is More Complex Than Expected
ScienceDaily (Nov. 27, 2009) — What are the bare essentials of life, the indispensable ingredients required to produce a cell that can survive on its own? Can we describe the molecular anatomy of a cell, and understand how an entire organism functions as a system?
Mammalian System for Controlling Bone Remodelling Also Regulates Fever
ScienceDaily (Nov. 26, 2009) — Mammals have evolved a complex system for controlling bone remodeling. bonBabies require calcium for healthy bones and they obtain it from their mother’s milk. Nursing mothers release calcium from their bones. Surprisingly, however, the same system also plays a key part in the control of fever and of female body temperature.
Published on Friday, November 27, 2009 by Live Science
Americans Toss Out 40 Percent of All Food
by Robert Roy Britt
U.S. residents are wasting food like never before.
While many Americans feasted on turkey and all the fixings yesterday, a new study finds food waste per person has shot up 50 percent since 1974. Some 1,400 calories worth of food is discarded per person each day, which adds up to 150 trillion calories a year.
Published on Friday, November 27, 2009 by the Independent/UK
Dubai: A Morally Bankrupt Dictatorship Built by Slave Labor
by Johann Hari
Dubai is finally financially bankrupt – but it has been morally bankrupt all along. The idea that Dubai is an oasis of freedom on the Arabian peninsular is one of the great lies of our time.
Yes, it has Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts and the Gucci styles, but beneath these accoutrements, there is a dictatorship built by slaves.
Rg mail
The wave is gathering force & could hit between the first & second
quarter of 2010
by Matthias Chang
Future Fast Forward (November 22 2009)
Global Research (November 22 2009)
Many of my friends who have been receiving my e-mail alerts over the
last two years have lamented that in recent weeks I have not commented
on the state of the global economy. I appreciate their anxiety but they
forget that I am not a stock market analyst who is paid to write
articles to lure investors back into the market. My website is free and
I do not sell a financial newsletter so there is no need for me to
churn out daily forecasts or analysis.
RG mail
Dead Pool: Lake Powell, Global Warming and the Future of Water in the West
by James Lawrence Powell
California, 283 pp
£19.95 January 2010
ISBN 978 0 520 25477 0
London Review of Books
Vol. 31 No. 23 · 26 NOVEMBER 2009
Dry Lands
Rebecca Solnit: The Water’s Running Out
The Colorado River no longer reaches the sea. Its dams and reservoirs are failing, silting up while the water level drops. It’s too cold for many of its species of endangered fish. It isn’t even red any more. Yet it’s less than 150 years since the first white men floated down the Colorado. They were led by Major John Lesley Powell, who saw that there wasn’t enough water to irrigate the vast agricultural society that people wanted to build in the American south-west, but whenever he tried to point this out he was shouted down or ignored. As Rebecca Solnit writes in the latest issue of the LRB, ‘ignoring Powell has been the basis of almost everything that has come since.’
RG mail
The Economic Crisis
and What Must Be Done
by Richard C Cook
futurefastforward.com (November 25 2009)
The United States does not control its own destiny. Rather it is
controlled by an international financial elite, of which the American
branch works out of big New York banks like J P Morgan Chase, Wall Street
investment firms such as Goldman Sachs, and the Federal Reserve System.
They in turn control the White House, Congress, the military, the mass
media, the intelligence agencies, both political parties, the
universities, et cetera. No one can rise to the top in any of these
institutions without the elite’s stamp of approval.
RG mail
*Finance made simple….*
*Why we’re broke *
*http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OT5uw1Fb_0*
* 3 trillion dollars down the drain *
* For a country that’s so focused on business, we’re not very good at basic
arithmetic.
The US crowed about bankrupting the Soviet Union by engaging them in an arms
race the USSR couldn’t afford.
Just twenty years later, we’re bankrupting ourselves in a bogus “War on
Terrorism.”
Atheism is an ancient perspective, clear from the Jain and Buddhist traditions. But they never hastled anyone over this.
The New Atheist is thus an inverted duplicate copy of the monotheistic obession to convert. Converting people to atheism is a bit pointless if you get everything else wrong, starting with Darwinism.
I have been thinning out the archives of this blog, whose database was getting a bit large, like four hundred meg. But then I discovered to my astonishment that many of these older posts, some five years old, were still being read as total hits began to go down. A number of queries asked where these posts were. The stats software did not record this phenomenon. I regret touching the database, and the other solution is to stop worrying and let the posts accumulate again. From now on we will post til the whole system crashes. Best of luck.
Bioengineers Succeed in Producing Plastics Without the Use of Fossil Fuels
ScienceDaily (Nov. 26, 2009) — A team of pioneering South Korean scientists have succeeded in producing the polymers used for everyday plastics through bioengineering, rather than through the use of fossil fuel based chemicals
reece sullivan said,
November 26, 2009 at 12:48 pm ·
I’ve been reading “Morphic Resonance” by Sheldrake. He gives many examples of problems with (especially) neo-darwinism and also, of course, attempts to solve these problems. One of the more interesting involves regeneration. He uses the example of a newt’s eye whose lens has been removed surgically. The lens grows back, but from the eye’s iris (!). The book’s loaded with highly interesting examples of this nature . . . examples of traits being passed down through means other than genes.
At any rate, I think it belongs with other books that call into question the theory of evolution through natural selection. I think it – morphic resonance – can also coincide with biocentrism, as well.
John A. Davison said,
November 26, 2009 at 9:22 am ·
http://www.investigatingatheism.info/
Near the bottom of the introductory page you will find links to essays there by Dennett and myself. I believe they present a clear study in contrast.
Unfortunately “Investigating Atheism” seems to have “died on the vine” after launching what I felt was an auspicious debut. I would like to see it revived as the time is ripe for a public confrontation with those who worship the Great God Chance, a confrontation they obviously fear and avoid like the plague.
As for Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Paul Zachary Myers, among the last remnants of Darwin’s Victorian fantasy -
“There are in every age, new errors to be rectified and new prejudices to be opposed.”
Samuel Johnson
For years, I have been warning people that the time has come to man (and woman) the ramparts to defend the citadel of human exceptionalism (that’s a metaphor for you literalists) against its many attackers. Indeed, the unique and intrinsic value of human life merely for being human is under concerted attack across a broad array of disciplines–bioethics, animal rights, radical environmentalism, and Darwinism.
Interestingly, the latter field of controversy was addressed specifically in a Time magazine interview with Dennis Sewell, author of The Political Gene: How Darwin’s Ideas Changed Politics, which apparently deals with how Darwinism has been put to “sinister” political (ab)uses. (Funny, when Ben Stein pointed that same undeniable point in Expelled, he was called all sorts of names–even an anti-Semite!)
But that’s not why I am posting this entry. What caught my attention was the questioner specifically raising the issue of human exceptionalism. From the interview:
You believe that Darwin should continue to be taught in schools. But how can we teach Darwin and also teach that humans are somehow exceptional in the natural world? Wasn’t his great breakthrough to show that humans, like all animals, share a common origin? I think we have to decide what status we are going to give to the human race. Most of the world’s religions hold that human life is sacred and special in some way. In teaching our common descent with animals, we also have to examine what is special about human beings, and why they deserve to be treated differently and granted certain rights.
Evolution of Highly Toxic Box Jellyfish Unraveled
ScienceDaily (Nov. 26, 2009) — With thousands of stinging cells that can emit deadly venom from tentacles that can reach ten feet in length, the 50 or so species of box jellyfish have long been of interest to scientists and to the public. Yet little has been known about the evolution of this early branch in the animal tree of life.