History, Evolution, and the Darwin Debate
‘Safety Valve’ Protects Photosynthesis from Too Much Light
ScienceDaily (Nov. 25, 2009) — Photosynthetic organisms need to cope with a wide range of light intensities, which can change over timescales of seconds to minutes. Too much light can damage the photosynthetic machinery and cause cell death.
Opposites Attract: Monkeys Choose Mating Partners With Different Genes
ScienceDaily (Nov. 25, 2009) — The world’s largest species of monkey ‘chooses’ mates with genes that are different from their own to guarantee healthy and strong offspring, according to a new research study.
Global warming rigged? Here’s the email I’d need to see
The leaked exchanges are disturbing, but it would take a conspiracy of a very different order to justify sceptics’ claims
Published on Thursday, November 26, 2009 by CommonDreams.org
Call it Ecocide
by Robert C. Koehler
In the cradle of civilization, young women have become terrified about having children.
This is the news I take with me into Thanksgiving and the season of gratitude and family togetherness: that doctors in Fallujah, the Iraqi city we devastated in two military assaults in 2004, have begun documenting a startling rise in birth defects – about 15 times the pre-invasion occurrence of early-life cancers and brain and nervous-system abnormalities, according to the U.K.’s Guardian.
gnxp
It’s kind of simhealth: A vast compendium of medical knowledge translated into a series of equations
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/11/ff_archimedes
gnxp
Smokers inhale live bacteria into their lungs, which could add to the reasons why they contract so many infections and chronic diseases, scientists say
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=cigarettes-smoking-bacteria-infection-pathogen
gnxp
Researchers have added to evidence that suggests an innate ability among humans to integrate different sensory cues
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/01/science/01obpuff.html
gnxp
Last month, Matt Williams, an adjunct professor at the University of Akron, opened an e-mail from his bosses about the school’s new rules for hiring and was “absolutely blown away,” he says, “when I saw the reference to collecting DNA samples.”
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120587756&sc=emaf
gnxp
Does watching football lead to domestic violence?
http://www.slate.com/id/2236426/
RG mail
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8347409.stm
BBC News 9 November 2009
Free market flawed, says survey
By James Robbins
Diplomatic correspondent, BBC News
The fall of the wall looked like a crushing victory for capitalism
*Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a new BBC poll has found
widespread dissatisfaction with free-market capitalism.*
RG mail
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/KK26Ad02.html
SINOGRAPH
*China takes a new look at Marxism*
By Francesco Sisci
BEIJING – The week before the visit of United States President Barack Obama,
the Chinese media were full of hope and expectations: Obama’s meeting with
China’s leaders would lead to new and higher-level bilateral relations,
newspapers wrote. But it was already clear that, contrary to the ideas of
the foreign press, this would not mean that China was to become a second
America.
Ants Use Bacteria to Make Their Gardens Grow
ScienceDaily (Nov. 24, 2009) — Leaf-cutter ants, which cultivate fungus for food, have many remarkable qualities.
Fukuyama’s essay/book on the ‘end of history’ is starting to fade away now, having done its right wing work all too well, and having confused the left, who should have been able to deal with this ideologue.
But Fukuyama is deceptive here, because what he had to say was more to the point than anyone on the left realized.
It raises the question of what Hegel really meant. Hegel never discoursed on the ‘end of history’. He did produce a teleological metaphysics of spirit in which the emergence of freedom was part of a spiritual design.
This language was confusing to secularists, and finally rejected, missing the point he was making, which is twisted into something else in Fukuyama.
Fukuyama makes a subtle set of changes in Hegel, first to adapt the argument to ‘historical materialists’, so to speak, by getting rid of the spiritual apparatus for a secularized reductionism, and second by injecting the question of capitalism into the question of the end of history (that pun on the teleology of history, and the endpoint of history, clever pun indeed).
The permanance of capitalism at the end of history is something Hegel never claimed. What he did claim was that, as he toasted the French Revolution every year, the gains of modern freedom were an aspect of the teleology of Universal History. This kind of thinking just couldn’t survive the onset of positivism. But history has born Hegel out, in some fashion. This was therefore a strange sort of plug for the dawn of liberal civilization, even as he acutely critiqued liberalism even as it was being born. The issue is much clearer in Kant, who produced the great philosophy of liberal freedom.
The point for the left here is, not that Leninist ruffians can or should destroy liberalism and concoct a totalitarian socialism, but that a successor to liberal capitalism ought, at the end of history, to be a liberal socialism, a society of free men, free of the constraits of capitalist domination.
The idea was something Marx and Engels could not grasp. What to say of the degenerations of leftists of the French (and American) Revolution in the nineteenth century.
It is a remarkable thought to consider that Fukuyama cleverly distorted the question in this way. It has led us to consider that capitalism is blessed with the same aura of Hegelian mystification as liberalism. But that was a clever switch.
This might help to challenge the left also: there can only be a liberal socialism. There is no other kind. To take away all the gains of human rights fought for in modern revolutions, as Marx proposed, was a calamity of bad theory. And it is all a little too conventient for those obsessed with that other ‘fetish of the commodities’: the revolution, with its mystique of grand historical dynamics, a washed out variant of Hegel’s teleology of freedom.
Venezuela’s Chavez Calls for International Organisation of Left Parties
Published on November 23rd 2009, by Kiraz Janicke – Venezuelanalysis.com
This is an idea that has to be taken seriously, but unfortunately, just at the moment where something is needed nothing is really available save the same old bullshit, bad history, and the tired slogans of closet Stalinists hoping for the worst to maybe foment their limp leftism.
People need help, confronted with the globalization juggernaut. But the old left is in the way.
Since the Third International was Lenin’s bag, the Fourth Trotsky’s, the fifth will have to be something beyond both!!!
Note this point.
Instead we have the same recycled crap from the likes of Slavoj Zizek, whose open embrace of Stalinism is just the kind of well-written pastiche that will confuse and divide any fifth international. There is no going back to Leninism, but another generation will not face this fact. In reality, there is no going back even to Marx. We need a whole new set of concepts. But that is hard to come by!
I would say, however, that Zizek is naively open, and blows the whistle on the left unwittingly. No real revolutionary conspirator would write any the books he has written, which do the job of discrediting the old left better than anyone on the right.
Chavez means well, but what does he have to propose? Old boy slaps on the back with Fidel Castro?
We need a thorough critique of Leninism, with accurate history, a critique of Marx, a new take on the Hegelian starting point that ended by confusing the whole subject. Hegel needs to be understood, and critiqued, so the myth of dialectic doesn’t take another set of revolutionary idiots.
How many on the left who idolize Lenin have really read a history of what he did?
It is impossible to think the followers of such a man can create a socialist reality.
There are endless things to consider here, but the current left is worse than a waste of time: they are deadly to any kind of leftist future that is real.
Let us recall that Lenin exterminated virtually the whole left of Socialist Revolutionaries as whooly idealists. I almost say, OK, eliminate the whole generation on the left now, so we can start over.
It is important to grasp that Lenin was the chief Asshole of the Haute Bourgeoisie, and NOT a leader of the working class. Bolshevism was another bourgeois trick against labor.
History and evolution…
The absurdities of universal explanation/mythology in the abuse of natural selection theory lies in Dennett’s silly claim, sigh unseen, that natural selection produces free will as an adaptation.
Even stranger noone in science blows the whistle on this, or is able to!????
We need a refund on refereed science.
Freedom evolves? The discrete freedom sequence One of the striking features of Darwinian thinking lies in the rote application of selectionist and adaptational thinking to all circumstances and situations, the series of ‘Just So Stories’ that purport, without direct observation, to explain complex features of organisms seen in nature. With human evolution this becomes an increasingly strained activity, amounting to little more than the fiat of methodological naturalism. A good example is the inevitable conclusion, as in Dennett’s Freedom Evolves, that free will evolves by natural selection, as an adaptation! Not a shred of evidence is offered for this incoherent deduction from speculative selectionism. As we close in on the eonic effect we can actually produce a counter-example, the so-called discrete freedom sequence, showing a macroevolutionary component to the emergence of freedom, in the process defining human evolution in terms of the idea of freedom taken together with causality as a chord of two opposites.
Booknotes from Times Literary Supplement
TERRY EAGLETON
Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People (Verso) may not be the greatest work of genius to have appeared this year, but it is certainly one of the bravest. Read the rest of this entry »
Comment on Darwinism: A Bungled Theory
John A. Davison said,
November 25, 2009 at 10:16 am · A theory sensu strictu is an hypothesis which has been verified. Darwinism does not even qualify as an hypothesis as it is by its very nature untestable. A “random walk” goes to no certain place. Selection has been tested many times notably with Drosophila melanogaster by Theodosius Dobzhansky who admitted failure but remained a Darwinian nevertheless, one of the most remarkable aspects of the history of the Darwinian myth. Another Darwinian, Julian Huxley, after claiming evolution was finished, also remained a Darwinian to his dying day.It is hard to believe isn’t it? Read the rest of this entry »
Comment on CIA Pessimism on Israel
Saint Michael Traveler, USA said,
November 24, 2009 at 11:19 pm · MyAmerica said…
Saint Michael Traveler
Jerusalem: holy city belonging to Jews, Muslims and ChristiansThe issue of Jerusalem is complex and can not be decided by Israel or the United States. This city is religious holy city belonging to Jews, Muslims and Christians. This city should not be controlled by a theocratic Jewish state; in that case, it should be an open international city.
What are the options for the Arabs-Jewish region? Read the rest of this entry »
Stephen P. Smith said,
November 24, 2009 at 11:00 pm ·
The Evidential Refutation of Darwinism
What does it mean that Darwin`s theory is provisional? It means that it is limited to a narrow domain of application (like plant and animal breeding), and we can point to things that Darwin`s theory can`t tell us. Darwin’s theory did not anticipate biological symbiosis. It did not explain the extreme convergences of a kind noted by Simon Conway Morris. It did not anticipate the fewness of our genes. It did not anticipate the Hox systems, and the extreme examples of cooption noted by the interactive complexity apparent in the genome. It did not anticipate the findings of epigenetics where DNA is found activated by environmental cues. Darwin’s theory anticipates little, it merely rationalizes itself after the fact of discovery. And therefore, such a theory cannot be used as a foundation for evolution.
Read the rest of this entry »
TV Presenter On Death Row For Witchcraft
by Sky News
from Dawkins site
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/5/20091124/twl-tv-presenter-on-death-row-for-witchc-3fd0ae9.html
Ali Sibat is not even a Saudi national. The Lebanese citizen was only visiting Saudi Arabia on pilgrimage when he was arrested in Medina last year.
A court in the city condemned him as a witch on November 9.
The only evidence presented in court was reportedly the claim he appeared regularly on Lebanese satellite issuing general advice on life and making predictions about the future.
The case is causing outrage among human rights campaigners but has made little news elsewhere despite the ludicrous nature of the charges and the extraordinary severity of Sibat’s sentence.
“Saudi courts are sanctioning a literal witch hunt by the religious police,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch.
“The crime of witchcraft is being used against all sorts of behavior, with the cruel threat of state sanctioned executions.”
Ali Sibat’s supporters say he was denied a lawyer at his trial and was tricked into making a confession.
He is not the only victim of Saudi Arabia’s literal witch hunt. Human Rights Watch says two other people have been arrested on similar charges in the last month alone.
…
Continue reading
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/5/20091124/twl-tv-presenter-on-death-row-for-witchc-3fd0ae9.html
Darwin in the World: Evolution And Faith In The 21st Century
by The BBC Debate
from dawkins site
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0053fcn
Listen to audio – http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/p0053fcn
Published 150 years ago, Charles Darwin’s seminal work, On the Origin of Species, continues to cause debate between scientists and some people of religious faith for whom the idea that man evolved from more primitive animals remains controversial.
Bridget Kendall chairs a debate about evolution and faith from a conference at the famous Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt.
She is joined by an audience of students and academics and a panel including: John Hedley Brooke from the Theology Department of Oxford University; Nidhal Guessoum, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the American University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates; Salman Hameed, Professor of Integrated Science and Humanities at Hampshire College in Massachusetts; Eugenie Scott, Director of the US National Centre for Science Education in California; and Samy Zalat, Professor of Biodiversity at the University of the Suez Canal.
They discuss how Darwin’s ideas were received around the world in his own time, and how attitudes vary today, from the Christian fundamentalist heartland in the USA to faith schools in the Middle East. Will there always be conflict between evolution and religion? Do they apply to different, non-overlapping worlds? Or can science live in harmony with faith?
from dawkins site: Nature’s Little Scientists
by Mary Carmichael – Newsweek
http://www.newsweek.com/id/224079
Charles Darwin was famously reluctant to publish On the Origin of Species, which he did 150 years ago this week. Fearing it would degrade people’s religious convictions, he stalled on the manuscript for two decades. But he didn’t shield his own children from the science he thought would harm adults. Instead, he enlisted them in his experiments. When they were babies, he scrutinized their faces like an anthropologist for his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals; later, he assigned them to “sprinkle bumblebees with flour and chase after the bugs” for a study of cross-pollination, harnessing the children’s curiosity as a means of teaching them about nature while also discovering some things about it himself.
This outrageoous. Darwin was not reluctant to publish: he was dawdling because he couldn’t make his theory work right. He was cautioned by his friends to get cracking, since Wallace was rapidly catching up and outstripping him.
Wallace then got a series of Wallace’s letters, then finally the Ternate Letter.
With that plagiarized input from Wallace Darwin got Origin out rather rapidly.
The whole celebration over Darwin is a pack of lies, unworthy of the so-called scientific community.
Cf. The Darwin Conspiracy by Roy Davies, see sidebar pages for link
The Dark Side of Darwin’s Legacy
By Eben Harrell
Tuesday, Nov. 24, 2009
The Dark Side of Darwin’s Legacy
By Eben Harrell
Tuesday, Nov. 24, 2009
An 1869 portrait of British naturalist Charles Darwin
This year marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, and Nov. 24 marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species, the landmark work in which Darwin laid forth his theory of natural selection. While celebrations have emphasized the British naturalist’s giant role in the advancement of human progress, British political journalist Dennis Sewell is not convinced. In a new book, The Political Gene: How Darwin’s Ideas Changed Politics, he highlights how often — and how easily — Darwin’s big idea has been harnessed for sinister political ends. According to Sewell, evolution is scientifically undeniable, but its contribution to human well-being is unclear.
Bravo for Time to write up a critical piece on Darwin for the ’200th’.
BTW, what’s going on with Sewell’s book at Amazon???
American Freedom Alliance Files Lawsuit Against Leading Science Center Over Intelligent Design Movie
Group Claims Cancellation of ‘Darwin’s Dilemma’ Resulted from Organized Effort by Science Center to Suppress Discussion
Evolution vs. Intelligent Design: 6 Bones of Contention
The claim that the evolutioin of the eye, contrary to the ID folks’ claims, can proceed in a series of steps, is not convincing, and not shown to have occurred by random natural selection.
It doesn’t require accepting ID to see that the problem of complex evolution is a problem for Darwinism.
THE EYES OF VERTEBRATES
Why Intelligent Design?
On November 24, 2009–the 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species–the theory that new species can arise from old ones through natural selection is still met with some resistance. (Related: “FUTURE HUMANS: Four Ways We May, or May Not, Evolve.”)
Some of evolution’s most vocal critics are proponents of “intelligent design,” arguing that many structures in plants and animals bear the unmistakable signature of design by a supernatural intelligence.
Intelligent design proponents say the eyes of vertebrates–including humans and the common snapping turtle seen above–could not have evolved in a stepwise fashion. That’s because the eye is made of several interacting parts, and the removal of any one part will cause the entire system to cease functioning. Thus, the argument goes, the eye must have been produced in one fell swoop.
“If you look at these [evolutionary] schemes, they often very abruptly add a lens or a cornea,” said Casey Luskin, a spokesperson for the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based organization that advocates intelligent design. But things don’t just appear suddenly in evolution, Luskin said. “You need to evolve things in a step-by-step fashion.” (Take a Darwin quiz.)
Evolutionists Argue …
Steps in the evolution of the vertebrate eye exist in the fossil record, said Don Prothero, a paleontologist at California’s Occidental College and author of Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters.
“There’ve been multiple, very well-documented papers showing how complex structures like the eye can evolve in gradual steps from a simple eye spot that is just barely a light receptor all the way to things like the human eye,” Prothero said. Intelligent design advocates, he said, simply ignore the evidence.
(See “Was Darwin Wrong?” from National Geographic magazine.)
Violent World of Raptors Explored
ScienceDaily (Nov. 25, 2009) — A journey that started with a box of bird feet carried three Montana State University graduate students into the gruesome world of raptors and led to their findings being published in a prominent journal.
Dramatic Decline Found in Siberian Tigers
ScienceDaily (Nov. 24, 2009) — The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) has announced a report revealing that the last remaining population of Siberian tigers has likely declined significantly due to the rising tide of poaching and habitat loss.
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