History, Evolution, and the Darwin Debate
High Fructose Corn Syrup Proven to Cause Human Obesity
By Vanessa Barrington, EcoSalon. Posted December 24, 2009.
A new study indicates that high fructose corn syrup may be the cause of the huge upswing in childhood obesity and diabetes.
Jesus Hated War — Why Do Christians Love It So Much?
By Gary G. Kohls, Consortium News. Posted December 28, 2009.
There are no “blessed wars”. Yet virtually all evangelical, conservative and many mainstream church leaders were active supporters of the Bush wars.
RG mail
http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1261408947
*Uri Avnery**
26.12.09*
***Cast Lead 2*
DID WE win? Tomorrow marks the first anniversary of the Gaza War, alias
Operation Cast Lead, and this question fills the public space.
RG mail
To Face Climate Change With Honesty
by James Hansen
The Observer (December 27 2009)
Last weekend’s minimalist Copenhagen global climate accord provides a
great opportunity. The old deceitful, ineffectual approach is severely
wounded and must die. Now there is a chance for the world to get on to an
honest, effective path to an agreement.
http://www.countercurrents.org/hansen271209.htm
RG mail
http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/284487
China Launches World’s Fastest Train with Speed of 350 KPH
Posted Dec 26, 2009 by ? Leo Reyes
RG mail
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/24/opinion/24kuperman.html
New York
Times
December 24, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
*There’s Only One Way to Stop Iran*
By ALAN J. KUPERMAN
PRESIDENT OBAMA should not lament but sigh in relief that Iran has rejected
his nuclear deal, which was ill conceived from the start. Under the deal,
which was formally offered through the United Nations, Iran was to surrender
some 2,600 pounds of lightly enriched uranium (some three-quarters of its
known stockpile) to Russia, and the next year get back a supply of uranium
fuel sufficient to run its Tehran research reactor for three decades. The
proposal did not require Iran to halt its enrichment program, despite
several United Nations Security Council resolutions demanding such a
moratorium.
We commented on this review yesterday: http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2009/12/27/review-of-the-faith-instinct/
The ‘god gene’ turned here into the ‘faith instinct’ is a mythology of Darwinism, and fails to grapple with the realities of the evolution of religion, as visible in world history: e.g. the Axial Age, that taboo topic the Darwin establishment dares not mention.
Whether you believe in evolution, intelligent design or some other explanation for the origin of life, one thing is certain: The universe is so inconceivably vast that we can’t possibly be the only semi-intelligent species out there.
Can we?
Greenpeace Will Keep Up Pressure on Global Warming
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/12/25-1
Glacier Melt Adds Ancient Edibles to Marine Buffet
ScienceDaily (Dec. 27, 2009) — Glaciers along the Gulf of Alaska are enriching stream and near shore marine ecosystems from a surprising source — ancient carbon contained in glacial runoff
Exposure to Young Triggers New Neuron Creation in Females Exhibiting Maternal Behavior
ScienceDaily (Dec. 27, 2009) — Maternal behavior itself can trigger the development of new neurons in the maternal brain independent of whether the female was pregnant or has nursed
Resisting the Dangerous Allure
of Global Warming Technofixes
As the world weighs how to deal with warming, the idea of human manipulation of climate systems is gaining attention. Yet beyond the environmental and technical questions looms a more practical issue: How could governments really commit to supervising geoengineering schemes for centuries?
by dianne dumanoski
Published on Sunday, December 27, 2009 by The Observer/UK
Copenhagen Has Given Us the Chance to Face Climate Change With Honesty
by James Hansen
Last weekend’s minimalist Copenhagen global climate accord provides a great opportunity. The old deceitful, ineffectual approach is severely wounded and must die. Now there is a chance for the world to get on to an honest, effective path to an agreement.
gnxp
Sequencing project reveals microbial cache of protein families
http://www.nature.com/news/2009/091223/full/news.2009.1161.html
gnxp
Some species tolerate high levels of tetrodotoxin, and answers may lie in the evolution of sodium ion channels
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/22/science/22creature.html
RG mail
http://www.redress.cc/zionism/redress20091226
Redress Information & Analysis 26 December 2009
Britain’s Jews in crisis over national loyalty, identity and Israel
Whistleblowers say top Zionist institutions in unprecedented crisis
Britain’s leading Jewish institutions are facing their worst crisis in
living memory as their loyalty to the United Kingdom and support for basic
universal principles of human rights and common decency come under growing
scrutiny.
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http://www.mcclatchydc.com/226/story/81136.html
McClatchy Newspapers
Dec. 22, 2009
In Russia, foreboding about America’s war in Afghanistan
Tom Lasseter
MOSCOW — Thirty years ago this week, the Red Army began its invasion of
Afghanistan, a move that sank the Soviet Union in a decade of guerrilla war
and hastened the collapse of the Cold War empire.
gnxp
An accident with a tamping iron made Phineas Gage history’s most famous brain-injury survivor
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/78437017.html
RG mail
Towards a Steady State Economy
by Herman Daly
theoildrum.com (December 17 2009)
As the holidays approach we will probably be highlighting some of our
better content from years past. The below essay, on the day of Fed
Chairman Bernanke’s reappointment, is perhaps an apppropriate example of
such. Originally from May 2008 {1} the essay is written by Herman Daly
{2}, who popularized the term “Steady State Economy” over three decades
ago. (Professor Daly subsequently contributed another TheOilDrum essay {3}
on the credit crisis). Just as Paul Volcker’s recent comments {4} are a
refreshing departure from the garbage of Greenspan (who has been saying
that market reflation creates its own wealth).
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6051?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+theoildrum+%28The+Oil+Drum%29
RG mail
Dennis Kucinich: US War Presidents ignore Congress & Constitution
In one of the most improper of Christmas presents, Liu Xiaobo, a Chinese human rights activist, was sentenced to an unusually harsh 11 years in prison for charges of “subversion.” The decision was ostensibly made on Christmas Day to minimize international attention
http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/chinese_activist_sentenced_to_11_years_20091225/
The illusion that the Darwin debate is science vs religion.
Toward A Secular Postdarwinism
The New York Times announced that ‘the theory of evolution really does explain everything in biology,’ but that’s rather modest in the context of current celebratory hype. In now canonical versions, Darwin’s idea of evolution through natural selection – his ‘dangerous idea’ – was, as Daniel Dennett famously said, ‘the single best idea anyone has ever had’. Better than any idea of Newton’s or Einstein’s, and better than any idea had by Jesus or Aristotle or Hume or that other great 12 February 1809 birthday boy, Abraham Lincoln. It ‘unifies the realm of life, meaning and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law’. If T.H. Huxley was ‘Darwin’s bulldog’, the Oxford emeritus professor for the public understanding of science, Richard Dawkins, has been called his unmuzzled rottweiler; according to Dawkins, Darwin’s idea wasn’t just a great one (‘the most powerful, revolutionary idea ever put forward by an individual’), it is essentially the only idea you need to explain life and all its phenomena: ‘Charles Darwin really solved the problem of existence, the problem of the existence of all living things – humans, animals, plants, fungi, bacteria. Everything we know about life, Darwin essentially explained.’ One-stop shopping for the inquiring mind in a hurry, though one can wonder why an idea of such evident and all-encompassing power would – a century and a half later – need this aggressive marketing.
COMPLEXITY EXPLAINED: 12. The Likely Origins of Life
by Dr. Vinod K. Wadhawan – Nirmukta
http://nirmukta.com/2009/12/25/complexity-explained-12-the-likely-origins-of-life/
from dawkins site
According to one model of the origins of life, it is likely that life originated twice, with two separate kinds of organisms, one capable of metabolism without exact replication, and the other capable of replication without metabolism; at some stage the two features came together. Another model is that life originated with the emergence of RNA molecules which could act as both enzymes and self-replicators. In either case, the emergence of self-replicators also marked the first step towards the evolution of consciousness.
12.1 Freeman Dyson’s Dual-Origin Model for Life
Freeman John Dyson is a theoretical physicist and mathematician, well known for his work in quantum field theory, solid-state physics, and nuclear engineering. In 1949 he demonstrated the equivalence of the two formulations of quantum electrodynamics, one by Richard Feynman and the other by Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga. In 1985 he wrote a little book Origins of Life, in which he argued that metabolic reproduction and replication are logically separable propositions, and that natural selection does not require replication, at least for simple creatures. In higher-level life as seen today, reproduction of cells and replication of molecules occur together. But there is no reason to presume that this was always the case. According to Dyson, it is more likely that life originated twice, with two separate kinds of organisms, one capable of metabolism without exact replication, and the other capable of replication without metabolism. At some stage the two features came together. When replication and metabolism occurred in the same creature, natural selection as an agent for novelty became more vigorous.
…
Continue reading
http://nirmukta.com/2009/12/25/complexity-explained-12-the-likely-origins-of-life/
Chicago Cancer Genome Project Studies Genetics of 1,000 Tumors
ScienceDaily (Dec. 25, 2009) — No two tumors are alike, but analyzing the genetics of cancers from different parts of the body may reveal surprising details useful for treatment and prevention.
Fundamentalism began as reaction to modernism
Much has been written this year in observance of the birth of Charles Darwin in 1809 and the publication of his monumental work, On the Origin of Species, in 1859. Another important date – one which has gone largely unnoticed, yet which is also important in its perverse way to the ideas of our modern world – is 1909, the year in which a couple of oil tycoons met and hired theologian A.C. Dixon to produce a series of books called The Fundamentals.
Conceived as a reaction to Darwin and the other voices of modernism, The Fundamentals were a collection of 90 essays by prominent American and British clerics, compiled into 12 volumes and published between 1910 and 1915. They became the intellectual basis of modern fundamentalism.
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