History, Evolution, and the Darwin Debate
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In “The Trauma Myth,” the psychologist Susan A. Clancy documented interviews that trauma did not set in for victims of childhood abuse until they were adults
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/26/health/26zuger.html
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http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/LA26Dj04.html
Asia Times Jan 26, 2010
By Henry CK Liu
Nobel Laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz, a Roosevelt Institute senior
fellow and its chief economist, said on CNBC on January 19 that the US is
infested with “ersatz capitalism”, a flawed, unfair system that socializes
economic losses and privatizes the gains. He decries the “moral depravity”
that has led to the current financial crisis.
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[Note: the UK just also announced cancellation of Haiti's debt. When will
the USA, France and Canada -- the three culprits most responsible for the
devastation -- follow suit?]
Venezuela Cancels Haiti’s Debt
http://embavenez-us.org/news.php?nid=5257
The President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez announced
on Monday, January 25, that the Venezuelan government will forgive any
Venezuelan debts held by Haiti.
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Economists routinely ignore its hidden costs to the environment and the
community
by Herman E Daly
Scientific American (November 1993)
No policy prescription commands greater consensus among economists than
that of free trade based on international specialization according to
comparative advantage. Free trade has long been presumed good unless
proved otherwise. That presumption is the cornerstone of the existing
General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the proposed North
American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The proposals in the Uruguay Round
of negotiations strengthen GATT’s basic commitment to free trade and
economic globalization.
http://www.sciamdigital.com/index.cfm?fa=Products.ViewIssuePreview&ARTICLEID_CHAR=67F3AA0F-58E5-497E-953C-1D3AA992078
Since we are on the subject of liberalism, consider the issue in light of world istory (and the eonic effect), The Politics of Evolution
The many faces of liberalism
By Samuel Brittan
The Neo-liberal State
By Raymond Plant
OUP £50, 312 pages
British Party Politics and Ideology after New Labour
Edited by Simon Griffiths and Kevin Hickson
Palgrave Macmillan £60 256 pages
The Science of Liberty
By Timothy Ferris
HarperCollins $26.99 384 pages
Anyone searching for the underlying ideas behind the smokescreen of election battles is up against a preliminary difficulty: the key terms of political theory now have a very wide and often contradictory set of meanings. Read the rest of this entry »
The attempt to Darwinize ethics is the perpetual stumbling of the perpetual idiots of Darwinian theory. The point is not to make a religion out of Kant but to see his point that negating freedom through causal arguments is by definition the wrong approach to ethics.
Evolution and Ethics at Oxford: From Charles Darwin to C. S. Lewis
Hume was not a Darwinist, so it is unfair to lump him together with Darwin, and the reductionist pseudo-ethics that gets produced by natural selection theory.
The endless slanders against Kant’s simple gesture of separating causality and freedom in theories of ethics is forever a stumbling block to Darwinian idiocy.
A growing number of leading philosophers are adopting a Humean/Darwinian moral psychology supported by recent research in evolutionary science, neuroscience, anthropology, and animal behavior. But one can still see the powerful influence of a Kantian transcendentalism in moral philosophy that regards morality as an autonomous realm of pure reason totally separated from the empirical realm of nature as studied by natural science.
UD comments on previous article:
The study of 101 phylogenies reveals a new interpretation of speciation. Nature Vol 463 21 Jan 10 p349
The hypothesis that speciation follows the accumulation of many small events that multiply or simply add together (gradualism as Dawkins promotes) is supported in only 8% and 0% of cases.
78% of phylogenies fit the simple model where new species emerge from single rare stochastic events that produce reproductive isolation sufficient to cause speciation.
Species simply wait for the next sufficient cause of speciation to occur. Speciation is freed from the gradual tug of natural selection. There need not be an arms race between species. Gradual genetic and other changes may often be consequent to the event that promotes the reproductive isolation and hence speciation, rather than causal themselves. Factors that can cause speciation include polyploidy, altered sex determination mechanisms, chromosomal rearrangements, accumulation of genetic incompatibilities, sensory drive, hybridization and physical isolation.
It seems that the clever prose of Richard Dawkins demonstrating how easy it is to gradually scale Mt Improbable are simply not supported by the data.
The Red Queen describes a view of nature in which species continually evolve but do not become better adapted. It is one of the more distinctive metaphors of evolutionary biology, but no test of its claim that speciation occurs at a constant rate2 has ever been made against competing models that can predict virtually identical outcomes, nor has any mechanism been proposed that could cause the constant-rate phenomenon. Here we use 101 phylogenies of animal, plant and fungal taxa to test the constant-rate claim against four competing models. Phylogenetic branch lengths record the amount of time or evolutionary change between successive events of speciation. The models predict the distribution of these lengths by specifying how factors combine to bring about speciation, or by describing how rates of speciation vary throughout a tree. We find that the hypotheses that speciation follows the accumulation of many small events that act either multiplicatively or additively found support in 8% and none of the trees, respectively. A further 8% of trees hinted that the probability of speciation changes according to the amount of divergence from the ancestral species, and 6% suggested speciation rates vary among taxa. By comparison, 78% of the trees fit the simplest model in which new species emerge from single events, each rare but individually sufficient to cause speciation. This model predicts a constant rate of speciation, and provides a new interpretation of the Red Queen: the metaphor of species losing a race against a deteriorating environment is replaced by a view linking speciation to rare stochastic events that cause reproductive isolation. Attempts to understand species-radiations3 or why some groups have more or fewer species should look to the size of the catalogue of potential causes of speciation shared by a group of closely related organisms rather than to how those causes combine.
The Existence and Acceptance of Evolution
Talk Radio 702 – Believe It or Not
Listen to the MP3 Podcast:
http://www.pod702.co.za/podcast/believeitornot/20100124BESTKATE.mp3
Podcast Feed:
http://www.702.co.za/podcast/podcast_believeitornot.asp
Human evolution in Siberia: from frozen bodies to ancient DNA
The Yakuts contrast strikingly with other populations from Siberia due to their cattle- and horse-breeding economy as well as their Turkic language. On the basis of ethnological and linguistic criteria as well as population genetic studies, it has been assumed that they originated from South Siberian populations.
However, many questions regarding the origins of this intriguing population still need to be clarified (e.g. precise origin of paternal lineages and admixture rate with indigenous populations).
This study attempts to better understand the origins of the Yakuts, by performing genetic analyses on 58 mummified frozen bodies dated from the 15th to the 19th century, excavated from Yakutia (Eastern Siberia).
New Darwin Film Creates Controversy By Benjamin Radford | Tue Jan 26, 2010 12:18 AM ET
Darwin’s life is one of the greatest lies in the history of science: Check out The Darwin Conspiracy, by Roy Davies (see sidebar)
The new film Creation depicts Charles Darwin (portrayed by Paul Bettany) as a semi-reclusive, frail scientist who spent much of his time watching animals and scribbling his observations in notebooks. He was also of course the man whose work serves as the foundation for modern biology. Darwin’s contemporary, explorer and scientist Sir Richard Francis Burton, praised Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1863 as “the best and wisest book of this, or, perhaps, of any age.” A century later, evolutionary biologist (and Russian Orthodox Christian) Theodosius Dobzhansky famously noted, “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.”
Review | ‘Remarkable Creatures’: Fossils, woman power come to the surface
The main character, Mary Anning, is a real-life figure in 19th century paleontology.
Opinion: Conor Cunningham’s Has Darwin Killed God?
By Bart B. Van Bockstaele.
‘Microraptors’ Shed Light on Ancient Origin of Bird Flight
ScienceDaily (Jan. 26, 2010) — A joint team from the University of Kansas and Northeastern University in China says that it has settled the long-standing question of how bird flight began.
Everybody Laughs, Everybody Cries: Researchers Identify Universal Emotions
Bat Echolocation: 3-D Imaging Differentiates How Various Bats Generate Biosonar Signals
Human Brain Uses a Grid to Represent Space
ScienceDaily (Jan. 25, 2010) — ‘Grid cells’ that act like a spatial map in the brain have been identified for the first time in humans
Value of Sexual Reproduction Versus Asexual Reproduction
ScienceDaily (Jan. 25, 2010) — Living organisms have good reason for engaging in sexual, rather than asexual, reproduction
The Ozone Hole Is Mending. Now for the ‘But.’
Published: January 25, 2010
That the hole in Earth’s ozone layer is slowly mending is considered a big victory for environmental policy makers. But in a new report, scientists say there is a downside: its repair may contribute to global warming.
Which Economy is Obama Talking About?
By MICHAEL HUDSON
http://www.counterpunch.org/hudson01262010.html
The State of the Union address is in danger of purveying the usual euphemisms. I expect Obama to brag that he has overseen a recovery. But can there be any such thing as a jobless recovery? What has recovered are stock market averages and Wall Street bonuses, not disposable personal income or discretionary spending after paying debt service.
There is a dream that what can be “recovered” is something so idyllic as to be mythical: a Bubble Economy enabling people to make money without actually working, by borrowing and riding the tide of asset-price inflation to make capital gains. Corporate Democrat Harold Ford Jr. writes nostalgically that Bill Clinton’s eight years in office created 22 million jobs, “balanced the budget and left his successor with a surplus. This can be done again,” if only Obama moves further to the right (which Ford calls the center, meaning the Bayhs and Republicans).
It can’t be done again. Pres. Clinton’s administration balanced the budget by “welfare reform” to cut back public spending. This would be lethal today. Meanwhile, his explosion of bank credit and the dot.com boom (rising stock prices and bonuses without any earnings) fueled the early stages of the Greenspan bubble. It was a debt-leveraged illusion. Instead of the government running budget deficits to expand domestic demand, Clinton left it to banks to extend interest-bearing credit-debt pollution that we are still struggling to clean up.
gnxp
Most men in Europe can trace a line of descent to early farmers who migrated from the Near East, a study says
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8467623.stm
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New MRI analysis shows dolphins are smarter and more self aware than scientists had realized
http://news.discovery.com/animals/dolphins-smarter-brain-function.html
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Rare mutations linked to disease may hide in common variants
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100126/full/news.2010.33.html
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Nicholas Wade: Though scientists hit a wall in their search, a Duke geneticist has ideas on how to renew the hunt
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/26/science/26gene.html
The Obama Brand: Feel Good While Overlords Loot the Treasury and Launch Imperial Wars
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/centralamericaandthecaribbean/haiti/7070795/Haiti-earthquake-Italian-disaster-expert-attacks-US-response.html
Daily Telegraph 25 Jan 2010
*Haiti earthquake: Italian disaster expert attacks US response*
Guido Bertolaso, Italy’s top disaster expert, has attack the US response to
the Haiti earthquake, criticising its lack of organisation and the reliance
on soldiers with no training in humanitarian operations.
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http://www.jpost.com
/servlet/Satellite?cid=1263147942240&pagename=JPArticle%2FShowFull
The Jerusalem Post Jan. 21, 2010
‘Hamas accepts Israel’s right to exist’
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