03.30.10
Two posts at UD on Harris’ ethis project
Sam Harris on Deriving Ought from Is — BY MEANS OF SCIENCE!
William Dembski
Christian militia group arrested
Christian militia group arrested
by Jerry Coyne – Why Evolution Is True
http://richarddawkins.net/articles/5346
from dawkins site
Harris’ vaulting ambition: ethics and scientism
Moral confusion in the name of ‘science’
by Sam Harris, Project Reason
http://richarddawkins.net/articles/5343
from dawkins site
Last month, I had the privilege of speaking at the 2010 TED conference for exactly 18 minutes. The short format of these talks is a brilliant innovation and surely the reason for their potent half-life on the Internet. However, 18 minutes is not a lot of time in which to present a detailed argument. My intent was to begin a conversation about how we can understand morality in universal, scientific terms. Many people who loved my talk, misunderstood what I was saying, and loved it for the wrong reasons; and many of my critics were right to think that I had said something extremely controversial. I was not suggesting that science can give us an evolutionary or neurobiological account of what people do in the name of “morality.” Nor was I merely saying that science can help us get what we want out of life. Both of these would have been quite banal claims to make (unless one happens to doubt the truth of evolution or the mind’s dependency on the brain). Rather I was suggesting that science can, in principle, help us understand what we should do and should want—and, perforce, what other people should do and want in order to live the best lives possible. My claim is that there are right and wrong answers to moral questions, just as there are right and wrong answers to questions of physics, and such answers may one day fall within reach of the maturing sciences of mind. As the response to my TED talk indicates, it is taboo for a scientist to think such things, much less say them public.
Most educated, secular people (and this includes most scientists, academics, and journalists) seem to believe that there is no such thing as moral truth—only moral preference, moral opinion, and emotional reactions that we mistake for genuine knowledge of right and wrong, or good and evil. While I make the case for a universal conception of morality in much greater depth in my forthcoming book, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values , I’d like to address the most common criticisms I’ve received thus far in response to my remarks at TED.
Harris’ claims here are not clear yet, but we should be extremely suspicious of this clear vaulting ambition to complete the ‘iron cage’ mentality of scientism now current.
On the other hand, Harris’ project was clearly prefigured by Kant in another mode: deriving ethical action from rational premises, a project both brilliant and flawed, but properly founded in the framework of transcendental idealism.
Harris superficial substitute will probably be more scientism, never challenge the dogmas of Darwinism, and be more wishwashy ‘ethics as the search for happiness’ bullshit.
The danger here is of bestseller idiots like Harris et al. creaing a public mood of fanaticism, as with Darwinian propaganda.
The trick here is to claim that ‘future research’ will solve the question, and that therefore it has solved the question. This trick is part of what made Darwinism a dogma of science, even as the failure to produce evidence for the claims of natural selection was phased into the background.
Scientists are angry they can’t reduce morality, and are lusting to make it a corner of scientism.
Keep in mind these idiots can’t get Darwin straight, ethics, well, they are overwheening in their ambition
Amoeba genome
Amoeba Genome Shows Evolution of Complex Life
March 30, 2010
An amoeba with a split personality is giving biologists clues to the ancestry of organisms from fungi to people and insight into how complex organisms evolved.
More on walking upright
Researchers: Laetoli footprint fossils are oldest evidence of upright walk
29th March 2010
Despite a penchant for hanging out in trees, human ancestors living 3.6 million years ago in what is now Tanzania extended their legs to stride much like people today do, a new study finds.
If so, walking may have evolved in leaps and bounds, rather than gradually, among ancient hominids.
The discovery comes from the famed trackway site in Laetoli, northern Tanzania, where more than 30 years ago researchers discovered footprint trails from two, and possibly three, human ancestors who had walked across a wet field of volcanic ash.
Bipedalism
Bipedalism takes a big step backward
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Human ancestors began walking more like humans and less like apes long before modern humans began walking the Earth.
A new laser analysis involving footprints discovered in 1976 at Laetoli, Tanzania, suggest that 3.6 million years ago, hominids (proto-humans) were walking in a very humanlike way, extending their legs and using more-balanced foot mechanics than apes. Walking on two legs has been considered a key feature of human evolution since Charles Darwin, but scientists have not agreed on when humanlike walking began. A likely time frame seemed to be about 2.5 million years ago, since that is when the earliest members of our species emerged.
Smithsonian targets darwin doubters
Smithsonian’s New Human Origins Exhibit Targets Students Who Doubt Darwinism
The Smithsonian has a new human origins exhibit, “What does it mean to be human?” specially targeted at swaying student visitors who might doubt Darwinian evolution.
Tea party and social darwinism
Finding the Forgotten Man
Tea Party populism and the return of Social Darwinism
By Christopher Malone
Physicists may have broken law of nature
For One Tiny Instant, Physicists May Have Broken a Law of Nature
ScienceDaily (Mar. 30, 2010) — For a brief instant, it appears, scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island recently discovered a law of nature had been broken.
Moral judgments and brain
Moral Judgments Can Be Altered: Neuroscientists Influence People’s Moral Judgments by Disrupting Specific Brain Region
ScienceDaily (Mar. 30, 2010) — MIT neuroscientists have shown they can influence people’s moral judgments by disrupting a specific brain region — a finding that helps reveal how the brain constructs morality.
Angkor and climate change
Did Climate Influence Angkor’s Collapse? Evidence Suggests Changing Environment Can Bring Down a Civilization
ScienceDaily (Mar. 30, 2010) — Decades of drought, interspersed with intense monsoon rains, may have helped bring about the fall of Cambodia’s ancient Khmer civilization at Angkor nearly 600 years ago
How Bats Avoid Collisions
How Bats Avoid Collisions: Making Mental Templates of Sound and Echo
ScienceDaily (Mar. 29, 2010) — For years, Brown University neuroscientist James Simmons has filmed bats as they flew in packs or individually chased prey in thick foliage. All the while, he asked himself why the bats never collided with objects in their paths or with each other.
Atlantic conveyor belt
Atlantic ‘Conveyor Belt’ Not Slowing, NASA Study Finds
ScienceDaily (Mar. 29, 2010) — New NASA measurements of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, part of the global ocean conveyor belt that helps regulate climate around the North Atlantic, show no significant slowing over the past 15 years. The data suggest the circulation may have even sped up slightly in the recent past.
‘Road-Runner’ Dinosaur
‘Road-Runner’ Dinosaur Lived In The Fast Lane, Dug Termites And Ants
ScienceDaily (Mar. 29, 2010) — A new study published in the scientific journal Zootaxa by Chinese, Canadian and British researchers describes a new dinosaur that was one of the smallest known and also one of the best adapted for running.
The Magic Potion
Published on Tuesday, March 30, 2010 by The New York Times
The Magic Potion
by Bob Herbert
With the marathon effort to overhaul the health care system behind us, it is time for the Obama administration to move quickly and powerfully to the monumental task of putting Americans back to work.
The just-say-no crowd will insist that we can’t afford a real effort to revitalize employment, that budget deficits are too high, that the economy will recover without additional government stimulus, that the president has used up most of his political capital, and that there isn’t much that government can do under any circumstances to create jobs.
Meanwhile, the United States is in real danger of sinking into a long-term economic funk. The recession is not over for the nearly 15 million people who are unemployed. Many of them have been out of work for longer than six months, a seeming eternity. Widespread joblessness and underemployment are threatening to become permanent features of the American landscape, corroding not just our standards of living but the very vibrancy of the American way of life.
Modern slavery
Katrina vanden Heuvel | Modern Slavery
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/03/29-0
Naomi Wolf and Tea Party
Naomi Wolf Thinks the Tea Parties Help Fight Fascism – Is She On to Something or in Fantasy Land?
Naomi Wolf, author of ‘End of America,’ talks about why she has become an improbable Tea Party darling, and if progressives can learn from the conservative activists.
Like heroin
An Interview with Harry Markopolos
Madoff’s Fund was Like Heroin
By RUSSELL MOKHIBER
Bernie Madoff was paying one percent a month.
Month after month.
To his investors.
Many of his investors suspected, or were told, that something was up with Madoff.
But the investors didn’t listen.
Why not?
“Once you get those kinds of returns – and that happened to so many of those feeder funds – it was like heroin,” Madoff whistleblower Harry Markopolos told Corporate Crime Reporter last week.
At odds on warming
sciftp
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/30/science/earth/30warming.html
March 29, 2010
Scientists and Weathercasters at Odds on Warming
By LESLIE KAUFMAN
The debate over global warming has created predictable adversaries, pitting environmentalists against industry and coal-state Democrats against coastal liberals.
GNXP: egg markets, moral brain, Alzheimer’s , gene patents
GNXP mail
What determines the price of a woman’s eggs? SAT scores
http://www.slate.com/id/2249098/
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A person’s moral judgments can be changed almost instantly by delivering a magnetic pulse to an area of the brain near the right ear
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125304448
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New Effort Tries to Fight Disease With Word, Math Games, Even Wii for Exercise
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703416204575145921517534304.html
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In a ruling with potentially far-reaching implications for the patenting of human genes, a judge struck down a company’s patents on two genes linked to an increased risk of breast and ovarian cancer
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/30/business/30gene.html
RG mail: honeybees, chomsky, h1n1, california water…
RG mail
http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=10191391
Honeybees Dying: Scientists Wonder Why, and Worry About Food Supply
A Third of America’s Food Depends on Plants Pollinated by Bees and Other
Insects
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http://www.latimes.com/features/la-sci-swine-flu30-2010mar30,0,1544108.story
New worries about H1N1 influenza
Continuing activity in the Southeast raises fears of a third wave of swine flu cases.
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http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1159848.html
Haaretz 29/03/2010
Israel is sliding toward McCarthyism and racism*
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http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/03/26-14
New York Times Syndicate
March 26, 2010
*Globalization Marches On*
To date, growing popular outrage has not challenged corporate power. The
future depends on how much the great majority is willing to endure, and
whether that great majority will collectively offer a constructive response
to confront the problems at the core of the state capitalist system of
domination and control. If not, the results might be grim, as history more
than amply reveals.
by Noam Chomsky
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http://www.alternet.org/story/146130/
AlterNet March 23, 2010 The
Looming Water Disaster That Could Destroy California, and Enrich Its
Billionaire Farmers By Yasha Levine, AlterNet
03.29.10
Mini Big Bangs
Scientists seek dark matter in “Big Bang” project
GENEVA, Mar. 29, 2010 (Reuters) — Scientists at the CERN research center will begin trying on Tuesday to make particles collide at ultra-high power and close to the speed of light to create mini-versions of the “Big Bang” that gave birth to the universe.
Booknotes: Contested Will, and an old post on ‘who wrote Shakespeare?’
This article at Salon reviewing a new book on Shakespeare and the Anti-Stratfordians deserves a recycled post from a while ago on an article by Justice Stevens on the subject: “Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?”
A new book on the authorship debate asks why some people refuse to accept “the Stratford man”
By Laura Miller
Justice Stevens Renders an Opinion on Who Wrote Shakespeare’s Plays It Wasn’t the Bard of Avon, He Says; ‘Evidence Is Beyond a Reasonable Doubt’
The question of ‘who wrote Shakespeare’ can be confusing and many speculative authors here can give you a bum steer. I was never an anti-Stratfordian,quite, but I did read several such books on the subject, finding that they raised questions I couldn’t answer. Read the rest of this entry »
Reconciling evolution and religion, doing it right
Mysterious Drumbeat
Reconciling religion and evolution (as opposed to Christianity and Darwinism) is quite easy if you examine the evidence of the eonic effect and its perception of evolution, and the emergence of religion, in tandem, in the same model of historical evolution.
The question of the Axial Age is crucial here.
This is not a matter of belief in the particular phases of religion, but a perception of the real significance of religion at each stage of its history, including the phase of secularism.
Ayala’s contradictions.
“The Idea of Intelligent Design is Blasphemous”
Ayala just got the Templeton prize, but here we can see how confused he is (as are his critics, perhaps!), a condition hard to avoid as you blend religion with evolution, that is, Christianity and Darwinism. It just won’t work, but Ayala has created a useful propaganda set here and is awarded the booby prize for contradictions.
I am a critic of ID, but to say that ID is a form of blasphemy is going too far and shows that Ayala’s religion is false: the entire question of revelation is a form of design in history.
I just can’t see any way to reconcile the natural selection reductionism with Christian beliefs. Does Ayala buy the usual nonsense about morality and natural selection? If he does then his religion can’t be anything but a vestigial association.
Evidence, skepticism, and the double standard with darwinism
Face-Off: Sam Harris and Deepak Chopra on God’s existence
I find the New Atheists/skeptics to be unconvincing here, and, whatever his faults, Chopra is aware of the larger dimension of religion and its history that this cult of scientism cannot seem to handle on any level.
The demand for evidence is great. The need for skepticism is dire. But where is the evidence for Darwinian natural selection? The inadequate demonstration requires skepticism about Darwinism. It is urgent, but these skeptics exempt themselves at the convenient moment.
The question is almost insoluble, as Kant makes clear: the evidence for the ‘will’ required for ethical man (and the associated free will) is hounded by the noumenal/phenomenal boundary. So the demand for evidence can backfire, because it will lock us in a box on certain questions about which we remain ignorant yet must make assumption. One dimensional scientism can only wreak havoc in this situation.
I am surprised at the way that these skeptics handle Chopra. They are very naive about the history of religion and are genuine knownothings. Chopra, whatever his wild pitches, is aware of that history and is struck into incredulity by the ignorant attitude of Shermer and Harris.
Harris, in fact, is a hypocrite who knows about New Age subjects, but lies about his activities in public.
Harris’ morality project
Can You Derive Ethics from Science?
For those of you who don’t know, TED is a convention of (usually) world-class thinkers who each give a 15-minute talk about a subject. Many of the people in TED are thought leaders. Some of them, however, get in merely because they have written a popular or controversial book. In one of this year’s TED talks, Sam Harris demonstrated that he has no grasp on the basic concepts of either philosophy or ethics.
Harris’ goal was to demonstrate that there is an objective right and wrong, and that it can, at least potentially, be determined scientifically.
Harris’ basic argument went like this:
The goal of ethics is to make conscious people have more enjoyable lives
Neuroscience can tell us factually what sorts of things make people happy or unhappy, whole or broken, etc.
Therefore, ethics is a scientific discipline, with objective rights on wrongs determined by science
To begin with, Harris somehow thinks that he is unique in saying that ethical reasoning can include scientific reasoning. In fact, all ethical reasoning uses scientific data in one way or another. It is rather amusing that Harris points out quite emphatically that if he were to go to a physics convention on string theory, he would be rightfully thrown out, yet he misses the fact that the same thing would happen if he went to a philosophy or ethics convention.
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