07.31.10
Posted in Booknotes, Evolution at 4:17 pm by nemo
Links to Review of What Darwin Got Wrong
A review at TPM (The Philosopher’s Magazine) is about as reliable as an astrological prediction.
The magazine is the worst kind of academic pseudo-philosophy and is an abject lickspittle to scientism/Darwinism.
I think that the problem with Fodor/PP’s book is that it is too slyly arcane to really bear full conviction.
There is nothing complex about the failure of natural selection: as Fred Hoyle pointed out years ago, the statistics won’t work. Period.
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Posted in Booknotes, Evolution at 4:11 pm by nemo
Reading: Cro-Magnon: How the Ice Age Gave Birth to the First Modern Humans by Brian Fagan
Interesting, but the subtitle might be misleading: the ‘first modern humans’, as I understand, are Out of Africa migrants, as already ‘modern’ humans.
But I will recomment anon, after reading the book.
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Posted in Booknotes, Evolution at 2:07 pm by nemo
The Extended Synthesis
Amazing, this book FINALLY gets another review at Amazon.com. I was wondering if I was to be the only person to comment on this book, whose fate in the Darwin universe is to be deepsixed, and never discussed by the Agents of the Paradigm.
The reviewer challenges me as to whether the gang of 16 is really a bunch of cowards. A thousand apologies for such a rude accusation, but, I fear, it is true. You would think the authors would make some attempt above a peep to point out that the ‘synthesis’ has failed, in some promotion of their work to the public, which, so far, hasn’t a clue this book even exists.
My harsh remarks are regrettable perhaps, but I am through promoting partial paradigm shifts: I have my own far superior view, which is not another theory, but a general perspective on (human) evolution looking at world history. So four stars was too many, but still I need to recomment someone read the book to realize that Darwinism is from the rear view mirror at this point. The authors are too timid to actually say so, and the ‘extended’ synthesis is really the ‘kaput’ synthesis, but if you examine book carefully you will see trouble on the horizon for Darwinism.
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Posted in Booknotes at 1:49 pm by nemo
After it hit me like a ton of bricks last year that I have been laggard on grasping the 9/11 issues, I have also been going back to study the old JFK classics, here Marrs’ Crossfire. I got a copy at Amazon for $.50 (cents!), and can only feel sadness that the cover story is still operative in the braindead mass media, and, worse, on the left.
Chomsky still doesn’t get it???!
In fairness to myself, I hadn’t read the materials coming out, and thus the problem with the 9/11 material was simple lack of reading as I expended my book capital on ‘darwiniana’. It took finally the price of one book by David Ray Griffin to set me in a tailspin, reorienting my reading.
Nota bene, and be forewarned. You have to take the initiative, and be able to afford the book basics here.
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Posted in Evolution at 1:34 pm by nemo
Review of Weiner book, see previous post, also”
In his remarkable Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “The Beak of the Finch,” Jonathan Weiner followed Peter and Rosemary Grant, biologists who had spent years studying birds in the Galápagos Islands. Their work showed that finches evolve rapidly in response to changes in the food supply, a discovery that ran counter to Darwin’s idea that natural selection operates only very slowly. Weiner’s portrait of this scientific couple worked well as a narrative portal to that story of evolutionary biology.
We discussed this book and review in the previous post, but this introductory paragraph about Weiner’s earlier book deserves a challenge:
The speed of adaptation here described is not true evolution but the microevolutionary adjustments of finches who are doubtfully different species.
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Posted in General at 1:30 pm by nemo
In his new book, “Long for This World,” Weiner makes similar use of another brilliant theoretical scientist, the English gerontologist Aubrey de Grey, a tireless proselytizer for radical life extension.
While there may well be a case for life extension, the references to ‘immortality’ are totally off, as is the Darwinian pyschology that animates all these discussions.
The real ‘immortality’ that stands behind the physical body is completely denied by current scientism/Darwinism.
But this aspect of man, which is not the immortality of the psyche, but the dimension of man beyond space and time (pace Kantian/Schopenhauerian discussions of the categories, etc..) has been completely lost by students of evolution. Yet this aspect of man was/is known to all societies and times of man, however confused the variants. Homo sapiens, until the coming of modern scientific stupidity, always had a sense of the larger dimension of man.
True ‘immortal man’, in the sense of the man who was never born and never died.
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Posted in General at 11:33 am by nemo
Freud and Lewis, God and atheism
http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20100731/ARTICLE/7311058/2055/NEWS
Published: Saturday, July 31, 2010 at 1:00 a.m.
Last Modified: Friday, July 30, 2010 at 11:04 p.m.
What could have happened if the atheistic Sigmund Freud had met the newly religious British writer C.S. Lewis three weeks before the Viennese doctor’s death in London on Sept. 23, 1939? This is what Mark St. Germain ponders in his delightful comedy-drama “Freud’s Last Session” at New York’s Little Theatre. If it did not happen exactly like this, it should have.
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Posted in Booknotes at 11:30 am by nemo
A Revolution Of the Mind
The Industrial Enlightenment put knowledge in the service of production, changing the course of history.
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Posted in technology at 11:28 am by nemo
Awe and the Machine
Today we are less likely to feel awe in the presence of our machines than we are to experience what historian Jacques Barzun called “machine-made helplessness.”
The problem is that one machines made us feel intelligent, now they can make us feel unintelligent.
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Posted in Booknotes at 11:25 am by nemo
Not a Day Over Infinity
By ABRAHAM VERGHESE
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Posted in atheism at 11:18 am by nemo
Public Perceptions of Atheism By HITCHENS_JNR
Added: Saturday, 31 July 2010 at 01:38 PM
http://richarddawkins.net/discussions/494530-public-perceptions-of-atheism
I was inspired to write this by the discussion on the “Four Horsemen” video. There’s a part of the video where they discuss the “image problem” that atheism has, especially in the US. Many people seem to asume that atheists are pessimistic, joyless, cruel, uncharitable, untrustworthy etc etc. Christian apologists are quick to whip out the argument that Hitler and Stalin were atheists (even though Hitler probably wasn’t, and even though Stalin probably learned a lot about how to control people through fear in his youthful studies at an Orthodox seminary, and even though Christians are bound to lose any arguments about cruelty and oppression, seeing as how their religion is caked in two thousand years’ worth of heretical blood!!) Opponents of atheism always raise the spectre of social Darwinism, and some of its crueller tenets, as if this is a necessary consequence of a lack of faith in God. Then there’s that famous survey which shows that atheists are the least trusted group of people in the US.
Anyway, two questions suggest themselves:
1) Where does this mistrust of atheism in public and private life originate?
2) What do you think atheists can do to improve how atheism is perceived in the world at large?
I wonder how many believers who are seriously questioning the existence of God are deterred from becoming atheists because of nasty preconceptions about what atheists are like
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Posted in Evolution at 11:16 am by nemo
Oy! The Koala and Kangaroo Came to Australia from Elsewhere
By David Bois | Thursday, July 29, 2010 7:06 AM ET
Surprising finds from evolutionary biology indicate that while the marsupial is most closely associated with Australia, they actually got there from the Americas following their start in China.
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Posted in technology at 11:05 am by nemo
Breaking the Language Barrier: Language Translation Devices for US Troops Tested
ScienceDaily (July 30, 2010) — At dusk, a car stops at a checkpoint in Afghanistan. It is a tense moment for all. Because an interpreter is not available, U.S. Marines use hand gestures to ask the driver to step out of the car and open the trunk and hood for inspection. There’s a lot of room for error.
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Posted in Evolution at 11:03 am by nemo
Unexpected Viral ‘Fossils’ Found in Vertebrate Genomes
ScienceDaily (July 30, 2010) — Over millions of years, retroviruses, which insert their genetic material into the host genome as part of their replication, have left behind bits of their genetic material in vertebrate genomes. In a recent study, published July 29 in the open-access journal PLoS Pathogens, a team of researchers have now found that human and other vertebrate genomes also contain many ancient sequences from Ebola/Marburgviruses and Bornaviruses — two deadly virus families.
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Posted in In the News at 11:02 am by nemo
Published on Saturday, July 31, 2010 by CommonDreams.org
Rotting Fish
by Linh Dinh
Congress has just failed to pass the 9/11 health care bill, which would have compensated and provided medical care for thousands of first responders, those who have become gravely ill from breathing toxic dust at the World Trade Center nearly nine years ago. Hundreds have already died. At the time, our government declared the air at Ground Zero safe, just as it had vouched that Agent Orange was harmless several decades earlier, or Corexit innocuous now. Soon enough, thousands of BP clean up workers will have to litigate, and many, if not most, will die before they’ll see a penny.
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Posted in General at 11:00 am by nemo
Published on Saturday, July 31, 2010 by CommonDreams.org
Out of Afghanistan
by Ralph Nader
The war in Afghanistan is nearly nine years old—the longest in American history. After the U.S. quickly toppled the Taliban regime in October 2001, the Taliban, by all accounts, came back stronger and harsher enough to control now at least 30 percent of the country. During this time, U.S. casualties, armaments and expenditures are at record levels.
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Posted in In the News at 10:58 am by nemo
Chelsea’s Wedding
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts07302010.html
It is not unusual for members of the diminishing upper middle class to drop $20,000 or $30,000 on a big wedding. But for celebrities this large sum wouldn’t cover the wedding dress or the flowers.
When country music star Keith Urban married actress Nicole Kidman in 2006, their wedding cost $250,000. This large sum hardly counts as a celebrity wedding. When mega-millionaire real estate mogul Donald Trump married model Melania Knauss, the wedding bill was $1,000,000.
The marriages of Madonna and film director Guy Ritchie, Tiger Woods and Elin Nordegren, and Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones pushed up the cost of celebrity marriages to $1.5 million.
Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes upped the ante to $2,000,000.
Now comes the politicians’s daughter as celebrity. According to news reports, Chelsea Clinton’s wedding to investment banker Mark Mezvinsky on July 31 is costing papa Bill $3,000,000. According to the London Daily Mail, the total price tag will be about $5,000,000. The additional $2,000,000 apparently is being laid off on US Taxpayers as Secret Service costs for protecting former president Clinton and foreign heads of state, such as the presidents of France and Italy and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who are among the 500 invited guests along with Barbara Streisand, Steven Spielberg, Oprah Winfrey, Ted Turner, and Clinton friend and donor Denise Rich, wife of the Clinton-pardoned felon.
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Posted in you've got mail at 10:55 am by nemo
mxmail
Assaf Kfoury: Keeping the Record Straight
About Noam Chomsky’s trip to the Middle East in May 2010: Coverage of the
trip
and discussions of Chomsky’s statements on Fayyad’s development policies,
on
being a “supporter of Israel,” on “One-State” vs. “Two-State” vs.
“No-State,”
and on BDS.
http://www.israeli-occupation.org/2010-07-30/assaf-kfoury-keeping-the-record-straight
/
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Posted in you've got mail at 10:53 am by nemo
Greg Mitchell: What’s Sadly Missing in Time’s Afghan Cover
http://act.commondreams.org/go/1688?akid=128.96588.oR7etF&t=32
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Posted in you've got mail at 10:51 am by nemo
Pete Seeger Live – New Protest Song About BP Oil Spill in Gulf Coast on Banjo w James Maddock Guitar
http://act.commondreams.org/go/1680?akid=128.96588.oR7etF&t=16
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Posted in you've got mail at 10:49 am by nemo
Oil Industry Safety Record Blown Open
http://act.commondreams.org/go/1676?akid=128.96588.oR7etF&t=8
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07.30.10
Posted in Evolution at 3:46 pm by nemo
A Humanist’s Reflections on Evolutionary Biology
All of these strategies are beside the point: why not simply abndon Darwinism and educated the public in the facts of evolution without Darwin’s theory?
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Posted in you've got mail at 3:35 pm by nemo
http://wsws.org/articles/2010/jul2010/gulf-j30.shtml
Corporate media downplays Gulf oil spill
By Josué Olmos
30 July 2010
Read the rest of this entry »
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