History, Evolution, and the Darwin Debate
Core Knowledge of Tree Fruit Expands With Apple Genome Sequencing
ScienceDaily (Aug. 29, 2010) — An international team of scientists from Italy, France, New Zealand, Belgium and the USA have published a draft sequence of the domestic apple genome in the current issue of Nature Genetics.
Published on Monday, August 30, 2010 by The Guardian/UK
Friends of the Earth Urges End to ‘Land Grab’ for Biofuels
Charity predicts more food shortages in Africa because of EU target to produce 10% of all transport fuels from biofuels by 2020
by Katie Allen
Putting the Brakes on Neoliberal Economics
Race to the Bottom
By ISMAEL HOSSEIN-ZADEH
http://www.counterpunch.org/zadeh08302010.html
While the harrowing economic hardship that started in late 2007 and early 2008 rages on, and countless people in the United States, Europe and other parts of the world are losing their jobs, their homes and their sources of livelihood, policy-makers in the advanced capitalist countries of the West are standing idly by without lifting a finger to alleviate the onerous burden of the crushing recession. On the contrary, they have embarked on an orchestrated series of cruel belt-tightening austerity policies that have, indeed, contributed to the worsening of the recession.
The question is why? How can the policy makers’ callous indifference to the plight of the people, or their pathetic inability to carry out effective policies of economic recovery, be explained?
http://www.nymag.com/daily/intel/2010/08/in_1913_the_department_of.html
New York, Darwin, and Cimex Lectularious
In 1913, the Department of Agriculture issued a warning to
housewives about a bug called cimex lectularius, then known as a
“chinch,” “crimson rambler,” or “mahogany flat.” Now we call it
something else: a bedbug.
Even then, the bedbug was said to show “a certain degree of
wariness and intelligence from its long association with man.” The
Department of Agriculture chose to look on the bright side: Thank
God the damn thing lost its wings ages ago, because “otherwise
there would be no safety from this pest, even for the most careful
and thorough housekeeper.” Nearly 100 years later, freedom from
cimex is increasingly hard to find. Summer 2010 has been the
Summer of the Bedbug.
Yale University and the Problem of Antisemitism
By Lawrence Davidson
Monday, August 30, 2010
Between the 23rd and the 25th of August, Yale University held a conference on “Global Antisemitism: A Crisis of Modernity.” It was sponsored by the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism. Therefore, this was a university event and not one brought in from the outside to use Yale facilities. On the surface there is nothing wrong with this. Antisemitism is an age old form of racism and it calls for ongoing academic study. The problem is that this particular conference approached the subject from the ideologically driven position of radical Zionism. In other words, many of the assumptions upon which the conference was built were unfortunately tainted with bias. Indeed, in at least one instance (a panel on the “self-hating” Jew), one might suggest that the event was itself promoting a particularly virulent form of antisemitism. Very odd indeed.
http://www.zcommunications.org/yale-university-and-the-problem-of-antisemitism-by-lawrence-davidson
CLIMATE AND CAPITALISM
An online journal focusing on capitalism, climate change, and the
ecosocialist alternative.
http://climateandcapitalism.com
Facebook: http://tinyurl.com/CandC-FaceBook
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gnxp
Why did our ancestors eat each other? Simple: They were hungry.
http://news.discovery.com/human/first-cannibals-nutrition.html
gnxp
Recent research suggests that mind-wandering may be important and that knowledge of how it works might help treat such conditions as Alzheimer’s disease, autism, depression and schizophrenia
http://www.latimes.com/health/la-he-brain-20100830,0,479095.story
gnxp
The idea that your mother tongue shapes your experience of the world may be true after all
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html
gnxp
We’ve evolved ways to come back from the brink of death — and doctors’ efforts to help may just be getting in the way
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20727731.600-darwinian-medicine-does-intensive-care-kill-or-cure.html
gnxp
A new study suggests that young children possess a skill many adults assume they lack: they are able to judge when a human behavior is statistically probable versus when it is
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2014315,00.html
RG mail
http://www.jpost.com/LandedPages/PrintArticle.aspx?id=186154&utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=b33865cc72-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
Jerusalem Post 27/08/2010
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RG mail
A Book Review
by Alistair McConnachie
Prosperity (August 2000)
Many people today think that the State creates all the money in
circulation. It doesn’t. Almost all money in circulation, around 97%,
is created by the banking sector “out of nothing” and circulates as
electronic and cheque book money – see Prosperity, April 2000 for the
process by which money comes into circulation:
http://www.prosperityuk.com/prosperity/articles/moneymake.html
Coming tomorrow, I hope: the (first pages of the) online edition of World History and The Eonic Effect, fourth edition.
http://history-and-evolution.com/
The horrible U.S. air raids on Japan were so successful that by the end of WWII it was hard to find suitable targets for the A-bombs… more
(from A&L)
Do you blame all Muslims for 9/11?
This artificially created hate controversy serves the obvious purpose of deflecting attention from those responsible.
Since we are on the subject a useful post, linked from Marxmail:
Friday, Aug 27, 2010 09:28 ET
Racial and ethnic exploitation of economic insecurity
By Glenn Greenwald
Shermer’s remarks about markets and virtue are pretty wretched. How could anyone make such statements publicly in an economy like this one? The reality is something ominous. Two years ago I wrote a post about homelessness, and strategies there, with an update on ten below sleeping bags: http://darwiniana.com/2009/07/17/homelessness-neoliberals-in-distress/
The reality, Mr. Shermer, is that economic hard times and unemployment can cause people to turn into criminals, and they will never quite recover from that. Shermer’s ideological crap is thoroughly offensive once you see the reality.
In fact, a lot of the capitalist class emerges from the ethical turn in the low life riffraff baptised in evil by capitalist downturns.
This is NOT evolution.
We referred in the previous post to ‘Das Adam Smith Problem (a German phrase)’, the seeming contradictions in his ethical views.
Beware of what you say in life, or you will end up like Adam Smith, the justification for every kind of economic folly, forever after.
http://www.bigquestionsonline.com/columns/michael-shermer/evolution-ethics-and-the-market
We have already cited Coyne’s critique of this nonsense from Shermer. But Shermer, like Larry Arnhart at Darwinian Conservatism blog, is so extreme that he at least shows us the connection between fake/bad evolution science, economic ideology, and the propaganda game made out of all of it.
Note that Shermer gives us a complete chain of influences with the original perps, e.g. de Waals, who should be more cautious in dosing stupidity in people who will ideologize his findings, and Adam Smith, whom Shermer, typically, must disagree with. Smith was a very complex figure sufficiently still detached from capitalist ideology to distinguish between observations about markets by external observers, and the action of those inside markets as players, and what they said, or soon would say, to justify themselves. Marx called it alienation in the latter case: you are inside the game and lose all perspective on what you are doing, and just might believe that ‘greed is good’.
Note that a meta statement, theory, about markets made outside of them, viz. ‘greed is good’, is an ironic statement, possibly true about macro behaviors about behaviorism in the ‘rats inside the skinner box’, quite different from a statement inside such a system where it is false because a naive agent who is easily sold on nihilism will destroy his ethical life because of an economic theory. There is life outside of markets, and you must live that life by a different standard from market mechanics.
The whole game was suspected and criticized in advance by Smith whose views on ethics are the object of some classic studies (‘Das Adam Smith Problem’).
The discussions of chimpanzees here, as usual, puts you on the defensive, at first, for, who has seen these situations at close hand. But we have to wonder that these Just So Stories are the obvious evidence of what Marx charged, reading capitalist ideas into nature.
Meanwhile, at least we can cite Shermer as a ‘base and vulgar author’ in the classic phrase of Marx for such writers at the lowest ring of the capitalist Inferno (those who induce these easy evils in their readers), but the Templeton gang is something worse, a kind of Christian theological dysentery, a sort of smelly stool and demonic canceration of that bastion of modernity, the Protestant Ethic. Note that those who believed in the latter in the early modern surely feared any nonsense about ‘greed being good’ would send them to hell. Even secularist should take due not: hell comes in many forms, and the sorry wretches at the end of the capitalist game would be to far gone for normal life.
In any case, it is entirely against the experience of life, and a complete nullity for Shermer to spout this nonsense about markets increasing virute. Shermer must be a pampered child of the meritocracy, buffered from the action of markets, the ultimate suck up to spout this kind of ‘wished for’ ideology, that yields the profitable comfort life of those who are smart enough to concoct these lies. Otherwise he would not spout this kind of naivete in a social scene where immense suffering has been inflicted on so many, and quite probably immense harm has been inflicted on that sacred fetish, the American economy, now assisted by capitalists pushing it into decline.
The Oedipus Paradox
Our discussions of Hauser and his future book ‘Evilicious’ have pointed out the way that our study of the Oedipus Paradox previewed this, doing the job right, by showing the whole phase of this Social Darwinist game of theory to justifiy/legitimate evil deeds devoutly wished for.
First Cannibals Ate Each Other for Extra Nutrition
Why did our ancestors eat each other? Simple: They were hungry.
I guess that at some point savvy apes, applying kin selection theory, refrained from cannibalism to generate altruism.
You would think Huxley’s problem here would be cited: why, how and when did we evolve past these behaviors?
The Templeton Foundation has two major goals, promoting capitalism and blurring the line between science and faith.
Shermer here is too much even for the strict Darwinist Coyne who also usefully points out the ideological orientation of the Templeton gang. Coyne’s critique is good. I have a hard time with Shermer who is so confused I tend to start sputtering in speechless gasping when confronted with Shermer on markets and evolution.
So it’s hardly a surprise that their Big Questions online magazine would publish an article claiming that capitalism is really an important source of human morality. And it’s not that surprising that they’d also claim an evolutionary basis for this wonderfully fortuitous and Gekko-ish conjunction of greed and ethics.
What is surprising is that the argument is made by Michael Shermer.
We have critiqued Shermer on this blog many times, as briefly here.
It is almost incredible how the nexus of Darwinism, Social Darwinism, market economics, and classical liberalism merge in the minds of often intelligent people to produce this ideological ‘mud’, as with Shermer. I have a bad feeling Shermer has never read any Karl Marx. (HaHa funny joke)
Sorting out the confusion requires seeing the problem with Darwinism, how natural selection can generate Social Darwinism, distinguishing historical dynamics from economic, especially market, dynamics, and some detachment as to the dangerous shibboleeths of Adam Smith on self-interest, and morality.
Shermer, sadly, seems to flunk all tests here. To say that capitalism is a source of morality is entirely the wrong approach (there are some ways to argue something related to this, e.g. the ‘Protestant ethic’ approach (which is actually the reverse argument: markets need ethical meta-behaviors), with some understanding that markets presupposes honest men, apparently so that dishonest men can score a bundle.
But in general it won’t work. In fairness, the mix of Dawinism and market delusion is not a final judgment against capitalism. A non-Social Darwinist capitalism that isn’t confused by Darwinism is a possibility never tried, save in the spectacular successes of Social Democratic Sweden type experiments.
That the Templeton gang should be promoting capitalism is a warning that their religious garbage is worse than the Darwinian brand.
The dangerous reality is that entire populations are becoming sick psychologically from this mixture of poisons. To inculcate innocent publics with limited intelligence that ‘greed is good’ as a spin off of Adam Smith (whose views were much more complicated) is close to a crime against humanity, and Bolshevik experience shows one outcome.
Pope Benedict’s visit: Beleaguered Catholic church struggles against secular tide
As the pope heads for Britain amid a chorus of militant criticism, the UK’s Catholics remain reluctant to confront their detractors
The pitch of the New Atheists has a suspicious resemblance to the catechismic doctrinality that spoiled Christianity. The similar circusmtance with Darwinian scientism and the New Atheist blurb thinking on religion makes one hope that the two opposites will kill each other off, leaving us to move onto something real, both scientifically and religiously.
Racism? Sexism? Que sera, sera.
Evolutionary evangelist Jerry Coyne argues that we are all just slaves to our genes and that behaviors likes racism and sexism are facts of evolution. They’re in our “own nature”.
http://www.uncommondescent.com/darwinism/darwin-as-racist-vs-darwin-as-anti-slavery-hero/
Darwin as racist, vs. Darwin as anti-slavery hero
O’Leary
From some correspondence with a friend:Darwin was a racist, pure and simple. Why can’t people just accept that fact, and get PAST it?
I have become increasingly suspicious of efforts to excuse Darwin’s racism by saying that the old boy was also anti-slavery.
Lots of racists are anti-slavery. That was true thousands of years ago, by the way.
This happened, but how does one explain it? By DAVIDPHILPOT
Updated: Sunday, 29 August 2010 at 6:19 AM
http://richarddawkins.net/discussions/507204-this-happened-but-how-does-one-explain-it
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