08.27.10
ACLU versus heat ray device
ACLU Calls On Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Officials to Abandon Plans to Use Military Heat Ray Device Against Jail Inmates
http://act.commondreams.org/go/2053?akid=149.96588.LVqBnv&t=34
The next 500 years
Robert C. Koehler | The Next 500 Years
http://act.commondreams.org/go/2047?akid=149.96588.LVqBnv&t=22
Frankenfish
‘Frankenfish’ May Go on Sale in US After Public Consultation
http://act.commondreams.org/go/2042?akid=149.96588.LVqBnv&t=12
SS cuts threaten poor
Social Security Cuts Threaten to Hurt Low-Income Americans More
http://act.commondreams.org/go/2039?akid=149.96588.LVqBnv&t=6
Atrazine threat
Atrazine Threat to Male Sexual Development Revealed
http://act.commondreams.org/go/2038?akid=149.96588.LVqBnv&t=4
Why the wars can’t be won
RG mail
by Professor John Kozy
Global Research (August 20 2010)
Edmund Burke’s statement, “Those who don’t know history are destined to
repeat it” is frequently cited, but in truth, even history’s obvious
lessons are unrecognized by many who know history very well.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=20707
08.26.10
What Wallace Got Wrong, Fodor/PP book mistitled
Since it was Wallace who, we strongly suspect, produced the basic theory that became Darwinism, after Darwin plagiarized the result (cf The Darwin Conspiracy), it is useful to see where Walace went wrong, the more so since he himself began to dissent from his own theory.
That is a big subject, more than we can handle in one post, but it is clear that he was one of the first to be overconfident in natural selection. Part of the problem is that he was trying perhaps to solve another problem, that of divergence, and simply took the experince of jungle life as universal: if you live in a jungle the teeming populations of life forms, especially insects, makes the problem of speciation look simpler than it might be. You might assume that the competitive environment of tens of thousands of creatures in one stupendous mixture running on survival of the fittest. But Wallace’s basic insight was compatible with many other things. Note that divergence was the problem that stumped Darwin, and it was Wallace who bumped him out of his last vestiges of creationist thinking, concealed by an earlier meaning of the phrase ‘natural selection’, with his series of letters.
But as Wallace realized as he left those suggestive scenes of wild nature the problem was not so simple.
He came to see that man had a soul, bad bad word, that is, a ghost ‘something’ that is beyond space and time and didn’t suffer effects from the environment. End of natural selection evolution, end of Darwinism, per se.
His change of views had no effect,as noone realized that Dawin the Dunce had stolen his ideas, ideas tailor made as a belief system for the Darwin Dunces who get PhD’s in biology, and now dominate a field from which Wallace, like Cordelia was banished.
The term ‘soul’ is one of biggest obstacles to discussion that there is, and should be wafted out the window in paper airplane form, but its logic arises powerfully in many ways, viz the philosophy of Schopenhauer, that quintessential atheist and disbeliever in souls, where the simple distinction of representation and thing in itself, applied to the human frame, makes us realize that we are dealing with the evolution of representation, a concept that is bound to fail at some point.
So Fodor/PP’s otherwise excellent book is mistitled and should have been called ‘What Wallace Got Wrong’
We need to study Wallace at length to really address this issue: this post wasn’t enough.
Morris reviews WDGW
Simon Conway Morris on What Darwin Got Wrong.
I am puzzled by Morris: he is basically a Darwin critic manque. His ideas of convergent evolution are entirely apt, but the interpretation of this remains in limbo, given the context of Darwinism.
At the end, to accuse Fodor/PP, not of ID, but of potential ID, is hardly fair. They don’t endorse ID, so what’s the problem?
ID is symptom of what is missing in Darwinism, and that is seen in the suggestions of fine-tuning in physics. The answer is in front of biologists, but they wont’ take it, stuck in nineteenth century scientism and its illusions.
Jacoby on Hirsi’s Nomad
Susan Jacoby finds herself in a lonely place among liberals. She will not accept multiculturalism as an excuse to violate universal human rights… (blurb from Arts & Letters):
Jacoby is to be commended, and I agree that the left is confused here. The current multiculturalism in Europe in relation to Islam, and Moslem immigration and integration, has produced a welfare culture that is out of control, and a demographic situation that is unfair to the European public as European societies are flooded with an invasion, not a cultural osmosis. But this issue has been taken up by the right, and the literature on the problem is all from conservative authors.
Thus Hirsi hits a nerve with her book Nomad, even as she is swept up in a rightwing tide. But Jacoby is right, and justified in her defense.
Hirsi dislikes Islam, and has good reason to say what she says. A balanced view of Islam is very difficult to achieve. Having lived with the world’s biggest islamophobes, the sufis, I would say that Islam is a curious circumstance, and awefully easy to get wrong. If you criticize it, you usually buy into some partial view, but if you are enthusiastic you end up ignoring some hard realities. As a student of world history, and the eonic effect, I am systematically plus and minus with Islam. It was a truly stunning explosion created by hidden gnostics hoping to complete their project of monotheistic globalization after watching Christianity stall and deviate in its doctrines into a curious mess of pottage. They had one last chance, as it were, and at the dawn of the Dark Ages waged Holy War against chaos, with mixed results. Results that were themselves a chaos.
Just figuring out how Islamic culture works is confusing, because it has many layers, and a far mor sophisticated gnostic culture than Christianity. Islam is filled with some unique mysteries Assessing that is not so simple. And it is not an excuse to use this to suppress the sad realities of Jihad, cf. Paul Fergosi’s book by that name.
Jacoby’s point, which is at risk in a postmodern age of sophistical anti-modernism, is that a modernist universalism should stand as a challenge to multiculturalism. It is a hard point to make at this point given the history of modernism. But the point remains, that the rise of the modern created the first steps toward a new form of universal global culture. The irony is the concealed resemblance to similar projects in the original Islam and Christianity.
I recommend a look at the eonic effect, which has all the pieces in one place for this kind of analysis.
Darwin challenged
We reported on this new research here yesterday, but didn’t pursue it because it doesn’t seem to really amount to much. Now Coyne’s blog takes on the article.
To me, Darwin was wrong for very basic reasons. But most of all his theory, which comes from Wallace, fails basic observation tests. We don’t know, because observing natural selection in practice is really tough. Finally, the study of world history shows us the real process of evolution, we suspect.
But in general, the critique of Coyne is not believable.
Darwinists have cried ‘wolf’ to many times to be believable as critics of critics.
More later here.
Natural selection, problems, problems
Stephen
hucklebird@aol.com
76.103.217.68 Submitted on 2010/08/25 at 11:48pm
Evolution’s driver is now given over to the space-time fabric, as this fabric is the maker of niches. This new view does not over step the Kantian limits having to do with space and time, and the new view can look to support by pointing to my ontological refutation of Darwinism given in an old post, see item (2):http://trinitybook.wordpress.com/2010/06/07/natural-selection-is-not-evolution/
So I am very happy seeing this major concession.
Liver cells from skin
Scientists create liver cells from human skin
By AFP – YAHOO NEWS
Added: Thursday, 26 August 2010 at 9:47 AM
http://richarddawkins.net/articles/505860-scientists-create-liver-cells-from-human-skin
How Much Did Darwin Get Wrong?
http://news.discovery.com/earth/how-much-did-darwin-get-wrong.html
A study in Biology Letters written up in the BBC earlier this week has found an interesting wrinkle in Darwin’s theory of natural selection. In short, evolution may not be as driven by competition as once thought.
In the classic view of “Darwinism” (itself a misleading phrase, perhaps), organisms compete over resources for the right to survive and reproduce. Those that are successful pass on their genes. Those that can’t cut it die out.
But looking at the fossil record over the last 400 million years, Sarda Sahney and colleagues at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom found that patterns of evolution don’t always match this trend.
Instead, species tend to move away from competition into new ecological niches. And sometimes they just get lucky.
For example, the evolution of birds allowed a whole group of animals to take to the skies. The extinction of the dinosaurs, which had for millions of years ruled the landscape, opened the door for mammals to colonize the planet.
Darwin’s “wrongness” on this point or any related to evolution is in the eye of the beholder. Religious leaders who advocate creationism have campaigned mercilessly against his ideas (and against science in general), seeking to sew false controversy in the tenets of natural selection whenever and wherever possible.
Misunderstood ID?
A Biologist Misunderstands Intelligent Design (Again)
Applegate may have been amusingly off, yet right, with her statement (s), but it is not fair to tell anyone they don’t understand ID. As if the Discovery Institute understood it, or had a monopoly brand.
ID debate and affirmation is a form of philosophic deliberation with an inadequate evidentiary base. We can’t say that people who disagree with the Discovery brand has misunderstood design issues.
What the Discovery Institute really means here is that critics haven’t read e.g. Dembski or understood his misleading math intened to create the illusion of hard science, and useful, as here, with telling off people who haven’t mastered this equal and opposite sophistry to the Darwinian.
In an earlier article, I pointed out biologist Kathryn Applegate’s astonishing attempt to attribute the bacterial flagellum to “magic” rather than intelligent design. But I neglected to point out another problem with her critique of ID: She apparently does not understand what the theory of intelligent design actually proposes. Applegate’s misunderstanding becomes clear early-on when she asserts: “Despite the strong appearance of special design, most scientists, myself included, believe the evidence points to a gradual development for the bacterial flagellum.” Applegate here treats intelligent design as the opposite of “a gradual development of the bacterial flagellum.” But no intelligent design theorist would do that. Many intelligently-designed things in nature may well develop through a gradual process. That’s not the issue. The issue is whether things can develop through a gradual process that is undirected.
Natural antifreeze
Why Fish Don’t Freeze in the Arctic Ocean: Chemists Unmask Natural Antifreeze
ScienceDaily (Aug. 26, 2010) — Bochum researchers have discovered how natural antifreeze works to protect fish in the icy waters of the Arctic Ocean from freezing to death. They were able to observe that an antifreeze protein in the fish’s blood affects the water molecules in its vicinity such that they cannot freeze, and everything remains fluid. Here, there is no chemical bond between protein and water — the mere presence of the protein is sufficient.
A great fizz at end of Ice Age
A ‘Great Fizz’ of Carbon Dioxide Was Produced at the End of the Last Ice Age
Neural switch for fear
Freeze or Run? Not That Simple: Scientists Discover Neural Switch That Controls Fear
Biosynthetic Corneas
Seeing the World With New Eyes: Biosynthetic Corneas Restore Vision in Humans
Social security madness
Published on Thursday, August 26, 2010 by The Washington Independent
Social Security Cuts Threaten to Hurt Low-Income Americans More
by Martha C. White
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/08/26-4
Ground zero
Seeing Only What We Are Shown
It’s Not About Religion
By GREGORY HARMS
http://www.counterpunch.org/harms08262010.html
Since the September 11 attacks, the topic of Islam, and in particular Muslim extremism, has come front and center in the news coverage and public discourse. This focus has in some cases spun off into strange and disturbing areas. One example in the news is the “Ground Zero mosque,” which is neither a mosque nor located at Ground Zero. Another are reports on a recent Pew Research poll indicating 18 percent of Americans think President Obama is a Muslim.[1] Yet the point in both stories is not the inaccuracies. The point is that these perceptions are construed as being negative; the mosque’s “location” and Obama’s “religion” are a source of indignation. In other words, anything associated with Islam existing at Ground Zero or in the White House is, to some, unacceptable. More succinctly put, anything associated with Islam is unacceptable.
Gene test crackdown
gnxp
A crackdown on firms selling gene tests direct to the consumer would come at a cost, argue Daniel MacArthur and Caroline Wright
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20727745.500-dont-stand-in-the-way-of-genomes-for-all.html
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Time: new version for adults
TIME Announces New Version of Magazine Aimed at Adults
http://act.commondreams.org/go/2025?akid=148.96588.zX9N7k&t=16
Tea Parties, Think Tanks & Koch Brothers
RG mail
Tea Parties, Think Tanks & Koch Brothers
August 25th, 2010 Read the rest of this entry »
Kin selection
gnxp
Evolutionary biologists overturn long-held kin-selection theory
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100825/full/news.2010.427.html
Fish diets
gnxp
One reason Americans don’t eat enough fish is that it’s rarely in our diets when we’re children
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2013098,00.html
Tears and evolution
gnxp
Many animals yelp or cry out when they’re in pain. But as far as scientists can tell, we humans seem to be the only species that shed tears for emotional reasons. Scientists who study evolution say crying probably conferred some benefit and did something to advance our species — because it’s stayed with us
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129329054
Stem cell appeal
gnxp
The head of the National Institutes of Health said a judge’s decision would most likely force the cancellation of dozens of experiments in diseases ranging from diabetes to Parkinson’s
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/25/health/policy/25stem.html
Hitler’s roots
gnxp
Adolf Hitler is likely to have had Jewish and African roots, DNA tests have shown
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/world-war-2/7961211/Hitler-had-Jewish-and-African-roots-DNA-tests-show.html
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