History, Evolution, and the Darwin Debate
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http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hnJ5xv6JWfUMC_76C9JW9JAZEuHg?docId=CNG.d6447c3c5ab62a5cb2ae1bab9f8cbab8.4a1
AFP October 27, 2010
He added that it would be “difficult” for the US to pull out of Afghanistan
because the US had previously trained militants there who were still
“terrorising” the region.
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http://af.reuters.com/article/egyptNews/idAFN2616428720101026?sp=true
Reuters Oct 26, 2010
UN investigator urges probe of alleged US torture
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Not his finest hour: The dark side of Winston Churchill
By Johann Hari
/Thursday, 28 October 2010/
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An email exchange on WHEE/4th and Darwinism
from: H-WORLD@H-NET.MSU.EDU
The Darwin debate is controversial, but times are changing, and a book such as Fodor’s What Darwin Got Wrong indicates a new wave of critiques of that theory.
My citation of the Darwin debate was to free the study of history from the evolutionary psychology nonsense that tends to lurk in the background of even those who never refer to it. Darwinism has distorted our views of history, that’s all. The latent Social Darwinism of such accounts is egregious and unnecessary. So let’s be rid of it.
My point here was simply to alert teachers of world history to a new way to approach all that with a unique blend of theory that doubles as practical periodization. Read the rest of this entry »
Stable Way to Store the Sun’s Heat: Storing Thermal Energy in Chemical Could Lead to Advances in Storage and Portability
ScienceDaily (Oct. 25, 2010) — Researchers at MIT have revealed exactly how a molecule called fulvalene diruthenium, which was discovered in 1996, works to store and release heat on demand. This understanding, reported in a paper published on Oct. 20 in the journal Angewandte Chemie, should make it possible to find similar chemicals based on more abundant, less expensive materials than ruthenium, and this could form the basis of a rechargeable battery to store heat rather than electricity.
We fail to see the spectacular correlation of Greek Archaic culture, whose first clarion was the Homeric opus (or its redaction), with the macroevolutionary pattern of the eonic macrosequence.
http://www.redfortyeight.com/2010/10/27/the-great-american-stickup/
The abuse of intelligence tests goes on and on because noone is ‘metaintelligent’ and therefore able to judge what real intelligence is.
This confusion is absolutely rife in the Darwin debate where highly intelligent Darwinists assume that because they are smart the theory is smart and that anyone who doesn’t agree is not smart.
It never dawns on anyone that Darwin was notably dumb, and had to be rescued by Alfred Wallace, whose theory Darwin ripped off.
Wallace discovered ‘Darwinism’ with a series of brilliant intuitions, that broke through the deadlock of several confusions (e.g. his divergence theory) but he later, quite intelligently, came to see that his theory, by then Darwin’s, was too limited, especially for human evolution.
Wallace was highly intelligent in several senses, among them science intuition able to create new theories.
Darwin was not, and part of the reason for his clinging to natural selection was that the idea is prime for people who are not very intelligent and need something simple to serve as the all around explanation.
I think it is dawning on many that something is very wrong here. Darwinism is stupid, and for some reason a lot of smart people have been mesmerized into taking it as a belief system. It is also a sly tactic of peer pressure and groupie submission to the leader, a phenomenon visible in the Dawkins cult. Dawkins has a unique knack for making his readers feel smart if they agree with him, read his books in search of that tactic.
Part of the problem is the way the people who are ‘smart’ are grabbed at an early age and inducted into the general conditioning of the science system, which is in fact a uniquely stupid organization, beyond, once again, the surface brilliance of its technical specialitists, and especially physicists.
We had a taste of something different in the generation of the founders of Quantum Mechanics, but the reign of high IQ stupidoes is now upon us.
So forgive me if I find the ‘G spot’ mostly malarkey. It measures certain things perhaps, aggregates of individuals in economies, etc…
But it is a highly misleading indicator for science intelligence in general, beyond the physics/math routines where the whiz factors means at least something.
At the beginning of the 20th century the British psychologist Charles Spearman “discovered” the idea of general intelligence. Spearman observed that students’ grades in different subjects, and their scores on various tests, were all positively correlated. He then showed that this pattern could be explained mathematically by assuming that people vary in special abilities for the different tests as well as a single general ability—or “g”—that is used for all of them.
Skeleton dating clears Columbus of importing syphilis to Europe
Tale of the Headless Dragonfly: Ancient Struggle, Preserved in Amber
ScienceDaily (Oct. 26, 2010) — In a short, violent battle that could have happened somewhere this afternoon, the lizard made a fast lunge at the dragonfly, bit its head off and turned to run away. Lunch was served.
But the battle didn’t happen today, it happened about 100 million years ago, probably with dinosaurs strolling nearby. And the lizard didn’t get away, it was trapped in the same oozing, sticky tree sap that also entombed the now-headless dragonfly for perpetuity.
Newly Discovered Snub-Nosed Monkey Sneezes in the Rain
ScienceDaily (Oct. 27, 2010) — An international team of primatologists have discovered a new species of monkey in Northern Myanmar (formerly Burma.) The research, published in the American Journal of Primatology, reveals how Rhinopithecus strykeri, a species of snub-nosed monkey, has an upturned nose which causes it to sneeze when it rains.
Nature’s Backbone at Risk: World’s Vertebrates Face an Extinction Crisis, Assessment Finds
ScienceDaily (Oct. 26, 2010) — The most comprehensive assessment of the world’s vertebrates confirms an extinction crisis with one-fifth of species threatened. However, the situation would be worse were it not for current global conservation efforts, according to a study launched Oct. 26, 2010 at the 10th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, CBD, in Nagoya, Japan.
What are They Hiding at Bagram?
Obama’s Black Site Prison
By DAVE LINDORFF
http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff10272010.html
A victory for the government in a federal court in New York Monday marks another slide deeper into Dick Cheney’s “dark side” for the Obama Administration.
In a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, which has been seeking to force the Pentagon to provide information about all captives it is holding at its huge prison facility at Bagram Airbase outside Kabul in Afghanbistan, Federal District Judge Barbara Jones of the Southern District of New York has held that the government may keep that information secret.
http://www.salon.com/news/politics/barack_obama/index.html?story=/politics/war_room/2010/10/27/barack_obama_wall_street
Barack Obama: The oligarchs’ president
By Charles Ferguson
When I first decided to make a documentary about the financial
crisis, in late 2008, my biggest question was how to handle Barack
Obama. Alas, the answer rapidly became all too clear, as my film
“Inside Job” shows in painful detail.
Published on Tuesday, October 26, 2010 by The Independent/UK
The Real Reason Obama Has Let Us All Down
On the night he won, I too shed a little tear; but the people weeping today are those having their homes repossessed
by Johann Hari
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/10/26-14
Is Barack Obama a politician whose
Published on Wednesday, October 27, 2010 by GRITtv
Campaign Cash, Corruption, Corporate Power
by Laura Flanders
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/10/27-4
Campaign cash—we’re drowning in a flood of it. As Katrina vanden Heuvel noted yesterday on GRITtv, this is on track to be a $5 billion election—and it’s not over.
Published on Wednesday, October 27, 2010 by Foreign Policy in Focus
Worlds Collide at Cancun Climate Talks
by Laura Carlsen
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/10/27-5
The debate over climate change generally transpires within the cloistered confines of expensive hotels, executive boardrooms, and diplomatic halls. As seen in the failure to arrive at binding agreements in Copenhagen, the talks are generally as sterile as the surroundings.
Published on Wednesday, October 27, 2010 by Reuters
UN Investigator Urges Probe of Alleged US Torture
UN says “torture practices” under Bush not continuing * But Obama administration has failed to investigate
by Louis Charbonneau
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/10/27-2
UNITED NATIONS – A U.N. torture investigator said President Barack Obama has ended harsh interrogations that were commonplace during the Bush era but an independent probe is needed of U.S. practices since 2001.
… to Wiretap the Internet
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by Charlie Savage
The New York Times (September 27 2010)
Federal law enforcement and national security officials are preparing
to seek sweeping new regulations for the Internet, arguing that their
ability to wiretap criminal and terrorism suspects is “going dark” as
people increasingly communicate online instead of by telephone.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/27/us/27wiretap.html
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http://mobile.nytimes.com/2010/10/27/world/americas/27briefs-CUBA.xml
UNITED NATIONS
Assembly Again Urges U.S. to Lift Cuba Embargo
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
Published: October 27, 2010
The annual General Assembly resolution calling for the United States to lift its longstanding economic embargo against Cuba passed by the lopsided vote of 187 to 2.
Global Warming to Bring More Intense Storms to Northern Hemisphere in Winter and Southern Hemisphere Year Round
ScienceDaily (Oct. 25, 2010) — Weather systems in the Southern and Northern hemispheres will respond differently to global warming, according to an MIT atmospheric scientist’s analysis that suggests the warming of the planet will affect the availability of energy to fuel extratropical storms, or large-scale weather systems that occur at Earth’s middle latitudes. The resulting changes will depend on the hemisphere and season, the study found.
Stream and Sequence: The Axial Transitions
It is very hard to understand Indian religious history without studying the eonic effect. The sudden crystallization of Buddhism from Jainism in the indicated interval is prime evidence.
Pew poll showing atheists know more about religion is flawed, scholar says
We said as much here last week.
Author of ‘Am I a Monkey?’ explores questions of life
Francisco Ayala of UC Irvine discusses six main topics of evolution, including the tension between science and religion.
The most striking thing about the genomic revolution is that the revolution never happened …
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