Fossils in amber
Vast Amber Deposit from India: New Trove of Fossils Suggests Global Distribution of Tropical Forest Ecosystems in the Eocene
ScienceDaily (Oct. 25, 2010) — A vast new amber deposit in India has yielded 100 fossil spiders, bees, and flies that date to the Early Eocene, or 52-50 million years ago. These arthropods are not unique — as would be expected on an island (which India was at that time) — but have close evolutionary relationships with fossils from the Americas, Europe, and Asia. The amber is also the oldest evidence of a tropical broadleaf rainforest in Asia.
Sleep and genes
Why Does Lack of Sleep Affect Us Differently? Study Hints It May Be in Our Genes
Flamingos Add Natural ‘Make-Up’
Beauty from the Bottom Up: Flamingos Add Natural ‘Make-Up’ to Their Feathers to Attract Mates
‘Normal’ Becomes Obsolete
The Arctic Shifts to a New Climate Pattern in Which ‘Normal’ Becomes Obsolete
Coffee Party
Published on Tuesday, October 26, 2010 by Agence France-Presse
Coffee Party Seeks to Outbrew Tea Party in US Politics
WOODBRIDGE, Virginia — A progressive infusion in US politics, the Coffee Party is brewing a strong counter-movement to the ultra-conservative Tea Party, just a week ahead of the US legislative elections.
Monbiot on Tea Party
George Monbiot: The Tea Party Movement: Deluded and Inspired by Billionaires
http://act.commondreams.org/go/2862?akid=237.96588.uLuT9D&t=32
Mapping Global Wealth
Sam Pizzigati | Mapping Global Wealth
http://act.commondreams.org/go/2858?akid=237.96588.uLuT9D&t=24
Tea Party Climate Change Deniers Funded by BP
Tea Party Climate Change Deniers Funded by BP and Other Major Polluters
http://act.commondreams.org/go/2848?akid=237.96588.uLuT9D&t=4
FBI and Wellstone
From Protester to Senator, FBI Tracked Paul Wellstone
http://act.commondreams.org/go/2847?akid=237.96588.uLuT9D&t=2
When the future invades
RG mail
The CIA Funds ‘Predictive Behavior’ Start-Ups
antifascist-calling.blogspot.com (October 10 2010)
A place at the table
RG mail
http://www.newsweek.com/2010/10/18/is-hamas-ready-for-peace-with-israel.print.html
Newsweek Magazine October 18, 2010
A Place for Mr. Meshaal No one wants the leader of Hamas at the Mideast
peace table. But everyone needs him there.
BDS conference
RG mail
http://www.rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/aalya/2010/10/what-i-learned-bds-conference
October 26, 2010
What I learned at the BDS conference
By Aalya Ahmad
US defends Iraq record
RG mail
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hiUt15hxCn1JG0tU8iLw_Oj6yb8A?docId=CNG.1c29e0b64ef02ac621d8a8911f61ba89.191
AFP October 26, 2010
US defends Iraq record after WikiLeaks furore
By Shaun Tandon
WASHINGTON — US officials defended the US military’s record probing civilian
deaths and abuse in Iraq after graphic revelations in leaked secret
documents triggered worldwide concern and condemnation.
Collapsing Empire
RG mail
Collapsing Empire Watch
By Glenn Greenwald
It’s easy to say and easy to document, but quite difficult to really
internalize, that the United States is in the process of imperial collapse.
10.25.10
Weighing planets
A New Way to Weigh Planets
ScienceDaily (Oct. 23, 2010) — An international CSIRO-led team of astronomers has developed a new way to weigh the planets in our Solar System — using radio signals from the small spinning stars called pulsars.
Will Democracy Survive?
Another discussion of ‘postdarwinian liberalism’ in relation to previous discussions today: Will Democracy Survive? Toward A Postdarwinian Liberalism
The Great Freedom Sutra
The Great Freedom Sutra
Lost in the debates over science, religion, and modernity is the fact that the secular age is a better candidate for ‘spiritual’ paths than those of antiquity, for a set of various obvious reasons.
Zen slammer for Harris
The neuroscientist and rationalist has made his name attacking religious faith. Who knew he was so spiritual?
We have discussed this issue several times here: Sam Harris is a closet New Ager who has backed himself into a corner, having made his interest in such taboo subjects as Vedanta a vestigial ‘secret’ buried in his The End of Faith.
The realm of scientism to which he has navigated will have none of it, and Harris has apparently shut up on the subject to maintain his market share.
We won’t get away with it.
Sam Harris, a member of the tribe known as “the new atheists,” wishes the headline to this story said something else. How about “Sam Harris Believes in Spirituality,” he suggests over lunch. Or “Sam Harris Believes in ‘God,’ ” with scare quotes?
In any case, Sam Harris—a hero to the growing numbers of Americans who check the atheist box on opinion polls—concedes he believes in something certain people would call “God.” In a related thought, he raises the topic of his next project: a spirituality guide tentatively titled The Illusion of the Self. Based on Harris’s own “spiritual journey,” it will “[celebrate] the spiritual aspect of human existence [and explain] how we can live moral and spiritual lives without religion,” according to a statement from his publisher, Free Press. It’s surprising. One hardly expects Harris, a hyperrational polemicist, to veer into the realm of spiritual self-help.
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From the archives: ‘Toward a postdarwinian liberalism’
In discussing the essay by Chris Hedges at Truthdig the phrase ‘toward a postdarwinian liberalism’ came up: this was actually an essay/webpage from several years ago, still on the server at the history & evolution site:
It would seem that the kneejerk embrace of Darwinism by liberals will backfire itself in the end, because, whatever the flaws in intelligent design theory, the movement promoting it based its starting point on some legitimate criticisms of evolutionary theory that won’t go away. Anyone who finds problems with Darwin’s theory must be mindful of the misleading way in which conservatives have coopted challenges to Darwin, and the way they are testing the waters with intelligent design, with the quite obvious result that liberals will close ranks around the flawed version of Darwinism that has been so dominant for so long that noone can challenge it except powerful conservatives. Is this any way to do science?
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Darwinism: ideology of thugs
Theories of evolution can be deadly instruments. Is Darwinism anything more than an ideology for thugs?
Theory Failsafe We are so beset by simplistic speculative theories that we fail to really observe or understand what evolution is. Simply tracking an evolutionary sequence over time is a useful discipline and a reminder of the real complexity of evolution. Tracking the evolutionary sequence detectable in world history is an immense task. We cannot easily produce theories about this.
Should serious evolution books (theory) be non-profit??!
http://history-and-evolution.com
The influence of the market mentality on evolution authors makes them untrustworthy!
The various editions of World History and The Eonic Effect have been a non-profit gesture with the text coming online. Anyone who writes a book on evolution in the mainstream, academic/scientific press is under pressure to make a product that will sell. Books on evolution, even critiques, are forced to compromise. So a non-profit text also available via POD self-publishing is an important statement, as here. We are therefore happy to bring the text of this book to the public. We start with the first two chapters.
Gaps arguments
http://telicthoughts.com/god-of-the-gaps-analysis/
Gaps arguments, with or without god, are inevitable and almost always confused or wrong. The trick is to 1. see an example where the idea works (without the god concept), 2. and think not in terms of gaps but of fullness packed with effect.
The discussions of the Axial Age in terms of the eonic effect shows that the ‘gap’ is in reality not a gap at all but an interval where a special macroevolutionary process is at work.
Punctuated equilibrium has a discussion of the ‘gaps’ confusion.
Hedges on liberals, the need for postdarwinian liberalism
The World Liberal Opportunists Made
It is all very well to denounce failed liberals: but what about the embrace of Darwinism, thence Social Darwinism, by the liberal world. It is a confusion, in part created by successful Darwin propaganda, that has empowered the Social Darwinism of the right, even as they play two sides of the fence with the oddly rightwing ID movement.
Liberalism should contain a critique of Darwinism, Social Darwinism, and the economic ideology it serves. Instead we find the hopeless confusion of Darwin groupies calling themeselves liberals.
Tea Partiers as fronts
The media repeatedly invoke grass roots and other code words to describe the tea party. Tell a lie often enough and it is believed. Our media wizards must realize that with the revelations of high-powered funding and the involvement of Republican operatives, the characterization of the tea party as a spontaneous, ground-up movement does not fit; nagging facts nevertheless must bow to pursuing the “colorful.”
Ability of bees to solve the “traveling salesman problem”
http://www.uncommondescent.com/evolution/its-amazing-what-evolution-can-do/
This article here recounts the now documented ability of bees to solve the “traveling salesman problem” faster than computers. And to imagine that evolution has done this! My, what a wonderful thing it is!—-(he says with sarcasm dripping). By just doing something over and over again, with little changes accumulating, a ‘computer,’ better than any we have, somehow comes into existence. And, of course, this ‘computer’ is the size of a grass seed (!!). One of the experimentalists said this: “Despite their tiny brains bees are capable of extraordinary feats of behaviour. . . We need to understand how they can solve the travelling salesman problem without a computer.” I agree with his statement. I would only suggest that RM+NS won’t lead to this understanding.
ID and anti-science
Misframing Intelligent Design: Falsely Painting ID Advocates as Anti-Science
Maybe, but it doesn’t follow that ID is scientific.
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