History, Evolution, and the Darwin Debate
The Real News February
24, 2011
Wisconsin’s Billionaires Make a Sacrifice? Paul Jay: Here’s an alternative
“something has to give” plan for Wisconsin
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=6323
Oil Up, Gaddafi Hangs On, Wisconsin Vote/General Strike Coming
February 24th, 2011
Is Wisconsin the new Egypt? I don’t think so, at least not yet. Americans are
not that hungry or pissed off, well maybe some Tea Party members are, but it
takes a lot to get reasonably well paid academic teachers mad enough to want to
start throwing bricks. On the other hand, there are plenty of young anarchists
and communists willing to throw the first brick. They just need a Seattle-like
consensus that now is the time.
Read the rest of this entry »
Quantum Hot Potato: Researchers Entice Two Atoms to Swap Smallest Energy Units
ScienceDaily (Feb. 23, 2011) — Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have for the first time coaxed two atoms in separate locations to take turns jiggling back and forth while swapping the smallest measurable units of energy. By directly linking the motions of two physically separated atoms, the technique has the potential to simplify information processing in future quantum computers and simulations.
http://history-and-evolution.com/whee4th/chap5_2_2.htm scroll down for a section on the Axial Age dynamics of Israelite history.
The history of Israel is one of the most remarkable moments in the phenomenon of the Axial Age, but the mythologies of Jews and Christians have nearly destroyed it.
The perversion of convenental Judasim, followed by the propaganda for the Roman Empire called ‘Christianity’ has virtually destroyed the whole tradition.
In fact, the coming of Islam was desperate attempt to start over, which created Mess #3.
The action of the eonic sequence was detected by the Israelites, who thought it evidence of a ‘higher power’ in history, about which they, originally, refused to speak.
http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2011/02/24/rabbi-yoffie-lays-it-out/
The old joke goes, “What do you call a Jew who doesn’t believe in God?” The answer is, “A Jew.” And that’s largely true, but there are some exceptions to Jewish atheism. One is Rabbi Eric Yoffie, who, in a piece at PuffHo called “The frustrating, difficult, never-ending search for God,” tells us all how to find Him in these difficult times when the Big Man in the Sky seems to be hiding from us.
The question of ‘god’ has been ruined by monotheists themselves: let us note that the Israelites’ history in the period of the prophets shows clear hints of a lost tradition that meta-theistic, even vulgar pop theism came into exisentence and overwhelmed the unknown tradition that refused to speak ‘god’s name’ using the glyph IHVH.
The point is fundamental: we can easily detect, not some Big Man in the sky, the operation of a cosmic/planetary dynamic that has the enigma of a higher power at work.
Even a superficial look at the eonic effect will show the action of this higher power, But we must refrain from using the term ‘god’ altogether.
Meanwhile the New Atheists are proving to be even more confused than the monotheists of vulgar theism.
http://history-and-evolution.com/whee4th/chap3_1.htm
The idea of revoluton has been distorted by the Marxist/Bolshevik left: its place in world history is key, but still secondary to the macro-evolutionary mystery we see in the eonic sequence.
The sudden eruption of revolutions in the early modern, from the Reformation and German social revolution onwards, needs to find its completion in a new understanding, and a new activism of true revolution at the climax of globalization.
That market dynamics isn’t going to do it for us is hard for devoteess of the capitalist religion to accept, but the time to jump is coming soon.
Revolution U
BY TINA ROSENBERG
I cited this article indirectly yesterday, here is the direct link. Important background to the Middle East uprisings.
Let us note that toppling a dictator, with the methods of the Serbain students, now in effect everywhere, is easy compared to what we have to do here in the USA, the New American Revolution.
The elites can easily hide behind democracy, and, we suspect, have already staged a series of anti-democratic coups using the intilligence agencies. This disguised coup is a demonic in its cleverness, and apartly beyond the grasp of the current left.
Richard said,
February 23, 2011 at 6:09 pm ·
Dr. James Fetzer Separates JFK Assassination Science From Fiction:http://www.skeptiko.com/james-fetzer-jfk-assassination-science/
Fetzer also has a book on 9/11. Also see JFK and the Unspeakable, now in paperback, which is a partial summation of much of the JFK research.
It is almost unbelievable the left is still confused about JFK, what to say of 9/11.
http://www.redfortyeight.com/2011/02/24/booknotes-how-to-change-the-world/
This review is worth reading (as is the book, no doubt). But I think we should be glad that the hold of Marxism has loosened, since the failure of Marx’s approach (more the failure of the Leninists) needs to open up the way to a new version of the basic theme, that goes back to the French Revolution, and whose relevance is even greater today than it was several decades ago. Marx monopolized the whole subject, and then his formulation failed, leaving a void.
Not a single idea in his formulation was original: so we have the way forward, and we can actually start learning from Marx as we move away from him.
We are in a state of crisis, and a formulation of the issues of socialism/social democracy, then the more distant communism, are crying out for some attention. But noone can get past the dead hand of Marx’s theories, Engels’ theories, and Lenin’s quiet appropriation of that legacy for his Blanqui-ism.
Marxists are masters of confusion. If you mention Blanqui, they foam at the mouth. That Lenin was a Blanqui-ist is never uttered in public. So it goes at all points.
Why not just drop all of it? Marxism is suffering from metal fatigue.
The deck has been reshuffled here: we propose A New American Revolution of the bourgeois type, but recast as bourgeois-socialist and democratic. The point is that socialism is a form of liberalism, and the issues should have been addressed within the context of rights based politics. The old left has made an enemy of social democracy, but some of its achievements (and they are real, almost the only achievements of the far left) need to be built into a new form of social democracy . The left needs to put Marx in a museum, and, starting with an emergency version of democratic socialism (with a few ideas from social democracy) that still accepts the market, but one based in framework of rights, commence the hard work of asking if a movement can lead to this, or whether the American system is too corrupt for orderly change. I think that it is beside the point to call this unrealistic. The phenomenon of global warming is making capitalism unrealistic, and we need to start preparing a failsafe version of socialism revolutioin to be ready when the thugs decide they have to create a brand of socialist non-socialism for the rich eco-survivors.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n05/terry-eagleton/indomitable
Indomitable
Terry EagletonHow to Change the World: Marx and Marxism 1840-2011 by Eric Hobsbawm
Little, Brown, 470 pp, £25.00, January 2011, ISBN 978 1 4087 0287 1In 1976, a good many people in the West thought that Marxism had a reasonable case to argue. By 1986, most of them no longer felt that way. What had happened in the meanwhile? Were these people now buried under a pile of toddlers? Had Marxism been unmasked as bogus by some world-shaking new research? Had someone stumbled on a lost manuscript by Marx confessing that it was all a joke?
We are speaking, note, about 1986, a few years before the Soviet bloc crumbled. As Eric Hobsbawm points out in this collection of essays, that wasn’t what caused so many erstwhile believers to bin their Guevara posters. Marxism was already in dire straits some years before the Berlin Wall came down. One reason given was that the traditional agent of Marxist revolution, the working class, had been wiped out by changes to the capitalist system – or at least was no longer in a majority. It is true that the industrial proletariat had dwindled, but Marx himself did not think that the working class was confined to this group. In Capital, he ranks commercial workers on the same level as industrial ones. He was also well aware that by far the largest group of wage labourers in his own day was not the industrial working class but domestic servants, most of whom were women. Marx and his disciples didn’t imagine that the working class could go it alone, without forging alliances with other oppressed groups. And though the industrial proletariat would have a leading role, Marx does not seem to have thought that it had to constitute the social majority in order to play it.
Below is a repost of some Roy Davies’ material: I scanned three chapters of the book, and you can get as sense of it from that:
The evidence that Darwin plagiarize Wallace is clear from the Roy Davies’ book, which was linked to here at the pages section. But the link is now broken. While I search for another online source for the pdf of the book you can read three scanned selections from the book.
Three posts on The Darwin Conspiracy, By Roy Davies
Darwin’s shifting usage of natural selection
Darwin’s thinking as he receives first letter from Wallace
Wallace’s letters and suspicious changes in Darwin’s views on evolution
Repost of my Wallace piece from yesterday (My Amazon review was cited at the Uncommon Descent blog). I think that the ID gang has once more confused the issue by suppressing the evidence Darwin plagiarized Wallace. Why this stubborness? The previous link to an article by Klinghoffer may suggest the reason: they want to trumpet Wallace as a secular critic with a few dropped hints on something resembling ID. They are frustrated by the resistance they are receiving, and perhaps hope Wallace can be a disguised ID proponent in disguise. The ID group ruins whatever it touches, and Wallace will soon be a muddle.
Note the Roy Davies’ book is almost impossible to obtain in this country, a sign of skulduggery for sure.
There was a free pdf online version, but it has disappeared. Here’s a reference, and some critique of the book:
http://thedispersalofdarwin.wordpress.com/2009/08/21/roy-davies-the-darwin-conspiracy-freely-available-as-pdf/
First, those insights can be found in notebooks dating to 1838, and a preliminary draft of “On the Origin of Species” was completed in 1844, twelve years before Messrs. Darwin and Wallace began corresponding. Second, scholars who have carefully compared their joint publications of 1858 are struck by how very different the two theories are, given Mr. Darwin’s initial reaction to the essay Mr. Wallace sent him.
This quote shows why it is essential read Davies’ book. The material from early Darwin, as scholars here have shown were revised later, and made to look as if Darwin’s theory appeared in the Galapagos and after. But that is false. The careful research here shows how his early understanding was far short of what came later.
Response to my Flannery review
Flannery responds to my review of his book on Wallace, which I think was reasonable and he has made some statements that aren’t quite comprehensible. First a quick response, and then more later. But basically Flannery’s attitude is a head-scratcher. His arguments are without merit. The key point is the Sherlock trail showing beyond a reasonable doubt that 1. Darwin was out in left field until he 2. began receiving a set of letters from Wallace. That Darwin lied about these letters has now been established by archival research on the dates of devlivery by the British mails. This mendacity is highly suspicious next to the other evidence. It is clear from Darwin’s own statements to his colleagues, recorded in his letters/journals, that he was simply unable to resolve the evolution question as late as 1855, when he received his first Wallace letter.
I am not clear how a biographer of Wallace could neglect this material, let alone declare it false. I am not especially fanatic on this: I have read Davies and Brackman et al. many times and I realize that this evidence can fool you. It is tricky. But the basic outline is clear. Unfornately in one phase a set of blunders occurred in relation to one set of claims. These made the counterattack by Darwinists easy, witness the book on Wallace by Shermer. Note that Shermer is monumentally silent about Davies’ subsequent correction. Darwinists are running scared.
So why on earth would the ID group, or else Flannery alone, take this bizarre position to the painstaking evidence disovered???
That Davies’ might not have gotten the full Wallace right is possible, but his book is about the eivdence for a scientific crime, and the argument is devastating. How could Flannery simply reject this, and what on earth for?
I gave the book four stars, but suggested the refual of the Davies’ evidence was both wrong and a disservice. Has Flannery really read Davies’ book???
That Wallace’s and Darwin’s theories ended up different is not a bit surprising, and no objection to my statements, which are an attempt to pass on the information form Brackman and Roy Davies. Darwin’s Origin was composed on the basis of cribbed ideas still barely published, apart from the Ternate and earlier letters. It was more than a year before Wallace even returned to England.
Note that Darwin ‘s receipt of Wallace’s letter jumpstarted a a new understanding, and he saw clearly how he could devise his own theory and write a book about it. Since he had never read anything much by Wallace save for a few letters, it is not surprising his book would look different.
I am not clear why the ID group is reluctant to examine this evidence???
You would have thought this scandal of Darwin’s plagiarism would have been grist for their mill.
I suggested the need to study Roy Davies’ book very carefully to see that the claims are robust, but tricky. It requires careful study of the whole development of Darwin and Wallace, study of the Wallace letters, and the archival evidence from the British post to see how Darwin lied about what he had received, and changed the claims for when the posts arrived. This evidence alone is highly suspicious. Why would Flannery simply disregard this painstaking research?
Flannery has missed the point here. The latter Wallace deserves close study but the issue here is the criminal investigation method of Roy Davies, and his findings, based on a generation of careful research by many scholars is elusive for general readers who clearly can fail to grasp the whole of the argument. Thus Flannery leaves me puzzled: has he really read Davies?
More on this later.
Note this material from UD has a lot of interior links. Check the original.
John Landon has just posted a review of my Alfred Russel Wallace: A Rediscovered Life chiding me for not following the Roy Davies Darwin Conspiracy thesis that Charles “stole” Al’s theory of natural selection.I have explained my skepticism over this persistent plagiarism charge thoroughly in the book, not the least of which is that to make the accusation stick you really have to see both theories as one in the same, and I believe (as do most scholars) that closer examination reveals they are not. In fact, Wallace’s version appears on the face of it more coherent.
Nonetheless, this reductionist thinking whereby Darwin’s theory becomes a mere derivative of Wallace’s actually winds up doing violence to Wallace’s ideas. For example, Landon writes, “I am not sure why the Intelligent Design and Creationist critics of Darwin are reluctant to see this aspect of the paradigm’s history. We need to face the fact that Wallace most probably created the Darwinism we know, and that he is therefore responsible for its side effects and un-glorious history.”
Fact is the Darwin and Wallace theories had fundamental differences built into them from the very beginning as a thorough reading of the Ternate Letter will reveal. Jean Gayon has written on this most persuasively in Darwinism’s Struggle for Survival: Heredity and the Hypothesis of Natural Selection.
Most importantly, Wallace NEVER thought Darwin’s breeding examples were appropriate to natural selection, and this is an important aspect I think captured the attention of Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton as he developed eugenics. There are other difference too that needn’t be gone into here. So maybe the ID community is reluctant to “see this aspect” for two reasons: 1) it fails to comport with Wallace’s theory as he proposed and developed it; and 2) it impugns to Wallace a responsibility and guilt he doesn’t deserve. Wallace, for example, was a vocal opponent of eugenics and social Darwinism in general.
Well, if Wallace immediately saw that selective breeding (guided selection) is not equivalent to natural (unguided) selection, he knew more than 99% of the New York Times readers who swallowed ultra-Darwinist Richard Dawkins’s claim that it is (when Dawkins was attacking ID theorist Mike Behe’s Edge of Evolution.) And Wallace was not the one who thought that black people were closer to gorillas than white people were.
Link to my review
http://www.amazon.com/review/R2BJRLPDV575AG/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm
How evolutionary theory’s other discoverer could heal the Darwin divide
By David Klinghoffer
Now Klinghoffer picks up the Wallace torch, citing Flannery’s book, which we discussed yesterday here: no mention of the plagiarism question or of Roy Davies.
It is true Wallace could help (read the first comment to Klinghoffer’s essay) here, but not because he was a Christian theist, or ID dogmatist.
Wallace is significant because he created the theory stolen by Darwin, and then recanted it. Darwin was left behind.
Wallace’s intimations of spirituality are most interesting and should not be suppressed, but they need to be discussed by people not connected with creationist/ID groups.
BTW, Wallace had socialist sympathies.
Surprise, right-wing atheists do exist
Actually the tide of atheism was almost taken over and distorted by the righwing Nietzsche. And his influence on so-called liberal ‘new atheists’ is always there behind the scenes.
The world, it seems, is waking up to the existence of politically right-wing atheists, who prove that you don’t have to believe in God to believe in the innate superiority of white and Asian brains; the ruinous impact of immigration on American society (unless the immigrants have white or Asian brains); the infallibility and supremacy of that deity of conservatism, the market; and the idea that the poor are poor only because they are lazy and stupid.
Collisions of Protein Machines Cause DNA Replication DerailmentScienceDaily (Feb. 24, 2011) — Scientists have published results that will forever change the way researchers view the interplay between gene expression, DNA replication and the prevention of DNA damage.
Polygamy Hurt 19th Century Mormon Wives’ Evolutionary Fitness, Scientists Say
ScienceDaily (Feb. 21, 2011) — Polygamy practiced by some 19th century Mormon men had the curious effect of suppressing the overall offspring numbers of Mormon women in plural marriages, say scientists from Indiana University Bloomington and three other institutions in the March 2011 issue of Evolution and Human Behavior.
Virus-Mimicking Nanoparticles Can Stimulate Long-Lasting Immunity
ScienceDaily (Feb. 23, 2011) — Vaccine scientists say their “Holy Grail” is to stimulate immunity that lasts for a lifetime. Live viral vaccines such as the smallpox or yellow fever vaccines provide immune protection that lasts several decades, but despite their success, scientists have remained in the dark as to how they induce such long lasting immunity.
Microbes Help Children Breathe Easily? Bacteria and Fungi May Offer Protection Against Asthma, Study Suggests
‘Thunder-Thighs’ Dinosaur Discovered: Brontomerus May Have Used Powerful Thigh Muscles to Kick Predators
ScienceDaily (Feb. 23, 2011) — A new dinosaur named Brontomerus mcintoshi, or “thunder-thighs” after its enormously powerful thigh muscles, has been discovered in Utah, USA. The new species is described in a paper recently published in the journal Acta Palaeontologica Polonica by an international team of scientists from the UK and the US.
Published on Thursday, February 24, 2011 by CommonDreams.org The Year of Revolution: The “War on Tyranny” Replaces the “War on Terror”
by Andy Worthington
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/02/24
The Case Against Raymond Davis
The CIA’s Killing Spree in Lahore
By MIKE WHITNEY
http://www.counterpunch.org/whitney02242011.html
When CIA-agent Raymond Davis gunned down two Pakistani civilians in broad daylight on a crowded street in Lahore, he probably never imagined that the entire Washington establishment would spring to his defense. But that’s precisely what happened. Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Mike Mullen, John Kerry, Leon Panetta and a number of other US bigwigs have all made appeals on Davis’s behalf. None of these stalwart defenders of “the rule of law” have shown a speck of interest in justice for the victims or of even allowing the investigation to go forward so they could know what really happened. Oh, no. What Clinton and the rest want, is to see their man Davis packed onto the next plane to Langley so he can play shoot-’em-up someplace else in the world.
February 24, 2011
http://socialistworker.org/2011/02/24/western-fear-of-qaddafis-fall
The revolt in Libya has liberated almost the entire eastern half of the country, but Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi continues to insist he will die rather than surrender his grip on power. As defections in the military and air force continue, Qaddafi is relying on personal security forces and mercenaries to defend his base in Tripoli.
Richard Seymour, author of The Liberal Defence of Murder and a blogger at Lenin’s Tomb, argues that the West’s weak response to the crisis in Libya is a consequence of its dread of Qaddafi’s fall.
Lisa Graves: A CMD Special Report: Scott Walker Runs on Koch Money
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/02/23-5
Vandana Shiva: Climate Change and Agriculture: Biodiverse Ecological Farming Is the Answer, Not Genetic Engineering
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/02/23
Adam Parsons and Rajesh Makwana: A Global Call for Sharing and Justice
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/02/23-1
Tom Morello: Putting Wind in the Sails of the Struggle
http://www.commondreams.org/video/2011/02/23
Growing Anger in Pakistan Over US CIA/Blackwater Killings
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/02/23
Oil-Rich Saudi’s Try to Stave Off Revolution With Cash
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/02/23-5
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