History, Evolution, and the Darwin Debate
Optical Microscope Without Lenses Produces High-Resolution 3-D Images on a Chip
ScienceDaily (Apr. 21, 2011) — UCLA researchers have redefined the concept of a microscope by removing the lens to create a system that is small enough to fit in the palm of a hand but powerful enough to create three-dimensional tomographic images of miniscule samples.
Comment on Marx was NOT Jewish:
Kirby Olson
lutheransurrealism.blogspot.com
Marx was raised as a Lutheran. He often cites Luther. Luther was against the indulgences of the Papacy, and Marx was against the indulgences of the capitalist entrepreneurs of his time, making a false equivalency between them and the Papacy. Luther wanted to get rid of the false product of the Popes of his time: the indulgences sold to get dead relatives out of Purgatory, which were in fact used by the Pope and his minions to party down. Marx saw an equivalence among the grande bourgeoisie and their wishing to party down with the money taken from the proletariat.Luther understood people better than Marx did, and limited the role of the church, and meanwhile set the economy free to do its own thing.
Marx’s central mistake may have been to try to centralize the economy on the government (which he thought was pure, or could be pure, if run by the proletariat for their own ends), but he didn’t count on a professional class arising in the name of the Party to play the role of the stand-in for the workers, and thus formed a true Dictatorship that never withered until the Revolutions of 1989 brought most of the Marxist states back to an economic democracy. We still don’t understand exactly why Luther’s revolution worked (the proof is Scandinavia), whereas the Marxist revolutions inevitably went bad (something was wrong in Marx’s description/prescription, that wasn’t wrong in the original Lutheran model).
Agree or disagree you raise some interesting points: the revolutionary left was an attempt, after Kant and Hegel, to complete the Reformation, perhaps they failed, but the Lutheran era, despite its compromises with authority, next to Thomas Muntzer (during the German Peasant Revolution period) does indeed contain some deep and subtle elements. It is not accident Engels went back to study this period.
The stubborn insistence on the random character of world history is part of the agenda of conflict, social darwinism, and economic ideology.
But world history yields to a set of very simple non-random tests, leaving the picture of a developmental logic of great subtlety.
Schopenhauer
And The Caveman Buddhas
Schopenhauer is a remarkable hybrid of many different things, in his reflection of Plato and Kant, the Upanishads, and the amazing rediscovery of the real meaning of Samkhya, with his thinking on the will and representation.
I think one reason the New Atheists get so much flack is that their position emerged in the early modern period and was soon transcended with something more complex, pace Schopenhauer.
http://stkarnick.com/culture/2011/04/24/hitches-rallies-the-troops-this-easter/
We already commented on this today, but another point is in order: it is completely OK to get angry at Christian dogma on death at some point. Xtianit has to be the world’s most totally unhelpful religion at that point, as the threat of hell and bait of heaven is used to degrade the approach to the death experience.
To make the threat of hell on the basis of idiotic legalistic rules of Xtian idiocy can throw any dying person into total confusion and malevolent hallucination.
Buddhism is far more intelligent here, and a dash of Shopenhauer might help also: here’s our post on Schopenhauer, representation, and the implications for the ‘death’ point. That point is when ‘representation’ is switched off, what we think of as death, only to realize that it is not death, but the switch off of representation. That seems like death, perhaps, because the ‘experiencing and experiencer’ are switched off!
In any case, the famous phrase, never born, therefore never died applies at this point.
Aryans, Hinduism, And a Buddhist Revolution
The confusion in the current sci/religion debates over Xtianity and ‘religion’ needs a broader base, provided by the data of the Axial Age, where we theistic and atheistic religions transform in parallel. The question of religion is deeper than the issues of divinity.
http://stkarnick.com/culture/2011/04/24/hitches-rallies-the-troops-this-easter/
I, for one, do not begrudge Hitchens a determined defiance of Xtianity to bypass some kind of silly reversal at the point of death, if that point is in fact near. However, dying angry at religion won’t help. There are plenty of atheist religions, like Buddhism, that forewarn the dying of what they might expect. Another myth? Only one way to find out, but that perspective is far more ancient and truly based than the confusing and childish themes of Xtianity which demands belief in silly mythologies created as church constructs for the masses.
Small wonder an avowed atheist would shake his fist here.
But I think that there is a better understanding than the negation of Xtian fancies.
http://trinitybook.wordpress.com/2011/04/24/pope-attacks-mindless-evolution/
http://darwiniana.com/2011/04/25/jerry-coynes-open-letter/
The previous post contains an open letter from Jerry Coyne re: the NCSE.
I am not a party to either side of this debate, since I don’t support ‘accomodationism’ and don’t support Darwinism and its hoarde. I think however that the NCSE senses that using evolutioinism to attack theism isn’t going to work, and move to some kind of compromise. The danger of compromise is that a new establishment consensus will arise that makes Christianity and Darwinism the standard dogmas, together. I can see why the New Atheists balk, even as I can see why the NSCE (et al) are trying to bypass defeat in the useless effort to combat religion with the tenets of Darwinians and Dawkins groupies.
Real accomodationism proceeds apace, as the trend toward postdarwinism and a real evolutionism are matched by the erosion of Xtianity and the ‘New Age’ search for 1. a new religious understanding and 2. a robust secularismm that is not beholden to religion, nor so narrow as to exclude it from a pluralistic society.
So we can see that both sides are useless here, wrongheaded and wrong, and in the case of many Darwin defenders plying atheism, suspiciously shifty eyed about the limits of evolutionary dogma: we must suspect that Darwinism is all too convenient as a prop for this new brand of atheist fundamentalism.
In the meantime, if the issue is education, then it is false to claim that teaching Darwinism is the foundation of good science education. Sadly, it is the religious right that has stolen a march on science, by picking up some of the classic critiques of Darwin’s theory. That they overreached with ID is another issue. These religious groups have discovered that Darwinism is bad science and the joke is on the science groups, who don’t get it, most probably because the science education they got was phony, a form of indoctrination of the young that is all too familiar in the history of religion. The Darwinists/new atheists have chosen get their asses kicked. There is not much I can do to help, even if I wanted to.
Jerry Coyne’s open letter
Category: Communicating science • Politics • Religion
Posted on: April 24, 2011 11:12 AM, by PZ Myers
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/04/jerry_coynes_open_letter.php
Go read Open letter to the NCSE and BCSE. Or read it here:
Dear comrades:
Although we may diverge in our philosophies and actions toward religion, we share a common goal: the promulgation of good science education in Britain and America–indeed, throughout the world. Many of us, like myself and Richard Dawkins, spend a lot of time teaching evolution to the general public. There’s little doubt, in fact, that Dawkins is the preeminent teacher of evolution in the world. He has not only turned many people on to modern evolutionary biology, but has converted many evolution-deniers (most of them religious) to evolution-accepters.
Read the rest of this entry »
The untold story of evolutionAround six million years ago in Africa, human history began. But how exactly did hairy, tree-dwelling apes, become modern 21st-century people?
Mitochondrial DNA and the mysteries of human evolutionAll living humans are more closely related than you might think
CAPTCHAs With Chaos: Strong Protection for Weak Passwords
ScienceDaily (Apr. 21, 2011) — The passwords of the future could become more secure and, at the same time, simpler to use.
Ozone Hole Linked to Climate Change All the Way to the EquatorScienceDaily (Apr. 25, 2011) — In a study to be published in the April 21st issue of Science, researchers at Columbia University’s School of Engineering and Applied Science report their findings that the ozone hole, which is located over the South Pole, has affected the entire circulation of the Southern Hemisphere all the way to the equator. While previous work has shown that the ozone hole is changing the atmospheric flow in the high latitudes, the new Columbia Engineering paper demonstrates that the ozone hole is able to influence the tropical circulation and increase rainfall at low latitudes in the Southern Hemisphere.
Development in Fog Harvesting Process May Make Water Available to the World’s Poor
ScienceDaily (Apr. 21, 2011) — In the arid Namib Desert on the west coast of Africa, one type of beetle has found a distinctive way of surviving. When the morning fog rolls in, the Stenocara gracilipes species, also known as the Namib Beetle, collects water droplets on its bumpy back, then lets the moisture roll down into its mouth, allowing it to drink in an area devoid of flowing water.
On the Danger of a Killer Earthquake in the Japanese Archipelago
By HIROSE TAKASHI
http://www.counterpunch.org/takashi04252011.html
Translated by Doug Lummis
The nuclear power plants in Japan are ageing rapidly; like cyborgs, they are barely kept in operation by a continuous replacement of parts. And now that Japan has entered a period of earthquake activity and a major accident could happen at any time, the people live in constant state of anxiety.
Seismologists and geologists agree that, after some fifty years of seismic inactivity, with the 1995 Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake (Southern Hyogo Prefecture Earthquake), the country has entered a period of seismic activity. In 2004, the Chuetsu Earthquake hit Niigata Prefecture, doing damage to the village of Yamakoshi. Three years later, in 2007, the Chuetsu Offshore Earthquake severely damaged the nuclear reactors at Kashiwazaki-Kariwa. In 2008, there was an earthquake in Iwate and Miyagi Prefectures, causing a whole mountain to disappear completely. Then in 2009 the Hamaoka nuclear plant was put in a state of emergency by the Suruga Bay Earthquake. And now, in 2011, we have the 3/11 earthquake offshore from the northeast coast. But the period of seismic activity is expected to continue for decades. From the perspective of seismology, a space of 10 or 15 years is but a moment in time.
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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April 24, 2011 Read the rest of this entry »
Published on Monday, April 25, 2011 by Empire
The Evolution of Arab Revolutions
Why are countries such as Libya, Yemen, Syria and Bahrain facing bloody battles for change?
http://www.commondreams.org/video/2011/04/25
Published on Monday, April 25, 2011 by The Nation
The Warped US Tax System: Taxpayers Subsidize Their Own Destruction by Allison Kilkenny
One of the more interesting battles being waged right now is between labor and Boeing, the aerospace and defense corporation. The National Labor Relations Board accuses the company of illegally retaliating against its largest union when it decided in 2009 to put a second 787 Dreamliner assembly line in a nonunion plant in South Carolina.
Published on Monday, April 25, 2011 by TomDispatch.com
Washington on the Rocks: An Empire of Autocrats, Aristocrats, and Uniformed Thugs Begins to Totter
by Alfred W. McCoy and Brett Reilly
In one of history’s lucky accidents, the juxtaposition of two extraordinary events has stripped the architecture of American global power bare for all to see. Last November, WikiLeaks splashed snippets from U.S. embassy cables, loaded with scurrilous comments about national leaders from Argentina to Zimbabwe, on the front pages of newspapers worldwide. Then just a few weeks later, the Middle East erupted in pro-democracy protests against the region’s autocratic leaders, many of whom were close U.S. allies whose foibles had been so conveniently detailed in those same diplomatic cables.
Published on Monday, April 25, 2011 by TruthDig.com
The Corporate State Wins Againby Chris Hedges
When did our democracy die? When did it irrevocably transform itself into a lifeless farce and absurd political theater? When did the press, labor, universities and the Democratic Party—which once made piecemeal and incremental reform possible—wither and atrophy? When did reform through electoral politics become a form of magical thinking? When did the dead hand of the corporate state become unassailable?
Published on Monday, April 25, 2011 by The Guardian/UK
Guantánamo Leaks Lift Lid on World’s Most Controversial PrisonInnocent people interrogated for years on slimmest pretexts • Children, elderly and mentally ill among those wrongfully held • 172 prisoners remain, some with no prospect of trial or release
by David Leigh, James Ball, Ian Cobain and Jason Burke
More than 700 leaked secret files on the Guantánamo detainees lay bare the inner workings of America’s controversial prison camp in Cuba.
RG mail
http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/04/2011413152522296883.html
Aljazeera
Recognising Palestine?
The efforts of the Palestinian Authority to push for statehood is an
elaborate farce. Pursuing diplomatic recognition for an imaginary
Palestinian state on a fraction of historic Palestine is a strategy of
desperation from a Palestinian leadership that has run out of options, lost
its legitimacy, and become a serious obstacle in the way of Palestinians
regaining their rights.
Ali Abunimah
What do you do if your decades-long campaign to bring about an independent
Palestinian state on those fractions of historic Palestine known as the West
Bank and Gaza Strip have resulted in total failure?
RG mail
dissidentvoice.org/2011/04/libya-in-the-face-of-humanitarian-imperialism/
Dissident Voice
April 19th, 2011
If we apply the underlying principles of interference behind the aggression
against Libya, it means that anyone can intervene anywhere they want to.*
Interview with Jean Bricmont*
by Grégoire Lalieu
Before Darwin it was clear to most, a la Lamarck, that evolution required a procees to ‘climb the hill’ of complexification. The result in Lamarck was an evolutionary conception on two levels. It is strange how the founder got it right (despite many confusions) while now in the name of science we have reinvented getting it wrong.
Dawkins has become famous, and rich, peddling the ‘getting it wrong’ version. It seems that science will be stuck here forever.
Fossil Sirenians, Related to Today’s Manatees, Give Scientists New Look at Ancient Climate
ScienceDaily (Apr. 24, 2011) — What tales they tell of their former lives, these old bones of sirenians, relatives of today’s dugongs and manatees. And now, geologists have found, they tell of the waters in which they swam.
This Easter, try to avoid the Gospel of Grayling
The underlying message of the New Atheists’ ‘secular bibles’ is far more soul-destroying than anything in the original Good Book.
The Crisis of
The Enlightenment
The current crisis of science is foretold fairly clearly in the period of the Romantic revolt.
The sad reality is that scientists have learned nothing, and remained obstinate in their stupidity
behind the brilliance of their technical achievements.
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