History, Evolution, and the Darwin Debate
Global Warming May Increase the Capacity of Trees to Store CarbonScienceDaily (May 25, 2011) — One helpful action anyone can take in response to global warming is to plant trees and preserve forests. Trees and plants capture carbon dioxide during photosynthesis, thereby removing the most abundant greenhouse gas from the atmosphere and storing some of it in their woody tissue.
Repost on Luke link….
update: I think that this post on the genesis of the ‘eonic model’ might scare people off: actually, the real problem here is the rigidity of scientific thinking, and the refusal to study anything that isn’t total causal determinism applied to everything. Once you see the reality, as Kant put it, that ‘freedom’ is implied by the data of history, and ethics, the standard causal model collapses, and the approach used in the ‘eonic model’ will seem simple and very useful. And empirically based.
The eonic model is too elegant to be wrong!
http://dianoeidos.wordpress.com/2011/05/30/a-critique-of-freedom-free-will-and-soul/
Thanks again to Luke for links and discussion of some posts here on the ‘eonic effect’. The issue of freedom and free will are not quite the same.
We speak of causality in history, and the mechanics of history beyond causality. The old eonic model focussed on ‘system action’ and ‘free action’, and ‘free action scripts’, terms causing a problem with many readers up to third edition, the fouth putting them in the background. Strictly speaking the eonic effect/model makes no assumptions ‘free will’, only about ‘relative free action’ in relation to ‘system action’. That ‘free action’ represents choice, a branching of mechanical potential.
Think of an ocean liner and its passengers: the machine and the people are a hybrid system. We see ‘relative free action’ in relation to the system. Now apply that to history: it shows a systematics and relative to that human free action. The distinction is essential to understanding history. Look at the systematics of the Axial Age, and then Israelite history (barely known) and then the ‘free action’ that produced one people’s religious belief system.
In general we can for good Kantian reasons assume the existence of free will as the reality behind ‘free action’, but that the latter refers to ‘choice’, whether or not choice due to free will.
I don’t know why this set of distinctions creates so much trouble. The conditioning of science here has made discusions of free agents in history nearly taboo, what a muddle, something Kant pointed to two centuries ago.
The eonic model should be a five minute job to understand, but the evidence of mental impairment in science jocks is alarming in the extreme.In general, I would say to Luke that not a single person has ever rightly understood the ‘eonic model’. It is an IQ Test and a half, and everyone flunks (don’t worry about it). I am exempt since I discovered the model, but indirectly over time. I would not have been smart enough to have understood it if I hadn’t discovered it and had to read my own explanations (!), an obscure statement to anyone but the discoverer.
That is why Darwinism appeals no doubt: a dumbed down ideology at the level of adolescent sports competition: Darwinism for dummies indeed.
That’s a pity, because the basics are a kind of Kantion 101 kindergarten based on Kant’s third antinomy, but here even Kant scholars couldn’t deal with it, in part because Kant studies can’t acknowledge in public that Kant couldn’t have been a Darwinist.
So the issues are not hard, not at all, but public understanding is grotesque here, bad science propaganda in action.
Again: consider a car and the driver, simplest case. The car represents a causal system, and the driver a ‘free agent’ (i.e. he has a steering wheel and a plan to go somewhere) inside that system.
That’s not hard. But somehow the issue is too much for people trained in science these days.Still, it takes time. The eonic model came to me in one afternoon in 1995, but it took me ten years til the second edition of WHEE to grasp it for myself, despite already grasping it! Small wonder noone can understand it. Too bad, because it shows the real key to the evolution of man, and to the ‘evolution of freedom’, a concept requird when discussing man.
To put the issue in perspective: everyone already understands this, for the same reason that the distinction of car and driver is obvious to all, until you try and get theoretical.
And in the study of history we simply assume that man is a free agent who creates that history, not an automaton following the laws of physics. And that free agency is real whatever the status of free will But the contradiction has created total confusion (althugh students of history just slip away by ignoring it).
It’s only a matter of time before the ‘secular buddhists’ try to darwinize buddhism, so let’s be clear: that’ impossible.
Buddhists can’t be darwinists
Our discussion of ‘secular buddhism’ has been an eye-opener, and I will need to study this group at length, but I suspect my first instincts were correct: this is a fruitless effort to hybridize scientism with buddhism, and it won’t work.
Needless to say our discussion of rebirth should also be a moment to consider that rebirth in man is a falsification of Darwinism, step one, perhaps one reason for the effort to neutralize real buddhist beliefs.
Richard said,
May 31, 2011 at 7:56 am · Edit
This is the reason why you have to use the “anatta” doctrine. The mind has a hard time detecting the “focal point of the knower” in the very refined stages of samadhi. I think this is where the Upanishadic “seers” went wrong…they didn’t go far enough and thought they had reached some sort of “cosmic self” (hence, Gautama’s point:there shouldn’t be any focal point or sense of “self” at all). It becomes obvious when you see how the practice unfolds:
http://www.forestdhammabooks.com/book/3/Arahattamagga.pdf
Richard said,
May 31, 2011 at 8:42 am · Edit
Key passage:
By investigating further, the citta becomes detached from these mental factors as well. Then nothing remains except an extraordinary radiance that infuses the cosmos, a luminous essence of being that seems boundless, and an amazing and profound mental void. This is the awesome power of genuine avijjã. By continuing to employ the full might of mindfulness and wisdom, avijjã is ?nally extinguished within the citta. When everything permeating the citta is removed, one attains genuine emptiness. The emptiness experienced at this level is a total and permanent disengagement that requires no further effort to maintain. This means true and absolute freedom for the citta. The difference between the emptiness of the avijjã-citta and the emptiness of the pure citta, free of avijjã, can be illustrated by imagining a person in an empty room. Standing in the middle of the room, admiring its emptiness, that person forgets about himself. Seeing that there is nothing around him in the room, he re?ects only on the emptiness he perceives and not on the fact that he is occupying a central position in that space. As long as someone is in the room, it is not truly empty. When he ?nally realizes that the room can never be truly empty until he departs, that is the moment when avijjã disintegrates and the pure citta arises. Once the citta has let go of phenomena of every sort, the citta appears supremely empty; but the one who admires the emptiness, who is awestruck by the emptiness, that one still survives. The self as reference point, which is the essence of avijjã, remains integrated into the citta’s knowing nature. This is the genuine avijjã. One’s “self” is the real impediment at that moment. As soon as it disintegrates and disappears, no more impediments remain. Everything is empty: the external world is empty, and the interior of the citta is empty. As in the case of a person in an empty room, we can only truly say that the room is empty when the person leaves the room. The citta that has gained a comprehensive understanding of all external matters, and all matters pertaining to itself, this citta is said to be totally empty. True emptiness occurs when every single trace of conventional reality has disappeared from the citta. Avijjã’s extinction is unlike that of all other things that we have investigated up to this point. Their ending was accompanied by a clear and de?nite understanding of their true nature. Uniquely, the radiance of avijjã is extinguished in an instant, like a ?ash of lightening. It is a moment of being that happens spontaneously: it just ?ips over and vanishes completely. Only then, when the radiance disappears, do we know that it was really the genuine avijjã. What remains is entirely unique. Its nature is absolutely pure. Although it has never before been experienced, there’s nothing to doubt when it appears at that moment. Anything that might cause doubt has ceased along with it. This is the end of all burdens. All allusions to oneself, to the true essence of one’s being refer speci?cally to this genuine avijjã. They indicate that it is still intact. All investigations are done for its sake. This self is what knows; this self is what understands.
Richard said,
May 31, 2011 at 9:00 am · Edit
By the way, that whole book is good for giving first-person accounts of how the samadhi states “feel.” After reading it, you understand why a lot of confusions arise when people interpret these states.
More comments at ‘a secular buddhist’
http://darwiniana.com/2011/05/22/a-secular-buddhist
Richard
rmbr117@yahoo.com
207.138.47.153 Submitted on 2011/05/31 at 7:37 am
“The Buddha did not teach consciousness transmigrating through existences and those monks that misrepresented essential parts of the teachings were rebuked by him. Saati, the fisherman’s son, is a prime example (MN38).”That is referring to the “consciousness khandha.” The point is clearer from Samkhya. The conditioned gunas (which include “consciousness”) only “transmigrate.” The “Purusha” (if you will) doesn’t transmigrate.
You are quite right: the change in the meaning of the term ‘secular’ is misleading. It implies that ‘secularism’ is an atheistic cult of scientism. But the prime starting point for secularism was the Protestant Reformation.
In general the secular displays the diversity of ‘modernity’. A ‘secular’ buddhism is going to cause total confusion.
star
justalittledust.com/blog/
74.197.60.235 Submitted on 2011/05/30 at 12:06 pm
Perhaps, then, some of the *apparent* disagreement comes from defining the term “secular” differently. If those who call themselves Secular Buddhists* define secular as being about life in this world, without reference to religion or metaphysics — that is, not necessarily *denying* religion or metaphysics but simply not giving them any weight — and you are defining “secular” as “the era of modernity” — is it any wonder there is confusion and disagreement? How can any two people effectively communicate if they can’t even come close to agreeing on what the words they are using mean (and isn’t this just the sort of thing the Buddha was trying to point out to us with his descriptions of emptiness?).Perhaps we should try tossing out the word Secular and discuss whether Buddhism can be practiced without giving any weight to things which cannot be seen for oneself in this life?
* a title I do not claim for myself, btw
Almost Like a Whale by Steve Jones – book review
With a cool assurance that should persuade the open-minded and thrill the converted, Steve Jones tackles the arguments Creationists routinely level against Darwin
Auithors eulogizing Darwin who cannot reference the clear evidence of Darwin’s plagiarism of Wallace (cf. Roy Davies’ The Darwin Conspiracy) are not to be trusted.
http://www.uncommondescent.com/biology/another-windy-day-in-the-junkyard/
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/05/in_which_creationists_make_me.php
When Michael Behe visited the UK, back in November, the Humanist Society of Scotland and the British Center for Science Education wrote up a list of “10 + 1 Questions For Professor Behe” which they subsequently distributed to their ranks of faithful followers. I responded, at the time, fairly thoroughly to the arguments made therein here (to which the BCSE retaliated fairly viciously here).
Since PZ Myers has been invited to visit Glasgow next week (one week from today to be specific), to lecture on the embryological evidence for Darwinism, I took it upon myself to draw up this list of “10 + 1 Questions For Professor Myers”. If you happen to be in the area, and are anticipating attending this event next Monday (which will take place in the Crystal Palace, 36 Jamaica Street, from 7pm), feel free to use the following questions as inspiration for the Q&A session which will follow the talk.
10 + 1 Questions For Professor Myers Read the rest of this entry »
Researchers Solve Mammoth Evolutionary Puzzle: The Woollies Weren’t Picky, Happy to Interbreed
ScienceDaily (May 30, 2011) — A DNA-based study sheds new light on the complex evolutionary history of the woolly mammoth, suggesting it mated with a completely different and much larger species.
Scientists Discover the Largest Assembly of Whale Sharks Ever RecordedScienceDaily (May 25, 2011) — Whale sharks (Rhincodon typus) are often thought to be solitary behemoths that live and feed in the open ocean. Scientists at the Smithsonian Institution and colleagues, however, have found that this is not necessarily the case, finding that whale sharks can be gregarious and amass in the hundreds to feed in coastal waters.
Biological Circuits for Synthetic BiologyScienceDaily (May 29, 2011) — “If you don’t like the news, go out and make some of your own,” said Wes “Scoop” Nisker. Taking a page from the book of San Francisco radio legend Scoop Nisker, biologists who find themselves dissatisfied with the microbes nature has provided are going out and making some of their own. Members of the fast-growing “synthetic biology” research community are designing and constructing novel organisms and biologically-inspired systems — or redesigning existing organisms and systems — to solve problems that natural systems cannot. The range of potential applications for synthetic biological systems runs broad and deep, and includes such profoundly important ventures as the microbial-based production of advanced biofuels and inexpensive versions of critical therapeutic drugs.
Published on Tuesday, May 31, 2011 by RobertReich.org
The Truth about the US Economy
by Robert Reich
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/05/31-6
The U.S. economy continues to stagnate. It’s growing at the rate of 1.8 percent, which is barely growing at all. Consumer spending is down. Home prices are down. Jobs and wages are going nowhere.
It’s vital that we understand the truth about the American economy.
How did we go from the Great Depression to 30 years of Great Prosperity? And from there, to 30 years of stagnant incomes and widening inequality, culminating in the Great Recession? And from the Great Recession into such an anemic recovery?
Nobel Laureate: Globalism Has Been Ruinous for Americans
How Offshoring Has Destroyed the Economy
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
These are discouraging times, but once in a blue moon a bit of hope appears. I am pleased to report on the bit of hope delivered in March of 2011 by Michael Spence, a Nobel prize-winning economist, assisted by Sandile Hlatshwayo, a researcher at New York University. The two economists have taken a careful empirical look at jobs offshoring and concluded that it has ruined the income and employment prospects for most Americans.
http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts05312011.html
NY Review
The Very Violent Road to America
June 9, 2011
J.H. Elliott
Before the Revolution: America’s Ancient Pasts
by Daniel K. Richter
Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 502 pp., $35.00
Over the last fifty years the writing of North American colonial history has undergone a great transformation. During the nineteenth century and a substantial part of the twentieth there was not much doubt about its scope or its purpose. Essentially the colonial period was seen as a prelude—a prelude to the achievement of independence by the thirteen mainland colonies from British imperial domination, and to the creation of the God-blessed nation that was to become a model and an inspiration to the peoples of the world. The challenge facing historians of this period was to trace the origins and early manifestations of those elements—political and religious liberty, individual self-fulfillment, innovation and enterprise—that grounded the new nation on a set of fundamental principles, and to explore the processes that would enable the United States to win its rendezvous with destiny.
The resulting story, as told to generations of Americans, was relatively simple and straightforward. Its origins were located in England, the England of Magna Carta, the Protestant Reformation, and the seventeenth-century struggle to save liberty from the grasp of arbitrary power. It was thus an essentially English story, which was then carried across the Atlantic by English emigrants, and was in due course replayed on the soil of America, and primarily of New England. Naturally it acquired new elements along the way. In particular, Frederick Jackson Turner added a fresh dimension to the origins of American individualism with his arguments for the impact of the frontier experience on American society.
The story, however, continued to be shaped by three defining elements. It was Anglocentric, in the sense that it placed the weight of its emphasis on the contribution of British settlers, with some assistance from continental Europeans, primarily those of Teutonic origin, who were granted a kind of honorary Anglo status. It was teleological, in the sense that everything in the story built up to a logical conclusion in the winning of independence. And it was exceptionalist, in the sense that it was a story like no other about a nation that itself was like no other. As William Findley wrote, even before the eighteenth century was over, Americans had “formed a character peculiar to themselves, and in some respects distinct from that of other nations.”
full: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jun/09/very-violent-road-america/
David Michael Green: Dispatches from the End of Empire
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/05/30-1
Chris Hedges: The Sky Really Is Falling
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/05/30-5
Chuck Collins: A Decade of Magical Tax-Cut Thinking
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/05/30-4
Protesters Pack Tahrir to Push Military Council on Unfulfilled Revolutionary Demands
http://www.commondreams.org/video/2011/05/30
“Massacre”: Yemeni Forces Kill 20 Protesters as Sit-In Smashed
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/05/30-0
UK Undermining Europe’s Tar Sands Ban, say Campaigners
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/05/30-3
After Years of War, House Holds Votes to Check Military Action
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/05/30-1
Germany’s Nuclear Phaseout Is an ‘Historic Moment’
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/05/30-2
Worst Ever Carbon Emissions Leave Climate on the Brink
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/05/30
Our discussion of ‘secular buddhism’ has been an eye-opener, and I will need to study this group at length, but I suspect my first instincts were correct: this is a fruitless effort to hybridize scientism with buddhism, and it won’t work.
Needless to say our discussion of rebirth should also be a moment to consider that rebirth in man is a falsification of Darwinism, step one, perhaps one reason for the effort to neutralize real buddhist beliefs.
Idea For A Universal History‘
The whole point of the ‘idea’ for a universal history is to be sure we are dealing with free agents, who had to evolve somehow. That free agency may be incomplete: still evolving its own free agency.
That’s why the idea of Big History only get its half right. We must find the point at which the real man with his free agency evolved to create his own history.
Current science can’t handle that.
http://dianoeidos.wordpress.com/2011/05/30/a-critique-of-freedom-free-will-and-soul/
Thanks again to Luke for links and discussion of some posts here on the ‘eonic effect’. The issue of freedom and free will are not quite the same.
We speak of causality in history, and the mechanics of history beyond causality. The old eonic model focussed on ‘system action’ and ‘free action’, and ‘free action scripts’, terms causing a problem with many readers up to third edition, the fouth putting them in the background. Strictly speaking the eonic effect/model makes no assumptions ‘free will’, only about ‘relative free action’ in relation to ‘system action’. That ‘free action’ represents choice, a branching of mechanical potential.
Think of an ocean liner and its passengers: the machine and the people are a hybrid system. We see ‘relative free action’ in relation to the system. Now apply that to history: it shows a systematics and relative to that human free action. The distinction is essential to understanding history. Look at the systematics of the Axial Age, and then Israelite history (barely known) and then the ‘free action’ that produced one people’s religious belief system.
In general we can for good Kantian reasons assume the existence of free will as the reality behind ‘free action’, but that the latter refers to ‘choice’, whether or not choice due to free will.
I don’t know why this set of distinctions creates so much trouble. The conditioning of science here has made discusions of free agents in history nearly taboo, what a muddle, something Kant pointed to two centuries ago.
The eonic model should be a five minute job to understand, but the evidence of mental impairment in science jocks is alarming in the extreme.
In general, I would say to Luke that not a single person has ever rightly understood the ‘eonic model’. It is an IQ Test and a half, and everyone flunks (don’t worry about it). I am exempt since I discovered the model, but indirectly over time. I would not have been smart enough to have understood it if I hadn’t discovered it and had to read my own explanations (!), an obscure statement to anyone but the discoverer.
That is why Darwinism appeals no doubt: a dumbed down ideology at the level of adolescent sports competition: Darwinism for dummies indeed.
That’s a pity, because the basics are a kind of Kantion 101 kindergarten based on Kant’s third antinomy, but here even Kant scholars couldn’t deal with it, in part because Kant studies can’t acknowledge in public that Kant couldn’t have been a Darwinist.
So the issues are not hard, not at all, but public understanding is grotesque here, bad science propaganda in action.
Again: consider a car and the driver, simplest case. The car represents a causal system, and the driver a ‘free agent’ (i.e. he has a steering wheel and a plan to go somewhere) inside that system.
That’s not hard. But somehow the issue is too much for people trained in science these days.
Still, it takes time. The eonic model came to me in one afternoon in 1995, but it took me ten years til the second edition of WHEE to grasp it for myself, despite already grasping it! Small wonder noone can understand it. Too bad, because it shows the real key to the evolution of man, and to the ‘evolution of freedom’, a concept requird when discussing man.
To put the issue in perspective: everyone already understands this, for the same reason that the distinction of car and driver is obvious to all, until you try and get theoretical.
And in the study of history we simply assume that man is a free agent who creates that history, not an automaton following the laws of physics. And that free agency is real whatever the status of free will But the contradiction has created total confusion (althugh students of history just slip away by ignoring it).
Mars: Red Planet’s Rapid Formation Explains Its Small Size Relative to Earth
ScienceDaily (May 25, 2011) — Mars developed in as little as two to four million years after the birth of the solar system, far more quickly than Earth, according to a new study published in the May 26 issue of the journal Nature. The red planet’s rapid formation helps explain why it is so small, say the study’s co-authors
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110525131705.htm
Non-Genetic Evolution
we have to suspect that genetics has confused the issue of evolution, which occurs at a higher level with an abstract dynamics that impresses itself secondarily on the genes, made to follow the real time effects of evolutionary transformations of culture.
The Tower of Babel: as noted in the previous post, Darwinism fails on human evolution, witness the misunderstanding over the evolution of language.