History, Evolution, and the Darwin Debate
Fossilized Pollen Reveals Climate History of Northern Antarctica: Tundra Persisted Until 12 Million Years Ago
ScienceDaily (June 27, 2011) — A painstaking examination of the first direct and detailed climate record from the continental shelves surrounding Antarctica reveals that the last remnant of Antarctic vegetation existed in a tundra landscape on the continent’s northern peninsula about 12 million years ago.
Evolution And Ethics
The question of the evolution of ethics (as Huxley sensed late in life) is the Achilles heel of Darwinism.
But, ironically, it is also a problem for proponents of ID, who are saddled with the Old Testaments of Moses (etc) which leave us absolutely puzzled as to the how ethics could have appeared at all. We don’t even understrand our basic ethical behavior, and can’t resolve its contradictions, although Kant made a good start.
Tajikistan’s god-less childrenAttempting to keep religion from Tajik children to stop the spread of fundamentalism is worse than the evil it targets
Making Stories Visible The Task for Bioethics Commissions
Narrative explanations can help us understand difficult scientific issues, but they can also mislead us. Critical skepticism is always appropriate.
How Many “Friends” Can You Really Have?Can social networks expand the evolutionary limit on how many people anyone can truly be close to?
By Robin Dunbar / June 2011
Traditional religion is having a tough time in parts of the world. Majorities in most European countries have told Gallup pollsters in the last few years that religion does not “occupy an important place” in their lives. Across Europe, Judeo-Christian church attendance is down, as is adherence to religious prohibitions such as those against out-of-wedlock births. And while Americans remain, on average, much more devout than Europeans, there are demographic and regional pockets in this country that resemble Europe in their religious beliefs and practices.
The rejection of traditional religion in these quarters has created a vacuum unlikely to go unfilled; human nature seems to demand a search for order and meaning, and nowadays there is no shortage of options on the menu of belief. Some searchers syncretize Judeo-Christian theology with Eastern or New Age spiritualism. Others seek through science the ultimate answers of our origins, or dream of high-tech transcendence by merging with machines — either approach depending not on rationalism alone but on a faith in the goodness of what rationalism can offer.
‘Belief’ in evolution? It may be the wrong word
The challenge to the term ‘belief’ here is quite appropriate, but misses the point that the real issue with ‘belief’ is natural selection as the mechanism of evolution. Darwinism indeed resembles relligion here, since this ‘belief’ borders on a kind of faith.
Alien encounters ‘within twenty years’A top Russian astronomer say he expects humans to encounter extraterrestrial civilisations within the next two decades
Scientists Sequence Endangered Tasmanian Devil’s GenomeScienceDaily (June 27, 2011) — A revolutionary species-preservation approach based on whole-genome analyses of two Tasmanian devils — one that had died of a contagious cancer known as Devil Facial Tumor Disease (DFTD) and one healthy animal — has been used to develop a theoretical model to predict which individuals would need to be kept in captivity to maximize chances of preserving enough genetic diversity for the species to survive. The research helps to formulate one possible plan of action to prevent the extinction of the Tasmanian devil — a marsupial found in the wild exclusively in the Australian island-state of Tasmania. The research model also may be extended to other endangered species.
Brain Rhythm Associated With Learning Also Linked to Running Speed, Study Shows
ScienceDaily (June 27, 2011) — Rhythms in the brain that are associated with learning become stronger as the body moves faster, UCLA neurophysicists report in a new study.
How Humpback Whales Catch Prey With Bubble NetsScienceDaily (June 27, 2011) — Marine biologist David Wiley of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and others report in the latest issue of Behaviour how humpback whales in the Gulf of Maine catch prey with advanced water technology.
Not Even Good Propaganda Anymore
Sacred Mantras
By URI AVNERY
http://www.counterpunch.org/avnery06282011.html
The Palestinians are planning something thoroughly obnoxious: they intend to apply to the UN for statehood.
Michael T. Klare: The New Thirty Years’ War: Winners and Losers in the Great Global Energy Struggle to Come
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/06/27-1
John Nichols: Bernie Sanders to Obama: ‘Do Not Yield to Outrageous Republican Demands’ on Taxes, Cuts, Deficit Policy
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/06/27-8
Peter Hart: Tell the People about the People’s Budget
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/06/27-2
GOP Lawmakers Take Aim at Endangered Species Act
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/06/27-0
Outcry in America as Pregnant Women Who Lose Babies Face Murder Charges
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/06/27-7
Floodwater Seeps into Nebraska Nuke Plant Building
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/06/27-6
Sen. Bernie Sanders Takes to Senate Floor, Demands ‘Shared Sacrifice’
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/06/27-11
Ocean Currents Speed Melting of Antarctic Ice: A Major Glacier Is Undermined from Below
ScienceDaily (June 26, 2011) — Stronger ocean currents beneath West Antarctica’s Pine Island Glacier Ice Shelf are eroding the ice from below, speeding the melting of the glacier as a whole, according to a new study in Nature Geoscience. A growing cavity beneath the ice shelf has allowed more warm water to melt the ice, the researchers say — a process that feeds back into the ongoing rise in global sea levels. The glacier is currently sliding into the sea at a clip of four kilometers (2.5 miles) a year, while its ice shelf is melting at about 80 cubic kilometers a year — 50 percent faster than it was in the early 1990s — the paper estimates.
http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2011/06/world-secular-means-god
Attempts to define secularism are mostly misguided. The secular is not a philosophy, but a cluster of issues centered on the early modern. The atheism of Nietzsche isn’t any more secular than Protestantism, the later, to be sure, already an archaic phase (as the Reformation) of the early modern.
The best way to consider the issue is to see ‘secularism’ as the phase of the new age of modernity relative to the eonic effect and its series. The issues are those of establishing a transformation beyond the Axial Age foundations, that, and much else. It is an aspect of historical/evolutionary dynamism, with a cluster of effects.
The postmodern, although Eagleton won’t give up here easily, is simply a phantom red herring that has confused the issue, as has Nietzsche, whose obsessions are no more solid that what he attacks.
Secularisation is a lot harder than people tend to imagine. The history of modernity is, among other things, the history of substitutes for God. Art, culture, nation, Geist, humanity, society: all these, along with a clutch of other hopeful aspirants, have been tried from time to time. The most successful candidate currently on offer is sport, which, short of providing funeral rites for its spectators, fulfils almost every religious function in the book.
If Friedrich Nietzsche was the first sincere atheist, it is because he saw that the Almighty is exceedingly good at disguising Himself as something else, and that much so-called secularisation is accordingly bogus. Secular thinking, too, had to be demythified. “God had in fact gone into hiding,” Robbins observes, “and now had to be smoked out of various secular terms, from morals and nature and history to man and even grammar.” Even Nietzsche’s will to power has a suspiciously metaphysical ring to it.
Postmodernism is perhaps best seen as Nietzsche shorn of the metaphysical baggage. Whereas modernism is still haunted by a God-shaped absence, postmodern culture is too young to remember a time when men and women were anguished by the fading spectres of truth, reality, nature, value, meaning, foundations and the like. For postmodern theory, there never was any truth or meaning in the first place, and so mourning its disappearance would be like lamenting that a rabbit can’t recite Paradise Lost.
Postmodernism is properly secular, but it pays an immense price for this coming of age – if coming of age it is. It means shelving all the other big questions, too, as hopelessly passé. It also involves the grave error of imagining that all faith or passionate conviction is incipiently dogmatic. It is not only religious belief to which postmodernism is allergic, but belief as such. Advanced capitalism sees no need for the stuff. It is both politically divisive and commercially unnecessary.
History and Evolution: A Paradox
Attempts to negate free will have an ironic result: theories of evolution (human, especially) are falsified before they get out of the starting gate.
One perspective that might help is to see that ‘freedom evolving’ might show a multitude of situations where that evolution is incomplete.
Advances in brain science are calling into question the volition behind many criminal acts. A leading neuroscientist describes how the foundations of our criminal-justice system are beginning to crumble, and proposes a new way forward for law and order.
I think this would be a mistake, not so much because of the special case of the criminal zone, but because the author seeks it out to attack free will in general, no?
The question of criminal behavior bypasses the more general issue of science and freedom, and the classic Kantian issues that arose in response to Newtonian fundamentalism and hubris.
In any case, the findings of neuroscience, while not as suspect as the findings of Darwinism, are too easily hyped by adherents of the cult of scientism to be trustworthy.
Let’s face it: advances in neuroscience haven’t achieved understanding of the human mind!
Evolution News & Views June 27, 2011 6:00 AM | PermalinkDNA repair: The more we learn, the more complicated it gets.
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2011/06/dna_repair_under_stress047831.html
DNA repair mechanisms are a re-occurring topic here at Evolution, News, and Views because scientists are constantly uncovering layers of complexity and integration within the DNA repair system that seem to defy any notions of having developed by a random, step-by-step process.
For no Atheists may be made a Freemason
By STEVEN RABSON
Updated: Sunday, 26 June 2011 at 2:25 PM
http://richarddawkins.net/discussions/641912-for-no-atheists-may-be-made-a-freemason
‘Belief’ in evolution? It may be the wrong word
When the contestants in the Miss USA pageant last week were asked whether evolution should be taught in schools, many volunteered that they either “believed” or “didn’t believe” in the concept.
“I don’t believe in evolution,” said Miss Alabama. “They should teach both sides since some people believe in evolution and some people believe in creation,” said Miss Arizona. “It’s something people believe in,” said Miss Florida. “I believe in evolution . . . and I like to believe in, like, the big bang theory,” said Miss California, who won the crown.
Some scientists were not impressed, saying the use of the word belief as applied to evolution confused science with faith and discounted evolution’s central role in biology.
http://www.nl-aid.org/continent/sub-saharan-africa/the-new-scrambla-for-africa/
There is a 21st-century version of “the scramble for Africa,” a continuation of what started in the 19th century (1880-1914) by the Europeans who pillaged the continent’s resources, systematically exploited its people, caused tribal and regional wars, destroying its culture; and all of it by invoking social Darwinism and other Eurocentric theories, including ethnocentrism and “Exceptionalism,” to justify white hegemony.
Is there a new round of neo-colonial race to carve up Africa’s lucrative agricultural lands, or is it all radical rhetoric by hyper-enthusiastic NGOs, irresponsible activists who probably hate themselves and in need of psychotherapy, misguided liberal and leftist Western intellectuals looking for a “politically correct” causes and who feel guilty about sins that their white ancestors committed in the Dark Continent, the 19th-century expression to describe sub-Saharan Africa?
Genome Editing – A Next Step in Genetic Therapy — Corrects Hemophilia in Animals
ScienceDaily (June 26, 2011) — Using an innovative gene therapy technique called genome editing that hones in on the precise location of mutated DNA, scientists have treated the blood clotting disorder hemophilia in mice. This is the first time that genome editing, which precisely targets and repairs a genetic defect, has been done in a living animal and achieved clinically meaningful results.
In Search of the Memory Molecule, Researchers Discover Key Protein Complex
ScienceDaily (June 26, 2011) — Have a tough time remembering where you put your keys, learning a new language or recalling names at a cocktail party? New research from the Lisman Laboratory at Brandeis University points to a molecule that is central to the process by which memories are stored in the brain.
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