06.27.11
Ancient Species of Mayfly
Ancient Species of Mayfly Had Short, Tragic LifeScienceDaily (June 24, 2011) — About 100 million years ago, a tiny mayfly had a problem.
Gone With the Papers
Published on Monday, June 27, 2011 by TruthDig.com
by Chris Hedges
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/06/27-7
I visited the Hartford Courant as a high school student. It was the first time I was in a newsroom. The Connecticut paper’s newsroom, the size of a city block, was packed with rows of metal desks, most piled high with newspapers and notebooks. Reporters banged furiously on heavy typewriters set amid tangled phone cords, overflowing ashtrays, dirty coffee mugs and stacks of paper, many of which were in sloping piles on the floor. The din and clamor, the incessantly ringing phones, the haze of cigarette and cigar smoke that lay over the feverish hive, the hoarse shouts, the bustle and movement of reporters, most in disheveled coats and ties, made it seem an exotic, living organism. I was infatuated. I dreamed of entering this fraternity, which I eventually did, for more than two decades writing for The Dallas Morning News, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor and, finally, The New York Times, where I spent most of my career as a foreign correspondent.
Newsrooms today are anemic and forlorn wastelands
C&C/June27
CLIMATE AND CAPITALISM
An online journal focusing on capitalism, climate change, and the
ecosocialist alternative.
http://climateandcapitalism.com
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There is now a “Share on Facebook” link after every article on the
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June 27, 2011
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Four Decades of Cruelty and Inhumanity
Glen Ford: Four Decades of Cruelty and Inhumanity to U.S. Political Prisoners
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/06/26-0
Is Greece Being Blackmailed?
Medea Benjamin: Is Greece Being Blackmailed to Put the Brakes on Gaza Flotilla?
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/06/26
Haiti: Leaked Cables
Haiti: Leaked Cables Expose U.S. Suppression of Min. Wage, Election Doubts and Elite’s Private Army
http://www.commondreams.org/video/2011/06/25
Warming Oceans
Warming Oceans Cause Largest Movement of Marine Species in Two Million Years
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/06/26-4
Gay Marriage Legalized in New York
Gay Marriage Is Legalized in New York
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/06/25
Israel Warns Foreign Journalists
Israel Warns Foreign Journalists: Joining Gaza Flotilla Is Illegal
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/06/26
‘Pushing Us to the Edge’
Greeks: Austerity Measures Are ‘Pushing Us to the Edge’
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/06/26-2
A Tale Of Two Crimes
Justice In America: A Tale Of Two Crimes
http://www.commondreams.org/further/2011/06/24-8
‘Safety Myth’ Left Japan Ripe for Nuclear Crisis
RG mail
by Norimitsu Onishi
The New York Times (June 24 2011)
SHIKA, Japan – Near a nuclear power plant facing the Sea of Japan, a
series of exhibitions in a large public relations building here extols the
virtues of the energy source with some help from “Alice in Wonderland”.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/25/world/asia/25myth.html?_r=1&hp&gwh=E6D5FE385046857B298E5C45FB3B6231
Japan’s ‘throwaway’ nuclear workers
RG mail
Reuters (June 24 2011)
by Kevin Krolicki and Chisa Fujioka
FUKUSHIMA, JAPAN (Reuters) – A decade and a half before it blew apart in
a hydrogen blast that punctuated the worst nuclear accident since
Chernobyl, the Number Three reactor at the Fukushima nuclear power plant
was the scene of an earlier safety crisis.
Then, as now, a small army of transient workers was put to work to try
to stem the damage at the oldest nuclear reactor run by Japan’s largest
utility.
At the time, workers were racing to finish an unprecedented repair to
address a dangerous defect: cracks in the drum-like steel assembly known
as the “shroud” surrounding the radioactive core of the reactor.
But in 1997, the effort to save the 21-year-old reactor from being
scrapped at a large loss to its operator, Tokyo Electric, also included
a quiet effort to skirt Japan’s safety rules: foreign workers were
brought in for the most dangerous jobs, a manager of the project said.
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2011/06/24/japan-nuclear-re-idUKL3E7HO0FE20110624
06.26.11
‘Natural Antifreeze’
Scientists a Step Closer to Understanding ‘Natural Antifreeze’ MoleculesScienceDaily (June 23, 2011) — Scientists have made an important step forward in their understanding of cryoprotectants — compounds that act as natural ‘antifreeze’ to protect drugs, food and tissues stored at sub-zero temperatures.
Free will eludes evolutionary theory
Free Will, Moral Action, And Self-consciousness
The question of free will and evolution is evaded by science, witness the recent stance of Sam Harris, and the irony is that social control of the individual will fail for science, because it can’t resolve the ‘will’ of the individual.
Sprint thru WHEE…
In search of history
Sunday’s weekly sprint through WHEE will be postponed til midweek: create your own series, one section per chapter in the online edition. Don’t get bogged down.
Islam, evolution, and science acceptance
Does Islam Stand Against Science?
You can’t have it both ways: if you want to promote science, then critiques of Darwinism are on the table, and might help to clarify the confusion many Moslems are stuck with.
Marxism vs the Social Democrats
Marxism without revolution: Crisis
From Crooked Timber
by John Quiggin on June 25, 2011
From the author of Zombie Economics (read it!).
I’m writing series of posts examining the question – what is left of Marxism, as a way to understand the world, and as a way to change it, once it is accepted that capitalism is not going to be overthrown by a working class revolution. Last time I talked about class. This post is about crisis. As before, the shorter JQ is “there are lots of valuable insights, but there’s a high risk of political paralysis.”
I think this take is of interest, and we have proposed something related here, which is simply that Marx’s antiliberalism backfired. The Social Democrats were anathema to Marxists, but their implicit liberalism balanced with the ‘social rights’ against marketss ought to be the first step to a possible post-capitalist society. I think that the left has thrown away an ally here, and thrown away a viable first step toward something like sanity.
In any case, the demented market mania of American society is, at this point, a sad spectacle of poor intelligence getting the upper hand, the low intelligence that I am referring to is that of fellows like Alan Greenspan and the myriad pseudo-geekish cases of theory hypnosis in the meritocracy, that novel contribution to class stupidity. Zombie eck. Crooked timber, I guess.
The Global Financial Crisis, which initially seemed (to me at any rate) likely to bring an end to the dominance of the financial elite, has so far reinforced it, though it will be quite a while before the final whistle blows.
Standard Marxist analyses don’t deal with this very well, in my view. The tendency is always to present the response to each crisis in terms of increasing exploitation, and of papering over the cracks in a system that is doomed to inevitable failure. After three hundred years of such crises (if you start with the South Sea Bubble), it’s necessary to work on the hypothesis that crises are inherent features of the capitalist system.
The problems with the standard Marxist approach were evident in the response of the German Social Democrats to the Great Depression, which we discussed in the seminar on Sheri Berman’s book The Primacy of Politics The orthodox Marxist response, exemplified by the leading Social Democrat theorist Hilferding was that within the system, there was no alternative to ‘sound finance’. The revisionist Swedish Social Democrats weren’t so constrained and produced a response that was social democratic in the modern sense of the term.
Closely related is the question of what, if anything, can and should be done to stabilise the capitalist economy. The orthodox Marxist answer, it seems to me, is the same as that of classical economics, namely “Nothing”. By contrast, I read the historical evidence as showing that the system can and should be stabilised to a significant extent, as was done during the postwar decades, using Keynesian macroeconomic policies and tight regulation of the financial system. Obviously, those policies broke down in the late 1960s and early 1970s. On the other hand, the limited resort to Keynesian methods in 2008 and 2009 did prevent complete collapse of the system.
As I argued in Zombie Economics, the most promising route forward is to redevelop Keynesian economics in a way that overcomes these failings. That’s not a strategy with a guarantee of success, but it seems more hopeful than any alternative, and certainly better than standing by and restating the obvious fact that crises are part of the system.
Horgan: Defending Stephen Jay Gould’s Crusade against Biological Determinism
http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=defending-stephen-jay-goulds-crusad-2011-06-24
Innteresting article (below) from Horgan, but the issue of biological determinism, which the old sociobiologists attacked in lieu of attacking Darwinism as such, is part of a broader problem: 1. the question of free will, and its evolution (Horgan has defended free will from Sam Harris’ attacks), and 2. the failure of Darwinism, as such. Horgan is apparently still stuck in The Paradigm: but how can he explain the evolution of free will?
I used to be tough on Stephen Jay Gould, the great evolutionary biologist, who died in 2002. I found him self-righteous and pompous, in person and on the page. In an August 1995 profile of him for Scientific American I summed up his worldview, which emphasizes the role of randomness, or “contingency,” in shaping life, as “shit happens.”
But I admired Gould’s ferocious opposition to biological determinism, which he defined as the view that “the social and economic differences between different groups—primarily races, classes and sexes—arise from inherited, inborn distinctions and that society, in this sense, is an accurate reflection of biology.” I loathe biological determinism, too, and so I must defend Gould against charges that he was a fact-fudging “charlatan,” as the anthropologist Ralph Holloway of Columbia University put it.
Holloway’s slur is based on a critique by him and five other anthropologists of Gould’s famous 1981 work The Mismeasure of Man (W. W. Norton & Co., 1981), in which Gould exposed case after appalling case of scientists in the past two centuries “proving” the biological inferiority of certain races as well as criminals, the poor, “imbeciles” and women. One chapter focused on the work of a 19th-century physician, Samuel George Morton, who amassed a collection of almost 1,000 skulls from around the world. Morton estimated the brain size of different racial groups by pouring seed and lead shot into the skulls. He concluded that whites have larger brains on average than blacks, confirming his suspicion that the races did not do not share a common ancestry but stemmed from different evolutionary roots.
Defenders of slavery embraced Morton’s work. After he died, an editorial in the Charleston Medical Journal and Review declared, “We in the South should consider him our benefactor, for aiding most materially in giving to the Negro his true position as an inferior race.” In Mismeasure, Gould reanalyzed Morton’s skull measurements and concluded that the average sizes of blacks’ and whites’ skulls were roughly equivalent. Gould suggested that Morton’s racial bias had led him, probably unwittingly, to “discover” results consonant with his beliefs.
In “The Mismeasure of Science: Stephen Jay Gould versus Samuel George Morton on Skulls and Bias,” published June 7 in PLoS Biology, Holloway and five colleagues from other institutions stated that Gould’s own analysis of Morton “is likely the stronger example of a bias influencing results.” The group reported that its re-measurements of the skulls in Morton’s collection support Morton’s conclusions more than Gould’s.
Commenting on Gould’s claim that bias often influences science, an unsigned editorial in The New York Times snidely remarked, “Right now it looks as though he proved his point, just not as he intended.” The anthropologist and blogger John Hawks claims that the “straightforward” analysis of Holloway et al. shows that Gould clearly engaged in “utter fabulation.” Hawks added, “Some of Gould’s mistakes are outrageous, with others it is hard for me to believe that the misstatements were not deliberate misrepresentations.”
Some caveats are in order here. First of all, Holloway and his colleagues analyzed fewer than half of the skulls in Morton’s collection. Second, their analysis, far from being “straightforward,” was highly technical and based on many judgment calls, as were those of Gould and Morton. The divergent results depend in part on whether to include or exclude certain skulls that could unduly skew estimates of brain sizes. Third, neither Morton nor Holloway et al. corrected their measurements for age, gender or stature, all of which are correlated with brain size.
Finally, at least one of the PLoS authors, Holloway, is obviously biased against Gould. The Times quoted Holloway saying: “I just didn’t trust Gould. I had the feeling that his ideological stance was supreme.” Holloway faulted Gould because he “never even bothered to mention” a 1988 paper by John S. Michael that found Morton’s conclusions to be “reasonably accurate.” But Holloway and his co-authors stated that the paper by Michael, written when he was an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, “has multiple significant flaws rendering it uninformative.”
Maybe Gould was wrong that Morton misrepresented his data, but he was absolutely right that biological determinism was and continues to be a dangerous pseudoscientific ideology. Biological determinism is thriving today: I see it in the assertion of researchers such as the anthropologist Richard Wrangham of Harvard University that the roots of human warfare reach back all the way to our common ancestry with chimpanzees. In the claim of scientists such as Rose McDermott of Brown University that certain people are especially susceptible to violent aggression because they carry a “warrior gene.” In the enthusiasm of some science journalists for the warrior gene and other flimsy linkages of genes to human traits. In the insistence of the evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne and neuroscientist Sam Harris that free will is an illusion because our “choices” are actually all predetermined by neural processes taking place below the level of our awareness. In the contention of James Watson, co-discoverer of the double helix, that the problems of sub-Saharan Africa reflect blacks’ innate inferiority. In the excoriation of many modern researchers of courageous anti-determinists such as Gould and Margaret Mead.
Biological determinism is a blight on science. It implies that the way things are is the way they must be. We have less choice in how we live our lives than we think we do. This position is wrong, both empirically and morally. If you doubt me on this point, read Mismeasure, which, even discounting the chapter on Morton, abounds in evidence of how science can become an instrument of malignant ideologies.
Answering the Dreaded ‘Evolution’ Question
http://spectator.org/archives/2011/06/24/answering-the-dreaded-evolutio#
More Than 9 in 10 Americans Continue to Believe in God
More Than 9 in 10 Americans Continue to Believe in God
Professed belief is lower among younger Americans, Easterners, and liberals
The God of the Old Testament …
By IGNORANT AMOS – WWW.RICHARDDAWKINS.NET
Added: Sunday, 26 June 2011 at 9:30 AM
http://richarddawkins.net/articles/641920-the-god-of-the-old-testament
Sun and Planets Constructed Differently Than Thought
Sun and Planets Constructed Differently Than Thought, NASA Mission Suggests
ScienceDaily (June 24, 2011) — Researchers analyzing samples returned by NASA’s 2004 Genesis mission have discovered that our sun and its inner planets may have formed differently than previously thought.
‘Quantum Magic’
‘Quantum Magic’ Without Any ‘Spooky Action at a Distance’
ScienceDaily (June 25, 2011) — Quantum mechanical entanglement is at the heart of the famous quantum teleportation experiment and was referred to by Albert Einstein as “spooky action at a distance.” A team of researchers led by Anton Zeilinger at the University of Vienna and the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information of the Austrian Academy of Sciences used a system which does not allow for entanglement, and still found results which cannot be interpreted classically.
Artificial Pancreas
Artificial Pancreas Being Developed to Ease Diabetes BurdenScienceDaily (June 25, 2011) — The 25.8 million Americans who have diabetes may soon be free of finger pricks and daily insulin dosing. Mayo Clinic endocrinologists Yogish Kudva, M.B.B.S., and Ananda Basu, M.B.B.S., M.D., are developing an artificial pancreas that will deliver insulin automatically and with an individualized precision never before possible.
Spain’s ‘Indignant’
Published on Saturday, June 25, 2011 by Agence France Presse
Spain’s ‘Indignant’ Launch New Protest March
Spain’s Indignant: First We Took the Steets, then the Squares, Now the Roads. “After That, We Will Take Europe.”
by Josep Lago
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/06/25-1
If the Sea Is in Trouble
Published on Saturday, June 25, 2011 by The Independent/UK
If the Sea Is in Trouble, We Are All in Trouble
by Sylvia Earle
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/06/25-5
“America Has the Wealth to End the Despair”
Published on Sunday, June 26, 2011 by YES! Magazine
Nurses come face-to-face with the fallout of the financial crisis every day. Now they’ve joined the worldwide movement for a tax that would curb financial speculation—and help fill public needs.
by Sarah Anderson and Marlee Blasenheim
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/06/26-2
Pullout or a Shell Game?
Published on Sunday, June 26, 2011 by EricMargolis.com
A Real Pullout or a Shell Game?
by Eric Margolis
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/06/26-1
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