08.27.11
Reactors Brace for Hurricane
Nuclear Reactors on East Coast Brace for Hurricane Irene’s Wrath
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/08/26-2
“Heal America Tax Wall Street”
Nurses Take the Message “Heal America Tax Wall Street” to 60 Congressional Offices
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/08/26-7
Gulf Spill’s Underwater Dispersants
Impact of Gulf Spill’s Underwater Dispersants Examined
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/08/26-3
Initial Green Light
State Department’s Environmental Analysis Gives Pipeline an Initial Green Light
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/08/26-10
No Way to Honor Dr. King
Medea Benjamin: No Way to Honor Dr. King
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/08/26
08.26.11
New way to map spiraling light
New Depiction of Light Could Boost Telecommunications Channels
ScienceDaily (Aug. 26, 2011) — Physicists with the Institute of Ultrafast Spectroscopy and Lasers (IUSL) at The City College of New York have presented a new way to map spiraling light that could help harness untapped data channels in optical fibers. Increased bandwidth would ease the burden on fiber-optic telecommunications networks taxed by an ever-growing demand for audio, video and digital media. The new model, developed by graduate student Giovanni Milione, Professor Robert Alfano and colleagues, could even spur enhancements in quantum computing and other applications.
WHEE discounted
I just noticed: You can get a discounted copy of WHEE/4th edition: World History And the Eonic Effect, 4th Edition for $13.81, at the link. Scroll down to the listings: Seller: pbshopus. Don’t buy used copies, they may be earlier editions.
You can also get a discounted Kindle edition, for $7.69:
World History And the Eonic Effect: Civilization, Darwinism, and Theories of Evolution Fourth Edition [Kindle Edition]
I did not design the Kindle edition, but it looks quite good.
Since WHEE is probably the only book not either braindead Darwinism, or ID gambit stealth tactics, you need an independent view of the matter, one that will show you the ‘meaning’ of evolution, something that Darwinists (amazingly) have failed to do.
The question of evolution has been totally misunderstood by those who promote Darwinian randomness. WHEE will make that clear. You will consider that unless it is not genetic it is not evolution, but, I fear for you: the reverse is true. Evolution has to a macro process that the genetics adapts to.
The eonic effect and the meaning of evolution
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2011/08/the_eight_meanings_of_evolutio050011.html
This post has some useful comments on evolution, but unfortunately Darwin critics can fumble the ball as badly as Darwin dogmatists.
The question of evolution is easily overdefined: it is a word from the dictionary meaning ‘rolling out’, and if this ‘rolling out’ shows a developmental process then the term ‘evolution’ can be applied to it.
That’s it. ‘Evolution’ has NO intrinsic connection to genetic definitions of biological development. And in fact the use of the term in genetic contexts has been consistently confused, because of the muddle over random mutations/natural selection.
And no clear facts exist to really close the case on human evolution, so-called. Man’s complex consciousness may well have evolved in some sense, but the statement doesn’t have a clear meaning. How could the ‘soul’ ‘evolve’ between homo erectus and homo sapiens? What does that even mean?
I think that the meaning of evolution must include the extended usage seen in the so-called eonic effect, where the macroevolution of civilization is visible in a very dramatic, but intuitive, demonstration of ‘evolution’ in history. And this includes the phenomena of the Axial Age, and its displays of emergent religions. And we must suspect that the earlier emergent evolution of man, homo sapiens, was like this, a top down process in which the genetics followed the macro.
Thus ID-ists are not going to get ‘evolution’ right because they can’t see the ‘evolution’ behind the Axial Age, thence the Old Testament mystery. Evolution! Not god!
In an illuminating article called “The Meanings of Evolution,” Stephen Meyer and Michael Keas distinguished six different ways in which “evolution” is commonly used:
1. Change over time; history of nature; any sequence of events in nature.
2. Changes in the frequencies of alleles in the gene pool of a population.
3. Limited common descent: the idea that particular groups of organisms have descended from a common ancestor.
4. The mechanisms responsible for the change required to produce limited descent with modification, chiefly natural selection acting on random variations or mutations.
5. Universal common descent: the idea that all organisms have descended from a single common ancestor.
6. “Blind watchmaker” thesis: the idea that all organisms have descended from common ancestors solely through unguided, unintelligent, purposeless, material processes such as natural selection acting on random variations or mutations; that the mechanisms of natural selection, random variation and mutation, and perhaps other similarly naturalistic mechanisms, are completely sufficient to account for the appearance of design in living organisms.
Meyer and Keas provide many valuable insights in their article, but here we’re only concerned with “evolution” insofar as it’s relevant to theology.
The first meaning is uncontroversial — even trivial. The most convinced young earth creationist agrees that things change over time — that the universe has a history. Populations of animals wax and wane depending on changes in climate and the environment. At one time, certain flora and fauna prosper on the earth, but they later disappear, leaving mere impressions in the rocks to mark their existence for future generations.
Of course, “change over time” isn’t limited to biology. There’s also cosmic “evolution,” the idea that the early universe started in a hot, dense state, and over billions of years, cooled off and spread out, formed stars, galaxies, planets, and so forth. This includes the idea of cosmic nucleosynthesis, which seeks to explain the production of heavy elements (everything heavier than helium) in the universe through a process of star birth, growth, and death. These events involve change over time, but they have to do with the history of the inanimate physical universe rather than with the history of life. While this picture of cosmic evolution may contradict young earth creationism, it does not otherwise pose a theological problem. The generic idea that one form of matter gives rise, under the influence of various natural laws and processes, to other forms of matter, does not contradict theism. Surely God could directly guide such a process in innumerable ways, could set up a series of secondary natural processes that could do the job, or could do some combination of both.
In fact, virtually no one denies the truth of “evolution” in senses 1, 2, or 3. And, pretty much everyone agrees that natural selection and random mutations explain some things in biology (number 4).
What about the fifth sense of evolution, universal common ancestry? This is the claim that all organisms on earth are descended from a single common ancestor that lived sometime in the distant past. Universal common ancestry is distinct from the mechanism of change. In fact, it’s compatible with all sorts of different mechanisms or sources for change, though the most popular mechanism is the broadly Darwinian one. It’s hard to square universal common descent with some interpretations of biblical texts of course; nevertheless, it’s logically compatible with theism. If God could turn dirt into a man, or a man’s rib into a woman, then presumably he could, if he so chose, turn a bacterium into a jellyfish, or a dinosaur into a bird. Whatever its exegetical problems, an unbroken evolutionary tree of life guided and intended by God, in which every organism descends from some original organism, sounds like a logical possibility. (So there’s logical space where both intelligent design and theistic evolution overlap — even if ID and theistic evolution often describe people with different positions.)
Besides the six senses mentioned by Meyer and Keas, there is also the metaphorical sense of evolution, in which Darwinian Theory is used as a template to explain things other than nature, like the rise and fall of civilizations or sports careers. In his book The Ascent of Money, for instance, historian Niall Ferguson explains the evolution of the financial system in the West in Darwinian terms. He speaks of “mass extinction events,” survival of the fittest banks, a “Cambrian Explosion” of new financial instruments, and so forth. This way of speaking can sometimes be illuminating, even if, at times, it’s a stretch. Still, no one doubts that there are examples of the fittest surviving in biology and finance. We might have some sort of “evolution” here, but not in a theologically significant sense.
Finally, there’s evolution in the sense of “progress” or “growth.” Natural evolution has often been understood in this way, so that cosmic history is interpreted as a movement toward greater perfection, complexity, mind, or spirit. A pre-Darwinian understanding of “evolution” was the idea of a slow unfolding of something that existed in nascent form from the beginning, like an acorn eventually becoming a great oak tree. If anything, this sense of evolution tends toward theism rather than away from it, since it suggests a purposive plan. For that reason, many contemporary evolutionists (such as the late Stephen J. Gould) explicitly reject the idea that evolution is progressive, and argue instead that cosmic history is not going anywhere in particular.
New Atheism, the religion
http://darwiniana.com/2011/08/26/rights-and-benefits-offered-to-religious-groups/
To demand the rights of religous groups is a confession by new atheists that they are a religion in the making!
Leftists confused by Darwinism
http://darwiniana.com/2011/08/26/coulter-attack-on-evolution/
This article is good example of the way that Darwinian propaganda harms the left, harms secularists, and makes them look foolish at a time when the right is dangerously active.
Coulter’s ID arguments may be flawed, but he assertion that natural selection can’t explain complex structures is a no-brainer.
Proponents of Darwinism should consider the damage they are creating, and it is incredible to put Coulter in the right on any subject.
Soulful atheists?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dori-hartley/the-soulful-atheist_b_932373.html: The Soulful Atheist
Having defended this article in the previous post, for today, I would also say that I don’t endorse its views. However it is of great interest to see the way atheists are forced to consider the context of atheism, and the way it should be taken. It is a cinch to declare ‘atheism’, the next, and further, steps are hard.
But, in any case, as here, it is definitely true that an atheist can believe in soul. The independence of ideas the new atheists wish to package in a monist ideology is fundamental.
I think one of the most popular misconceptions about atheists is that we don’t believe in anything, that our lives are void of spirit, belief and or any of the other things that theists think make the world go ’round.
You know what? It’s just not true.
Read the rest of this entry »
Coyne, an obsessive and intolerant fanatic in the making/and ‘social darwinist’ woo
An atheist who almost believes in God
Well, it’s really hard to tell about Dori Hartley from her PuffHo piece, “The soulful atheist.” I’d like to say that she’s a kindler, gentler atheist (she certainly believes she is), but she might as well be religious, because she seems quite susceptible to Chopra-ian woo.
The new atheists baffle me sometimes. It is not enough to be an atheist, you must conform to the full set of dogmas of the ‘new atheist’ cult.
I know from my own experience: I was always, as here, an atheist, but always ‘sort of an atheist’. The reaon for that is that noone defines what the term means, and attaches all sorts of secondary implications to the affirmation.
Any intelligent stance here should be either an agnosticism tending towards theism, or an agnosticism tending toward atheism, or both at the same time.
The attempt to trash an atheist by Coyne because of some ‘Chopra-style woo’ is remarkable narrowness. Anyone tending toward atheism is going to have to consider the religious atheism of, for example, the buddhists, and a similar disguised brand in Chopra who plays two sides of the fence. That may be deceptive, but it is not woo. I think the clearest case of ‘woo’ is that of Darwinists trying to explain ethics with natural selection, social darwinist woo.
I think Coyne should be deprogrammed from the ‘new atheism’ cult. A healthy agnosticism would do wonders to his ‘obsessive twitch’ syndrome (new atheist fanaticism, still embryonic, but getting dangerous)
Adam and Eve controversy
http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXOvYn1OAL0&feature=player_embedded
Rights and benefits offered to religious groups
Military atheists seeking the rights and benefits offered to religious groups
By CHRIS CARROLL – STARS AND STRIPES
Added: Thursday, 25 August 2011 at 7:14 PM
http://richarddawkins.net/articles/642797-military-atheists-seeking-the-rights-and-benefits-offered-to-religious-groups
Coulter Attack On Evolution
Coulter Continues Her War On Science With A Misguided Attack On Evolution
August 25, 2011 5:12 pm ET by David Shere
http://mediamatters.org/blog/201108250021
In her latest syndicated column, Ann Coulter launched an attack on Darwin’s theory of evolution. She argues that “[m]odern science has disproved Darwinian evolution” because biologists now know that many features of organic life, such as complex cell structures, DNA, blood clotting, molecules, and “the cell’s tiny flagellum and cilium” are extraordinarily complicated. From this, Coulter makes the leap that such things couldn’t possibly have evolved through natural selection and random mutation, claiming this shows that evolution is “mathematically impossible.”
Not only is that false, it’s yet another example of Coulter’s longtime war on science.
Read the rest of this entry »
Humans got immunity boost from Neanderthals
http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-neanderthal-immune-genes-20110826,0,377237.story:
Humans got immunity boost from Neanderthals, study finds
Neanderthals, as well as hominids known as Denisovans, contributed key types of immune genes still found in human populations, scientists say.
Are you a man or a mouse?
Are you a man or a mouse? How humans evolved from RODENT that lived in China 160m years ago
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2029844/We-evolved-rodent-lived-China-160m-years-ago.html#ixzz1W9oElwiv
Growing Muscle Tissue
Simple Way to Grow Muscle Tissue With Real Muscle StructureScienceDaily (Aug. 18, 2011) — Researchers at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) have found a simple way to grow muscle tissue with real muscle structure in the laboratory. They found that the muscle cells automatically align themselves if they are subjected to tension in one direction — this is essential for the ability of the muscle cells to exert a force. The endothelial (blood vessel) cells in the culture also automatically grouped themselves to form new blood vessels. This finding is a step forward towards the engineering of thicker muscle tissue that can for example be implanted in restoration operations.
Interbreeding Between Modern Humans and Evolutionary Cousins
Interbreeding Between Modern Humans and Evolutionary Cousins Gave Healthy Immune System Boost to Human Genome, Study Finds
ScienceDaily (Aug. 25, 2011) — For a few years now, scientists have known that humans and their evolutionary cousins had some casual flings, but now it appears that these liaisons led to a more meaningful relationship.
Bacteria Successfully Re-Engineered
Protein-Making Machinery in Bacteria Successfully Re-EngineeredScienceDaily (Aug. 25, 2011) — Yale University researchers have successfully re-engineered the protein-making machinery in bacteria, a technical tour de force that promises to revolutionize the study and treatment of a variety of diseases.
Risibility of the Planet of the Apes
http://www.slate.com/id/2302405/
On the great divide between humans and chimpanzees.
By Jon Cohen
Updated Friday, Aug. 26, 2011, at 7:02 AM ET
Caesar in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Click image to expand.Caesar in Rise of the Planet of the ApesIn the gorgeous and stupidly fun Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Caesar, a chimpanzee, has an oh-so-poignant identity crisis during a walk in the Muir Woods near San Francisco. Thanks to an experimental gene therapy for Alzheimer’s that a biotech firm tested on Caesar’s mother, the CGI-created chimp has inherited a brain with extraordinary wiring. He lives with the drug’s developer, Will Rodman (James Franco), who occasionally takes Caesar on strolls through the giant redwoods and unleashes him, letting him express his inner ape. This day, they startle a woman walking a German shepherd on a leash. Caesar looks at his own collar and, in American Sign Language, plaintively asks Rodman, “Am I a pet?”
Leaving aside the spectacularly implausible scientific scenario that made Caesar a few marbles short of a human, Rise of the Planet of the Apes flirts with an idea that has beguiled researchers for more than a century. What if we could speak with one of our ape cousins? What would they tell us about their views of the world, their disappointments and dreams, their spirituality and existential angst? A second, recently released movie that includes a flesh-and-blood talking chimp, the documentary Project Nim, offers a most sober answer: not much. The subject of the sad documentary (based on the Elizabeth Hess book, Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human) mastered only 125 signs after years of training. “Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you,” he said in his most elaborate string of words ever recorded.
Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Project Nim have a mess of overlap, from the clothes that Caesar and Nim wear to their longing stares out the windows of their nicely appointed homes, the close-ups of their soulful eyes, the horrors of well-meaning scientific research, and the outright cruelty of some human caretakers. Yet there’s one less obvious parallel: Both feature humans who have wildly exaggerated what we have in common with chimpanzees and blurred the line between our differences. The humans in each film are gobsmacked that the cute, innocent creatures they’ve adopted, so strikingly similar to our own kootchy-kootchy-coo babies, grow violent and dangerous by about age 5, ripping off faces and fingers of college-educated Homo sapiens who apparently forgot that Pan troglodytes is a distinct species. In answer to Caesar’s humanlike question, Rodman says, no, you’re not a pet—I’m your father. Ahem.
Much as we may want to believe that a brain gene or two separates the chimp from the human mind, that with proper upbringing and training a chimpanzee could snuggle into our necks and share its innermost thoughts, the reality is that a great, inviolate divide separates the species. Two revolutionary and rightfully celebrated scientists, Charles Darwin and Jane Goodall, along with the masses that promoted their agendas, have lulled us into thinking otherwise.
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The exaggeration of our similarities is a pendulum swing from the 1700s, when the Swedish taxonomist Carl Linnaeus feared a theological backlash if he followed his convictions and placed man and other “simians” on the same branch of the tree of life. By the time of Darwin, a century later, the religious still saw chimpanzees as “inventions of the devil.” An infamous cartoon mocked Darwin by depicting the head of the longbearded scientist atop a chimp torso.
Darwin supporters soon turned the chimpanzee to their advantage, using the physical similarities between us and them as a cornerstone to prove evolutionary theory—they even tried to introduce one, resplendent in suit and bow tie, at the Scopes trial. Behavioral research with captive chimpanzees that began in the early 1900s demonstrated their remarkable, humanlike cognitive skills. Then in the 1960s, Jane Goodall emphasized chimp-human similarities in her pioneering studies of wild chimpanzees, overturning the canard that only humans used tools and, with her many disciples, going on to document a wide range of “human” attributes, from empathy to transmission of behaviors (“culture”), that existed in chimpanzees, too. In the 1970s, biologists cemented the evolutionary argument when they revealed that chimpanzee proteins differed from those in humans by a mere 1.2 percent. By this measure, we were 98.8 percent identical.
Darwin’s theory of evolution and Goodall’s conservation agenda today no longer need the help of chimpanzees. Modern genetics makes it abundantly clear that evolution is real. The conservation movement now rightly protects the welfare of all animals, putting special emphasis on threatened and endangered species, regardless of their human attributes: Many of us care deeply about saving black rhinos, beluga sturgeon, and northern right whales, none of which have looks or behaviors that make us purse our lips and feel a squishy bond.
The pendulum needs to swing back to find the actual divisions that separate us from them and better understand what it means to be human. We separated from a common ancestor with chimpanzees at least 5 million years ago, and random mutation coupled with the evolutionary forces of positive and negative selection have steadily driven the two species further and further apart. For starters, we have 46 chromosomes and they have 48. A recent comparison of chimp and human genomes that assesses all our DNA, including the vast majority that does not make up protein-coding genes but has a major influence on their function, finds about a 5 percent difference—more than a four-fold difference from what was previously thought. Many diseases that profoundly alter our lives—including Alzheimer’s—have no impact on them. (Note to Rodman: lousy animal model.) Only humans primarily walk upright, cook, teach, swim, miscarry at high rates, run long distances, and depend heavily on grandmothers to raise children. Chimps have remarkable short-term memory that may outperform our own, and, as Rise of the Planet of the Apes repeatedly emphasizes, jump and climb with a power and grace that put Cirque du Soleil acrobats to shame. Side-by-side analyses of autopsied brains from chimpanzees and humans further reveal distinct architecture and gene networks in each species.
Language is one of our most pronounced differences. Chimpanzees and other nonhuman great apes communicate in sophisticated ways, and researchers working with the likes of Nim have shown that they can learn to use signs and symbols to speak with humans. But Project Nim, led by Columbia University psychologist Herbert Terrace, marked a watershed moment in ape language research—and effectively killed the high-profile field.
Documentary maker James Marsh (Man on Wire) goes to some length to pillory Terrace for showboating and treating both humans and Nim callously, which oddly garbles the main import of his groundbreaking language research. In a devastating paper published in Science in 1979, Terrace and his co-workers asked, “Can an Ape Create A Sentence?” They analyzed more than 19,000 utterances of Nim and determined, convincingly, that their subject—along with other famous signing apes, Koko the gorilla and Washoe the chimp—had fooled researchers. Upon close inspection, Terrace’s group decided that the apes were stringing words together in response to the recent signs of their teachers and, for the most part, were making simple demands. “Apes can learn many isolated symbols (as can dogs, horses, and other nonhuman species), but they show no unequivocal evidence of mastering the conversational, semantic, or syntactic organization of language,” they concluded.
In the 32 years since, no one has proven Terrace wrong. Critics of the work with Nim rightly point out that Terrace and his slapdash crew of students had methodological problems with their experiment, and legitimate debates exist about the meaning of “language.” But no compelling evidence has come forward that any apes, other than humans, can acquire massive vocabularies (we typically have 60,000 words by high-school age), use words with a set of rules, embed several ideas in a sentence, or converse with a humanish give-and-take of speaking, listening, and responding. Linguist Noam Chomsky, Nim’s namesake, was right. Humans, and not chimps or gorillas or bonobos, seem hard-wired for language.
One of the most telling language differences between us and them comes from the researchers who claim to have made the most progress teaching apes to communicate. In an eyebrow-raising gambit, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh in 2007 co-authored a scientific paper with three bonobos. She spoke with her colleagues using symbols called lexigrams and vocalizations. The study, “Welfare of Apes in Captive Environments,” recounts how Savage-Rumbaugh had a dialog with Panbanisha, Kanzi, and Nyota about what they need. She proposed various options and asked them yes/no questions. The 12 they deemed important—which include the ability to move and interact with others at their choosing, fresh food that they like, and freedom from fear of harm by humans—hardly surprise.
What if the design of the experiment actually asked the bonobos what they needed? These bonobos routinely go on walks in the woods near the sanctuary that houses them in Des Moines, Iowa. Their handlers restrain them with collars and leashes. Imagine if Panbanisha said, “To run free without a collar and leash, which demeans me and makes me feel like a pet.” Now we’re talking language, crossing the Rubicon, and being forced to reconsider where to place the line that separates Julius from Caesar, Noam from Nim. But of course none of them said anything of the sort.
Vietnam’s rice bowl threatened
Vietnam’s rice bowl threatened by rising seas
Climate change is turning rivers of Mekong Delta salty, spelling disaster for millions of poor farmers
Arrested at the White House
Bill McKibben: Arrested at the White House: Acting as a Living Tribute to Martin Luther King
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/08/25-0
Approaching the Collapse
Ronnie Cummins: Approaching the Collapse: Don’t Panic, Go Organic
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/08/25-2
The End of the Nuclear Era?
Sandy LeonVest: The End of the Nuclear Era? Not So Fast …
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/08/25-1
What Did You Learn in School Today?
Craig Studer: What Did You Learn in School Today? (The Texas Version)
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/08/25-5
Wakeup Call
Daphne Wysham: Obama, Earthquake Is a Wakeup Call on Dirty Energy Standards
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/08/25-3
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