10.21.09
Kant, teleology, biology
Archive
Post rescued from google: from an older version of a ‘darwiniana’ blog before this one.
Interesting take on Kant, teleology, and biology
8/15/2005
Kant, Design, Darwinism
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08.06.09
Archive: Darwin (Erasmus), discovery of evolution
Archive: December 11, 2005
From an older biography of Erasmus Darwin: the founder of evolutionary theory, along with Lamarck. It is actually quite nice to think that the origins of anything lie in poetry, and so it is with evolution, Darwin’s (Erasmus) composing the discovery of evolution into verse.
Archive: Dennett and books of the dead
Archive: January 20, 2006
Dennett’s new book on religion, Breaking the Spell, is out, and I have been waiting in the bushes, sharpening my claws. All I need is a copy of the book. Here is the blurb from Amazon. Of course, I could be pleasantly surprised…
Religion is definitely not off limits to science, but it is completely beyond the capacities of Darwinists, and science idiots.
Please,….
Dennett should read the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and get the Dalai Lama to explain it to him…
Read the rest of this entry »
Archive: Who remembers Wistar?
archive: April 3, 2007
Questioning Evolution. Read the rest of this entry »
Archive: Armstrong’s PR Muhammad
archive: September 27, 2006
Armstrong’s new hagiography of Muhammed seems likely to backfire. The days of covering up the facts are passing, gone.
Muhammad: A Prophet for Our Time (Eminent Lives) (Hardcover) Read the rest of this entry »
Archive: ‘breaking the spell’
archive:
March 19, 2006
3quarks reviews Dennett’s Breaking the Spell.
Daniel Dennett’s new book Breaking the Spell has been systematically misrepresented by its critics. Frankly, I think a lot of them are getting hung up on the title. Breaking the Spell is not an attempt to discredit religion by subjecting it to scientific scrutiny. The “spell” Dennett wants to break is the taboo against the scientific study of religion. There is widespread concern that understanding religion as a natural phenomenon will undermine religious faith. Dennett agrees that disenchantment is an empirical possibility, but Breaking the Spell doesn’t appeal to naturalistic explanations to refute or discredit religion.
My reaction to this is, stop pulling my leg. Not an attempt to discredit religion? Even a cursory survey of the parties to the debate shows a considerable case of ferocity against religion, of all kinds. It is a new kind of religion itself, about to form its own ‘jihad’, and it is ignorance disguised behind scientific baloney.
Since I am not a religionist, I can’t be accused of special pleading here. I share the hopes for a true secular age. But Darwinists have, unbelievably, blown the case.
The prob lem was stated plainly by Weiseltier in his review at the Times, whatever the case with his own beliefs: scientism is a superstition and a non-starter on the question of religion. Almost every scientific/sociological attempt to analyze religion since Max Weber has simply failed due to the one-dimensionality of the basic assumptions.
Producing a naturalistic account of religion is all very well, but what does that mean?
The term is incoherent in the way it is used. I take it that any consideration of consciousness a inch above Dennettian behaviourism is mystical. C’mon.
It is interesting that ancient India produced a materialistic/naturalistic version in the form of Samkhya for the wisdom teachings of the Upanishads. The later invasion of India by Islam created a revision or layer on top of the ancient tradition, one that was ‘theistic’, but the earliest form of these religions simply didn’t have the problems monotheists/scientists have in the nature/supernature divide. It is curious that Darwinism has degraded understanding in scientists to the level of fundamentalism. By their opponents ye shall know them.
Archive: Ouspensky on evolution
archive: March 13, 2006
After a post on Gurdjieff I got a question about Ouspensky and evolution. Below is a quote from A Secret History of Consciousness, by Gary Lachman.
Warning: be very careful of these people, their claims, and the innuendo they give out that since they are ‘esoteric’ they have all the answers. BULLSHIT.
Note that Gurdjieff was very cagey here, and said very little, probably because the reality behind claims for sufis, gurus, and adepts was known to him directly and he could see they were a crock. A bunch of occult crooks aren’t supermen in the style of Nietzsche. What on earth are these people doing falling for Nietzsche??? They arent’ smart enough to figure out Kant (not true of Ouspensky) who scares them for that reason. Note the point.
The guru Rajneesh achieved enlightenment in his teens. But had to take a University course to learn something so he could have something to teach! Not quite the style of an overman. To surpass man as man would be a big thing, far beyond mere Buddhahood.
These people would be more helpful if they simply were themselves, and stopped their shenanigans that have corrupted these traditions.
Don’t fall in the trap of being mesmerized by the propaganda of these people, all too often concocted by their disciples. The tactics are to make people think they must submit to others to gain the key to their ‘evolution’. It can be a pitiful con.
In fact, not even enlightened Buddhas have the key to evolution. They have changed ancient terminologies in many cases to New Age lingo, ’self-evolution’, as a spiritual evolution. The confusion of terms is not helpful. We have no evidence that this is connected to the general evolution of man.
Ouspensky confuses the issue here. It is true that ‘conscious self-evolution’ has to be individual, but all that means is that man can live up to the potential nature gave him, and gave to men universally. To decline into a mechanical consciousness and the work to repair that is good psychological self-maintenance (we do it all the time) but can we call that evolution. This issue of self-consciousness is very important, but the confusion with evolution is puzzling.
Man’s latent potential is universal, it is an aspect of his species being (a term from Feuerbach, and Marx? since Ouspensky so dislikes socialists). Step down a peg. To say this arose from some race of early superapes who became man is baloney. Man emerged as a species with unique features. We simply don’t know how that happened. Please note that Enlightened men are nervous on this question. They ought to know all that, but they don’t.
In all fairness, New Agers correctly grasp that Darwin’s theory couldn’t possibly be right. Alfred Wallace snapped out of it too.
Ouspensky’s Nietzscheanism, and antidemocratic bias is tasteless, reactionary, and for it to be packaged as some esoteric truth is the height of impudence. Even a cursory glance at the structure/history of Buddhism shows the double process at work: individual attainment becomes connected to general being, as with the Bodhissatwas.
The idea some grotesque Nietzschean thug is going to become superman and exterminate the rest is unconsciously present in this votile mix of stupid thinking, and it is simply paranoid nonsense, not spirituality. The crime wave among sufis created by Nietzsche is a sign it has long since fallen into decline. Stay away from these idiots.
That a man like Gurdjieff lets Ouspensky say all this without comment, exploits it to attract mass followers, just shows he is the usual cunning sufi shark. They know a thing or two, and can create stupefaction in the gullible, but the idea they are supermen is such stupidity it is amazing. Occultists, so far from being supermen, are more like Faust, next stop Hell. The ordinary fellow who resists Faustian temptations looks less impressive, but, like Frodo the hobbit, has to carry the idea.
The future evolution of man is as yet unknown, and the same is obviously true of the emergence of anatomically modern man.
Lest anyone try to challenge spiritual democracy let us note that it is a fait accompli. Every case of homo sapiens has the same potential as every other, and this didn’t happen through the Nietzschean grotesquerie that Ouspensky and so many other intellectuals of that generation fell for as some kind of esoteric path.
The powers and attainments of yogis are real, but they are not evidence of supermen. Bullshit. That they should snobbishly think so just discredits them. Most of these gurus are a bunch of hidebound windbags corrupted by millennia of enforcing the laws of caste. They wouldn’t have a clue to the real evolution of man, or the evolutionary significance of democracy.
Archive: Dennett’s dismal scientism
Arcive: February 19, 2006
The NY Times has Leon Wieseltier’s review, The God Genome , of Dennett’s Breaking the Spell.
Review by LEON WIESELTIER
Published: February 19, 2006THE question of the place of science in human life is not a scientific question. It is a philosophical question. Scientism, the view that science can explain all human conditions and expressions, mental as well as physical, is a superstition, one of the dominant superstitions of our day; and it is not an insult to science to say so. For a sorry instance of present-day scientism, it would be hard to improve on Daniel C. Dennett’s book. “Breaking the Spell” is a work of considerable historical interest, because it is a merry anthology of contemporary superstitions.
Dennett’s book is a disaster. He can’t be that stupid. Is it simply a made up piece? He has handed ammunition to every postmodern religious critic of science who thinks that it is incapable of dealing with religious issues. In this form it is.
The worst thing about this book is that it will succeed, in the short term. This kind of propaganda is lapped up by the young Darwin set, who are being indoctrinated by the kind of scientism Wieseltier exposes. After succeeding the failure is going to be disastrous because noone can conclude anything much more than that science/Darwinism is incurably braindead on the subject of religion.
Not being a religionist myself, that’s a considerable statement, made reluctantly.
The next thing we will hear is that this is the peer reviewed version of how science and Darwinism does religion.
Is anyone left alive in the University system?
Read the rest of this entry »
08.04.09
Archive: the myths of revelation and the actual perception of ‘eonic’ evolution
Two comments on The Eonic Effect and the Emergence of Values in History/Evolution
James said,
July 16, 2009 at 3:51 pm
No doubt about it, but I was backing up your point that neither side gives us any insight into our moral sense.James said,
July 16, 2009 at 3:58 pm
…and I can sympathize with the desperation of religionists when they are confronted with reductionist theories.
Although the ‘eonic effect’ solves the problem, it doesn’t either provide a neat scheme of ethics. We see a system operating at a high level of abstraction, beyond human intelligence.
We distinguish macro-action and micro-action, which here can be seen in the fantastic ‘macro-action’ we can detect behind the historical interval of Axial Israel. Unfortunately the creation of the Bible is micro-action, a secondary process. Our great source of ‘revelation’ is nonesuch, but a deeper process beyond our own creativity.
The next great correlation is the realm of German Classical philosophy 2400 years later.
The point here is that the action producing ethics as an action of divine revelation has been completely misunderstood: the filter of micro-action.
As we stand back and gaze over the millennia since the Neolithic the eonic effect shows the intersection with a mysterious realm of values. But these emerge often in parallel worlds in different ways. It does not show itself in any simple fashion. It just shows itself!
At the very end we seem to get a hint for mere monkeys: the Kantian system of ethics (among other things characteristic of the modern transformation), as though this was telling us that our morality understanding is to be a function of our own self-understanding once we evolve to a higher level of intelligence.
I recommend a long and thorough study of the eonic effect, to get a feel for the way this problem works itself out, with the antique saga of the Old Testament rapidly passing into our rear view mirror.
But we will bungle our future with Nietzschean stupidity?
Our history shows us emergent values, and these include the great strain of modern liberalism, and freedom discourse. A close study shows us, then, something more complex that idiot myths of Moses figures and tablets of the law.
It is confusing because our ‘common moral understanding’ is already present in our body/mind combinations, and has been there all along, since the Paleolithic. It acts through us, but we can’t easily understand it completely.
Clearly Kant’s ethical system shows how you start to get mental overload as you try just one set of facets of that.
08.02.09
Archive: Axial Age and the evolution of religion
March 12, 2007
Sunday, Bloody Sunday.
Scientists have boxed themselves into a corner making their studies of religion exercises in nullity. One problem is that atheism is as poorly founded as theism, and leads to a perspectives that are false. The best example is the Dawkins style connection between atheism and selectionist evolution. There is no real connection, and in any case the selectionist position is probably false. Read the rest of this entry »
Archive: Why we know Darwin was wrong
March 9, 2007
Comment on post challenging Dawkins/Dennett:
Dawkins/Dennett challenged on Enlightenment
Darwin’s theory was challenged almost immediately by a host of people with knowledge of Eastern religions, Read the rest of this entry »
Archive: selectionist ideology and ecology
February 9, 2007
Survival of the Cutest.
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Archive: Wallace leaves darwinists behind
by JONATHAN ROSEN
Alfred Russel Wallace, Charles Darwin’s neglected double.
Archive: Crisis of the enlightenment
February 1, 2006 Archive
Michael Ruse invokes the Enlightenment,
I see evolution and creation as very much the top end of the iceberg. It’s a litmus test of this whole red-blue division in America. I’d like to see the left, the Democrats or whatever we call ourselves, be more open to people’s concerns. I mean, it’s not helpful, and certainly not in America, when Richard Dawkins says all religion is evil. We have got to talk about moral values. We people of the left, we people of the Enlightenment, if you like, have got to start talking about broader issues. I would like to see science teaching, including the teaching of evolution, to be part of this, rather than something we isolate.
But who speaks for the Enlightenment? Darwinists? Hold your horses. Now here’s E. O. Wilson:
You will see at once why I believe that the Enlightenment thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries got it mostly right the first time. The assumptions they made of a lawful material world, the intrinsic unity of knowledge, and the potential of indefinite human progress are the ones we still take most readily into our hearts, suffer without, and find maximally rewarding through intellectual advance. The greatest enterprise of the mind has always been and always will be the attempted linkage of the sciences and humanities. The ongoing fragmentation of knowledge and resulting chaos in philosophy are not reflections of the real world but artifacts of scholarship. The propositions of the original Enlightenment are increasingly favored by objective evidence, especially from the natural sciences.
Consilience is the key to unification. I prefer this word over “coherence” because its rarity has preserved its precision, whereas coherence has several possible meanings, only one of which is consilience. William Whewell, in his 1840 synthesis The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, was the first to speak of consilience, literally a “jumping together” of knowledge by the linking of facts and fact-based theory across disciplines to create a common groundwork of explanation. He said, “The Consilience of Inductions takes place when an Induction, obtained from one class of facts, coincides with an Induction, obtained from another different class. This Consilience is a test of the truth of the Theory in which it occurs.”
That’s it we need a consilience process here. The problem is, what really is the Enlightenment, and what happened to that?
Wilson is actually drawing on a very narrow spectrum of the total Enlightenment, and the people he claims got it straight were part of a larger process, one aspect of which is the response to the ‘crisis of the Enlightenment’, in the ample prophecy of what is now a played out rehash of all that in the Darwin debate.
In the ‘crisis of the Enlightenment’ we see the attempt to create a course correction on the momentum of the narrow definition of science soon to swamp the social and biological sciences. But, of course, this gesture did not succeed.
So, Ruse’s impulse is right, and yet it is inevitably the case that Darwinism simply doesn’t represent the Enlightenment, and we are left with the second string, ID types and creationists, the only ones left, apparently, to carry the response to the ‘crisis of the Enlightenment’. They can never manage that, we can be sure, but it might be a reminder that the ’social variation’ latent in the current secular culture has in principle the correct potential for the situation, save that the tide of Darwin dummies, beside the tide of Creationist superdummies, is actually making the problem worse in the name of solving it.
08.01.09
Archive:links on Nietzsche, evolution, and the Kantian limits of knowledge
Archive: goes with ‘Nietzsche, prophet of Nazism’, some links on Nietzsche and Darwinism (eugenics)
Here are the links to the four Nietzsche posts from yesterday. Looking at Nietzsche on evolution/eugenics shows the danger of current views of evolution, especially when the ‘paradigm’ falls into the hands of a closed elite whose ethics are suspect, and ideological manipulations part of their Machiavellian social power (please note: Machiavellians are NOT able to do science, they can only lie in public). Such views of evolution are hype, potentially violent, and armed with a closed ideological propaganda system that noone can penetrate. DANGEROUS! Dangerous once, with Hilter, to a high probability dangerous again in the future. But this time the critics can move in to expose the Darwinian pseudo-science.
If you examine the situation it becomes obvious that the attraction of Darwinism to many lies in that very potential to legitimate violence.
Again, studying the eonic effect will show that ‘evoluton’ in man is far more complex than anyone had suspected, and that noone can mimic that process, leastwise by Social Darwinist capers of the political psychopaths.
The eonic effect, it should be noted, is buffered with a Kantian-style discourse on the phenomenal/noumenal: the dynamic of evolution can be observed, described, but its essential action is beyond observation, and beyond the limits of knowledge.
Anyone who claims to have a theory of evolution is probably an ideologist with an agenda. So watch out. Nature doesn’t grant man the power to imitate evolution (beyond the potential of microevolution), and a look at the Nietzsche abortion suggests a funny wisdom in that.
Let me repeat that: beware of anyone who claims to have a theory of evolution.
Note that the eonic effect is not a theory! But a descriptive map.
http://darwiniana.com/2008/12/23/nietzsche-prophet-of-nazism/
http://darwiniana.com/2008/12/23/nietzsche-evolution-and-the-superman/
http://darwiniana.com/2008/12/23/nietzsches-assault-on-liberal-modernity/
Archive: Nietzsche, prophet of Nazism
archive, from earlier this year:
Nietzsche, Prophet of Nazism: The Cult of the Superman–Unveiling the Nazi Secret Doctrine (Paperback)
by ABIR TAHA
I have previously cited Ascheim’s book on this question as a balanced treatment. This book by Abir Taha goes much further in condemning Nietzsche. Normally I would be wary, especially with a book from Authorhouse, but, despite possible criticisms (the whole thing requires careful checking), the argument gets hard to deal with, there isn’t any refutation: quote after savage quote after savage quote from Nietzsche.
The question thus arises, why is conventional academic Nietzsche scholarship so adamant on not dealing with the facts?
Preface
The “Cult of the Superman” has haunted humanity throughout history, yet it was only clearly expressed in the philosophy of its modern prophet, Friedrich Nietzsche, and culminated in its fiercest supporter, the National Socialist ideology, a political religion whose main ideal and objective were the creation of a superhuman species.By showing the link between the Nietzschean and Nazi worldviews ¬and more specifically the Nazi Secret Doctrine which I have called “esoteric Nazism”- my aim is to demonstrate that the Nazis were pure Nietzscheans, thus repudiating the views of some scholars who deny or undermine any link between the Nietzschean and Nazi doctrines. I endeavour to prove that the Nazi esoteric ideology was primarily an endeavour to actualise and institutionalise Nietzsche’s cult of the Superman, applying it to a political system that would breed a Herrenvolk or “Master Race” in body and spirit, destined to rule the earth. Nazism was in fact greatly influenced by Nietzsche’s philosophy, especially his concept of the Superman, giving it a political dimension in order to “put Nietzsche into motion” and turn the philosopher’s cult from an abstract notion into a concrete reality. The S.S. (Schutzsta/ftln, or “Security Squads”), Nazi Germany’s racial and political elite, was indeed a self-proclaimed Nietzschean institution of Obermenschen or “Supermen” claiming to embody the creed of the Godlike man.
Thus did both Nietzsche and the Nazis call for a revival of Aryan paganism, namely the ancient Aryan esoteric tradition from India to Greece, rejecting the Jewish religion of Christianity, which they believed was a gross distortion of Christ’s original teachings. Both doctrines acknowledged the Will to Power as the motor of history; both praised the qualities and values of the Superman, glorifying war, and advocating a radically aristocratic view of the world. Both Nietzsche and Nazism despised Western Judaeo-Christian Civilisation and its two products, Liberalism and Socialism, introducing a “third option” – aristocratic radicalism – between “corrupt egalitarian democracy” and the “materialist socialism of the mob”. In addition, both advocated the rule of an Aryan universal “Master Race” transcending the boundaries of states and nations; and finally, both Nietzsche and the Nazis dismissed the “decadent” Jew from civilisation, considering him alien to the natural order, an incarnation of the slave morality.
Not to be confused with:
Nietzsche, Godfather of Fascism?: On the Uses and Abuses of a Philosophy (Paperback)
by Jacob Golomb
Archive: Kant and design
Archive: January 28, 2006
An interesting passage from Neil Shanks’ God, The Devil, and Darwin: A Critique of Intelligent Design Theory (Oxford, 2004).
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07.31.09
Archive: The greatest deceit in the history of science
Archice: January 7, 2006
A useful critical history of Darwinism can be found in Soren Lovtrup, Read the rest of this entry »
Archive: Brian Goodwin: How the leopard changed it spots
Archive: January 19, 2006
The current developmental revolution started properly as a critique of Darwin’s theory, though you wouldn’t think so now, as evo-devo is carefully garbled with Darwinian thinking.
From Brian Goodwin’s, How the Leopard Changed Its Spots (Scribner, 1993)
Scientific theories develop out of choices and assumptions that are neither arbitrary nor inevitable.
07.28.09
Archive: Dennett on ghost detection
Archive: January 4, 2006
George Johnson reviews a new Dennett book on religion, which I will have to read, unfortunately. Here we go again. Get a grip on it, Dan. First, Johnson is a closet Darwin heretic, the ghostwriter it seems of ‘At Home in the Universe’. So I won’t trust what I read on evolution or religion. No matter. Dennett is at it again. Belief in ghosts is the beginning of religion, and cybenetic metaphors are on the verge of explaining it, on the verge, mind you. Good to start off with a good Just So story, since we don’t really know too much at all about Paleolithic man and religion. Close to zero in fact. Read the rest of this entry »
Archive: arrogance of the scientists?
Archive:; December 6, 2005
______________________
Kristof has an editorial in the Times (Times Select): The Arrogance of the Humanities.
How about the arrogance of the Scientists? Especially the Darwinians.
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Archive: Darwin’s Use of the Term ‘Evolution’
I am starting to sort out some of the older posts on this blog (which has an incredible seventeen thousand pots). This is from November 27, 2005
The Letters to the Editor at New York Review of books has an exchange over the term ‘evolution’: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18570.
Darwin was reluctant to use the term ‘evolution’ Read the rest of this entry »