04.10.08
Posted in History at 1:36 pm by nemo
Currently reading:
What Emancipation Didn’t Stop After All
SLAVERY BY ANOTHER NAME
The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II
By Douglas A. Blackmon
Illustrated. 468 pages. Doubleday. $29.95.
In “Slavery by Another Name” Douglas A. Blackmon eviscerates one of our schoolchildren’s most basic assumptions: that slavery in America ended with the Civil War. Mr. Blackmon unearths shocking evidence that the practice persisted well into the 20th century. And he is not simply referring to the virtual bondage of black sharecroppers unable to extricate themselves economically from farming.
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04.02.08
Posted in World History and The Eonic Effect, History, Evolution at 2:48 pm by nemo
‘Persecution’ of the religious gets curiouser and curiouser
Okay, what with the Internet and print on demand publishing etc., why don’t all these scientists now silenced for their rejection of Darwinism just publish and be damned? It seems they are fearful of speaking out about the censoring of their evidence because they will all lose their government grants.
Already done: check out World History And The Eonic Effect, one of the first POD to be published, with a critique of Darwinism, one not entangled in religious or design arguments.
The basic problems with Darwinism and its distortions on human evolution and history are layed out clearly and decisively.
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03.05.08
Posted in The Eonic Effect, History, Evolution at 7:35 pm by nemo
An Exercise for readers
I and a diverse group of people got a question in email, one that we are supposed to answer in a single sentence. The question is,
What is evolution?
You know, Ernst Mayr wrote a whole book to answer that question on a simple level, and I’m supposed to have the hubris to answer that in one sentence? OK, knowing full well that it is grossly inadequate, here’s my short answer:
Evolution is a well-confirmed process of biological change that produces diversity and coherent functionality by a variety of natural mechanisms.
Go ahead, you people try to answer it in one sentence in the comments. It’s harder than it looks, especially since I feel the itch to expand each word into a lecture.
A one-line definition of evolution is an interesting exercise, but in fact it shows our fixation on simplistic explanations, mostly Darwinian reductionist. These oversimplifications are then used to reduce everything else to the rubric of explanation. But a fallacy lurks in this process. The first part of the fallacy is the assumption that we can put a handle on evolution. Because we apply this reasoning to unseen events in deep time we never get the right feedback with the facts, in a word a reality check.
In fact, I doubt if there is such a thing as a general process description of evolution. Any generatlization will always fail, but ‘evolution’ can reveal itself it many different ways at different levels of reality.
I recommend an examination of the eonic effect. There we see a process of evolution in relation to history, one that has no direct connection to genetic evolution. The myth of purely genetic evolution will die hard. If we examine the factor of evolution in history we discover something that outstrips simple process explanations, in terms of laws. In fact, we can only proceed descriptively to see a series of processes that change over time and manifest themselves in a series of complex successive transformations.
The idea that all this complexity can be annexed as a footnote to physical/chemical/genetic explanations is clearly false and pernicious to our views of what evolution is.
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02.24.08
Posted in The Eonic Effect, History, Evolution at 6:27 pm by nemo
Greg Laden is from Greg Laden’s Blog at Scienceblogs and comments onThe d-word bugaboo, along with Hucklebird
Greg Laden said,
February 24, 2008 at 10:58 am
What do you mean by this:
“And concepts of evo-dynamics that are different from selectionist explanation, natural teleology.”
Good question, I was bit brief, since this has been discussed here a number of times.
The ID group has polarized the debate between ‘materialistic’ Darwinism and the ambiguous ’spiritual’ (?) ‘intelligent design’ argument.
My point was to claim that the real debate is always, and solely over natural selection. The failure of natural selection doesn’t require a religious perspective, but a naturalistic study of processes that aren’t based on natural selection.
Beyond that the question of design is crippled by the ambiguity that ID people have given it. We can’t really avoid the issue of design, taken in a very ordinary sense: biological structures show more than just mechanism, they show the design of functional processes that proceed with teleology: they do things as devices. It is a failure of our understanding that we can’t yet quite explicate such things.
The issue of natural teleology was raised by Kant, et al., and represents an attempt to consider the teleological aspect of nature without violating the basic premise of naturalism.
One can, by the way, approach this question very directly by looking at the eonic effect, and the question of ‘evolution in history’ as described by the eonic model. There we see that the question of ‘directionality’ arises naturally in the discussion of the disguised developmental sequence in history. We see a practical application of macroevolution also showing directionality, hence quite probably a form of natural teleology.
Natural teleology takes the phantom ‘designer’ out of design.
Here are some posts here at Darwiniana on:
Natural teleology,
G design, N-design
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02.20.08
Posted in The Eonic Effect, History at 8:32 pm by nemo
Wilkins at Evolving Thoughts
From The Blackwell Companions to Philosophy series comes A Companion to the Philosophy of History and Historiography edited by Aviezer Tucker. It looks fascinating, especially essay 36 on Darwin…
I am sure that Wilkins is aware of World History and the Eonic Effect and its revolution in the discussion of philosophy of history. Guess they all have to make sure the subject remains braindead so that Darwinism can survive.
This Blackwell companion will end up being Darwinized, hence worthless.
Darwin’s theory completely cripples any effort to grasp greater history, and makes philosophy of history into a reductionist confusion.
Blackwell link
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12.27.07
Posted in History, Evolution at 4:58 pm by nemo
Buffon, the Enlightenment sensation
The finest pen of his age, a giant of natural history, geometry and art: Buffon deserves to be restored
Not Darwin, but the whole generation of the Enlightenment produced the discovery of evolution. Darwin’s dumbing down of the subject into selectionist scientism was almost a decline.
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