History, Evolution, and the Darwin Debate
Space Shuttle Science Shows How 1908 Tunguska Explosion Was Caused By A Comet
ScienceDaily (June 25, 2009) — The mysterious 1908 Tunguska explosion that leveled 830 square miles of Siberian forest was almost certainly caused by a comet entering the Earth’s atmosphere, says new Cornell University research. The conclusion is supported by an unlikely source: the exhaust plume from the NASA space shuttle launched a century later.
Is There a Postmodern Age?
One of the fallacies behind Eagleton and Fish on religion was the postmodern fallacy itself, an illusion of periodization, that has produced endless confusion to the point where modernity itself seems at risk.
The periodization of the eonic effect makes short work of postmodern nonsense.
Keats’s Afterlife
By Christopher Ricks
Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography
by Stanley Plumly
Norton, 392 pp., $27.95
Today’s discussion of Snow’s two cultures, and the essays on the histories of evolution and positivism bring to mind the Romantic era, which almost never enters the consciousness of those who chitchat about science and its ‘triumph’. The Romantics are of interest to our study of history and evolution because, next to German Classical Philosophy (which in part spawned the Romantic period), they show that mysterious perfect timing we see in the correlations of the eonic effect: The Great Divide.
The enigmatic logic of the eonic sequence leaves this beautiful effect in its wake, and the point here is the tremendous balance in the Enlightenment, whose definition has been so narrowed that we have lost the sense of the era in which it occurred, and its immediate successor. In fact, the Romantic era not the successor to anything: it was a part of the Enlightenment period, and its dynamic.
Rome, November 30, 1820. John Keats, who at the age of twenty-five has less than three months to live, is writing to his friend Charles Brown in England:
I have an habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am leading a posthumous existence. God knows how it would have been—but it appears to me—however, I will not speak of that subject.
The word that rotates, “but,” is rounded upon, in its turn, by the word “however.” Keats, with a courage that is something better than unflinching (for the unflinching may be not so much courageous as foolhardy), declines to speculate on what might have been his prospects in love and in art, and on what those prospects now are, here and hereafter. He makes deeply real, within real life, a line of thought that has become the shallowest of modern injunctions: Let’s not go there. His unwavering decision, painful and pained, is to treat his friend with the utmost, the uttermost, decorum.He was leading a posthumous existence as he lay dying of consumption. It was proving to be “a long day’s dying to augment our pain” (Adam’s vision in Paradise Lost of what lay in store for mankind after the Fall). Our pain as well as his. A posthumous existence was a paradoxical thought at the time that Keats voiced it; it would soon (not, given his agony, all too soon) become no longer a paradox but a plain truth, when he entered upon the only kind of afterlife that he could continue to believe in. His belief contained an acknowledgment of the dark doubts about art’s worth that many great artists have found themselves suffering.
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Moreover, for Keats, his had long been a hope at once firm and tentative: “I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death.” For it is I think that gives the asseveration such grace and dignity, so that a small but not insignificant wrong is done when (on a couple of occasions in Posthumous Keats) his precisely guarded hope is indurated into “his statement to his brother George, in 1818, that he would be among the English poets after his death,” within “a future that meant to place him ‘among the English poets.’”
Stanley Plumly’s profoundly humane evocation of Keats’s life and his immediate afterlife is better than magisterial, for it is masterly. Characteristic of the attentive powers is his pausing upon Keats’s word past: “my real life having past.” The last word does double duty and more than duty, this having passed into the past. The book is supremely well informed, by means not only of sheer information but of the larger—the Keatsian—sense of what it is to inform. Here is imaginative realization, with width as well as depth of sympathies. Even while Plumly knows that there is no substitute for knowledge, he knows that this is because there is no substitute for anything: for, say, conviction, sensibility, intelligence, honesty, curiosity such as does not kill but gives life, and love. While this “personal biography” never relinquishes its confidence that there are crucial assurances that can be both given and taken, it succeeds in holding such assurances in respectful balance with Keats’s complementary concept and precept, ” Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”
A new model of history
All of our ideas about evolution, and, indeed, history have become cockeyed. Science proceeds according to the model of physics, but that only works on one level in study of evolution/history. The inability to accept this point, and adopt a new theoretical strategy is delaying a sensible understanding of evolution. The issue impinges on the classic issue of a ‘science of history’, where the basic contradiction stands out in glaring form. Yet scientists tend to prefer the confusions of purely causal theories to facing the reality that it won’t work on history. We can resolve the issue in a very elegant way by uniting the ideas of evolution and history and by finding our way through the contradictions of causality and freedom. The result is shown to us by nature itself.
The rise of science has seen the extension of its methods and perspectives into all fields of human knowledge, and yet it is significant that no science of history has ever been successfully created. In part this is due to its complexity, and more fundamentally due to the failure of the assumptions of universal reductionism. The reasons for the confrontation with this limit are not mysterious and were clearly outlined by the philosopher Kant, whose system of critiques sounded a master chord in the discourse on causality and freedom. In a nutshell, the science of history must confront the reality and significance of the idea of freedom. But if we adopt the perspective of freedom can we create a science at all? This issue is the object of multiple insights by a host of students of history and theory, among them Isaiah Berlin with his critique of the idea of historical inevitability, and Karl Popper with his attack on what he called ‘historicism’, a term with a long history, but one to which he gave an idiosyncratic, but useful, definition, putting it in close concordance with the issue of historical inevitability.
In the previous two posts we have discussed Kant, The Matrix, and seen the way that Kant’s thinking applies, but that we are looking at long-term history, which we don’t observe. Revolutions per second
However, there is a most ironic partial exception to this, the period of the French Revolution straddles the most sensitive and significant sub-interval of the modern transition as seen in the eonic effect, and has a direct significance both to the question of historical dynamics, and to the issues of the way that Kantian concepts of the philosophy of history impinge on the realm of facts. We can’t see history in large intervals, but we can experience short periods over a generation and if these are a moment of high-speed transition and ‘eonic’ changing of gears, we do (if we were there!) get a sense of something almost noumenal leaving its aroma of mystery in an historical moment.
You need to study the whole model to get a feeling for this, but the facts are clear: people were spooked by the French Revolution, and felt as if no movement they had experienced before in their lives could match this unexpected burst of change, and they could not pinpoint the mysterious reason for this the sudden eruption, as if epochs in succession were in motion by a different law of life. Kant is notable for such a reaction to the French Revolution, as were many others. He was seeing the resolution of his own Kant’s Challenge in history, but his immersion in events was still too great to be able to see this. And yet he sensed that we was close to something extraordinary, and we now see that he was correct. Radicals saw it as a kind of sacred parade of manifesting freedom, reactionaries thought it as an eruption of the demonic and took fright for good. It is clear from the eonic analysis that the whole set of episodes in the large correspond to a Kantian analysis in the large.
It is the same effect that left those caught in the period and generations from Josaiah to Exekiel spooked by the strangeness of an historical transition, leaving them to consider, in a pre-Kantian era, the supernatural acting on the realm of nature (to the disconbobulation of our thinking perhaps). The point is that the dynamics of the eonic model, without explaining it, isolate the dynamics of why that ‘spooked’ feeling arises as a sense of awe in those who lived that transitional moment, recording the experience in the Old Testament.
A commenter in reference to the film The Matrix asks what book about it I was referring to. Here: The Matrix And Philosophy
This film made quite a stir when it came out because of its striking philosophic subtext in the background. Two books showing the connection to philosophy are known to me.
I just watched the film for the first time yesterday and found it quite interesting, despite its violent action-pic style.
And the book has an interesting chapter on Kant, and this, remarkably, raises an issue that is related to the eonic effect and model: with Kant the idea of the ‘matrix’ arises in the way the mind constructs, as it were, a priori the principles of science in the way it perceives the outer world.
This raises the question related to the matrix as to whether the issue is one of the external world or the interior world of the experiencer. I am not sure the movie quite distinguishes these two (I could be wrong, I didn’t quite grasp this strange film in the distractions of plot, action-pic style, and philosophy).
To state the issue in terms of the eonic effect: we see that the eonic effect is an actual historical pattern. Close examination shows its relationship to Kant’s system, with a huge difference: Kant speaks of the mind’s constructions a priori, while the eonic effect finds something Kantian about ‘Big History’ in the exterior world, with no reference as such to the a priori constructs of the experiencer of history.
I need to come back on this issue again in a slightly different way.
In any case, I learned something from this film and the book, or, at least, they pointed to something that has long been a somewhat confusing aspect of the eonic model. Does it refer to the external world (yes) or to the constructs a priori of the historical experiencer (yes, also, but…)
The eonic effect is strange in the sense that its structure resembles a Kantian analysis, but this is applied to ‘history’ which is not a person.
There isn’t actually any contradiction, or a problem on these grounds, but it is at first a strange variant of Kantian thinking.
The connection to history arises from the way that Kant’s Third Antinomy expresses the seeming clash of freedom and causality, making contradictory the idea of ‘laws of history’, and this can’t be resolved except via the hypothesis of (an historical version of ) ‘transcendental idealism’, i.e. the appearance of uncaused events in punctuated discontinuities, resulting in the extension of the analysis beyond space and time. The phenomenal/noumenal distinction suddenly appears in the way in which the ‘uncaused event’ (e.g. the Axial Age) might actually have some ‘determination’ (but not stricly a causal factor in space and time) outside of time and space. All this says nothing about the constructs a priori of the experiencer. The problem here is that we don’t ‘see’ history, we read about it in books, and construct mental data processing on curious phantoms in our minds about the past.
But in fact that, as far as I know, doesn’t change the issue. It is as if we were seeing the past. But we have transposed beyond ‘perception’ to ‘large intervals of history’ which we certainly don’t see, so the Kantian perceptual mechanism doesn’t apply.
In fact the same analysis does apply, and we discover this in a surprise: the data of the Axial period, just as one example.
Something simply appears in space and time, and the usual rules of causal antecedence are violated. So how to proceed?
But in fact, it hardly matters since we merely detected that transcendental idealism is once again a better explanation of our ‘bookish’ perceptions so-called, than realism. We see that our experience of history arises in the way we analyze the problem of history. It seems like an issue of empirical realism, but all of a sudden we have a Copernican revolution applied to the appearances of history and we detect by indirect inference the incomplete character of our perceptions of history and the reality of something behind those appearances.
Jim Blaut’s 8 Eurocentric Historians is a good book to read on the confusions over the rise of modernity. We have already cited a selection from World History And The Eonic Effect, at redfortyeight.com.
The student of the eonic effect can resolve this question quite easily by enlarging the context of the discussion to include the whole of world history: then we see that the eonic effect shows a a triple series of sudden new ages and the modern era needs to be seen in that context.
Unfortunately, neither the dominant style of historiographical theories, nor the acute critics such as the Marxists can get the question straight.
Inbreeding & the downfall of the Spanish Hapsburgs
I was just reading/researching the same issue with respect to the end of the Old Kingdom in Egypt: the need to find partners based on the requirement that a ‘divine’ Pharaoh could not breed with anyone outside his immediate lineage is suspected in weakening the vigor of the entire dynasty series.
Yestereday’s post, Slavery and the course of civilization raises the question of the Great Pyramid and how it was constructed, and who constructed it.
The issue is significant because the greatest construction project in world history was constructed very early in the rise of civilization with only what seem now the most limited tools. It puts to shame the later works constructed with slave labor.
I think we can begin to set the record straight, and a recent book on the construction of the great pyramids seems to have zeroed in on some of the problems that have undermined previously theories: the basic idea is of an internal spiral ramp, an ingenious new proposal.
As to the labor force, the Hollywood cliche of slaves crushed under rollers died hard.
We can no more claim the pyramids were constructed with slave labor as we could claim the same for the medieval Cathedrals of Europe.
The Secret of the Great Pyramid: How One Man’s Obsession Led to the Solution of Ancient Egypt’s Greatest Mystery (Hardcover)
by Bob Brier (Author), Jean-pierre Houdin
I have just been looking at: Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present (Hardcover)
by Christopher I. Beckwith
Our discussions of PIE (proto-indoeuropean…) and the homeland question are discussed in this book, which takes no final position, but which tends toward assuming a central Eurasian source.
More to say when I finish reading it, but there are many disccusions of IE linguistics that are worth the price of the book. The trickiness of the Indo-Iranian and Indic streams of PIE are given a twist: Avestan is so close to Vedic Sanskrit that the author suspects that it is wrongly associated with the Indo-Iranian branch!!!! etc…
Another interesting idea that clicks: the emergence of the many IE languages is the result of creolization, an obvious explanation.
More later….
History And Evolution, Darwinian Or Eonic?
Why is it that we take evolution to be purely genetic? Think about it. Is it merely a convenience for reductionists to define evolution in terms of a tangible entity? The problem is that this way of defining evolution throws our thinking out of whack. But it is a frustrating situation: we confine ourelves to the observable,and the results are misleading. The unobservable, if we can infer something, may hold the key.
There are many ways to define evolution. After all, ‘cosmic evolution’, the province of physicists, is not subjected to Darwinism/Darwinists. It has its own canon.
The same, we suspect strongly, applies to much of what is routinely put under the rubric of Darwinian evolution.
Especially the evolution of man, which noone has ever properly explained (or even observed) using Darwinian natural selection.
Further, the question of history suggests we are missing something. It is strange, at first, to bring evolution into history. But then you realize that many things are described with the term ‘evolution’. So in principle there is no problem here.
The point is to find a genuine process that deserves the term, in history.
Not hard to find! The data of the eonic effect foots the bill to a tee, but in its own way, and according to its own definition. And this leads us to wonder what the connection is with the earlier evolution of man. We become suspicious that we have misdefined it using reductionist genetics, whose problems are easy to point to.
Perhaps history holds the key.
An interesting side show map of PIE homeland and successions. With commentary here
The Rigveda represents a language, religion and culture which is the most archaic in the Indo-European world. As Griffith puts it in his preface to his translation: “As in its original language, we see the roots and shoots of the languages of Greek and Latin, of Celt, Teuton and Slavonian, so the deities, the myths and the religious beliefs and practices of the Veda throw a flood of light upon the religions of all European countries before the introduction of Christianity. As the science of comparative philology could hardly have existed without the study of Sanskrit, so the comparative history of the religions of the world would have been impossible without the study of the Veda.”
To say that the early vedic is the most archaic is misleading and hardly established correctly.
Here’s the strange anomaly: Anatolian seems, in some arguments, to be an offshoot prior to the formation of PIE. It would then have to break off from proto-Vedic as the putative people so associated migrate to Anatolia from India.
I doubt it.
Archaic Greece: The Clue
We go through so many contortions attempted to grasp the significance of the Old Testament, or the period of the Indian Axial, or the Axial Age in general, but fail to see the ironic clue in the history of Archaic Greece. Everything else has been mythologized, but in the case of early Greece the solution to the riddle stands out in plain sight if we know where to look.
History and evolution
The relationship between history and evolution is often taken in the sense of opposites, but the better way to proceed is to see them as reciprocal, and one emerging from the other.
Thus history and evolution are like two overlapping processes, the one the chronicle of man’s emergent free activity, the other the greater process of an evolutionary driver behind this emergence. The two stand in a reciprocal relationship, one clearly visible, still, in history itself. Indeed, we must ask if man’s evolution is, in fact, complete. His evolution and his emergent freedom are braided together, and the question remains as to the ‘end of evolution’ and the completion of man’s epic self-evolution. The speciation of man as homo sapiens is thus still underway, preempting easy definitions of its significance and meaning.
The elite attack on ancient Greek achievement is made manifest in London, Paris, and Berlin.
These mutual comparisons, in light of the eonic effect, seem misguided, misplaced cultural nationalisms displaced into an historical void.
The question of Persia is totally misguided here: the moment of the Mesopotamians was centuries before, in Sumerian times.
There is no perspective short of a global perspective at this point.
In the context of the eonic effect, the relationship of Greece and Mesopotamia needs to be seen through the action of the eonic sequence, so-called.
This puts the first stage of civilization in the Mesopotamian core, then in the next stage the system moves to the peripheries, East and West.
This has been spoiled by incorrect notions of ‘Western Civilization’, etc,…
One can only throw up one’s hands at the ethnocentric ignorance and outbreak of bickering and recrimination. But these will pass away as the global moment overtakes these antique phantoms.
Check out the stepping stone sequence, and outline of world history in World History And The Eonic Effect: Symphony of Emergence
The August heat made Berlin feel like Baghdad. Inside the Pergamon Museum, and constructed specially for the travelling Babylon show, were narrow winding ways impenetrable to air conditioning. In packed discomfort hundreds of us were slowly inching past glass cases of cuneiform tablets—little panels of baked brick that seem to have been Mesopotamia’s main industrial product. One of them told of Babylon’s creation epic. Another contained a magical spell. The biggest invariably declaimed the power of kings. Craning our heads we tried hard to read the labels and tried just as hard to be impressed.
Being impressed by Mesopotamia was the point. For too long had Hellenism been uncritically exalted in the West. Now it was time for the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome to stand aside so that we could gaze upon the je ne sais quoi that was Mesopotamia. But what exactly was Babylon? Imperial majesty? Architectural folly? A voluptuary paradise? Oriental despotism incarnate? To try to answer these questions the combined museological might of the British Museum, the Musée du Louvre, and the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin had assembled a display of things Babylonian under the title Babylon: Myth and Reality. Early in 2008, the exhibition had begun its travels in Paris; it was in Berlin at the time of my visit; and it was in London until last Sunday.
Comment on Evolution and Space-time
A lot of the confusion in evolution revolves around this issue. It is certainly a big step to consider issues of the space-time framework as relevant to evolution.
But in looking at human history in light of the eonic effect we can see that this is the case.
Stephen P. Smith said,
March 24, 2009 at 8:43 pm ·
That’s right! The question of evolution boils down to the space-time fabric. Dawkin’s bioform space turned sample space with probability measure, and the fitness landscape that is friendly to natural selection, makes only a caricature of the space-time fabric. We find that Darwinists are guilty of the very thing they accuse others of doing: intelligently designing creation, but by turning space-time into a caricature.
You don’t have to put up with Darwinian nonsense: ask a Darwinist if there is a science of history? If he starts talking about ‘laws of history’, cite Karl Popper on historicism, and/or the Kantian framework.
When it is obvious that the scientists have no such science of history, start moving backwards: when did history start and evolution stop? You can nudge the contradiction backwards, and then backwars: clearly you can go along way back. Therefore where is the science of evolution (for man, at least).
A clue to the problem lies in the failure to produce a science of history , where the facts are visible, even as Darwinists claim a science of evolution, where the facts are not visible. And at what point do we divide history from evolution? This situation is altogether odd, and we left suspicious Darwinism is failing a photo finish test . Not a single hard result has ever been achieved for a science of history. That should make us suspicious of Darwinian claims at the onset. We indulge in far too much idle talk about evolutionary theory in the abstract. These discussions are impoverished, but brilliant sounding speculations about something we never observe. It’s time to take a long, slow motion look at the one good data set that we have, world history. We will soon be cured of Darwinian fantasies. The scale of evolution is tremendous. Even the record of world history, five thousand years over the whole surface of a planet, is nothing compared to deep time. That is a reality check. We see at once the fallacy of throwing generalizations at such a complex system. It is primitive behavior.
History And Evolution
Much of the confusion over Darwinism arises because of confusion in our own mind, as to the meaning of evolution. There are lots of ways to define evolution, but we have actually introduced an inconsistency into our usage, using Darwinism, between history and evolution, and the result is the discordance between the two (resulting in Social Darwinist mismatches of the two).
The issue of history and evolution is a confusing one, and it seems as if we are making a category error. But consider the following question: when did evolution stop and history begin? This tricky question will trip up the Darwinian approach and leave it to collapse in a contradiction. The answer of course is that there couldn’t be an instantaneous switch. We can see that to set a specific date is contradictory. So we must specify a transition between evolution and history. What form would this hybrid take, passing from evolution to history? Either it is all evolution or all history?? Or maybe a series of mini-transitions with evolution dominant then history dominant. In alternation. Now look at the eonic effect: it speaks not just of evolution, but of history and evolution, the two braided together, with history emerging from evolution. And this eonic effect takes the form of a sequence of alternating periods, with evolution (in our sense) dominant during eras of transition, and co-related periods with history (in our sense) dominant. Thus we actually see in history the data matching the deduction about transitions, passing from evolution to history.
The issue of theism/atheism is dealt with at the beginning of World History And The Eonic Effect: Nth god name sequence
Our strategy is not to use the word ‘god’. The word causes endless confusion, and has no place even in the literature on the Old Testament.
Please recall the many ancient, among them Israelite, prohibitions on the use of the name of divinity. That’s a gesture the Old Testament never did justice to, but the point might resonate in our own times as atheists simply get terminally fed up with ‘god talk’.
The problem with Darwin’s theory can be found by asking if we can create of a science of history…From The Legacy Of Darwinism
Hegel Denies Evolution (But Dies 28 Years before the Origin of Species)
Curious post over at Uncommon Descent on Hegel’s rejection of evolution. Good post, but one wonders, what brought this on? Anyway, this is a touchy subject for Hucklebird and I since we were banned from hegel@yahoogroups.com for saying as much, that Hegel wasn’t a evolutionist/Darwinist. The pretense is pure academic mindcontrol, it seems, and it is hard to see how anyone could not see this point, but with Hegel and Darwin confusion reigns at all times.
That said, Hegel was one part of the early movement towards an historical understanding that eventuated in the breakthroughs of evolution.
The reason, perhaps, for Hegel’s rejection of evolution lies in the way a ‘sense of the eternal’ beggars the temporal sense, in many.
Having criticized Hegel, it is important to see how Darwin was almost as confused.
The study of the eonic effect shows us the way to approach the philosophy of history within the context of the idea of evolution.
Just in case any doubt remains, Houldgate notes rather plaintively that “To the discomfort of many who are otherwise persuaded by his philosophy, Hegel rejects outright the doctrine of the evolution of species.”. Houldgate attempts some reconciliation between Hegel and Darwin, but eventually admits that “Further exploration of the relation between Hegel’s speculative philosophy of nature and Darwinian evolutionary theory must, however, await another occasion.”
It is interesting to note that Hegel published his views on evolution in 1816. He does not use the term “evolution” but he clearly articulates the concept as he denies it. This shows that the idea of evolution was in circulation long before Darwin, and must have been widely understood for Hegel to make his comments. The current “Year of Darwin” hoopla fails to mention this, and gives the impression that Darwin all by himself came up with the idea of evolution. Unfortunately, the probability that the Marxists will challenge that is about as great as them rehabilitating Hegel as an ID supporter.
After the Amazon review flap it might help to start over and highlight some of the key points of World History And The Eonic Effect, to how they revolve around one simple question, and objective: a non-random pattern in world history, and its demonstration. That’s it.
1.1.1 In Search Of History: Using The Text
Historical research has greatly expanded our knowledge of world history, and the result is an unexpected discovery: that of a process of universal history in the action of a mysterious dynamic generating a non-random pattern. Read the rest of this entry »
Comment at my review page of Coyne’s Why Evolution Is True
This a reply to a comment puzzling over the eonic effect, and the problems with a three beat, two beat, or one beat sequence. Check out the comment being replied to, it shows some of the problems people have with the eonic model.
I conclude only that something is missing in human evolution. I don’t necessarily generalize to all of evolution.
You denounce this as sophmoric on the basis of one paragraph. Why not follow the evidence over the full range available? It is Darwin’s theory of natural selection that is sophmoric. It is worse, it is childish fantasy to think that Darwin’s scenario could explain the totality of man. This Darwinian fantasy theory is grotesque. This is the proof by insult tactic. Enough.The point is very simple: no macro forces are considered to exist in human evolution, but we can detect them even in world history!!!! and evolution and history overlap. Read the rest of this entry »
Easter Island’s Controversial Collapse: More To The Story Than Deforestation?
ScienceDaily (Feb. 18, 2009) — Easter Island (Rapa Nui) has gained recognition in recent years due in part to a book that used it as a model for societal collapse from bad environmental practices—ringing alarm bells for those concerned about the health of the planet today. But that’s not the whole story, says Dr. Chris Stevenson, an archaeologist who has studied the island—famous for its massive stone statues—with a Rapa Nui scientist, Sonia Haoa, and Earthwatch volunteers for nearly 20 years.
Published on Monday, February 16, 2009 by The Independent/UK
Israel is Trapped, and the Chance of Peace is Ever More Remote
by Bruce Anderson
While the West is preoccupied with a crisis, a tragedy is unfolding. The world’s financial system will recover. On the Israel/Palestine peace process, there can be no comparable optimism, for it is not clear whether such a process still exists. No process, no peace; a settlement is further away now than at any time since 1967. Israel seems bent on a course which will lead to its eventual destruction.
Lincoln, Darwin share birthday, respected places in history
One man is credited with the Emancipation Proclamation, the other with the theory of evolution through natural selection.
This manufactured story/meme on Lincoln and Darwin’s birthday is actually a superstition in the making. So what if they share birthdays?
They don’t share worldviews, and in fact Darwin can’t hold a candle to Lincoln.
The strategy here is the usual nervousness about Darwin’s reputation and the desire for some rub off glamor.
And the strategy resembles that of Desmond and Moore’s recent book on Darwin and abolitionism (The Sacred Cause) where the grubby whig and crypto-social-darwinist Darwin is turned into some kind of extreme liberal.
Danube Delta Holds Answers To ‘Noah’s Flood’ Debate
ScienceDaily (Jan. 27, 2009) — Did a catastrophic flood of biblical proportions drown the shores of the Black Sea 9,500 years ago, wiping out early Neolithic settlements around its perimeter? A geologist with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and two Romanian colleagues report in the January issue of Quaternary Science Reviews that, if the flood occurred at all, it was much smaller than previously proposed by other researchers.
Published on Tuesday, January 20, 2009 by Consortium News
Historical Mystery of Bush’s Presidency
by Robert Parry
After little more than two years of the Watergate scandal, Richard Nixon resigned and his successor, Gerald Ford, famously declared, “our long national nightmare is over.” But the painful end game of Nixon’s presidency was nothing compared to the eight excruciating years of George W. Bush.
Even on Inauguration Day 2009, as most Americans rejoice that Bush’s disastrous presidency is finally heading into the history books, there should be reflection on how this catastrophe could have befallen the United States – and on who else was responsible.
Indeed, it may become one of the great historical mysteries, leaving future scholars to scratch their heads over how a leader with as few qualifications as George W. Bush came to lead the world’s most powerful nation at the start of the 21st century.
Darwinism and popular culture: Bill Moyers moonlights as a geneticist
Poor Moyers gets himself in trouble with a garbled combination of bad Biblical history and genetics. The question of genetics and Old Testament history is, to be sure, a complete unknown.
The commentary on this, however, misses the point that Moyers is describing a set of myths, about events that didn’t happen, and people we can’t be sure existed. Starting with Abraham. We have no real evidence of such a figure, despite the fact that he makes sense as an historical abstraction. That is, the Sumerian connection with ‘early Israelites’ makes a priori sense, in terms of the way civilizations and their diffusions were flowing past the boundaries of the Mesopotamian world into its greater environment.
The same for Moses. These figures have about the same status as Agamemnon and Achilles in the Iliad (and those figures might well have existed in some form).
But one key point is that the egregious violence described in the Old Testament in the invasion of Israel almost certainly never happened. The complex history of the Israelites is looking like something quite different, check out The Bible Unearthed by Silberman and Finkelstein.
The discussion here totally misses the point. The negative influence has nothing to do with genetics but with the suggestive portrait of events (that never happened!) that constituted a violent and genocidal invasion of ‘Israel’ in the Joshua mythologies. The issue is not genetics but propaganda.
In any case, I doubt if the Israelites in modern Israel could care less about the Old Testament, certainly not the elite thuggish pols who are currently quite violent in their way of doing business. That’s mostly for the Bible Belt cheering section. They must be having a good laugh at the naivete of their gentile bankrollers.
The underground influence of Nietzsche, rarely discussed public outside of academic commentaries, from the first generation of Zionists, is worth considering. This influence is not visible on the surface because of the surface bad reputation of Nietzsche in term of Nazism, etc, etc… All of which misses the point and is blind to the strain of genocideal eugenic Nietzschean ‘will to power’ mythology blended into Zionist aspiration (on an individual basis for those who have figured out Nietzsche’s complex treatment of the Jewish question, it never appears in public ideologies).
All that can be said here is that Nietzsche is disastrous advice for Jews. Stay away from it, if you are secular. Nietzshe is a crackpot genius, thrown out of whack by Darwin (among other bad influences).
In any case, it is stupid, almost irresponsible, to be stuck at this late date on the mythology of the Old Testament. And it is a mistake to think that the cynical and nihilist gang of thugs running Israel as current has any illusions about Biblical nonsense.
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