By studying the genome of a kind of octopus not known for its friendliness toward its peers, then testing its behavioral reaction to a popular mood-altering drug called MDMA or ‘ecstasy,’ scientists say they have found preliminary evidence of an evolutionary link between the social behaviors of the sea creature and humans, species separated by 500 million years on the evolutionary tree.
Flight: The Genius of Seeds | Evolution News
Plant seeds come equipped to spread themselves in ways that baffle engineers. Did they invent these mechanisms by chance?
Epigenetics: Roundworm study focuses on health effects transmitted through sperm | Uncommon Descent
From ScienceDaily:For many years, it was thought that sperm do not retain any histone packaging and therefore could not transmit histone-based epigenetic information to offspring. Recent studies, however, have shown that about 10 percent of histone packaging is retained in both human and mouse spe
Source: Epigenetics: Roundworm study focuses on health effects transmitted through sperm | Uncommon Descent
New Caledonian crows can create compound tools: The birds are able to combine individual parts to form a long-distance reaching aid — ScienceDaily
The birds are able to combine individual parts to form a long-distance reaching aid.
[Marxism] The socialists are coming! White House sounds alarm at rise of the left | US news | The Guardian
Chinese and Russian Spies Have Tapped Trump’s Personal Phone — But He’s Ignored All the Warnings: Report | Alternet
President Donald Trump has been spied on by both Chinese and Russian intelligence agencies that have hacked into his personal phone while in office, according to a new report in the New York Times Wednesday.
‘Wow Wow Wow… Huge News’ as New York Sues ExxonMobil for Defrauding Investors by Hiding Climate Threat
“The New York Attorney General is standing up for investors who may have been swindled, and indirectly for the seven billion of us who will suffer from Exxon’s lies.”
Buried in “Hilariously Stupid” White House Attack on Socialism, An Accidentally Strong Argument for Medicare for All
Amid hysterical comparisons between Sen. Bernie Sanders and Mao Zedong, the White House unwittingly makes a solid case for socialist policies
This is your ‘golden’ age of ‘science’…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution
Does this sound like science?
It is mostly garbage, propaganda from the Darwin Propaganda Machine, which has reached most public outlets including Wikipedia. It is a scandal that all these media still promote the archaic darwinian paradigm.
To get oriented in the darwin debate you only need one idea: natural selection can never be right. Period. Endless attempts to wriggle out of this confuse people ad infinitum, so remember: natural selection can never be right. You next problem is saying this in public: you will be an outcast of society…So, will you lie?
Here is the classic warning of Hoyle, from decades ago:
In a now classic text, Evolution From Space, Hoyle and Wickramasinghe give one version of this objection.
Darwinian evolution is most unlikely to get even one polypeptide right, let alone the thousands on which living cells depend for their survival. This situation is well known to geneticists and yet nobody seems prepared to blow the whistle on the theory.[iii]
Translating Thucydides
I resumed translating Thucydides and will move the material to another blog. I was surprised to find that WordPress will now allow cut and paste of ancient greek text. Thucydides is one of the most difficult writers of greek (or any other) prose but is stunning in his demonstration of a mysterious genius of the type so common in the classical period. His work is relevant to our age when ‘democracy’ is under attack and his account of Athens in the era of Pericles and then the Peloponesian war is classic. It is a lot easier to do this now with so much material on the web, it is almost like filling in the blanks: here is the online text and commentary at: Tufts/Perseus. A contribution might be to rewrite the standard translations crippled with filler trying to reproduce the elusively nuanced original: the result is the noticeable verbiage in most translations. A very clipped style would work better. Just locating ‘subject verb object’ (rarely in that order) is often hard. We get lucky in the first paragraph, the first sentence is only four lines long and the subject verb object is here transparent at the start. The Tufts site includes Hobbes’ translation, another classic…
This is the first ‘section’ or paragraph.
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Θουκυδίδης Ἀθηναῖος ξυνέγραψε τὸν πόλεμον τῶν Πελοποννησίων καὶ Ἀθηναίων, ὡς ἐπολέμησαν πρὸς ἀλλήλους, ἀρξάμενος εὐθὺς καθισταμένου καὶ ἐλπίσας μέγαν τε ἔσεσθαι καὶ ἀξιολογώτατον τῶν προγεγενημένων, τεκμαιρόμενος ὅτι ἀκμάζοντές τε ᾖσαν ἐς αὐτὸν ἀμφότεροι παρασκευῇ τῇ πάσῃ καὶ τὸ ἄλλο Ἑλληνικὸν ὁρῶν ξυνιστάμενον πρὸς ἑκατέρους, τὸ μὲν εὐθύς, τὸ δὲ καὶ διανοούμενον. [2] κίνησις γὰρ αὕτη μεγίστη δὴ τοῖς Ἕλλησιν ἐγένετο καὶ μέρει τινὶ τῶν βαρβάρων, ὡς δὲ εἰπεῖν καὶ ἐπὶ πλεῖστον ἀνθρώπων. [3] τὰ γὰρ πρὸ αὐτῶν καὶ τὰ ἔτι παλαίτερα σαφῶς μὲν εὑρεῖν διὰ χρόνου πλῆθος ἀδύνατα ἦν, ἐκ δὲ τεκμηρίων ὧν ἐπὶ μακρότατον σκοποῦντί μοι πιστεῦσαι ξυμβαίνει οὐ μεγάλα νομίζω γενέσθαι οὔτε κατὰ τοὺς πολέμους οὔτε ἐς τὰ ἄλλα.
Thucydides, an Athenian, composed a chronicle of war between the Peloponesians and the Athenians, starting at its onset, considering it would be greater and more noteworthy than all that had gone before (than all ere fought), judging that both sides were in full readiness, as the rest of Greece took sides, some straightway, some intending to do so in the future. For this was the greatest martial kinetic (kinesis, commotion) to have beset the Greeks, including even some barbarians, indeed much of mankind. In fact, the history just prior to our present and that more ancient still, as difficult as that might be to assess given the passage of time, squinting to furthest extent possible to me, are lost to us now but would seem to have been not as great, either militarily or otherwise.
