Darwinism

Here’s my latest Deprogram from Salvo, a magazine you should support. The stuff you are about to split a gut laughing while reading is all true: FIT FOR A ZOMBIE Evolutionary Brand Marketing for Your Survival[ … ] Hogshead is a brand marketing specialist; she helps executives persuade us to pay more for their brands. She has even formulated a theory, developed from the study of apes and neuroscience: to sell is to cast a spell, and the best strategy for casting a spell is to “fascinate” people. She has identified seven Darwinian triggers for successful sales spells. These triggers are not the fundamental reasons why we buy things, of course. We buy shoes to protect our feet, but brand Read More ›

In “Traumatizing your DNA: Researcher warns that it isn’t ‘all in the genes’” (Physorg, March 23, 2011), we learn, Epigenetic research suggests that the effects of stress and environmental pollution can be passed on to future generations without any obvious change or mutation in our DNA. The problem, Prof. Jablonka points out, is that we have no idea of the extent these effects will have on the human genome of the future. “I am a story teller. I read a lot of information and develop theories about evolution. For the last 25 years, before it became a fad, I was interested in the transmission of information not dependent on DNA variations,” Dr. Jablonka says. “Epigenetic inheritance is information about us Read More ›

Dawkins book The Greatest Show on Earth has now been published in German, and as such is being interviewed by a German publication. The conversation centers mostly on why Dawkins thinks that believing the world and universe to be designed is unhelpful:

It is an attempt to disabuse people, especially in America, but also in other parts of the world, who have become influenced by fundamentalist religion into thinking that life can be and should be explained as all designed. I regard that as a lazy and unhelpful explanation as well as an untrue one.

As if people who think it’s designed just stop there with regards to describing the world and the universe with the philosophy called science. Ignore that fact that the history of the world has had folks investigating nature that believed and still believe it’s designed. This is one of Dawkins’ favorite arguments, and no one ever says it’s akin to saying that since we know that songs are composed by intelligence no one else will ever try to figure them out and learn to play them. Or since books are written no one will employ textual criticism and determine something along the lines of why it was written the way it was. As if anything thought to be designed is immediately uninteresting. I suppose that rules out an effort at understanding his book by the same logic. A designed book, that says that don’t look at things as designed if they are to have any merit, is an odd thing.

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Here, der Spiegel gives Richard Dawkins the floor (03/02/2011), as his book, The Greatest Show on Earth is published in German:

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Has religion not been very successful in an evolutionary sense?Dawkins: The thought that human societies gained strength from religious memes in their competition with others is true to a certain extent. But it is more like an ecological struggle: It reminds me of the replacement of the red by the gray squirrel in Britain. That is not a natural selection process at all, it is an ecological succession. So when a tribe has a war-like god, when the young men are brought up with the thought that their destiny is to go out and fight as warriors and that a martyr’s death brings you straight to heaven, you see a set of powerful, mutually reinforcing memes at work. If the rival tribe has a peaceful god who believes in turning the other cheek, that might not prevail.

– “Interview with Scientist Richard Dawkins: ‘Religion? Reality Has a Grander Magic of its Own'”

It’s hard to tell exactly what Dawkins is trying to say here, but curiously, “a peaceful god who believes in turning the other cheek” was exactly what the early Christians preached and they went from being a persecuted people in the Roman empire to running the show in the course of about two and a half centuries. But your mileage may vary.

We also learn, Read More ›

Amazing what people have tried to get out of it. In “Darwinism and the Quest to Cheat Death”(ABC Religion and Ethics | 28 Mar 2011), British pundit John Gray tells us Like so many others, then and later, Sidgwick looked to science for salvation from science. If science had brought about the disenchantment of the world, only science could re-enchant it.The result of scientific inquiry seemed to be that humankind was alone. Evolution would bring about the extinction of the species and eventually, as the sun cooled and the planet ceased to be habitable, life itself would die out. It was a desolate prospect, but one that could be accepted if science could also show that human personality would survive Read More ›

In this article in The Scientist, “Imprinting Diversity”, Cristina Luiggi interviews Joachim Messing about ways in which genomic imprinting may be a strong driver of diversity: Sexual reproduction yields offspring with two copies of the same gene, one from each parent; but in an epigenetic phenomenon known as genomic imprinting, only one copy of certain genes is turned on or off, depending on which parent contributed it. Imprinted genes are stamped by patterns of DNA methylation or histone modification during gamete formation, and their activation or inactivation is then passed on to offspring. Previously, approximately 100 genes were thought to be imprinted in mammals. But Rutgers University molecular biologist and F1000 Member Joachim Messing, discusses a recent paper that found Read More ›

No biologist has been responsible for more – and for more drastic – modifications of the average person’s worldview than Charles Darwin” (“These words were spoken by Harvard professor Ernst Mayr (1904–2005), veteran evolutionary biologist, when on September 23, 1999, he received the Crafoord Prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. Dr, Mayr made the point that although most groundbreaking scientists, such as Albert Einstein, had a marked influence within their own fields of science, they made little impact on the way the average person apprehends the world, whereas Darwin changed the very fabric of our worldview.

And so this book. …

Which shows why Darwinism didn’t and shouldn’t have changed the Hindu worldview.

Unless Hindus want to buy into the Evolutionary Agony Aunt, and Darwinian brand marketing, and the Big Bazooms theory of evolution. Why not let it be a late Western neurosis?

by Leif A Jensen, Rethinking Darwin: A Vedic Study of Darwinism and Intelligent Design (Bhaktivedanta Book Trust: Germany, 2010), p. 1

Hey, just readin’ is all. And repeat after me,   Read More ›

Earlier this year, sociobiologist E. O. “Dear Pastor” Wilson disowned his “inclusive fitness” (kin selection) theory, developed from his study of ants and bees. According to his theory, among life forms that live in groups, many members may give up the chance of reproducing their selfish genes so that the group as a whole is more fit. The problem is that it’s notclear how this situation could arise.

He hadn’t long to wait for a reaction from his colleagues: Read More ›

Here’s Ann Coulter, on science as done by trial lawyers and activists:

In response to my column last week about hormesis – the theory that some radiation can be beneficial to humans – liberals reacted with their usual open-minded examination of the facts.

According to Noel Sheppard at Newsbusters, MSNBC’s Ed Schultz devoted an entire segment to denouncing me. He called me toxic, accused me of spreading misinformation and said I didn’t care about science.

One thing Schultz did not do, however, was cite a single physicist or scientific study.

I cited three physicists by name as well as four studies supporting hormesis in my column.

Just think. There was a time when science was based on evidence (not always easy to come by).

Not on myths, rituals, incantations against evil, superstitions, and witless worship.

The latter state pretty much characterises Read More ›

PaV’s recent post Darwinn Step Aside – Survival of the ‘Quickest’ got me thinking again about natural selection and the role it supposedly played in evolution. The conventional wisdom among Darwinists, including Darwin himself, is that NS is a mechanism. The very title of Darwin’s famous tome suggests as much – On The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection . The clear implication is that NS is some sort of mechanism. A mechanism by definition is something that does something. Consider the simple dictionary definition of the term “mechanism”

1
a : a piece of machinery b : a process, technique, or system for achieving a result
2
: mechanical operation or action : working 2
3
: a doctrine that holds natural processes (as of life) to be mechanically determined and capable of complete explanation by the laws of physics and chemistry
4
: the fundamental processes involved in or responsible for an action, reaction, or other natural phenomenon

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Here, University of Toronto’s Larry Moran, blogger at Sandwalk (named after Darwin’s garden path) and famed (okay, okay, reputable) textbook author, commented at UncommonDescent on this story about Jonathan Wells’ new book on the junk DNA myth, complaining, Denyse, you’ve promised in the past to stop using the term “Darwinism” to refer to all of evolution. What happened to that promise?In evolutionary biology, “Darwinism” refers to those who focus on adaptation as the almost exclusive mechanism of change. They are also called adapationists. Moran calls himself a pluralist. For the record, he said, I’m a pluralist who promotes the importance of random genetic drift and accidental evolution. That’s perfectly consistent with junk DNA. I am not a Darwinist. Yes, as Read More ›

A being so powerful and so full of knowledge as a God who could create the universe, is to our finite minds omnipotent and omniscient, and it revolts our understanding to suppose that his benevolence is not unbounded, for what advantage can there be in the sufferings of millions of the lower animals throughout almost endless time? This very old argument from the existence of suffering against the existence of an intelligent first cause seems to me a strong one;

Charles Darwin

Consider that Darwin loved shooting birds. Shooting birds is an act that induces suffering for the bird and the bird’s family.

In the latter part of my school life I became passionately fond of shooting, and I do not believe that anyone could have shown more zeal for the most holy cause than I did for shooting birds. How well I remember killing my first snipe, and my excitement was so great that I had much difficulty in reloading my gun from the trembling of my hands.
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“How I did enjoy shooting”
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If there is bliss on earth, that is it”
….

So Darwin thinks that an intelligent being would not inflict suffering on other creatures, yet he himself inflicts suffering for his own blissful pleasure.

Darwin implicitly assumes he himself is an intelligent being since he presumes to know what God ought to do in managing the affairs of creatures on Earth. Yet Darwin argues intelligent beings won’t cause suffering, yet Darwin himself, an intelligent being, does the very thing he claims an intelligent being wouldn’t do. Would Darwin therefore argue Darwin doesn’t exist because Darwin causes suffering in the world? His line of reasoning is most ironic.
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Here at Slashdot we are informed by someone or other that “There is a Texas bill, HB 2454, proposed by Republican State Rep. Bill Zedler, that will outlaw discrimination against creationists in colleges and universities. More specifically, it says, ‘An institution of higher education may not discriminate against or penalize in any manner, especially with regard to employment or academic support, a faculty member or student based on the faculty member’s or student’s conduct of research relating to the theory of intelligent design or other alternate theories of the origination and development of organisms.’” Most of the comments are predictable, and it would be far too much to ask otherwise. It strikes me that there was a time when outlawing Read More ›

Lenski’s the guy who studied all those generations of E. Coli bacteria, and discovered that over many thousands of generations, there were very few beneficial mutations. (Darwinism depends, not on mutations as such but on mutations that benefit the organism.) Recently, his work was the subject of an item, “Evolvability, observed” by Jef Akst (The Scientist, 17th March 2011 ), where we learn

Natural selection picks the most well adapted organisms to survive and reproduce. But what if the most beneficial mutations in the short term meant less room for adaptation in the future?[ … ]

Researchers at Michigan State University and the University of Houston in Texas took advantage of a long-term evolution experiment on Escherichia coli that’s been running for more than 50,000 generations. Characterizing archived strains from 500, 1000, and 1500 generations, the team identified two beneficial mutations that arose in some strains prior to 500 generations and eventually spread through the entire population. The researchers dubbed the strains that carried these mutations at 500 generations the eventual winners (EWs) and those lacking the mutations the eventual losers (ELs).

Andrew J. Fabich at Tennessee Temple University, who knows somewhat of bacteria, writes to say that none of the stuff about them is any big surprise, Read More ›

And why not? It’s real. It’s actual. Paul Farhi tells us (March 16) The Washington Post suspended one of its most seasoned reporters Wednesday after editors determined that “substantial” parts of two recent news articles were taken without attribution from another newspaper. Oh, but wait. That implies purpose, a big no-no, if you go by Darwinist rules. Still, the guy was suspended. Does anyone other than me get sick of the hypocrisy? That incident the reporter was covering (Jared Loughner), by the way, led to a huge demand among our moral and intellectual superiors for control over private speech. I deal with the threat here. What keeps me going is a chance to serve coffee here.