Challenging Scientism

ABC News “Nightline” program, which parades commentary about and by pop-culture prostitutes and occasional pandering, meandering war-coverage as serious news (where have you gone Ted Koppel?), pretended to cover a real and genuine cultural controversy on last night’s program.

Cynthia McFadden, Nightline Anchor – “Would I lie to you?”

“Inside a Truther Convention.”

“Chris Bury and producer Katie Hinman did just that this weekend — attending a convention in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, alongside hundreds who share a collective distrust of the official explanation for the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

As they will report tonight, the attendees come from several different viewpoints, knitted together in this “movement” largely online.

We talk to conference organizer Betsy Metz, who tells us there is “absolutely a cover-up,” and the producers of “Loose Change” a conspiracy theorist film that is among the most downloaded videos in Google history.”

Indeed. Let’s ask this question:

How do you investigate a crime? How do you cover one up?
Read the rest of this entry »

What is Nature?

(Neo)-Darwinists always talk about the ‘laws of nature.’ No question is too difficult to answer, because the answer is always the same…

Q: How did oxygen precipitate from a barren, heat-scorched earth and bind with nitrogen and hydrogen to somehow magically combine to make the first, and second, and two-hundred-fiftieth amino acid?

A: “Natural processes.”

Q: How did hardened, arrayed, differentiated, multilayered calcium outcroppings (teeth) emerge in soft tissue?

A: “Natural selection.”
Read the rest of this entry »

Endless Darwinism, Most Flexible;
A non-Darwinian philosopher’s review of “Endless Forms, Most Beautiful,” by Sean B. Carroll.
by Liam Scheff

published by W.W. Norton and Co. 2006
Amazon link.

Dr. Carroll likes his rock and roll, and he’ll give you an unwanted lyric from time to time, to let you know that he’s cool, as well as really smaht. The under-title of the book, and its constant refrain throughout – the rhyming, new-wave rock-sounding “Evo Devo,” gives the biggest hint as to what’s wrong with this ‘new’ science.

The clever, cloying catch-phrase will now be employed by undergraduates, and Ph.D. candidates everywhere, to describe a myriad of processes that they don’t understand. (They’ll just sound cute and clever saying it). Carroll throws it around blithely, to cover a variety of sins.

The trouble with the book isn’t what Dr. Carroll gets right. Indeed, things develop! There are patterns to that development. Those mechanical patterns can sometimes be elucidated, even described, even tinkered with to produce horrible, horrible animals (that researchers should be remorseful for causing to suffer, but don’t seem to care much at all).

The reductionists have named genes, described some intermediary functions, given clever, populist names to their ideas: Hox genes! Toolbox genes! Do they control the birth and regulation of the entire organism? Are the great mysteries solved at last!? Read the rest of this entry »

– Collagen Molecule

I want to share with you excerpts from several items I’m reading, more or less unfiltered. It goes like this:

We’re all connected, right? Everybody says so – somewhere beneath the surface, we’re ‘one,’ part of a single organism, being, entity. Everybody’s had an experience – touching, sensing, feeling, knowing – transmitting information, thoughts, feelings, ideas, images, across a room, in the presence of a friend, or someone you’re just meeting, or in a place, or waking from a dream, or in a dream itself… We’ve all had bits and images of feelings of connection and knowing and transcendence despite our rational selves…. Despite our ’scientific, modern’ idea of an accidental, mechanical world – something we inherited from the 17th Century, caught in the wake of René Descartes’s Enlightenment discoveries of logic and method.

But to prove it? You can only say it, know it, feel it. Share it with people who understand. But prove it? Is there a ruler, a graph, a measuring stick for this sort of thing?
Read the rest of this entry »

No hero of mine, this poor fool who pile-drove his plane into the IRS building in Austin…

Read the rest of this entry »

You believe in evolution, no? Yes? Right?

Right, of course you do. You’re an educated individual…

So, have you read Charles Darwin? It’s not so hard to do. You can read his work – all of it – for free, online, at various websites, if you have a computer (which evolved from the abacus, of course).

So, have you read Darwin? Maybe not? Probably not. But who needs to? Evolution is true. That’s apparent. Things change. Animals change over time. Legs become fins, fingers become wing struts, scales become feathers. And vice-versa. It’s just so. We come from things that we used to be. We used to be other things. Things change! And life is connected.

Right?

Sure, why not. Life is connected, certainly – to life, to itself. And it comes from… itself. It evolves from itself into…itself. Just differently. How simple! How self-evident.

But, what is the theory of Evolution?

Well, what about it? It’s self-explanatory. It’s not a theory, it’s a fact. And you do know it, even if you think you don’t. Venture a guess?

Survival of…
Read the rest of this entry »

I quote her with care, as she derails easily, but it’s a well-stated opinion:

“If there is any one way to confess one’s own mediocrity, it is the willingness to place one’s work in the absolute power of a group, particularly a group of one’s professional colleagues. Of any form of tyranny, this is the worst; it is directed against a single human attribute: the mind–and against a single enemy: the innovator.

The innovator, by definition, is the man who challenges the established practices of his profession. To grant a professional monopoly to any group, is to sacrifice human ability and abolish progress; to advocate such  a monopoly, is to confess that one has nothing to sacrifice.”

- Ayn Rand, “The Return of the Primitive”

Take that, peer review…

On that note, and after years of observing it, I can agree that the value of peer review truly seems to be to repress movement. “Reproducibility” should be the measure of success in any venture, and reproducibility can be seen by any 3rd grader…

Shakespeare, Not Shakespeare
Part One: His Second Best Bed
Interview with Mark Anderson
by Liam Scheff

“Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too,
Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out;
And take upon us the mystery of things,
As if we were God’s spies…”
—King Lear, Act V, Scene iii

Who was Shakespeare? A poor, unschooled glover’s son from a rural English village? Or a man of great learning and talent – and of sensitive political stature – who chose to hide his compromising poetic and political works behind the name of another, less important, less politically vulnerable man?

If we are to believe conventional wisdom, we must choose the former – the village lad of no means and no instruction in the arts, letters and sciences. If we choose the latter, we must argue against what is currently written in history books – that William Shakespeare was an uneducated, only passably literate calf-skinner, who just happened to write the greatest works in the English Language – because he also happened to be a genius.

In this series, Mark Anderson, author of “Shakespeare by Another Name,“ takes us through the history of the history of the Bard, and explains why biography is the only lens through which the works of Shakespeare can truly be understood. What is genius, and what is required in the training of that mind, to create history’s greatest works?
Read the rest of this entry »

I am just reading this: Debating Darwin – Adventures of a Scholar, by John C. Greene.

A wonderful mind. I regret that I didn’t look him up in 2007, when I first picked up the book…

Of all the writing in this book, his correspondence zings loudest and clearest, (as it does with many of us – we know our audience, and are trying to make our point with wit and force). His mind so nicely, cleanly and lucidly understands and separates the biologists’ fiction of having it both ways: That we have a supernaturally all-powerful, choosing, remaking, selecting and altering “nature,” always spurring on life to ‘greater’ accomplishment and ‘higher’ levels of expression; which we also and simultaneously must, by definition regard as a dead, ‘chance-driven’ evolutionary machine.

The book takes the form of several essays, together with long excerpts from considerable correspondences with two evolutionary biologists, Theodosius Dobzhansky, and Ernst Mayr. Below is an excerpt from one exchange with Mayr.
Read the rest of this entry »

Prediction: The iPad (“Apple’s Genius New Product”) will further erode the world of private versus public life, thinking freely and independently, and reading anything that requires meditative consideration.

- The iPad, soon to take over your life, or the life of every twenty to thirty-something near you.
Read the rest of this entry »

Here in the great State of Massachusetts, a great many irritated people, tired of immense taxation, voted for a pretty decent, hard working fellow from a local town to represent their interests and to oppose D.C. desires, as State Senator.

And it’s good as far as it goes. It might hold up the massive health care fraud. It does announce that many old Dems will be vacating their positions soon, and Congress and the Senate will see some new blood, most of which will be quickly corrupted.

New can be good, but it only goes so far…

Democrats will remain what they have been, and so will Republicans. Read the rest of this entry »

Greetings free thinkers and other trouble-makers,

I’ve recently had an experience with the very friendly Facebook platform, which has made me evaluate its friendliness and utility.

I had accrued some massive coterie of ‘friends’ on the site – most of whom I did not know (that’s the great lie of the internet age – that we’re all one happy group of well-informed people just amiably chatting with each other (about the end of the world and other topics))…

I began to use the site for longer for conversations in topics of my interest, such as religion, philosophy, science, etc, and was enjoying some of that banter, and so was somewhat put off when I arrived one day at the sign in to find that I could not sign in! I had been deleted, in total, and without explanation.

Following the advice of the ‘you no longer exist here’ page, which was displayed before me, I wrote the Facebook architects, wherever they may be on earth, and asked them for some assistance in returning use to me.

Alas, four letters over a week sent, and nary a response.
Read the rest of this entry »