tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-87370898437741792232024-03-17T08:46:10.129-07:00Forms Most Beautiful"There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved."
Charles Darwin Origin of SpeciesAdriphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12553791848838245281noreply@blogger.comBlogger77125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8737089843774179223.post-66731219454940060692024-02-21T04:57:00.000-08:002024-02-21T05:03:24.176-08:00 The myth of the 'paleo diet' and what the science say<p>The <a href="https://paleolivingtoday.website/" target="_blank">paleolithic diet, also known as "paleo diet"</a>, the Stone Age diet, or the caveman diet, has gained popularity in recent years as a way to eat healthier and lose weight. The idea behind this diet is that modern humans should eat as their prehistoric ancestors did, before agriculture and animal husbandry became common practices. According to proponents of the paleolithic diet, our bodies are genetically adapted to eat the same foods as our hunter-gatherer ancestors, and that by doing so, we can avoid many of the chronic diseases that affect people today.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIvpQHxNurM8B2s1oTwer1g0WxWk2pXAzcNSZG3SwF8Fs6_N84CDpeej2AJOBlz3aa6-1kX7UQLTKA0Kf1N3wY4ffR0h9TTOMrVGAPWRV3qMsaBV-ThS9mnPumI3jc5Onm1-OYkLoV-MnfvnXmbzXCCSqD1YTlcp3n6BOnyAYPufNWVUBwWrdihM98BzA/s450/paleo%20living.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="302" data-original-width="450" height="430" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIvpQHxNurM8B2s1oTwer1g0WxWk2pXAzcNSZG3SwF8Fs6_N84CDpeej2AJOBlz3aa6-1kX7UQLTKA0Kf1N3wY4ffR0h9TTOMrVGAPWRV3qMsaBV-ThS9mnPumI3jc5Onm1-OYkLoV-MnfvnXmbzXCCSqD1YTlcp3n6BOnyAYPufNWVUBwWrdihM98BzA/w640-h430/paleo%20living.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><p>However, the scientific evidence behind the paleolithic diet is mixed at best. While it is true that our prehistoric ancestors did not have access to processed and refined foods such as sugar and white flour, it is also true that their diet was very different from what is currently promoted as the paleolithic diet. For example, prehistoric hunter-gatherers did not have access to foods such as beef and chicken, as these animals were not domesticated until long after our prehistoric ancestors had disappeared. Instead, their diet consisted mainly of game meat, fish, seafood, fruits, vegetables, nuts, and seeds.</p><p>Furthermore, the paleolithic diet does not take into account the fact that our bodies have evolved since the Stone Age. For example, our prehistoric ancestors had larger and more acidic stomachs than we do, which allowed them to digest large amounts of raw meat. They also had a higher tolerance for foods high in saturated fats, as they needed these fats to survive in a hostile environment. In contrast, modern humans have smaller and less acidic stomachs, which means that they cannot digest large amounts of raw meat. Additionally, our modern diet is much richer in saturated fats than that of our prehistoric ancestors, which means that we do not need to consume as much fat to survive.</p><p>In summary, the paleolithic diet is a myth based on a misinterpretation of the scientific evidence. While it is true that our prehistoric ancestors did not have access to processed and refined foods such as sugar and white flour, it is also true that their diet was very different from what is currently promoted as the paleolithic diet.</p>MS2http://www.blogger.com/profile/11765803565278277995noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8737089843774179223.post-79676550456744736202023-02-13T12:12:00.008-08:002024-02-21T07:08:15.254-08:00Terraplanism, a disinforming movement<p>Over the past few years, a new pseudoscientific thought line has emerged as a result of the growth of social media networks: flat-earth theory.<br />It is a movement in which its followers show a clear lack of understanding of physical and astronomical concepts and discredit, without basis, the knowledge that humanity has been building and verifying over 2 millennia.<br />The real and serious problem with all of this is not the flat-earth theory itself, but the philosophy behind it.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiC0b1oK3q3A_C4yqkG_Lr56zbpEDLxzJkfnLEGf5uC0BjMMR6tAkHZXio6i2JJKVUMu9M9omyO_CzZFPgCT0NTjon3oqNZyIt6Ik1WSMEXhaK09_t5KA7eWPJBLKDr-r92onwtfy6yq2zcR_rbY7unjJVQFGGqglyOYAMjLmP8MVFX4b2ZlNoqN7d5/s976/flat%20earth.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="549" data-original-width="976" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiC0b1oK3q3A_C4yqkG_Lr56zbpEDLxzJkfnLEGf5uC0BjMMR6tAkHZXio6i2JJKVUMu9M9omyO_CzZFPgCT0NTjon3oqNZyIt6Ik1WSMEXhaK09_t5KA7eWPJBLKDr-r92onwtfy6yq2zcR_rbY7unjJVQFGGqglyOYAMjLmP8MVFX4b2ZlNoqN7d5/w640-h360/flat%20earth.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><p>The 21st century is undoubtedly the era in which not only are the fastest changes taking place in various fields of human knowledge, but also, and particularly, in social behavior. Just to give an example, social networks have had a colossal impact on our lives. There are considerable paradoxes. While on our mobile devices we have the most accessible information in all of human history, misinformation pervades everyday life.</p><p>Today, taking into account that information is the most precious asset we have, there is one element that is scarce and plays a fundamental role in all of this: having the ability to filter it, analyze it, and give it value. We are faced with a substantial, and very dangerous, oxymoron.</p><p>In the 1950s and 1960s of the last century, there was a current of opinion in which an unfounded emptiness on our planet Earth was manifested. Its faithful followers claimed that we lived on a "hollow" Earth.</p><p>Another clear and famous example of unfounded opinion was the UFO issue. In a world where cell phones did not yet exist, tens of thousands of photographs appeared in magazines and newspapers every day with the alleged ships of beings from other worlds. What a paradox that today these "proofs" have disappeared, literally counting with billions of cameras at all times and places on the planet.</p><p>Lately, for a few years now, a new line of pseudo-scientific thinking has emerged along with the growth of social networks: flat Earthism. It should be said that it is one of the clearest and concrete examples of this nefast "post-truth era" in which we are immersed.</p><p>This is a movement in which its followers and faithful believers, without any foundation, ignore the knowledge that humanity has been building and cross-checking for 2 millennia. Furthermore; they not only ignore this (the checking of information among peers, institutions, nations, work groups), but paradoxically, they exercise their right to opinion from the most absolute ignorance of physics, mathematics, astronomy, to mention a few areas of human knowledge.</p><p>I want to be very clear on one concept. From no point of view am I trying to restrict freedom of expression. Who am I to do so? It would be a gross error on my part to take such a position. But it is no less true to emphasize the importance of giving opinions the necessary weight, not based on the people who express them, but particularly on the foundations on which they are based.</p><h2 style="text-align: left;">The Earth is round</h2><p>The building of human knowledge is based on premises which must be respected in order to reach a good port. In the case of physical and natural sciences, it is clear that observation is one of them with the corresponding peer review. It only takes one test that contradicts a theory, for that theory to cease to be valid. And thus, our understanding, for example, of the planet we live on and its place in the cosmos, has increased over time.</p><p>It was not with Christopher Columbus that we learned of the sphericity of the Earth, but much earlier. For starters, it was the same navigator who, knowing the true shape of the Earth, imagined reaching the east by departing from the kingdom of Spain and sailing west. More than 2 millennia ago, Eratosthenes, an extraordinary astronomer and mathematician, became aware of something very curious. As the director of the Alexandria Library, he found in a papyrus that every June 21st at noon, the Sun's rays fell vertically on the city of Siena, causing any vertical stake not to produce a shadow.</p><p>Eratosthenes realized that at the same moment, in Alexandria, this situation did not occur, but any obelisk would produce a respective shadow. He not only concluded that the way this phenomenon could occur was through a curved surface, but also, with only knowing the distance between both cities, paper, pen and extraordinary ingenuity, he determined with a simple mathematical calculation the size of the Earth.</p><p>Two millennia after that singular event, another of the convincing proofs of the sphericity of the Earth was obtained from the first image of our planet captured from space as a result of the launch of the V2 rocket on October 24, 1946.</p><p>Adherents to flat-earth theory show a clear lack of understanding of basic physical and astronomical concepts. This is not a problem in itself, but the audacity with which they openly debate issues such as the reasons for solar and lunar eclipses, how we measure distances to other objects in the universe, or why ocean water is attached to the Earth's crust and does not "fall" (in that case, I wonder where it would go). A mere investigation into their understanding of Antarctica is enough to give us an idea of what we're dealing with.</p><p>We could offer hundreds of arguments to show how literally unbelievable it would be to live on a "Flat Earth." On a flat earth, the moon could not be observed at the same time by people in both hemispheres of the earth. Circumnavigation of the seas and air routes would not be possible as they are today, with the first example having been done for millennia. The daily observation of the sun and the moon would not correspond to what we observe on a daily basis.</p><p>Of course, flat-earthers have the courage to answer each of these phenomena, and if they cannot offer an answer, they give themselves the possibility of continuing their research to obtain the necessary answers. And here is one of the big disadvantages they face: obviously, without an appropriate physical-mathematical model, when trying to answer a phenomenon, they thereby invalidate another existing one. In other words, if a model allows me to answer why such an observation occurs, that model contradicts a second phenomenon.</p><p>If you think that these gross contradictions discredit the flat-earth position, let me tell you that it is the exact opposite. In the impoverished era of post-truth, "anything goes." Even some of their most fervent followers have found a significant source of income.</p><h2 style="text-align: left;">The True Danger of Terraplanism</h2><p>I believe it's time to clearly state what the true and serious problem is in all of this. It's not flat earthism, but the philosophy behind it. Here, the enemy is post-truth. It's not a coincidence that a high percentage of its followers fervently believe that the arrival of man on the moon is a fraud, that vaccines are not important, and even that drinking chlorine dioxide is healthy. Public opinion leaders have shown this with total disregard for medicine and public health.</p><p>Towards the end of 2019, an opinion from a well-known Argentine actor caught my attention. Without any foundation, I was concerned about his unfounded expression of his belief in a flat earth. It made me think that such a way of constructing an argument, an idea, could easily be extrapolated to the non-importance of vaccines, one of society's main instruments - along with sewage systems - for eradicating global pandemics.</p><p>That's why in December of that year (2019) I embarked on the idea of making a series of videos for YouTube to unmask these fervent believers, knowing full well that I could never achieve it against the prevailing philosophy of post-truth on the other side of the counter.</p><p>The paradox of this story is that in the first chapter of the series, the true danger of all of this was realized, mentioning as an example the anti-vaccine movements. Who could have known that 3 months after that publication we would be facing the greatest pandemic in modern history, showing once again how human knowledge was able to respond to millions of deaths in the world.</p><p>The strength of human knowledge lies in its construction step by step, from solid steps on which we can rely to continue advancing. Let us have the capacity of discernment. It's what will save us as a species. Because ultimately, it's the human mind that distinguishes us from the rest of the existence in this wonderful and unfathomable cosmos.</p><p><br /></p><p><i>Diego Bagú, astronomer from the Faculty of Astronomical and Geophysical Sciences of the National University of La Plata</i></p>Adriphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12553791848838245281noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8737089843774179223.post-51371691943507251892018-11-08T16:06:00.001-08:002024-02-20T11:02:08.077-08:00 Deism and atheism<div style="text-align: justify;">There are those who believe that everything wonderful in the universe is the work of God, however, with all the powerful that they consider, they do not judge him author of the evils and human tragedies. That is why there are more and more people who consider that the divinity is a human creation, that the powerful created it to subdue the weak. Christopher Hitchens considers that God has all the attributes of goodness and love, provides the good, but misfortunes are not attributed to him.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg18bkRK7ejeawiodqY3cSYtZlewozsUUbzCBiwNY-nzJizdzwkFBJAoK2SCRQk3IoSUW_ZeewgxJrw2-GoZHc9XGvhveH5iRzoS59-m4xaM8edWdIQNlG3BC3aJkqNujvCqhewki1w_0Q7m4EqnBhIzGPtHFGjK3Stk_QDRae_YIPwcuLcvsJ7rW3hp68/s850/deism%20and%20atheism.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="624" data-original-width="850" height="470" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg18bkRK7ejeawiodqY3cSYtZlewozsUUbzCBiwNY-nzJizdzwkFBJAoK2SCRQk3IoSUW_ZeewgxJrw2-GoZHc9XGvhveH5iRzoS59-m4xaM8edWdIQNlG3BC3aJkqNujvCqhewki1w_0Q7m4EqnBhIzGPtHFGjK3Stk_QDRae_YIPwcuLcvsJ7rW3hp68/w640-h470/deism%20and%20atheism.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">He affirms that "From God come compassion, consolation, health, love, and when none of that comes, when life is a hell of suffering, responsibility is never attributed to God but to fate. God is almighty, but the evils that happen are the work of the devil or are there to test the faith of men and make them worthy of eternal life. "</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">He asks "if the human species is a dream of God or God is the oldest dream of the species", and quotes Luis Borges stating that "theology is a branch of fantastic literature, (that) Einstein made sarcasm famous that being an expert in God was equivalent to being an expert in fairies. "</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Taking Eagleton Ferry that "there is a link between fundamentalisms and global capitalism, which generates hatred, anxiety, insecurity and feelings of humiliation." Concludes that if God does not exist, man is the only source of values ("God is not good", Debate, Buenos Aires, 2008).</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">Since 1996 Michael Behe defends the theory of intelligent design, biblical creationism. This theory was adopted by the government of George W. Bush, and imposed in some states of the Union, although Darwin showed that species, including humans, "are the result of a chain of natural transformations."</div><br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">Religion was always opposed to scientific evidence, as the universe is the result of an infinite chance. There will always be people who yearn to return to the conservative past.</div>Adriphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12553791848838245281noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8737089843774179223.post-71211478869466262602018-09-28T18:07:00.002-07:002024-02-20T11:04:21.628-08:00The opinion of George Clooney or Emma Watson on the theory of evolution has more impact than that of biology teachers<div style="text-align: justify;">Only in the first months of last year, four states in North America studied laws to authorize the teaching of creationist theories in science class. And is that, despite the scientific consensus around Darwinism, human evolution remains a controversial issue in much of the world.<br />
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Therefore, many scientists are dedicated to pursuing strategies to better convey evolutionary ideas and make them stop in a reluctant society. It is true that this problem is especially strong in the US where 42% of the population believes that man was created as it is today. But that is precisely what is helping us to learn things: like where a celebrity gets to take off a biology teacher.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbhdK4SZnDMgZgBXwFBLIV8FTFqM3Sv25Rdt5WF-TAwZy-A3Pp30EagL6m96dNLkSPqH6_R-8l5LpqZaEkxkxJAAwUtJ0gbLfduOcOU8PilK9mB6CeO1WdwIn8AxnjbBQmkRbJjATbMzE/s1600/cracionism.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="556" data-original-width="993" height="223" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbhdK4SZnDMgZgBXwFBLIV8FTFqM3Sv25Rdt5WF-TAwZy-A3Pp30EagL6m96dNLkSPqH6_R-8l5LpqZaEkxkxJAAwUtJ0gbLfduOcOU8PilK9mB6CeO1WdwIn8AxnjbBQmkRbJjATbMzE/s400/cracionism.jpg" width="400" /></a></div></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">Through the New Evolutionary Illustration, I came to a work by Steven Arnocky and his team realized that no research had explored whether the acceptance of evolution could be susceptible to the opinions of other influential people. To study it, they selected 158 subjects to different opinions to see which of them had a greater effect on the population.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">On the celebrity side, they chose George Clooney and Emma Watson (who were selected because a previous investigation showed that they met the maximum criteria of social attractiveness). On the side of the academy, they created a prestigious biology professor named George Rooney.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">The sample is small and homogeneous, but as exploratory research it seems correct. In addition, the conclusions go in the line of previous investigations. The data indicate that, indeed, the opinion of a celebrity on the evolution influences the social acceptance of the same (more than the one of the experts in the field). It is not a big surprise. We already knew that celebrities can influence the fundamental values and beliefs of people, on important issues, such as political orientation or religious affiliation.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">But, more important, what the study points out (and previous ones) is that once the celebrities make a statement, the impact is very difficult to eliminate. "Public statements made by celebrities that contain scientific misinformation continue to exert an influence on people's opinions, even after they have retracted," the authors explain.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">That is, the results show that, for better or for worse, celebrities have a fundamental role in the scientific literacy of the general population. In evolution, but also in vaccines, climate change or transgenics, the influence of celebrities seems to be decisive. It is something to keep in mind.</div>Adriphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12553791848838245281noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8737089843774179223.post-32499937939985083882018-09-18T10:39:00.002-07:002024-02-20T12:27:46.677-08:00A flaw in the thinking that unites creationists and conspiranoids<div style="text-align: justify;">Says Steven Pinker in Los Angeles that leads within humanity took a great leap forward when he decided to accept that much of the misfortunes is not behind the will of a God angry with our behavior or the spell of a witch. The English phrase "shit happens" is one of the foundations of civilization. Scientific thought in particular, the idea that "everything happens for a reason" or that something "had to happen". However, they are phrases that are often heard with some frequency.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">In a recent article published in the journal Current Biology, a group of researchers led by Sebastian Dieguez, from the University of Freiburg (Switzerland), has tried to understand what is behind this type of thinking flaws and has found a relationship between two Evidence seemingly separate: creationism and theories of conspiracy.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsgMWwzv_SCEW5M7MHDYelECdzRexkGIztTAasYx1FYE9_Y3VOBxUUs3KfPujZ3Xm_w9-ec0EmDYcSvU5WuisGU_JU30udTddPpoZcFwIApiIOt3OgiUhz_ekktwmpn3Giv0u1MiC5S5NeST8GZfTCHV8h-LwO7GlHtmAafWiTp8MnS2ScJns508A4Tfw/s688/creationists%20and%20conspiranoids.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="358" data-original-width="688" height="334" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsgMWwzv_SCEW5M7MHDYelECdzRexkGIztTAasYx1FYE9_Y3VOBxUUs3KfPujZ3Xm_w9-ec0EmDYcSvU5WuisGU_JU30udTddPpoZcFwIApiIOt3OgiUhz_ekktwmpn3Giv0u1MiC5S5NeST8GZfTCHV8h-LwO7GlHtmAafWiTp8MnS2ScJns508A4Tfw/w640-h334/creationists%20and%20conspiranoids.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">"Both belief systems share a very powerful cognitive bias that we know as teleological thinking," says Dieguez. "It is a way to deal with complex issues but they are easy to understand if we have a distant and last cause that made everything as it is now," he continues. "In the case of creationism, that ultimate cause is God, who created everything as we know it," he adds.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">That way of thinking made the appearance of the theory of evolution difficult, because it was a less intuitive way of understanding the world. "The way of thinking that says that trees have leaves to give us shade or that the sun rises to warm us up, seems to be something very intuitive and is the way the brain works spontaneously, seeing that things are good for something", indicates Dieguez. "Small children, for the most part, think like that, whether they are children of a religious family or not. And neither is it a completely stupid way of thinking, because to say that white bears are white to hide in the snow makes sense. That way seems the easiest to assume for the human being, but scientific progress and especially Darwin's theory of evolution has given us another way of seeing reality, "he says.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">In previous works that try to understand these ways of thinking, Dieguez had shown that conspiracy is not explained because it is believed that nothing happens by accident. The conspiracy see that the world is complex and that there are random factors in its operation, but still believe that what happens in the world has one or several active minds behind that make it happen with an intention. The researcher from the University of Freiburg saw similarities between this way of thinking and creationism and tried to see if both were related to teleological thought and were related to each other. "Conspiracy is a way of thinking that does not involve a creator god but a group of people identified, but very nebulous, very strange, hidden, that clarifies everything," Dieguez recalls. "Everything you see is an attack or a natural disaster, it seems very complicated, but it is easy to understand if a distant and ultimate cause is the explanation of everything that made it as it is," he concludes.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">After studying several groups of people in Switzerland and France from questionnaires, they observed that there was an association between believing in creationism and conspiracy theories. By pointing out this relationship, the authors want to highlight the flaws in this type of theories so that people can detect them. "Conspiracy is a kind of creationism that refers to the social world and knowing it can help to deal with some of the most widespread problems within our post-truth era."</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">"Creationism is a kind of conspiracy theory because to believe it, you must also believe that scientists or biologists are not only wrong but have a plan to discredit religion and sacred texts. It is a conspiracy against God, "says Dieguez. "On the other hand, conspiracy theories are a form of sociological creationism. As soon as you see something that is spectacular like a terrorist attack or a natural disaster, you are looking for a very clear explanation and a function. That has been seen with the bridge in Genoa. On Twitter and Facebook there are people saying that it is very strange that it happens now when there are certain problems in politics in Italy or France and that it is used to distract people's attention from other problems. Someone managed to make it happen completely perfectly and hidden for something, although it is not clear who did it or for what, "he concludes.</div>Adriphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12553791848838245281noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8737089843774179223.post-17905837215764991172018-08-29T16:49:00.002-07:002024-02-20T12:56:09.363-08:00Darwin's theory of evolution confirmed: the moth changes color to adapt to the environment<div style="text-align: justify;">Scientists from the University of Exeter (United Kingdom) have shown that the spotted moth, also known as 'Darwin's moth' for having been identified as an evolutionary example, uses its color to better camouflage itself from the birds that feed on them, which caused them to darken when industrial pollution blackened British forests in the nineteenth century.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">"It is one of the most emblematic examples of evolution, but fiercely attacked by creationists who seek to discredit the theory of evolution," says Martin Stevens, of the Center for Ecology and Conservation of the Penryn Campus of the University of Exeter. The study has been published in the journal Communications Biology.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLExsXowEE7P6fxtwE9IKRcyEJ0FJosnaAXMsR6usMR6bAeaP9yMpdn6qpQ5gWB_cC7mNTuoxy5z6e_isleOOBeYbgxAvJg6L8w7uQl8hymv9FOuvwYEWKugb85OpoBWhqLugCL_n5RkM/s1600/Darwin+moth+1.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="405" data-original-width="730" height="354" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLExsXowEE7P6fxtwE9IKRcyEJ0FJosnaAXMsR6usMR6bAeaP9yMpdn6qpQ5gWB_cC7mNTuoxy5z6e_isleOOBeYbgxAvJg6L8w7uQl8hymv9FOuvwYEWKugb85OpoBWhqLugCL_n5RkM/w640-h354/Darwin+moth+1.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">The mottled moth or butterfly of the birches (Biston betularia) owes its name to this tree, whose trunk it uses to camouflage itself before the predators. In the 19th century, with the Industrial Revolution and the atmospheric pollution produced by the coal dust, the bark of the trees darkened, which also caused the moths to darken.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgK6C-MCAY-pdGManUsmal_jywgGm8gz30qBqBhpsPkXFQGUfrQNv5NKRRzo_hsVHipa2LF2EVs7SqQ_t-QQFbbaUdQ9YB1sovp_Jjp9VCQAY8Wi3lx4T0VpcCCkZYMxzwHQkKJ47rZiE/s1600/Darwin+moth+2.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="600" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgK6C-MCAY-pdGManUsmal_jywgGm8gz30qBqBhpsPkXFQGUfrQNv5NKRRzo_hsVHipa2LF2EVs7SqQ_t-QQFbbaUdQ9YB1sovp_Jjp9VCQAY8Wi3lx4T0VpcCCkZYMxzwHQkKJ47rZiE/w480-h640/Darwin+moth+2.jpg" width="480" /></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">This phenomenon, called industrial melanism, in which the darker varieties prevail in contaminated areas, served to demonstrate Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, being a subject of debate between evolutionary and creationist biologists. Afterwards, the disappearance of the coal dust pollution returned to harmonize the amount of lighter moths, which were majority before the Industrial Revolution.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">The study by the University of Exeter has shown that moths manage to camouflage themselves in the trunks of trees effectively to the vision of predatory birds. "Using digital image analysis to simulate bird vision and field experiments in British forests, we compare the ease with which birds can see dark and pale butterflies, and determine their risk of predation," explains Professor Stevens. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;"></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipF_xJOcmOnifmFzf3voj2uWHsxU9pF-frOQkTG1eEHE840fi1VzpZF9W6e-8EMPV0pu_BaWpxEfCMYZzoNECttysS4aq1IbRC9ZcalO0u8wZivOigfL11xQRD-by8Z15qpSQKKXWZrz0/s1600/Darwin+moth+3.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="405" data-original-width="730" height="354" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipF_xJOcmOnifmFzf3voj2uWHsxU9pF-frOQkTG1eEHE840fi1VzpZF9W6e-8EMPV0pu_BaWpxEfCMYZzoNECttysS4aq1IbRC9ZcalO0u8wZivOigfL11xQRD-by8Z15qpSQKKXWZrz0/w640-h354/Darwin+moth+3.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div>"Our findings confirm the conventional history presented by the first evolutionary biologists: that the changes in the frequency of dark and pale butterflies were due to changes in pollution and camouflage," adds the Exeter researcher.</div><br />
Adriphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12553791848838245281noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8737089843774179223.post-46331989531599660762018-08-01T12:03:00.002-07:002024-02-20T12:31:04.638-08:00 An investigation could rewrite part of the theory of human evolution<div style="text-align: justify;">The new hypothesis indicates that the species progressed in dispersed and isolated populations from the extreme south to the coasts of North Africa, and not from a single and concentrated population.</div><br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">A group of researchers from the University of Oxford determined that the human species evolved at first in dispersed and isolated populations in Africa, contradicting the usual narrative.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">The extended theory defends that "Homo sapiens" progressed from a single ancestral population in a region of Africa about 300,000 years ago.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMTtnSVcNIR4Fz6KnUxy_To2l3vJf8z3c5oo3L4DHKI7ocxa3ce1JbKaoL0adDGS2xuQK72i5a3kx3ARWdb10UPw5WMpssfGHkxZw3faagJAvklRC8I8Y3a97QBAcrTrCQDRZmrxOLu0c/s1600/evolution.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="525" data-original-width="930" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMTtnSVcNIR4Fz6KnUxy_To2l3vJf8z3c5oo3L4DHKI7ocxa3ce1JbKaoL0adDGS2xuQK72i5a3kx3ARWdb10UPw5WMpssfGHkxZw3faagJAvklRC8I8Y3a97QBAcrTrCQDRZmrxOLu0c/w640-h360/evolution.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">However, the team led by the University of Oxford scientist Eleanor Scerri concluded that the first humans understood a pan-African meta-population "subdivided, changing and with physical and cultural diversity".</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">"This fits with a subdivided population model in which genetic exchanges are not random or frequent and allows us to begin to detail the processes that shaped our evolutionary history," Scerri said, according to the specialized journal Cell Press.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Natural barriers, such as rivers, deserts and forests, that separated these populations, created opportunities for migration and contact between groups that had previously separated.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">The theory presented today, which points out that there was mixing and isolation of populations from the extreme south to the coasts of northern Africa, is more consistent with the fossil and genetic data than a single population model.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">The analysis of fossils of "Homo sapiens" combined with inferences made from contemporary DNA samples suggested levels of early human diversity that supported the changing subdivided population model of the researchers.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">"For the first time, we have examined all relevant archaeological, fossil, genetic and environmental data to eliminate field-specific biases and assumptions and confirm that a mixture of pan-African origin fits much better with the data we have," Scerri said.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">In the future, according to the authors, this research will allow models of human evolutionary history to reject the simple linear progression of what might be called "archaic morphology" towards a more precise explanation of the complexity and irregularity involved in evolution.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">"We are an evolutionary lineage with deep African roots, so to understand this history, we must re-examine the evidence from various sources without an a priori conception," concluded the scientist.</div>Adriphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12553791848838245281noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8737089843774179223.post-49445321618857288022018-07-22T20:25:00.001-07:002024-02-20T12:36:51.670-08:00Does the theory of evolution still affect the human being?<div style="text-align: justify;">On February 12, 1809, Charles Darwin was born, the British naturalist who completely changed our vision of life, based on divine creation until then. 200 years ago nothing was known about the origin of the first living organisms and how they had laid the foundations of the exuberant biological wealth of our planet. Charles Darwin postulated that all species of living beings have evolved over time from a common ancestor through a process called natural selection. Natural selection is based on the fact that certain organisms present hereditary variations that enable them to live longer and leave more offspring than others, so that in the long term, generation after generation, there is an accumulation of favorable characteristics that improve the adaptation of the species to its surroundings.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgC2Z5nicgXISguUKHYONxVxGU7V643ea7uHPDU-fjZuz5L3Ra4V6GEAEh63higwiSsZTJp5FnbZzuGy8xqiuWt0YT1sanRjphqMfsYK5ioVMtVP7rmVpJFXfJEGQprCJgDOJkNd9uawlh5lPc3JVOOVSiCfKECM2H6PJRvAXpK7RVSdVZd2UV86Flh_GQ/s800/evolution.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="525" data-original-width="800" height="420" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgC2Z5nicgXISguUKHYONxVxGU7V643ea7uHPDU-fjZuz5L3Ra4V6GEAEh63higwiSsZTJp5FnbZzuGy8xqiuWt0YT1sanRjphqMfsYK5ioVMtVP7rmVpJFXfJEGQprCJgDOJkNd9uawlh5lPc3JVOOVSiCfKECM2H6PJRvAXpK7RVSdVZd2UV86Flh_GQ/w640-h420/evolution.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">There is some controversy in the scientific community about whether the human being continues to evolve, and therefore, experiencing changes in its genome that make it unrecognizable in a matter of centuries. Some researchers are convinced that natural selection has stopped affecting humanity thanks to technological advances, which allow, for example, the genetic manipulation of the zygote. However, most suggest that man is in constant evolution and that the natural and sexual selections are still valid in our species, since we have not reached the maximum degree of adaptation to the environment, which is increasingly changing due to precisely , to this technological development.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">These are some of the changes experienced by the human being during the last thousands of years and that would demonstrate that we are still subject to evolution:</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Less intelligent:</b> According to a study by the University of Umea (Sweden), the human being has seen its IQ reduced in recent decades because smarter people choose to have fewer children, while people with less favorable genes increase his offspring.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Smaller brains:</b> The latest measurements reveal that the average volume of the brain of the human being has decreased by 10% in the last 30,000 years, that is, the equivalent of a tennis ball. According to experts, this brain reduction has its explanation in that we have developed more sophisticated forms of intelligence and we depend to a lesser extent on the gray matter that controls our body to survive.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Best musicians:</b> According to various studies, musical ability is an index of good learning abilities or fine motor skills, which would explain the greater reproductive success of those who practice it. On the other hand, man has developed an innate predisposition to dance from birth, also considered an indicator of social skills and communication skills.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Monogamous:</b> A study by the University of British Columbia (Canada), stated that communities that allow men to have several wives develop a higher rate of violence, poverty and gender inequalities, while monogamy reduces male competitiveness, thus decreasing the associated social problems and ensuring greater longevity.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Better cooks:</b> Cooked meat provides more energy than raw meat, according to a team of researchers from Harvard University (USA). This finding suggests that humans are biologically adapted to take advantage of the benefits of cooked foods.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Liars:</b> Some researchers suggest that knowing how to lie is an evolutionary advantage, since conflicts of interest cause that nature is favored by individuals who suppress or misrepresent information.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>More readers:</b> According to an investigation carried out by the American researchers Jonathan Gottschall and Joseph Carroll, the literature favors social behaviors that fulfill an adaptive function and incite us to fight basic impulses and work cooperatively.</div>
Adriphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12553791848838245281noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8737089843774179223.post-60149786194690025652018-07-15T01:00:00.001-07:002024-02-20T12:54:38.601-08:00The new strategy of Creationism against Science<div style="text-align: justify;">The theory of the evolution of the British naturalist Charles Darwin is a fallacy and the existence of the human being can only be explained by a "creator". This is what creationists want to be taught in schools since the 1920s. And they have not always used the same strategy for it. As their particular arguments have been rejected by the courts as unconstitutional, they have been adapted with others modified to gain influence and power. Does it sound like something? Is not it precisely what animals and plants do to survive? A new study by the National Institute of Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (NIMBioS) and the National University of Australia (ANU) ensures that, ironically, the particular creationist battle over the years to modify the way in which biology is taught in The classrooms are very similar to the theory of evolution that they criticize so much.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">The researchers, who have published their findings in the journal Science, have developed a kind of phylogenetic tree that reflects the variations in the texts of the legislative proposals of these fundamentalist ideologues in favor of Creationism from 2004 to the present, ten years totaling 65 bills.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">Initially, the creationists advocated directly to eliminate the teaching of the evolution of the classrooms. They managed to enact prohibitionist laws in several states, but the Supreme Court considered them contrary to the Constitution in 1968. They then opted for a new strategy and tried to introduce an alternative subject to biology, so that students could also learn the "design intelligent ", which maintains that life is so complex that it can only be explained as a designer's work, just as a watch is the work of a watchmaker. After achieving it several times with great controversy, Justice turned its back on them again.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6gVxLVpckdnA6DWLfVPGHg8EHZc3WMv56oYlUynZrTUJv5wubw0Y1M5Rab9VwQ7QMQjKm9_1wCRUdujWyNpIfDLNYTxPrpxEeKvt0M5UG-5ZLwJHSfQjHhG8XwqyTJ6C0R73RKip9HNxKzB3wFLWLuO_dV3ULNydkcZpr2BXAOyPbcT6_gQT4Q1zlABc/s547/new%20strategy%20of%20Creationism.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="338" data-original-width="547" height="396" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6gVxLVpckdnA6DWLfVPGHg8EHZc3WMv56oYlUynZrTUJv5wubw0Y1M5Rab9VwQ7QMQjKm9_1wCRUdujWyNpIfDLNYTxPrpxEeKvt0M5UG-5ZLwJHSfQjHhG8XwqyTJ6C0R73RKip9HNxKzB3wFLWLuO_dV3ULNydkcZpr2BXAOyPbcT6_gQT4Q1zlABc/w640-h396/new%20strategy%20of%20Creationism.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b><h2><b>
The "critical analysis"</b></h2></div><div style="text-align: justify;">As "intelligent design" challenged legality, creationists opted for a stealthier last strategy, which fosters policies of "critical analysis" of evolution and the origin of life, and of other scientific aspects such as cloning or global warming. This is what happened in Louisiana and Tennessee, where they managed to pass laws so that schools can study Creationism. The trick is to defend that teachers have academic freedom to teach what they want and question what is in the textbooks. So if a teacher says that the theory of evolution has gaps and that there are alternative explanations, it is in all its right.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">"It is clever, because they do not mention creationism, but they give teachers permission to include pseudoscience and protect them from public administrations that say that these things should not be taught," explains Nick Matzke, ANU researcher. However, his analysis shows "that most of these bills can be related to Creationism again through the presence or absence of phrases that reveal their shared history".</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">In fact, the study found that anti-evolutionist proposals show evidence of "offspring with modification", suggesting that anti-evolutionist legislators are copying proposed ideas recently, instead of writing new bills from scratch. "Most of the proposals do not make sense, they have been copied from another State and changed without thinking," says Nick Matzke, and jokes: "They are not terribly well designed."</div>Adriphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12553791848838245281noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8737089843774179223.post-28945870220175571292018-07-10T17:03:00.001-07:002023-08-30T16:46:19.565-07:00 They allow to extract 40 samples from the Grand Canyon to a creationist who sued the national park<div style="text-align: justify;">The followers of the "creationism of the young Earth" believe that our planet is not more than 6000 years old, despite the enormous amount of evidence that indicates the contrary. One of those tests is the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, whose layers exhibit about 2,000 million years of the geological record.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">How does a creationist defend himself against an argument the size of the Grand Canyon? For example, assuring that its erosion is actually due to the Universal Flood mentioned in the Bible. Or at least that's what the group Answers in Genesis believes to which the doctor in geology Andrew Snelling belongs.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Snelling has been working for years on an explanation of the Grand Canyon that is consistent with the Bible. In 2013, he asked the National Park Service for permission to collect some rock samples in the Arizona canyon, but he was told that his project had no value to justify the extraction.</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhU9JAkFMSMQt5ztRFUcBd0liV5y32dpFdafHFtX7L7RadLrR7ofL-D3eE4kq3kgZfer8GvwOUc2st4ah4gRJSikrYRQeM7Q3s7i5sOeFF9YWrd3J-J3hxbUYUBrSxECJ9ekZdDsPx4260/s1600/grand+canyon.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="800" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhU9JAkFMSMQt5ztRFUcBd0liV5y32dpFdafHFtX7L7RadLrR7ofL-D3eE4kq3kgZfer8GvwOUc2st4ah4gRJSikrYRQeM7Q3s7i5sOeFF9YWrd3J-J3hxbUYUBrSxECJ9ekZdDsPx4260/s400/grand+canyon.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The creationist geologist wanted to collect a rock type known as a deformation structure to show that all the folds of the canyon were formed from soft sediments, which do not require long periods of time to create those structures. However, one of the academics advising the park said that such samples could be found anywhere in the world, so Snelling could pick them up outside the Grand Canyon.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">The creationist did not get his permit and in May of this year he sued the National Park Service. He argued that his rights had been violated when the federal agency rejected his request for his religious opinions.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Finally the national park gave way to pressure and Snelling withdrew its claim in June. The creationist geologist will be able to collect about 40 samples the size of a fist, as long as he freely publishes the results of his study.</div>Adriphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12553791848838245281noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8737089843774179223.post-76614328136687602262018-07-03T14:07:00.001-07:002024-02-20T14:36:08.897-08:00 Sighting test of 'Yangtze River goddess' gives great hope to Chinese ecologists<div style="text-align: justify;">The baiji, nicknamed the "goddess of the Yangtze River", is considered an extinct species, however, some observers claim to have sighted it last month.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">In fact, more than a decade has passed since the baiji was declared "functionally extinct".</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">However, a recent image tries to show that the "goddess of the Yangtze River" still exists, awakening hopes in keeping this mammal alive thanks to the recovery of the ecological vitality of the longest waterway in Asia.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizQUIA3P_nN8gEvFjW3gQ17gB4Pac3MCTKrz9zQ7Jj8Neg6xrw1-zFnJt6RhTkwYWj59wh8ItLyfV9JcLpzErTOCuRQFij7yOtCmuXjZ83KKrimdpcsaqf1TmOfw93XLoCLcse-S0nkscDVB-TOxHRG4RWMJsIM3MWHHtxAeIEkxMWqYVFtgmBXufAKoI/s1280/baiji.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="1280" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizQUIA3P_nN8gEvFjW3gQ17gB4Pac3MCTKrz9zQ7Jj8Neg6xrw1-zFnJt6RhTkwYWj59wh8ItLyfV9JcLpzErTOCuRQFij7yOtCmuXjZ83KKrimdpcsaqf1TmOfw93XLoCLcse-S0nkscDVB-TOxHRG4RWMJsIM3MWHHtxAeIEkxMWqYVFtgmBXufAKoI/w640-h360/baiji.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Many observers believe that this type of dolphin, the only one of its kind to inhabit fresh waters, is only found in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Some environmental scientists have never stopped believing that somewhere in the immense area of the third longest river, hiding from stubborn human activity survive a few Baiji who fight every day for their survival.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Earlier this month, the China Foundation for the Conservation of Biodiversity and Green Development published a photograph of a creature that resembles a baiji. The photo was taken in April on a section of the Yangtze River, near Wuhu, Anhui Province.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Previously, two fishermen's reports had already been distributed, which declared a group containing adult and juvenile specimens.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;"><b>A growing optimism</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">The China Foundation for the Conservation of Biodiversity and Green Development confirmed that several researchers who know this species well have confirmed that the creature in the photo is a baiji.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">"Although the baiji is very likely to have been drastically reduced in the wild, there are chances that a few will still survive in those waters," said Wang Kexiong, a professor at the Institute of Hydrobiology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Wuhan Province. from Hubei.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">"But without performing other tests of rigor, it is unwise to identify as a baiji the creature that appears in the photograph," the Institute said. However, other experts warn that it is too early to label the baiji as an "extinct" species.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">"The test goes beyond a photo," says Fei, director of the baiji program of the China Foundation for the Conservation of Biodiversity and Green Development.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">For three years, this institution has organized observation trips in the hope of spotting freshwater dolphins in the Yangtze. In May of last year, several expedition members claimed to have sighted the mammal.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">"Baiji does not live in isolation," said Li Xinyuan, researcher and recovery activist for the baiji, who was present when the picture was taken last month and described the meeting as "very exciting."</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">"For two days in a row our companions witnessed a baiji, but escaped before obtaining the snapshot." On the third day, photographer Jiao Shaowen decided to use a camera lens instead of binoculars to observe the surface of the water, so he was able to to take the picture when the baiji emerged, "says Li, who in the 1980s commanded a cabinet program for the conservation of mammals.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">He thinks that if the animal detected is really a baiji, it is very likely that there are others swimming nearby.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">"Thanks to state protection, it is clear that the water quality of the Yangtze and the ecosystem have improved in recent years," Li acknowledged.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">He added that many Chinese environmentalists admit that if the level of environmental quality in the region continues to improve, there is a good chance that the Baiji will reappear.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Necessary resources</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Hua Yuanyu, one of the scientists who participated in the 1980 census, advises that "to protect the possibility that the Baiji dolphins survive, emergency actions must be taken using the best resources, specialists and technology in the country."</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">"River transport along the Yangtze River should be properly managed to reduce the noise that has seriously affected the lives of these dolphins that are oriented by their sonar," said the veteran professor at the Institute of Life Sciences of the Nanjing Normal University. Jiangsu province.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Hua also condemned destructive fishing methods such as electro-fishing, gillnets and the dynamic wall, a technique that equips the nets with "knocking" devices to scare the fish out of hiding.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">"These practices must be strictly prohibited and any violation must be punished severely in order to protect the baiji and its food chain," Hua said.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">"Baiji is a mammal that uses the lungs to breathe in. If they are affected by an electric shock, they can become unconscious and drown," said Hua, pointing out the danger of electro-fishing.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">And he urged to train local fishermen in law enforcement and in better environmental education, so that they become efficient protectors of the ecosystem.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">"The protection of the Yangtze must not only include the quality of its water, but also the banks and the wetland must be taken into account throughout its trajectory because the ecosystem functions as an indivisible whole," Hua recalled.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">The prominent professor also suggests that the protection zone of the Baiji should be expanded to include the habitat of the possible last baiji of Wuhu.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">"I am optimistic, if the environment continues to improve, the baiji will reappear," adds Hua, creator of the sonar guidance method to observe and infer the size and distribution of the Baiji population in 1986.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">In the mid-1980s it is estimated that there were about 300 Baiji divided into 42 groups.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Hua's hypothesis is that these intelligent mammals have hidden themselves from human activity and industrial waste and live in calm waters that are difficult to access.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;"><b>The ecological restoration</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">It is estimated that the baiji lived on the Yangtze River for 20 million years.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">However, in recent decades the peaceful existence of the Baiji was shattered by the boom in the fishing industry and river transport.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">The ancestors considered this mammal as a goddess who protected the fishermen and sailors along the 6,380 kilometers of waterway that originates in Qinghai Province and flows into the East China Sea of Shanghai.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">The last Baiji that lived in captivity died in 2002. After an international expedition carried out at the end of 2006, no proof of its existence could be found. The following year the species was declared "functionally extinct".</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">In the Red List of Endangered Species of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, the baiji is defined as "critically endangered and already probably extinct".</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Due to the absence of the "Yangtze River Goddess", China has been making great efforts to restore the ecosystem of the vital river.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">The construction of an ecological civilization has already been defined in the Constitution of the Republic as a national development objective.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">As a result, scientific studies have confirmed an increase in the number of black porpoise and other mammals of the Yangtze River.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">The supposed reappearance of the baiji is further evidence of the ecological improvement of the Yangtze, says Hua.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">For his part, Professor Wang, of the Institute of Hydrobiology of Wuhan, insists that there is still a long way to go in protecting and restoring the natural habitats of the river for species such as the black porpoise.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">"But the current development strategy is in the right direction," he said.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">"Monitoring, protecting, revitalizing and restoring the ecology and natural habitats of the Yangtze River should be prioritized tasks for the next 50 years," Wang concluded.</div>Adriphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12553791848838245281noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8737089843774179223.post-30651264748120697422018-06-27T14:04:00.003-07:002024-02-20T14:29:12.321-08:00 When ecology and economy are in conflict<div style="text-align: justify;">MEP Maria Heubuch gave a lecture on the state and future of agriculture - Hot discussion on glyphosate.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Even the bare facts may surprise: The share of agricultural land in Germany is 52.4 percent - followed by the forest areas with about 30 and the settlement and traffic area with about 13.5 percent.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">But in terms of gross value added in the total spectrum (GDP), farmers generate just 0.8 percent. However, Germany is still - after France - the second largest agricultural producer in Europe. Which wrestling takes place around this 0.8 percent, which press concerns, what demands and hopes are in the room: This is what Maria Heubuch, member of the Greens of the Greens, talked about on Friday evening before quite committed and sometimes quite heated discussing visitors in the stadium restaurant.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">In doing so, the agricultural expert immediately put her finger in the wound: she used various examples to show how ecology and economy are often irreconcilably confronted with how difficult it is to harmonize this sad conflict, which in the main is being carried out on the general public.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinkmqOGb7CTUNHQNLat6OSddXj9YfVKfRObZNpposUTcRDi2QE5EPIU-KrTRCsTJSl7_lQdhO5xBeIlrcMLr9tvi63BqD_nrcpUhhQQcW2JeWtb6s2WXgB9td2duySIzEamFbnzfIkKji-zBJyKESUXqaqrcSk-shXZJOF60AEn3FPiTqVlXl4m5yueoU/s1200/glyphosate.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="630" data-original-width="1200" height="336" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinkmqOGb7CTUNHQNLat6OSddXj9YfVKfRObZNpposUTcRDi2QE5EPIU-KrTRCsTJSl7_lQdhO5xBeIlrcMLr9tvi63BqD_nrcpUhhQQcW2JeWtb6s2WXgB9td2duySIzEamFbnzfIkKji-zBJyKESUXqaqrcSk-shXZJOF60AEn3FPiTqVlXl4m5yueoU/w640-h336/glyphosate.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">From the tradition farmer woman as well as owner of a dairy farm allgäu, she was direct witness of the milk crisis in the years to 2014/15, which had cost in the end 4081 enterprises in the existence of Germany. The common European agricultural policy (CAP) had demanded this in the context of a structural change, had set profitability norms.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Among other things, this has a detrimental effect on diversity and also means that fewer and fewer farms produce more and more food. Quality of life is lost - and at all levels. Above all, biodiversity suffers from structural changes, such as with regard to insect and bird life.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">The stimulus word "glyphosate" (a weed control), which appears in almost every public debate when it comes to healthy nutrition, also largely dominated the discussion that followed the lecture. It was precisely here that there was considerable dissension between the experiences and interests of the farmers present on the one hand and the ecological agenda of the ecological party on the other.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Again and again, the speaker pointed out that the problems that surround biodiversity, sustainability and responsible economic activity should be seen not only with regard to the Kraichgau, but "that we all sit in the same boat, after all", that all people have to look beyond the domestic demands that lie on their doorstep and have to think globally.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Ultimately, consumer behavior determines which direction the development is going for. If you want quality and variety, you also have to dig deeper into your wallet, stressed Maria Heubach.</div>Adriphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12553791848838245281noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8737089843774179223.post-3705024860375710322018-06-18T21:46:00.001-07:002024-02-20T14:48:14.067-08:00 Ecology has determined the great development of the human brain<div style="text-align: justify;">
There is no scientific consensus on why the human brain has such a large relative size, compared to other living beings. Numerous evolutionary theories have tried to explain this singularity, but none has been able to discern whether its growth is a cause or an effect of other factors.</div>
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One of the best known hypotheses is that our brain grew to allow our ancestors to function better in an increasingly complex society. Another hypothesis is that this increase in size is related to the fact that our ancestors began to eat meat. The greater protein contribution would have allowed the reduction of the digestive system, in favor of an increase in brain mass.</div>
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<br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjP6clA_sHYp9-V1yV1sNcpxxpXaGmCXXRfZ70acn8i3uBmfQSthlcnikEwEeQ8t8Wc-bHSFQDv5AG9pvohQD7s9_BO1PkpcULCbOD-mcsmZyJKOu47BqcSiPYCeA-nU9AV2x3c9o-FcH_XljaNQYBO_kC023yo5WuppQYxhR3MC91M1weiIk-2baotK6M/s768/human%20brain.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="511" data-original-width="768" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjP6clA_sHYp9-V1yV1sNcpxxpXaGmCXXRfZ70acn8i3uBmfQSthlcnikEwEeQ8t8Wc-bHSFQDv5AG9pvohQD7s9_BO1PkpcULCbOD-mcsmZyJKOu47BqcSiPYCeA-nU9AV2x3c9o-FcH_XljaNQYBO_kC023yo5WuppQYxhR3MC91M1weiIk-2baotK6M/w640-h426/human%20brain.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div style="text-align: justify;">A new study published this week in Nature rejects those hypotheses. "Our results indicate that ecology has been a determining factor in the evolution of the size of the human brain, and not social aspects such as cooperation or competition", explains Sinc Mauricio González-Forero, researcher at the Faculty of Biology at the University of Saint Andrews (United Kingdom).</div>
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Among these ecological factors are problems such as finding food, storing it, and processing it to consume it. "The hunter-gatherers who live in the African savanna solve these problems through animal tracking skills, construction of tools such as bottles and leather containers, and with the production and control of fire to cook food," explains the researcher.</div>
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The study concludes that when the environment is inhospitable and individuals can continue to learn how to solve problems long after childhood - for example, because they can learn difficult techniques from other individuals - that combination between ecology and knowledge accumulation produces brains of size human.</div>
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<b>On the trail of a larger brain</b></div>
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With the help of a computational model, the authors have analyzed the energy costs and benefits provided by a larger brain. The larger the size, the more energy is consumed and the less energy available for other functions, such as the reproductive organs. However, a larger brain also tends to allow the individual to solve more complex problems.</div>
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"The model calculates how large the brain should be as a result of natural selection when individuals have evolved by finding problems of different types. We have considered ecological problems and three types of social problems (cooperation, competition between individuals, and competition between groups), "explains González-Forero.</div>
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In this way, 60% of the determining factors are of an ecological nature, 30% would be related to cooperation and only 10% would be based on competition between groups. The competition between individuals would not have been relevant for the evolution of the brain.</div>
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These percentages are consistent with the fact that human psychology is characterized by its tendency to cooperate. Cooperation among individuals plus competition between groups, which involves cooperation among individuals in the group, provides a high proportion of cooperation problems - 40% - that could have shaped human psychology.</div>
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"Our model refutes the hypothesis that the human brain expanded throughout evolution due to social demands. On the contrary, we found that such demands contribute to decrease the size of the brain ", explains González-Forero.</div>
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"That does not mean that we should diminish our social interactions to promote a bigger brain, because the consequences of something like that would take hundreds of thousands of years to have an effect and could involve negative consequences that the model does not anticipate," concludes the researcher.</div>
Adriphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12553791848838245281noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8737089843774179223.post-71987543241977573982008-11-19T15:37:00.000-08:002024-02-20T16:45:28.433-08:00Woolly mammoth DNA mapping<p>My hometown paper reports today that scientists, including PSU biochemist Stephan Schuster, have sequenced 80% of an extinct Siberian mammoth. Even more incredibly, we might be on the verge of an Ice Age version of Jurassic Park.</p><p>Three years ago, Japanese scientists said they planned to find frozen mammoth sperm and impregnate an elephant and raise the offspring in a safari park in Siberia. But using genetics to engineer a mammoth makes more sense, Schuster said.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirVltLKN4vocTSl4iGLcgwvrd-gVEID2xyBqmfF1bjsvbqv-q-19-pPPR4plH8qnWdaSrPC1GPj5cYZOyBVFuiheL_Ac-A-Wma7DjYxIpZBxjloIYfnchbM7eJds1WfXjvSfUxBXzyVrJ5HrM1uFfxafGn7-5RPJbXEKJ-XO7ATuwYefkX9BiOnWik5So/s768/woolly%20mammoth.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="575" data-original-width="768" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirVltLKN4vocTSl4iGLcgwvrd-gVEID2xyBqmfF1bjsvbqv-q-19-pPPR4plH8qnWdaSrPC1GPj5cYZOyBVFuiheL_Ac-A-Wma7DjYxIpZBxjloIYfnchbM7eJds1WfXjvSfUxBXzyVrJ5HrM1uFfxafGn7-5RPJbXEKJ-XO7ATuwYefkX9BiOnWik5So/w640-h480/woolly%20mammoth.jpeg" width="640" /></a></div><p>Anthropology professor Hendrik Poinar of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, said he no longer considers such ideas impossible. Poinar, who wasn't part of Schuster's study but consulted on the movie Jurassic Park, said director Steven Spielberg may have had it right when he told skeptical scientists: "This is the science of eventuality."</p>
<p>For those of us who unabashedly love Jurassic Park, this sounds so cool I want to jump out of my seat with joy. But let us not forget Ian Malcom's chidings. To paraphrase, just because you think you can engineer extinct animals doesn't mean you should stop yourself from considering whether you should engineer extinct animals.</p><p>But Jurassic Park dreams aside, the coolest thing in this is that we are learning about evolutionary rates.</p><p>Elephants and mammoths - comparable in size at about 8 to 14 feet tall - diverged along evolutionary paths about 6 million years ago, about the same time humans and chimps did, Schuster said. But there are twice as many differences between the genetic makeup of chimps and humans as those between elephants and mammoths.</p><p>"Primates evolved twice as fast as elephants," Schuster said. But some animals such as rodents have had even more evolutionary changes, indicating that it might have to do with size or metabolism, said study co-author Webb Miller.</p><p>Another interesting finding is that in the 50 or so species with mostly mapped genomes, there are certain areas where the genetic code is exactly the same in all the animals - except the mammoth.</p><p>Pretty cool stuff. With each new finding we see more and more of the tree of life through deep time up to the present.</p>MS2http://www.blogger.com/profile/11765803565278277995noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8737089843774179223.post-37163505864557412132008-11-10T15:47:00.000-08:002024-02-20T16:55:19.657-08:00Metal post! Obituary<p>I haven't done a metal post in a while. So why not go with a death metal classic like Obituary? Only great reasons exist for listening to music so brilliantly mindless and bone-crushingly violent. If there is a band that sounds like a backhoe digging up your great grandmother's grave so that the kids at the youth center can play catch with her bones, it's Obituary.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6WLc9IGpR6Kn42YC-dHg5iqd4aDHeQ8hK3O8KiRdg4MlYOq5Xsj5rI-Ae0m7e5MdKPyLvp04m51nRxHntqW04dH15uzIkH_MBJ241HkVXe6nMnG3sD-FSozjvGLjvK0E-5gVlplVpz3nb0atkUc2E-61D0krewNwbvZugLPmn-IwhLD5oz8cYvCDXrh8/s1200/Obituary.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1028" data-original-width="1200" height="548" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6WLc9IGpR6Kn42YC-dHg5iqd4aDHeQ8hK3O8KiRdg4MlYOq5Xsj5rI-Ae0m7e5MdKPyLvp04m51nRxHntqW04dH15uzIkH_MBJ241HkVXe6nMnG3sD-FSozjvGLjvK0E-5gVlplVpz3nb0atkUc2E-61D0krewNwbvZugLPmn-IwhLD5oz8cYvCDXrh8/w640-h548/Obituary.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><p>Obituary is one of the original Florida death metal bands with the likes of Death, Cynic, Deicide, and Cannibal Corpse (who totally suck!). The band's signature style comes from a combination of tuned down ultra-distorted guitars that sound like a Tiger tank outside of Stalingrad in 1942, a tendency towards very slow tempos, simple driving repetition, descending chord progressions, wailing whammy bar dives and strangely chromatic solos, and John Tardy's growl. I'd venture to say that Tardy (pictured at right) has perhaps the most distinctive growl in all of death metal. He has this fantastic ability (no doubt aided with some production) to fade in or out from a growl with fantastic control. A T-Rex would be envious.</p><p>The lyrics are generally unabashedly awful. Song titles paint the picture for the most part: "Insane," "Chopped in half," "Slowly We Rot," "Cause of Death," "Like the Dead," "The End Complete." They tend toward the horror genre of returning from the dead, dying, destruction, unleashed minions of evil, and the like. This is bad horror movies come to music in the great tradition of Black Sabbath, the Misfits, Venom, and Slayer but at slow tempos. From time to time though we get a sneak of sentimentality as on "Final Thoughts," a song that bemoans the death of a friend, presumably by suicide.</p><p>What I like about bands like Obituary, is that they give free reign to that part of me that is quite simply morbidly fascinated. What social commentary there might be embedded in a band fixated on teenage interpretations of H.P. Lovecraft and our reptilian fears. There really is just something primally appealing in it. Its seeming stupidity - its baseness, callousness, obsessive grotesquery - make it genius somehow. </p>MS2http://www.blogger.com/profile/11765803565278277995noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8737089843774179223.post-461001960073162122008-11-07T16:07:00.000-08:002024-02-20T17:12:02.789-08:00Unforeseen consequences in Florida<p>The National Center for Science Education (whose new website is very snazzy if you haven't seen it yet) is reporting that the Florida science standards might be put up again for vote. This past year, evolution was finally and correctly represented as a "fundamental concept underlying all of biology." But there might be a glitch as language arts, social studies, math, and science might need to be revised so that they are sufficiently under the umbrella of the "Next Generation."</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihEvkFs615Vbwl5Ai2CnUfWNARqupsFYDXBnWq7OdF7rbX5rZXDWnZp-_g0uRB1ma1qEpO0OnB6Pf2uOoueGLb0ArHB-ahUrWOOYBLDJOK7OB8oP55m7gMKuz4jxny6-7e8tjFMI_EhZKbTfM42s7dfbacsPXYKlDOhUvCBG4hvZ6G6z_PVjPTPkqDAK8/s634/National%20Center%20for%20Science%20Education.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="357" data-original-width="634" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihEvkFs615Vbwl5Ai2CnUfWNARqupsFYDXBnWq7OdF7rbX5rZXDWnZp-_g0uRB1ma1qEpO0OnB6Pf2uOoueGLb0ArHB-ahUrWOOYBLDJOK7OB8oP55m7gMKuz4jxny6-7e8tjFMI_EhZKbTfM42s7dfbacsPXYKlDOhUvCBG4hvZ6G6z_PVjPTPkqDAK8/w640-h360/National%20Center%20for%20Science%20Education.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><p>Florida Statute 1003.41 seeks to create the "Next Generation Sunshine State Standards that establish the core content of the curricula to be taught in this state and that specify the core content knowledge and skills that K-12 public school students are expected to acquire." Here we have the law of unintended consequences at work. As in all of policies, the words "Next Generation" are fuzzy enough to allow legislators, advocates, and lobbyists to define whatever their particular agenda item as part of the "Next Generation" and that their opponents' ideas are antiquated. How could this affect evolution education in Florida?</p><p>All of these new standards need to be adopted by December 31, 2011. These could include the evolution standards that some legislators, school board members, parents, or lobbyists like Disco 'Tute attorney Casey Luskin and his fellow creationists could lobby the state government to change. We know that this is already a possibility. Florida Citizens for Science report that Brian Moore, member of the Joint Administrative Procedures Committee (JAPC which works with Florida Department of Education to work out the Deparment's rules), "opined that the standards that were revised and approved prior to the passage of SB 1908 are not “Next Generation” as required by the new law."</p><p>Over at EdWeek, they report that Moore:</p><p>wasn't making any judgment about the scientific merits of the new standards. His only interest is what the law requires, and in this case, it appears that the new science standards are out of compliance, given the requirement that such documents be approved as "Next Generation" standards. So they'd have to be approved with this designation by 2011.</p><p>It's unclear what happens next. It's possible, Moore explained, that Florida's commissioner of education could seek to have various experts certify that the recently approved science standards comply with the Next Generation law. But it appears likely that new standards would have to be re-approved in some form by the state board of education.</p><p>It seems that procedural rules within the Florida 1003.41 might simply require that all standards passed before it came into effect on July 1, 2008 will need to be passed again to reach consensus on whether standard X (evolution for example) is sufficiently part of Florida's "Next Generation."</p><p>This is, I think, quite unfortunate and perhaps also necessary. The science standards that passed in the last year took an enormous effort and overcame a lot of resistance from creationists supported by the Disco 'Tute and others. Following their adoption, Rep. Rhonda Storms tried to get one of the oh-so lovely "academic freedom" bills (SB 2692) through the legislature. Thankfully, it died. I'm afraid that the fight will renew if the science standards come up for review under the new definition. It may not happen if the JAPC committee member's judgement is not held widely. But this is politics and it's worth being cautious and skeptical, especially when the Disco 'Tute and other creationist opportunists are on the march.</p>MS2http://www.blogger.com/profile/11765803565278277995noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8737089843774179223.post-34064743782245412552008-11-07T16:00:00.000-08:002024-02-20T17:05:12.340-08:00Obama: 'Whose Christianity would we teach in schools? James Dobson's or Al Sharpton's?'<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPaOB844m9VDVYQ5wK6edNob4KDQ2eaPgm7M04dN5xdb4qPzPoFA9gYkT4IW2u7JP_Oym6YSz4_SDIWW9OtpyiAMmKu9Dm9RB4xRrSX29a4vmOfj4NFEv8_URm3g-rKHAOuXq-Rb23f12Px3Ixf3gaxBCik50hMKsblukwPxUJgwbzJKUe36m85vq_OBY/s700/obama.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="469" data-original-width="700" height="428" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPaOB844m9VDVYQ5wK6edNob4KDQ2eaPgm7M04dN5xdb4qPzPoFA9gYkT4IW2u7JP_Oym6YSz4_SDIWW9OtpyiAMmKu9Dm9RB4xRrSX29a4vmOfj4NFEv8_URm3g-rKHAOuXq-Rb23f12Px3Ixf3gaxBCik50hMKsblukwPxUJgwbzJKUe36m85vq_OBY/w640-h428/obama.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><p>"Democracy demands that the religiously-motivated translate their concerns into universal rather than religion-specific values. What do I mean by this? It requires that their proposals be subject to argument and amenable to reason."</p><p>How about it? Vive common law!</p><p>Now if we could just convince him that faith-based initiatives are a bad idea.</p>MS2http://www.blogger.com/profile/11765803565278277995noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8737089843774179223.post-82409152778656432612008-10-08T17:19:00.000-07:002024-02-20T17:22:11.832-08:00It's not just evolution. It's the big bang too.<p> To state the obvious: I hammer away at evolution acceptance and denial in the United States, science denial in general, and religious lunacy in total here on Forms Most Beautiful. I've just read a statement by the International Planetarium Society (IPS) asserting and explaining the age of the universe (courtesy of the NCSE). This statement provides a primer on the various and independent lines of inquiry that have led astronomers, astrophysicists, and cosmologists to accept the date. It's also a sad commentary on the state of scientific knowledge in contemporary American culture.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDN_PgP8r77UapXWA1VaGvQ7emzvVZCEG4qMSbMXrD-9_bjcm83702gd_bd7VIC9VpQA-4TmgnhRRFHX-WvQgcDr5bLoRch0r7mKJ3sCk_8xhM-uHK8pfAXcbe9MMPOSMW5ZPBQoA5GUGZFA6I2nI66WFjd2e0Alw85IpreswLP-LfXEYNV9K-fk3PsNY/s800/big%20bang.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDN_PgP8r77UapXWA1VaGvQ7emzvVZCEG4qMSbMXrD-9_bjcm83702gd_bd7VIC9VpQA-4TmgnhRRFHX-WvQgcDr5bLoRch0r7mKJ3sCk_8xhM-uHK8pfAXcbe9MMPOSMW5ZPBQoA5GUGZFA6I2nI66WFjd2e0Alw85IpreswLP-LfXEYNV9K-fk3PsNY/w640-h320/big%20bang.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><p>The statement interests me because it shows us why and how scientists can make the knowledge claims that they do. In essence, it's a nice statement on science's means of making knowledge claims (epistemology) and does a nice little job of introducing people to the philosophy of science. IPS states that:</p><p>These measurements of age are accepted by nearly all astronomers, including both research astronomers and planetarium educators. These astronomers come from nations and cultures around the world and from a very wide spectrum of religious beliefs.</p><p>A fundamental reason why these ancient ages are so widely accepted by the scientific community is that they are derived from several independent lines of evidence accumulated by independent and often competing teams of researchers...</p><p>A second reason why these ages are so widely accepted is that for scientific results to be published in research journals, they must be critically reviewed by other scientists who are experts in the same research area...</p><p>A third reason why these ages, and other scientific paradigms such as Einstein's theory of relativity, are so widely accepted is that by the nature of its acquisition--through independent lines of evidence and always subject to scrutiny--scientific evidence is built up only very slowly, one step at a time. Only when a very large and diverse body of evidence has been accumulated is a broad conclusion accepted. Even then, a broad conclusion remains subject to inspection, as further evidence may reinforce or refine it, or in rare cases, overthrow it.</p><p>I think that the IPS statement succinctly describes why scientists justifiably believe the things that they come to believe and can therefore categorize their belief as acceptance. You can believe anything you like but can you justify that belief without special pleading, appeals to authority, or appeals to revelation? Many of our beliefs seem to require such things. But the scientific method needs no such thing. It uses independent lines of inquiry, it uses the competitive human ambition to check these findings against one another, and then awaits to make its conclusions - which are tentative and reviseable - until a great deal of data has been gathered and put through the wringer.</p><p>It seems a bit sad that this statement even had to be written though. Creationists, bloated on their own zeal and buoyed by wealth, have successfully vaulted ignorance onto the public, seeding doubt in people's minds. They generate bad reasons to believe in superstition all the while calling good science religion while using bad science to hold up bad religion.</p><p>I'm glad the IPS has this statement and yet I sort of cry that it even had to come out. It's not just evolution. It's the whole scientific enterprise that plenty of creationists want to take down...maybe not all of them, but enough of them that you should take pause and consider how reasonable any of their claims might seem to be. This is not just a slippery slope they hope to lead us down, but a hefty shove on a slick cliff.</p>MS2http://www.blogger.com/profile/11765803565278277995noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8737089843774179223.post-18966276290989307322007-09-14T08:39:00.000-07:002024-02-20T15:08:35.084-08:00A world of plastic<div style="text-align: justify;">
So I'm thinking a lot about this ecoliteracy and thinking about our evolved state in the world and what we need to do. My friend Patrick sent this article, "Plastic Ocean: Our Oceans Are Turning Into Plastic. Are We?" to me a little while back and it is one of the most frightening things I have read in a while. I want to share it with you.</div>
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It began with a line of plastic bags ghosting the surface, followed by an ugly tangle of junk: nets and ropes and bottles, motor-oil jugs and cracked bath toys, a mangled tarp. Tires. A traffic cone. Moore could not believe his eyes. Out here in this desolate place, the water was a stew of plastic crap. It was as though someone had taken the pristine seascape of his youth and swapped it for a landfill.</div>
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How did all the plastic end up here? How did this trash tsunami begin? What did it mean? If the questions seemed overwhelming, Moore would soon learn that the answers were even more so, and that his discovery had dire implications for human—and planetary—health. As Alguita glided through the area that scientists now refer to as the “Eastern Garbage Patch,” Moore realized that the trail of plastic went on for hundreds of miles. Depressed and stunned, he sailed for a week through bobbing, toxic debris trapped in a purgatory of circling currents. To his horror, he had stumbled across the 21st-century Leviathan. It had no head, no tail. Just an endless body.</div>
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Leviathan. I'll say.</div>
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Humanity occupies an unprecedented niche in the living world. Our ability to adapt to new environments dwarfs all other “higher” taxa animals on planet earth. Though the humpback and bowhead whales sing elegant arias to one another over dozens of miles in a language of which we can only grasp the rudiments, they have no ability to make tools to change their environments. Last year researchers discovered that female chimpanzees in Africa were making and using spears to hunt; additionally, the females were teaching each other how to make the spears, thus creating a spear meme in their local culture. As fascinating as the unknown grammar and syntax of whale languages and “lower” order primate tool-making are, the human ability to speak, write, and read and use that language instinct to manipulate and adapt to its environment stand as both our greatest asset and our greatest weakness.</div>
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And here we see how it has become our greatest weakness. The ability to create plastic has naturally coupled itself with the human middle-world desire for convenience and the result? A massive swath of plastic twice the size of Texas. If I were religious, I'd start praying now. But that's not the point.</div>
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This is the kind of thing that requires action at every level - bottom-up and top-down. Our enormous evolved brains have gifted us with the most incredible abilities, including the collective delusion that garbage disappears. Out of sight. Out of mind. Here we are in middle world. Will we soon be walking on and swimming in our own trash?</div>
Adriphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12553791848838245281noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8737089843774179223.post-32597754091242416142007-09-14T08:37:00.000-07:002024-02-20T15:24:51.694-08:00Eco-Realism Part II<blockquote class="tr_bq">
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"When an opponent declares, 'I will not come over to your side.' I calmly say, 'Your child belongs to us already…What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.'"</div>
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- Adolf Hitler</div>
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David Orr recognizes in Ecological Literacy (if you're going to buy the book though, get it locally) that in order for children, especially American children we must presume, to become ecologically literate, that a great transformation must occur. Where traditional American education has focused on our developing students’ abilities to recognize and generate semantically meaningful language and become fluent with arithmetic and mathematics so that they might learn and master (at least partially) other scholastic disciplines, Orr believes that we must expand those scholastic disciplines and the application of linguistic and mathematical literacy to develop ecological literacy. “By failing to include ecological perspectives in any number of subjects, students are taught that ecology is unimportant for history, politics, economics, society, and so forth.”</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyfSQpCVFDbZDMNCRVbeVQTcqTjjqjA3X2RLKbV5ObVmV1qwG2JlGjbVWmQUBX0sDK-K0qVYaHIrifecP6YFQnr8TaOOea9ezIYENfeYAUosEWEnWSOV10elfB6NILCMliJ5anAyU7MBWs4T9caYVJjKLz8qkAjyMd3m-FDkJiuXsEY1V-U7QFUK1k9pU/s1080/ecological%20education.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="675" data-original-width="1080" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyfSQpCVFDbZDMNCRVbeVQTcqTjjqjA3X2RLKbV5ObVmV1qwG2JlGjbVWmQUBX0sDK-K0qVYaHIrifecP6YFQnr8TaOOea9ezIYENfeYAUosEWEnWSOV10elfB6NILCMliJ5anAyU7MBWs4T9caYVJjKLz8qkAjyMd3m-FDkJiuXsEY1V-U7QFUK1k9pU/w640-h400/ecological%20education.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div style="text-align: justify;">Orr believes that children are the foundation on whom we are to build this brave new world. In order for this to happen, they must be instilled with both a sense of wonder and be given integrative thinking skills.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div>
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But some things must first be overcome. First, students need to think broadly about topics. American students are taught in an educational system that presents them with discrete topics where things do not overlap; they are boxed. But good thinking draws connections and presents us with the opportunity to “think at right angles.” Second, we are schooled inside. How are we to realize ourselves as mammals that are a part of the nature of things if we are so constantly shielded from much of the environment? Our schooling places blinders on how our culture shapes the biotic world. Third, and in no small part because we are shielded from nature by our cultural machines and machinations, we do not learn to appreciate the aesthetic qualities of nature. How do we appreciate the beauty of the Great Horned Owl in the knot of the Willow tree if we are cloistered indoors or staring at shopping malls and car lots? We will never see the owl. This is like the world in Phillip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the movie of which was Bladerunner. In its world of technological advancement, animals are all but figments. Yet there is still some vestigial appreciation for their beauty and necessity. So they are engineered. Even worse, given the degree to which American homo sapiens sapiens spends on computers (look where I am now), we could end up in The Matrix or the world of E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops wherein human beings are fully integrated into machines that come to own them. You are not only what you eat, but you are what you use. These science fiction stories give us dystopic visions of how our attempt to separate ourselves from nature dooms us not even to forget nature outside of our own creations, but to not even know much of its existence at all.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div>
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To avoid this world, we must reeducate ourselves and our children by showing them and ourselves that all education is environmental education. From there, we have to integrate the lion’s share of disciplines and departments into the formal understanding of and dissemination of our gathered information on the environment. This education should take place in patient dialogues wherein we develop respect and understanding whose pace is “governed by cycles of day and night, the seasons, the pace of procreation, and by the larger rhythm of evolutionary and geologic time.” This pacing should lead us to develop experiential means that become, in some ways, the content and initiate a more conversational pedagogy between student and teacher as facilitator. Experiential environmental learning will also develop good thinking which, in turn, develops the learner’s competence with natural systems.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div>
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Orr hopes that our new educational culture will create people who realize that they are integrated in the world, part of the great chain of being. Orr, in a marvelous assault, contrasts his philosophy of education with Allan Bloom whose Great Books philosophy was set in stone in his 1987 tract, Closing of the American Mind, a book of such self-congratulatory narcissism that one feels trapped in a hall of mirrors that reflect only Bloom’s face.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div>
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However, Bloom does set down a vision of the liberal education, but one that ensconces a philosophy that sets man apart from nature. Bloom writes in his chapter, “Culture” that “[t]his Rousseauan-Kantian vision is in essential agreement with the Enlightenment view of what is natural in man. But for the first time within philosophy, something other and higher that nature is found in man (emphasis mine).” Bloom believes that the American student has lost his (he is thoroughly androcentric and patriarchal) way by losing his connection to the Enlightenment. In many ways, Bloom is right. Some of our best codifications of rational thought come from the Enlightenment and Locke, Kant, Newton, Leibniz, Voltaire, Hume, D’Holbach, Paine, and their intellectual ancestors like John Stuart Mill, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Bertrand Russell give us great tools for thought. But they are not the end.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div>
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In steps Orr, who hopes to reconstruct the liberal arts education “to develop balanced, whole persons who have connected minds and feelings.” He cites Alfred North Whitehead a fair bit. To go beyond Orr’s citations, we read in the preface of Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World, “We may ask ourselves whether the scientific mentality of the modern world in the immediate past is not a successful example of such provincial limitation.” To use this in Orr’s terms, we should consider that Bloom’s Great Books ideal and the modern world’s scientism (which could now be renamed technologism) has been temporally provincial and myopic and must now shift to a new Kuhnsian paradigm of ecologically realistic science and humanities that would help learners become whole – integrated into their communities, including their campuses.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div>
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The quotation with which I opened this essay serves us as a reminder. I don’t just mean to be an alarmist or suggest that Orr and Hitler are somehow morally equivalent. It is pure caution on my part so that we approach the endeavor skeptically and compassionately. Children’s biobehavioral clay is molded by their cultural environments and we, the cultural occupants, shape that culture. We shape it for our own ends and by our own means and we form kinds of learners who become kinds of actors. Anyone who watches Triumph of the Will sees the young German learner believing in the realism of the Reich wherein Aryan science and Aryan humanities were developed. Consider the millions sent to the Gulag because they had violated the doctrines of Socialist Realism. Children are raised to believe in the moral efficacy of misogyny, filicide, patricide, homicide, and genocide by the world’s dominant religions. What we believe and how we believe it profoundly affect our behavior.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div>
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The Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hahn said that a man with a gun in hand can kill one, five, or even twenty people. But a man armed with an ideology can kill millions. Ideas have consequences. While I agree with Orr that we need, desperately need, to realize ourselves as part of the biosphere, we must always guard ourselves against the tyrant within us who believes s/he knows what is best for others and will dominate others to see it through.</div>
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First, do no harm. Second, love others.</div>
Adriphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12553791848838245281noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8737089843774179223.post-43636121727825810192007-09-11T13:54:00.000-07:002024-02-20T16:31:57.519-08:00Eco-realism and other ideologies<div style="text-align: justify;">
As a graduate student in education right now, I am faced with an interesting barrage of science. I am taking anthropology which, depending on the branch, is pretty hefty falsifiable Popper-approved science, educational psych which can be so qualitative as to be armchair, and down to economics and political science. Nonetheless, I have to deal with postmodernists who want to relativize and gut lots of science because it doesn't serve their ideological goals.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvkvPiAAAQnTV1UANYX2Z_BpYb-gQWeLWLlGelQI3wwrhbbTbczEQuALHSb5jwess3KXla-Ptk55nQO3-sLuDx26nmlbBUzkp7zxctI_Xw3J5JUeWKwDxEIi0xQMUF82NgRvMPPk_mVYAuH7hB4AmdUe9u9Fg91g-Fi0y-zdb3yFGfj5UVmkLCN5jD3Xw/s640/evolution.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="384" data-original-width="640" height="384" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvkvPiAAAQnTV1UANYX2Z_BpYb-gQWeLWLlGelQI3wwrhbbTbczEQuALHSb5jwess3KXla-Ptk55nQO3-sLuDx26nmlbBUzkp7zxctI_Xw3J5JUeWKwDxEIi0xQMUF82NgRvMPPk_mVYAuH7hB4AmdUe9u9Fg91g-Fi0y-zdb3yFGfj5UVmkLCN5jD3Xw/w640-h384/evolution.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div>
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So we've been reading Ecological Literacy by David Orr who wants us all to believe that we can launch ourselves into a postmodern world wherein we can recapture those good-old days as hunter-gatherers and reattain that Arcadian past. He tells us that he doesn't want a new Eden, but I find it hard to believe. He believes that humans aren't patriarchal. In rare exceptions are they not. We weren't always violent. That's a sham and any tribal society left to its own devices will show you that as will our nearest evolutionary cousins, the chimpanzees. He also thinks that human evolution took a "wrong turn" because our big brains and our culture have imbued us with a will to dominate nature.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div>
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Since when are we supposed to take value judgments from the non-intentional selections of our ancestors' mutations? This, I think is a profound misreading of evolution on par with the the eugenics professors of the late-19th and early 20th centuries who attempted to manipulate populations to create Nietzschean supermen.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div>
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Let me explain why, in no small part because I have used evolution as a justification for or realization of the roots of morality. I'd hate to be a hypocrite.</div>
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Evolution doesn't take wrong turns in and of itself. Local environmental pressures, which are moment to moment (even if they tend to be fairly consistent over time) select from the gene pool of organizations at any time. That's it. A set of selective pressures can not select a "wrong turn" so to speak. They can only select from what is available. Mutations are non-moral entities. They are random, insofar as DNA can generate "random" material with its limited resources. So to say that something in evolution is a wrong turn is to place a moral value judgment on something that was not moral in the first place, was not intentional, and therefore has no place as something to be castigated as such. It is creationist level nonsense and misreading.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div>
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But why am I calling this eco-realism? If you take some time to look at the books, as I hope to do here over the next couple of days, you will see that we are dealing with someone so blinded by ideology that he hopes to make science serve his political and ideological agenda.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div>
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This is where some of you might accuse me of being a hypocrite because I see science as serving the atheist. Note, however, that science is not made to serve the atheist agenda. I infer from the findings of science and induce based on the preponderance of the lack of evidence that verifies the god hypothesis (much less the God or Jesus or Allah hypothesis) that god(s) do not exist. But never do I, or does a reasonable scientist, remind themselves before testing and observation that all of this must disprove god's existence. Why bother? It's not what we are interested in as observers of the natural world. Sure, we are methodological naturalists, but we are not all philosophical naturalists. [I am, but I am not a majority.] We needn't put the cart of atheism before the horse of science because we don't have anything to prove. A positive assertion like "God exists" will show itself with evidence. Or...it won't. I needn't worry about it.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div>
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Science serves the atheist so far as it shows that natural explanations account for natural phenomena. It doesn't prove in the logical or mathematical sense that we can write a proof for "NO GOD" or make a water-tight deduction like "God doesn't exist." But we can induce from the available lack of data and make a statistical prediction that says, "Given the overwhelming absence of evidence and the very good natural explanations that we gave that god(s) are very very improbable. Why believe in them. Let them present their evidence for themselves instead of using apparently feeble human proxies."</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div>
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To get back to Orr though, I am wary of his proposed doctrines. He wants to reconstitute the fabric of society. Lots of people have wanted to do this and I am naturally leery of them: Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, Hitler, Napoleon, Bismarck, FDR, MLK, Gandhi, and more. Some of these worked very well. Some not. But you better have really good reasons to make over our society and they better contain a proposal that includes some hefty feasibility and not just wish-thinking and Arcadian revisionism (that's for another time I hope) to send us into a brave new world. Thich Nhat Hahn said something like, a man with a gun in hand can kill one, two, ten, or twenty people; but a man with an ideology he believes to the the truth can kill millions. As much as I sympathize with Orr's position, his eco-literacy could create a new straitjacket that limits free thought and inquiry.</div>Adriphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12553791848838245281noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8737089843774179223.post-78034576911832736972007-09-10T12:22:00.000-07:002024-02-21T05:17:02.300-08:00Penn State non-believers unite<div style="text-align: justify;">
Last week I was coming off of campus after my Educational Psychology class and lo and behold, at the gates of the University Park campus stood two students holding a poster that something like, "Atheists and Un-believers unite!" Well, as you can imagine, I sped over to them on my bike and said, "Alright!" and introduced myself.</div>
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Nat and Dave and I chatted, I signed a petition to reform the old Penn State Atheist and Agnostics Organization...or something like that. How cool!</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1mIrIvdQsxjDWFst0eiMKcknJ1l0doMTVl2AfsaVUm8vfa28QFIY9-nkbxY7vSAFueFsbaiWFdsowGkCju7SwnrJX4B4mfRDfvYCRlwitzkli_ea0bGs7RcRjH_PSMw5PFa554E_Y_P7NR7BBYwIK0ajIvULa4gS3Q5yEocwsmxJqQJAmAcUHShAcskU/s500/fundamentalism.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="458" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1mIrIvdQsxjDWFst0eiMKcknJ1l0doMTVl2AfsaVUm8vfa28QFIY9-nkbxY7vSAFueFsbaiWFdsowGkCju7SwnrJX4B4mfRDfvYCRlwitzkli_ea0bGs7RcRjH_PSMw5PFa554E_Y_P7NR7BBYwIK0ajIvULa4gS3Q5yEocwsmxJqQJAmAcUHShAcskU/w366-h400/fundamentalism.jpg" width="366" /></a></div><br /><div style="text-align: justify;">The next day I came by and they were there again and some idiot theist (I assume he was a Christian) was up on Nat's face threatening him. One of the coolest things about it, though, was that there were two Christian missionaries there trying to talk Captain Tough-guy down. We were all saying, "Dude. He [Nat] has the right to be here."</div>
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"It's an embarrassment!" He must have repeated this several times. It was the PSU vs. Notre Dame football weekend and this guy thought that a couple of atheists trying to organize was a problem. Talk about exactly the kind of guy that I worry really exists! Man.</div>
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So after a minute of wrangling and saying that Nat has the right under the First Amendment to gather and speak (the Christian missionaries and I both made this point...thanks guys), Capt. Tough-guy yells, "Not if I kick his ass he doesn't!"</div>
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At this point, I said, "Go ahead and do it. Do the Christian thing. Love your neighbor. Turn that other cheek buddy."</div>
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After some fluster, he left, clearly very frustrated. And there aren't people blinded by their faiths?</div>
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Let's hope that he was just having a bad day though.</div>Adriphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12553791848838245281noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8737089843774179223.post-68187227712190758112007-09-10T12:17:00.000-07:002012-08-06T12:22:00.650-07:00Why won't this thing work?<div style="text-align: justify;">
In general, I avoid these kinds of things but...I really like this one. A former student of mine sent it along to me.</div>
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<br /></div>Adriphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12553791848838245281noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8737089843774179223.post-77804669952356502802007-09-06T09:22:00.000-07:002024-02-21T05:52:55.562-08:00Modern prophets of atheism's demise are as deluded as they say they aren't<div style="text-align: justify;">
It's pretty sad, not to mention telling, when some religious folks like Denyse O'Leary (see also here and here)and Alister McGrath resort to prophecies about atheism's pending demise, Over at the Mindful Hack O'Leary has posted some thoughts on the matter. They are like most non-scientific predictions, loaded with wish-thinking and presumably some sort of confirmation bias.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBUBzbV9sLVgZABp1pRuBo-DOgNc_kG1xrvWKvZ2evMKOv62xUqgk4qm1r_zN9dy2eKS4X5U8yThu0fXQB0FuWwXQ9yWYWQl44Oar5l2REIrlZOmeEf2LZn_8-1j6l1KJld5sycw7i5sSaww6Bu0vY2Xcf7U3RvmHgODURJkqs9qx8sLYD9x4d_KmZ-Xk/s2400/atheism.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1256" data-original-width="2400" height="334" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBUBzbV9sLVgZABp1pRuBo-DOgNc_kG1xrvWKvZ2evMKOv62xUqgk4qm1r_zN9dy2eKS4X5U8yThu0fXQB0FuWwXQ9yWYWQl44Oar5l2REIrlZOmeEf2LZn_8-1j6l1KJld5sycw7i5sSaww6Bu0vY2Xcf7U3RvmHgODURJkqs9qx8sLYD9x4d_KmZ-Xk/w640-h334/atheism.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div>
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After she lets us know that lots of atheists - namely one: the philosopher Michael Ruse - have a big beef with Richard Dawkins, one of the current so-called "New Atheists" who's gotten a lot of press for saying that religion is not immune to criticism, that it's factual proposition that God(s) exist(s) is so improbable as to be a deluded belief, and that religion as practiced and believed by too many people endangers humanity. His arguments are those that have existed for centuries, but he has the added bonus of the overwhelming majority of the modern scientific enterprise behind his assessments of religion. But I am digressing...</div>
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O'Leary wants us to know that the atheists are a desparate lot:</div>
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McGrath’s historical analysis sheds some light. He identifies three thinkers as founders of modern materialist atheism: Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-72), Karl Marx (1818-83), and Sigmund Freud (1856-1939. Why these founders? Feuerbach was the first to treat God simply as a construction of the human imagination, essentially replacing theology with religious studies. In other words, when we ask why people believe in God, we do not entertain the idea that God has revealed himself in some way. God does not actually exist, and therefore the causes of belief are sought in society or nature. </div>
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I can only do so much with Feuerbach, Marx, and Freud, but I will tackle them briefly. Feuerbach, whose work I know only peripherally as a critic of Christianity, believed that human beings are animals infused with thought, will, and emotion. Because we feel so much for ourselves, we wish a being - God and Feuerbach's case - the Christian God into existence who is a paragon of our own image. Marx regarded religion as the "opium of the masses" but not an opiate as a mere diversion. He really thought of it as a medicine that provided the proletariat, the common man, with a respite from the nasty pains of the capitalist industrial society. Though Marx may have been a religious skeptic, he certainly sympathized with belief. Freud, like Feuerbach, thought of religion as an illusion, a manifestation of human wish-thinking. Obviously, we can spill millions of words on these men's thoughts.</div>
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Perhaps they had had so much trust in the power of their arguments that they believed that religion would one day fade away, though this seems unlikely. Freud also believed the religious impulse is delusional. While I sympathize with these men, they hadn't 20th- and 21st-century science behind them.</div>
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The 18th-century thinkers from d'Holbach and Hume to Jefferson and Paine created a marvelous basis for intellectually and ethically defensible atheism. And while Jefferson and Paine were highly critical and skeptical of relgious claims, they correctly innoculated us against sectarian battles by formulating a nation that separates church and state in which (like Canada too) people can privately address their own religious beliefs. Great. I'm glad. That wall of separation has served us well.</div>
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But in a way, whether or not a political system works well for people's private beliefs, that doesn't mean that people's private beliefs are reflected by reality nor that they are true. Not one shred.</div>
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O'Leary and McGrath think that Keats and Shelley weren't so bad because they had some sense of "transcendant ideas" like Aristotle and Plato. This is an appeal to the authority of the Greeks, but it's a red herring. When you consider the findings of modern cognitive science (see Pinker, Ramachandran, and Dennett) we find no reason to believe that we have souls. We are material. All of the evidence that we have supports the material proposition and none of it supports the ephemeral phantasmata of the soul. Not one shred.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div>
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It's alleged that if we are to accept that we have no souls, that then we are left with nothing but cruelty. Please. Can we stop trying to throw new paint on the gulag? The problem of Stalin is only tangentially an atheist problem. The real problem was true belief or true faith in the end of capitalism and the triumph of his own schizophrenic interpretation of Marxist-Leninist pending triumph. He had NO good evidence to suggest that it would happen. He was a myopic fanatic who believed that he was the inheritor of history. His fervor had all of the hallmarks of religious zealotry, not the strength of reason. Look at or listen to any moral philosopher or listen to or read the words of Dewey, Hook, or Kitcher or the respect and reverence for altruism amongst the "new atheists." These are not the post-modernist relativists that push us around on slippery slopes and not the cruel boogey men and women that O'Leary and McGrath try to assert we are. If anyone is using the po-mo arguments of separate but equal epistemologies, it's the IDists with their damnable forms of religion.</div>
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O'Leary ends thusly:</div>
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The story of atheism also provides a warning for prophets, religious or otherwise. Fifty years ago, who would have thought that post-atheism would better describe European society than post-theism? Trustworthy prophets should have a better track record.</div>
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Did I just see her throw a brick in her own glass house?</div>Adriphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12553791848838245281noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8737089843774179223.post-16786055439851163362007-09-04T13:52:00.000-07:002024-02-21T06:16:48.723-08:00Doubting Teresa<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgROHYYq_VNPs4SE6sob2eGOhn7EWyp3q0gIIIroaIwh0PQw3DiL0l9gQEmETrxOZrMCqMUac0RCW3SD1rHH3KnNoz6XflftY_S42_3AFO9PVOr86pp0xwIfA9ntUqIA_ji3Dm2aVjOjrf2RYJow2zka1RaUkICwRnS8HQ1T7cK1HePUcuXzvxJ86EnezU/s1200/mother%20teresa.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="675" data-original-width="1200" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgROHYYq_VNPs4SE6sob2eGOhn7EWyp3q0gIIIroaIwh0PQw3DiL0l9gQEmETrxOZrMCqMUac0RCW3SD1rHH3KnNoz6XflftY_S42_3AFO9PVOr86pp0xwIfA9ntUqIA_ji3Dm2aVjOjrf2RYJow2zka1RaUkICwRnS8HQ1T7cK1HePUcuXzvxJ86EnezU/w640-h360/mother%20teresa.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div style="text-align: justify;">Sam Harris has a new article at Newsweek where he exposes Mother Teresa's questions about her own faith. Christopher Hitchens has another at MSNBC. I find her confessions, below, to be rather poignant and that much more sad for not facing the reality of God's actual absence and Jesus' real and eternal death.</div>
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<i>Lord, my God, who am I that You should forsake me? The Child of your Love — and now become as the most hated one — the one — You have thrown away as unwanted — unloved. I call, I cling, I want — and there is no One to answer — no One on Whom I can cling — no, No One. — Alone ... Where is my Faith — even deep down right in there is nothing, but emptiness & darkness — My God — how painful is this unknown pain — I have no Faith — I dare not utter the words & thoughts that crowd in my heart — & make me suffer untold agony.</i></div>
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<i>So many unanswered questions live within me afraid to uncover them — because of the blasphemy — If there be God — please forgive me — When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven — there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives & hurt my very soul. — I am told God loves me — and yet the reality of darkness & coldness & emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul. Did I make a mistake in surrendering blindly to the Call of the Sacred Heart?</i></div>
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— addressed to Jesus, at the suggestion of a confessor, undated</div>
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This was the tethered mind of someone who felt she had no choice. Here we see the power of what Dan Dennett calls "belief in belief" (explained well here and developed in Breaking The Spell) She wanted to believe because she believed that in that belief she would achieve something that would transcend all of the the suffering of herself and the world; from this belief she could attain a level of love and bliss that she couldn't find in earthly life. Or, perphaps, it was her belief in belief that prevented attaining real joy here on Earth because belief in a supernatural omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, and omnibenevolent God would only ever grant it later. Thus, her embrace of universal suffering and her death houses (see Christopher Hitchens' God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything).</div>
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Just briefly, revisit this segment:</div>
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<i>If there be God — please forgive me — When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven — there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives & hurt my very soul. — I am told God loves me — and yet the reality of darkness & coldness & emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul.</i></div>
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This is much like one of my favorite Psalms, Psalm 130, De Profundis clamavi est, which reads:</div>
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<i>Out of the depths I have cried to Thee, O Lord; Lord, hear my voice.</i></div>
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<i>Let thine ears be attentive to the voice of my supplication.</i></div>
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<i>If Thou, O Lord, shalt observe iniquities; Lord, who shall endure it?</i></div>
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<i>For with Thee there is merciful forgiveness:</i></div>
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<i>and by reason of Thy law, I have waited for Thee, O Lord.</i></div>
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<i>My soul hath relied on His word; my soul hath hoped in the Lord.</i></div>
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<i>From the morning watch even until night, let Israel hope in the Lord.</i></div>
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<i>Because with the Lord there is mercy, and with Him plentiful redemption.</i></div>
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<i>And He shall redeem Israel from all her iniquities.</i></div>
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<i>Eternal rest give unto them, O Lord,</i></div>
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<i>and let perpetual light shine upon them.</i></div>
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<i>Let us pray.</i></div>
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<i>O God, the Creator and Redeemer of all the faithful,</i></div>
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<i>grant to the souls of Thy servants departed the remission of all their sins, </i></div>
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<i>that through our pious supplication they may obtain that pardon </i></div>
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<i>which they have always desired; </i></div>
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<i>who lives and reigns for ever and ever. </i></div>
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<i>Amen.</i></div>
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That's beautiful stuff in the light of medieval thinking. It is a call from loneliness to hope and I have and always will have a soft spot for it because it is the earnest cry of one who feels banished. Perhaps something could save the Psalmist from his and his community's iniquities? But alas, like Teresa, the Psalmist too was alone and without a God who reigns for ever and ever.</div>
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<i>What do I labor for? If there be no God—there can be no soul—if there is no Soul then Jesus—You also are not true.</i></div>
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The reality is "darkness and coldness and emptiness" when you seek for that which is not there and maybe Teresa knew that nothing was there but fought it every day of her life as she sought for that thing, that eternal love from a fictitious malevolent filicidal misogynist that would never come. When people are tools for such a non-existent entity, they are NOT ends in themselves. They are MEANS for God. How can you have an "I-thou" relationship with someone who believes in nothing? Really, turn the question around: How can a person who believes in nothing have an "I-thou" relationship with you? By deceiving themselves perhaps. But it seems that it takes a rather herculean effort that stretches the believer on a Procrustean bed that really destroys parts of them.</div>
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Here we see Teresa faced with the existential crisis and it is binary, as I suppose it often is. She has faced herself with a seemingly logical chain:</div>
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1. There can be no meaning in life without a soul. </div>
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2. Souls come from God.</div>
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3. There is no God.</div>
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4. Therefore, I have no soul</div>
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5. Therefore, I have no meaning in life.</div>
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But her deduction is only as good as her premise, the first of which is false and so is its conclusion. Were she to have been unfettered by her slavish belief in belief, perhaps she'd have worked to alleviate people's suffering instead of giving them places to die from that suffering. Did she really make a mistake in surrendering her life to the Sacred Heart? It would seem so. As Hitchens notes, "It seems, therefore, that all the things that made Mother Teresa famous—the endless hard toil, the bitter austerity, the ostentatious religious orthodoxy—were only part of an effort to still the misery within." A lifetime of overcompensation. We can almost see the little woman inside of her like the real wizard in The Wizard of Oz, shouting all the time, "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain."</div>
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But it would seem that there never was a man behind the curtain in this case, just the palest simulacrum.</div>
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So out of the depths I call to you my brothers and sisters, and that you will listen to the sincerity of my voice and leave behind these chains, stop this poison, break this spell, end this faith, and free yourself from this delusion that calls itself by many names - God, Yahweh, Jehovah, Jesus, Allah, Krishna, or Shiva - and leads us into meaningless labyrinths of smoke and mirrors.</div>Adriphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12553791848838245281noreply@blogger.com0