I wanted to post a status that says: "Never kill a slow roach, you just improve the breed!" But --I can't find the origin of it. All my google searches take me to my own blog : ). So --if Google says I said it, then I risk their ire if I should deny it. Google has spoken!!
I cannot believe that at a time when the right wing and many throughout the ranks of the GOP have most vociferously attacked Darwinism no one but me would have summoned up the wisdom of cowboys with respect to the propagation of cockroaches in order to refute them. Cockroaches are a species which, by Darwinian standards, typifies "natural selection", less accurately, the "survival of the fittest". Like Republicans, cockroaches can be depended upon to crawl into and spoil stuff.
Cockroaches are a species which, by Darwinian standards, typifies "natural selection", less accurately, the "survival of the fittest". Critics of Darwin have said that no one has yet produced an entirely new species by selection. But they have indeed done precisely that! Consider wheat! Wheat does not grow in the wild. Wheat is related to ancient grasses, clearly the result of an ancient application of "artificial selection." Had wheat evolved naturally, it would be found growing wild like prairie grass.
Wheat can be compared to a thoroughbred, but more evolved and, therefore, a better example of evolution at work. A thoroughbred, for example, is still a horse but wheat is no longer mere prairie grass. It's something entirely "new". It is a new species.
Social Darwinism has harmed mankind. It rationalizes and justifies the perpetual and deliberate impoverishment of large segments of our society. The GOP will support this as a matter of policy so long as someone like Ronald Reagan can, nevertheless, make them "feel good about themselves". Alas --the GOP will face its own extinction, a process that I believe is underway as we write.
by Len Hart, The Existentialist CowboyFree Republic and Discovery Institute are using the same words to attack their own strawman --a so-called "Wedge Document" exposing the tactics of Intelligent Design partisans. "A giant urban legend", they call it. They flatter themselves. I only heard about it on their websites in which the same article is run word for word. No one on the "left"would have written it and even the Freep says the Discovery Institute is the culprit.A better word than giant is "conservative circle jerk"! What's typical of this camp fire coziness is the mutual satisfaction both conservative entities hope to get by blaming others for their idiocy.All is done in the name of their search for absolute knowledge, a fool's errand if there ever was one. Warning: don't be fooled by the link on Freep that says "Evolution News". It goes straight to a Discovery Institute shill site, a "front" that has nothing to do with real or scientific theories about evolution. It's a typical right wing bait and switch.
Some background on this farce. Not too long ago a so-called "Wedge Document" outlined a plan by Intelligent Design (ID) proponents to subvert American education, science and the humanities. The document was roundly disowned by the right wing even though the document outlined a campaign that ID proponents had, in fact, embarked upon. Free Republic themselves attribute the document to the Discovery Institute which had apparently eschewed it only to recant later when pinned down. Now --both sites blame the left! But for what? No one on the left wrote it and Freep still attributes the document to Discovery. But the left is supposed to have fallen for it!! Stop me, my sides are hurting!
It is fair to characterize Intelligent Design [ID] itself as nothing more than a public relations campaign.
In 1999 someone posted on the internet an early fundraising proposal for discovery Institute’s Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture. Dubbed the “Wedge Document,” this proposal soon took on a life of its own, popping up in all sorts of places and eventually spawning what can only be called a giant urban legend. Among true-believers on the Darwinist fringe the document came to be viewed as evidence for a secret conspiracy to fuse religion with science and impose a theocracy. These claims were so outlandish that for a long time we simply ignored them. But because some credulous Darwinists seem willing to believe almost anything, we decided we should set the record straight.
I have news for "Free Republic". Telling me what I already know does not refute me. Repeating what so-called "Darwinists" know about the ID movement hardly amounts to a broadside. The freeper site, in fact, borrows its post verbatim from the discovery Institute (or is the other way 'round?). I can hardly call the freepers unbiased. At last, the only refutation of what were, in fact, ID tactics amounts to mere labeling, name-calling, typical of the ilk. If the "Wedge Document" is an "Urban Legend" it is only so among the stooges of the right wing, the circle jerk, the closed loop of equally closed minds. Until I stumbled upon the pair of them, I had never heard of the damn thing!
The discovery of "Wedge Document" itself means that someone created it even as the ID movement discredited itself. The ID movement has always been a mere PR campaign, perhaps the very campaign described and revealed by the "Wedge Document". That it might have been created to discredit one side or the other simply doesn't matter. Even before it was discovered, there was every reason to suppose that a subversive, anti-science sub-culture was overtly out to subvert the pursuit of truth itself anyway. The "Wedge Document" simply makes no difference one way or the other. ID is still creationism in fancy dress using big words.
That is the crux of it. ID proponents are all about content and ideology. The pursuit of truth, by contrast, is all about method and reason.
The Wedge Document is an internal memorandum from the discovery Institute (the leading proponent of Intelligent Designer "Theory") that was leaked to the Internet in 1999. The discovery Institute later admitted to its authenticity. Since then, discovery Institute hasn't talked very much about the document, or the strategy it outlines. The reason is crushingly obvious, since the Wedge Document makes it readily apparent that the discovery Institute is flat-out lying to us when it claims that its Intelligent Designer campaign is concerned only with science and does not have any religious aims, purpose or effect.
Frank is entitled to his opinion. It is at least as good as the various opinions of the Discovery Institute and that's not saying much. Frank states that Discovery owned up to the document. But who cares? A movement is what a movement does and the tactics and methods of ID are the real issue. Those methods are precisely what makes ID not science.
...we are convinced that in order to defeat materialism, we must cut it off at its source. That source is scientific materialism. This is precisely our strategy. If we view the predominant materialistic science as a giant tree, our strategy is intended to function as a "wedge" that, while relatively small, can split the trunk when applied at its weakest points. The very beginning of this strategy, the "thin edge of the wedge," was Phillip Johnson's critique of Darwinism begun in 1991 in Darwinism on Trial, and continued in Reason in the Balance and Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds. Michael Behe's highly successful Darwin's Black Box followed Johnson's work. We are building on this momentum, broadening the wedge with a positive scientific alternative to materialistic scientific theories, which has come to be called the theory of intelligent design (ID). Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions.
--The Wedge Document
The "Wedge Document" reads like a right wing strategy paper.
FIVE YEAR OBJECTIVES
A major public debate between design theorists and Darwinists (by 2003)
Thirty published books on design and its cultural implications (sex, gender issues, medicine, law, and religion)
One hundred scientific, academic and technical articles by our fellows
Significant coverage in national media:
Cover story on major news magazine such as Time or Newsweek
PBS show such as Nova treating design theory fairly
Regular press coverage on developments in design theory
Favorable op-ed pieces and columns on the design movement by 3rd party media
Spiritual & cultural renewal:
Mainline renewal movements begin to appropriate insights from design theory, and to repudiate theologies influenced by materialism
Major Christian denomination(s) defend(s) traditional doctrine of creation & repudiate(s)
Positive uptake in public opinion polls on issues such as sexuality, abortion and belief in God
Ten states begin to rectify ideological imbalance in their science curricula & include design theory
Scientific achievements:
An active design movement in Israel, the UK and other influential countries outside the US
Ten CRSC Fellows teaching at major universities
Two universities where design theory has become the dominant view
Design becomes a key concept in the social sciences Legal reform movements base legislative proposals on design theory
ACTVITIESResearch Fellowship Program (for writing and publishing) (2) Front line research funding at the "pressure points" (e.g., Daul Chien's Chengjiang Cambrian Fossil Find in paleontology, and Doug Axe's research laboratory in molecular biology)(3) Teacher training (4) Academic Conferences (5) Opinion-maker Events & Conferences (6) Alliance-building, recruitment of future scientists and leaders, and strategic partnerships with think tanks, social advocacy groups, educational organizations and institutions, churches, religious groups, foundations and media outlets (7) Apologetics seminars and public speaking (8) Op-ed and popular writing (9) Documentaries and other media productions (10) Academic debates (11) Fund Raising and Development (12) General Administrative support
This is not the way science is conducted. Science does not hire PR firms, recently called "think tanks" for PR reasons. Science does not try to sell you on relativity, evolution, quantum physics or string theory. Science is ever self-correcting. Science is not an ideology, it is a method and a process. Science is not a set of shibboleths to which you must pay obeisance or pledge allegiance. Science cannot, by definition, ever become a cult, a religion or an entrenched ideology. What might be a working hypothesis today may be disproved tomorrow. Intelligent Design is "creationism" written with jargon. It is hardly intelligent, considerably ideological, and most certainly disingenuous. It is defined by its "content", a dogma sold politically. It is not and cannot be science. The "Wedge Document" proves, forever, the un-scientific nature of "Intelligent Design".
The Wedge Document is at odds with ethics based upon the pursuit of truth. In the empiricist tradition, at the very core of America's founding, we inherit a methodology, an ongoing activity by which verifiable truths may be discovered and weighed according to the evidence. Those who carry this banner include John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and James Madison. Among the more recent, less popularly known philosophers are A.J. Ayer and a panoply of logical positivists who value the quest itself as opposed to a pre-conceived end result. Not content to write for academia and other philosophers, Bertrand Russell would reach a wider public with The Problems of Philosophy (1912) and, his nobel prize winning, A History of Western Philosophy (1945), in which Russell explores the idea that western civilization is essentially Greek civilization. Russell did not arbitrarily separate education from the pressing issues of the day; rather, he linked progress in education with social progress in general. He is famous for debunking fallacy, propaganda, and, most memorably, superstition and religion. He thought widespread superstition to have unwelcome social consequences. It is tragic that American society did not take to heart Russell`s simple admonition:
I wish to propose for the reader's favorable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true.
That simple doctrine might have replaced political ideologies of all sorts in America. Language, Truth and Logic by A.J. Ayer should be required reading in American high schools. It is the defining explanation of the "verifiability criterion of meaning" --the cornerstone of logical positivism.
Ayer identifies the characteristics of "significant propositions" -- propositions which purport to contain real and meaningful information about the world i.e, verifiable information. It is the ability to state, at least in theory, the conditions under which a proposition may be shown to be either true or false. In a world in which no one has a monopoly on truth but many are willing to pervert it, it is essential that we think clearly about what can be proven and what is just meaningless bunkum.
Ayer's "Logical Positivism" is seen by many to be lacking the "human touch", thought by some to be untenable from a practical standpoint, "Godless" by various ideologies. It is, in fact, the logical basis of empiricism, the antidote to ideology.
In the work of Jacob Bronowski we find a critique of "logical positivism", a critique that saves it from itself. In his Science and Human Values, Bronowski points out a social injunction implied in Ayer's analytical methods, It takes the following form:
"We ought to act in such a way that what is true can be verified to be so."
In the activity of pure science, there is, then, an ethic. Bronowski writes even more convincingly about verification, culture and civilization than about symbols and formal systems.
This is the act of creation, in which an original thought is born, and it is the same act in original science and original art. But it is not therefore the monopoly of the man who wrote the poem or who made the discovery. On the contrary, I believe this view of the creative act to be right because it alone gives a meaning to the act of appreciation.
...
'The society of scientists is simple because it has a directing purpose: to explore the truth. Nevertheless, it has to solve the problem of every society, which is to find a compromise between man and men. It must encourage the single scientist to be independent, and the body of scientists to be tolerant. From these basic conditions, which form the prime values, there follows step by step a range of values: dissent, freedom of thought and speech, justice, honour, human dignity and self-respect.'
--J. Brownowski, Science and Human Values, New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1965, p. 11.
Bronowski's critique derives an ethic from the practice of science, an ethic based upon what science does, not what scientists themselves believe. Bronowski places the foundations of Western Civilization upon an existentialist affirmation --a single value, the pursuit of truth itself. This value is not itself subject to proof. It is chosen. It is an existential choice, one that Jean-Paul Sartre himself might have made. It was Sartre, after all, who summed it up: "A man is nothing else but what he makes of himself". Eariler, Voltaire: "I have no name but the name that I have made for myself". And with that, we come full circle to Bertrand Russell's belief that the discipline he found in Ancient Greece --the pure pursuit of truth --is at the very foundations of our culture.
I found another take on Bronowski and Clark. It is from the nationally syndicated Engines of Our Ingenuity hosted by my good friened, Dr. John Lienhard of The University of Houston's College of Engineering.
Clark and Bronowski converge on hope, they converge on belief, they converge on the pervasive unity of the human species. Of course both are wary. In the end, Bronowski says,
We are all afraid ... That is the nature of the human imagination. Yet [we have] gone forward. ...
And a worried Kenneth Clark, facing the social upheaval of the late '60s, says (as much to himself as to us),
... civilization has been a series of rebirths. Surely this should give us confidence in ourselves.
They both clearly assert our capacity for saving ourselves. They realize that technology, science, and the other arts have always converged upon our problems. And they surely remain our only real hope in troubled times.
Bronowski, who understood science as well as art, wrote a perfect synthesis of both sides of the human brain, this perfect description of the cultural role that is often played by science. He embraces its contradiction and transcends it in another paradigm. At a time when modern philosophy had consigned human values to the realm of meaninglessness, Bronowski, conjoined them in a supreme act of creativity.
Bronowski is best known for his monumental Ascent of Man, a series that he wrote and hosted for the BBC. In thirteen episodes, Bronowski traced the evolution of human society. Many characterize this monumental achievement as refuting Kenneth Clark's earlier Civilization series. That criticism misunderstand both Bronowski and Clark. I prefer to think of both efforts as book ends on a single shelf.
Despite fallacious assertions by the Wedge Document amid even more absurd behavior by the likes of Free Republic and the Discovery Institute, it has fallen to secular minds to advance the spirit of inquiry. It is during those times in which we lose confidence in our progress that humankind seems eager to seek out comforting or religious ideologies. Russell, who connected broad departures from ancient priesthoods originating in Greece with the emerging spirit of science taking shape over centuries of European history, also saw in an anti-democratic authoritarianism a persistent threat which would in his lifetime result in fascism and Nazism.
"There is over a large part of the earth's surface something not unlike a reversion to the ancient Egyptian system of divine kingship, controlled by a new priestly caste. Although this tendency has not gone so far in the West as it has in the east, it has, nevertheless, gone to lengths which would have astonished the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries both in England and in America. Individual initiative is hemmed in either by the state or by powerful corporations, and there is a great danger lest this should produce, as in ancient Rome, a kind of listlessness and fatalism that is disastrous to vigorous life.
I am constantly receiving letters saying: 'I see that the world is in a bad state, but what can one humble person do? Life and property are at the mercy of a few individuals who have the decision as to peace or war. Economic activities on any large scale are determined by those who govern either the state or the large corporations. Even where there is nominally democracy, the part which one citizen can obtain in controlling policy is usually infinitesimal. Is it not perhaps better in such circumstances to forget public affairs and get as much enjoyment by the way as the times permit?' I find such letters very difficult to answer, and I am sure that the state of mind which leads to their being written is very inimical to a healthy social life.
As a result of mere size, government becomes increasingly remote from the governed and tends, even in a democracy, to have an independent life of its own. I do not profess to know how to cure this evil completely, but I think it is very important to recognize its existence and to search for ways of diminishing its magnitude."
The most moving moment in the Ascent of Man occurred in an episode entitled: 'Knowledge or Certainty'. In it, Bronowski visited Auschwitz where many members of his family had died.
We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people.
In response to my previous article in which the sixties were mentioned with some nostalgia, I got this email from Dr. John H. Lienhard of the University of Houston:
During the '60s I looked around at the complexity of life and dreamt about my simpler world of the '30s.
Lienhard hosts the nationally syndicated The Engines of Our Ingenuity, a radio series about how our culture is formed by human creativity. His program must be listed among all those things that are right and good about American culture. Check your local NPR radio outlet. There is a good chance that you can tune in --as we were urged to do in the sixties.
The point Dr. Lienhard made about nostalgia is timely. Like the sixties, these are times of great disillusionment. In the sixties, we were as frustrated with the course of war and politics as many are today. Perhaps the "soundtrack" was better but that's my subjective opinion honed upon the timeless classics like Blowin' in the Wind, The Eve of Destruction, and, from Woodstock, the infamous:
And, of course, Bob Dylan, who became the conscience not just of our generation, but, as Johnson said of Shakespeare, "he was not of an age, but for all time."
I was born just days before Adolph Hitler took his own life in the bunker. About four months later, the US would drop two nuclear devices on two cities in Japan. I have vague, near infantile recollections of hearing a "pop" song about "the" bomb on the radio. In the early 70's the distinguished scholar, Jacob Bronouski, in Science and Human Values would, likewise, associate a pop song with the end of a "Golden Age" that nuclear weaponry portends. That song was "Is You Is or Is You Ain't My Baby?". Bronouski was touring Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the head of the British team sent to assess the damage:
I had blundered into this desolate landscape as instantly as one might wake among the craters of the moon. The moment of recognition when I realized that I was already in Nagasaki is present to me as I write, as vividly as when I lived it. I see the warm night and the meaningless shapes; I can even remember the tune that was coming from the ship. It was a dance tune which had been popular in 1945, and it was called “Is You Is Or Is You Ain’t Ma Baby…?” The power of science for good and for evil has troubled other minds than ours…. Nothing happened in 1945 except that we changed the scale of our indifference to man; and conscience, in revenge, for an instant became immediate to us…civilization face to face with its own implications. The implications are both the industrial slum which Nagasaki was before it was bombed, and the ashy desolation which the bomb made of the slum. And civilization asks of both ruins, “Is You Is Or Is You Ain’t Ma Baby?”
Johnny Mercer wrote a 1943 version of Is You is or is You Ain't My Baby. I am inclined to believe that the recording Bronouski heard was by Louis Jordan, an American Rhythm and Blues pioneer who was born July 08, 1908 in Brinkley, Arkansas and died Feb 04, 1975 in Los Angeles. An Answer.com entry lists a "Representative Song" as Is You Is or Is You Ain't My Baby
The concept of the "Golden Age" is brought to mind. Moderns may discount this ancient idea, but it is nevertheless ingrained in the human psyche. Europeans and Americans will most probably associate the concept with the Greek spectrum of Iron, Bronze, Silver and Gold. In western tradition a "Golden Age" often ends in disaster, a flaming Götterdämerung. Ancient Vedic texts often interpret history in terms of alternating dark and golden ages.
Then there are the very arcane concepts that may be found in the relatively obscure work of former MIT professor of history, Giorgio de Santillana, not to be confused with Georges Santayana who wrote: "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to relive it." Santillana, rather, dealt with myths, legends, story as all related to human culture. In his book, Hamlet's Mill, he posits a zodiacal precession caused by a verifiable tilting of the equator. Thus for ancient peoples, he wrote, time and the cycles of change "came into being".
The "untuning of the sky" was, in fact, an actual event. It requires a momentary suspension of our modern mentality to allow that ancients might have found in this event a beginning of time and, eventually, a re-alignment of the heavens that would usher in a new "Golden Age". Walter Cruttenden, author of Lost Star of Myth and Time, believes the cycle of the ages has a basis in fact indirectly due to the motion of the solar system around another star. The point, rather, is not whether ancients were right or wrong. The point is that the idea of a Golden Age seems ingrained. At worst, golden ages are depicted in myth and art as primitive Arcadia.
The loss of Golden Age seems always associated or caused by those things associated with civilization such as war. A return to Arcadia seems always to beckon just below the wakeful human consciousness. Is it ingrained or learned? Is "Arcadia" lost upon achieving civilization. Was Rousseau correct? Was Voltaire wrong?
I recall an infant dream in which I floated effortlessly down a wide but gentle river. The trees on either side grew taller, denser, darker as I drifted. At last the branches overhead met and merged, forming a lovely intricate, crystalline lattice. The woods on either side were, to borrow a phrase from Robert Frost, "lovely, dark and deep". Had I tapped into the human, sub-concious desire to return to a gentle, golden age?
by A.J. Ayer should be required reading in American high schools. It is the defining explanation of the "verifiability criterion of meaning" --the cornerstone of logical positivism.
, a series that he wrote and hosted for the BBC. In thirteen episodes, Bronowski traced the evolution of human society. Many characterize this monumental achievement as refuting Kenneth Clark's earlier 
The concept of the "Golden Age" is brought to mind. Moderns may discount this ancient idea, but it is nevertheless ingrained in the human psyche. Europeans and Americans will most probably associate the concept with the Greek spectrum of Iron, Bronze, Silver and Gold. In western tradition a "Golden Age" often ends in disaster, a flaming Götterdämerung. Ancient Vedic texts often interpret history in terms of alternating dark and golden ages.
