“Doubters Rip Darwin — Badly” would have been better. In his article, Michael Ruse adds Thomas Nagel to the fold of philosophers seeming to enter a late, demented phase in otherwise illustrious careers. (He discusses Alvin Plantinga too, but he’s been a card carrying creationist for a very long time.)
As always, it’s enough to state the fact: there is not yet an iota of successful science done in the pseudo-scientific field of Intelligent Design. However, on the philosophical side of things, the controversies are different. But, as I’ve maintained previously, scientific research is not utterly contingent on a completely developed philosophy of science, so it’s not likely that any substantial challenge to biological research and demonstration will break free of the usual circularity found in such philosophy.
Ruse:
For 150 years, since the Origin, critics have feared that we humans might become part of the evolutionary picture—not just our bodies, but our minds, our very souls. What makes us distinctively and uniquely human? This worry is still alive and well in today’s philosophical community. Plantinga is open in his fear that Darwinism makes impossible the guaranteed existence of our species. More, for years he has argued that Darwinism is bound up with the metaphysical belief that everything is natural (as opposed to supernatural), and that this leads to a collapse of rational belief and knowledge. The chance elements in Darwinism are simply not compatible with Plantinga’s Christian faith.
This alludes to real problems because there are versions of philosophical naturalism that collide. Are nature’s mechanics run by a strictly determined code that necessarily voids free will? (Etc..) It seems a stretch to imply that if nature is all there is, then some set of singular philosophical assumptions are necessary and inevitable.
But, from the other side, there isn’t any real philosophy upon which to hang the various suppositions of ID.
After all, it is the nexus of designer and materiality, and the mechanics of supernatural intervention that are the only fruitful fields for a science, rather than a superstition, of intelligent design. So, what philosophizing might aid (or underpin,) research into the designer/nature interface? No such coherent and cogent philosophy yet exists. (This noted, Del Ratszch and Bradley Monton are possibly the only mildly worthwhile thinkers on ID.) The problem obviously is research into the interface would tend to be subsumed into the normative philosophy of ‘applied’ science; such as it is.
from a comment to the article:
Thomas Aquinas used logics, reasoning and other qualities that none of the philosophers after him will ever have.
Darwinism is a complete nonsense in the eyes of a contemporary science. The center of Darwinism in London has admitted that, but you won’t! All you do is quoting what this and that guy said!
Open your eyes and think about what it really is! A piece of non-organic matter becomes a human being and yet we relatively know almost nothing about it! Exuse me, but when science tell you that one the sea shrimps has the most sophisticated vision in color (!) than any organizm known on the planet, I have no choice, but to think about the super intelligence behind it! When I know that human optical nerve(relatively thin) is composed of over 6 million cables, each of which is isolated (!) I have no choice, but to think about super intelligence behind it. When I think of the total length of human blood vessels being 2,5 times longer than size of our planet around equator, I am thrilled about intelligence behind it. And knowing that complete blood exchange across the entire human body takes just about 2 minutes, all I can say that all of you “smart” Darwinists either deliberately don’t want to admit the facts of science, or you are just a bunch of complete idiots.
So far, nothing good has ever come out of Darwinism except of a lot of wasted time! Not to mention Hitler who got inspired by it and came with the idea of a holocaust! And no, he was not sick, he just based his ideas an a false science!
This raw comment encapsulates many of the anti-Darwin arguments and their wrongheadedness. As far as the laity goes–and I’m a member–I have discovered over and over again folk proponents of ID invariably have no grasp on biology, biological research, and very rarely can tell you much about either the paperwork of ID or the responses to this paperwork. You know, the responses which have obliterated complexity-based arguments.
Still, I appreciate the irony behind having no choice but to believe in the super intelligence and his or her’s brutal, so-called, creation. Hey, and the Thomist reference–as in, one version, the universe being wholly a Catholic one in which almost everybody is going to roast in hell?
So an august public intellectual publishes what is supposed to be an important, even ground-shaking book, and, then, as it turns out for lack of a certain kind of proof-reader, their shattering project turns out to. rather, represent the lowest point of their career. It takes a really rotten idea to fuel a fall like this, or, as is the case with Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini’s What Darwin Got Wrong it takes a category error so glaring and obvious that their fail is tragic. When I first read a brief review back about a month ago, I simply went ’tisk’ to myself, and waited for the full take-down. At the same time, given the perverse pleasure I take in observing the creationist crowd latch onto anything favorable issued from the non-Discovery Institute subsidized wing of the academy, I relished seeing down-the-line Fodor and Piatelli-Palmarini’s mistake both slip on through all the way to the ID carnival, and, get fully blown up.
The take-down was supplied by Ned Black and Philip Kitcher, Misunderstanding Darwin, in Boston Review.
They write in their review, quoting the book,
Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini’s central thesis is that selection-for is intensional:
There can be coextensive but distinct phenotypic properties, one (but not the other) of which is conducive to fitness, but which natural selection cannot distinguish. In such cases, natural selection cannot, as it were, tell the arches from the spandrels. That being so, adaptationist theories of evolution are unable, as a matter of principle, to do what they purport to do: explain the distribution of phenotypic traits in a population as a function of its history of selection for fitness.
This brought a chuckle when I read the quote because it doesn’t make sense on its face.
Black and Kitcher explain, (and I’ve reversed the order.)
The essential point is that however they choose, causation and selection-for always travel together. If they take the first approach, both will be extensional; if they opt for the second, both will be intensional. Their argument turns on mixing criteria, taking one version in one place and a different one elsewhere.
When you are interested in causation, however, you are not concerned about guises. What is of concern is the identity of the causing property.
Ironically, the action now will move to watching the creationists embrace the error at the center of What Darwin Got Wrong. Doubly ironic, and sad, is Fodor fluttering all the way down to the low perch already occupied by the ID charlatans Behe and Dembski. Triply ironic is that not even an intelligent designer could attach to the mistake even were it logically viable and not a mistake.
The authors:
That said, however, one final detail bears notice: although contexts of causation and selection-for are extensional in the respect mentioned, contexts of explanation are notoriously intensional. Does that mean that there can’t be evolutionary explanations? Not at all. Nature determines which properties are causally efficacious, and hence what is selected for. Then we theorists can find out about this and give explanations based on what is selected for.
The Shadow that the Future Throws
Text based on a conversation between Nathan Gardels and Ivan Illich in 1989
Now, nearly two decades [after 1969] later, a woeful sense of imbalance has dawned on the common sense.
The destruction of the ozone layer, the heating up of the earth’s atmosphere, the non-reversible and progressive depletion of genetic variety, the ability to discuss what shall be a human being through genetic intervention – all these things bring to consciousness, even to a non-philosophically inclined intelligent official of the World Bank, that we now face the banquet of consequences of our Promethean transgression.
There is a generalized sense now that the future we expected does not work and that we are in front of what Michel Foucault called an “epistemic break”: a sudden image-shift in consciousness in which the once unthinkable becomes thinkable. For example, it was simply not thinkable that a king could be beheaded up until the French Revolution. Then, suddenly, there was a new way of seeing, a new form of language that could speak about such things.
For most of the Cold War, atomic bombs were commonly considered as weapons. People like myself were little understood in our arguments that such bombs were literally unspeakable; that, epistemically, they are not within the realm of speech because they are not weapons, but acts of self- annihilation.
It is no longer tolerable to the common sense to think of nuclear bombs as weapons, or of pollution as the price of development. The disintegrating ozone layer and warming atmosphere are making it intolerable to think of more development and industrial growth as progress, but rather as aggression against the human condition. It is now imaginable to the common mind that, as Samuel Beckett once said, “this earth could be uninhabited.”
So, what is different than when I first wrote about Nemesis is that the common sense is also searching for a language to speak about the shadow which the future throws. What is new is not the magnitude, nor even the quality, but the very essence of the coming shift in consciousness. It is not a break in the line of progress to a new stage; it is not even the passage from one dimension to another. Mathematically, we can only describe it as a catastrophic break with industrial man’s image of himself.
By Collin Eaton Daily Texan Staff Published: Thursday, February 25, 2010
Nearly a third of registered voters in Texas believe humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time, according to a statewide survey conducted by UT and The Texas Tribune.
Eight hundred registered voters across the state were polled between Feb. 1-7. The survey included questions about religious and political persuasions and beliefs in evolution.
A map of the poll results would be really telling. Austin, other metros, would be shown to be in the 20th century. But, the hinterlands?
In the aftermath of the release of the poll, trumandogz wrote at freerepublic,
Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”…
God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day. Genesis 1:26,31
Well, should I believe God’s Word or some uniformitarians who find a few fossils and assume they are from some strata millions of years ago?
Uniformitarian?! (trumandogz refers here to a fault line between young earth creationists and proto-geologists of the mid-18th century.) Texas! Be as ignorant as you wish as far as I’m concerned; The University of Texas excepted.
The current chair of the Texas Education Agency is Gail Lowe, a young earth creationist. She was appointed by Gov. Perry. Texas Tribune: Meet the Flintstones
The Pareto Principle, commonly known as the 80-20 rule, first figured into my own thinking several years before someone hipped me to the origins of a conception I was using. In truth, I had developed its bastard child, also a regulation of the vital few, I called–at the time–the 10% problem. The context was artist development in the music industry and the application was as a device to thoughtfully put reverse pressure on a musician’s tendency to spend time convincing naysayers. What I saw was artists spending more time trying to market to naysayers than they spent either pullng fence sitters in, or turning their believers into evangelists. Also, it seemed at the time what promoted this was their sense everybody was supposed to be a fan and that those who weren’t yet fans were thought to be ripe targets. But, the naysayers were hardly low hanging fruit and so I offered the suggestion that they should be ignored.
Several years later a colleague on the only management team I’ve ever been a member of hipped me to The Pareto Rule in the aftermath of my attempt to apply the 10% problem to the company’s marketing philosophy. In this instance, I was advocating more product testing because it seemed to me the company was wasting resources based in the assumption that 90% of the new products would always appeal to 100% of their customers.
Since then I’ve employed variations of the 80-20 (or 90-10) principle to all sorts of situations. My innovation is with respect to transformative learning: roughly, spend a figurative 10% of your time doing wild experiments, and doing so irrespective of so-called conventional wisdom. Here, in a sense, one pays attention to the outlying possibilities.
This has led me to reflect upon how the concept of the vital few may be consequential for perspectives about systems. This follows from a hypothesis about systems, (or about how in effect the world works,) that goes like this, what aspects of the system are hidden when it is presumed seeing the entire system in fact sees only 90%? (90%, or, whatever is the presumptive portion said perspective views.
This comes back to the genesis of the 10% Problem because often the conventional wisdom, or habitual perspective, holds its conclusions about the system to be the inevitable product of seeing/understanding the system in the purportedly correct, (read into this also: normative, ‘as commonly understood,’) way. Whereas, my supposition holds that any incomplete perspective allows for, at least, inclusion of what’s absent, and, audaciously, allows for novelty–especially novel ways for viewing and analyzing the system at hand.
Obviously #64 of 64 Ways to Beat the Blues, a book of cartoons by Yolanda Nave. (Amazon)
Had the pleasure of participating in a Hunting & Gathering session with a very close friend, and veteran of squareONE learning’s experiential tool processes. This unfolded on the birthday of original squareONE partner, and mentor to us both, Judith Buerkel. (Judith passed from this world in 2007.) It was exploration fit to Judith’s charge to fully dive into the open-ended learning any moment provides.
It was great fun. I’ll have something to say about some of what came ‘up,’ soon.
Yolanda Nave’s cartoon is a real good one, as far as fitting into my model of the teaching cartoon. It was a serendipitous find of the hunt.
Both these abstract montages use some screen snaps from my Dreamlines experiment, and other materials that include an old photo of me and a bud from a long time ago, used in Weak Shot. Weakshot also uses some news photos of the failed Russian missile test that spooked Scandinavia for a day last month–thus the title.
Archie Pajabi, in character as Kalinda, on The Good Wife
The Good Wife is my favorite new tv show of the several candidates for my favor. It’s a variation on the legal procedural, yet it splits time between the legal case at the center of each episode, and, lawyer Alicia’s (played by Margulies) knotty domestic drama. The domestic portion of the plot is concerned with Alicia’s politician-husband’s infidelity and struggle to overturn a suspect conviction for corruption. The show has a smart ensemble cast and is an appealing, grown-up, entertainment.
The original hook for me was the return of Julia Margulies to a solid prime time opportunity. However, the show has consistently carved a surprising single pattern almost every week. It goes like this: sometime before the weekly case comes to have its stereotypical day in court, the starring law firm’s staff investigator has cracked the case through a combination of her pluck, street smarts, interpersonal savvy, and, forensic skills.
We’re talking week-after-week, investigator Kalinda brings the winning run across the plate. Kalinda’s character is the most mysterious, guarded, intriguing in the cast. Archie Pajabi really grabs the frame too, even on the rare occasions when she shares it with the mild scene chewer, the marvelous Christine Baranski.
The Good Wife risks spinning off into a new orbit around the uncanny Kalinda. It seems unlikely this was the plan, but this is no reason to complain–the show remains about as good as it gets in the minor league of old line big 3 broadcast tv. And Pajabi is the sleekest brainiac sleuth since Carla Guigino ran Karen Sisko through her paces.
Dreamlines is an art generator that uses search terms entered by the user.
Over at nogutsnoglory studios I have melded a 20 minute ‘generation’ with an outtake from recording sessions done for the Kamelmauz recording last year, Slidemare. There you will find a little more explanation about the specifics of the video, titled Quark.
Since the creative instigation is a simple user input and the animated product manifests as a result of visionary programming, lots of questions are raised about the status of the ensuing art. The instigator doesn’t earn much credit, except it’s up to the instigator to capture or otherwise appropriate the product. Otherwise the results are truly ephemeral.
The captures above, and the video too, are forms of mechanical-graphical kitsch. Still, if you operate Solaas’s generator you may find yourself wanting to retain what appears to be artistic ‘production.’
I’ve been feeling my way around vampires because the Jung-Fire group has also been doing so.
Whilst descriptions of vampires varied widely, certain traits now accepted as universal were created by the film industry. Where did vampires originate? Well, nearly every culture has its own undead cretures which feed off of the life essence of the living but ancient Persian pottery shards specifically depict creatures drinking blood from the living in what may be the earliest representations of vampires. In the 1100s English historians and chroniclers Walter Map and William of Newburgh recorded accounts of various undead fauna. By the 1700s, an era often known as the Age of Enlightenment, fear of vampires reached it’s apex following a spate of vampire attacks in East Prussia in 1721 and the Hapsburg Monarchy from 1725 to 1734. Government positions were created for vampire hunters to once-and-for-all rid man of this unholy scourge.
Even Enlightenment writer Voltaire wrote about the vampire plague in his Philosophical Dictionary, “These vampires were corpses, who went out of their graves at night to suck the blood of the living, either at their throats or stomachs, after which they returned to their cemeteries. The persons so sucked waned, grew pale, and fell into consumption; while the sucking corpses grew fat, got rosy, and enjoyed an excellent appetite. It was in Poland, Hungary, Silesia, Moravia, Austria, and Lorraine, that the dead made this good cheer.” Movie Myths 101 – Vampires (Amoeblog)
Vampires occupy a class of folkloric beings termed revenant. In this class are all the varieties of beings believed to have returned from being dead. (Ghosts are revenants.) Revenants, as mythologem, have ancient origins. Their genealogy, (given by anthropology and literary history,) is woven in the folklore of almost every culture.
***
I was moved to do a little digging, in the phenomenological moonlight.
The vampire is one of the representatives of a phenomena part-and-parcel with any ‘folk’ skepticism a person would have when is believed the soul persists beyond bodily death. In Christian terms, a revenant is a work-around. The piper is paid, yet the rules are different than the normative rules for succession into the next life. Revenants are outliers in relation to the normal redemptive scheme. It’s important to understand the revenant is not a formalization, is not part of the strict cast of characters. The revenant–as work-around–is a strain of necessary superstition, is in a sense an archaic adjunct in the folk scheme of life and death.
A vampire lives forever under particular conditions, but our human night is their day. This inversion suggests also an inversion of the christological mythologem.
Yet, this can go beyond a Christian antithesis. It is possible, maybe likely, that wonderment over the finality of death. goes back beyond paganism, penetrates beyond proto-religion, goes back even before the organization of a spirit world. And, maybe even is among the most primitive of all social-existential phenomena; expressing as it does the base quandry, “Is Bubba really dead?”
I take this up in this way to highlight the archaic of a (kind of) archetype. Buried in this quasi-archetype is a very primitive, primeval layer.
From this, I wonder about the brute opposition in these same primal terms: here today, gone tomorrow, yet gone where? I can imagine how mysterious both would be if we, with modest imagination, consider how death was dealt with intrapsychically, long before the mystery was organized and concretized by proto-pagan artifice.
This development would suppose the development of a chain of being as a response to the mystery of mortality. Moreover, this would be a response given by skepticism: ‘is Bubba gone-where did Bubba go?’ This is all prior to the conceptions of salvation, purgatorial penance, damnation. Also, in supposing that the dead could manifest a near semblance of ‘the living,’ or otherwise manifest a phantasmal form, the particulars of types of revenants fit in culturally distinct ways into Preternatural–worlds behind worlds–cosmic, vertical schemes.
Edvard Munch – Vampire
The pagan layer is persistent. Belief in the work-around of the revenant is inflected with the revenant’s mercurial nature, and this seems to be an important aspect of their alternative myth of resurrection. Vampires are worrisome, unpredictable, and, the vampire’s activities could be glossed as: bugging, tormenting, fooling, tricking, gaming, messing around with, the living. After all, vampire and ghost and spectral phantasm, are also kin.
The revenant provides a kind of gnawing reminder: the ‘vertical’ world itself isn’t in the thrall of the light-bearing beings, ‘the angels.’ Revenants are profane. They exemplify in different ways, negative models.
Archetype is darkened, manifest in human enactment of a particular feeling tone, in precise ways, from specific contexts. Vampire, in the imagination, is an archetype of evil, but only from specific perspectives. The Benedictine Calmet sharpened his axe in antipathy to revenant denizens in accordance with his Catholic perspective. Three centuries earlier, the infections of plague, came to be understood in terms committed to explain the spread of death to be a damnation. At that time, the idea was: the dead were able to cause havoc even though ‘they appeared dead.’ Again, in the context of communities dealing with vast contagion, this response is in accordance with the timely intrapsychic ground. The contagion’s agents of punishment were the ubiquitous dead.
Archaic prototypes may infuse attempts at explaining what had befallen the community. Calmet leaned on, railed against(!) the archaic precedent.
So, why the fascination with vampires today? I don’t know anything about the cultural details. I enjoy the tv serial, True Blood, but this isn’t because I get a charge from vampires. I can’t analyze the trend in any Jungian way because I’m not a proponent of Jung’s collective unconscious.
I do note several rough features of today’s, in effect, multi-media vampire. One, he or she is often a very energized erotic figure. Two, often vampires are sorted out into good vampires, bad vampires, and ‘tweener’ vampires. Taking True Blood as an example, it seems to offer ambiguous morality tales. These take place within a decidedly supernatural cosmos, but much of the primitive vampire is not appropriated.
However, the focal point of the ongoing narrative seems to be how living and undead refract one another’s light and dark. Supernatural conceits don’t matter. In this drama, human and vampire are much closer to being two sides of the same coin. There is then, in at least this example, a humanization of the vampire. This would stand against demonization. Humanity inflects profanity.
The contemporary vampire may even be–all too human. This vampire is often a libertine, with sex* subsuming blood lust. Sometimes, as is the case with Bill fromTrue Blood, he is ambivalent, conflicted, a tweener vampire between worlds, yet not able to transcend the vampire rules. Here is the post-modern turn: vampire as loose, identity mashup, This vamp reflects the chancy play of cosmopolitan identity. And, he or she may be more at home in the intoxicating nights’ cape, than in the tightening days’ cape.
Short of any fascination with vampires, the most common way the idea is entertained is when people speak of having their energy glommed onto and sucked by vampire-like pests. In this what’s left of either the token of the irredeemably fallen or the magical explanation for contagion, is: energy-sapping neediness.
The mercurial-work around able to defeat bodily death and enlightened eternal being is a more subtle layer of the undead.
Dr. Jung wrotes in the chapter Paracelsus as a Spiritual Phenomenon, (in Alchemical Studies.)
Paracelsus, like many others, was unable to make use of Christian symbolism because the Christian formula inevitably suggested the Christian solution and would have conduced to the very thing that had to be avoided. It was nature and her particular “light” that had to be acknowledged and lived with in the face of an attitude that assiduously avoided them.
(Jung earlier in the chapter speaks of the limits of the adept’s “daymind.”)
Archetype possesses the mechanics of refraction in the splitting of dominants and subordinate into further aspects. I’m going to recombine my rough intuitions and suggest the vampire is a subaltern figure–so the contemporary vampire imago stands “outside,” even when the currency of our day’s edgy, camp Vamp, is more the lip-sucking idol, is more sensitive, is more bourgeois. Remember, the contrast between primitive instrumentality and modern character is as stark as that between night and day.
As a practical matter, the attraction to the vampire at least seems to be a worthwhile anecdote to religious neuroticism; does not, as Jung put it, ‘conduce to the very thing that has to be avoided.’
It was nature and her particular NIGHT that had to be acknowledged and lived with in the face of an attitude that assiduously avoided them.
*Most psychoanalytic criticism related to vampires focuses on Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Maurice Richardson, in “The Psychoanalysis of Ghost Stories,” says: “From a Freudian standpoint—and from no other does the story really make any sense—it is seen as a kind of incestuous, necrophilous, oral-anal-sadistic all-in wrestling match”. Phyllis A. Roth finds Bram Stoker’s neurotic fear of sex and women to be the clue to his novel’s popularity; it allows readers “to act out” their own “essentially threatening, even horrifying wishes,” based in the “lustful anticipation of an oral fusion with the mother”. Judith Weissman concurs: “The vampire, an ancient figure of horror in folk tales, undoubtedly represents in any story some kind of sexual terror . . .”. Others, like Christopher Craft and Andrew Schopp, regard vampire literature as a disguised opportunity, as Schopp says, “for acting out socially prohibited roles, and for reconfiguring desire”. p54:Vampire God. The Allure of the Undead in Western Culture, Mary Y. Hallab, SUNY Press 2009 Amazon
Archie Pajabi, in character as Kalinda, on The Good Wife
