Category Archives: Darwinism

BLOOMINGTON A director of a group working to prevent drowning in the Great Lakes area says stigmatizing drowning hampers such efforts.

People blame the victim, blame the parent or caretaker or blame Darwinism, said Dave Benjamin, executive director of public relations and project management for the Great Lakes Surf Rescue Project.

But doing that gives people a false sense of security that it wouldn't happen to them or their loved ones, said Benjamin.

In fact, it can happen to anyone and it can happen quickly.

Part of the problem, according to Benjamin, is that people don't know what they don't know.

Few people know that swimming ability alone might not be enough in a water emergency, he said.

Sixty-six percent of all drowning victims were good swimmers, he said.

But factors such as cold water, waves, underwater hazards, dangerous currents and disorientation following unexpected immersion can limit swimming effectiveness and affect how quickly fatigue can set in.

About half of drowning victims never intended to be in the water, he said. They may have fallen off a boat or pier or were washed off by waves.

A study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said males are three times more likely to die from drowning than females.

Males tend to be greater risk takers, more susceptible to peer pressure and more likely to overestimate their swimming ability, said Benjamin.

Do not dare your friends to jump off the pier. Do not dare your friends to swim to the buoy, he said.

Rather than saying, You can't fix stupid, Benjamin advocates fixing misconceptions through education.

Schools have fire drills, tornado drills, active shooter drills and earthquake drills, yet students are more likely to die of drowning than those causes combined, he said.

Follow Lenore Sobota on Twitter: @pg_sobota

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Don't blame Darwin, says anti-drowning project leader - Bloomington Pantagraph

The evolutionary idea contributed proposed by Charles Darwin called Darwinism or Natural selection theory, explaining the mechanism of evolution is clearly stated in his book Origin of species.

The important postulates of the theory are: Over production, Struggle for existence, Variations, Survival of the fittest, and Origin of species.

Darwinism vs Lamarckism

Darwinism

1. It does not believe in the internal vital force.

2. They do not form part of Darwins natural selection theory.

3. An organ can develop further or degenerate only due to continuous variations.

4. Struggle for existence is very important in this theory.

5. Only useful variations are transferred to the next generation.

6. Darwins natural selection theory is based on survival of the fittest.

Lamarckism:

1. This theory states that there is an internal vital force in all organisms.

2. It considers new needs or desire produce new structures and change habits of the organism.

3. According to this theory if an organ is constantly used it would be better developed whereas disuse of organ results in its degeneration.

4. It does not consider struggle for existence.

5. All the acquired characters are inherited to the next generation.

6. Lamarckism does not believe in survival of the fittest.

See the article here:

Difference between Darwinism and Lamarckism | Major Differences

Assessment task: Social Darwinism in Australia

In 2002 a movie called Rabbit Proof Fence was released. It tells the story of three Aboriginal girls in Australia who escape from a detention centre after being taken from their homes to be trained as domestic workers. They set off on a trek back home, using the rabbit proof fence to help them keep moving in the right direction. Read these two very different reviews of the same movie, and then answer the questions that follow. (suggested answers appear below the questions).

Review 1

Based on true events, "Rabbit-Proof Fence" is a moving story of racial prejudice, and amazing endurance as three girls walk 1,500 miles to find their mothers in 1930s Australia.

Special detention centres were set up across the continent to keep the mixed race children from "contaminating" the rest of Australian society, and orders were given to forcibly remove "half-caste" children from their families. It was a disastrous, racist policy that brought about the misery of the so-called "stolen generations".

With an epic journey ahead of them, three girls set out to find their way back home by following the rabbit-proof fence that stretches across the Outback.

By highlighting the realities of this hidden genocide (unbelievably, the policy continued until the early 70s), "Rabbit-Proof Fence" stands as a powerful, worthy testimony to the suffering of the stolen generations.

- Adapted from http://www.bbc.co.uk

Review 2

A hit movie based on myth and misunderstanding, by Peter Howson (Minister for Aboriginal Affairs 1971-72)

The Australian film Rabbit Proof Fence presents a dramatic story about three young half-caste Aboriginal girls who ran away from a Western Australian settlement in which they were placed in 1931. Two girls are portrayed as returning to their mother's community by the almost super-human feat of walking for nine weeks along 1500 miles of rabbit proof fence. After being diverted from the other two, police returned their cousin to the settlement.

The story of the separation of the rabbit proof fence girls rests only on a story told 35 years later by one of the girls to her daughter.

When he received reports these girls were being allowed to run wild amongst whites and were in danger, Neville (Chief Protector of the Aborigines) acted responsibly to assist with the serious problem of child neglect. Only those judged most in need of care were removed.

- Adapted from an article in The Australian, 11 March 2002

Questions

Read the two very different movie reviews of 'Rabbit Proof Fence'.

1. Which review says that 'Rabbit Proof Fence' was historically reliable? (1)

2. Which review says that 'Rabbit Proof Fence' was historically unreliable? (1)

3. Do you think the BBC review is accurate to refer to what happened to Australian Aborigines as 'genocide'? (2)

4. Give a reason why Review 2 defends the policy towards the Aborigines. (1)

Extended writing

From what you have learnt about Social Darwinism in Australia, write an essay in which you argue with Reviewer number 2 and Explain the other evidence there is to support Review number 1. (30)

Suggested answers

1. Review 1

2. Review 2

3. Yes. Definition of genocide: the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group (x1)

Yes, Aborigines almost exterminated by European conquest and colonisation (X1)

4. Reason, the reveiw was written by a Minister of Aboriginal Affairs

Extended writing

Outcome: Need to develop a coherent argument - need to explain the concept of Social Darwinism and then explain how it affected Aborigines.

Content selection:

The author of Review 2 implemented a paternal attitude towards Aborigines.

He thought 'they' were different, and had to be 'looked after' to avoid 'them' being a danger to themselves.

Definition of Social Darwinism

19th century western science Darwin/evolution

Applied falsely to human beings

Physical characteristics linked to mental and behavioural characteristics

Classified into 'races'

Europeans regarded as superior

Justification for colonialism and conquest

Regarded the 'other' as primitive and uncivilised

Not unique to Australia

British colonised Australia

Found people living there

Saw Australian aboriginal as inferior 'race'

Europeans had weapons

Exterminated, hunted and killed 90% died

Discriminatory Laws controlled Aborigine's lives

Examples of laws

Stolen generation

Children of mixed descent removed from parents

Link:

Assessment task: Social Darwinism in Australia | South ...

A group of intellectuals has exposed a deep rift within Serbian society by challenging the veracity of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.

Local media say the unidentified "organized citizens" submitted an anti-Darwin petition to parliament in Belgrade, signed by dozens of intellectuals.

The initiative calls for a review of the teaching of Darwinism -- the evolutionary history of life on Earth accepted by the overwhelming majority of the scientific community -- and demands that the religiously inspired theory of creationism be taught in Serbian schools alongside evolution.

The petition's organizers say their goal is to challenge the dominant status of Darwinism in schoolbooks, arguing it is just one of several theories of human creation and that they question the science behind it.

"I tell you that the [Darwin] theory of evolution and claiming that man came from monkeys [sic] offends all [religious] believers, not just Orthodox [Christians]," said Belgrade University professor Ljiljana Colic, whose failed attempts as education minister to oust Darwinism from the school curriculum led to her resignation in 2004.

Colic told Danas.rs that she was happy to sign the petition because she "absolutely agrees with everything written in it."

Zeljko Tomanovic, dean of the biology department at Belgrade University, countered: "It is the old creationist ideas that are totally anachronistic and unscientific. There is no scientific knowledge that supports the aforementioned claims [of creationism] and that deny evolution."

In addition to the signatures of certain elites in Serbia, the petition has been championed by several leading newspapers.

The issue has divided the country, and pro-creationists have tapped into an anti-Western, antiglobalist current that has festered in Serbia as high unemployment (16 percent in 2016) and a stagnant economy combine with Brussels' perceived indifference toward Belgrade's aspirations for closer relations and eventual EU membership.

"There is a disillusionment with liberal democracy and even an anger against the West," an RFE/RL Balkan correspondent said, adding that "this dogmatic, conservative movement is on the rise."

Those who fear the rising influence of the Serbian Orthodox Church -- manifested in the push to teach creationism in schools -- are worried that such proposals will dilute the country's education system and lower public discourse on science and other important topics.

The National Assembly said it had received the petition, which had been signed by 166 people, including doctors, professors, priests, and politicians, some of them reportedly also members of the Serbian Academy of Sciences.

But the Academy of Sciences said that "we don't share the petition's views" and added that only two of its members had signed the document. Initial media reports said dozens of academicians had signed.

Aleksandar Jerkova, a member of parliament's Science, Education, and Technology Committee, told Danas.rs that he regretted that "the signatories to this petition are not engaged in solving the really important problems in education [facing Serbian schools] that will determine the future of our country."

He added that the standards and curriculum in Serbian schools were at a "20th-century level" and this anti-Darwin petition will "take the schools back to the [standards] from the start of the 19th century."

Belgrade resident Stevan Karic agreed, telling RFE/RL: "I don't know [about this creationism initiative].... I think it's reverse evolution."

Go here to read the rest:

Adam & Eve Challenge Darwinism In Serbia - RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty

Sam Harris is no stranger to controversy. Known as one of the Four Horsemen of New Atheism, critics have accused the neuroscientist and author of being racist and Islamophobic for his comments, including suggesting we should profile Muslims at airports. He also raised eyebrows in a 2015 when he laughed along with gay conservative Douglas Murrays transphobic comments during an episode of Harris podcast Waking Up. Most recently, Harris interviewed Charles Murray, co-author of the infamous 1994 book The Bell Curve, which suggests Black people are genetically predisposed to low IQs. According to Harris, the controversy surrounding the book is due to political correctness:

People dont want to hear that a persons intelligence is in large measure due to his or her genes, and there seems to be very little we can do environmentally to increase a persons intelligence even in childhood. Its not that the environment doesnt matter, but genes appear to be 50 to 80 percent of the story. People dont want to hear this. And they certainly dont want to hear that average IQ differs across races and ethnic groups.

Unfortunately, Harris must have missed the memo that the truth is more complicated than that.

For starters, critics are quick to point out Murray and co-author Richard Herrsteins scholarship is shoddy at best and outright political propaganda at worst. In a 1995 Scientific American article, psychologist Leon Kamin noticed that one of their sources was a 1991 paper by Richard Lynn comparing the average IQs of people of different ethnicities which, according to Kamin, reported only average Matrices scores, not IQs; the other studies used tests clearly dependent on cultural content. He also claimed that Murray and Herrnstein ignored social and economic factors that lead to individual success and instead just focus on IQ. Then theres the fact that Murray and Herrnstein devote two chapters of The Bell Curve criticizing affirmative action, which led Kamin to believe the book was politically motivated (Wikipedia) refers to Murray as a libertarian conservative).

Scientific American revisited The Bell Curve last month in the wake of Murrays recent return to the spotlight. Although data shows an average lower IQ in Black people than white people, data analyst Eric Siegel says that Murray and Herrnstein never explained why they researched IQ differences among different ethnicities. By never spelling out a reason for reporting on these differences in the first place, he writes, the authors transmit an unspoken yet unequivocal conclusion: Race is a helpful indicator as to whether a person is likely to hold certain capabilities. Even if we assume the presented data trends are sound, the book leaves the reader on his or her own to deduce how to best put these insights to use. The net effect is to tacitly condone the prejudgment of individuals based on race. Seigel also echoes Kamins belief that Murray and Herrnstein had a political agenda since the last chapter of the book suggests political policies that might help society progress in light of their findings, including simpler tax codes, decreasing government benefits that could incentivize childbearing among the low-income, and increasing competency-based immigration screening.

As far as whether or not intelligence is hereditary well, its complicated. According to Robert Plomin, a deputy director of the MRC Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Center at Kings College London, there are genetic differences that affect differences in intelligence test results, but we all share 99.5 percent of our three billion DNA base pairs, so only 15 million DNA differences separate us genetically. Also, according to Plomin, genes only tell half of the story while environmental factors tell the other half. In other words, the claim that IQ differences between different ethnicities is mainly because of genetics with no outside factors is bunk.

The Bell Curve is just one example of sciences darkest chapters: scientific racism Its been around since the beginning of time, but became especially prominent with the advent of Social Darwinism (not to be confused with Darwins original theory of evolution), which basically said White Europeans were more evolved than other races and therefore superior. Its no wonder Hitler was a big fan of Social Darwinism.

Now Im not suggesting Harris is an outright bigot. I never met him, so I cant say who he is as a person. However, this does bring up a common problem even among skeptics: picking and choosing facts that support a narrative. Harris often criticizes the so-called Regressive Left for silencing people that disagree with them and with the recent incident involving Murray and Middlebury College, its easy to assume Murrays telling the truth and whiny snowflakes just dont want to listen. Im not interested in debating whether or not Murray has a right to speak at college campuses, but I am interested in whether or not his claims are true. So far the science says its way more complicated that Murray and Harris think.

Trav Mamone is a queer trans blogger who write about the intersections of social justice and secular humanism at Bi Any Means. They also host the Bi Any Means Podcast and co-host the Biskeptical Podcast.

Read more:

Is The Bell Curve Scientific Racism? - Paste Magazine

Eric Metaxas at BreakPoint is one of our favorite popular commentators on evolution. In a broadcast, he takes note of our commentary here. As we noted last month, Octopus Genetic Editing Animals Defy Their Own Neo-Darwinism.

From Metaxas on how The Octopus Outsmarts Darwin Again:

The Tel Aviv researchers found tens of thousands of such RNA recoding sites in cephalopods, allowing a creature like the octopus to essentially reprogram itself, adding new riffs to its basic genetic blueprint. In other words, these invertebrates dont care that they didnt inherit the smart genes. They make themselves smart, anyway.

Of course, an animal cant be the author of its own intelligence, and this is not a process anyone believes cephalopods perform consciously. Rather, it is a marvelous piece of adaptive programming built-in to their biology.

Darwinists have tried to spin this feat as a special kind of evolution. But the folks at Evolution News cut through this nonsense and identify RNA editing for what it is: non-evolution.

Neo-Darwinism did not make cephalopods what they are, they write. These highly intelligent and well-adapted animals edited their own genomes, so what possible need do they have forblind, random, unguided evolution?

This is also an emerging field of research, which means its possible, in theory, that other organisms make extensive use of RNA editing, and were just not aware of it, yet.

If, as one popular science website puts it, other creatures can defy the central dogma of genetics, the implications for Darwins tree of life, and his entire theory, are dire.

But if cephalopods and the complex information processing that makes them so unique are in fact the result of a Programmer of a Designer the waters of biology become far less inky.

A friend asks if this phenomenon is an example of Lamarckism, according to which organisms evolve by adapting to their environments and then passing on newly acquired characteristics to their offspring. We wouldnt call it that, but we do call it a problem for neo-Darwinism. Among other reasons, thats because it reveals that organisms need much more information than is provided by DNA sequences. Therefore, DNA mutations cannot provide sufficient raw materials for evolution.

This latest research is impressive, but RNA editing is not new. As Eric Metaxas smartly anticipates, there is indeed extensive RNA editing in other organisms, too including humans.

Care for documentation? Find it here:

That would make the problem for Darwinism even more acute than Eric suggests.

Photo: Octopus tetricus (Gloomy Octopus), by Sylke Rohrlach (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

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More on Octopus RNA Editing A Problem for Neo-Darwinism - Discovery Institute

Politics | Funding | People | Publishing | Events | Policy | Education | Trend watch | Coming up

Pro-Europe win raises scientists hopes Researchers in France reacted with relief and optimism to Emmanuel Macrons sweeping victory in the countrys presidential elections on 7 May. Macron decisively defeated his far-right opponent Marine Le Pen, the leader of the Front National party, who had threatened to take France out of the European Union. The pro-European president-elect promised in his campaign to save Frances research and higher-education budgets from cuts and to launch a science-driven innovation programme to create jobs.

Jeff J. Mitchell/Getty

Cap on grants The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, will limit the amount of funding that scientists supported by the agency can hold at any one time. The policy, announced on 2 May, is intended to make it easier for early- and mid-career scientists to obtain NIH grants. The agency said it will not set a hard limit on the number of grants or the amount of funding that individual researchers can receive. Instead, it will introduce a grant-support index that assigns a point value to each type of grant on the basis of its complexity and size. Currently, just 10% of grant recipients win more than 40% of the NIHs research money.

Mixed societies A total of 36 women were inducted last week into the leading scientific societies of the United States and the United Kingdom. On 2 May, the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) announced 84 new members, 23 of whom (27%) are women. And on 5 May, the Royal Society, Britains oldest and most prestigious scientific society, named 13 women (26%) in its 2017 class of 50 fellows. In addition, NAS president Marcia McNutt, a geophysicist, was made a foreign member of the Royal Society.

New shores David Lipman is stepping down as director of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) in Bethesda, Maryland, the institute announced on 3May. Lipman, who has directed the NCBI since its creation in 1988, was responsible for launching the literature database PubMed and the DNA-sequence repository GenBank, along with other public bioinformatics databases. Lipman will now serve as chief science officer at a private food-science company, Impossible Foods in Redwood City, California.

Failed deal Dutch universities have failed to reach a new agreement with Oxford University Press (OUP) over access to the publishers academic journals. On 1 May, the Association of Universities in the Netherlands, which led the negotiations, said that the countrys research universities were unable to agree to the British publishers latest licensing proposal, because it did not include an offer for affordable open access to research articles in OUP journals. The Netherlands aims to make the results of all publicly funded science freely accessible by 2020.

Secret mission After nearly 718 days in space, the US Air Forces unmanned X-37B spaceplane landed at NASAs Kennedy Space Center in Florida on 7 May. The reusable plane, which looks like a miniature space shuttle, was on an unspecified mission to carry out experiments in orbit. It was the fourth and longest flight yet for the military programme, and the first to land in Florida rather than at an Air Force base in California.

US Air Force

DIY memo The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) in Stockholm has called on European Union member states to review their procedures for authorizing do-it-yourself gene-engineering kits produced in the United States. The kits, which are intended to contain a harmless strain of the common laboratory bacterium Escherichia coli, use CRISPR precision-editing technologies and are targeted at citizen scientists. The move followed the discovery in March by German authorities that some kits had been contaminated with pathogenic bacteria, including some multidrug-resistant strains. Germany has since banned their import. The ECDCs assessment report concluded that the risk of infection to users is low.

Dead flowers A paperwork blunder has led to the accidental destruction of a valuable botanical reference collection, according to media reports. In March, biosecurity officers with the Australian quarantine authorities destroyed allegedly mislabelled samples of rare nineteenth-century daisies, which the French National Museum of Natural History in Paris had sent on loan to Brisbane. Australian authorities have asked for a review of the incident, the BBC reports.

Call for diversity Canadian universities must develop plans to diversify the composition of some of their most prestigious posts, according to a requirement announced on 4May by a trio of science-funding agencies. The new rule applies to the Can$265-million (US$194-million) Canada Research Chairs Program, which funds an estimated 1,600professorships at Canadian higher-education institutions. By December, universities with five or more research chairs must present a plan to increase the representation of women, indigenous peoples and other minority groups, as well as people with disabilities. Progress reports are required annually, and the agencies warned that failure to fulfil the requirements could result in the withholding of funds.

Advisers axed The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has dismissed at least five academic researchers from a scientific advisory board. The scientists were notified on 5May that their appointments to the 18-member Board of Scientific Counselors had expired and would not be renewed, according to media reports. An EPA official said the agency would consider replacing them with representatives from EPA-regulated industries. The US House of Representatives has also passed a Republican-sponsored bill to restructure another EPA advisory board; critics say the legislation would make it easier for industry representatives to serve.

Nazi review Germanys Max Planck Society has launched a 1.5-million (US$1.6-million), three-year study to discover as much as possible about the victims of Nazi euthanasia programmes whose brains were acquired by scientists for neuroscience research. Around 200,000 physically or mentally disabled people were murdered during the programmes. On 2May, the society named a four-member international team that will try to identify those victims whose remains are still in Max Planck institutes and those who were interred in a special ceremony in 1990. The team will also try to reconstruct exactly what happened to the brain preparations, and how they may have been used in research and research publications.

Irrational doctrine Serbias evolutionary society has expressed concern over a renewed attack on Charles Darwins theory of evolution by some 170Serbian academics, including engineers, physicians, artists, philosophers, journalists, teachers and clergy. On 3 May, the group signed a petition to include the teaching of creationist theory in schools and universities. The academics also claim in a letter to the education and science ministry, the parliament, Serbias Academy of Sciences and Arts and its leading universities that Darwins dogmatic theory lacks scientific confirmation. In response, scientists with the evolutionary society said that the signatories and their creationist reasoning lack understanding of simple biology. In 2004, the Serbian education ministry had attempted in vain to ban evolutionary theory from school curricula.

Charitable donations to British universities surpassed the 1-billion (US$1.3-billion) milestone for the first time last year. The 110 universities that took part in the latest RossCASE survey of charitable giving secured a total of 1.06billion in philanthropic income in the academic year 201516. Donations were up 23% on the previous year and have almost tripled over the past 12 years. Fifty-five per cent of this income came from organizations, and 45% from individual donors.

Source: Council for Advancement and Support of Education

1516 May A Royal Society meeting in Newport Pagnell, UK, addresses how long-term climate change has affected marine palaeolandscapes.

1519 May The International Conference on Precision Physics and Fundamental Physical Constants takes place in Warsaw.

Read more:

DIY gene engineering, an attack on Darwinism and a probe into Nazi science. - Nature.com

commentary By Robert H. Nelson | 13 mins ago Does God exist? Michael Peligro, CC BY-ND

The question of whether a God exists is heating up in the 21st century. According to a Pew survey, the percentage of Americans having no religious affiliation reached 23 percent in 2014. Among such nones, 33 percent said that they do not believe in God an 11 percent increase since only 2007.

Such trends have ironically been taking place even as the rational probabilities for the existence of a supernatural God have been rising. In my 2015 book, God? Very Probably, I explore five rational reasons why it is very probable that such a God exists.

In 1960, the Princeton physicist and subsequent Nobel Prize winner Eugene Wigner raised a fundamental question: Why did the natural world always so far as we know obey laws of mathematics?

Most working mathematicians today believe that mathematics exists independent of physical reality. It is the job of mathematicians to discover the realities of this separate world of mathematical laws and concepts. Physicists then put the mathematics to use according to the rules of prediction and confirmed observation of the scientific method.

But modern mathematics generally is formulated before any natural observations are made and many mathematical laws today have no known existing physical analogues.

Einsteins 1915 general theory of relativity, for example, was based on theoretical mathematics developed 50 years earlier by the great German mathematician Bernhard Riemann that did not have any known practical applications at the time of its intellectual creation.

In some cases, the physicist also discovers the mathematics. Isaac Newton was considered among the greatest mathematicians as well as physicists of the 17th century. Other physicists sought his help in finding a mathematics that would predict the workings of the solar system. He found it in the mathematical law of gravity, based in part on his discovery of calculus.

At the time, however, many people initially resisted Newtons conclusions because they seemed to be occult.

How could two distant objects in the solar system be drawn toward one another, acting according to a precise mathematical law? Indeed, Newton made strenuous efforts over his lifetime to find a natural explanation but in the end he conceded failure. He could say only that it is the will of God.

Despite the many other enormous advances of modern physics, little has changed in this regard. As Wigner wrote, The enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and there is no rational explanation for it.

In other words, as something supernatural, it takes the existence of some kind of a God to make the mathematical underpinnings of the universe comprehensible.

Other leading physicists and mathematicians have since offered similar views.

The great British physicist Roger Penrose in 2004 put forward a vision of a universe composed of three independently existing worlds mathematics, the material world and human consciousness. As Penrose acknowledged, it was a complete puzzle to him, how the three interacted with one another outside the ability of any scientific or other conventionally rational model to explain.

How can physical atoms and molecules, for example, create something that exists in a separate domain that has no physical existence, human consciousness?

It is a mystery that lies beyond science.

This mystery is the same one that existed in the Greek world view of Plato, who believed that abstract ideas (above all mathematical) first existed outside any physical reality. The material world that we experience as part of our human existence is an imperfect reflection of these prior formal ideals. For Plato, the realm of such ideals is the realm of God.

Indeed, in 2014 the MIT physicist Max Tegmark argued in Our Mathematical Universe that mathematics is the fundamental world reality that acting in a God-like fashion drives the universe.

The workings of human consciousness are similarly miraculous. Like the laws of mathematics, consciousness has no physical presence in the world; the images and thoughts in our consciousness have no measurable dimensions.

Yet, our nonphysical thoughts somehow mysteriously guide the actions of our physical human bodies. This is no more scientifically explicable than the mysterious ability of nonphysical mathematical constructions to determine the workings of a separate physical world.

Until recently, the scientifically unfathomable quality of human consciousness inhibited the very scholarly discussion of the subject. Since the 1970s, however, it has become a leading area of inquiry among philosophers.

Recognizing that he could not reconcile his own scientific materialism with the existence of a nonphysical world of human consciousness, a leading atheist, Daniel Dennett, in 1991 took the radical step of denying that consciousness even exists.

Finding this altogether implausible, as most people do, another leading philosopher, Thomas Nagel, wrote in 2012 that, given the scientifically inexplicable the intractable character of human consciousness, We will have to leave [scientific] materialism behind as a complete basis for understanding the world of human existence.

The supernatural character of the workings of human consciousness offers a second strong rational grounds for raising the probability of the existence of a supernatural God.

Darwins theory of evolution in 1859 offered a theoretical explanation for a strictly physical mechanism by which the current plant and animal kingdoms might have come into existence, and assumed their current forms, without any necessary role for a God.

In recent years, however, traditional Darwinism and later revised accounts of neo-Darwinism have themselves come under increasingly strong scientific challenge. From the 1970s onwards, the Harvard evolutionary biologist Steven Jay Gould, for example, complained that little evidence could be found in the fossil record of the slow and gradual evolution of species as theorized by Darwin.

In 2011, the University of Chicago evolutionary biologist James Shapiro explained that, remarkably enough, many micro-evolutionary processes worked as though guided by a purposeful sentience of the evolving plant and animal organisms themselves a concept far removed from the random selection processes of Darwinism.

With these developments bringing standard evolutionary understandings into growing question, the probability of a God existing has increased correspondingly.

For the past 10,000 years at a minimum, the most important changes in human existence have been driven by cultural developments occurring in the realm of human ideas.

In the Axial Age (commonly dated from 800 to 200 B.C.), world-transforming ideas such as Buddhism, Confucianism, the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, and the Hebrew Old Testament almost miraculously appeared at about the same time in India, China, ancient Greece and among the Jews in the Middle East these peoples then having little interaction with one another.

The development of the scientific method in the 17th century in Europe and its modern further advances have had at least as great a set of world-transforming consequences. There have been many historical theories, but none capable of explaining as fundamentally transformational a set of events as the rise of the modern world. It was a revolution in human thought, operating outside any explanations grounded in scientific materialism, that drove the process.

That all these astonishing things, verging on miracles, happened within the conscious workings of human minds, functioning outside physical reality, offers further rational evidence in my view for the conclusion that human beings may well be made in the image of [a] God.

In his commencement address to Kenyon College in 2005, the American novelist and essayist David Foster Wallace said that Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.

Even though Karl Marx, for example, condemned the illusion of religion, his followers, ironically, worshiped Marxism. The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre thus wrote that for much of the 20th century Marxism was the historical successor of Christianity, claiming to show the faithful the one correct path to a new heaven on Earth.

In several of my books, I have explored how Marxism and other such economic religions were characteristic of much of the modern age. So Christianity, I would argue, did not disappear as much as it reappeared in many such disguised forms of secular religion.

That the Christian essence, as arose out of Judaism, showed such great staying power amidst the extraordinary political, economic, intellectual and other radical changes of the modern age is a fifth rational reason for thinking combined with the other four that the existence of a God is very probable.

(Robert H. Nelsonis a professor ofpublic policy and the University of Maryland)

Read more from the original source:

Five rational arguments why God (very probably) exists - Religion News Service

CNSNews.com

Darwinism in Question with Discovery: Octopi Edit Their Own Genes CNSNews.com It's a mind-boggling coincidence that Darwinists have long dismissed with euphemisms like, convergent evolution. But octopi, squid, and cuttlefish seem to have altogether missed the memo about Darwinism, because new science is revealing another way ...

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Darwinism in Question with Discovery: Octopi Edit Their Own Genes - CNSNews.com

Charles Darwin. Political economy would be revived as a rounded subject of inquiry, informed by understanding of the world and history. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

In recent decades the world economy and society have been changing at an unprecedented rate. According to Unesco, the total number of qualified scientists and engineers undertaking research has soared to about 10 million, of which a fifth are in China. Technical inventions have emerged ever faster, providing us with new gadgets and machines, along with new ways of engaging with one another and organising the institutions within which we live.

This has brought us great benefits, but it has also brought dangers and damage: weapons of mass destruction, global warming, the economic bubble and collapse caused by new financial tricks, global tax evasion and tax avoidance, high-tech monopolies, and the diffusion of powers of information and misinformation resulting from new means of communication.

We need to put aside the long-established Newtonian vision of a harmonious economy with negligible innovations

To navigate these new conditions we need to be on the watch for innovations, technological and non-technological, and to analyse their probable consequences. We need to adopt a Darwinian vision of a restless, evolving economy and society that is shaped by competitive selection of successful innovations from the many that fail.

We need to put aside the long-established Newtonian vision of a harmonious economy with negligible innovations in which demand and supply tend to maintain equilibrium in markets and the whole economy. That vision of the capitalist system was plausible when it was expounded, in words, not algebra, by Alfred Marshall more than a hundred years ago. But it does not bear scrutiny today.

Since the crash of 2008, economists have tended tacitly to abandon the Newtonian model and turn to empirical studies. But these have concentrated on economic phenomena that can be measured in statistics among which links may be sought. The many unmeasurable aspects of social and economic phenomena have been largely ignored; and it has been assumed that if an association is discovered it will continue into the future.

The adoption of the Darwinian approach would liberate economists from this myopia. It would mean that the subject of study was social evolution and all its causes, measurable and unmeasurable. Political economy would be revived as a rounded subject of inquiry, informed by understanding of the world and history, as it was for its founder, Adam Smith. It would not promise a distant Utopia, as Newtonian economics and Marxism have done in their different ways. Instead it would invite study of what is happening and the possible responses to it, as a prelude to politico-moral debate by all-comers.

Here are three disparate examples of actual or potential benefits of the approach:

In my book, Public Corruption: The Dark Side of Social Evolution, I asked, Why was corruption cleaned up in northern Europe in the late 18th and 19th centuries?

If rulers gained and held power by corrupt means, for them to abolish corruption would have been political suicide. I found an evolutionary explanation in military-cum-economic competition: when the development of firearms gave advantage to costly, trained, standing armies, states that could raise tax and spend it on their army with least corruption (for example, the highly militarised Prussia as it expanded to become Germany), were at an advantage and expanded or induced their neighbours to clean up in competition with them a process that no longer operates since arms have become cheap relative to national income.

Before the financial crisis of 2008, economic forecasters, using models that projected past statistical relationships into the future, kept predicting that the boom would continue. They failed to see that it was being fed by a growing mountain of lending based on new financial tricks that were unsustainable. Had they been Darwinians, looking out for dangerous innovations and working closely with the bank regulators, the crisis and subsequent depression might never have occurred.

Economists are so steeped in the assumption that human beings are rational meaning they make choices only by pleasure-pain calculus that when confronted by evidence that that is not so, they commonly speak of deviations from rationality. They have ignored that our behaviour is governed by primal instincts as well as reason, and that denial of instincts has blinkered their understanding of incentives to work and other aspects of economic behaviour. A Darwinian would look at behaviour in the round as the product of past genetic and social evolution and current innovations.

In short, the adoption of Darwinism would be a return to reality, and morality.

Continued here:

How do we fix our 21st century economy? Look to Darwin - The Guardian