Comment of the day...

It's probably time to do more research as far as sources cited. There is something satisfying about thinking that you recognize a pattern and then verifying it. I must be getting old and slow as I used to get in numerous comments and a post, now I'm reduced to using my comments as a post while weaving old research in them. Oh well, I don't feel old and slow but the evidence may be there.

On to the comment of the day, from the same place as the one below:
Assertion 6.14: Evolution is the basis for Nazism. Analysis

(i) Philosopher Philip Kitcher correctly points out that evolution, like all good scientific theories, is morally neutral...


That is an ironic argument, given that the Nazis argued that what they did was "morally neutral" because it was based on biological fact, i.e. scientific facts. It seems that those who want to egage in Darwinian forms of reasoning and philosophy want people to forget that so that they can rely on the same exact intellectually degenerate standards based on naturalism and similar arguments to this day.

Before going into the proto-Nazi nature of Darwinists given the material that you've provided, something is making me a little sad now. For you didn't pick up a challenge to cite your own imagination as "scientific" evidence in the Darwinian way (and factual, too!) based on the smallest of things about life, like the copulatory organ of the male dragon fly. What, are the tittles of Mommy Nature suddenly not titiliating enough? Ah well, the point of much of it is that you must know that when it comes to Life, pretenses of "neutrality" toward the subject are all false because the subject is not merely just an object and never can be...trying to assume it is so "scientifically" and objectively has been the business of proto-Nazi half-wits. So back to that, the Darwinian reasoning that you cite and the view toward biology and Life that is contained in it is especially ironic to cite here given that the same intellectual degeneracy helped Nazism succeed in technical ways that exponentially increased the effect of barbarism, given that the barbarians were technically proficient. I.e. the same argument of "moral neutrality" toward Bios/biology that the little fellow above tries to prop up was promoted in proto-Nazi and Nazi times based on the same reasoning and the same philosophy that makes biology into a mask for the urge to merge that some little fellows seem to have:

Biological thinking in Nazism:

“And they were all doctors like me, who tried to think biologically, biology as the foundation of medical thought. . . . We didn’t want politics—we were critical of politics—but [concerned] with the way human beings really are—not just an idea or philosophy.”

National Socialism as Applied Biology:

The nation would now be run according to what Johann S. and his cohorts considered biological truth, “the way human beings really are.” That is why he had a genuine “eureka” experience—a sense of “That’s exactly it!”—when he heard Rudolf Hess declare National Socialism to be “nothing but applied biology” (see page 31). Dr. S. felt himself merged...

(The Nazi Doctors: Medical
Killing and the
Psychology of Genocide
By Robert Jay Lifton :129) (Emphasis added)

Is it really a brute "scientific fact" at issue or do some little fellows just like feeling merged to overcome the "Jewish influence" of alienation? It seems that all that is essential and conceptual is alienating for some little fellows. As one put it:

Our whole cultural life for decades has been more or less under the influence of biological thinking, as it was begun particularly around the middle of the last century, by the teachings of Darwin...

(Hitler’s Professors: The Part of Scholarship in
Germany’s Crimes Against the Jewish People
by Max Weinreich
(New York:The Yiddish Scientific Institute, 1946) :33) (Emphasis added)

Darwinists simply cannot seem to engage in conceptual thinking because they are usually trying to engage in "biological thinking" instead. That leads to them running in a Herd as well as scholarship of this form:

The scholars whom we shall quote in such impressive numbers, like those others who were instrumental in any other part of the German pre-war and war efforts, were to a large extent people of long and high standing, university professors and academy members, some of them world famous, authors with familiar names and guest lecturers abroad...
If the products of their research work, even apart from their rude tone, strike us as unconvincing and hollow, this weakness is due not to inferior training but to the mendacity inherent in any scholarship that overlooks or openly repudiates all moral and spiritual values and, by standing order, knows exactly its ultimate conclusions well in advance.

(Ib. :7)(Emphasis added)

Anyone who has debated those trying to prop up the Darwinian creation myth these days knows that the apt summary of a historian has given Nazi reasoning matches Darwinian reasoning, which is often based more on a repudiation of the spiritual than actual evidence. Indeed, Darwinists have often said and written that their repudiation of the spiritual in negative theology is their best evidence. Panda's Thumb, anyone? They named their blog after an argument of the same structure, a repudiation of the spiritual is actually being cited as evidence and "scientific" evidence at that. I am merely calling a spade a spade when I point out that Darwinian reasoning is proto-Nazi by Nature. The ignorance and stupidity of the willful denial of the evidence of creation that goes on among Darwinists and the links to further degeneracy is truly amazing, for instance one of the avenues of misdirection used by charlatans such as this has been to try to associate ID types with Holocaust denial but I doubt that the little fellows have never debated a Holocaust denier because they seem to have little use for actual historical evidence.

Various people have appealed to the theory of evolution to lend respectability to their appalling moral views...But this fact says very little about evolutionary theory itself. Virtually any morally neutral, or even morally good, doctrine can be misused for evil purposes. (Kitcher 1982:196)

Intellectual history demonstrates that Darwinian forms of reasoning and the degenerate anti-philosophy that sits behind it that was dead at its conception was not misused or abused, instead it was applied, which lead to death. Apparently these dead in the head fellows who are willing to engage in so much charlatanism for their pseudo-religion of Darwinism simply refuse to admit to the historical evidence, once again. Perhaps instead they are busy believing that their own little imaginings about history can serve as valid historical evidence again and perhaps their own imagination is even becoming "scientific" evidence too!

(ii) Creationists, most of whom are fundamentalist Christians, should be able to understand the point by considering some of the horrendous moral doctrines others have taken Christianity to be their basis for, and asking whether or not this means that Christianity must therefore be evil or incorrect...

Essential Christian reasoning can be known from Christian texts just as Darwinian reasoning can also be known, given that it can be proven that the Nazis engaged in Darwinian reasoning as opposed to Christian reasoning.

Yet although the Christian Church has a checkered history, it is evident that Christians can claim - quite justifiably - that the evils result from perversions of religious doctrine.

With justification drawn from its own texts and tradition. The reason these fellows cannot seem to do the same in the case of Darwinism and Darwinian reasoning and so instead are relying on a misdirection (Say, let's look at the perversion of Christian principles and reasoning instead or somethin'...) is because the eugenics movement and Nazism was not a perversion of Darwinian reasoning but instead its application given the state of science of its day. And it is not "science" that is holding back its application these days because Darwinian reasoning is still prevalent among scientists, instead it is once again the "wise lack of consistency" typical to those who try to be half-wits about half of the time.

(iii) Philosopher and historian Michael Ruse notes that while Germans from Bismarck to Hitler did seem to absorb a "bastardized" form of Darwinism, this form "bore little resemblance to anything to be found either in The Origin of Species or The Descent of Man" (Ruse 2000:81).

Now they finally get to the point, yet there's nothing there. No evidence is cited of this sort: "Darwin said this, but as you can see from the historical evidence the Nazis said and did this instead." Etc. Why do you suppose that is?

Moreover, explains Ruse,

it does not take much to see that there could have been no simple relationship between any philosophy based on evolutionary ideas and the ideology that was so important for the national socialists (Kelly 1981). Apart from anything else, evolutionism -- Darwinism in particular -- stresses the unity of humankind. The Victorians were quite happy to put themselves at the top of the evolutionary tree -- others, including Slavs and Jews, came lower down. However, ultimately, we are all part of one family.

Wrong, the metaphor of a tree clearly also represents the possibility of divisions or a degeneration away from an original purity as well as a lack of being"fit," i.e. one branch of Darwin's so-called Tree of Life could become corrupted and so in need of being pruned off so that the tree will not die and so on. I'm still waiting on the vast contradictions between Nazi attempts at "biological thinking" and the mentally retarded forms of Darwinian reasoning that seek to accomplish the same thing by failing to admit that organisms are living things and the like.

A consequence like this was anathema to Hitler and his cronies. It is revealing that although [German evolutionist Ernst] Haeckel (like so many of his countrymen at the time) was anti-Semitic, his solution to the Jewish problem was one of assimilation rather than elimination.

Evidence? I suppose it depends on what you mean by so-called "assimilation." Isn't it curious that these are the same fellows that still cling to Haeckel's frauds? They do not seem to mind associating themselves with someone who helped shaped the worldview of a proto-Nazi generation so that more and more youth would attempt to engage in biological thinking.

E.g.

I remember vividly a scene during a school picnic when I stood surrounded by a group of schoolboys to whom I expounded the gospel of Darwinism as Haeckel saw it.Goldschmidt claims that his experience of embracing this Darwinian worldview…was typical for educated young people of his day, and abundant testimony from his contemporaries confirms this. In 1921 the physiologist Max Verworn stated, “One can state without exaggeration that no scientist has exercised a greater influence on the development of our contemporary worldview than Haeckel.”

Ernst Haeckel, the most famous German Darwinist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, enthusiastically adopted Darwin’s theory of natural selection and applied the struggle for existence to humans in many of his writings. He believed the most important aspect of Darwinism was the animal ancestry of humans, which would “bring forth a complete revolution in the entire worldview of humanity.

(From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics and Racism in Germany
by Richard Weikart :11)

The prophet of “biological thinking,” the stygian stench that follows him is only appropriate given that he sought to invert what goes on in the womb:

To be sure, other movements, Marxism and Soviet Communism, for instance, have also claimed scientific validity. But only the Nazis have seen themselves as products and practitioners of the science of life and life processes—as biologically ordained guides to their own and the world’s biological destiny. Whatever their hubris, and whatever the elements of pseudo science and scientism in what they actually did, they identified themselves with the science of their time….
The contribution of the actual scientific tradition to this ethos was exemplified by the quintessentially German figure of Ernst Haeckel, that formidable biologist and convert to Darwinism who combined with ardent advocacy of the Volk and romantic nationalism, racial regeneration, and anti-Semitism. He was to become what Daniel Gasman has called ‘Germany’s major prophet of political biology.’

(The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the
Psychology of Genocide
By Robert Jay Lifton :441)

This was the very opposite of the policy endorsed and enacted by the Nazis...Truly, as scholars have shown, national socialism owed far more to the Volkish movements of the nineteenth century, and particularly to the so-called redemptive anti-Semitism of the group of Wagnerians at Bayreuth, than it did to anything to be found in the writings of evolutionists (Friedlander 1997). (Ruse 2000:81-82)

More charlatanism, it seems that those with the urge to merge cannot help themselves.

The late Carl Sagan adds a few comments....

For those who became bored with the incessant misdirection of these half-wits away from the thinking organism as such, Sagan added a few bits of his own form of drivel.

As to the list of material "causes"...for that matter, there would have been no Hitlerism if the pattern of matter that we call "Hitler" did not exist in history. Is that an argument against the power of the individual thinking organism to cause an unfolding/evolution of events that are good or evil? For some reason half-wits assume that someone must be arguing against material existence as well as any unfolding of events ("Why that would just be poof, there it is or somethin'.") if they point out to obvious spiritual realities like organisms desiring, experiencing, selecting and choosing based on their own sentiments and sentience. Why, the very notion of intelligent selection must be opposed to material existence according to those with the urge to merge, so how could it exist? Etc. Natural selection as the Darwinian way of denying that organisms are selecting and choosing was always a mentally retarded idea. It was dead at its own conception in the minds of some mentally incompetent organisms...yet they continue with it!

It was also mentioned Darwinism was used by communists...

It is not as clear as in Nazism, so I assume that these charlatans would have a grand old time with their red herrings and so on. Yet it would still be obvious that the general milieu of scientism based on the forms of "reasoning" or "thinking" that they still want to try to engage in was a key factor in all forms of socialism.

I can't resist an irony at the end:
...a better appreciation for evolutionary biology probably would have prevented many innocent in the Soviet Union from starving.

He may as well declare that Darwinian reasoning leads to am understanding of the Soil and the Blood more in tune with Nature than the Marxian.

Note that Marxism and its heretical branch still tended to share a common Darwinian vision anyway, e.g.:

Marx's friend Engels put it this way:
"Among all the nations and petty ethnic groups of Austria there are only three which have been the carriers of progress, which have played an active role in history and which still retain their vitality—the Germans, the Poles and the Magyars.For this reason they are now revolutionary. The chief mission of all the other races and peoples—large and small—is to perish in the revolutionary holocaust."
(Engels, “Der Magyarische Kampf”;trans.
as “Hungary and Panslavism” in
Blackstock and Hoselitz: 59)

"Hugh Lloyd-Jones comments that, 'remarks about Lassalle sometimes recall the tone of Goebbels.' W. H. Chaloner and W. 0. Henderson claim that Marx 'detested his own race. 'Max Geltman writes that Jews 'never knew that Marx had called for their utter disappearance from the face of the earth.' And Robert Payne remarks that Marx’s 'solution of the Jewish question was not very different from Adolph Hitler’s.''

("In the Interests of Civilization": Marxist Views
of Race and Culture in the Nineteenth Century
By Diane Paul
Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 42, No. 1.
(Jan. - Mar., 1981), pp. 115-138)

Why are there these historically verifiable similarities in vision based on Darwin's metaphoric Tree of Life, that he couldn't seem to admit was made up of living organisms? You aren't really fully taken in by the charlatanism of these half-wits, are you? Do you notice the missing evidence, the missing comparisons of Darwinian reasoning and texts to the supposed "perversion" of them in history? Why is it that Darwin's own version of perishing races found in the Descent of Man reads a lot like Engels vision? The supposed perversion of the correct version does not seem to be much of a change, that's probably why some fellows cannot seem to cite actual evidence to make comparisons. Perhaps we should imagine a different history and then cite our own imaginations as evidence while murmuring that is all that is "natural" and therefore our own imaginations define the truth about history? That seems typical to Darwinian "reasoning," after all.

Do you suppose that Christians arguing against a "perversion" of the Christian version of things would be as lacking in Christian reasoning, texts and tradition as these little fellows seem to be or that they'd sit about with arguments of this mentally incompetent structure: "Well, Darwinian reasoning was perverted this one time or somethin', so look over here at this and this! This one time, people burned witches or somethin'." (That red herring was a little ironic given that as the Inquisition spread there is evidence that the old superstitious/folk practice of witch burning decreased.)

Local politics...

A comment on this and this , in my experience with the fellow (That began mostly here.) all he can do is make a shift typical to the Leftist mind away from text and what is being stated to the person and their supposed feelings about things. That shift away from language does away with civilization, just as the rise of civilization is linked to language to the point that it is characteristically included in the very definition of the term. So you can expect a decline in the civility that comes naturally with language around the fellow unless you infuse language with meaning and shift the issue back to being defined by it. It seems to me that the Leftist mind cannot succeed in an area that is defined by text unless it directs and controls the flow of information. Well, it might take too long to try to explain that and it would only be an attempt anyway. This was just supposed to be a note about the local blogosphere. All I would say is that as for me I would just have some fun with the Leftist mind, leading it here and then there when it goes into projecting its little feelings about things and so on. In the end it will be left rather pathetically: "But isn't having a little feeling about things good or somethin'? At least I have my feelings, which means I'm sympathetic and tolerant. But you, you're a Big Meanie!"

And so on. Why, it's such a touching pathos that I'm about to cry a little tear about it right now. And there it goes, down my cheek, which means that I'm sympathetic and tolerant. And supposedly my own feelings can do away with facts, logic and evidence...

Something else to do is to just let the Leftist mind have its assertions about your supposed physical feelings or your identity because such things do not touch on any understanding of the metaphysical, transcendent and the same applies even to physical facts or conceptual facts that are not subjective and so in a smaller way transcend each individual subject/person. So I could say: "Even if I am feeling hatred and rage right now, yes, I'm just frothing and raging away! Well, this objective fact here still sits here and some bits of logic can easily be applied to it because I and my feelings had nothing to do with such things in the first place. I am quite in a rage though, rage and hate!" Etc.

One can do the same with their identity to redirect the shifts typical to the Leftist mind back to the objective. Unfortunately for some people I guess that isn't an option.

I never did understand the vast epistemic weight the Leftist mind gives to feelings and the personal when it comes to knowledge and admitting to it. E.g., I could die in a car crash tomorrow and have no more supposed subjective feelings of hate and rage toward the poor people of America that are morbidly obese, yet the poor would generally have the same amount of excess adipose tissue weighing them down anyway. They'd still generally be easy prey for the tin-pot socialists who want to control the Herd by caring for its health and so on. Supposedly the Herd will have "free" healthcare for all and the Leftist will take care of the poor people, for supposedly it cares enough to feel their pain in its little feelings about things. But does it really and how would one know or verify that something like feelings are authentic? For instance, in the case of the starving homeless it seems that everytime Leftists come into political power, poor people starve, so one wonders about their feelings or the possibility that their feelings may be irrelevant.

A comment that got out of hand.

I've already noted various points made in this one here over time. If you're interested in some of the research used search this blog for some of the citations for more.

Source, comments:
Surely you jest, Dr. Numbers.

Rarely come across an anti-scientific notion? Creationists believe that the Bible is a source of evidence that trumps anything a scientist might discover. [...] Another common imprecation was, “Do not let evidence fuel your appreciation of God. Let your appreciation of God influence your view of the evidence.”

It's hard to imagine anything more anti-scientific than that.

Ironically, he'd have no problem with: "Do not let the evidence fuel your appreciation of Nature. Let your appreciation of Nature influence your view of the evidence."

His ignorant criticism of creationist appreciation for the God of Nature is also ironic given that historically it has been those who adhere to creationist values who have generated the type of science and technology typical to the West.

Furthermore, there comes a time when the allegedly scientific arguments you are making are so weak and ignorant that you brand yourself as anti-science simply by offering them. Creationists love science and love what it can do? Then why do they persist in arguing that the second law of thermodynamics contradicts evolution?

Because there are real issues there that have to be drawn out given that ignorant bigots such as this have polluted language. They begin by polluting the term "evolution" to mean anything from a change in the size of finch beaks to the unfolding of any series of events that ever has been or can be. Is that falsifiable and testable? Of course not, yet that is the way the term is polluted by leading proponents of "evolution" and when some try to make a distinction such micro and macro evolution and than creates problems for Darwinists then it is back to all distinction and definition being of the dread "creationists." That's probably because fellows like this who have the urge to merge cannot engage in the definition typical to conceptual thought to save their own Life, so their terms tend to just blur together, sometimes they have even included Life and Death in their mergings. That's "evolution" to those who are conceptually and mentally retarded enough to believe it. Apparently such blurred "reasoning"/imagining evolves to be quite overwhelming when you begin to include your own imagination about the past* as evidence for the truth of your own hypothetical goo.

*An entirely too charitable summary of a form of such "reasoning":

The viewpoint of Coyne et al. (1988) is one in which past events are argued to explain, in a causal sense, the world around us. Such explanations cannot be verified or tested, and the only biological observations they require are that variation and differential reproduction occur. This is not a caricature, as a reading of Coyne et al. will verify. In keeping with this general viewpoint, proponents claim that species are explained with reference to history. Important characters are hence “mechanisms” that have established and maintained the separation between diverged lineages of an ancestral population. According to Coyne et al., even the adaptive purpose of the changes that resulted in these mechanisms is irrelevant.
We would ask where biology enters into this schema. The answer is that it does not. Rather, biology is interpreted in terms of a range of historical processes, including selection of variation over time. This could, with equal relevance, be used to understand any nonbiological phenomenon such as the development of the automobile, agricultural methods, culture, or men’s suits (Lewontin, 1976).

(Points of View
Species and Neo-Darwinism
By C. S. White; B. Michaux; D. M. Lambert
Systematic Zoology, Vol. 39, No. 4. (Dec., 1990), :400-401) (Emphasis added)

I suppose they cannot heap the contempt and disdain on the blindness of Darwinists that they deserve in such a forum. But it is not a caricature, even if those with the urge to merge immediately catch a fright at the definition that comes with their own text so that they must snivel of "quote mining," etc. It was actually known from early times that despite the specious title of his book, Darwinism does not and cannot explain the origin of things or the origin of any specific information.

E.g.

That Darwinism is not the whole doctrine of evolution is perceived clearly enough by Mr. O’Neill, who devotes two or three opening chapters to a lucid exposition of the well known fact that Natural Selection does not explain the origin of characters. This truth has for twelve years been maintained by the editors of this journal, as well as by others, and has been epitomized in the statement that “the origin of the fittest” is the primary problem of evolution, while the “survival of the fittest“ (Darwinism) is secondary.

(Review: The Refutation of Darwinism, and the Converse Theory of Development, Based Exclusively Upon Darwin's Facts by T. Warren O'Neill
The American Naturalist Vol. 14, No. 3 (Mar., 1880), :193) (Emphasis added)

That was their way of saying that Darwinism does not explain the origin of the information characteristic to the formation of organisms. Creationists all, I suppose...oh, those dread creationists! They'll bring the collapse of civilization and the Dark Ages. (Odd though, how in modern times only those like the Nazis and Communists have believed in worldviews rooted in variants of the Darwinian creation myth, with Dark Ages of barbarity seeming to follow.)

Why do they argue that natural selection is a meaningless tautology....

Please, that wasn't just all "creationists." And in some sense to say that the inanimate is all that "selects" is an argument to remove all the meaning/spirit from things, which is why Darwinism was dead at conception. As noted by this biologist:

“In my previous books... I tried to show that the currently accepted theory of evolution—called ‘neoDarwinism’ or ‘the modern synthesis’—is false. Taking an interest in the history of evolutionary thought in the course of subsequent work, I made a very remarkable and unexpected discovery: nobody, not even Darwin and his closest friends, ever believed in Darwin’s theory of natural selection: Darwinism was refuted from the moment it was conceived.

”
(Darwinism: The Refutation of a Myth
Reviewed by Gareth Neslson
Systematic Zoology, Vol. 37, No. 1 (Mar., 1988) :80) (Emphasis added)

What selected natural selection?


All of this was recognized very early and yet the Darwinian creation myth is propped up, clearly for religious reasons, so when creationists use the "holy writ" of its own scientific jargon, i.e. the religion's own terms, as according to this fellow that is like the Devil citing scriptures and so on.

Another critic pointed out that the Darwinan view is dead at conception later, although it was already known from the very beginning the same things must be pointed out time and again:

Electrons and nucleons are not known to be sentient, while the higher animals are. If a rat laps up a solution of saccharine, the rational ex planation of this lies in the fact that the solution tastes sweet and that the rat likes that. The tasting and liking are facts that physics and chemistry as known today cannot explain.
And this conclusion gives the whole show away. Because it acknowledges a conscious desire by an individual capable of such desire, it leads on further to the recognition of deliberate actions by individuals and the possibilities of error on their part. Thus a whole series of conceptions emerges that are absent from physics and chemistry as known today. Indeed, nothing is relevant to biology, even at the lowest level of life, unless it bears on the achievements of living beings: achievements such as their perfection of form, their morphogenesis, or the proper functioning of their organs; and the very conception of such achievements implies a distinction between success or failure—a distinction unknown to physics and chemistry.
But the distinction between success and failure is present in, and is indeed essential to, the science of engineering; and the logic of engineering does substantiate in fact what I am saying here of biology. No physical or chemical investigation of an object can tell us whether it is a machine and, if so, how it works. Only if we have previously discovered that it is a machine, and found out also approximately how it works, can the physical and chemical examination of the machine tell us anything useful about it, as a machine. Similarly, physical and chemical investigations can form part of biology only by bearing on previously established biological achievements, such as shapeliness, morphogenesis, or physiological functions.
A complete physical and chemical topography of a frog would tell us nothing about it as a frog, unless we knew it previously as a frog. And if the rules of scientific detachment required that we limit ourselves exclusively to physical and chemical observations, we would remain forever unaware of frogs or of any other living beings, just as we would remain ignorant also by such observations of all machines and other human contrivances.
The achievements which form the subject matter of biology can be identified only by a kind of appraisal which requires a higher degree of participation by the observer in his subject matter than can be mediated by the tests of physics and chemistry. The current ideal of “scientificality” which would refuse such participation would indeed destroy biology but for the wise neglect of consistency on the part of its supporters.

(Scientific Outlook: Its Sickness and Cure
by Michael Polanyi
Science New Series, Vol. 125, No. 3246 (Mar., 1957), pp. 482)

Essentially what Darwinists have been arguing is that an individual organism has virtually no role in its own evolution. Instead it is all physics, which is "science" and so on. Why do some little fellows that can hardly seem to think through their mind of the synaptic "gaps" keep comparing their hypothetical goo with the theory of gravity? Is the so-called "theory" of natural selection just like the theory of gravity? It seems that in theory the survival of the fittest is fit enough to explain all, yet in fact it does not.

...or that the fossil record contains no transitional forms...

The fossil record doesn't fit with the Darwinian creation myth, that's why creationist rubes are sometimes too comfortable with overblown rhetoric and bombastic negative assertions. Yet they still have a point and vast amounts of evidence for typology, even bigoted fellows like this that rely on small bits of stereotypical knowledge that read like talking points seem to know it on some level. I.e., it is claimed by those with the urge to merge that it is all so "overwhelming" and yet anyone who knows the evidence knows that it annihilates the Darwinian creation myth. There are too many exceptions, to many organisms that do not fit, too much for mere handwaving towards negative theology to fill in. As far as I know, creationists do not deal with all of the evidence against "natural selection" because it does not suit them to point to the life-cycles of parasites as evidence against all adaptations and organisms coming about by a process of minute "natural selections." That's probably because so many seem to view things based on an inversion of Darwinian reasoning: "If not natural selection, then divine selection!" But one shouldn't invert Darwinian "reasoning"/imagining because if you invert excrement it is still excrement, just as when you mutiply by zero you get zero.

...or that elementary probability theory proves evolution is false...

That's been brought up since the Wistar conference. I suppose they were all "creationists." Isn't that just like the Darwinian Herd though, they imagine that they've refuted "creationists" and then come to use that supposed fact to trample all dissent as well. It seems they can do anything once they set the degenerate epistemic standard of citing their own imagination about the past as actual evidence/"facts."

...or that all of the hominid fossils paleontologists have collected are either fully ape or fully human? If you love science then you pause a moment to educate yourself about the basics of the subject.

Anyone who knows the basics about paleoanthropology knows that the vast majority of paleoanthropologists have never even seen the fossils that they're constructing their hypotheses around. Etc., let's not play pretend here.

You don't routinely quote scientists out of context for the purpose of distorting what they believe.

I hope he's not trying to conflate Darwinists with scientists.

Referring to creationists as anti-science is not meant as a description of how they see themselves. It is meant as a description of what they are. Just as the Devil can cite scripture for his purposes, so too can creationists use scientific sounding jargon in making their case.

Now that is funny, coming from those who make use of their own pollution of language, beginning with the term "evolution."

Just as scripture can be cited there are "holy words" of science that can be distorted? Only if you develope words from the very beginning such as the term "evolution" itself that are religious enough to encompass all that is, has been or ever can or will be. After all, if a transcendent being of light came down from the sky and claimed to be responsible for creating Life as we know it that would be natural to us, naturally enough. So supposedly as long as it was here it would be natural and all scientific like, yet if it left then it would be supernatural and religious. That distinction may be fine in some ways, yet using it to claim that "faith" in the future based on records of past events is a lower form of knowledge than "science" or can be contradicted by a "science" based solely on a myopic view of current uniformitarian processes, etc., would be absurd.

The fact remains that in both word and deed their actions drip with contempt for science and scientists. It is terribly naive for Numbers to pretend otherwise.

He's probably playing pretend that those trying to prop up the tattered remnants of the Darwinian creation myth, i.e. Darwinists, are scientists again. Actually I find that most creationists are far to soft on Darwinists given that Darwinists are proto-Nazis by Nature. You might call it a natural selection for the urge to merge to slowly smother their mind of the synaptic gaps into their imagination. For if there is a gap then they imagine that they must fill it by murmuring about what is natural, which is supposedly what is "scientific" to the little fellows. They're not selecting anything as an organism, it is all Nature and natural selections. They cannot select against their own excrement becoming overwhelming to them.

Listen, there is a mind murmuring about how overwhelmed it is now: "There is no point in trying to convince those that are so sure in their belief that they wouldn't recognize overwhelming evidence to the contrary...

So you're overwhelmed by it all. It's a degenerate standard of evidence to imagine that we can slap the term "natural" on things we recognize as patterns and then play pretend that we have explained them, naturally. But very well, I suppose what people mean by natural is physical and by physical they mean something governed basically by a Newtonian worldview, although Newton was one of the dread creationists, etc. We can just assume various assumptions that people seem to be making when they murmur about what "natural" or scientific explanation is vs. what a supernatural explanation would be. Putting all that aside go ahead and overwhelm me and anyone else who cares to be overwhelmed, to begin with something small, what is a natural narrative for the copulatory organ of the male dragon fly? Let us even admit to a degenerate epistemic standard in which once someone has imagined a little story about the past which they call natural, naturally enough, then that is evidence for it. Indeed, if someone can imagine something about it then that is a theory on its way to being verified in fact! So it should be easy to overwhelm beginning with such little things as the copulatory organ of the male dragon fly, as well as hundreds of other adaptations.

Why do I suspect that all the talk of being "overwhelmed" has more to do with the proto-Nazi nature of the Darwinian Herd than much else?

Religion, again...

Problems [with Christianity (source)]:

1) We are reading a secondhand account of what Christ said and do not know that the quotes are accurate. And I’m sure you’ve heard of quote mining.

That is a common criticism of secondhand creatures, yet we wouldn't necessarily understand any bit of information first hand even if given the opportunity to see the metaphoric Light that bears information directly anyway. Information relies on an agreement between the sender and the reciever to admit to its nature. Even now you expect people not to dissect you and to accept what you have to say as bits of information, although they are secondhand artifacts of your brain events that may have "errors" naturally enough. If we assume that there is such a thing as error then if there is any unfolding of events after the original word/form is spoken or given then there is the possiblity that it may be deformed and the information corrupted as it unfolds.

2) We are reading an english translation of an ancient language and there are undoubtedly meanings and nuances lost or mangled in translation.

Not to mention the fact that there may be information that cannot even be represented in our degenerate forms of language that would probably look as strange hieroglyphics to us, if we could even see it. The pattern of the ancient narratives have something to say about language/"tongues" and the like, note the original naming of things that separates, forms and informs by the word, then man recognizing things, then later an attempt to merge heaven and earth based on a tower brought about by civilization/language that is ironically separated by words/language itself as it becomes a tower of babel and so a metaphor of Babel. Those with the urge to merge who live in a metaphoric Ivory Tower seem to pick up on some of it, at least metaphorically. E.g. Tower of Babel by Pennock, in which it is argued that civilization itself is at stake! Those with the urge to merge never seem to get the irony as they seek to bring civilization/language/intelligence to their end based on their practical and often violent resistance to transcendence in favor of immanence. On the other hand, intelligence is not all of transcendence either...but never mind.

3) The custody and integrity of the written record is questionable. ... They’ve passed through more or less a lot of hands and could have been modified along the way.

For that matter, it is rather ironic for a secondhand creature that has passed through some of its existence as a bit of information in some sperm and the like to come to think in its current stage of developement that it has a handle on knowledge enough to say much of anything about what forms of knowledge are questionable. I suppose if we cannot take things in hand then it is time to go on a quest to get a handle on things, yet the quest cannot be based on a quest for knowledge that is itself questionable. We have to begin somewhere, don't you know. And despite our age of scientism we can still know that written records preserve and define knowledge in a way that is superior to all others. If anything, what is written is less questionable than forms of knowledge that are not.

4) The difference between the God the old testament and the God of the new testament is so striking that to me they can hardly be the same God. It’s almost like someone saw that a mean and vengeful God in the old testament was losing popularity and that a gentle and loving God needed to step in for the religion to continue. In other words the linkage looks contrived to me. An invention.

(The framework of that argument in Gnosticism*.)

It seems to me that different patterns through the ages follow the scripts of Scriptures rather than such scripts being written as an imitation of their age. It was Christ himself who emphasized a sort of New Age of love in which he would send the Comforter to nurse us back to health and so on when the popular answer seemed to be crucifixion. Even today, we may live in a culture in which the notion of being more feminine is good, so good, impossible for the pattern to be perverted in fact and so there is almost no such thing left as "harlotry" or the like. Yet there are plenty of cultures in which such notions are remarkably unpopular just as there were before Christianity took a feminine turn. Popularity is not the guiding force, or if it was then the gospel writers were wrong about what was popular in the cultures at the time anyway.

There is little evidence that I know of that anything was written and formed to fit so that it could become popular. In fact, there is little evidence that scribbling scribes write to become popular as instead they usually write because they are not and the geeks still tend to be the unpopular to this day, meek little fellows that they are. Maybe in the back of his mind Paul thought, "I'll write a little about love here or somethin' to make Christianity popular in a more feminine age." but it certainly didn't seem to make him popular.

5) If God wanted us to know these things why did He need human spokesmen and human writers to communicate and record it? God could have emblazoned the ten commandments on the face of the moon instead of on stone tablets that Moses could carry down off the mountain.

Hypothetically, what would your argument be to living words that rejected their capacity to bear wit/knowledge because they could also witness the information that they contained and bore witness to? I suppose my argument would be, why reject your opportunity or wish for your own death? Of course God could have emblazoned the ten commandments on the face of the moon if the earth revolved around us, yet it clearly does not. Instead of such writing there is plenty of evidence that there is a sense of good and evil written on the metaphoric hearts of billions of secondhand creatures that unfold biologically again and again. The problem seems to be that people dislike the sense that comes naturally to them because of disordered/perverted desires and so would rather believe nonsense.

Would it be better to have a message written on the moon? Perhaps, although most likely all that would happen with a "Made by Yahweh." written on the moon* is that some fellow named Rael would come along and say, "Yahweh was the Big Meanie God but there's really some Yawehians that he's taking the credit for. And....uh, the first rule of the Yawehians is that young women have sex with me because that's the rule of loooove."

Etc.

*"P.S. This testament is written by the same God as the Old Testament! It's just the different ages based on the patterns you know as Father, Son and Mother. It's not all about you."

*

"In the god of the [Old Testament] he saw a being whose character was stern justice, and therefore anger, contentiousness and unmercifulness. The law which rules nature and man appeared to him to accord with the characteristics of this god and the kind of law revealed by him, and therefore it seemed credible to him that this god is the creator and lord of the world (κοσμοκράτωρ). As the law which governs the world is inflexible and yet, on the other hand, full of contradictions, just and again brutal, and as the law of the Old Testament exhibits the same features, so the god of creation was to Marcion a being who united in himself the whole gradations of attributes from justice to malevolence, from obstinacy to inconsistency."[8] In Marcionite belief, Christ is not a Jewish Messiah, but a spiritual entity that was sent by the Monad to reveal the truth about existence, and thus allowing humanity to escape the earthly trap of the demiurge. Marcion called God, the Stranger God, or the Alien God, in some translations, as this deity had not had any previous interactions with the world, and was wholly unknown.

Wikipedia on Marcionism

Vacation

Great ocean windsurfing today but no one took pictures of it.

On a different note I happened to see a special on CNN about some beetles eating spuce forests in Alaska. The framework of the report was that it is a travesty. I tend to agree, yet I find it interesting that people often project their subjective values onto Nature while assuming that they are objective. From the beetle's perspective it isn't a travesty, and in so far as beetles have a perspective it is probably more sentient and intelligent than the perspective of a tree. (For if a beetle eats a tree and the tree cannot feel it, etc.) At any rate, it's from our perspective viewed through our aesthetic values that spruce beetles eating away forests is wrong.

Ironically, if one believes the Darwinian creation myth then beetles and humans share a common ancestry and there is no transcendent basis for a difference between them. So we are left with the survival of the fittest, i.e. those organisms that best fit into Nature in the Darwinian way. Darwin also had some things to say about a sort of will/strength and survival but such notions do not "fit" with natural selection in which the driving force is Nature and not the organism. It seems that if we want strength, will and the willful organism that we must look to Nietzsche. In the case of Darwinian philosophy there isn't much of a reason to draw a distinction between our attempts to garden the Garden based on our vision of how things ought to be as if there is some (non-existent) divine mission or standard to do so. So there's little reason to condemn the beetles or "impose" our values on them. Like the little Darwinian fellows who tell stories about their evolution, they're just fitting into Mommy Nature by her natural selections. Nietzsche is more interesting to me, as he sees the organism as capable of an act of will that will help define its own evolution. He is the philosopher of creativity that tried to believe in the Darwinian creation myth. So when it comes to the beetles I supppose he'd say that to the creative, to the intelligent, to those organisms that can manufacture values by an act of will goes the right to do so.

As for me, it seems to me that people are assuming that there is a transcendent and objective basis for values that would be subjective and so "imposed" by an act of will without one. The Leftist mind often murmurs of the supposed "imposition" of morality and religion or the things of transcendence, yet ironically it constantly tries to assume the existence of spiritual things and works to impose them itself. Nietzsche and the fascists were more honest about their assumptions and did not live as intellectual parasites on Christianity because they openly believed in the Darwinian creation myth and began their philosophy from there while rejecting the Christian narrative as being from the Jews. In contrast, the Leftist mind usually wants to maintain the Judeo-Christian ethic in various ways (as they slowly do away with it) while rejecting any historical or factual claims made in Christian texts.

An ID proponent on Ann Coulter's book

Interesting, I only have one of her books because Leftists took the time to attack it. If Leftists feel the need to call someone hateful (don't be hatin'!) and begin to pretend that the poor homeless that they can drag into things at any moment are about to starve, etc., then it is often a sign that someone is skewering them. If they begin to invent their Gays© and pretend that they're going to get beat down in the street if the person is not censored then you know that the Leftist mind feels threatened.

I think I bought one of Coulter's books because a Leftist said it was "shrill." I never did read it. Maybe I'll take it on vacation.* It seems that the way Coulter is going one will have to read her books just to find out what people are talking about. And that's a good situation for an author to be in. Although from what I hear she probably is shrill, so her success as an individual may harm the Right. Everyone should engage in self-censorship and sound self-government in so far as it is possible so that power can be retained and maintained by the individual/Self, otherwise power tends to shift to the State.

*I'm going to Hatteras NC on Friday. I may blog some windsurfing pictures from down there and blog lightly through next week. I've already been slower lately. It was windy last year but it probably won't be this year, so we'll see.

The DCBA

I added some links to a local network of conservative bloggers to the sidebar.

Some of them are trying to explain why they disagree with another local now on the Left, Michael Berg. He's running as a Green, which seems to say a lot about the psychological nature of Greens these days. Instead of telling him to go into the counseling that he needs the Greens seem to want to let him try to work out his issues in their political party, along with the rest.

To the politics of it, with avowed enemies like this you can see why Bush doesn't need many friends. Those that tend to the Right seem to be trying to be nice to Berg and so avoid dealing with his Leftist insanity and psychosis. I.e., a derangement characterized by a loss of touch with basic reality. That is to say that he'd probably still be murmuring about the supposed powers of verbal "negotiation" as his own head got cut off, if it came to that. The Leftist mind fails to realize that language only applies among those who are already civilized or on the path to civilization.

On the other side of insanity, if a person who tends to the Right goes insane then they will most likely be proclaiming themselves to be the Messiah and the like as a matter that is not negotiable.

In either case it is dehumanizing to claim that someone can be reduced to being insane in the membrane, yet sometimes people are just that.

DCBA bloggers trying to get at good and evil on the issue:

Anna Venger, on the difference between a psychotic Rightist claiming to be the martyred messiah and a conservative trying to achieve balance:

Furthermore, to put President Bush in the same category as Zarqawi, calling him a terrorist, slanders the President. Not only that, but he says Bush is even more of a terrorist than al-Zarqawi. Our military is there in Iraq trying to stabilize the country so we can turn over a free nation to the Iraqi people. Zarqawi, on the other hand,* is trying to stop that process and has been involved in the deaths of not only U.S. soldiers, but innocent Iraqis as well, attempting to prevent them from obtaining the freedom they desire and deserve.

Berg on Zarqawis Death

*For compared to Zarqawi Bush is on the other hand.

Politakid, hinting at insanity or the psychological aspect of it. I.e. when people cannot handle things. It seems that if you go all one way toward the left-hand way then reality begins to slip from one's grasp as things get out of hand. That can happen to Rightists too. Politakid's theory on some Leftists:

I think Berg, like Cindy Sheehan, is overcome with grief and just went off the deep end because he doesn't know how else to handle it.

Michael Berg, Saddened by Death of Son's Murderer

Amusing

The Intelligent Designer Speaks

Bird brains

An interesting observation from a book I'm finishing up:

Newly hatched chicks, ducklings, and goslings “imprint” on, or form an attachment to, the first moving object they encounter, and they then follow it around. Under normal circumstances, this imprinting instinct causes them to bond with their mother, but if the eggs are hatched in an incubator and young birds first meet a person, they will follow that person around instead. In laboratory experiments they can even be induced to imprint on moving balloons or other inanimate objects.

In his experiments, Peoc’h used a small robot that moved around on wheels in a series of random directions. At the end of each movement, it stopped, rotated through a randomly selected angle, and moved in a straight line for a randomly determined period before stopping and rotating again, and so on. These movements were determined by a random-number generator* inside the robot. The path it traced out was recorded. In control experiments, its movements were indeed haphazard.

Peoc’h exposed newly hatched chicks to this robot, and they imprinted on this machine as if it were their mother, Consequently they wanted to follow it around, but Peoc’h stopped them from doing so by putting them in a cage. From the cage the chicks could see the robot, but they could not move toward it. Instead, they made the robot move toward them (Figure 16.1). Their desire to be near the robot somehow influenced the random-number generator so that the robot stayed close to the cage. Chicks that were not imprinted on the robot had no such effect on its movement.

In other experiments, Peoc’h kept non-imprinted chicks in the dark. He put a lighted candle on the top of the robot and put the chicks in the cage where they could see it. Chicks prefer being in the light during the daytime, and they “pulled” the robot toward them, so that they received more light.

Peoc’h also carried out experiments in which rabbits were put in a cage where they could see the robot. At first they were frightened of it, and the robot moved away from them; they repelled it. But rabbits exposed to the robot daily for several weeks were no longer afraid of it and tended to pull it toward them.

Thus the desire or fear of these animals influenced random events at a distance so as to attract or repel the robot. This would obviously not be possible if animals’ desires and fears were confined inside their brains. Instead, their intentions reached out to affect the behavior of this machine.

(Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming
Home: And Other Unexplained Powers of Animals
by Rupert Sheldrake :271-272)

Related books: The Quantum Brain
Related posts: The Quantum Brain

*Note, there is no such thing as a random number "generator." I.e., the programmer has to find a source of entropy outside the computer to use as a sample of the degenerate. Then we call that "random" and make use of it.

(From the perspective of "beings of light" what we call random in all probability wouldn't be random, but that would be based on a frame of reference that we cannot see or know. As for us, things are often random and uncertain enough that our choices matter. So you're supposed to make choices about things that are already known and predestined to be or to use a metaphor, run a race that is already layed out. And so on, so let the sniveling about how can we choose if things are already known and predestined begin...I suppose the sniveling about it on the one hand vs. the silly arguments about knowledge that one cannot have on the other was all predestined too? Don't mind me, I was probably predestined to make fun.)

Two links..

Two interesting posts from Uncommon Descent:
Berlinski on Chomsky, Ideological Orthodoxy, and Peer Review

Breaking the Peer-Review Barrier


On Chomsky, this is the sort of thing that he's said at times:

It is perfectly safe to attribute [innate mental structures] to 'natural selection', so long as we realize that there is no substance to this assertion, that it amounts to nothing more than a belief that there is some naturalistic explanation for these phenomena. . . . In the case of such systems as language and wings it is not easy even to imagine a course of selection that might have given rise to them.

--Noam Chomsky (emphasis added)

Unfortunately, those with the urge to merge view evidence against their imaginings as a challenge to begin citing their own imaginations as evidence against the actual evidence, yet again.* Trying to get them to realize that there is no substance to their imaginings unless they model and test them is like sticking your hand in a mud puddle, they and their hypothetical goo will just fit to it. It seems that they can also easily imagine that their own imagination is a conceptual model or defined statement that is testable and falsifiable. Perhaps all that is what comes of their mind existing only in their imagination.

*E.g.

Our pre-language ancestors may have simply been missing one thing: the Merge operation.

Carl Zimmer

Zimmer is one with quite the urge to merge, as I've noted before. I wish he'd keep his Merge operation to himself, though. It's good material, but a bit embarrassing.

Maybe I should get a dog.

A little more on dogs from the writings of a quintessential half-wit, so you'll have to mine through it for the essential half of knowledge that is true while discarding little stories about the existential past that now supposedly exists only in a sort of unknown oblivion, instead of yet being known by and in the Mind of God.

It would seem that if you deny all that is essential then the present is all that matters, yet if you deny the existential then matter does not matter at all and then one's mind gets lost in a placid nostalgia about the past or perhaps the fervor of ideological claims about the future. At any rate, you may have to sift through these bits of knowledge on dogs while keeping the essential nature of time in mind:

D. K. Belyaev and his colleagues took captive silver foxes, Vulpes vulpes, and set out systematically to breed for tameness. They succeeded, dramatically. By mating together the tamest individuals of each generation, Belyaev had, within 20 years, produced foxes that behaved like Border collies, actively seeking human company and wagging their tails when approached. That is not very surprising, although the speed with which it happened may be.* Less expected were the by-products of selection for tameness. These genetically tamed foxes not only behaved like collies, they looked like collies. They grew black-and-white coats, with white face patches and muzzles. Instead of the characteristic pricked ears of a wild fox, they developed ‘lovable’ floppy ears. Their reproductive hormone balance changed, and they assumed the habit of breeding all the year round instead of in a breeding season. Probably associated with their lowered aggression, they were found to contain higher levels of the neurally active chemical serotonin. It took only 20 years to turn foxes into ‘dogs’ by artificial selection.
[...]
No doubt the original story of the evolution of dogs from wolves was similar to the new one simulated by Belyaev with foxes, with the difference that Belyaev was breeding for tameness deliberately. Our ancestors did it inadvertently, and it probably happened several times, independently in different parts of the world. Perhaps initially, wolves took to scavenging around human encampments.
[...]
Several writers have speculated, plausibly enough, about orphaned cubs being adopted as pets by children. Experiments have shown that domestic dogs are better than wolves at ‘reading’ the expressions on human faces. This is presumably an inadvertent consequence of our mutualistic evolution over many generations. At the same time we read their faces, and dog facial expressions have become more human-like than those of wolves, because of inadvertent selection by humans. This is presumably why we think wolves look sinister while dogs look loving, guilty, soppy and
so on.

A distant parallel is the case of the Japanese ‘samurai crabs These wild crabs have a pattern on their back which resembles the face of a Samurai warrior. The Darwinian theory to account for this is that superstitious fishermen tossed back into the sea individual crabs that slightly resembled a Samurai warrior. Over the generations, as genes for resembling a human face were more likely to survive in the bodies of ‘their’ crabs, the frequency of such genes increased in the population until today it is the norm. Whether that story of wild crabs is true or not, something like it surely went on in the evolution of truly domesticated animals.

(The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution
by Richard Dawkins :29-31) (Emphasis added)

He says that sort of thing a lot, i.e., "Whether the story I just made up or cited is true or not, I'm sure it is the correct likeness of what happened." If you ever find yourself saying or writing such things very often then it may be time to go back to the original philosophical assumptions that have led you to do so and examine them. I.e., you generally should not be engaging in a form of reasoning in which you expect reason to emerge out of and evolve from your own drivel, as adding more hypothetical goo just makes more. If you want something to make sense, then you have to make it make sense based on an essential structure of reason and logic that already exists by design.

*The fact is, nothing has been observed to be preventing rapid changes within "kinds"/forms of life, i.e. life forms, and yet there does seem to be something causing forms to be maintained. Take butterflies, if one is silly enough to interpret the fossil record as recording millions upon millions of years (despite all the evidence for the existence of fossils comporting with catastrophism, cataclysm and Great Doom, etc.) then the basic form that we still call "butterfly" in this day and age was the same millions of years ago. The evidence is the same with many organisms, although many are also extinct. That pattern of the general maintenance of form and the extinction of certain forms seems to indicate that more and more life forms are dying out instead of more and more forms emerging. According to most Darwinists we are to blame for what is apparently happening because their Mommy Nature supposedly tends to create Life and life forms given the mystical powers of her "natural selections" that supposedly birthed all life forms in the first place. But they're wrong about Nature, so their ideas matter little.

[Related posts: Empirical evidence for the transphysical?]

Empirical evidence for the transphysical?

...or empirical evidence for the existence of things outside of Newtonian physics. Note that all things are "physical" to us if for no other reason than that is what we call every thing that we are aware of as an object. If you are aware of that then you may become aware of various things that do not fit the Newtonian worldview, not that Newton or many other physicists would recognize the type of worldview that has been built on their understanding of physics. For instance, Newton was a young earth creationist just as Maxwell and others who developed the conceptual equations that have found their technological application in things like cell phones and the internet these days were. I mention that because those who believe in the Darwinian creation myth act as if creationism will lead to the Dark Ages and often try to pretend that civilization will collapse if their icons and mythological narratives of naturalism are not imprinted on the minds of students by the State. Yet if that were true, then Newton and Maxwell would not have developed the conceptual thinking by which we now know enough to have the knowledge that is being applied in technology.

It is doubtful that Newton would agree with the worldviews and philosophies that have been built on his insights. So ironically, it is doubtful that he would have a problem with possible empirical evidence for that which would be "transphysical." (As defined in reference to his conceptual view of the world.) Instead, it is those who have built their worldviews based on Newtonian physics who seem to have a problem with admitting to such evidence.

Here is some possible evidence for the importance of mind in the little things of life, like dogs that know when their owners are coming home:

Moreover, Mr. and Mrs. Smart had already noticed that Jaytee [a dog] anticipated Pam’s return [home] even when she arrived in unfamiliar vehicles.

Nevertheless, to check that Jaytee was not reacting to the sound of Pam’s car or other familiar vehicles, we investigated whether he still responded when she traveled by unusual means: by bicycle, by train, and by taxi. He did.

Pam did not usually tell her parents in advance when she would be coming home, nor did she telephone to inform them. Indeed, she often did not know in advance when she would be returning after spending an evening out, visiting friends, or shopping. But her parents might in some cases have guessed when she would be coming and then, consciously or unconsciously, communicated their expectation to Jaytee. Some of his reactions might therefore be due to her parents’ anticipation rather than to some mysterious influence from Pam herself.

To test this possibility, we carried out experiments in which Pam set off at times selected at random after she had left home. These times were unknown to anyone else. In these experiments, Jaytee started to wait when she set off, or rather a minute or two before while she was making her way to her car, even though no one at home knew when she would be coming. Therefore his reactions could not be explained in terms of her parents’ expectations.
By this stage it was clearly important to start taping Jaytee’s behavior so that a more precise and objective record could be kept. [...] Pam and her parents kindly agreed to do this filmed experiment with Jaytee.

Together with Dr. Heinz Leger and Barbara von Melle...I designed an experiment using two cameras, one filming Jaytee continuously in Pam’s parents’ house, and the other following Pam as she went out and about.

This experiment duly took place in November 1994. Neither Pam nor her parents knew the randomly selected time at which she would be asked to return.

Some three hours and fifty minutes after she had set out, she was told it was time to go home. She then walked to a taxi stand, arriving there five minutes later, and reached home ten minutes after that. As usual, Jaytee greeted her enthusiastically.

From the videotapes, Jaytee’s behavior can be observed in a detail not previously possible. During the period that Pam was out, he spent practically all the time lying quite calmly by the feet of Mrs. Smart. In the edited version produced by ORF for transmission on television, over the period that Pam was told to return, both videotapes can be seen together on a split screen in exact synchrony, so that Pam can be observed on one side of the screen, and Jaytee on the other. To start with, Jaytee is, as usual, lying by Mrs. Smart’s feet. Pam is then told that it is time to return, and almost immediately Jaytee shows signs of alertness, with his ears pricked. Eleven seconds after Pam has been told to go home, while she is walking toward the taxi stand, Jaytee gets up, walks to the window, and sits there expectantly. He remains at the window for the entire duration of Pam’s return journey.

There seems no possible way in which Jaytee could have known by normal sensory means at what instant Pam was setting off to come home. Nor could it have been routine, since the time was chosen at random and was at a time of day when Pam would not normally have returned.
This experiment highlights the importance of Pam’s intentions. Jaytee started to wait when Pam first knew she was going home, before she got into the vehicle and began the taxi journey.

(Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming
Home: And Other Unexplained Powers of Animals
by Rupert Sheldrake :56-57)

I am no longer in the habit of accepting or simply assuming the "natural" explanation first and treating that as the explanation that supposedly defines whether something is explained or unexplained. For instance, there are some dogs that are known to be able to detect when their owner is going to have a seizure. We could explain that in various ways, perhaps they pick up on a change in body odor and the like. Yet I would not accept that explanation based on nothing but the form of reasoning that has become typical to naturalists: "If we assume that my explanation is true because I call it natural, then it is true!" I.e., you are supposed to accept their explanation as a working hypothesis that is well on its way to being a theory "just like gravity" based on little more than a wave of their hand and murmurings about what science must be limited to according to their own philosophic preferences. It may well be that the dog is picking up a change in body odor, yet one should not accept that explanation by assuming it is so as a matter of first principle or give it any preference based on philosophic naturalism or what passes for "naturalism" these days. In so much as it is an actual and conceptual idea, philosophic naturalism can be tested against the empirical, the logical, etc. The main problem is that it is not an actual idea and more just vague murmurings that include all that is in terms like "natural."

I'll be back.

I'm going to have to go a little longer without updating the blog. I may get back to blogging (and email) by tomorrow night or Saturday, the end of the semester is a busy time.