Reflectorites
Below are web article extracts for the period 7 - 15 March, with my comments in
square brackets.
I have added some gene therapy extracts at the end without comment.
Steve
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http://www.kcstar.com/item/pages/local.pat,local/37744fa1.314,.html The Kansas
City Star ... Kansas Board of Education's science standards continue to draw
controversy By KATE BEEM The Kansas City Star Date: 03/14/00 ... TOPEKA -
- Almost a year after they first came before the Kansas Board of Education, the
state's new science standards are still a hot-button topic. Five of the eight speakers
in the open forum of the board's meeting Tuesday addressed the standards, which
the board approved in August on a 6-4 vote. Four of those who spoke criticized
the standards, which the state's testing program will be based on. ... But even as
the board met, work was progressing at the University of Kansas on new science
tests based upon the standards, which de-emphasize evolution and leave out
references to the big-bang theory and the age of the Earth. ... New science and
social studies tests will be given to students in spring 2001. That does not leave
much time to write the test, review the questions and field-test the exam in
classrooms in the fall. The KU center will ask teachers from a random sample of
Kansas schools to help the center write the test questions. ... Students in the
fourth, the seventh and the 10th grades will take the science exams. ... about 30
teachers [were needed] to write questions and 30 to review them. Some critics of
the standards have said that few Kansas science teachers will agree to be involved
.... [It's still false to say the new standards "de-emphasize evolution". The new
standards have a *lot* more about evolution than the old standards. That Darwinists
continually misrepresent this simple point, despite it being pointed out to them many
times that it is simply false, makes me cautious in accepting *anything* they say
unless I can check it for myself.]
http://www.zogby.com/news/ReadNews.dbm?ID=199 "An overwhelming number
of Americans believe creationism should be taught equally in public schools along
with evolution." - Zogby American Values Poll Released: March 09, 2000 New
Zogby "American Values Polls" reveals: Creationism & evolution should be taught
equally ... An overwhelming number of Americans believe creationism should be
taught equally in public schools along with evolution, a new Zogby's "American
Values Poll" reveals. The February survey of 1,028 adults throughout the nation
showed that 63.7% of those surveyed agreed that creationism needs to be part of
the regular public school curriculum, including 38.9% who strongly agreed. The
survey showed that just three in 710 of the respondents (32.2%) disagreed with the
notion of creationism being taught in public schools. Zogby's "American Values"
Polls are conducted quarterly to probe more deeply into what values Americans
hold and what values will ultimately influence their behavior. This is the second
poll in a continuing series. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3.2%. ... [Despite
an overwhelming educational, legal and media advantage, Darwinists have failed in
their 75-year attempt to convince the U.S. public that life originated
and developed without a Creator. It will be interesting if the new U.S. President will give
effect to what opinion polls consistently reveal the majority want. At the very least
the problems and philosophical assumptions of Darwinism should be taught.]
http://www.space.com/opinion/gonzalez_000229.html ... Mar 14, 2000 space.com
... Alien Intelligence? Think Again By Guillermo Gonzalez .... Rare Earth
Punctures Alien Assumptions ... Opinions. For too long, the astronomy
establishment has spouted propaganda about extraterrestrial intelligence, writes
astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez. But now, a real debate has begun. ... The
existence of extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) has been debated since the ancient
Greeks. Views have never been unanimous, and the center of opinion has
periodically shifted between positive and negative. Over the last few decades, both
intellectual and public opinion have been decisively in the pro-ETI camp.
Unfortunately, the debate has taken place on a very slanted playing field, at least in
the United States. Among astronomers, the pro-ETI forces have gained the power
to effectively squash dissenting opinion in recent years. This power is exemplified
by the "gatekeepers" at popular and even some refereed science journals, and by
the successful public relations of the SETI institute (see, for example, the movie
Contact). While I was a "believer" in ETI most of my life, I changed my mind
about 10 years ago, after I thought carefully about the astronomical and
geophysical requirements for advanced life in the universe. I found that ETI
proponents were ignoring basic constraints such as high levels of radiation in many
regions of the universe. These proponents use the Drake Equation (invented by
astronomer Frank Drake) to estimate the number of civilizations in the galaxy. But
the equation is laden with optimistic assumptions and virtually useless. ... Perhaps
the single most influential criticism of the pro-ETI position in the U.S. was just
published in book form -- Rare Earth. It is by two of my colleagues at the
University of Washington, Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee; we met often during
the last couple of years while the book was being put together to discuss
astronomical constraints on advanced life. The book's thesis is that advanced life
may be extremely rare due to: 1) the many potential hazards in the universe and 2)
the stringent requirements for its existence. The book's growing success shows
that a significant fraction of the public wants a real debate on the subject, not one-
sided propaganda from the astronomy establishment. ... [This shift from believing
that life was abundant and intelligent life plentiful in the universe, to believing that
life may be rare and intelligent life outside of Earth non-existent, is remarkable. If
life and intelligent life were plentiful it would be regarded as a confirmation of
materialism and a problem for Intelligent Design and particularly Christianity.
Since aliens have taken the place of God in public mythology, if the idea starts to
sink in that we really might be alone it may have almost as profound an effect as a
discovery by SETI that we weren't!]
http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/health/031400hth-behavior-evolution.html
The New York Times March 14, 2000 Human Nature: Born or Made? ... By
ERICA GOODE When two scientists proposed in a recent book that rape was best
viewed as a sexual act with its roots in evolution, it set off a squall of protest from
feminists and social scientists... Even last week the controversy continued, with the
book's authors engaging in a rancorous exchange over a critical review in the
scientific journal Nature. But the case put forward by Dr. Randy Thornhill and Dr.
Craig Palmer in "A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual
Coercion," ...was not, as some assumed, a fringe theory developed by a pair of
renegade researchers. Rather, the arguments made by Dr. Thornhill and Dr. Palmer
fit into a larger theoretical framework, the work of a group of scientists who have
ushered Darwin into new and provocative areas, including sexual attraction
between men and women, parenting, jealousy and violence. ... The genes for these
complex mental mechanisms, the argument goes, were passed on through the
generations because they adaptive, enhancing survival or reproductive success, and
eventually, they spread widely and became standard equipment. But in the year
2000, such mechanisms may or may not be adaptive, and may or may not represent
aspects of behavior that society wants to encourage. ...even if rape was adaptive in
the distant past, a notion even many of Dr. Thornhill and Dr. Palmer's like-minded
colleagues think dubious, that would not mean that it is excusable or should not be
heavily punished. .. Evolutionary psychologists have not always carried on their
campaign quietly. They have issued a noisy assault on the way the social sciences
have done business for the last 50 years, asserting that social scientists have a
collective phobia about possible biological influences on behavior and an obsession
with more "politically correct" environmental explanations. Some researchers have
thrust their work into the spotlight by pursuing topics that seem guaranteed to
push people's emotional buttons, rape being only the latest example. In the
process, the scientists have gained a reputation for a self-confidence bordering on
arrogance ... biology, applied to human behavior, also has a disturbing history of
misuse. .."social Darwinism," a 19th-century theory that borrowed catch words of
evolutionary thinking and twisted them into a justification for class differences: the
struggle for wealth and power, social Darwinists argued, was a battle for "survival
of the fittest," ... Darwin's theory, stretched and distorted in various ways, was also
called upon by the Nazis as a rationale for genocide, and has been a staple of
forced sterilization campaigns and racist propaganda. ... Dr. Stephen Jay Gould...in
particular, has continued to find fault with the work of scientists, including
evolutionary psychologists, who seek to explain traits as "adaptations." In fact, he
argues, many traits are not the products of natural selection, favored because they
enhance reproduction or survival, but are simply random byproducts of other
evolutionary developments. ... Some evolutionary biologists have also historically
opposed applying Darwinian principles to humans...because they think the task is
simply too complicated....to tease out the legacy of evolution from the effects of
thousands of years of human culture presents almost insurmountable obstacles,
particularly given the limits on the kinds of experiments that can be done with
people.... Still, some evolutionary psychologists feel their arguments for biology
must overcome substantial resistance. "There is a flagrant double standard that's
applied to the evidence," said Dr. Buss, whose latest book, "The Dangerous
Passion" (Free Press, 2000) deals with jealousy, and who has recently proposed
that human beings may have a specialized mental module for murder. "If it's an
evolutionary hypothesis, you have to document mountains of evidence before
anyone will take it seriously, and even then it will be dismissed," Dr. Buss said....
[More on this "A Natural History of Rape" debate. Thornhill and Palmer seem to
want to have it both ways, claiming that rape is built-into our selfish genes, yet
"that would not mean that it is excusable or should not be heavily punished". Buss'
claim about there being a "specialized mental module for murder" maybe the
reductio ad absurdum of this genre. The great thing about this debate is that the
general public will start to realise some of the less palatable aspects of Darwinist
thinking. Even if other Darwinists oppose evolutionary psychology, the public may
at least realise how arbitrary are Darwinist claims about what is, and is not, the
result of natural selection.]
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000313/sc/tech_threat_2.html Yahoo! ...
March 13 .. New Technologies Imperil Humanity - U.S. Scientist SAN
FRANCISCO (Reuters) - The co-founder of one of Silicon Valley's top technology
companies believes scientific advances may be ushering humanity into a nightmare
world where supersmart machines force mankind into extinction....Sun
Microsystems Inc. .... chief scientist Bill Joy urges technologists to reconsider the
ethics of the drive toward constant scientific innovation. "We are being propelled
into this new century with no plan, no control, no brakes," Joy writes. "The last
chance to assert control -- the fail-safe point -- is rapidly approaching." Joy's article
comes as a rare cry of caution in an industry that thrives on relentless and often
unplanned advances and is now riding the boom of a "new economy" expansion
attributed to technological progress. The warning is all the more disturbing
because of the author's own impressive tech credentials. A leading computer
researcher who developed an early version of the Unix operating system, Joy has
more recently pioneered software technologies like Java and was co-chairman of a
presidential commission on the future of information technology. Joy's fears focus
on three areas of technology undergoing incredibly rapid change. ... The first,
robotics, involves the development of "thinking" computers ... setting the
groundwork for a "robot species" of intelligent robots that create evolved copies
of themselves. The second, genetics, deals with scientific breakthroughs in
manipulating the very structure of biological life. While Joy says this has led to
benefits such as pest-resistant crops, it also has set the stage for new, man-made
plagues that could literally wipe out the natural world. The third, nanotechnology,
involves the creation of objects on an atom-by-atom basis, which before long could
be harnessed to create smart machines that are microscopically small. All three of
these technologies share one characteristic absent in earlier dangerous human
inventions such as the atomic bomb: they could replicate themselves, creating a
cascade effect that could sweep through the physical word in much the same way a
virus spreads through the computer world. "It is no exaggeration to say we are on
the cusp of the further perfection of extreme evil," Joy writes. "An evil whose
possibility spreads well beyond that which weapons of mass destruction
bequeathed to nation states on to surprising and terrible empowerment of extreme
individuals." ... [Bill Joy is one of the computer industry's great visionaries, and
what he says should be taken seriously. Maybe, to paraphrase MIT's Joseph
Weizenbaum (the creator of ELIZA), "not everything in science that can be done,
*should* be done.]
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000311/sc/environment_gorillas_2.html
Yahoo! ... March 11 ... Poachers Decimate Gorilla Population in East Congo By
Todd Pitman BUKAVU, Congo (Reuters) - Poaching has decimated the
population of endangered gorillas in the war-ravaged east of the Democratic
Republic of the Congo, officials said on Saturday. Only 70 eastern lowland gorillas
remain in the highlands of Kahuzi-Biega National Park, just outside the lakeside
border town of Bukavu, compared with a population of 258 several years ago.
Most of the gorillas have been killed in the last year by poachers, militiamen and
villagers in search of food.... Villagers living around the park have chopped down
trees for charcoal and firewood and hunt animals, including antelope and
chimpanzees, for "bushmeat." "People here have no money, but in the park they
can find what they need," one park official said. "They can find bushmeat, gold,
diamonds, ivory. It's become a business, and we can't control it." ... corruption and
unfulfilled promises on the part of local rebel authorities have compounded the
problem. ... [At least one of Darwin's predictions is coming true (see
tagline).]
http://www.cnn.com/2000/NATURE/03/10/environment.mines.reut/ ... CNN ...
Acid-eating bug may be to blame for mine pollution March 10, 2000 ...
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- A newly discovered microbe that eats iron and
thrives in acid may be one of the main culprits causing pollution from metal ore
mining, researchers said on Thursday. The microbe, dubbed Ferroplasma
acidarmanus, seems to be able to make polluting sulfuric acid out of the sulfides
found in metal ores ... It is a member of an ancient class of one-celled organisms
called archaeons, ... The discovery may help explain why sulfur becomes part of
nasty compounds so quickly around mines. It is also of interest to biologists
because the microbe has no cell wall, defying the idea that microorganisms tough
enough to live in harsh environments do it with the help of thick barriers. ... "It
oxidizes irons and forms slimes and grows on pyrite sediments." ... Also at:
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000309/sc/environment_mines_1.html
[Sounds like an interesting `bug'. If this has been converting sulphides to sulphuric
acid for billions of years, one wonders that there are any sulphides left. Maybe it is
a fairly recent adaptation?]
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000308/sc/science_brain_1.html ... Yahoo! ...
March 8 ... Scientists Map Children's Brain Development LONDON (Reuters)
Scientists said Wednesday they had successfully mapped the development of the
brains of children between the ages of three and 15. ... the images provided new
information about which areas of the brain were involved in learning at different
ages. ... The scans of three and six-year-olds showed peak growth rates in frontal
circuits of the brain that help to sustain a vigilant mental state and to plan new
actions. The researchers also found that growth rates in an area of the brain linked
to language were slow between the ages of three and six but speeded up from six
to 15 years when fine tuning of language usually occurs. "The ability to learn new
languages declines rapidly after the age of 12 years, as does the ability to recover
language function if linguistic areas in one brain hemisphere are surgically
resected," the scientists added. ... [More evidence of Chomsky's claim that the
acquisition of language is a unique `hard-wired' feature of the human brain.]
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000308/sc/science_profiling_1.html ... Yahoo!
... March 8 ... UK Firm Applies for Patent on Gene Profile System By Patricia
Reaney LONDON (Reuters) - A British company has applied for a patent for a
gene-profiling system that can quickly reveal a person's genetic make-up and
susceptibility to disease. Genostic Pharma, based in Cambridge and Edinburgh,
claims the system could help doctors predict the course of an illness, the best drugs
to treat it with the fewest side effects, and how a patient will respond. ... The
system is based on a database of 2,500 genes, out of the 100,000 or more that
make up the human genome, which the company believes are the key to
understanding diseases. ... Genetic profiling is a controversial area of science.
Advocates claim it will revolutionize medicine and improve the diagnosis and
treatment of diseases. Critics fear it is a Pandora's box that will be used by
insurance companies and employers to discriminate against people susceptible to
certain diseases such as cancer. ... [One wonders how useful this genetic profiling
would really be to employers? If firms reject an employee on the basis of his/her
genetic profile, they would be sitting ducks for a discrimination claim. My guess is
that employers would rather not know and simply work from a past history of
illness (even that is discriminatory in Australia.]
http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/features/2000/0308/fea4.htm The Irish Times
... March 8, 2000 The selfish meme ... Have scientists discovered the DNA of
culture? Mic Moroney thinks not but it's a very catchy notion It started as a
throwaway notion in 1976, has spread steadily like a cult, and now looks set now
to virally implant itself, permanently, into the language. Enter the meme, a
metaphoric spin-off from the genetic explosion: the fundamental self-replicating
unit of culture, or even thought. ... the very idea of a meme has proved to be a
successful bug, having spawned a growing academic field of "memetics" which its
exponents, and impressionable journalists, now describe as a "science". ... Apart
from precursor concepts such as "mnemones", the "meme" originally occurred to
evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins in the final pages of his influential
bestseller, The Selfish Gene (1976). ... It's a catchy notion - the very idea of an
idea, wrapped up in a neat word adapted from "gene" and linguistic terms such as
"phoneme" (a perceptually distinct unit of sound). And in an increasingly
freemarket world, it's but a short step to see a Darwinian struggle going on
between chunks of information within a global habitat of human minds - what
meme-heads call the "ideosphere". ... And just as mutually compatible genes
ganged together symbiotically to form higher organisms, so memeticists argue,
successful memes hooked up with other memes to form meme complexes, or
"memeplexes": big selfcontained accretions of ideologies which may provide fringe
benefits to human communities - or indeed damage ... Ultimately, such
memeplexes exist only to ensure their own propagation. ... Memeticists tend to be
hard-wired with neo-Darwinist memes ... As you go deeper and more gullibly into
memetics, a whole ontological paradigm emerges in which ideas are seen as living
organisms, which like viruses, "infect" and "parasitise" us, causing real physical
changes in the wiring of our brains. ... Never mind that memes have no identifiable
substrata or structure, or indeed that memes are not perfect replicators (people,
say, tend to pass on the gist, rather than the literal text, of a story). Despite the
dubious analogy with the gene, academia is buying memetics big-time. Memetics is
now infiltrating cultural studies, media and communication theory, ethology
(animal behaviour) and speculative fields such as evolutionary psychology, which
worries about the origins of language, and indeed moral and altruistic behaviour. ...
The wonderful circularity of memetics has seen it take over from semiotics as the
central, delirious cul-de-sac of post-modern discourse. ... Just as we have always
made anxious metaphors of ourselves and society from our dominant technologies,
the meme meme, so to speak, ties in with the revival of social Darwinism in visions
of capitalism; the infective metaphor of computer viruses; even the viral
apocalypse of AIDS. ... Oxford University Press seems to have bought into it too.
Among its recent "popular science" publications was The Meme Machine by Dr
Susan Blackmore, a Zen practitioner and senior lecturer in Psychology at Bristol
University ... To be horridly rational about it, memetics is all pseudo-scientific
palaver, an analogy stretched too far, a metaphor gone badly to seed - but it's
catchy and fun, and it's certainly not going to go away. Despite memetic
fundamentalism, the "meme" word is a very elegant piece of intellectual shorthand;
a rich lexicographical, and metaphorical tool - especially in an age in which, as
never before, ideas often "take on a life of their own". ... [A good debunking of
memes. Memes are a suicidal strategy for Darwinists, because Darwinism itself is a
good candidate for a memeplexes: a "big self-contained accretion... of ideologies
which exist only to ensure their own propagation"!]
GENE THERAPY:
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000315/sc/genetherapy_1.html
Yahoo! ... Wednesday March 15 ...Congress to Continue Probe of Gene Therapy
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A Congressional committee said on Tuesday it would
continue a close examination of how the experimental field of gene therapy has been
regulated, and warned the National Institutes of Health it might interrogate individual
employees. ...
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000310/sc/health_genetherapy_5.html Yahoo!
... March 10 ... U.S. Experts Reject Halt to Gene Therapy By Maggie Fox, Health
and Science Correspondent WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Scientists and other
experts who advise the federal government on gene therapy issues rejected calls
for a moratorium on experiments on Friday, but also warned researchers and
patients against placing undue faith in the field. ... Experts in gene therapy say they
have been unable to document any cure from the treatment -- which involves
infusing new genes into the body to treat disease. .. "It is important for
investigators and oversight bodies in gene transfer research to resist the temptation
to exaggerate the potential for benefit and to overlook excessive risk out of the
desire to help desperately ill patients, because at present the possibility of benefit
from this novel technology is, on the whole, still too uncertain," ... Several patients
taking part in gene therapy trials, or the parents of patients, pleaded with the RAC
to press to keep experiments moving, saying that for many patients, gene therapy
was the only hope. ...
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000309/sc/health_genetherapy_4.html Yahoo!
... March 9 ... Parents' Plea Illustrates Gene Therapy Dilemma By Maggie Fox,
Health and Science Correspondent BETHESDA, Maryland (Reuters) - A
desperate, emotional plea on Thursday from the parents of a brain-damaged
daughter who say gene therapy is her only hope illustrated the dilemmas facing
government advisers. Lindsay Karlin, now 5, suffers from a genetic disorder
known as Canavan disease. She has been a patient in several experimental gene
therapy trials and her parents, Dr. Roger Karlin and his wife, Helene, of New
Fairfield, Connecticut, believe the experiments have helped her. ... To some
scientists, the obvious answer is for researchers to report everything that goes
wrong, immediately, so it can be discussed and decided whether the gene therapy
is to blame. But private corporations, who sponsor many of the trials, fear that
releasing such information would not only confuse people, but would give away
valuable clues. "One phrase they used was that deaths of patients was a trade
secret ... proprietary information," ...
http://www.cnn.com/2000/HEALTH/03/07/gene.therapy/index.html ... New plans
unveiled to protect gene therapy patients March 7, 2000 ... WASHINGTON
(CNN) -- ...The FDA is implementing a Gene Therapy Clinical Trial Monitoring
Plan and the NIH is sponsoring a series of Gene Transfer Symposia. Both
initiatives are designed to enhance current safety standards for patients enrolled in
gene therapy trials. The safety of patients in clinical trials involving gene therapy
has been under scrutiny after one patient died during a gene therapy trial at the
University of Pennsylvania last year. The FDA's plan will require that sponsors of
gene therapy trials routinely submit their monitoring plans to the agency. ... Critics
have said that there is not enough oversight in gene therapy trials and are skeptical
that there are many more than the one known death which has been reported as a
direct result of gene therapy. ...
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"At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the
civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the
savage races throughout the world. At the same time the
anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked,* will
no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies
will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised
state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a
baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla."
(Darwin C.R, "The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex,"
[1871], Modern Library, bound in one volume with, "The Origin of
Species", Random House: New York NY, nd., p.521)
Stephen E. Jones | sejones@iinet.net.au | http://www.iinet.net.au/~sejones
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