In anticipation of celebrations around the world for Darwin's 200th Birthday (Feb 12), and this year is also 150 years since the publication of On The Origin of Species, the BBC has published a special feature in its Focus magazine.

"Charles Darwin effectively rewrote the history of not only Man, but every living thing on the planet. This special section looks at the legacy of the man whose ideas changed everything."

Read the Digimag here. (Requires 'Flash' player)

Contains articles by esteemed scientists such as Carl Zimmer, PZ Myers, Richard Dawkins, and Steve Jones, as well as other 'feature' articles.

Nietzsche, the philosopher you recently have been reading and quoting on this forum, thought darwin's thinking was so ultra lame he used him and some other examples like john stuart mill (the utilitarianism guy) as the ultimate spotlights of why British people are no race of thinkers lol.

But being an atheist, Nietzsche went much further then Darwin and he would have liked Richard Dawkins and Daniel C. Dennett.

it is my opinion Nietzsche was a bipolar beast of a man on a manic spree when writing a lot of his material and the main reason he said 'god is dead' is because in German, it is "Gott ist tot" and that rhymes and he was doing word clanging in his excitable delirium tremendousness - also no other philosopher in history to ever publish used more exclamation !!!!points!!!!! in his writing than Nietzsche (a wannabe dancer using words to get his kicks out), and deliberate hyperbole and provocative declarations and arrogations as a device to scream to subtler points that way. So i don't really think Nietzsche meant "god is dead' in the narrow atheist way like dawkins and how other simplistic atheists may want to appropriate that to use him for.

The direct quote he uses for Darwin is "mediocre mind" and for John Stuart Mill "blockhead" lol.

Sorry I am distracting from this Darwin appreciation thread with my tabloid-level quotes, I don't find darwin compelling.

Perhaps not in the narrow way of D & D, because FN was a moralist, (although he called himself 'amoral') but he accepted the most controversial ideas of Darwin, that man had evolved from the apes through a process of chance and necessity.

And only in the Zarathustra did he use quite a lot of exclamation marks. Besides "Gott ist tot" does not rhyme and his deliriums only started when the syphilis kicked in.

True, he was a wannabe musician and composer, he did write some trite salon pieces for piano. But Wagner liked them and said " You have to become a composer or get married."

I heard Nietzsche's sucky music and he reminds me of what Leonard Cohen says in a song "a prima ballerina who cannot dance to anything." But no wonder Wagner liked it,



the king of grandiose trite-pomp and lol what kind of thing is that for him to say.

Nietzsche nevertheless holds the title of histrionic princess of philosophy for exclamation point count, if only concentrated in Zarathustra, critics crowning him that way and contrasting it with how in real life he was a rather reserved man compared to his vitriolic writing style and exhortations to WRITE IN BLOOD!

and in that way also reminds me of people who go irate in writing on the internet but are silent in real life.

what we see in others is actually what is within ourselves and so this is what evakurvan is actually saying:


"i am the the king of grandiose trite-pomp and lol what kind of thing is that for me to say.

i nevertheless holds the title of histrionic princess of philosophy for exclamation point count, if only concentrated in my online avatar, critics crowning me that way and contrasting it with how in real life she was a rather reserved woman compared to her vitriolic writing style and exhortations to WRITE IN BLOOD!

and in that way also reminds me of myselves who go irate in writing on the internet but are silent in real life."

Hi Babu, that's what crossed my mind as well while reading... but I wasn't as courageous as you, who will now probably get the flak!

Yes, Wagner is rather overblown. As Rossini put it: “Mr. Wagner has beautiful moments but bad quarters of an hour.”
And a guy who likes pink, silken underwear can't be all bad.

And as to

you might be right if you consider Nietzsche to be a philosopher, I always saw him as a great, and very rajasic, humorist or satirist.

Humourist or satirist is what I was trying to get at when I said Nietzsche uses hyperbole as a device to communicate subtler points. I think even SP, or at least his form conveys that sometimes but it is not an obvious kind of humour if you even want to call it that. "There are no lesbians in india," is a good one. Rather than lament his homophobia there I lament and pity all the white people who are only getting to hear such a funny line for the first time, maybe too late in life to get that golden nugget of humour stuck up the larynx for hours of choke-chuckles.

I did not know Wagner wears pink silk underwear but I am just happy someone else dovetails talk like this by blurting out the one tabloid bizarroid fact. I sabotage myself doing this with thinkers I like all the time but it is an added perk to see it derail off topic like this in a darwin appreciation thread.


Dhyana you do need more courage I have been thinking that ever since you erased your blog post praising me for praising animal killing!!!!!!!!

Babu what I said about Wagner is one consensus opinion so I was not thinking anyone would relate that to me there, but the second part is so obvious they would, which is why I posed it on purpose just to have the excuse to answer back, 'and if you think I am one of those people vitriol in words and quiet in reality, why don't you say that live and I will show you how unliteral WRITE WITH BLOOD is.

It is the perfect time of the month for that too.

Thank you for pointing this out, Softbrain.
Claiming something rhymes just because two similar vowels occur in one line betrays poor judgement or confirms the progress of Kali Yuga .

I remember writing a blog entry about it. I am much less sure if I remember erasing it later! Wouldn't rule it out though. It was long ago, I have tried to look up my old GR blog but it seems to have been phased out. You are right about courage!

I don't know German so I did not know that - but I don't think it has to discount what I was saying about Nietzsche's God is Dead; to purposefully mispronounce in order to get near-rhymes to rhyme, to get you to say a word in different ways or for other reasons to word juggle famously done in poetry.

Unfortunately the only example coming to mind now is not from Shakespeare but from a pop band which makes fun of the group Rush, which I was only looking at yesterday because someone posted Rush here the Logical Song.

Or sometimes the word left well-prounounced so the unrhyme rhymes in undercurrent effect, i.e. CROOKED RHYME.

Which is funny because it has nothing to do with GV but reminds you of CROOKED SPEECH lol.

Okay Correction it is not Rush who sings The Logical Song but I just checked it is Supertramp. I was sure it was Rush that singer looked to me like Geddy Lee but what do you want all this 70s FM Radio Rock blends into one soup pile. Another group to confuse with these is YES.

you are my hero

I knew me mentioning "white people" would get your attn...
But No Babu you are my hero and at your proud American awards ceremony it is going to be playing this song right as you step up to collect your Grammy.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7f_HsjpSVaI

P.S. Dhyana I only point that out to shock you again with my memory of your posts but you are not giving me shocked/happy emoticons for it anymore.

i used hero meaning an overstuffed sandwich with vinegar

babu is that black and white dinosaur upfront, you, doing a dance of seven evasions with the urinal?

Thank you for your support in this never-ending struggle against this kind of inaccuracies

babu, is it true that instead of the title "gaudy vaisnav"which was under your avatar before, your actual initiation name is Marcel Ducampy?

This is why we need technical dudes like epitau to fix my computer to run like Germany, while I sprung rhyme my way to the sprint line. If you dudes think Nietzsche did not get private delight from the Gott/tot delusion than maybe you need to TYM to get a miette of my net nit*

*A unit of illuminative brightness equal to one candle per square meter

delete

(don't actually delete)

I am sorry to see that you take the remark about Nietzsche's failed rhyme (because a near rhyme in a three word slogan is worthless) so hard that you start drinking alone. But he really wasn't much of a poet. cheers!

he was trying to say Gott ist pot

lololololol
dude it's 2 pm which means 'i just woke up' for an alcoholic, one who is affected, but when i am done with this hangover from last night's anguish don't think i haven't done more to say. I am just shocked epitau the secretary is not pointing out that Gott/tot is not necessarily a sprung rhyme either, which i chose only cause it rhymes with sprint, but such a 'perfect questions perfect answers' entry in waiting btw it's nice to see Softbrain make up new rules* as he goes along for anthologies of literary terms, maybe you should ask Tapati to change your name to Norton.

* (because a near rhyme in a three word slogan is worthless) (lolol)

Reading this I'm almost sure you qualify for the GR Predictable Dude of the Year Award.
A high degree of personal predictability is a brilliant foundation for building lasting relationships .

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and since you just got done saying basically a less refined version of what I just got done saying:



I will accept your covered compliment, and double you a martini.

I think it is cool to be precise with terms but sometimes it misses the point. I never checked the pronunciation of God is Dead - it doesn't have to beat in perfect time to call it a rhyme, but leave it to the Germans to tell you. Look at Emily Dickinson's profuse use of slant rhyme; in one poem she shouts out even to her style in verse, "tell the truth but tell it slant." Unless you want to sound like a Hallmark Card or Dr. Seuss you will off-kilter yourself and your rhymes to subtler effect, and they still call that a rhyme, and I doubt Nietzsche was trying to be Dr. Seuss with God is Dead. Still I don't know how it sounds in German if I can even call it a "sprung rhyme" but if you want to be a soft brain you would be safe in calling it for sure an "eye rhyme."

All this to say, if you are really lazy the only thing you have going for you is to take on the pretenses of a poet, and together with that laziness goes such a widening of what a 'rhyme' is in the poetics lexicons, which profits not only the poets but also the ultimate lazies, people who don't even write anything just talk about it, who don't ever have to bother with those audio clips on dictionary.com. to call it as they see it.
________
P.S. I had to reduce the number of martinis I posted because the computer told me: "You have posted a message with more emoticons that this board allows." lol

I am not here to build lasting
relationships, but to start casting
nets toward, their Lord ship's
board.

As a troll, a fisher of men,
out of this samsaric den.

I call that one, An Ode Against The Householder

P.P.P.P.S

Don't think it is lost on me this Dawkinsonian jargon of "almost sure" and "high degree of predictability" - a brilliant foundation for building lasting conclusions off science experiments

(in waiting to be blasted in one fell stroke of God's Invisible Hand).

predictable dude nonetheless but good night and thanks for the martinis I had a whiskey IRL peace

How about a sort of deletion?

Click to view attachment

Happy Darwin Day!!

(groan, I've heard that silly line so many times today that I've finally surrendered and jumped on that bandwagon)

So did anyone read the digimag? If so, what did you think of it? I enjoyed it quite a lot; my favourite articles were the ones by Zimmer and the 'debate' between Jones and Myers about whether evolution has halted and is a 'dead' process.

Zimmer absorbingly describes the work of Richard Lenski and his experiments with E-coli bacteria. One ancient (and also current) criticism of evolution/Darwinism is that as it supposedly takes place over millions of years, how can anyone say for sure if the principle is operating if no one can see it happen? Lenski's experiments have negated this by his bacterial experiments. E-coli is a common microbe in the human gut that survives by the consumption of sugar (glucose). Lenski wanted to observe what happened to the bacteria as it underwent continual feast and famine cycles. He kept records by periodically collecting samples of the mixture and freezing them. After a while one flask developed a change; E-coli needs trace amounts of iron to survive but cannot consume free iron atoms, and the mixture contains citrate (a compound that can bind iron atoms) which the E-coli can absorb but which the citrate cannot actually enter the microbe. In normal circumstances E-coli microes also cannot consume citrate in the presence of oxygen. In this particular flask it was found that the E-coli was consuming the citrate. In other words, the E-coli bacteria had evolved into a type that could feast on the citrate and thus didn't have to starve when the glucose supply ran out! This was proof that the manipulation had generated a set of circumstances by which the original microbe mutated in order to adapt to it's new circumstance. By consulting his records of samples, he could determine that the mutation occurred after 31,000 generations but before 31,500 generations. The microbes continue to evolve. More details in the digimag.

I enjoy the digimag format, it is nice 'flipping' pages just as one might flip the pages of a real magazine.

World-renowned medical journal, The Lancet, has also published a special issue (in digimag format) of their own for the bicentennial: Darwin's Gifts.

With the raft of evolution documentaries on the BBC the past week, I have been most impressed with the one presented by Sir David Attenborough. I don't know about the rest of the world, but Sir David is the Godfather when it comes to nature and wildlife documentaries. This particular documentary finished off with a lovely graphical representation of the progress of evolution, which I delightfully see has made it's way onto YouTube:

Tree of Life video

Go take a look, make sure you see the High Quality version. It's truly beautiful.

Good he ended mentioning the bacteria with which he began and spared us the embarrassing speciesism.
The score was a little pathetic, BBC . . .

Devolve Yourself!

Upload a picture of yourself and see what you would have looked like:

• 500,000 years ago (homo heidelbergensis)
• 1.8million years ago (homo erectus)
• 2.2million years ago (homo habilis)
• 3.7million years ago (australopithecus afarensis)

Or experiment with one of the template photographs provided. Have fun.

I should mention that bonafide devolutionists are not Darwin bhaktas. Darwin's siddhanta, is in fact, quite the opposite of ours. Although there may be passages in his shastras that conform with some truths of devolutionism, he maintains an upwardly mobile of sadhana of change, reinforced by his Christian upbringing which is the equivalent of being a stool sniffing mayavadi to a devotee. True devolotionism asks not where we came from, but what we can get back to. Public sex, bodily hair, and burned flesh foods are not our 'past' but verily our birthright. Its sad though that Darwin bhaktas have tried to assume some connection to devolutionists to give legitimacy to their own cause.

Sorry if I got a little preachy there, I just wanted to clear that up for people, though that link is pretty cool.

"Public sex, bodily hair, and burned flesh foods"
i have to read that twice to see it is not saying
"Bodily sex, pubic hair, burned fresh foods."

If I was around 1.8 million years ago, I'd definitely have hit on that Asian woman (template photo)... She looks like she'd have made a lot of homos erectus...

Blog for Darwin has done a great job of aggregating as much as possible of the blogosphere's orgasmic adoration of Darwin over the past few days, so check it out if you fancy a few cool pieces.

With Darwin's 200th birthday just passed and the 150th anniversary of Origin of Species coming up in November, 2009 looks set to be Darwin Year. (muahahaha!)

In the meantime, weird sex in the animal kingdom.

Thanks for the laughs, Brainiac!

If the animated devolution showed the relative penis enhancement there would be no laughter

I neglected to mention a rather important and real-life implication of evolution: the emergence of HIV-resistant immune systems.

For some reason or other, some individuals appear to have a genetic structure that is naturally resistant to the HIV virus. I wrote about this some time ago on my blog: Genius of Charles Darwin, where I reviewed a recent TV documentary (you can watch the embedded video if you like). Dawkins travelled to Kenya where he visited a Kenyan prostitute and interviewed her about her resistance. There have been such cases before but they have been mainly anecdotal, but a few years ago a British man went rather public when he claimed to be cured of HIV.

In an interesting development, a case report has recently been published about a man who had become 'cured' of HIV after undergoing stem-cell treatment for leukaemia. They are being cautious about claiming a 'cure', but the principle is that the donated bone marrow came from an individual who possessed the 'immunity' genes. Just to consider how this is going to significantly enhance gene therapy, I'm going to dig around and see if I can read a copy of the case report. This is stupendous, though!

Now that I review what I wrote on my blog, it sounds a bit chilling what I wrote:

Last night I caught up with the BBC documentary series - Darwin's Dangerous Idea - presented by BBC journalist Andrew Marr. It was the second part, and Marr was explaining how Darwin's ideas of natural selection had been co-opted into someone else's phrase of 'survival of the fittest', leading to the 'new' science of eugenics, bettering the world population through selective breeding.

In retrospect we can see that eugenics was a horrible and racist perversion of Darwin's idea, based on subjective notions of 'perfection' and the type of genes that would be desirable to inherit and allow to proliferate. And of course this came to a head with Hitler's vile Final Solution. It is important to note that as well as having a pathological hatred of Jews (anti-Semitism was de rigeur at the time), not much is known about earlier American research by Charles Davenport. Eugenics, at the time, was de rigeur and seen as a noble thing to do. Elder statesmen such as Winston Churchill and Theodore Roosevelt supported scientific endeavours to forcibly sterilise those that they considered unfit for breeding, and famed authors such as HG Wells used eugenics as the subtext to his book The Time Machine. Economists calculated that "weaklings" and "feeble minded" etc were a burden on national finances. The case of Carrie Buck is particularly notorious in this regard, the Supreme Court Justice who heard her case dclared:


Between 1907 and 1970, over 60,000 Americans were forcibly sterilised. And Hitler of course, gassed six million Jews. He also systematically killed Gypsies, homosexuals, disabled, some religious sects (Jehovah's Witnesses) and political dissidents, making the total somewhere between 10 and 14 million. These were clear moves to eliminate the "degenerate". In the end, Darwin's idea was rescued and properly enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as per the UN.

As I was watching all of this, it seemed to me that the Srimad Bhagavatam also seems to propound these racist ideas, accepting the dwindling standards of degenerate humanity as inevitable and beyond help. Even the doctrine of avatarana, God's (or Chaitanya's) taking an incarnation to redeem mankind, redeem them from what exactly? I thought that it was lamentable that these sections of the Bhagavatam are considered "prophecies", what kind of prophecies are they? That mankind degenerates into crap? How nice. See the BBT SB translations:


I have a huge collection of spiritual books and I'm sure I can dig out some more of these Vedic end-time "prophecies" if anyone wants, including "local" scriptures, they are often much more graphic and detailed about the degeneration of the human race and their descent into oblivion. Fair enough, the Bhagavatam is talking about the situation as a whole, but it is clear that the conception of humans is very low indeed. Which is why Kalki will advent according to Srila Prabhupada:

"Kalki's nature, that is described in Bhāgavata. He will come just like a prince, royal dress with sword, and on horseback, simply killing, no preaching. All rascals killed. No more preaching. (laughing) That is the last. There will be no brain to understand what is God." - Room Conversation with Allen Ginsberg -- May 13, 1969, Columbus, Ohio

"There will be no candidate for learning. You have to kill everyone. That will be at the end, Kalki-avatāra, simply killing, bas, finish. They'll have no capacity to understand." - Room Conversation with Ratan Singh Rajda M.P. -- April 15, 1977, Bombay

But of course we know that it isn't completely over, because:

"When Lord Vāsudeva, the Supreme Personality of Godhead, appears in their hearts in His transcendental form of goodness, the remaining citizens will abundantly repopulate the earth." (SB 12.2.22)

What remaining citizens? Clearly those who are "fit" for "survival", presumably devotees according to the viewpoint of the shastra, but fit nevertheless. So it seems to me that even the Bhagavata isn't immune to these racist notions that were behind eugenics; get rid of the degenerates and repopulate the earth with the fit to bring about the Satya-yuga. At the very least it preaches a worldview that teaches it's followers to expect what to happen, which I think is the root cause behind all the anti-materialism and "fallen" rhetoric that plagues so much of their preaching. The fatalism is scriptural law.

Any thoughts?

So no one thought much of the inherent racism in the Bhagavata? Oh well...

Spider sex violent but effective

A violent but evolutionarily effective mating strategy has been spotted in spiders from Israel. Males of the aptly-named Harpactea sadistica species pierce the abdomen of females, fertilising their eggs directly in the ovaries. The so-called traumatic insemination gives the first male to inseminate a reproductive advantage by bypassing structures in the females' genitalia. The findings are reported in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Insects including mites and bedbugs have been spotted using a similar strategy, but this is the first time that it has been seen in spiders. Typically, spider males deliver their genetic package via sperm that is deposited into a small web and manually inserted using a pair of appendages on their undersides known as pedipalps. The sperm are then held in a receptacle between the ovipore and ovary known as a spermatheca until an egg is released. However, the spermatheca is a "last in, first out" structure, so that if any further males inseminate a female, the last mate's sperm is the first in line to fertilise an egg.

Direct route

Milan Rezic, an entomologist at the Crop Research Institute in Prague, has spotted a spider circumventing this problem by delivering sperm directly to the ovaries via holes that the males bore directly in the females' abdomens. Naming the species H. sadistica, Dr Rezac noted that the species has specialised sex organs at the ends of its pedipalps, with one part specialised for gripping and another, hypodermic needle-like structure for injecting sperm. Like many spider mating rituals, H. sadistica's approach follows an elaborate pattern, with the male tapping the female, subduing her, and wrapping himself around her to properly position the sex organs. He then alternates between the two, piercing and injecting the sperm on one side, then the other, forming two neat rows of holes in her abdomen. An analysis of the females of the species has shown that relative to other spiders, their spermathecae are atrophied, or shrunken.

In an apparent case of co-evolution, they seem to be slowly shrinking into nonexistence now that their purpose is being bypassed by the males' more direct approach. "In insects there is a co-evolutionary development of female physiological responses to the male sperm that gives her at least some control of fertilisation," said William Eberhard, an expert in the mating habits of insects and spiders at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. "Something similar might occur here."

Dr Rezac suggests equally that a means to avoid the injury caused by the males might drive the evolution of secondary genitalia nearer to the ovaries, which have been seen in some spiders and butterflies. "The evolution of these features has been heretofore difficult to explain," he said. "Perhaps the secondary genital structures of butterflies and spiders could have originated via traumatic insemination."

Source: BBC News (with video clip)

What an emphatic case for natural selection's "blind wisdom." It seems a safe guess that spider males cannot possibly know about this "last in, first out" system.