Apr 21
Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for an interview with Dr. Rupert Sheldrake. A distinguished biologist, Dr. Sheldrake is the author of several books including, “Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home.” During the interview Mr. Tsakiris and Dr. Sheldrake discuss the latest claims of Skeptic Richard Wiseman. Dr. Rupert Sheldrake on the Persistence of Richard Wiseman’s Deception.
I’ve started using a Mac again after many years. I still have my Vaio for work but now I can’t imagine going back to the PC. Apple makes a much higher margin on their computers than their other iDevices and I’m now understanding their ‘ecosystem’ strategy. They made me a customer again, gradually over time. First, the original iPod, then the iPhone, then the iPad, and now … the iMac. As Darth Vader would say, “the circle is complete”.
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Nov 30
I just realized that I’ve gone an entire year without posting my reading list. Obviously I didn’t do a lot of writing this year but I did do a lot of reading. Here is the list in chronological order with the ones I’m still reading on top.
As an undergraduate, I helped run a psychology lab for a professor where we did cognitive experiments on Psychology 101 students. My major was Cognitive Science and I spent most of my free time reading anything I could get my hand on the subject. I would read an author’s paper in a journal and flip to their references and then read those papers and flip to those references until I found what seemed to be primary sources – though largely unattributed – it was the philosophers, of course. Carl Jung was among those whose contribution to the field of cognitive science was conveniently buried under tons of footnotes and references.
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The larger the company the less agile they are. This is a basic truism of business. In fact, companies often spend millions of dollars trying to improve processes, streamline workflows, and reduce unnecessary staff – all with the aim of becoming more agile, more competitive. Smaller companies can react more quickly to market changes. What is the tipping point though? There are plenty of large companies doing very well. Some companies are reporting earnings completely off the charts. These sorts of earnings can evoke disgusted reactions from even the greediest of greedy. So, what is the secret?
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Jul 27
I’m not sure how the dream started but I found myself in the middle of a worldwide panic. I think I was watching the news. There was some sort of catastrophe approaching. In my dream it seemed to take the form of an earthquake. I was in a large city and the buildings were collapsing everywhere around us. I was somehow able to jump from building to building. A friend was always there with me but I’m not sure who. I saw another friend and his kids. I tried to get him to leave with me but he said that he needed to stay with his family. A moment later we were all underwater. I was looking for a little girl’s stuffed animal. I found it and gave it to her but it was the wrong one. It belonged to some other kid. She died holding some other kid’s teddy bear. My friend and his family were gone and somehow I moved on to the next place.
I was standing on the edge of a large window while a building was falling backwards and I jumped and somehow floated to the next building and then ended up on the street. People were flocking to priests of all sorts on the street corners. Each priest was trying to help people by quoting words from each of their scriptures. Donald Trump was on another corner selling cars and gasoline for ridiculous amounts of money so that people could try to escape. I remember looking at the crowd and thinking of a quote from Moby Dick about Jonah: “He thinks that a ship made by men will carry him into countries where God does not reign…” I ran to a gas station where I found a puppy and I held on to him. I think it was a bulldog. We jumped to a parking garage, a big ship floating through the middle of the city, and other strange places. And, after what seemed like an endless journey of jumping from building to building I finally said, “This is it” as I looked up and saw the side of a skyscraper falling on us.
The next thing I knew I was standing in a garden with Vishnu, Buddha, and Jesus. I asked why I was there and they said it was because I truly believed. I said that of course I believed. Then credits started rolling like it was the end of a bad religious movie. Next, I found myself floating just above the chaos as if taking a tour of the devastation. Some people were still barely alive but most were dead. The people that were still alive were like zombies. One of the barely alive zombies saw me floating by and tried to shoot me. The bullet went through me and I said, “you missed me.” But they responded by saying, “No, you’re already dead.” Then I woke up.
Jul 26
There were always those people that amazed me with their clarity of vision for their own futures. I’ve often wondered about those with such a clear vision. They always seemed to know exactly what they wanted – they always had a plan on how to achieve it. I have a sort of admiration for those that have their act together enough to have a vision and a plan to get there. I’m a little jealous.
After high school they knew where they were going to college. After college they knew where they were going to work. After working for a while they knew that they would get married and where they were going to live and how many children they were going to have. We all have friends like this. I have many friends like this. One by one I have watched as their plans have splintered, unraveled, and just fallen apart. The energy it takes to hold to the vision must be exhausting. In personality terms, these are the folks that love certainty and predictability. They wonder why people do dangerous things.
From the perspective of a psyche, the more certain the ego is of doing something the more obstacles there will be to overcome. Jung called this the ‘transcendent function’. It’s a kind of pressure valve on the ego and it goes into action exactly when we wouldn’t want it to. Imagine walking up to the stage to receive the award that you are absolutely certain you deserve and you trip and fall walking up the stairs. This is the transcendent function in action. It keeps things like pride in check. I’m not saying that having a plan is a bad thing. A plan is a great thing. However, without any built in flexibility a plan is certain to fall apart. Be open to what comes and try to welcome adventure. Or in other words…
Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily. Life is but a dream.
Jun 26
Something has always troubled me about Darwin’s theory and even modern revisions of his work – there is still no explanation for instinct. Ethologists call instincts innate releasing mechanisms or IRM, which in layman’s terms means “we’ll use big fancy words because we just don’t know.” The most common definition is, “The mechanism by which an organism responds to a key stimulus (KS) with a fixed action pattern (FAP).” Of course, this explains nothing. This is one of the limitations of Darwin’s theory – it always has been. An earlier theory of inheritance was posed by the French zoologist, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829). From Understanding Evolution:
Lamarck’s scientific theories were largely ignored or attacked during his lifetime; Lamarck never won the acceptance and esteem of his colleagues Buffon and Cuvier, and he died in poverty and obscurity. Today, the name of Lamarck is associated merely with a discredited theory of heredity, the “inheritance of acquired traits.”
Darwin clearly ruled out “inheritance of acquired traits.” According to current thinking in genetics and in evolutionary biology, parents are unable to pass on anything other than their genes to their offspring. In another post I briefly mentioned that there is currently a debate among scientists about the role of proteins in the transmission of heredity. Some of Lamarck’s ideas have been picked up again by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in the forms of memes. Memes are ideas rather than genetic material but they are subject to very similar selection criteria in nature.
What did Lamarck in was his idea that all organisms were headed toward perfection – a concept that Darwin took great pains to eliminate from his theories. Darwin was also vindicated by the science of genetics – it did appear that random mutations in genes were the only possible way an organism could change.
How does this relate to instincts? If there is no way to pass on knowledge from the parent to the offspring, how do animals inherit this information? For example, how do turtles return to the same beach where they were born to lay their own eggs? How does a bird know build a nest? Why does a human immediately after birth has a suckling instinct? Where do these things come from. The short answer is that no one really knows. The only scientist I know of that has really tried to tackle this topic is Rupert Sheldrake. Sheldrake’s second book, Presnce of the Past does an excellent job of summarizing some of the problems in biology today. Sheldrake even goes as far as testing these effect empirically through simple experiments. One of his favorite questions is: how do pigeons find their way home? No one has offered a theory to explain this. In fact, these topics are almost off limits to scientists because no one seems to have even a clue how these IRMs work.
Sheldrake’s theory of morphogenetic fields matches very well with Jung’s theory of archetypes. Jung never gave us a real cause for archetypes but only observed their presence and patterns. Jung’s answer was that we all share information and memories through the collective unconscious. It’s not clear if he sees archetypes as having always being there or patterns that have built up over millions of years. These archetypes show up in our dreams and our every day lives – they are usually completely unconscious to us. Like IRMs, archetypes beg the question – what are they really? Well, they appear to be inherited ideas or characteristics of ancestors – or at the very least collective ideas that are available to individuals of the same species. Sheldrake’s basic idea is that memories are stored, not in matter (the brain), but in time and space via morphogenetic fields. It’s a non-materialist view of memory and perhaps even a method for the transmission of acquired characteristics.
For more on recent research that is causing many geneticists and biologist to rethink inheritance, take a look at Science Magazine’s article, Inheritance Is More Than Gene Deep.
May 9
From The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan:
“The ingredients listed in the flyer suggest a lot of thought goes into a nugget, that and a lot of corn. Of the thirty-eight ingredients it takes to make a McNugget, I counted thirteen that can be derived from corn: the corn-fed chicken itself; modified cornstarch (to bind the pulverized chicken meat); mono-, tri-, and diglycerides (emulsifiers, which keep the fats and water from separating); dextrose; lecithin (another emulsifier); chicken broth (to restore some of the flavor that processing leeches out); yellow corn flour and more modified cornstarch (for the batter); cornstarch (a filler); vegetable shortening; partially hydrogenated corn oil; and citric acid as a preservative. A couple of other plants take part in the nugget: There’s some wheat in the batter, and on any given day the hydrogenated oil could come from soybeans, canola, or cotton rather than corn, depending on the market price and availability.
According to the handout, McNuggets also contain several completely synthetic ingredients, quasiedible substances that ultimately come not from a corn or soybean field but form a petroleum refinery or chemical plant. These chemicals are what make modern processed food possible, by keeping the organic materials in them from going bad or looking strange after months in the freezer or on the road. Listed first are the “leavening agents”: sodium aluminum phosphate, mono-calcium phosphate, sodium acid pyrophosphate, and calcium lactate. These are antioxidants added to keep the various animal and vegetable fats involved in a nugget from turning rancid. Then there are “anti-foaming agents” like dimethylpolysiloxene, added to the cooking oil to keep the starches from binding to air molecules, so as to produce foam during the fry.
The problem is evidently grave enough to warrant adding a toxic chemical to the food: According to the Handbook of Food Additives, dimethylpolysiloxene is a suspected carcinogen and an established mutagen, tumorigen, and reproductive effector; it’s also flammable. But perhaps the most alarming ingredient in a Chicken McNugget is tertiary butylhydroquinone, or TBHQ, an antioxidant derived from petroleum that is either sprayed directly on the nugget or the inside of the box it comes in to “help preserve freshness.” According to A Consumer’s Dictionary of Food Additives, TBHQ is a form of butane (i.e. lighter fluid) the FDA allows processors to use sparingly in our food: It can comprise no more than 0.02 percent of the oil in a nugget. Which is probably just as well, considering that ingesting a single gram of TBHQ can cause “nausea, vomiting, ringing in the ears, delirium, a sense of suffocation, and collapse.” Ingesting five grams of TBHQ can kill.”
I wonder why they don’t teach this in school. Still want your kids to eat Chicken McNuggets?
The story, still sometimes repeated in creationist circles, goes like this: it is the 1960s, at Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland, and a team of astronomers is using cutting-edge computers to recreate the orbits of the planets, thousands of years in the past. Suddenly, an error message flashes up. There’s a problem: way back in history, one whole day appears to be missing.
The scientists are baffled, until a Christian member of the team dimly recalls something and rushes to fetch a Bible. He thumbs through it until he reaches the Book of Joshua, chapter 10, in which Joshua asks God to stop the world for . . . “about a full day!” Uproar in the computer lab. The astronomers have happened upon proof that God controls the universe on a day-to-day basis, that the Bible is literally true, and that by extension the “myth” of creation is, in fact, a reality. Darwin was wrong – according to another creationist rumour, he’d recanted on his deathbed, anyway – and here, at last, is scientific evidence!
Why everything you’ve been told about evolution is wrong | Science | The Guardian.
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