The story of evolution-4: Darwin gets an idea from Malthus

In Darwin’s travels to distant lands from 1831 to 1836 on the Beagle, the different climates and environmental conditions he encountered made him aware of the weakness of the existing theory of ‘special creation’, where god was assumed to have created creatures best suited for their environment. Darwin saw for himself that very similar climates could produce hugely different kinds of species, and that the nature of these species seemed to be more influenced by the species in nearby areas than by anything else. This seemed to him to suggest that new species arose from the modifications of the old.

The discovery that the Earth was much older than had been previously thought, and the evidence for which was in the geology book by Charles Lyell that he had read on the boat, told him that it may be possible for these changes to occur gradually by very small steps provided that there was enough time for the changes to accumulate.
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The mixed views of candidate Ron Paul

If anyone had any doubts that the US is ruled by a single pro-war, pro-business party, recent Congressional action should dispel them. It is clear that the wheels are already being oiled for starting a war with Iran, and the Democrats are complicit in this pre-war demagoguery, just as they were before the war with Iraq, when many voted for the Iraq war authorization resolution.
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The story of evolution-3: Natural selection and the age of the Earth

It is clear that many people find it hard to accept Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. One reason is of course because it completely undermines the need to believe in a creator, making god superfluous when it comes to explaining the nature and diversity of life, and thus people may have a negative emotional reaction that prevents them from seeing the power of the theory. As I have discussed earlier, people are quite able to develop quite sophisticated reasons to believe what they want and reject what they dislike.
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Film reviews: Network and Matewan

Here are two more reviews of old films that are worth seeing.

Network (1976)

This film is a brutal satire on the TV news business and, sad as it is to say and even harder to believe, the kinds of attitudes it satirized in 1976 has only gotten far worse in the subsequent three decades.

Screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky uses the story of Howard Beale, a network news anchor who has a mental breakdown when he is told that he is being fired because of his low ratings, to show what really drives TV news. When Beale starts saying the truth on air about how things really work in the news world and the contempt that the people in TV have for the intelligence of their viewers, he starts getting audience attention and his ratings start going up again. He starts to pick up steam by voicing the frustration and sense of powerlessness that people feel.

The people in the entertainment division of the network see the chance to gain huge ratings by converting the news into a kind of entertainment, complete with segments involving soothsayers and the like, the whole thing showcased by Beale, now nicknamed ‘the mad prophet of the airwaves’, ranting on some topic, as can be seen in this clip, where he denounces the dangerous control that TV has on the minds of the public.

(Nowadays, nowhere is this film’s critique of how ‘news’ has become trivialized more apparent than in the ridiculous amount of coverage given to Paris Hilton. The best commentary on the media frenzy about the non-event that was her recent jailing was that given by Tommy Chong in an interview with Stephen Colbert.)
The film is immensely helped by the performances of two wonderful actors (William Holden and Peter Finch) in the twilight of their careers, aided by two other fine actors Faye Dunaway and Robert Duvall who were at their peak. Finch won an Academy Award for his performance but died before he could accept it.

Although Chayevsky a tendency has sometimes to give his characters (especially the one played by Holden) set-piece speeches on life and love and death that give the film a somewhat stagey-look, his writing is so good that he gets away with it. There are some interesting side-plots involving urban guerrilla chic and radical black activists of that time. The film shows how, in the end, everyone is corrupted by the allure of fame and money that TV exposure brings, and are willing to be manipulated by the TV executives to achieve that goal.

Network is one of those films that I saw when it first came out and is still good after all these years. It is a film that has become a cultural touchstone, with the line “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore” familiar to people who may not know from where it originated.

Matewan (1987)

Matewan is another fine film by independent filmmaker John Sayles. It is based on the true story of the struggle of coal miners in the West Virginia town of Matewan to obtain better condition by forming a union, and the fierce attempts by the mine owners and their thugs and goons to prevent it. Seeing films like this makes me appreciate so much more the efforts of the early efforts at unionization, fought by workers and their families at great cost and danger to themselves, which now give us the kinds of working conditions and safety that we take for granted.

Sayles’s first film was The Return of the Secausus Seven (1980), the story of a group of high school friends who reunite for a vacation ten years after graduation. It was shot on a low budget with an unknown and almost amateur cast. The much better-known The Big Chill (1983), which has almost the same story, looks like an unacknowledged remake of Sayles’s film.

Sayles has since gone on to make more commercially successful films (you can see a list of the films he as made here) and has been able to attract better known actors along the way, with some of them, such as Chris Cooper and David Strathairn, appearing repeatedly.

Sayles epitomizes the true independent. Many filmmakers like Steven Soderbergh who began as independents went the big budget Hollywood route after they achieved commercial success. Sayles refuses to do so. Even after he has shown himself to be a critical and commercially successful filmmaker, he refuses to seek funding from the big studios because they would require him to relinquish control over the final product. He says:

I want to direct films that no one else is going to make. I know if I don’t make them, I’m never going to see them. Of course, I hope some people will want to see my movies as well, but I won’t pander to the public. I won’t try to second guess what a Hollywood studio would like to see in a low-budget film, so that they will hire me the next time around. I know I will always do better work if I do projects in which I really believe. And if I never get to direct again, I will have made some movies I can feel proud of.

Sayles is very good at capturing the mood of a time and an event, and does not shrink away from showing the politics of race and class. For him, what a film says is more important than how it looks. As he said, “I’m interested in the stuff I do being seen as widely as possible but I’m not interested enough to lie. . .[A movie] may not look the way we’d like it to look or sound the way we’d like it to sound or get seen by as many people as we’d like to have see it but at least it will say the stuff we want it to say.”

The story of evolution-2: The lack of evidence for perfect design

In the first post in this series, I showed with the example of a soap spray nozzle how natural design could come up with systems whose intricacy and complexity is such that it was superior to the efforts of intelligent human designers. But what about the argument that a god-like designer would be able to come up with an even better nozzle design? It is true that if we allow for the existence of such a designer, we could get the best possible design for a nozzle. The catch is that assuming that god is a perfect designer opens up a whole set of new problems, not the least of which is why if god is so powerful he would need any kind of nozzle at all and not simply create any kind of spray he/she needed.
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Film reviews: Hearts and Minds and Medium Cool

Film reviews are usually about films that have been newly released. Since I am almost never the first to see any film, my reviews deal with very old but good or interesting films that people may have not seen the first time around but can do so now, thanks to the easy availability tapes and DVDs. I see these reviews as pointing out films to those who may not know what they are missing.

Here are reviews of two old films that I saw recently that dealt with the time during the Vietnam war.
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The story of evolution-1: The power of natural selection

We are rapidly approaching 2009, a year that marks a major scientific milestone that is going to be commemorated worldwide. It is both the 150th anniversary of the publication of the landmark book On the Origin of Species that outlined the theory of evolution by natural selection, and the 200th anniversary of the birth of its author Charles Darwin.

Darwin’s theory represents arguably one of the most, if not the most, profound scientific advances of all time, ranking well up with those scientific revolutions associated with the names of Copernicus, Newton, and Einstein. And yet it is widely misunderstood, or more appropriately, under-understood because most discussions of it remain on too high a level of generality, enabling critics to make statements about the theory that are not valid but yet seem plausible.

In order to create a better awareness of what the theory involves, today I will begin an occasional series of posts that looks at the details of the theory, including the mathematics that underlies it and which was developed later by people like J. B. S. Haldane, Sewall Wright, and R. A. Fisher.
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Guest post by Corbin Covault

My two posts on Taking offense and Taking offense (revisited) generated a lively discussion in the comments. One of the responses covered many of the issues raised by those who disagreed with some or all of my remarks and I felt that it should reach a wider readership so I asked the author to write it as a guest post. While it is a little longer than my own posts, I think readers will find that it provides an interesting perspective.

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Solving social problems the Confucian way

In writing my thoughts about Confucianism (here and here), one thing that struck me was the strong influence that its “Doctrine of the Mean” has, even down to this day. This is reflected in the “Chinese preference for negotiation, mediation, and the “middle man” as against resorting to rigid, impersonal statutes. Until recently, legal action has been regarded as something of a disgrace, a confession of human failure in the ability to work things out by compromises that typically involve family and associates. Figures are not available for China, but in the mid-1980s Japan in ratio to its population had one lawyer for every twenty-four in the United States.” (Huston Smith, The World’s Religions, p.191) [Read more…]

Taoism

The final religion that rounds out the major eastern religions is Taoism. Like Confucianism, it too is a rough contemporary of Buddhism. Its founder is named as Lao Tzu who is said to have been born around 604 BCE, which makes him the earliest of the three founders, but it is not clear if there ever really was such a person, or whether he was a later recreation to provide a single author for the book Tao Te Ching which translates as The Way and its Power and lays out the basic philosophy of Taoism. Huston Smith in his book The World’s Religions says that scholars do not think that the book was written by a single person although the coherence of the book suggests at least a strong single influence in shaping it. It is believed that the book took its final form around 250 BCE.
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