Mackenzie Discovery recebe o maior defensor do Design Inteligente
quinta-feira, setembro 26, 2019
25.09.2019 19h00
Compartilhe nas Redes Sociais
Considerado um dos maiores expoentes e defensores da Teoria do Design Inteligente (TDI), o físico estado-unidense, Michael Behe, estará na Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie (UPM), para participar do II TDI São Paulo,
em 15 de Outubro. No evento, o cientista falará sobre as novidades nas
discussões sobre o surgimento da vida no Planeta Terra, além de relançar
uma de suas obras mais importantes.
Em sua terceira vinda ao Brasil, Behe apresentará o que há de mais recente no debate entre as Teoria da Evolução a TDI, com evidências científicas sobre a (bio)química da vida e a física do Universo. O simpósio é organizado pelo Discovery Mackenzie e pela Editora Mackenzie.
De acordo com o coordenador do centro de pesquisas, Marcos Eberlin, a vinda do renomado cientista será de grande importância para a formação dos alunos da UPM, como formadores de opinião. “Behe é o maior expoente mundial de uma teoria de vanguarda. A aceitação da TDI, que se mostra cada dia mais eminente, certamente influenciará a nossa sociedade, e os alunos do Mackenzie precisam participar desse momento histórico”, afirmou.
A Teoria do Design Inteligente afirma que os seres humanos foram criados prontos e por uma mente inteligente, ao contrário das proposições feitas pelo Darwinismo. A TDI é baseada em conhecimentos científicos, principalmente no campo da química e da bioquímica.
Michael Behe é membro do Discovery Institute, nos EUA, uma dos centros mais atuantes no debate sobre a TDI no Mundo. Já o Discovery Mackenzie é o primeiro Núcleo de Pesquisas no mundo instalado em uma Universidade, e promove o debate científico sobre as nossas origens à luz da disputa entre evolução e Design Inteligente.
Eberlin acredita que a vinda do cientista aprofundará ainda mais as relações entre os centros de pesquisas. A visita do físico significará, “o fortalecimento do Mackenzie como uma instituição de vanguarda, que dá no Brasil o primeiro passo em uma revolução que tudo indica levará a ciência a um novo paradigma sobre nossas origens”, afirmou o coordenador.
Lançamento
Além de participar do evento na UPM, Michael Behe promoverá o relançamento do livro A Caixa Preta de Darwin, considerado um livro histórico para a TDI. A publicação será relançada pela Editora Mackenzie.
O cientista também é autor do livro Darwin Devolves (A Involução de Darwin, em português) que será lançado em breve lançado pela mesma editora.
Fonte: Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie
Em sua terceira vinda ao Brasil, Behe apresentará o que há de mais recente no debate entre as Teoria da Evolução a TDI, com evidências científicas sobre a (bio)química da vida e a física do Universo. O simpósio é organizado pelo Discovery Mackenzie e pela Editora Mackenzie.
De acordo com o coordenador do centro de pesquisas, Marcos Eberlin, a vinda do renomado cientista será de grande importância para a formação dos alunos da UPM, como formadores de opinião. “Behe é o maior expoente mundial de uma teoria de vanguarda. A aceitação da TDI, que se mostra cada dia mais eminente, certamente influenciará a nossa sociedade, e os alunos do Mackenzie precisam participar desse momento histórico”, afirmou.
A Teoria do Design Inteligente afirma que os seres humanos foram criados prontos e por uma mente inteligente, ao contrário das proposições feitas pelo Darwinismo. A TDI é baseada em conhecimentos científicos, principalmente no campo da química e da bioquímica.
Michael Behe é membro do Discovery Institute, nos EUA, uma dos centros mais atuantes no debate sobre a TDI no Mundo. Já o Discovery Mackenzie é o primeiro Núcleo de Pesquisas no mundo instalado em uma Universidade, e promove o debate científico sobre as nossas origens à luz da disputa entre evolução e Design Inteligente.
Eberlin acredita que a vinda do cientista aprofundará ainda mais as relações entre os centros de pesquisas. A visita do físico significará, “o fortalecimento do Mackenzie como uma instituição de vanguarda, que dá no Brasil o primeiro passo em uma revolução que tudo indica levará a ciência a um novo paradigma sobre nossas origens”, afirmou o coordenador.
Lançamento
Além de participar do evento na UPM, Michael Behe promoverá o relançamento do livro A Caixa Preta de Darwin, considerado um livro histórico para a TDI. A publicação será relançada pela Editora Mackenzie.
O cientista também é autor do livro Darwin Devolves (A Involução de Darwin, em português) que será lançado em breve lançado pela mesma editora.
Fonte: Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie
Terra Plana: Douglas Aleodin não reflete a posição do Design Inteligente sobre essa questão absurda!!!
domingo, setembro 22, 2019
Enquanto Caio Fábio diz entender de Física Quântica, Sean Carroll diz que os físicos não entendem!!!
quarta-feira, setembro 18, 2019
Opinion
Even Physicists Don’t Understand Quantum Mechanics
Worse, they don’t seem to want to understand it.
By Sean Carroll
Dr. Carroll is a physicist.
Sept. 7, 2019
Alejandro Guijarro, Tristan Hoare Gallery, London
“I think I can safely say that nobody really understands quantum mechanics,” observed the physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman. That’s not surprising, as far as it goes. Science makes progress by confronting our lack of understanding, and quantum mechanics has a reputation for being especially mysterious.
What’s surprising is that physicists seem to be O.K. with not understanding the most important theory they have.
Quantum mechanics, assembled gradually by a group of brilliant minds over the first decades of the 20th century, is an incredibly successful theory. We need it to account for how atoms decay, why stars shine, how transistors and lasers work and, for that matter, why tables and chairs are solid rather than immediately collapsing onto the floor.
Scientists can use quantum mechanics with perfect confidence. But it’s a black box. We can set up a physical situation, and make predictions about what will happen next that are verified to spectacular accuracy. What we don’t do is claim to understand quantum mechanics. Physicists don’t understand their own theory any better than a typical smartphone user understands what’s going on inside the device.
There are two problems. One is that quantum mechanics, as it is enshrined in textbooks, seems to require separate rules for how quantum objects behave when we’re not looking at them, and how they behave when they are being observed. When we’re not looking, they exist in “superpositions” of different possibilities, such as being at any one of various locations in space. But when we look, they suddenly snap into just a single location, and that’s where we see them. We can’t predict exactly what that location will be; the best we can do is calculate the probability of different outcomes.
The whole thing is preposterous. Why are observations special? What counts as an “observation,” anyway? When exactly does it happen? Does it need to be performed by a person? Is consciousness somehow involved in the basic rules of reality? Together these questions are known as the “measurement problem” of quantum theory.
...
READ MORE HERE: The New York Times
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NOTA BENE:
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NOTA BENE:
Na entrevista concedida a Luiz Felipe Pondé sobre espiritualidade cristã, em 15/09/2019, Caio Fábio, teólogo, diz entender de Física Quântica sub specie aeternitatis. É este o pano de fundo desta postagem.
Tabela periódica de moléculas???
terça-feira, setembro 17, 2019
Periodicity of molecular clusters based on symmetry-adapted orbital model
Takamasa Tsukamoto, Naoki Haruta, Tetsuya Kambe, Akiyoshi Kuzume & Kimihisa Yamamoto
Nature Communications volume 10, Article number: 3727 (2019)
Source/Fonte: Biotecnika
Abstract
The periodic table has always contributed to the discovery of a number of elements. Is there no such principle for larger-scale substances than atoms? Many stable substances such as clusters have been predicted based on the jellium model, which usually assumes that their structures are approximately spherical. The jellium model is effective to explain subglobular clusters such as icosahedral clusters. To broaden the scope of this model, we propose the symmetry-adapted orbital model, which explicitly takes into account the level splittings of the electronic orbitals due to lower structural symmetries. This refinement indicates the possibility of an abundance of stable clusters with various shapes that obey a certain periodicity. Many existing substances are also governed by the same rule. Consequently, all substances with the same symmetry can be unified into a periodic framework in analogy to the periodic table of elements, which will act as a useful compass to find missing substances.
FREE PDF GRATIS: Nature Communications Sup. Info.
Energética e potências nas células vivas: mero acaso, fortuita necessidade ou design inteligente?
sábado, setembro 14, 2019
Energetics and forces in living cells
Proteins can act as exquisite nanomachines to produce or sense the motion associated with cell division, intercellular trafficking, muscle contraction, and countless other activities.
Physics Today 68, 2, 27 (2015); https://doi.org/10.1063/PT.3.2686
Alex Dunn is an assistant professor of chemical engineering and Andrew Price is a doctoral student in biophysics, both at Stanford University in Stanford, California.
Life is intrinsically mechanical. Animals run, fly, and swim. Plants move daily to track the Sun. Even microscopic organisms, first observed more than three centuries ago when Antoni van Leeuwenhoek trained his microscope on pond water, swarm and tumble. A look at our own cells reveals that subcellular components are in constant motion, which allows living cells to grow, divide, change shape, and move.
In addition to producing motion, our bodies must also sense it. Living cells respond to a wide variety of mechanical stimuli, including stretch, fluid flow, osmotic potential, and the stiffness of their surroundings. Our senses of hearing and touch require nerve cells to detect minuscule mechanical forces. And our ability to regulate blood pressure across meters of height depends on mechanosensitive arteries and arterioles distributed throughout the body.
More subtly, living tissues are remarkably sensitive to the mechanical cues provided by their surroundings. Stem cells grown on soft surfaces are primed to differentiate and form correspondingly soft tissues such as fat or nervous tissue, whereas cells grown on harder surfaces differentiate to form bone cells.1 On longer length scales, the growth and development of our organs require precise changes in shape, with tightly controlled tissue-level mechanical stresses and strains. The mechanosensory response is also apparent in everyday life: Consistent exercise, for instance, leads to increases in bone and muscle mass, and slacking off reverses the gains.
To make complex morphogenetic decisions, our cells must constantly communicate with each other. Much of the intercellular communication is through chemical signals, but growing evidence suggests that physical mechanisms provide significant control as well.2 The image above, a still from a video of the development of a fruit-fly embryo, exemplifies the complex orchestration among hundreds of cells. Individual cells are squeezed, pushed, and pulled across significant distances to form different parts of the developing body.
Although motion is a pervasive aspect of life, until recently biologists had little understanding of how living things produce, detect, and respond to mechanical cues at the cellular level. Only in the past decade have researchers learned key aspects of how living cells pull that off and how those different functions are integrated among groups of cells within tissues. Although the molecular details of how a cell works are complex, some relatively simple physical models provide powerful hints.
...
FREE PDF GRATIS: Physics Today
Frotas de máquinas microscópicas trabalham em nossas células, realizando tarefas biológicas essenciais e nos mantendo vivos: mero acaso, fortuita necessidade ou design inteligente?
Self-straining of actively crosslinked microtubule networks
Sebastian Fürthauer, Bezia Lemma, Peter J. Foster, Stephanie C. Ems-McClung, Che-Hang Yu, Claire E. Walczak, Zvonimir Dogic, Daniel J. Needleman & Michael J. Shelley
Nature Physics (2019)
Source/Fonte: Emmanuel Dumont
Abstract
Cytoskeletal networks are foundational examples of active matter and central to self-organized structures in the cell. In vivo, these networks are active and densely crosslinked. Relating their large-scale dynamics to the properties of their constituents remains an unsolved problem. Here, we study an in vitro active gel made from aligned microtubules and XCTK2 kinesin motors. Using photobleaching, we demonstrate that the gel’s aligned microtubules, driven by motors, continually slide past each other at a speed independent of the local microtubule polarity and motor concentration. This phenomenon is also observed, and remains unexplained, in spindles. We derive a general framework for coarse graining microtubule gels crosslinked by molecular motors from microscopic considerations. Using microtubule–microtubule coupling through a force–velocity relationship for kinesin, this theory naturally explains the experimental results: motors generate an active strain rate in regions of changing polarity, which allows microtubules of opposite polarities to slide past each other without stressing the material.
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Otimização no código genético robusto em relação aos conjuntos de códigos de comparação: mero acaso, fortuita necessidade ou design inteligente?
quarta-feira, setembro 11, 2019
Biosystems
Volume 185, November 2019, 104023
Optimality in the standard genetic code is robust with respect to comparison code sets
Received 15 May 2019, Revised 22 August 2019, Accepted 24 August 2019, Available online 11 September 2019.
Darwin, mais complexidade: como que nós temos muitos tipos diferentes de neurônios em nossos cérebros?
sábado, setembro 07, 2019
Splicing in a single neuron is coordinately controlled by RNA binding proteins and transcription factors
Morgan Thompson, Ryan Bixby, Robert Dalton, Alexa Vandenburg, John A Calarco, Adam D Norris Is a corresponding author
Southern Methodist University, United States; University of Toronto, Canada
RESEARCH ARTICLE Jul 19, 2019
DOI: 10.7554/eLife.46726
Abstract
Single-cell transcriptomes are established by transcription factors (TFs), which determine a cell's gene-expression complement. Post-transcriptional regulation of single-cell transcriptomes, and the RNA binding proteins (RBPs) responsible, are more technically challenging to determine, and combinatorial TF-RBP coordination of single-cell transcriptomes remains unexplored. We used fluorescent reporters to visualize alternative splicing in single Caenorhabditis elegans neurons, identifying complex splicing patterns in the neuronal kinase sad-1. Most neurons express both isoforms, but the ALM mechanosensory neuron expresses only the exon-included isoform, while its developmental sister cell the BDU neuron expresses only the exon-skipped isoform. A cascade of three cell-specific TFs and two RBPs are combinatorially required for sad-1 exon inclusion. Mechanistically, TFs combinatorially ensure expression of RBPs, which interact with sad-1 pre-mRNA. Thus a combinatorial TF-RBP code controls single-neuron sad-1 splicing. Additionally, we find ‘phenotypic convergence,’ previously observed for TFs, also applies to RBPs: different RBP combinations generate similar splicing outcomes in different neurons.
eLife digest
All the cells in the human nervous system contain the same genetic information, and yet there are many kinds of neurons, each with different features and roles in the body. Proteins known as transcription factors help to establish this diversity by switching on different genes in different types of cells.
A mechanism known as RNA splicing, which is regulated by RNA binding proteins, can also provide another layer of regulation. When a gene is switched on, a faithful copy of its sequence is produced in the form of an RNA molecule, which will then be ‘read’ to create a protein. However, the RNA molecules may first be processed to create templates that can differ between cell types: this means that a single gene can code for slightly different proteins, some of them specific to a given cell type. Yet, very little is known about how RNA splicing can generate more diversity in the nervous system.
To investigate, Thompson et al. developed a fluorescent reporter system that helped them track how the RNA of a gene called sad-1 is spliced in individual neurons of the worm Caenorhabditis elegans. This showed that sad-1 was turned on in all neurons, but the particular spliced versions varied widely between different types of nerve cells.
Additional experiments combined old school and cutting-edge genetics technics such as CRISPR/Cas9 to identify the proteins that control the splicing of sad-1 in different kinds of neurons. Despite not directly participating in RNA splicing, a number of transcription factors were shown to be involved. These molecular switches were turning on genes that code for RNA binding proteins differently between types of neurons, which in turn led sad-1 to be spliced according to neuron-specific patterns.
The findings by Thompson et al. could provide some insight into how mammals can establish many types of neurons; however, a technical hurdle stands in the way of this line of research, as it is still difficult to detect splicing in single neurons in these species.
FREE PDF GRATIS: eLIFE
A Inquisição Secular: Darwin locuta, causa finita!
sexta-feira, setembro 06, 2019
The secular inquisition
A few days ago, the philosopher John Gray wrote on the Unherd website a bleak but precisely directed analysis of why the humanities can’t be saved. It used to be said, he wrote, that the humanities taught people how to think. No longer.
“Students learn an intra-academic argot – intersectionality, hetero-normativity and the like — that has zero utility in the world in which they will go on to live.They also learn that disagreement in ethics and politics is illegitimate. Anyone who departs from the prevailing progressive consensus is not just mistaken but malevolent. When enforced in universities, this is a prescription for censorship and conformism. What is being inculcated is not freedom of mind, but freedom from thought”.
Gray was echoing the despair of Sir Roger Scruton, himself a victim of vicious bullying by closed minds. Sir Roger recently observed that the intellectual corruption of the humanities had led him to conclude that those departments should be shut down altogether and the universities be reduced to institutions of scientific inquiry alone.
For many years, I have been writing about these trends and attempting to explain why western society seems to be tearing itself up by the roots. Much of the current discussion about the malign development of hate-fuelled divisions, identity politics and other aspects of our culture wars echoes the analysis in my own books: All Must Have Prizes (1996), The Sex-Change Society: Feminised Britain and the Neutered Male ( 1999) and The World Turned Upside-Down: the Global Battle over God, Truth and Power (2010).
As a result, I will be publishing on this blog a series of excerpts from these three books (the first two of which are now sadly out of print) in the hope they may further help illuminate today’s great cultural battleground.
Today I start with an excerpt from a chapter entitled “The Secular Inquisition” from The World Turned Upside-Down.
What have the issues of anthropogenic global warming, the war in Iraq, Israel and scientism got in common? Not a lot, you might think. But in fact a number of threads link them all. Most fundamentally, they all involve the promotion of beliefs that purport to be unchallengeable truths but are in fact ideologies in which evidence is manipulated, twisted and distorted to support and “prove” their governing idea. All are therefore based on false or unsupported beliefs that are presented as axiomatically true. Moreover, because each assumes itself to be proclaiming the sole and exclusive truth, it cannot permit any challenge to itself. It has to maintain at all costs the integrity of the falsehood. So all challenges have to be resisted through coercive means. Knowledge is thus forced to give way to power. Reason is replaced by bullying, intimidation and the suppression of debate.
This makes them all deeply regressive movements of thought, which corrode the most fundamental concept of the Western world. The principal characteristic of Western modernity is freedom of thought and expression and the ability to express dissent. The eighteenth-century Enlightenment ushered in the modern age by breaking the power of the church to control the terms of debate and punish heresy. Church and state were separated, and a space was created for individual freedom and the toleration of differences—the essence of a liberal society.
Cultural Totalitarianism
While it would be a mistake to idealize the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this era in Britain and America did provide a breathing space between the religious tyranny of the age that preceded it and the horrors that were to follow. Yet the French Revolution and the Terror unleashed by it presented the inescapable evidence that the Enlightenment, far from consigning murderous obscurantism to the dustbin of history, contained powerful strands from the start that would merely secularize tyranny. In the twentieth century, the political totalitarianism of communism and fascism, although overtly antireligious, echoed the premodern despotism of the church by declaring themselves the arbiters of a totalizing worldview in which all dissent would be crushed. Now, with both communism and fascism defeated, the West has fallen victim to a third variation on the theme of totalitarianism: not religious or political this time, but cultural. It is what J. L. Talmon identified back in 1952 as “totalitarian democracy,” which he characterized as “a dictatorship based on ideology and the enthusiasm of the masses.”
If religious totalitarianism was rule by the church and political totalitarianism was rule by the “general will,” cultural totalitarianism is rule by the subjective individual, freed from all external authority and constraints. Morality is privatized so that everyone becomes his or her own moral authority, while the laws and traditions rooted in Christianity and the Hebrew Bible have come under explicit attack. The old order of Western civilization, resting on the external authorities of religion and culture, has to be destroyed. With no order or purpose in the world, moral and cultural relativism are the rule; any attempt to prioritize any culture or lifestyle over any other is illegitimate.
The paradox—and it is acute—is that this relativist doctrine itself assumes the form of a dogmatic moralizing agenda that takes an absolutist position against all who challenge it and seeks to stamp out all deviations. Medieval Christianity—like contemporary Islamism—stamped out dissent by killing or conversion; Western liberals do it by social and professional ostracism and legal discrimination. It is a kind of secular Inquisition. And the grand inquisitors are to be found within the intelligentsia—in the universities, the media, the law, the political and professional classes—who not only have systematically undermined the foundations of Western society but are heavily engaged in attempting to suppress any challenge or protest.
It is paradoxical but not surprising that the assault on intellectual liberty is taking place within the institutions of reason. For decades, these have been dominated by a variety of wrecking ideologies such as anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism, utilitarianism, feminism, multiculturalism and environmentalism. What they all have in common is the aim of overturning the established order in the West. What was previously marginalized or forbidden has become permitted and even mandatory; what was previously the norm has become forbidden and marginalized. As the philosopher Roger Scruton has written, the curriculum in the humanities is “relativist in favour of transgression and absolutist against authority.” Because these are ideologies, they wrench facts and evidence to fit their governing idea. They are inimical to reason and independent thought—and thus to freedom, because reason and liberty are inseparable bedfellows.
As Sir Karl Popper has observed, reason grows by way of mutual criticism and through the development of institutions that safeguard the liberty to criticize and thus preserve freedom of thought. Because it treats people impartially, reason is therefore closely linked to equality. Pseudo-rationalism, by contrast, is “the immodest belief in one’s superior intellectual gifts—the claim to be initiated, to know with certainty, to possess an infallible instrument of discovery.” This pseudo-rationalism, the enemy of reason, is precisely what has the Western intelligentsia in its grip.
It is hard to overstate the influence on our culture that is wielded by the doctrines of anti-imperialism, multiculturalism, feminism, environmentalism and the like. They form the unchallengeable orthodoxy within academia, the base camp for their “long march through the institutions,” which they have colonized with stunning success. The center of political gravity has been shifted so that anyone who does not share these values is defined as extreme.
“Progressives” on the left believe that their secular, materialistic, individualistic and utilitarian values represent not a point of view but virtue itself. No decent person can therefore oppose them. In Manichean fashion, the left divides the world into two rival camps of good and evil, creating as the sole alternative to itself a demonic political camp called “the right,” to which everyone who challenges it is automatically consigned. Since “the right” is by definition evil, to dispute any left-wing shibboleth is to put oneself beyond the moral pale. There can be no dissent or argument at all. Only one worldview is to be permitted. Anyone who supports Israel or the Americans in Iraq, or is skeptical of anthropogenic global warming, or opposes multiculturalism or utilitarianism, or supports capitalism or is a believing Christian is “right-wing” and therefore evil.
A central doctrine in the progressive orthodoxy is that “discrimination” is the supreme crime. The very idea of a hierarchy of cultures, beliefs or lifestyles is deemed to be discriminatory. According to the ideology of nondiscrimination, all self-designated “victim” groups can do no wrong, while the majority culture can do no right. Morality is redefined around subjective feelings. Any objective evidence of harm that may be done by “victim” groups is swept away; all that matters is that they must not be made to feel bad about themselves, nor be put at any disadvantage even if it results from their own actions.
Activities previously marginalized or considered transgressive are now privileged, while those considered to embody normative values are actively discriminated against. In the cause of nonjudgmentalism, only those who are in favor of moral judgments based on the ethical codes of the Bible are to be judged and condemned. In the cause of antidiscrimination, only those who believe in a level playing field are to be discriminated against. In the cause of freedom, those who seek to limit anarchic behavior in order to prevent harm are to be denied the freedom to do so.
...
READ MORE HERE: MelanniePhillips
“Students learn an intra-academic argot – intersectionality, hetero-normativity and the like — that has zero utility in the world in which they will go on to live.They also learn that disagreement in ethics and politics is illegitimate. Anyone who departs from the prevailing progressive consensus is not just mistaken but malevolent. When enforced in universities, this is a prescription for censorship and conformism. What is being inculcated is not freedom of mind, but freedom from thought”.
Gray was echoing the despair of Sir Roger Scruton, himself a victim of vicious bullying by closed minds. Sir Roger recently observed that the intellectual corruption of the humanities had led him to conclude that those departments should be shut down altogether and the universities be reduced to institutions of scientific inquiry alone.
For many years, I have been writing about these trends and attempting to explain why western society seems to be tearing itself up by the roots. Much of the current discussion about the malign development of hate-fuelled divisions, identity politics and other aspects of our culture wars echoes the analysis in my own books: All Must Have Prizes (1996), The Sex-Change Society: Feminised Britain and the Neutered Male ( 1999) and The World Turned Upside-Down: the Global Battle over God, Truth and Power (2010).
As a result, I will be publishing on this blog a series of excerpts from these three books (the first two of which are now sadly out of print) in the hope they may further help illuminate today’s great cultural battleground.
Today I start with an excerpt from a chapter entitled “The Secular Inquisition” from The World Turned Upside-Down.
What have the issues of anthropogenic global warming, the war in Iraq, Israel and scientism got in common? Not a lot, you might think. But in fact a number of threads link them all. Most fundamentally, they all involve the promotion of beliefs that purport to be unchallengeable truths but are in fact ideologies in which evidence is manipulated, twisted and distorted to support and “prove” their governing idea. All are therefore based on false or unsupported beliefs that are presented as axiomatically true. Moreover, because each assumes itself to be proclaiming the sole and exclusive truth, it cannot permit any challenge to itself. It has to maintain at all costs the integrity of the falsehood. So all challenges have to be resisted through coercive means. Knowledge is thus forced to give way to power. Reason is replaced by bullying, intimidation and the suppression of debate.
This makes them all deeply regressive movements of thought, which corrode the most fundamental concept of the Western world. The principal characteristic of Western modernity is freedom of thought and expression and the ability to express dissent. The eighteenth-century Enlightenment ushered in the modern age by breaking the power of the church to control the terms of debate and punish heresy. Church and state were separated, and a space was created for individual freedom and the toleration of differences—the essence of a liberal society.
Cultural Totalitarianism
While it would be a mistake to idealize the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this era in Britain and America did provide a breathing space between the religious tyranny of the age that preceded it and the horrors that were to follow. Yet the French Revolution and the Terror unleashed by it presented the inescapable evidence that the Enlightenment, far from consigning murderous obscurantism to the dustbin of history, contained powerful strands from the start that would merely secularize tyranny. In the twentieth century, the political totalitarianism of communism and fascism, although overtly antireligious, echoed the premodern despotism of the church by declaring themselves the arbiters of a totalizing worldview in which all dissent would be crushed. Now, with both communism and fascism defeated, the West has fallen victim to a third variation on the theme of totalitarianism: not religious or political this time, but cultural. It is what J. L. Talmon identified back in 1952 as “totalitarian democracy,” which he characterized as “a dictatorship based on ideology and the enthusiasm of the masses.”
If religious totalitarianism was rule by the church and political totalitarianism was rule by the “general will,” cultural totalitarianism is rule by the subjective individual, freed from all external authority and constraints. Morality is privatized so that everyone becomes his or her own moral authority, while the laws and traditions rooted in Christianity and the Hebrew Bible have come under explicit attack. The old order of Western civilization, resting on the external authorities of religion and culture, has to be destroyed. With no order or purpose in the world, moral and cultural relativism are the rule; any attempt to prioritize any culture or lifestyle over any other is illegitimate.
The paradox—and it is acute—is that this relativist doctrine itself assumes the form of a dogmatic moralizing agenda that takes an absolutist position against all who challenge it and seeks to stamp out all deviations. Medieval Christianity—like contemporary Islamism—stamped out dissent by killing or conversion; Western liberals do it by social and professional ostracism and legal discrimination. It is a kind of secular Inquisition. And the grand inquisitors are to be found within the intelligentsia—in the universities, the media, the law, the political and professional classes—who not only have systematically undermined the foundations of Western society but are heavily engaged in attempting to suppress any challenge or protest.
It is paradoxical but not surprising that the assault on intellectual liberty is taking place within the institutions of reason. For decades, these have been dominated by a variety of wrecking ideologies such as anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism, utilitarianism, feminism, multiculturalism and environmentalism. What they all have in common is the aim of overturning the established order in the West. What was previously marginalized or forbidden has become permitted and even mandatory; what was previously the norm has become forbidden and marginalized. As the philosopher Roger Scruton has written, the curriculum in the humanities is “relativist in favour of transgression and absolutist against authority.” Because these are ideologies, they wrench facts and evidence to fit their governing idea. They are inimical to reason and independent thought—and thus to freedom, because reason and liberty are inseparable bedfellows.
As Sir Karl Popper has observed, reason grows by way of mutual criticism and through the development of institutions that safeguard the liberty to criticize and thus preserve freedom of thought. Because it treats people impartially, reason is therefore closely linked to equality. Pseudo-rationalism, by contrast, is “the immodest belief in one’s superior intellectual gifts—the claim to be initiated, to know with certainty, to possess an infallible instrument of discovery.” This pseudo-rationalism, the enemy of reason, is precisely what has the Western intelligentsia in its grip.
It is hard to overstate the influence on our culture that is wielded by the doctrines of anti-imperialism, multiculturalism, feminism, environmentalism and the like. They form the unchallengeable orthodoxy within academia, the base camp for their “long march through the institutions,” which they have colonized with stunning success. The center of political gravity has been shifted so that anyone who does not share these values is defined as extreme.
“Progressives” on the left believe that their secular, materialistic, individualistic and utilitarian values represent not a point of view but virtue itself. No decent person can therefore oppose them. In Manichean fashion, the left divides the world into two rival camps of good and evil, creating as the sole alternative to itself a demonic political camp called “the right,” to which everyone who challenges it is automatically consigned. Since “the right” is by definition evil, to dispute any left-wing shibboleth is to put oneself beyond the moral pale. There can be no dissent or argument at all. Only one worldview is to be permitted. Anyone who supports Israel or the Americans in Iraq, or is skeptical of anthropogenic global warming, or opposes multiculturalism or utilitarianism, or supports capitalism or is a believing Christian is “right-wing” and therefore evil.
A central doctrine in the progressive orthodoxy is that “discrimination” is the supreme crime. The very idea of a hierarchy of cultures, beliefs or lifestyles is deemed to be discriminatory. According to the ideology of nondiscrimination, all self-designated “victim” groups can do no wrong, while the majority culture can do no right. Morality is redefined around subjective feelings. Any objective evidence of harm that may be done by “victim” groups is swept away; all that matters is that they must not be made to feel bad about themselves, nor be put at any disadvantage even if it results from their own actions.
Activities previously marginalized or considered transgressive are now privileged, while those considered to embody normative values are actively discriminated against. In the cause of nonjudgmentalism, only those who are in favor of moral judgments based on the ethical codes of the Bible are to be judged and condemned. In the cause of antidiscrimination, only those who believe in a level playing field are to be discriminated against. In the cause of freedom, those who seek to limit anarchic behavior in order to prevent harm are to be denied the freedom to do so.
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Comparando as vocalizações dos primatas: profundo abismo na capacidade cognitiva dos humanos
quarta-feira, setembro 04, 2019
CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS ARTICLE
Front. Psychol., 03 September 2019
Systems Underlying Human and Old World Monkey Communication: One, Two, or Infinite
Shigeru Miyagawa1,2* and Esther Clarke1,3
1Linguistics and Philosophy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, United States
2Office of Open Learning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, United States
3Behavioral Ecology and Evolution Research (BEER) Group, Durham University, Durham, United Kingdom
Source/Fonte: MIT News
Abstract
Using artificially synthesized stimuli, previous research has shown that cotton-top tamarin monkeys easily learn simple AB grammar sequences, but not the more complex AnBn sequences that require hierarchical structure. Humans have no trouble learning AnBn combinations. A more recent study, using similar artificially created stimuli, showed that there is a neuroanatomical difference in the brain between these two kinds of arrays. While the simpler AB sequences recruit the frontal operculum, the AnBn array recruits the phylogenetically newer Broca’s area. We propose that on close inspection, reported vocal repertoires of Old World Monkeys show that these nonhuman primates are capable of calls that have two items in them, but never more than two. These are simple AB sequences, as predicted by previous research. In addition, we suggest the two-item call cannot be the result of a combinatorial operation that we see in human language, where the recursive operation of Merge allows for a potentially infinite array of structures. In our view, the two-item calls of nonhuman primates result from a dual-compartment frame into which each of the calls can fit without having to be combined by an operation such as Merge.
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