History
oracknows | August 21, 2007My regular readers here know to what lengths I go to combat Holocaust denial on the Internet. It's a fairly regular topic on this blog, as is rebutting the lies Holocaust deniers routinely spout. Not surprisingly, Holocaust deniers like to try to portray me as either Jewish or somehow in the thrall of the ADL, much as alternative medicine aficionados like to try to paint me as being a shill for big pharma. (Hey, big pharma and all you Jews out there controlling the New World Order, where are my checks? You guys owe me several years of back payments for my online efforts to undermine the…
aardvarchaeology | August 18, 2007China's interest in the natural resources of Africa has ballooned lately and received much media coverage. Apparently, the last time somebody was that interested in metal ores and scrap, they were Germany in the late 1930s. This political force field across Africa is now, of course, being dressed up in cultural finery, including the manipulation of historical perceptions.
Under the leadership of Admiral Zheng He, China enjoyed a brief era of transoceanic power with insanely huge ships in the early 15th century. These efforts were apparently terminated because the Chinese failed to reach…
evolvingthoughts | August 14, 2007
I have a book forthcoming, Species definitions: a sourcebook from antiquity to today, which gives and commentates definitions of "species" in logic and biology for 2,500 years, from Plato to Templeton and beyond. It's designed as a reader for scholars to see how the notion[s] have evolved separately in the logical definitional sense - for Aristotle, eidos, which we translate as "form", "species", and "kind", was a logical term, not a biological one, which had to wait until the 16th century, and even then they were distinct notions.
I argue in the commentaries that there was nothing…
evolvingthoughts | August 11, 2007
Laelaps has a very nice essay that ranges from the number of ribs humans have, the book of Genesis, creationism, and the variety of stories told about human evolution from the nineteenth century to now. Go read it. It's one of the few blog posts in which you'll read of petrified testicles...
[HT: Afarensis]
purepedantry | August 10, 2007Nicholas Wade reports in the NYTimes about a UCD professor, Gregory Clark, and his theory of the Industrial Revolution. His answer is that high fertility rates in the upper classes caused them to steadily supplant lower classes. They brought productive values with them such that when the population reached a critical mass of individuals with middle class breeding so to speak, the Industrial Revolution occurred:
A way to test the idea, he realized, was through analysis of ancient wills, which might reveal a connection between wealth and the number of progeny. The wills did that, but in…
pharyngula | August 9, 2007Somebody else has visited Darwin's house and taken a stroll on the sandwalk. I can testify that it is surprisingly difficult to get to the place, unless you have a trusty native guide — but once you get to the village, it really ought to be easier than that to find the place.
oracknows | August 8, 2007I learned the other day that one of the most renowned historians of the Holocaust, Raul Hilberg, passed away at the age of 81:
WILLISTON, Vt. --Dr. Raul Hilberg, a world renowned Holocaust scholar has died. He was 81.
Hilberg, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Vermont, died Saturday from a recurrence of lung cancer although he never smoked, his wife Gwen said. He died with her at his side at the Vermont Respite House in Williston.
Hilberg was the author of The Destruction of the European Jews, (1961), a landmark study of the Nazi killings of more than 5 million…
oracknows | August 8, 2007&uotI've been on call and grant writing, both of which have put a major crimp in my blogging time, preventing my usual daily magnum opus and leaving me reposts and pithy link-and-comment posts, at least for today. Since having become a little irritated by comparisons to Nazis by a certain opponent of bans on indoor smoking, I thought now would be a great time to show you something that I've been meaning to show since the time that I moved the old Blogspot blog over to ScienceBlogs. Yes, I'm talking about the origin of the Hitler Zombie. This post, which appeared on June 2, 2005, is in…
evolvingthoughts | August 7, 2007
I'm home sick, so I'm shirking duties and came across one of my favourite film scenes of all time:
evolvingthoughts | August 7, 2007
I have a soft spot for Herbert Spencer [see also here]. Supposedly the founder of social Darwinism and the precursor to American libertarianism and justifier of the robber barons of the Gilded Age, he has been the whipping boy of progressives and anti-evolutionists alike. Ever since Richard Hofstadter fingered him as the source of rough individualism and eugenics in his Social Darwinism in American Thought in 1943, Spencer has been the evil demon of philosophy, political thought, and evolution. But a recent article in The New Yorker occasioned by a new book Herbert Spencer and the Invention…
aardvarchaeology | August 7, 2007
I've spent the day metal-detecting for a project called Vasakungarnas Djurhamn, that is, "Animal Harbour of the Sheaf Kings". This name may not make much sense to you, Dear Reader, so let me explain.
In the 1520s Gustaf Eriksson, the most successful of many ambitious young noblemen at the time who tended to end up decapitated, wrested Swedish royal power from the Danes with the aid of Lubeck. He soon implemented Reformation and used the riches of the church and monasteries to repay his debts and reorganise Sweden from the bottom up. A very good 2002 biography of the man has the subtitle "…
omnibrain | July 30, 2007So freaking cool (and freaky)...Via Neatorama and Curious Expeditions.
It is a remarkable bit of irony, that finger. Venerated, kept in reliquary, subjected to the same treatment as a Saint. But this finger belonged to no Saint. It is the long bony finger of an enemy of the church, a heretic. A man so dangerous to the religious institution he was made a prisoner in his own home. It sits in a small glass egg atop an inscribed marble base in the Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza, or the History of Science Museum in Florence, Italy. On the shelf next to the middle finger of his right hand…
oracknows | July 26, 2007Until the other day, it had been a long time since I had indulged my interest in World War II history. Not surprisingly, a certain anti-Semitic troll appeared out of the woodwork, thus amazing me with persistence, given that it's been at least two months since I've even mentioned the topic. That's a long time to have to wait for an opportunity to leap into the comments here and rail against "Jews" and Zionists while I've been dishing out the usual commentary on alternative medicine, science, clinical trials,
Since he/she/it's here again, I thought I'd mention a story that's cropped up over…
oracknows | July 25, 2007...At least, that's what I most definitely say after reading this account of The rise & fall of the prefrontal lobotomy.
One question that stands out: How could a stepmother force her stepson to get a lobotomy just because she didn't like his sullenness and defiance, even after being told by other doctors that there was nothing wrong with the boy? An observation that stands out is that medicine and surgery are periodically caught up in fads. That's why it's every bit as important to apply evidence-based medicine to the newest procedures and treatments as it is to apply it to alternative…
oracknows | July 24, 2007
While I'm back on the subject of Nazi Germany, here's a rather interesting tidbit of news about a book that I'll undoubtedly want to read when it comes out:
During the latter half of World War II, the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) undertook a massive clandestine operation of which the full, extraordinary details are only now coming to light.
Between 1942 and 1945, a section of SIS - known as MI19 - secretly recorded no fewer than 64,427 conversations between captured German generals and other senior officers, all without their knowledge or even suspicion. The 167 most significant…
oracknows | July 24, 2007Here's a bummer of a bit of information that some elderly Germans are discovering:
Hundreds of elderly Germans are being confronted with the revelation that they were recruited into the Nazi party during the second world war.
Historians researching Nazi party archives in Frankfurt have discovered that a string of prominent Germans were among those automatically granted membership to celebrate Adolf Hitler's birthday.
Writers, a cabaret artist, scientists, journalists and politicians, including former cabinet ministers, are among those whose names are on the list.
According to records, they…
omnibrain | July 23, 2007This weeks article is again from the Book Review section of the NYTimes on April 28, 1890. Admittedly, I'm not very familiar with the history of Physiognomy so I am learning about it a little bit today as I post this. It is essentially Phrenology of the face, even more ridiculous and can be used for racist conclusions more readily. From Wikipedia:
Physiognomy (Gk. physis, nature and gnomon, judge, interpreter) is a theory based upon the idea that the study and judgement of a person's outer appearance, primarily the face, may give insights into their character or personality. The term…
terrasig | July 21, 2007From today's Washington Post:
Odile Crick, an artist who made the first widely published sketch of the double-helix structure of DNA, died of cancer July 5 at her home in La Jolla, Calif. She was 86.
Her graceful drawing of the double-helix structure of DNA with intertwined helical loops has become a symbol of the achievements of science and its aspirations to understand the secrets of life. The image represents the base pairs of nucleic acids, twisted around a center line to show the axis of the helix.
The free PDF of the famous 1953 Nature paper reveals the elegance of her interpretation of…
razib | July 18, 2007We know that the Magyars originated from Inner Eurasia. They were one of the long line of steppe peoples who conquered and settled central Europe, the Avars being their local predecessors. But unlike the Avars, or the Bulgars or the Huns, the Magyars left a cultural imprint: their language. And yet physically and genetically the current Hungarian population seems to exhibit continuity with their European neighbors (in contrast, Gypsies show evidence of haplotypes normally found in the Indian subcontinent). Dienekes points me to some new data:
Strong differences appear when the ancient…
evolvingthoughts | July 14, 2007
There has been a bit of a resurgence of science versus religion posts and chatter in various forums* that I inhabit when I'm not working lately. It occurred to me that it might be time to do one of my sermons.
There are basically two popular views of the relation between science and religion. One is the All-Or-Nothing view: science is either entirely subsumed under religion, or totally excluded from it. The other is the view that each has their own special role - Stephen Gould called it the Non-Overlapping Magisterial Authority (NOMA) view. Both are, in my opinion, quite wrong, both…