 |
I get to these pages every few years. The last visit took
place in November 2011, after a space of ten months. My readings are vastly more
numerous and diverse than the brief mentions recounted here. I used to wonder about all
this reading in human evolution until I found out that two other senior communications
lawyers of my acquaintance also read hugely into this subject.
My advice is: read voraciously. The more you know, the less
you will be subject to fashionable manias. Some of these are discussed below.
Gödel's
Incompleteness Theorem states that we can have a complete view of the world, which
must necessarily contain logical inconsistencies, or a perfectly consistent, but
incomplete one. I prefer the complete, but logically inconsistent one. Some people hate
inconsistency: my view is that I have a right not to be fully persuaded, and the
last thing I want to become is a persecuting hypocrite.As Leonard Cohen said:
"There's a crack in everything: that's how the light gets in."
Some time ago I began to see
that the Enneagram - a system of
personality analysis - could be represented by the creatures. Bear is a Four (The Artist),
Toad a Nine (The Peacemaker).
St.-John Crapaud and Mozart the Bear at the Club:
I visited the Temple at Kamakura, Japan, in
the summer of 2000 in conjunction with a conference. The place made a profound impression
on me. I gave some photographs and a script to my illustrator, Albert Prisner
(613-230-8604), and he turned them into this wonderful story. Quite silly. by the way,
Muffy is an Enneagram Two (The Giver),
Murray is a Six (The Loyalist). Timber Wolf, found elsewhere on this site, is an Eight
(the Challenger, the Boss). Timber is always asking, "Do you need to be culled?"
Do you?
Muffy and
Murray visit the temple at Kamakura
Timber's
Christmas Carol "Hunting in the Snow"
Curley Lake, Gatineau Park, Quebec.
Any fool can walk on water when it is ice. But when? This was taken on April 6, 2002, two
weeks after the spring equinox.
April?!
Global Warming, a small
presentation inspired by finding more snow on April 1, 2001 at my cabin than was there on
December 29th, three months before. Yes there is global warming. It happens every spring.
When spring does not warm the planet sufficiently, we call it an ice age. See the heading The Planet in Time below.Since the collapse of the global warming
hysteria in 2009 (thank heaven) by the release of the climategate
email leak, I have been proven right again. |
 |
McGill Society of
Ottawa, of which I was president from 1993 to 1995. The McGill Society organizes
interesting events for McGill alumni and friends in the Ottawa area. Please contact the
site and see what events are coming.
Thirteen
Strings of Ottawa Thirteen Strings is Ottawa's and the nation's first rate chamber
orchestra. I encourage anyone who likes classical and baroque music to subscribe.
Generally performances are held in St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church on the corner of
Wellington and Kent Streets.
The Prayer Book Society
of Canada
I can not say I attend Church often, but when I do, I want religion, not social
policy. The doctor of philosophy who assembled the Anglican Prayer Book in the 1500's knew
what he was doing. At once biblical and elegant, the Prayer Book has been the foundation
stone of the Anglican Church. Say good-bye to all that.
Gatineau Ramblers - It is so
exclusive it has no structure and you cannot join. Just show up!
 |
The
Masons. Yes, folks it's true. There is a cosmic conspiracy to improve the human
condition and I am a part of it. Inquiries are welcomed. Ottawa District No. 2
website is linked here for good measure. The Masons are a very old fraternity with a
continuously relevant message of peace, right conduct, responsibility, and brotherhood.
The Royal
Arch is the graduate school of Masonry. |
Did you ever read Julian Jaynes' "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind"?
No? Well it is probably the most important book of the twentieth century after Einstein's
and Godel's discoveries. It states that consciousness as we understand is a specialized
function of the brain arising in historical time, and that previously men's minds were
organized differently, or that their "user illusion" caused them to
believe they received voices and visions of gods. Indeed, "history" is a
construct of consciousness. Men built cities, worshipped gods, and traded for a long time
before consciousness replaced the previous mindset, probably under the growing influence
of alphabets. And along comes "The User Illusion, Cutting Consciousness Down to Size", by Tor
Norretranders (ISBN 0-14-023012-2, Penguin, 1998) proving Jaynes' fundamental insight into
consciousness was right, by all the instruments of electrode science. (The Origin of
Consciousness can be ordered via ISBN 0-8020-2306-1 - University of Toronto Press, 1976).
"Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God", by Jack Miles (ISBN
0-375-40014-1) "No summary of mine can do justice to the richness of this book",
said Paul Johnson. It may very well reorganize your view of the world. Not just more
information, but transformative information.
I thought Jacob Needleman's "What is
God" would turn out tobe one of those heavy books you read out of duty. It turned
out to be delightful.
"The
Devil's Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions" by David Berlinsky,
himself an atheist. I love it when an atheist and a logician points out that there is no
more evidence for an atheistic interpretation than a theistic one: Life is a matter of
interpretation.
Yes or No?
I say yes, always have. Matt Ridley has published a brilliant
interpretation of human history called "The
Rational Optimist". In it he takes issue with every modern trend of despair. He
points out the obvious - things are getting better, and getting better at an increasing
rate - and he shows why: trade. Trade enables specialization of production and
generalization of consumption. He links his arguments about human improvements quite
explicitly to increasing rates of energy consumption. Ridley has a broad sweep and employs
deep reading to make his case. His is a welcome challenge to the fashionable twaddle that
things are getting worse.
And on the lesser theme of theology, Philip Jenkins' "The
Jesus Wars" provides a rollicking good story about the disputes that embroiled
the Byzantine Empire over the relationships of God the Father to God the Son. They were so
busy fighting each other they hardly noticed the rise of Islam.
Fact: Ten thousand years ago man was making brick in Sumeria. Fact: Ten
thousand years ago there were four thousand feet of ice over the St. Lawrence River.
Conjecture: Ten thousand years from now Toronto may have been bulldozed into Chattanooga
by advancing ice.
Those who obsess about global warming might like to
contemplate the following fact. 500 million years ago the earth had 18 times the current
amount of CO2 and the globe was warm. Mammals did not exist then, so clearly we
did not either. 40 million years ago India drifted into Asia, up went the Himalayas, down
went the CO2 (yet again) as rain washed into the rock, absorbing the CO2,
down went the temperature, and mammals started to make sense on a progressively colder
planet. Fascinating facts from "The Time Before History, 5 Million Years of Human Impact", by
Colin Tudge (Scribner's 1996, ISBN 0-684-80726-2 at pp. 66-71). The earth has not ceased
to get colder in the last 50 million years, slowly, with many temporary plateaus of
stability. Perhaps Gaia evolved intelligence to burn up some fossil fuels to stabilize a
declining situation. Who knows? See Global Warming,
a presentation I wanted to give in Brazil instead of the usual Internet stuff.
For vitally important basic
information about the human species over the last 150,000 years, much of it of recent
origin, I urge you to Please read Nicholas Wade's Before the
Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors (ISBN 978-0-14-303832-0, 2006).
Recent findings suggest that all of the human race outside Africa may descend from
some escaping band that might have numbered no more than 150 people, some 35,000 years
ago. His major point is that evolution of the species is still going on. A highly useful
compendium of the latest findings on language, the evolution of human races, and
everything you wanted to know about how your ancestors got from then to now. I give the
same approval to The Time Before History, by Colin Tudge (ISBN 0-684-80726-2, 1996)
which, though a decade older, gives a very clear picture of the last 5 million years of
climate. (see above on this page)
"Global
warming" is what it appears like if you only count time from the end of the last
ice-age 12,000 years ago.
For the really long view, read "Annals of the Former World" by John McPhee, (Farrar Strauss and
Giroux, 1998, ISBN 0-374-10520-0) a review of the geology of North America told as the
geologists themselves piece it together, and the impact of the plate tectonics theory on
the story.
No time frame less than a thousand years has any relevance for
understanding man's place in nature.
See also "A Brain for All Seasons: Human Evolution and Abrupt Climate Change",
by William Calvin (ISBN 0-226-09201-1). The latest information from paleo-climatologists
is that an ice age can return with extreme rapidity, as in less than a decade. How do they
know this? Because it has happened before, many times. You will not see this in the papers
yet because it does not conform to the CO2 scare.
Brian Fagan's The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850
(ISBN 13 978-0-465-02272-4, 2000 and The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization (ISBN
13 978-0-465-02282-0) are worthwhile histories of the longer-term impacts of climate
changes.
"Genome: the Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters", by Matt
Ridley, Perennial, October 2000, ISBN0-06--019497-0. What we know now from research into
the genetic code of man.
Also by Matt Ridley, The Agile Gene:
How Nature Turns on Nurture, (ISBN 0-06-000679-X), 2003, covers the latest findings in
microbiology and investigates to what extent the new knowledge affects our understanding
of the nature versus nurture debates. It also undercuts Dawkins' "selfish gene"
idea.
- Charles Darwin was the greatest
biologist since Aristotle, and like Aristotle, his vast intellectual legacy is beginning
to cause problems. Darwin had at least two large theories, natural selection and sexual
selection. Natural selection works by predators and parasites. Sexual selection works by
mate choice, and was ignored until recently.
-
- Species have been found to speciate, that is, to
form new breeding pools that stay separate from their former potential mates if they are
isolated for long enough. So Darwin's significant insight has been proven true. Whether
all evolution occurs exclusively through the forces Darwin evoked - predators,
parasites, diseases, and sexual choice - is a matter of greater scientific controversy
than the laity are led to believe. I have read the Voyage of the Beagle (2007), the Origin
of Species twice, the Descent of Man at least once (2006), and I recommend Darwin to you
wholeheartedly. Like Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, you will benefit by a long
bath in his books.
-
- Geoffrey Miller's The Mating
Mind (ISBN 0-385-49517-X) asserts that, for whatever reason, once female proto-humans
started to select their mates for entertainment value, as well as for the provision of
food, and males began to select for beauty, the rapid increase in human intelligence,
beauty, and kindness began. The book explains better than any other why it feels
the way it does to be a human, from the inside-out. In the same vein, Jared Diamond's
less quoted book Why is Sex Fun? The Evolution of Human Sexuality (1997, ISBN
0-465-03126-9) deals with the fact that human sexuality is unique in the animal kingdom.
Humans are much odder than we realize. We have taken eating and turned it into cuisine; we
have taken reproduction and turned it into sex.
-
- The Danish writer Tor
Norretranders has thoughts of a similar nature in "The Generous Man: How Helping
others is the Sexiest Thing You Can Do"(2011). He too emphasizes that sexual
selection is the driving force behind man's rapid and otherwise inexplicable evolution.
Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate (ISBN
0-14- 20.0334 4) devastates the social science view that there is no such thing as human
nature with accuracy. The pendulum is swinging very far towards a hereditarian view of our
nature.
For a completely kick-butt, take no prisoners
attack on the fatuousness of the social-science view of rape, read A Natural History of
Rape, the Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion, by Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer. They make
evident the truth that rape is about sex, not violence, and that its offence lies
precisely in robbing the female of mate choice, contrary to the net direction of our
evolution, as depicted in The Mating Mind above. The book has sent all the usual suspects
into a tizzy.
I have my difficulties with the completely
materialist view of nature which lies at the core of Darwin, Pinker and that Marxist
fraud, Steven J. Gould. To their credit, both Pinker and Thornhill take on Gould for his
obfuscations and lies. A deeper challenge to the materialist paradigm comes from an
unexpected direction: biochemistry.
Darwin's Black Box, The Biochemical
Challenge to Evolution, refutes Darwinists at the fundamental level. Michael Behe's book was condemned to be
burned by the science reviewer at Scientific American. Behe's contention is that
though Darwinian evolution is in operation, the fundamental biochemical processes cannot
have been developed through natural or sexual selection, because the processes require the
minutest coordination of long chains of linked biochemical reactions that, if any fail,
the whole fails. There is no process acting on the outside, as proposed by natural or
sexual selection, that can organize the development of clotting, photosynthesis, or
oxygenation of the blood. Like The Bell Curve, Behe's book is a large stone dropped
in a still pond. What is absolutely assumed in one department of science, evolution,
explains absolutely nothing in another.
Says Behe: "The reluctance of science to
embrace the conclusion of intelligent design that its long, hard labors have made manifest
has no justifiable foundation. Scientific chauvinism is an understandable emotion, but it
should not be allowed to affect serious intellectual issues." at p. 251 [ISBN
0-684-83493-6]
I do not feel the need to conclude one way or
another on the completeness of Darwin or the correctness of Behe. An interesting
refutation of Behe comes from Kenneth R. Miller, in Finding Darwin's God (ISBN
978-0-06-123350-0). A biologist, Miller defends the ability of natural selection to
create the complex multi-stage processes that Behe says must be the products of
intelligent design. Miller says that the materialist ravings of Dawkins et alia are
refuted by the nature of physics itself. The materialists have not yet assimilated the
meaning of quantum physics, says Miller. "Matter" is not the solid, predictable
stuff that Newton described. Quantum indeterminacy rescues us from the clockwork universe
of Dawkins and the other atheists, with whom Darwin is so often numbered.
On the same point we have the Quantum Enigma, by Bruce Rosenbloom and Fred Kuttner.
Why does the observation of a conscious mind bring forth the results of the experiement,
and why in principle does this interaction of consciousness with material reality not
apply to the whole universe? For a more historical treatment of quantum physics in its
evolution, try Manjit Kumar's Quantum:Einstein,
Bohr and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality.
I have been greatly informed by Michael Denton's
(no relation) Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (1986, ISBN 0-917561) , and Henry Gee's
In Search of Deep Time (1999, ISBN 0-8014-8713-7). The more I read of them, the
more I am inclined to agree that Darwinism is now an axiom of the modern world,
rather than a fact. A good review of Michael Denton's book, not entirely on all fours with
the author, was written by Gert
Kortof.
For a complete and orthodox treatment of Darwin,
there is no better short introduction to the subject than Ernst Mayr's What Evolution
Is (2001, ISBN 0-465-04426-3) which has a short introduction by Jared Diamond,
possibly the world's most influential contemporary thinker. Like Diamond, I recommend Mayr
because, even if you are not completely persuaded, you profit mightily from reading
him.
For a completely non-western point of view on
this evolution debate, amuse yourself with Vine Deloria's "Evolutionism,
Creationism and Other Modern Myths" [ISBN 1 -55591-159-5], in which Deloria, a
North American Indian, punctures holes in the structure of western science, and shows how
parochial our categories of thought are. He says the entire evolution versus Creation
debate is like our "World Wars": for outsiders they are civil wars within the
framework of western Christian civilization. It is useful to get the ultimate outsider's
perspective.
For an
occasionally laugh-out-loud attack on those portions of Darwin's argument which are
extraneous to natural selection, please do yourself a favour and read Darwinian
Fairytales (ISBN ISBN 1-59403-140-1), by the late Australian philosopher David Stove.
Stove carries on most of his argument with the elements of Thomas Malthus in Darwin's
thinking, that all species are breeding up to and beyond the limit which the food supply
will bear. Stove also trashes Dawkin's selfish gene proposals with unholy glee. For total
bravery in taking on shibboleths and absolute lack of respect for rubbish, Stove is my
hero. For your information, Stove was an atheist and a materialist, and his attacks on
Darwin and his followers are not predicated in a theistic rejection of natural selection.
He just thinks their arguments must be false at certain points, and wittily explains why.
For the latest
in politically incorrect thought on the world's most sensitive subject, try Vincent Sarich
and Frank Miele's Race, the Reality of Human Differences ISBN 0-8133-4322-4 (2204)
Within the space of the last 30,000 years, they say, the human species has developed more
racial differences than chimpanzees have in the last million and a half. This argues for
extremely strong selective pressures operating on us. These are the guys who discovered
the mitochondrial clock, showing that we are all descended from "Eve", a woman
who lived 50,000 years ago. Orthodox Darwinism combats orthodox social science.
You can also find
the same argument in "The
Ten-Thousand Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution", by
Geoffrey Cochran and Henry Harpending. Blue eyes, blond hair, and adaptation to drinking
milk as adults all quite recent, newer than 9,000 years old. The last ice age only ended
12,000 years ago.
For a more
statitical view of some of these issues, go to La Griffe du Lion.
Ecology
Bjorn Lomborg's
The Skeptical Environmentalist (ISBN 0 521 01068 3, 2001) got him into a lot of
nasty trouble with extreme environmentalists for a) actually disputing that the world is
going to hell and b) taking an economist's view of how to prioritize both the assessment
of the scale of what real problems there are and the cost of fixing them. Roughly a fifth
of the book is endnotes, and he gets his data from the same places the International Panel
of Climate Change gets theirs. He differs on what the problems are, and for his troubles
they would crucify him.
Systematic
Philosophy
"A Brief History of Everything", by Ken Wilber, Shambhala 1996,
ISBN 1-57062-187-x. A fine, plain language and comprehensive survey of how we think and
have thought about our place in the world. No clearer exposition exists of the evolution
of consciousness, and why we are currently locked in unsatisfactory paradigms. Ascenders
versus Descenders. The Ego and the Eco. Left and Right Hand Paths. A philosopher who dares
to be clear.
A fearless soul, David Stove
also ripped into modern theories of science in Scientific
Irrationalism, and completed his attack on the insanity of most philosophers from
Plato to Hegel in The
Plato Cult, but which concentrates on British idealists of the 19th century. As a
reviewer said, "It's worth getting this book just for the final chapter, 'What is
Wrong with Our Thoughts?' (forty philosophical ways to go mad)."
In memory of Ronald Lyman Denton, physician, scientist,
father, gardener, November 27, 1912 - March 6, 2000
Address on the
occasion of my father's memorial service, May 13, 2000, Minton United Church, Hatley
Township, Stanstead County
Some words spoken by my
brother, Derek Denton, on the same occasion.
Some personal reminiscences and an appreciation for the
example he left.
|
