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Since starting my
blog, I get to these pages every few
years. My readings are vastly more numerous and diverse than the brief
mentions recounted here. I have more recently taken up blogging at
www.barrelstrength.com. You can
read about my current and abiding concerns for free speech in the light of
attacks from Human Rights Commissions in Canada. This is the issue of 2008.
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. For example, I do not mind being a Darwinist for some purposes,
but not all, because, while I think Darwin's theories are largely true, they are
also incomplete. See the discussion below under "Evolution, Sexual
Selection, and Design". Some people hate that kind of 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.
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"
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Curley Lake, Gatineau Park, Quebec. Any fool can walk
on water when it is ice. But when? This was taken on April 6, 2002.
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. |
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Gatineau Ramblers - It
is so exclusive it has no structure and you cannot join. Just show up!
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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.
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Diamond Heart: the
approach of A.H.Almaas. The ego is the problem, that we all know. What to do about it is
the issue. The writings of A.H.Almaas illuminate the problem. A marvellous,
illuminating mind.
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.
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.
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- 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.
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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.
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, stupid, 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, Steve 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.
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.
Ecology
Bjǿrn 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.
In memory of Ronald
Lyman Denton, physician, scientist, father, gardener, November 27, 1912 - March
6, 2000
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Address
on the occasion of my father's memorial service, May 13, 2000, Minton United Church,
Hatley Township, Stanstead County
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Some
words spoken by my brother, Derek Denton, on the same occasion.
Some personal
reminiscences and an appreciation for the example he left.
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