Fourteen days to seal history’s judgment on this generation

From The Guardian:

Copenhagen climate change conference: 'Fourteen days to seal history's judgment on this generation

Today [December 8, 2009] 56 newspapers in 45 countries take the unprecedented step of speaking with one voice through a common editorial. We do so because humanity faces a profound emergency.

Unless we combine to take decisive action, climate change will ravage our planet, and with it our prosperity and security. The dangers have been becoming apparent for a generation. Now the facts have started to speak: 11 of the past 14 years have been the warmest on record, the Arctic ice-cap is melting and last year’s inflamed oil and food prices provide a foretaste of future havoc. In scientific journals the question is no longer whether humans are to blame, but how little time we have got left to limit the damage. Yet so far the world’s response has been feeble and half-hearted.

Climate change has been caused over centuries, has consequences that will endure for all time and our prospects of taming it will be determined in the next 14 days. We call on the representatives of the 192 countries gathered in Copenhagen not to hesitate, not to fall into dispute, not to blame each other but to seize opportunity from the greatest modern failure of politics. This should not be a fight between the rich world and the poor world, or between east and west. Climate change affects everyone, and must be solved by everyone.

Read More: Here

Conspiracy Theorists Caught Cherry Picking Again

Climate deniers have been making a lot of noise about a set of stolen emails from one of the world's leading climate centers, The Universtiy of East Anglia.

The spin they're putting out is that the emails reveal what they always suspected, an evil global conspiracy. In the short video below a climate scientist debunks the so-called debunkers. But i'm sure the denialists and conspiracy will cherry-pick this as well.



From the director of the film below:

Now that the conspiracy theorists have blown off steam, it's time for a more sober analysis of those e-mails and what they mean. I can't go through all of them, there are far too many, and . So I've taken the two that seem to be getting conspiracy theorists most worked up -- Phil Jones's e-mail about "Mike's Nature trick" and Kevin Trenberth's e-mail about a "travesty." I'm glad to see that skeptic websites that cover the science understand what these e-mails actually mean. As you'll see, very few commentators who jumped on the conspiracy bandwagon even before reading the e-mails managed to get it right.

Politicians Talk, Leaders Act

Colin McGinn on New Mysterianism

Colin McGinn is a British philosopher currently working at the University of Miami. McGinn has also held major teaching positions at Oxford University and Rutgers University. Although McGinn has written dozens of articles in philosophical logic, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language, he is best known for his work in the philosophy of mind.

Below is an interview with McGinn about competing theories of mind:

100 Incredible Lectures

100 Incredible Lectures from the World’s Top Scientists

By Sarah Russel

Unless you’re enrolled at a top university or are an elite member of the science and engineering inner circle, you’re probably left out of most of the exciting research explored by the world’s greatest scientists. But thanks to the Internet, and our list of 100 incredible lectures, you’ve now got access to the cutting edge theories and projects that are changing the world.

Read More: Here

Here are some our favorties:

Richard Dawkins on our "queer" universe: Listen to this talk from biologist Richard
Dawkins to consider the strangeness of our universe, and how there are so many
things out there we can’t comprehend.

Kary Mullis on what scientists do: Biochemist Kary Mullis references the 17th century as he talks about the nature of discovery and experimentation.

Lee Smolin on science and democracy: Physicist Lee Smolin discusses how democratic (or not) the scientific community it.

A Passion for Discovery: Peter Freund of the University of Chicago considers the
entanglement of physics experiments and their effect on the behavior of
scientists.

A New Age of Exploration: From Earth to Mars: This video isn’t just about space exploration: it’s about the new age of experimentation and research.

A New Kind of Science – Stephen Wolfram: Stephen Wolfram’s talk A New Kind of Science, credits simple computer experiments with challenging him to look at research in a new way.

WTC Lecture – collapse of WTC Buildings: Steven E. Jones discusses the collapse of the World Trade Towers from a physics perspective.

Machine Learning: Discover how machines "learn" due to statistical patterns, learning theory, adaptive control and more.

The Second Law and Energy: Listen to Steven Chu’s talk about thermodynamics.

Molecular Biology: Macromolecular Synthesis and Cellular Function: Qiang Zhou from Berkeley discusses new findings in DNA research.

Evolution of the Human Species: The discussion about evolution is still active. This lecture considers evolution from genetic and fossil records.

Craig Venter on DNA and the sea: Biodiversity and genomics scientist Craig Venter
talks about starting to writing the genetic code instead of just reading it.

How Bacteria Cause Disease: Warren Levinson explains how bacteria are transmitted.

The Origin of the Human Mind: Insights from Brain Imaging and
Evolution: Find out how the human mind continues to evolve.

Biological Principles of Swarm Intelligence: Guy Theraulaz discusses animal psychology and swarm intelligence.

Psychology, Sex and Evolution: This lecture combines psychology and
biology to find an answer to how preoccupied we are with sex.

Dynamics on and of Biological Networks: Case Studies on the Machinery of Life: Stefan Bornholdt discusses molecular networks in this lecture.

The Physical World: Topics in these lectures from The Open University include
quantum physics, Einstein, helicopter flight and more.

The Black Hole at the Center of Our Galaxy: Nobel Prize-winning Charles H. Townes talks about what’s next in terms of deep galaxy exploration.

What is the simplest quantum field theory?: In this lecture, Freddy Cachazo brings forth ideas of simpler quantum field theories.

Stephen Hawking asks big questions about the universe: Stephen Hawking asks questions about the beginnings of the universe, where humans came from and more.

The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether and the Unification of Force: Anticipating a New Golden Age: Frank Wilczek introduces listeners to his new physics theory.

The Second Law and Cosmology: Max Tegmark asks questions about entropy, temperature and equilibrium when studying the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

David Deutsch on our place in the cosmos: Scientist David Deutsch urges the greater scientific community to seriously consider global warming.

Planet Water: Complexity and Organization in Earth Systems: Rafael Bras is credited with launching the science of hydrology and discusses water complexity here.

E.O. Wilson on saving life on Earth: Biologist E.O. Wilson entreats society to become more educated on natural life on Earth.

The U.S. Energy Crisis and the Role of New Nuclear Plants: Thomas A. Christopher considers the effects of nuclear plants on the energy and environmental crises.

CO2 beyond tomorrow: a fundamental approach: This panel featuring Helmut List aims to predict future CO2 emissions effects.

In Antarctica: The Global Warming: Sebastian Copeland explains how Antarctica is a microcosm for what will happen to the rest of the world due to global warming.

Climate change from the scientific point of view: Listen to a scientist’s view of what’s
going on in the development in climate change.

Saul Griffith on everyday inventions: Listen to inventor Saul Griffith discuss the importance and elegance of designing everyday materials.

Ray Kurzweil on how technology will transform us: Ray Kurzweil introduces the idea of a future populated with nanobots.

Technology and Social Responsibility: Larry Page and Sergey Brin hold technology projects, researchers and companies to a higher standard in this lecture.

Living with Catastrophic Terrorism: Can Science and Technology Make the U.S. Safer?: Lewis M. Branscomb is actually a public policy professor and co-chair at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, but this lecture takes on a critical debate about the importance of science and technology in government.

Juan Enriquez shares mindboggling science: Juan Enriquez explains how forward
thinking and science are going to pull us out of any crises or disasters.

Craig Venter is on the verge of creating synthetic life: Discover how synthetic
chromosomes may be in the future.

To upgrade is human: How can technology help human evolution? Gregory Stock
considers customized human babies and the future of adoption.

Helen Fisher studies the brain in love: If you’ve ever wondered about the physical
changes that the brain goes through when you’re in love, watch this lecture.

Science Education in the 21st Century: Using the Tools of Science to Teach Science:
Dr. Carl Wierman is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who comments on the future of science education.

Probability for Life Science: This mix of math and life science covers probability and beyond.

Psychology in Human-Computer Interaction: David Kieras considers human-computer interaction in this talk.

Renaissance Physicists: Steven Weinberg isn’t too optimistic about the future of science and discusses the characteristics that define a truly ambitious scientist.

Enjoy!

Encounters With Being and Event

Deleuze’s Encounter With Whitehead

By Steven Shaviro

In a short chapter of The Fold (1993) that constitutes his only extended discussion of Alfred North Whitehead, Gilles Deleuze praises Whitehead for asking the question, “What Is an Event?” (76). Whitehead’s Process and Reality (1929/1978) marks only the third time – after the Stoics and Leibniz – that events move to the center of philosophical thought. Deleuze wrote less about Whitehead than he did about the other figures in his philosophical counter-canon: Lucretius, the Stoics, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, Nietzsche, Bergson, and Foucault.

But Whitehead is arguably as important to Deleuze as any of these other thinkers. It is only today, in the wake of Isabelle Stengers’ great book Penser avec Whitehead (2002), that it has become possible, for the first time, to measure the full extent of Deleuze’s encounter with Whitehead. My work here is deeply indebted to Stengers, as well as to James Williams (2005) and to Keith Robinson (2006), both of whom have written illuminatingly about Whitehead and Deleuze.

“What is an event?” is, of course, a quintessentially Deleuzian question. And Whitehead marks an important turning-point in the history of philosophy because he affirms that, in fact, everything is an event. The world, he says, is made of events, and nothing but events: happenings rather than things, verbs rather than nouns, processes rather than substances. Becoming is the deepest dimension of Being.

Read More: Here

A Review of Pinker’s Blank Slate

Tunnel Vision: A Review of Pinker’s Blank Slate

By Thomas Hylland Eriksen

The gap between sociocultural anthropology and biological/physical anthropology is deep, but fairly recent. In the 1870s, Tylor enjoyed a fruitful relationship with the Darwinists; he was inspired by, and in turn inspired, Darwin himself. Later generations also engaged in respectful dialogue until, roughly, the end of the SecondWorld War.

After the war, biological approaches to human nature and culture were discredited in public life, only to reemerge with a string of popular books by the likes of Desmond Morris and Lionel Tiger, culminating in the last chapter of E. O.Wilson’s scholarly work Sociobiology (Wilson 1975), where the great entomologist pleads for a reintegration of the social sciences into the mother science, that is to say biology. The relationship between sociocultural anthropologists and some evolutionary biologists (who we may call neo-Darwinists) has been tense and occasionally hostile since then.

Certain developments in recent years nevertheless suggest that the aggression and deliberate mutual misunderstandings typical of the sociobiology debatemay have given way to a more sober and relaxed attitude among social anthropologists confronted with biological explanations of sociocultural phenomena. According to Knight et al. (1999), social and biological anthropologists in Britain had not really spoken to each other between the Royal Society conference about ritualisation among humans and animals in 1965 and a similar, but smaller conference on ritual and the origins of culture in 1994. A few years after this event, a number of social anthropologists contributed to a volume about ‘memetics’ (Aunger 2000; for a scathing critique see Marks 2002b) dominated by Darwinian scholars, and around the same time, a symposium organised by Harvey Whitehouse (2001) brought together different views on the role of evolution in shaping religious beliefs and practices.

Perhaps social anthropology is keen to find its feet again after postmodernism, and is therefore more open to ambitious and robust modes of explanation? Certainly, the new evolutionary psychology appears to more relevant and better informed about cultural variation than the old sociobiology, whosemacho obsession with sex and violence, and na¨ıve search for adaptive functions everywhere in cultural practices, could hardly win the admiration of many sociocultural anthropologists.

Read More: Here

Thomas Hylland Eriksen is a social anthropologist at the University of Oslo and Senior Research Fellow at the International Institute of Peace Research. Thomas has conducted fieldwork in Mauritius and Trinidad, exploring ethnicity, identity politics, nationalism, and minority right

The Central Role of Culture in Cognitive Evolution

The Central Role of Culture in Cognitive Evolution: A Reflection on the Myth of the "Isolated Mind"

By Merlin Donald

Human symbolic culture constitutes a distinctive, species-universal trait, usually thought to be the result of our having evolved special cognitive capacities, such as language. Seen from this vantage point, the flow of influence runs from cognition to culture, in that order, and the task of evolutionary psychology should be to decide how and when the basic cognitive foundations of modern culture came into being.

According to this doctrine, the coevolutionary brain-culture spiral that characterized hominids must have been driven primarily at the cognitive level. Thus, cognitive evolution triggers cultural evolution, which triggers further brain evolution, and so on. This is the conventional meaning of brain-culture coevolution.

Read More (PDF): Here

Also by Merlin Donald: A Precis of Origins of the Modern Mind and Cognitive Evolution and the Definition of Human Nature

Becoming Human

Where did we come from? What makes us human? An explosion of recent discoveries sheds light on these questions, and NOVA's three-part T.V special, Becoming Human, examines what the latest scientific research reveals about our hominid relatives.

Becoming Human Part 1
First Steps: 6 million years ago, what set our ancestors on the path from ape to human? Tuesday, November 3 at 8 pm (Check local listings)

Becoming Human Part 2
Birth of Humanity: New discoveries reveal how early humans hunted and formed families. Tuesday, November 10 at 8 pm (Check local listings)

Becoming Human Part 3
Last Human Standing: Many human species once shared the globe. Why do we alone remain? Tuesday, November 17 at 8 pm (Check local listings)

Learn More: Here

The Climate for International Solidarity

From the United Nations:

Impacts of Climate Change Coming Faster and Sooner: New Science Report Underlines Urgency for Governments to Seal the Deal in Copenhagen

September 24, 2009 -The pace and scale of climate change may now be outstripping even the most sobering predictions of the last report of the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC).

An analysis of the very latest, peer-reviewed science indicates that many predictions at the upper end of the IPCC's forecasts are becoming ever more likely.

Meanwhile, the newly emerging science points to some events thought likely to occur in longer-term time horizons, as already happening or set to happen far sooner than had previously been thought.

Researchers have become increasingly concerned about ocean acidification linked with the absorption of carbon dioxide in seawater and the impact on shellfish and coral reefs.

Water that can corrode a shell-making substance called aragonite is already welling up along the California coast?decades earlier than existing models predict. Losses from glaciers, ice-sheets and the Polar Regions appear to be happening faster than anticipated, with the Greenland ice sheet, for example, recently seeing melting some 60 percent higher than the previous record of 1998.

Some scientists are now warning that sea levels could rise by up to two metres by 2100 and five to ten times that over following centuries.

There is also growing concern among some scientists that thresholds or tipping points may now be reached in a matter of years or a few decades including dramatic changes to the Indian sub-continent's monsoon, the Sahara and West Africa monsoons, and climate systems affecting a critical ecosystem like the Amazon rainforest.

The report also underlines concern by scientists that the planet is now committed to some damaging and irreversible impacts as a result of the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere.

Read More: Here

God, Approximately

God, Approximately

By Brian Cantwell Smith

Consider the rise of the religious right: Muslim and Hindu fundamentalism, right-wing Zionism, the Christian moral majority. These movements are responding to—and exploiting—a widespread social hunger: a sense that reigning secular, scientific, and capitalist world views don’t supply what matters: ways to tell right from wrong, guidance to anchor individual lives and give them meaning, the wherewithal to resolve ethical dilemmas.

I find many of the fundamentalists’ answers appalling: bigoted, meanspirited, scary. But what are those of us on the left—we scientists, we intellectuals, we in the academy—doing about this heartfelt lack? If we don’t recognize (and respond to) the yearning—if, willfully or unwittingly, we remain blind to the hunger—then we have no leg to stand on, in criticising others' replies.

What we need are better answers: frameworks to stir compassion, give meaning to lives, combat prejudice, secure a modicum of economic wellbeing, preserve the planet. These frameworks must be global; it is too late for parochial sectarianism. And they must build on the best in science. We need to move forwards, not back.

Read More (PDF): Here

From Pre-rational to Meta-rational?

Cognitive Levels of Evolution: From Pre-rational to Meta-rational

By Francis Heylighen

The principle of natural selection is taken as a starting point for an analysis of evolutionary levels. Knowledge and values are conceived as vicarious selectors of actions from a repertoire. The concept of metasystem transition is derived from the law of requisite variety and the principle of hierarchy. It is defined as the increase of variety at the object level, accompanied by the emergence of a situation-dependent control at a metalevel. It produces a new level of evolution, with a much higher capacity for adaptation.

The most important levels are discussed, with an emphasis on the level characterizing man as distinct from the animals. An analysis of the shortcomings of this "rational" system of cognition leads to a first sketch of how the next higher "meta-rational" level would look like.

Read More: Here

New Theses on Integral Micropolitics

Daniel Gustav Anderson is a cultural critic and integral theorist currently teaching literature and cultural history in Washington D.C.

Anderson has called for the development of a "critical Integral theory," which he conceives as a theory capable of doing Integral work while holding up to a rigorous ideological analysis. He has mapped this position in his essay, "Of Syntheses and Surprises: Toward a Critical Integral Theory".

His work is heavily influenced by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Zizek, Ziporyn, and Tarthang Tulku among others. He has expressed the view that the aim of a critical integral theory must be radical democracy, on the hypothesis that enlightenment experiences and social revolution share a similar organizational pattern.

Below, in an outstanding new essay, Daniel further develops his project and provides resources towards a more critical and integrative social theory. Enjoy:

“Such a Body We Must Create”: New Theses on Integral Micropolitics

By Daniel Gustav Anderson

This essay proposes a rigorously postmetaphysical integral praxis, defines what this means and how such an intervention may be premised, and demonstrates throughout some methodological and practical advantages this approach may have over extant metaphysically-oriented integral theories.

Beginning with an interpretation of post-Hegelian historical and dialectical materialisms informed by the Buddhist dialectical tradition of Madhyamika, a series of coordinated and interrelated theses address problems proper to fields such as phenomenology, hermeneutics, semiotics, historiography, and subaltern studies.

The claimed purpose of this project is to coordinate subjective (psychological, spiritual) and objective (social, political, economic) transformational imperatives into a coherent, non-ontological “counterproject.” It takes as its aim the production of a radically democratized, responsible, and sane subjective and objective space, where responsibility is characterized as critical clarity, competence, creative consciousness, and compassion.

Read More (PDF): Here

See Also: An Interview with Daniel Gustav Anderson

Love and Integral Evolution

Integral Evolution: An Interview with David Loye

By Russ Volckmann

David Loye is one of those people that the longer you get to know them the more you begin to discover a bit of their depth and breadth of perspective and creativity in the world. His publications speak for themselves. His network with leading scientists and thinkers around the world is equally impressive.

Actually, my first contact was with David’s wife, Riane Eisler, author of the Chalice and the Blade (among other books written with and without David). Despite the fact that they live over the hill from me, I did not meet her face to face right away. Rather, I interviewed her over the telephone for the Integral Leadership Review, which I publish and edit. When I first approached her about doing the interview she suggested that I should interview David, but I did not know David Loye’s work at all. In that interview I discovered more about Riane’s work and the extent of their partnership. In fact, they are prime movers of a partnership approach to leadership that they promote through a nonprofit center and in a Master’s program at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco.

My conversation with Riane piqued my curiosity about David’s work and I bought one of his books, Darwin’s Lost Theory of Love. Here I found evidence of the extraordinary scope and depth of David’s work that made him a natural candidate for an interview. The only question was would I use it in Integral Leadership Review or in Integral Review: such is the quality of his interests and intellect.

Read the Entire Interview: Here

DAVID LOYE is a psychologist, evolutionary systems scientist, World War II veteran and the author of many books on Darwin, moral evolution, evolution theory, history, poetry, love and social action. David is also co-founder of the multinational General Evolution Research Group and World Futures: The Journal of General Evolution.

DeLanda on Deleuze

Deleuze and the Open-ended Becoming of the World

by Manuel DeLanda

With the final mathematization of classical physics in the nineteenth century, a certain picture of the world emerged dominant, one in which clockwork determinism reigned supreme and time played no creative role, so that the future was effectively closed, completely given in the past. Although the set of equations with which Hamilton was able to unify all the different fields of classical physics (mechanics, optics, and the elementary theory of electromagnetism) did contain a variable for time, this variable played only an extrinsic role: once the equations were defined for a specific instant, both the past and the future were completely determined, and could be obtained mechanically by simply integrating the equations.

To be sure, this static, timeless picture of reality did not go unchallenged within science, since thermodynamics had already introduced an arrow of time which conflicted with the symmetric conception of classical mechanics, where the past and the future were interchangeable. Nevertheless, as the history of statistical mechanics makes it clear, much scientific effort has been spent in our century to reconcile time asymmetry at the level of large aggregates with the still accepted time symmetry at the level of individual interactions.

Thus, it would become the task of philosophers and social scientists to attempt to reconceptualize the world in order to give time and history a creative role, with the vision of an open future that this implies. Although there have been a variety of strategies to achieve this open future, here I would like to concentrate on two contrasting approaches. The first is perhaps best illustrated by the intellectual movement that is today known as "social constructivism", but which roots lie in linguistic and anthropological theories which go back to the turn of the century.

At the risk of oversimplifying, we may say that the core of this approach is a neo-Kantian theory of perception, in which individual experience is completely structured by the interplay of concepts and representations, but one in which Kant's transcendental concepts (of space and time) have been replaced by the conventional concepts of a given culture. The guiding image of this strategy may be said to be "each culture lives in its own world", an image central to many theoretical approaches in this century, from the cultural relativism of Margaret Mead and Franz Boas, to the linguistic relativism of Edward Sapir and Benjamin Worf, to the epistemological relativism of Thomas Khun's theory of scientific paradigms. Again, oversimplifying somewhat, the key idea in all these theories is one of "incommensurability" across worlds, each conceptual scheme constructing its own reality so that bridges between worlds are hard, if not impossible, to build.

More: Here

WorldChanging Team

From WorldChanging Team:

Crackdown against 'environmental criminals' follows Greenpeace report

Slaughtering the Amazon from Greenpeace UK on Vimeo.

Some of the world's top footwear brands, including Clarks, Adidas, Nike and Timberland, have demanded an immediate moratorium on destruction of the Amazon rainforest from their leather suppliers in Brazil.

The move is the first major development since the Guardian revealed a three-year undercover investigation by Greenpeace in June. The investigation said leading Brazilian suppliers of leather and beef for products sold in Britain had obtained cattle from farms involved in illegal deforestation.