AVDI VIDE TACE translated means “HEAR, SEE, BE SILENT”

The Royal Society, the premier and oldest learned society for the study of science, was founded in 1660 with the motto “Nullius in Verba” or “On the words of no one.” This date probably was the start of that remarkable period in the intellectual history of Europe that we call today “The Age of Enlightenment.”

But the story of the beginning of that age went back many years.

European universities and intellectual climate at the time were still dominated by Aristotle and Scholastic system of thinking, that of the “Disputatio.”

The way to arrive at truth was the method of “Deduction” axiomatic deductions from authorities. Who constituted the “Authorities" anyway? The sacred books, writings by ancient authorities and so on. Scant attention was paid to empirical evidence.

An example being based on the authorities of St. Thomas, Deuteronomy, Leviticus, Kings 1, (the last three are books of the Bible) and St. Augustine, one must logically deduce that witches exist, and therefore it was heresy to say otherwise. (Hence the Witch Trials that lasted for 100's of years)

The Catholic Church’s pressure on Galileo to recant his heliocentric world view was base on a similar line of reasoning. The authority of the Bible and of Ptolemy clearly stated that the earth was immovable and was the center of the universe. (Many intellectual men of this time lost their lives or came very close at the hands of the Church)

Even Martin Luther, the man who started the "Reformation" was steeped in the Aristotelian world view and was a follower of the method of scholasticism of his Age. He had this to say regarding the heliocentric world view: “This FOOL Copernicus wishes to reverse the entire science of astronomy; but sacred scripture tells us that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, and not the earth.” (Again the teachings had to be that the Earth was the center of the universe because the Bible said so)

Even today you will see people holding up a Bible or Koran as proof of anything they disagree with. Evolution, Gay Marriages, Women's Rights, etc.

That was the method of scholasticism that one drew upon the rigid axiomatic deductions by logic from premises, the veracity of which were based on "AUTHORITIES."

To sum this up, “TRUTH” is to be derived by induction from the particular to the general, by induction based on empirically collected data.

When I read or hear a person quoting sources of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Bill O’Rielly, Donald Trump, or any other Mass Marketed Ultra-Conservative Personality as proof of their argument; my only thought is, “Hey Mindless, Non-Critical Thinking Lemming!!! At Least Try And Join The 17th Century Line Of Thinking!!”

“NULLIUS IN VERBA”

The View from the Center of the Universe

Discovering Our Extraordinary Place in the Cosmos

I have just been made aware of the book called, “The View from the Center of the Universe,” and I think that it will be on my short list for reading very soon.

In The View from the Center of the Universe: Discovering Our Extraordinary Place in the Cosmos, Joel Primack, a leading cosmologist and professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and his wife Nancy Ellen Abrams, a lawyer, writer, and musician, tell us that this cosmic alienation has its roots in the Copernican and Newtonian revolutions and a Faustian deal brokered by René Descartes and Francis Bacon.

This very important and fascinating book powerfully describes the scope and depth of human connections to our universe. Primack and Abrams make clear the revolutionary concepts and implications of the modern understanding of time, space, dark matter, dark energy, eternal inflation, and the stardust filling our bodies, and how that knowledge can affect our feelings about ourselves and our future. Drawing lessons from the history of creation myths in many cultures, and from the changing perspectives of science over the centuries, they use many complementary approaches, including images and symbols, to paint a comprehensive picture of the value of our place in the universe as we now know it, and our opportunities for action in this critical century. Their well-supported admonition to "think cosmically, act globally" can be a vital guide to build a "sustainable prosperity." This topic demands the attention of nearly every thoughtful adult at a time when our impact on our home planet is rising dramatically, as are conflicts between science and religions. So far, scientists have not succeeded in helping most people sense meaning or purpose when considering the vastness of space that astronomy has revealed over the past few hundred years.

We humans occupy an insignificant place in the grand scheme of things, and there is no evidence that the universe has taken or should take note of us. I suspect many other scientists, as well as nonscientists, have had a similar experience. Carl Sagan summed it up well: "We live on a hunk of rock and metal that orbits a humdrum star in the obscure outskirts of an ordinary galaxy"—and he said it before dark matter and dark energy were discovered and were found to account for 96% of the stuff in the universe.

In the wake of Galileo's bad experience with the Catholic Church, scientists adopted a policy of noninterference with religion, dividing the world into the material (realm of science) and the spiritual (realm of religion). This division allowed science to flourish unfettered. And flourish it did with profound advances in our understanding of nature, from quarks to the cosmos, and dramatic advances in our quality of life, from electricity and medicine to science-based agriculture and today's quantum-based information economy.

Yet Primack and Abrams argue that the bargain had a significant downside: the severing of humankind's connection with the universe. They also contend that the present revolutionary period of cosmic discovery is the right time to re-establish a widely shared cosmological myth that connects us to the universe. Reconciliation 400 years after a messy divorce is not easy; but with their complementary backgrounds and a decade of jointly teaching a course on cosmology and culture at Santa Cruz, this husband-and-wife team is well qualified to start the conversation.

The book is divided into three parts. The first part is a review of the cosmological myths that preceded the divorce of science and religion, from the cosmology of ancient Egypt to the heavenly spheres that survived from Ptolemy to the Middle Ages. The second part is an exposition of our present understanding of the universe; it focuses on recent breakthroughs such as inflation, dark matter, and dark energy. The third part is an exploration of how we might take advantage of this quantum leap in our knowledge to reconnect with the universe, and even learn lessons from the universe. In the authors' words, "think cosmically, act globally."

The discussion of contemporary cosmology is built around five simple and engaging questions: What is the universe made of? What is the "center of the universe"? What size is the universe? Where do we come from? Are we alone?

The Introduction Of Dauber

My oldest daughter and her fiancé have a new addition to their family. His name is Dauber named after the big goofy character of Swedish ancestry and the assistant coach from the show, “Coach.”

Being a mongrel they adopted from the local Humane Society and for curiosity sake, they had a DNA analysis of Dauber to see what his genetic makeup was.

Well the DNA analysis for Dauber has been completed using the state-of-the-art breed detection process, comparing his breed makeup to over 170 different breeds.
Dauber's ancestry report became available. Dauber is an



American bulldog,



Bulldog,



and Maltese….which just seems wrong on so many levels. OH the shame of uncontrolled and inferior breeding!!!! :-)

Now as many may know where I am going with this posting is from the science fact viewpoint of the validity of DNA genetic mapping. This science has progressed to the point that for a small cost, you can get the genetic makeup of your pet. The code and history of all organic things can be known by the simple understanding of DNA proteins of CGAT and in the order the mapping exposes itself.

Yes this is just another factual nail closing the lid in the fallacy of religious myths and superstition believers who wish to deny this science due to the fact it threatens these same beliefs.

A New Study Finds That Political, Religious and Sexual Behaviors May Be Reflections Of Intelligence

Evolutionary psychologist, Satoshi Kanazawa, at the London School of Economics and Political Science correlated data on these behaviors with IQ from a large national U.S. sample and found that people who identified as liberal and atheist had higher IQs. This applied also to sexual exclusivity in men, but not in women. The findings will be published in the March 2010 issue of Social Psychology Quarterly.

The IQ differences are not surprising to many of us. They do show how certain patterns of identifying with particular ideologies develop, and how some people's behaviors come to be.

"The adoption of some evolutionarily novel ideas makes some sense in terms of moving the species forward," said George Washington University leadership professor James Bailey, "It also makes perfect sense that more intelligent people, people with more intellectual firepower are likely to be the ones to do that."

Religion did not help people survive or reproduce necessarily, but goes along the lines of helping people to be paranoid. "It helps life to be paranoid, and because humans are paranoid, they become more religious, and they see the hands of God everywhere," Kanazawa said.

Atheism "allows someone to move forward and speculate on life without any concern for the dogmatic structure of a religion. Historically, anything that's new and different can be seen as a threat in terms of the religious beliefs; almost all religious systems are about permanence," he noted.

The study takes the American view of liberal vs. conservative. It defines "liberal" in terms of concern for genetically nonrelated people and support for private resources that help those people. "Liberals are more likely to be concerned about total strangers; conservatives are likely to be concerned with people they associate with," he said.

Given that human ancestors had a keen interest in the survival of their offspring and nearest kin, the conservative approach, looking out for the people around you first, fits with the evolutionary picture more than liberalism, Kanazawa said. "It's unnatural for humans to be concerned about total strangers." he said.

The study found that young adults who said they were "very conservative" had an average adolescent IQ of 95, whereas those who said they were "very liberal" averaged 106.

NOW THIS EXPLAINS SO MUCH DOESN'T IT?!?

Religious Myths Conflicting With Science Facts

Ralph Waldo Emerson in his book, "The American Scholar," predicted the day would come when America would end, and I quote, "our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands."

His prediction came true in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and in no area of learning more so than in science. This surely would have pleased Emerson. When he listed his heroes he would generally include Copernicus and Galileo and Newton along with Socrates and Swedenborg.

Although I think that Emerson would have mixed feelings today about one consequence of the advance of science that has led to a widespread weakening of religious belief.

Since the Renaissance, the tension between science and religion has primarily been the result of contradictions between scientific discoveries and specific religious doctrines. Galileo remarked in his famous letter to Grand Duchess Christina that "the intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how to go to heaven, not how heaven goes," and this was not just his opinion of the time. Many such as Leonardo Da Vinci and even Cardinal Baronius, the Vatican librarian, were discovering through science that religious teachings of the time were inaccurate.

Contradictions between scripture and scientific knowledge have occurred again and again, and have generally been accommodated by the more enlightened among the religious. For instance, there are verses in both the Old and New Testament that seem to show that the earth is flat, and as noted by Copernicus (quoted by Galileo in the same letter to Christina) these verses led some early Church fathers like Lactantius to reject the Greek understanding that the earth is a sphere, but educated Christians long before the voyages of Columbus and Magellan had come to accept the spherical shape of the earth. Dante found the interior of the spherical earth a convenient place to store sinners.

The direct conflict between scientific knowledge and specific religious beliefs has not been so important in itself, it is the tension between science and religion that has become important.

The primary source of tension arises from the fact that religion originally gained much of its strength from the observation of mysterious phenomena such as, thunder, earthquakes, disease, that seemed to require the intervention of some divine being. There was a nymph in every brook, and a dryad in every tree. But as time passed more and more of these mysteries have been explained in purely natural ways. People believe in God because no other explanation seems possible for a whole host of mysteries, and then over the years these mysteries were one by one resolved naturalistically. The “Cause & Effect” outcome is a certain weakening of religious belief is to be expected. It is no accident that the advent of widespread atheism and agnosticism among the educated in the eighteenth century followed hard upon the birth of modern science in the previous century.

From the beginning, the explanatory power of science worried those who valued religion. Plato was so horrified at the attempt of Democritus and Leucippus to explain nature in terms of atoms without reference to the gods that in “Book Ten of The Laws,” he urged five years of solitary confinement for those who deny that the gods exist or that they care about humans, with death to follow if the prisoner is not reformed.

Isaac Newton, offended by the naturalism of Descartes, also rejected the idea that the world could be explained without God. He argued for instance in a letter to Richard Bentley that no explanation but God could be given for the distinction we observe between bright matter, the sun and stars, and dark matter, like the earth. This is ironic, because of course it was Newton and not Descartes who was right about the laws of motion. No one did more than Newton to make it possible to work out thoroughly nontheistic explanations of what we see in the sky, but Newton himself was not in this sense a Newtonian.

Of course, not everything has been explained, nor will it ever be. The important thing is that we have not observed anything that seems to require supernatural intervention for its explanation. There are some today who cling to the remaining gaps in our understanding, such as our ignorance about the origin of life, as evidence for God. But as time passes and more and more of these gaps are filled in, their position gives an impression of people desperately holding on to outmoded opinions.

THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH

THE EVIDENCE FOR EVOLUTION
By Richard Dawkins


Being a man of science myself, this week as we celebrate and recognize Charles Darwin’s published science facts, I decided to complement this evolutionary science with a posting of Richard Dawkins.

The bible thumping, delusional, science fact deigning, folks whom funded and visit the Creation Museums popping across the country, are accomplishing nothing but dragging their children into a pit of regressive education.

Since its conception, one of the strengths of this country’s economical edge was our science lead within the world. Putting this country’s science edge into the hands of the Fanatical Religious Right, as stated in the video clip, has just placed our standing well below the competitiveness of other countries we have to economically compete with.

One of the most important issues in this country today is not Iraq, Afghanistan, etc, it is the oppressive agenda from within of those whom would insist that science facts be ignored and be replaced with their religious fundamental viewpoints.