Reason and Science in Danger.
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We could let Marx have the last word. This from the German Ideology;
”Philosophy and the study of the actual world have the same relationship to one another as masturbation and sexual love.”
Which I think translates as All Philosophers are Wankers. I hasten to add that he wasn’t talking about us here but only about the German philosophers of his day. We are discussing something different— not philosophy but the theory of science, aren’t we?
Hi Thomas,
The (emotionally charged) biological term “Machiavellian intelligence” was coined by Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal (“Chimpanzee Politics”: 1982). It was he who repurposed the 1960s peacenik slogan “make love — not war” to describe social behaviour among his studied bonobos.
Images of mammalian nurture do not prove what you imagine they do about “Machiavellian intelligence”. Why not? Because mothers in all mammalian species, independent of their social behaviours, are united by the inescapable biological constraint to suckle their offspring.
It is precisely beyond the mother—baby bond that we find Machiavellian intelligence — in the realm of a lack of cooperative social division of labour. In the wild, the males of our ape cousins sponge on the group and do not provision it.
Gentleness does not, as you imagine, disprove Machiavellian intelligence. Here I am not talking about poisoning, but of something of far greater social consequence: cunning directed towards self and against the group.
Here the question at issue is — how did our species manage to do what no other extant species (excluding present consideration our hominid cousins) ever quite managed to do. For the consequences of mutual trust are speech and the foundation for reasoned thought you are here championing.
(The issue of how over the last 10,000 years property rights have allowed social classes to parasitize our foundational biological trust is anthropological Machiavellianism, not biological, and far better understood.)
Isn’t there another forum here for discussing animal issues?
I would say that humans are not the only animals to demonstrate co-operative behaviour, nor to live socially, and there is much more to many nonhuman communities than the mother and child relationship alone.
L. Bird has not replied to my question of what he thinks of Carl Sagan, Richard Leakey, Brian Cox etc. Are they bourgeois scientists and hence not to be esteemed by socialists? The same question applies to Galileo, Kepler, Darwin, Copernicus, etc.
This is a thread about science and reason and immediately l bird changed its course toward his materialism/ idealism concept which is no more than a Marxist humanist conception of the Frankfurt school
“Elites” and “the elite” are not words used by socialists. They are part of conspiraloon vocabulary, like “illuminati” and “masonic.”
The loons don’t speak of capitalists and workers. They don’t know the social meaning of either word.They have no problem identifying with the nation state and most are patriotic. In fact the loons are strongly opposed to the word global, both in astronomist terms and social. But socialists are global, in every sense. The loons call us “globetards”: a cross between “globalist” and “retard” – their name for scientists like Stephen Hawking and a snipe at his physical disability.
For the loons the prime enemy, who they call “the elite”, is NASA and academia, and all purveyors of received knowledge in the sciences.
Workers with plum jobs, in other words.
These they call “the elite”, not the capitalist class.Workers of education are the target of the loons. Their heroes are video-makers of crap pseudoscience and sensationalism who couldn’t master any real science and hate those who could and who studied hard.
Their heroes are also those capitalists with an interest in global warming denialism, nationalists with an interest in Holocaust denial, and millionaire evangelists who promote creationism.
And it is these who are the hucksters for bourgeois “values”, keeping workers confused and deluded.Is it true the makers of haemorrhoid cream are bringing one out for postmodernoids?
L. Bird has not replied to my question of what he thinks of Carl Sagan, Richard Leakey, Brian Cox etc. Are they bourgeois scientists and hence not to be esteemed by socialists? The same question applies to Galileo, Kepler, Darwin, Copernicus, etc.
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Sadly this is L Bird’s pattern, comes in hijacks the topic, throws around all kinds of ridiculous statements, and then when the going gets sticky and there are a few questions he can’t answer (he has studiously ignored one of mine in this thread) he buggers off.
His next move will be to come back in a few week’s time, claiming to have trounced the arguments of everyone on here and then start spouting he same horse shit all over again.
But in our kindly, tolerant, demcratic way, we let him get on with it. It’s a bit like having a stray cat that comes and shits in your garden, you know it’s a pest, you get sick of clearing up the shit, but if you haven’t seen it for a while you get a bit worried about whether or not it’s ok.
Getting back to the original point of this post all of the anti science bullshit out there, as well as the general atmosphere of being anti expert, I also think that a lot of this stuff is out there for financial reasons. If you look at the case of the proven fraudulent research carried out by Andrew Wakefield on Autism and the MMR jab, his motivation was to profit from the legal claims that would come from it. He has now gone to the States and is coining it in from publishing the same rubbish, but there is a gullible audience that will buy it. A lot of the conspiracy websites have advertising and other associated income streams, get a lot of traffic and your in the money.
There is a similar thing going on with football at the moment, sites set up to report spurious football transfers (Messi to Hartlepool United, etc. If your reading this Harley, it’s not true, sadly he’s not on his way to the Victoria Ground) which then make money when the click bait is responded to.
From the point of view of those who get lured into this nonsense, I think a big part of it for them, is the idea of being in on the know, that you know something that others don’t and that when you tell them you can bathe in the kudos it brings. It’s a bit like an elaborate version of knowing a bit of juicy gossip.
“From the point of view of those who get lured into this nonsense, I think a big part of it for them, is the idea of being in on the know, that you know something that others don’t and that when you tell them you can bathe in the kudos it brings. It’s a bit like an elaborate version of knowing a bit of juicy gossip.”
Which explains why when challenged, they retort with “You’re afraid, and you know it. People are waking up. Do research.”
Also, if you point out things on the websites of their heroes, they sideslip by saying, “Those aren’t his words, but those of a shill, written to discredit him!”
It’s interesting that Andrew Wakefield is supported by one of the colleges of chiropractors, another bunch of evidence free schisters.
What actually is a chiropractor?
Isn’t osteopathy the study of bone disorders?
I often wonder whether one of the roots of fascination with the unreal and pseudoscience over real science was the Star Wars movie phenomenon.
My childhood preceded it. To be sure, we had American superhero comics, but they were just one genre of children’s entertainment.
I remember a wealth of material for children based on real history and real science. There were the How & Why books, Look & Learn and World of Wonder magazines. We had Britains toy Roman and Greek soldiers, Saracens and Crusaders, Cowboys & Indians. We had action figures: Viking, Medieval Knight, Cowboy, Crazy Horse. I had a board game of Little Big Horn, another of the Wars of the Roses, and colouring and cut & paste books of Prehistoric Man, Vikings, and Celts, Saxons & Normans. There were the Ladybird Books and Airfix models of authentic dinosaur species.
The point is that all of this seemed to disappear after Star Wars. Fantasy and unreality took over.
Just a view. Correct me if I am wrong.
I was confusing it with osteology.
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