Epiblast!
Atheism | Medicine | Spirituality | Science | Lifestyle
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Finished : One Hundred Years of Solitude
I just finished this book today. It’s taken me a couple of months but only because the only time I read it was in the toilet. No, not in one seating.I liked how the book keeps switching between a very medieval ambiance and a contemporary one. You can’t be sure whether it’s a fantasy book or not.
IT’s about this family which makes a settlement in the middle of a South American jungle. From scratch. They keep bumping into Gypsies who influence their worldview (since they’re the only outsiders they bump into for a while). Then they breed and the adventure continues.
This other literary device they use, which helps when you’re getting impatient with the slow storyline, is where an event is happening, and the character “jumps” into the future where this event will be recalled before his execution.
It was a flavourful book, though I hope I could have read it with better continuity. The other challenging bit is keeping track of the Spanish names because they keep repeating names for grandchildren. Next up I’d like to read is Love in the Time of Cholera. I think the Vibrios will be having a good time.
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Oh man, I can't wait for this showdown
Anonymous (the guys who stood up to Scientology) are now going head on against The Westboro Baptist Church (God hates fags?) It’s like almost like … 300 :)
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Evolution and Hinduism I : Different Dimensions of the Creation/Evolution Controversy
[ Note: Reposted from my old blog. I was waiting for Darwin’s 200th Anniversary on Feb 12, 2009 to release the article. Happy Birthday Darwin! I say this and risk sounding like a religious nut. I have to credit Dhevy S, WX Liu, JY Xue and Arvind R for helping me proof read. Kudos to them. I also need to thanks all my Hindu buddies for their inspiration =) ]
The 200th Anniversary of Charles Darwin’s Birth and the 150th of the first edition of ‘On the Origin of Species’, have revived the age old Creationism (or Intelligent Design according to preference) versus Evolution debate. The contestants are often religious folk who can be anyone from uneducated pastors to science professors, versus other scientists, school teachers and concerned parents. The religions involved, of course, often refer to the Judeo-Christian-Islamic conglomerate. Hinduism, comparatively, has almost turned a blind eye to the debate with the notable exception of ISKCON supporting the creationist viewpoint. There are various reasons why this has been the case.
The complication arises from the fact that there is no single, uniform Hindu viewpoint. Hinduism, by definition, is a complex body of ideas ranging from animism to monotheism to monoism. Some Hindu philosophies might even be considered atheistic (nir-ishwarawaad), though not in the contemporary scientific sense. By that definition, it becomes difficult to derive any sort of common “Hindu-view of evolution” which our non-hindu friends may probe us for. However, there are common threads which allow us to take sides, but I’ll keep you in suspense till the second article in the series.
Superficially, some ideas in Hinduism may be interpreted to support evolutionary biology. In the dashaavataar chronology, we observe Lord Vishnu taking the form of a fish, then a tortoise, then a boar and so on. This somewhat corresponds to, at least according to the lay person’s understanding, the advancement of life and the fact we did evolve from fish. Some thinkers quote the Brhadaranyaka Upanishad - about how the One Self became two, and then went on to create all life forms - as some support for evolution in the manner of which the process is supposed to have started with a cell, the common ancestor of all life, which divided and began evolving thereafter. Sounds like there is a Hindu consensus supporting Darwinian ideas? Wrong.
At the same time, it is necessary to consider Hindu criticisms of Darwinian Evolution. In many scriptures, such as the Shrimad Bhagawatam, it is stated that humans appeared quite early on in creation and have been on earth for a very long time. The commonly calculated figure for the timespan of one Yuga cycle (comprising four epochs of various time spans) is 4.32 million years*. And humans are believed to have existed right from the start, although I personally have not read anything that specifically says something like that. The Matsya (fish) Avatar, believed to have saved Manu (the ancestral Man) and his clan from a great flood, is said to have manifested in the Satya Yuga. This clearly contradicts biological evidence that anatomically modern humans have existed for roughly 200,000 years. I can almost hear you screaming your objections in my ear right now.
“Wait”, you might think, “this isn’t the domain of religion (or Hinduism)”. Sure, and some scientists agree. Stephen Jay Gould (bless his soul), a stalwart in paleontology and evolutionary biology, terms religion and science as Non-overlapping Magisteria (NOMA) (Don’t we all love to throw around technical terms?). He means that they have mutually exclusive “job scopes”, to put it differently. Most people in the modern day and age agree, but they forget that at one point, religion did make scientific claims. In the Shrimad Bhagawatam, there is a reasonably detailed description of a developing foetus which could correspond to reality, depending on the translator. Often the “scientific nature” of Hinduism is asserted with reference to the parallels between modern physics and Vedantic philosophy. So I see a kind of selective validation taking place here. The nature of science is that some of it changes from time to time as opposed to religion which is “the ultimate truth” so I cannot see why we need science to validate religion. My practice of religion is a form of self-improvement and if it works for me, I see no reason for it to have anything to do with science.
If you are one of the rarer types of Hindus, your objection would have been, “Hasn’t Michael Cremo disproved the widely accepted anthropological chronology?” ( Hare Krishna to you! ) or perhaps you might assert “Hinduism has existed for thousands of years, yet science has only been around for a few hundred, of course Hinduism is right”. I think that this points to a deficient understanding of scientific methodology and as tempted as I am to try and address this objection, I feel that watching a well made, informative video on Youtube might be a better idea. Watch Skewed Views of Science. Watch it even if you are a professional scientist because I believe it will help you to communicate ideas better.
I believe that should give you an idea of what a “hindu-perspective” on the issue could be. As I said, it is the individual’s prerogative to arrive at an informed decision. Before we can really tackle the issue head on there are still a few factors left to discuss. What exactly is (biological) Evolution and how does it impact religious views? Will religion have to modify itself? How do religious people, especially those who do not prescribe to the NOMA idea, perceive those theories? We’ll look at those in the next article.
Glossary:
ISKCON : International Society for Krishna Consciousness
Dashavataar : The ten incarnations of the Hindu god Vishnu
Vishnu : The being who incarnates in ten forms (ref wiki on circular reasoning).
Upanishad : A class of Hindu scripture involving dialogue between guru and disciple
Shrimad Bhagawatam : See wikipedia
Yuga : Can be loosely translated as age, era or epoch.
Avatar : Incarnation /manifestation of a higher being
Satya Yuga : The first epoch in a cycle of four. Not necessarily the “first” age since time is circular
Vedantic : End portion of the Vedas, discusses metaphysics
Michael Cremo : A Hindu Creationist with ISKCON.
* Sri Yuketshwar Giri, guru of Paramhansa Yogananda, proposes a slightly different figure, which might correspond to the fossil record. It is not known how well accepted his calculation is.
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Happy Birthday Darwin (Ok, its a week late). I’ll be posting up two articles on Evolution I wrote two years ago.
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The Real Cost Of Religious Faith - Atheist Experience 696 (via village1diot)
Amazingly clear explanation of the atheist side.
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The babe in the womb; Leonardo da Vinci (1511)
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Old classic reminds me of the days gone by.
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Save up.
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The beliefs of Chaarvaaks
I googled Carvaka and got a bunch of good reads on the subject. In summary, Carvakas were materialists. A lot of their original writings are not available. A lot of what we know about them is from second hand sources, mainly from Madhavacarya’s Review of Indian Philosophies (Sarva Darshana Samgraha). It might be caricatured, similar to how modern atheism is easily caricatured by religious figures and the press.
I think though that many of the fundamentals (seeking happiness, philosophical naturalism) of the philosophy presented are accurate, a lot of the implications (disregard for morality, hedonism) are exaggerated or plain wrong. Some critics resort to Arguments from Ignorance in an attempt to refute the Carvaka world view, such has how can consciousness arise from matter?
Nirmukta’s essay presents the ideas as an interview with a Carvaka. Most of the article seems source from Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya’s book. He has Marxist leanings and the whole class struggle (bramhanism vs the rest) seems to dominate his analysis. I think it is fair to admit that such a conflict was present at various points in Indian History. I am skeptical that these class relations were homogenous across India, and hence that the class struggle was the overwhelming motivator behind Carvaka philosophy.
Honestly, apart from that, I do not think I have much new to contribute to the discussion.
In the West, the Epicureans represent a similar philosophy. Alain de Botton has a short and succinct documentary on Epicurus. What is striking is how the reality is in contrast to the apparent hedonism we associate with those ideas. Epicurus was a simple, insightful guy.
Hi. Welcome to Epiblast! The name is partly inspired by PZ Myers famous blog, Pharyngula partly by the fact that the epiblast, a simple tissue in a developing embryo (labelled 5), gives rise, eventually, to virtually everything inside our body. It's a metaphor for how some of our simple, fundamental ideas vastly affect the other aspects of our life. This blog covers my interests; usually science, medicine, atheism, religion. I might sneak in a bit of philosophy or magic if I feel like it. I warn you, the discussion gets uncomfortable and I come to conclusions which are unconventional, maybe contradictory to yours. Don't go crying to someone if you are offended.
