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Favourite popular science authors; science for interested plebs
Topic Started: Jan 1 2011, 11:10 AM (934 Views)
Zoroaster
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My favourite all-time science writer is Steven J Gould... Been reading his stuff since the early 80s... And I re-read it every few years, he was a brilliant human being, and a humanist. Love his interpretation of the Burgess Shale and Ediacaran fossils. Never really decided if I believed in his "punctuated equilibrium" or not, but I wasn't there, neither was anyone else, so it's still valid, perhaps DNA science will prove once and for all whether it was bursts or drawn out spluts?

Loved Robert Bakkers "Dinosaur Heresies" which I got for Christmas 1985.

Next maybe Richard Dawkins? Probably not... I prefer new papers I read casually about in New Scientist or Scientific American.

Loved Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" book of the TV Series - astro-science for pedestrians and cyclists (and bikers?)...

Richard Dawkins is too much of an evangelist for my taste tho. He wrote some neat Pascal programs for Macs to show Natural Selection in progress, but I think he should be gagged and suppressed because he does the cause of Evolution Science via Natural Selection a disservice by being an Evangelist Nazi.

And I recently started reading Jared Diamond's book about Guns and Iron and Rice or whatever it's called. It seemed that everytime he found a research paper that backed his theory, he wrote as if it was the only theory. Goddamn him! Did he never take into account that the Australian aboriginals didn't have drop of Neanderthal blood in them, thus relegating them to non-adventurous backwater un-civilized has-beens?

Studying in West Australian universities, and even working at the WA Musem, I was astounded at the accepted fact, and scientific lie, that exhibits were tagged as Aboriginal Civilzation! I HATE dogmatic pseudo-science like that... Okay so it makes descendants feel better about being Aboriginal - but it AINT FUCKING SCIENCE!

I've read a couple of Steven Hawking books, but the sheer scale and abstract obscurity of the mathematics bewilders and bewitches and bothers me.. . In high school, I always knew that my career path was going to be more in the humanities than the sciences - never liked algebra never will.. .. generally I get the scale and ideas behind the physics when explained in big picture analogies - but show me a photo of greek characters on a chalkboard and I will think you're full of shit (despite the fact I can read Greek having lived there for 2 years between 1970 and 1972)...


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Ànraich
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What do you mean the Aborigines didn't have a civilization? You don't need cities and history to be a civilization, only culture and heritage.
We should all aspire to die surrounded by our dearest friends. Just like Julius Caesar.

"The Lord Universe said: 'The same fate I have given to all things from stones to stars, that one day they shall become naught but memories aloft upon the winds of time. From dust all was born, and to dust all shall return.' He then looked upon His greatest creation, life, and pitied them, for unlike stars and stones they would soon learn of this fate and despair in the futility of their own existence. And so the Lord Universe decided to give life two gifts to save them from this despair. The first of these gifts was the soul, that life might more readily accept their fate, and the second was fear, that they might in time learn to avoid it altogether." - Excerpt from a Chanagwan creation myth, Legends and Folklore of the Planet Ghar, collected and published by Yieju Bai'an, explorer from the Celestial Commonwealth of Qonming

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lamna
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Well Aborigines and other Melanesians share around 5% of their DNA with a newly discovered extinct human, the Denisovans who shared a common ancestor with Neanderthals.

I've always thought of civilization as having to be settled, but the Mongols were always on the move and they built the second largest empire ever.

Speaking of Mongols, while I was doing research for an Alternate history project about them conquering all Eurasia and North Africa I found out about the Kulin alliance in what's not Victoria. It certainly had the potential for settling down and becoming a "proper" civilization.

Perhaps that's what it was referring too?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denisova_hominin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kulin

Oh and the people who built Timbuktu, M'banza-Kongo and Great Zimbabwe had no Neanderthal blood in them.
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The Artist Formerly Known As Parasky
Jan 1 2011, 03:30 PM
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What do you mean the Aborigines didn't have a civilization? You don't need cities and history to be a civilization, only culture and heritage.


The last time science tried to investigate their claims of 40,000+ year ownership of Australia, the results came up with Mungo man have NO LIVING DECENDANTS - thats when the "traditional owners" of lake Mungo decided no more DNA analysis...

Australia's first ever tribes sufffered the same fate that subsequent tribes met, until the British.

All the tribes, who wishy-washy anthropologists would have you believe lived in 100% harmony with their environment, wiped out all the mega-fauna, completely changed the vegetation of the continent, and ritually practiced infanticide and paedophila, but the wishy-washy anthropolgists (read lesbian do-gooder academics) would have you believe they lived in some kind of utopian society...

I'm not sorry - get a f-ckin' job you bludgin' c-nts!
I thought you had to have a division of labour and purely civic job opportunities to be a civilization...

The only job vacancy aborigines ever had was that of witch-doctor... everyone had to hunt or gather or die...

But these days they have hundreds of job opportunities, apart from home invasion, robbery and child molestation...

They're only the "noble savage" when you live 10,000 mlles away from the stone-age hasbeens... when I apply cold rational Darwinism to these sorry individuals, I don't see much of a future for them...
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Zoroaster
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lamna
Jan 1 2011, 06:23 PM
I've always thought of civilization as having to be settled, but the Mongols were always on the move and they built the second largest empire ever.

Speaking of Mongols, while I was doing research for an Alternate history project about them conquering all Eurasia and North Africa I found out about the Kulin alliance in what's not Victoria. It certainly had the potential for settling down and becoming a "proper" civilization.
The Mongols were civilized.... a yurt is an instrument of civilzation... how did they take it from one grazing plane to another? on an Ox-cart with wheels...

Not every Mongol knew how to make wheels - there were (and still ARE!) specialists, who made wheels... Division of labour = civilization...

Genghis Khan - conqueror
Court Scribe and historian (example of division of labour)

Orkhan Runes (example of Turkic/Mongol tribes learning / inventing writing)
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Zoroaster
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I might add that I have an agenda to dispossess "australian aboriginals" of their supposed birthright...

They haven't been here for 40,000 years. Their ancestors killed (and probably ate) the people that settled Australia 40-60,000 years ago...

Prime example: between 8 and 12 thousand years ago, humans in Australia adopted the domestic dog (they'd never farmed or raised animals before) which killed off all the mainland Thylacines and Devils... The Tasmanian aboriginals were a different race of humans to the mainlanders, and they didn't have dogs (Tasmania is f--king cold, and one tribe didn't even know how to "make" fire)...

There are (were!) tribes of Negritos in North Queensland, but there were all homogenised and baptised and institutionalised in the 1930s. Academian Nazis through-out Australia have a policy of rooting out and destroying the careers of academics who flout convention and try to find out more about the Negrito tribes of North Queensland.
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And these days you get brotherhoods of Maori and Aborigine...

I reckon the Maori were only about 500-1000 years away from landing on the East Coast - do you think they would have been friendly? Like they were friendly to their Chatham Island cousins circa 1840? I don't think so!!!!

It's not a pretty world out there folks!
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lamna
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No need to get into a tizzy, I don't think anyone here believes in noble savages, you should have been here about a year ago for all the discussions that sprang up in the wake of Avatar.
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Oooh, that got a major backlash.
But I agree with Magoo on misinterpretations of natives in South America, North America, Australia, etc, etc. It really riles me when people say how much more Eco-friendly they were/are. No, no they weren't/aren't. Their way of life is far less eco-friendly than typically Western ways of life, they just lack the numbers to have a non-local effect. And let's not get started on the extinctions.
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YEAH! I 'm still pissed at the sped up desertification and possible extinction of the Megalania.
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SIngemeister
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They did wipe out the majority of Australian megafauna by replacing most of the flora with different flora due to slash-and-burn. Large animals such as Diprotodon couldn't eat this, so began to die put, followed by their predators. Others were simply hunted to the brink.
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dialforthedevil
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Now i really hate all of this 'noble savage' bollocks, it normally is used by some idiotic liberal who has probably never let his suburban middle class home. James Cameron really should be forced to live with them for a couple of years (maybe with a head hunter tribe) and see how it actually turns out. By the end of it Avatar would have been a very different film....

No civilization is ever 'good' when will people realise that!

Back on topic I love all the Dawkins books, i especially recommend 'The Greatest Show on Earth' since it is his least zealous and is more well grounded
Edited by dialforthedevil, Jan 2 2011, 07:12 AM.
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lamna
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I don't really have a favourite, I read lots of books. I did like Carl Sagan's Demon Haunted World and I get most of David Attenbourgh's books.
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Holben
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Currently reading 'the Trials of Life' by my old friend Sir Attenborough. :P

Time flows like a river. Which is to say, downhill. We can tell this because everything is going downhill rapidly. It would seem prudent to be somewhere else when we reach the sea.

"It is the old wound my king. It has never healed."
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Ànraich
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No more talk about the Australian Aborigines in this way. It's racist and derogatory and against the TOS. The fact that this thread survived the first post is a miracle in its own right.
We should all aspire to die surrounded by our dearest friends. Just like Julius Caesar.

"The Lord Universe said: 'The same fate I have given to all things from stones to stars, that one day they shall become naught but memories aloft upon the winds of time. From dust all was born, and to dust all shall return.' He then looked upon His greatest creation, life, and pitied them, for unlike stars and stones they would soon learn of this fate and despair in the futility of their own existence. And so the Lord Universe decided to give life two gifts to save them from this despair. The first of these gifts was the soul, that life might more readily accept their fate, and the second was fear, that they might in time learn to avoid it altogether." - Excerpt from a Chanagwan creation myth, Legends and Folklore of the Planet Ghar, collected and published by Yieju Bai'an, explorer from the Celestial Commonwealth of Qonming

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