Dragaera

The Great Debate....to DDB

Sat Nov 30 16:12:56 PST 2002

Damien Sullivan wrote:
> 

[SNIP]
> Around the time the fly result was announced there was also a paper on
> parallel evolution of stickleback fish populations in some lakes over the past
> 12,000 years, but I won't try summarizing that here.

Cichlids?  These have diversified quite heavily in a short time in a
number of African lakes which used to be joined but have separated with
gradually falling water levels.

> 
> I think researchers in the Galapagos have seen changes in the local finchoids
> since Darwin's time.

Yes; there's a book on this (_Darwin's Finches_) which I first heard
about because I knew two of the researchers mentioned in the book (they
were dons at the university where I did my undergraduate work).

> 
> I've lost the original reference.  I'll note that the Taliban was considered
> over the top by Iran, say, and recognized only by Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and
> some small Arab state.  But "mainstream Islam" is a bit murky.  If we look at
> who's in charge of Mecca -- the Saudis -- we see a nasty, virulent, form of
> Islam.  But Iran, which most Americans probably associate with "Islamic
> fundamentalism", lets women be doctors and serve in Parliament, never mind
> vote.  Plus Iran has a Parliament.  It gets vetoed by the clerics, but it gets
> to say things in public which need vetoing.  And then there's Turkey.
> 

"Mainstream Islam" has been a murky expression ever since the division
into Sunni and Shiite, which is a long time ago -- much further back
than, say the Reformation, or the end of the Dark Ages, for that
matter.  Of course, for many centuries it would have meant Sunni Islam
under the Caliphate.

> And pre-Enlightenment Christian countries were generally as nasty as modern
> Islamic countries.  Not sure what my point is here, but there should be one
> somewhere.

By our standards there were _no_ non-nasty countries, regardless of
religion, until about the seventeenth / eighteenth centuries, which is
when Western European countries started to accept the model of tolerance
as a positive value, following on a hundred years of "religious" wars (I
put "religious" in quotation marks because many of the real motivations
were straightforward power politics, with religion as an excuse).

> 
> > discussion, and even that it's *possible*.  As others have observed,
> > we seem to have been having this large fast discussion about
> > deeply-held and strongly-felt opinions very largely without real
> > nastiness, which has made it great fun.
> 
> Yeah.  On the Bujold list I'd have shut up in a tenth as many message.  Not so
> much actual nastiness as a personal sense that discussion couldn't go any
> further without getting nasty.  Or maybe I just feel more outnumbered there.
> 

Two or three years ago, there were quite lengthy religion threads which
were, if anything, even more civilized than this one on the Bujold list,
but the list environment has changed since -- not for the better -- and
it is now rather less able to handle this sort of thing than this list.

-- 
James Burbidge			jamesandmary.burbidge at sympatico.ca