Urantia Book Commentary and Articles

This video is an amazing testament to the speed with which Urantian civilization is accelerating...but is it accelerating in the right direction? Is is truly sustainable?

p1086:6(99:1.3) Urantia society can never hope to settle down as in past ages. The social ship has steamed out of the sheltered bays of established tradition and has begun its cruise upon the high seas of evolutionary destiny; and the soul of man, as never before in the world's history, needs carefully to scrutinize its charts of morality and painstakingly to observe the compass of religious guidance. The paramount mission of religion as a social influence is to stabilize the ideals of mankind during these dangerous times of transition from one phase of civilization to another, from one level of culture to another.

p909:6(81:6.25) The greatest twentieth-century influences contributing to the furtherance of civilization and the advancement of culture are the marked increase in world travel and the unparalleled improvements in methods of communication. But the improvement in education has not kept pace with the expanding social structure; neither has the modern appreciation of ethics developed in correspondence with growth along more purely intellectual and scientific lines. And modern civilization is at a standstill in spiritual development and the safeguarding of the home institution.

p910:1(81:6.28) At first life was a struggle for existence; now, for a standard of living; next it will be for quality of thinking, the coming earthly goal of human existence.

p1772:4(160:1.3) The more complex civilization becomes, the more difficult will become the art of living. The more rapid the changes in social usage, the more complicated will become the task of character development. Every ten generations mankind must learn anew the art of living if progress is to continue. And if man becomes so ingenious that he more rapidly adds to the complexities of society, the art of living will need to be remastered in less time, perhaps every single generation. If the evolution of the art of living fails to keep pace with the technique of existence, humanity will quickly revert to the simple urge of livingâ€”the attainment of the satisfaction of present desires. Thus will humanity remain immature; society will fail in growing up to full maturity

Please see The Maintenance of Civilization

And enjoy this short presentation...!

Labels: civilization, communication, complexity, religion, The Urantia Book

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Sunday, May 17, 2009

German Fossil Found to Be Early Primate

This article is on the same subject as the previous one, but with a slightly different perspective. From the Urantia Book:

p703:5 62:2.1 A little more than one million years ago the Mesopotamian dawn mammals, the direct descendants of the North American lemur type of placental mammal, suddenly appeared. They were active little creatures, almost three feet tall; and while they did not habitually walk on their hind legs, they could easily stand erect. They were hairy and agile and chattered in monkeylike fashion, but unlike the simian tribes, they were flesh eaters. They had a primitive opposable thumb as well as a highly useful grasping big toe. From this point onward the prehuman species successively developed the opposable thumb while they progressively lost the grasping power of the great toe. The later ape tribes retained the grasping big toe but never developed the human type of thumb.

p706:3 62:3.12 And so it may be readily seen that man and the ape are related only in that they sprang from the mid-mammals, a tribe in which there occurred the contemporaneous birth and subsequent segregation of two pairs of twins: the inferior pair destined to produce the modern types of monkey, baboon, chimpanzee, and gorilla; the superior pair destined to continue the line of ascent which evolved into man himself.

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
Published: May 16, 2009

Fossil remains of a 47-million-year-old animal, found years ago in Germany, have been analyzed more thoroughly and determined to be an extremely early primate close to the emergence of the evolutionary branch leading to monkeys, apes and humans, scientists said in interviews this week.

Described as the "most complete fossil primate ever discovered," the specimen is a juvenile female the size of a small monkey. Only the left lower limb is missing, and the preservation is so remarkable that impressions of fur and the soft body outline are still clear. The animal's last meal, of fruit and leaves, remained in the stomach cavity.

In an article to be published on Tuesday in PLoS One, an online scientific journal, an international team of scientists will report that this extraordinary fossil could be a "stem group" from which higher primates evolved, 'but we are not advocating this."

This is only a few sentences from a very interesting article, and pretty exciting, as it appears to corroborate what the Urantia Book tells us about this part of the evolutionary process, and this particular branch of the tree...please click on "external source" to access the complete article.

Labels: anthropology, Germany, John Noble WIilford, paleontology, primates, science, The Urantia Book

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Saturday, May 16, 2009

Fossil Discovery Is Heralded

May 16, 2009

From The Urantia Book:

The great event of this glacial period was the evolution of primitive man. Slightly to the west of India, on land now under water and among the offspring of Asiatic migrants of the older North American lemur types, the dawn mammals suddenly appeared. These small animals walked mostly on their hind legs, and they possessed large brains in proportion to their size and in comparison with the brains of other animals. In the seventieth generation of this order of life a new and higher group of animals suddenly differentiated. These new mid-mammals-almost twice the size and height of their ancestors and possessing proportionately increased brain power-had only well established themselves when the Primates, the third vital mutation, suddenly appeared. (At this same time, a retrograde development within the mid-mammal stock gave origin to the simian ancestry; and from that day to this the human branch has gone forward by progressive evolution, while the simian tribes have remained stationary or have actually retrogressed.)
p700:2 (61:6.1)

MAY 15, 2009
Fossil Discovery Is Heralded

By GAUTAM NAIK

In what could prove to be a landmark discovery, a leading paleontologist said scientists have dug up the 47 million-year-old fossil of an ancient primate whose features suggest it could be the common ancestor of all later monkeys, apes and humans.

Anthropologists have long believed that humans evolved from ancient ape-like ancestors. Some 50 million years ago, two ape-like groups walked the Earth. One is known as the tarsidae, a precursor of the tarsier, a tiny, large-eyed creature that lives in Asia. Another group is known as the adapidae, a precursor of today's lemurs in Madagascar.

Based on previously limited fossil evidence, one big debate had been whether the tarsidae or adapidae group gave rise to monkeys, apes and humans. The latest discovery bolsters the less common position that our ancient ape-like ancestor was an adapid, the believed precursor of lemurs.

Please click on "external source" for this most interesting article...

Labels: anthropology, evolution, Gautam Naik, lemurs, paleontology, The Urantia Book

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Friday, April 10, 2009

Astronomers: Dark Matter Guides Universe's Structure

by Bob Evans on
Apr 5, 2009

A 10-year study of 100,000 galaxies close to our own offers compelling proof that long-hypothesized "dark matter" does exist and is in fact a guiding force behind the structure of the universe, a team of Australian, British, and American astronomers revealed this week.

Saying that "the universe we see is really quite structured," one of the lead researchers explained that the 10-year "census" of galaxies near our own Milky Way offers powerful evidence that this invisible dark matter "seems to hold the galaxies together."

The dark matter's influence on galaxies "stops their constituent stars from flying off and it seems to be driving the large-scale galaxy clusters and super clusters" that are the largest objects in the universe, said Dr. Heath Jones of the Anglo Australian Observatory in an article on the website of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Offering rich details about the direction, speed, shape, and evolving structure of 100,000 galaxies, the 10-year study offered great promise because of its exhaustive scope: it analyzed those dynamic properties for a much larger number of galaxies than any other study had ever attempted.

In reviewing the data from the study, Jones said, it became clear that directly observable visible objects could not possibly have exerted sufficient gravitational force to account for all of the movement and dynamics of the galaxies being studied.

And in hypothesing about what other, nonvisible forces could account for that additional gravitational effect, theories about dark matter completed that equation very nicely, he told the ABC:

"The galaxies just aren't uniform. They are scattered throughout the universe," he said. "What we find is that they tend to clump and cluster together. So you'll get galaxies clustering along nice delicate filamentary chains. You get some galaxies that will congregate in their clusters and you will get clusters of galaxies collecting in super clusters of galaxies, so the universe that we see is really quite structuredâ€¦.

"Astronomers know that this dark matter must exist in the universe," he said. "We can't see it with our telescopes directly, but by studying large objects like galaxies and how they move with respect to each other we can infer its existence quite accurately."

In addition to the compelling evidence the study provides for the existence of dark matter, Jones said, it also offers equally compelling proof that the universe is expanding and will continue to do so, rather than at some point collapsing back in upon itself as some astronomers have theorized.

Labels: Bob Evans, dark matter, Dr. Heath Jones, galaxies, gravity, the universe, The Urantia Book

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No Ordinary Angel: Celestial Spirits and Christian Claims About Jesus

Books
April 07, 2009
by Sam Wells

Book Review: No Ordinary Angel: Celestial Spirits and Christian Claims about Jesus
by Susan R. Garrett
Yale University Press, 352 pp., $30.00

The most impressive thing about Susan Garrett's wide-ranging and lucid six-chapter discussion of angels is that it takes a subject that scholars generally consider to be on the fluffy end of popular piety and integrates it into ecclesial and academic reflection. The real energy of the book is how close it remains to the netherworld of angelic appearances, miraculous rescues and near-death experiencesâ€”in short, a theology based on the movie It's a Wonderful Life. Never condescending, never scaremongering, Garrett shows both an admirable grasp of and critical distance from the ways angels have captivated and continue to stimulate the popular imagination.

At the outset Garrett acknowledges the three broad constituencies in the conversation: Billy Graham-style ingenuousness toward the scriptural record, including the (erroneous) assumption that the Bible has a single consistent view of the nature and role of angels; Rudolf Bultmann-style skepticism about the abiding value of angel imagery, supplemented by Walter Wink-characterized disenchantment of the world into physical phenomena of assorted powers; and New Age "en chanted-world cosmology," sometimes called a "Third Great Awakening," full of spiritual presences and inexplicable powers, largely centered on and designed to bolster the self.

Garrett starts, as one would expect, with the notion of messenger. It seems odd that she does not offer a fuller account of Gabriel and the role of angels in the Christmas and resurrection narratives, since these seem to be at the core of the scriptural record, but her concern at the outset is more with showing Jesus' similarity to and difference from angels. (In brief, Jesus ate, suffered and died in a way that angels never do.) She goes on to explore the role of angels in naming and mediating God's presence, still focusing largely on Jesus, and she provides helpful notes on the way in which understanding of the divinity of Christ emerged from reflection on other motifs, such as God's word, glory, wisdom, power, spirit and name.

After the first two chapters Garrett dwells more on popular conceptions of faith and spirituality. The middle two chapters deal with the negative aspects of the spiritual worldâ€”fallen angels and Satan as the fallen angel; the final two deal with concerns of pietyâ€”guardian angels and experiences and beliefs surrounding death.

The book is exceptionally well structured, with conclusions to each chapter that perfectly summarize the foregoing material, and very engagingly written, with hosts of examples from ancient literature and contemporary culture. It is disappointing not to see more positive examples from contemporary experience and culture; almost without exception Garrett's contemporary material scrutinizes the self-centered, death-denying character of popular spirituality. This is not necessarily a criticism of the author; it is more a lament about the material she has at her disposal. There are glimpses of helpful historical narrative, particularly where she draws out the way that Calvin's theology, with its conviction that the finite cannot contain the infinite, enhanced the material-spiritual duality that undermined Protestant belief in the intimate presence of angels.

The theological absentee from the book is the Holy Spirit. Garrett helpfully points out how belief in angels thrives in a milieu where God seems to be distant from the world, either experientially or philosophically. Belief in angelsâ€”particularly guardian angelsâ€”seems to be a way in which people understand the divine drawing close to the human in everyday and crisis situations. This is exactly where the Holy Spirit fits into Christian theology. If, as Calvin insists, Jesus is fully human and thus after the ascension can only be in one placeâ€”heavenâ€”then the Holy Spirit is the One who makes "Christ and his benefits" present to the believer.

Angels amplify, illustrate, invigorate, add color to and make vivid the gospel narrative and the world of the discipleship community, but they are not the hinge of salvation; nor are they the principal way in which God is made known in the world today. These are the roles of Jesus and the Holy Spirit. It makes complete sense that angels emerged in Judaism as the faith searched for a vocabulary to describe God's communication with Israel, both corporately and in the experience of believers. But in the Christian era, emphasis on angels sounds suspiciously like an abandonment of the Trinity in favor of a unitary God who has a portfolio of alternative methods of communicating with the world.

These questions don't quite get the treatment they deserve in this otherwise highly readable and in many ways intriguing account of popular piety and historic faith.

Labels: angels, Sam Wells, spirituality, Susan R. Garrett

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Sunday, April 05, 2009

Editorial/Opinion Letters to the editor

Published Friday, April 3, 2009 9:26 AM MDT

Total collapse?

Dear Editor:

Jesus prayed, "Thy will be done on Earth as it is done in Heaven." Surely all Christians want this prayer to become reality, but how can we do our part to bring this to fruition if we don't know how things are done in heaven?

Nearly one hundred years ago in Chicago divine personalities began transmitting messages through a sleeping individual. Didn't Saint Luke write, "For with God nothing is impossible." After more than 40 years of transmissions these papers known as the "Urantia Papers" were published in 1955 as the Urantia Book. This 2,000 page book self proclaims to be the most recent presentation of truth to our planet.

The first 1,300 pages teach how things are done in Heaven. The last 700 pages are the complete life and teachings of Jesus. These papers give a detailed account of 19 appearances of Jesus after his resurrection. The New Testament only tells of four appearances.

When I became a student of the book in the 1970s I was intrigued by a paper entitled, "Government on a Neighboring Planet." The authors claim that our planet is in dire need of help and they relate how the most progressive nation on this neighboring planet is advancing its civilization. The paper makes suggestions for improvement in ten areas of our society. At this point of our nation's development, I believe the areas of Home Life, Education, Dealing with Crime, and Military Preparedness are the most relative.

In the family children are not allowed to marry until the age of twenty. They must attend marriage preparation classes before given a marriage license, and they must attend weekly parenting classes until their children are grown.

The education system doesn't confine children in classrooms. In the basics they are home schooled. The public schools are farms, building skills, libraries, and technical skills. One half of each school day is devoted to competitive athletics for all students. When they graduate from the public schools they are skilled craftsmen and women. All who desire academic education can attend colleges without cost.

Crime in this advanced nation is dealt with justly and quickly. The death penalty is given to all public officials who betray the public trust and to all petty criminals who can't be rehabilitated.

Military preparedness is only for defensive purposes. To aid less advanced nations, scholarships are provided for the most able students. They are taught by example how to advance their home nations.

Will the economic programs of the Obama administration rescue our nation and keep us from total collapse? Or is this an example of "the blind leading the blind?" Maybe it's time that skeptics make a serious investigation of The Urantia Book. Copies of the book can be found in our local libraries, the book is also on the internet.

Sincerely

Lynn E. Rhoderick

Labels: Government on a Neighboring Planet, heaven, Lynn E. Rhoderick, planet earth, President Obama, The Urantia Book

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Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Keck and Kepler team up to find other Earths

From the Urantia Book:

Satania itself is an unfinished system containing only 619 inhabited worlds. Such planets are numbered serially in accordance with their registration as inhabited worlds, as worlds inhabited by will creatures. Thus was Urantia given the number 606 of Satania, meaning the 606th world in this local system on which the long evolutionary life process culminated in the appearance of human beings. There are thirty-six uninhabited planets nearing the life-endowment stage, and several are now being made ready for the Life Carriers. There are nearly two hundred spheres which are evolving so as to be ready for life implantation within the next few million years.

Not all planets are suited to harbor mortal life. Small ones having a high rate of axial revolution are wholly unsuited for life habitats. In several of the physical systems of Satania the planets revolving around the central sun are too large for habitation, their great mass occasioning oppressive gravity. Many of these enormous spheres have satellites, sometimes a half dozen or more, and these moons are often in size very near that of Urantia, so that they are almost ideal for habitation.

The oldest inhabited world of Satania, world number one, is Anova, one of the forty-four satellites revolving around an enormous dark planet but exposed to the differential light of three neighboring suns. Anova is in an advanced stage of progressive civilization. p559:3 49:0.3

Keck and Kepler team up to find other Earths

This is an exciting article about the newest of science's efforts to discover inhabitable (or inhabited?) planets outside our solar system. Please click on "external source" to access the entire article, and to follow links to the Keck Observatory site - most interesting!

Kamuela, Hawaii- For nearly a decade, Cal-Berkeley astronomer Geoff Marcy and his colleagues have been using the W. M. Keck telescopes to discover giant planets orbiting distant stars. Now, with the successful launch of NASA's Kepler mission, they will be using Keck I's ten-meter astronomical eye to discover distant Earths. Kepler will pick out Earth-like candidates. Keck will then zero in on them and determine, with certainty, if they are at all similar to our home planet.

"Keck and NASA have a long-standing partnership to push astronomy research to its fullest potential. This Keck-Kepler collaboration gives that partnership a compelling new scientific focus," said Taft Armandroff, the Director of Keck Observatory headquartered in Kamuela, HI.

Kepler was launched from NASA's Kennedy Space Center last Friday. Aboard the spacecraft is an 84-megapixel camera that will focus on a single region of the sky and snap repeated images of 100,000 stars looking for those that dim periodically. By studying the stars' episodic decreases in starlight, astronomers will be able to determine the diameter of the object that passes in front of the star, blocks its light and causes the dimming.

"Kepler does not tell astronomers with certainty if the object taking a bite out of the starlight is a planet or another star. That is where Keck plays a crucial role to the Kepler mission," said Marcy, a frequent Keck user and Kepler mission co-investigator. He, along with a large international planet-hunting team, has discovered nearly half of the 300-plus known planets outside the Solar System.

Astronomers call the objects Kepler detects transits because from the telescope's perspective the planet candidate seems to eclipse its parent star's light. The phenomenon is similar to the Moon eclipsing the Sun during a total solar eclipse. But a distant planet eclipsing its parent star will only block a small fraction, 1/10,000, of the star's light. The Moon, by contrast, blocks nearly all of the Sun's light in a total solar eclipse.

In the Kepler-Keck duo, once Kepler team members find an Earth candidate and determine as best they can that theyâ€™re not looking at two stars orbiting each other, they will hand the object off to Marcy and his colleagues. The team will use Keck I telescope and its instrument HIRES, the High Resolution Spectrometer, to monitor how the light coming from the parent star changes as the planet candidate orbits.

HIRES is an instrument that spreads light collected from the telescope mirrors into its component wavelengths or colors. This is called a spectrum. When the planet candidate orbits around the back of the star, its gravity will ever so slightly pull on the star causing the star's spectrum to shift toward redder wavelengths. When the planet comes around in its orbit to cross the face of the star, it will pull the star in the other direction, and the star's spectrum will shift toward bluer wavelengths. HIRES will detect these shifts and give astronomers the star's radial velocity, or the speed at which the star moves toward or away from Earth. Based on this speed, Marcy and his team will be able to calculate the mass of planet candidate.

Calculating the planet candidate's mass is important because it tells astronomers whether a planet or another star is eclipsing the parent star. If the object turns out to be a planet, Marcy and his team can then use the Keck-calculated mass and Kepler-calculated diameter to determine the planet's density. "In a sense it's as if we are taking the planets and dunking them in a bathtub to see if they float. A rocky planet like Earth would sink," Marcy said. Earth has a density of about five grams per cubic centimeter. Gas giants, on the other hand, have a density close to water at about one gram per cubic centimeter.

"Studying the radial velocity of the planet candidates Kepler discovers is a key endeavor in understanding our place in the cosmos. It will help answer one of humanity's biggest questions, "Are we alone?" Armandroff said.

Marcy and his colleagues plan to start studying Kepler's candidate Earths with Keck I and HIRES during the last three nights of July 2009.

Labels: Geoff Marcy, High Resolution Spectrometer, Keck Observatory, Kepler mission, NASA, planets, Satania, Taft Armandroff, The Urantia Book

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Friday, March 13, 2009

Why is TUB translated into other languages when its authors favor a one world language?

Q: Why is The Urantia Book translated into other languages when its authors favor a one world language?

A: The very first paragraph of the book states that the authors were "authorized to translate into the English language..." I think one reason that the authors chose English is that it is a very fluid language, ever adaptable and full of derivative words from many languages.

This is surely no accidental or unthinking choice. All we have to do is look around us and we see that many countries educate their children in English, and English, I have heard, is becoming the language of business as well. And we know how important commerce is to establishing global unity and cooperation.

Jesus was conversant in several languages, and this is a trend that is developing throughout the world. For example, here in America, English co-exists with Spanish in many communities. Language is an evolutionary development, and it is going to take a long time before we reach the stage of a "one tongue" world, which is a feature of the ages of Light and Life.

Some may question the decisions that have been made regarding translations into other languages, but it seems to me that if you want to reach a wide audience, you do what is necessary. Jesus said that we were to spread this message to all the world... better that people should get this message in their own language right now; later on, they may be able to master English because of it. But regardless, they will have gotten the good news.

We are given no concrete guidance in the book regarding this issue, but since the Urantia Revelation is meant to feed humanity for the next millenium or so, I think translations in other languages at this early stage is entirely appropriate. In the end, the message of The Urantia Book - in any language - must be translated by each individual into "the language of the spirit..." that Jesus spoke of.

Thanks for this interesting question!

Labels: authors, English, language, The Urantia Book, translations

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Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Do we have intelligent planetary neighbors?

Q: The Urantia Book authors state that there is intelligent life in close proximity to Earth. They go on to say that there are three planets in our solar system suited to harbor life. Do we have intelligent planetary neighbors?

A: The Urantia Book teaches us that there are three planets near us that are suitable to harbor life, but perhaps not intelligent life, as we know it. However, there MAY BE intelligent life on some of the moons in our solar system.

Even if a planetary moon may appear to have no familiar attributes that would support life as we know it on Earth, it may yet be able to support life-forms that are unlike us, for example, the nonbreathers. The nonbreathers are a fascinating group, and they are mortals like us, except that they are not Adjuster-fused. Their lives are very different from our own, as you will see if you follow the links.

We are told in The Urantia Book that there are nine moons in our local universe which can support the nonbreather type of life, and, intriguingly, "You would be more than interested in the planetary conduct of this type of mortal because such a race of beings inhabits a sphere in close proximity to Urantia." p564:2(49:3.6)

Earth science may be our best bet for eventually uncovering these mysteries. Some of the moons of Saturn, such as Titan, which has an atmosphere (nitrogen and methane) and Enceladus, which seems to have a "primordial soup" and "deep sea vent" components have been the subject of recent speculation concerning the possibilities of life as we know it, but I am far more intrigued by these other moons which may harbor nonbreathers, who enjoy a type of life quite unlike ours. Jupiter also has a number of moons that are of interest.

So, that makes these moons of our solar system quite interesting to me...we could indeed, have intelligent (and God-knowing) neighbors closer than we know right now! Hope I live long enough to find out for sure...

Labels: extraterrestrials, Jupiter, moons, nonbreathers, planets, Saturn, The Urantia Book

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Do the Urantia Book authors refer to the Gregorian calendar?

Q: Do the Urantia Book authors refer to the Gregorian calendar?

The simple answer is no, the word Gregorian isn't mentioned in the text of The Urantia Book, but the authors do use the Gregorian calendar for their date references.

There are 6 references to the year 1934:
(31:10.12),
(56:10.20) ,
(62:5.1) ,
(62:7.6) ,
(63:6.7),
(74:0.1),
and one for the year 1935(119:8.9).

The year 1934 is used as the base year in the precise date calculations given by the authors of the papers, 1934 being the year when the bulk of material was indited for Parts I-III; the restatement of Jesus' life and teachings came after that in 1935. The specific dates of Jesus' life begin at 7 B.C.

The dates A.D. are based on the Gregorian calendar. B.C.dates prior to Jesus are usually counted back from the year 1934.

Labels: Gregorian calendar, The Urantia Book

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Sunday, February 15, 2009

AAAS: 'One hundred billion trillion' planets where alien life could flourish

p166:8 15:2.9 7. The Grand Universe. Seven superuniverses make up the present organized grand universe, consisting of approximately seven trillion inhabitable worlds plus the architectural spheres and the one billion inhabited spheres of Havona. The superuniverses are ruled and administered indirectly and reflectively from Paradise by the Seven Master Spirits. The billion worlds of Havona are directly administered by the Eternals of Days, one such Supreme Trinity Personality presiding over each of these perfect spheres.

There could be one hundred billion trillion Earth-like planets in space, making it "inevitable" that extraterrestrial life exists, according to a leading astronomer.

By Richard Alleyne, Science Correspondent in Chicago
Last Updated: 12:05PM GMT 15 Feb 2009

Life on Earth used to be thought of as a freak accident that only happened once.

But scientists are now coming to the conclusion that the universe is teeming with living organisms.

The change in thinking has come about because of the new belief there are an abundant number of habitable planets like Earth.

Alan Boss, of the Carnegie Institution in Washington DC, said there could be as many Earths as there are stars in the universe - one hundred billion trillion.

Because of this, he believes it is "inevitable" that life must have flourished elsewhere over the billions of years the universe has existed.

"If you have a habitable world and let it evolve for a few billion years then inevitably some sort of life will form on it," said Dr Boss.

"It is sort of running an experiment in your refrigerator - turn it off and something will grow in there.

He believes his views will be proved by NASA's Kepler outer space-based telescope, which takes off in the next three weeks with a mission to track down Earth-like habitable planets.

Within four years Dr Boss, who was speaking at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting, believes it will have found one in our galaxy and that will prove his theories about their abundance.

He then would like researchers to build even bigger telescopes and send out an unmanned spacecraft to take photographs of the distant planet that could be up to 30 light years away. It would, however, take at least 2,000 years to report back.

Dr Boss said: "We already know enough now to say that the universe is probably loaded with terrestrial planets similar to the Earth," he says.

Labels: Alan Boss, American Association for the Advancement of Science, inhabited planets, Kepler Telescope, Richard Alleyne, The Urantia Book

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Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Our Inner Artist - Book Review

Reviewed by Jonah Lehrer
Sunday, January 11, 2009

This is an interesting article about art, and its necessity in the lives of mankind. The Urantia Book suggests that art is a desire for the good, true and beautiful; Dutton has an unusual take on art.

Click on "external link" at the bottom to access the complete article, and click here for a Truthbook topical study of "Art" from the pages of The Urantia Book.

THE ART INSTINCT

Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution

By Denis Dutton

Bloomsbury. 278 pp. $25

The list of cultural universals -- those features that recur in every human society, from remote rainforest tribes to modern America -- is surprisingly short. There's language, religion and a bunch of traits involving social structures, such as the reliance on leaders.

Denis Dutton, a New Zealand philosopher, would like to add one more item to this list: art. As he observes in his provocative new book, The Art Instinct, people the world over are weirdly driven to create beautiful things. These aesthetic objects are utterly useless -- W.H. Auden pointed out that they make "nothing happen" -- and yet we enshrine them in climate-controlled museums and pay millions of dollars for a silkscreen of a soup can. What began with a few horses on the walls of a French cave has blossomed into a human obsession.

The premise of Dutton's work is that this instinct for art isn't an accident. Instead, he argues that our desire for beauty is firmly grounded in evolution, a side effect of the struggle to survive and reproduce. In this sense, a cubist painting by Picasso is no more mysterious than the allure of a Playboy centerfold: Both are works of culture that attempt to sate a biological drive.

Dutton frames his argument as a scientific response to the idea that art is a "social construction," driven by the fads of society. He begins the book by describing a series of paintings by the Russian artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, who in the early 1990s surveyed people in 10 countries on their preferences regarding color, subject matter and painterly style. These poll results were then distilled into a series of realist landscapes. The American painting, for instance, featured a foreground of sun-dappled grass, a lake, a few adorable children and the figure of George Washington. It's an absurd pastiche, the visual equivalent of combining all of America's favorite foods in the same dish. We might enjoy pizza and ice cream, but that doesn't mean we want pizza-flavored ice cream.

While Dutton appreciates the irony of Komar and Melamid, he's more intrigued by the striking similarity of their paintings. Although the 10 national landscapes differed in their details -- the Russians wanted a brown bear, while the Kenyans preferred a hippo -- the basic layout was identical. In each case, people craved a painting that featured a large body of blue water, some open grass, a human figure and a few animals.

Why the cross-cultural similarity? According to Dutton, the survey results reveal our hard-wired preferences, which developed when we were Pleistocene hunter-gatherers roaming the African savannah. The landscapes we find most beautiful are simply those from which we evolved. If we like paintings with a foreground of short grasses, it's because that habitat contains more protein per square mile than any other, which is a crucial perk for a meat-eating primate.

Dutton is also interested in the origins of the art instinct. Shouldn't those cave-dwellers have been busy hunting instead of drawing on the wall? Why do we squander so much time and energy on art? Dutton has two distinct theories. The first is that fictional narratives, from the Iliad to "The Sopranos," provide people with a "low-cost, low-risk surrogate experience." Because I watch HBO, I'll be prepared the next time I'm in New Jersey.

His second explanation, which leans heavily on the work of Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico, involves sexual selection. Like Miller, he sees the arts as a tool of seduction, an intellectual version of the peacock's tail. Consider poetry, which for Dutton is little more than a way of showing off to potential mates. (He cites Cyrano de Bergerac as an example of poetic courtship, although he fails to note that Cyrano doesn't get the girl. His eloquent genes are never passed on.) According to Dutton, this process of mate selection -- chicks dig big vocabularies -- is responsible for the propagation of genes that lead to "the most creative and flamboyant aspects of the human personality," including artistic expression.

On the one hand, this explanation of art is just common sense. It doesn't take an evolutionary psychologist to know that a lot of poetry is written to impress the opposite sex, or that Lord Byron and Elvis Presley seldom slept alone. However, arguing that the sex lives of poets explains the origins of poetry makes about as much sense as using the bedroom exploits of Wilt Chamberlain to construct a biological explanation of basketball. Yes, poets have sex, perhaps even more sex than normal. That still doesn't explain Shakespeare.

Dutton is an elegant writer, and his book should be admired for its attempt to close the gap between art and science. It really is time that art critics learn about the visual cortex, musicologists study the inner ear and evolutionary psychologists unpack Jane Austen. Unfortunately, like so many other aesthetic theories, Dutton's ideas are ultimately undone by what they can't explain. This is the irony of evolutionary aesthetics: Although it sets out to solve the mystery of art, to explain why people write poems and smear paint on canvases, it ends up affirming the mystery. The most exquisite stuff is what we can't explain. That's why we call it art.

Labels: art, Denis Dutton, evolution, natural selection, sex, The Art Instinct, The Urantia Book

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