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Art as Propaganda for Evolution April 10, 2009 — Should a scientific theory be propagated by appeal to scientific evidence, or by appeal to emotions through visualization?  Nature this week contained two articles that shamelessly praised art as propaganda for evolution.  Surprisingly, one of them mentioned Charles Darwin as someone “at the cutting edge of visualization.” Endless Forms:  Carl Zimmer reviewed an exhibit currently at the Yale Center for British Art, Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts.1  The title is taken from the last sentence in the Origin where Darwin said that endless forms most beautiful...

Lima, Oct 18 (EFE).- Peru's Abimael Guzman, the founder of a Maoist guerrilla movement-cum-death cult that sometimes dynamited the bodies of just-murdered functionaries and hanged canines from lamposts as warnings to "capitalist dogs," also had his soft, sappy and romantically poetic side. The man known by his fanatic followers as "President Gonzalo" revealed some of his secrets in a hand-written ode dedicated to his wife, who died in 1988 under mysterious circumstances. A video seized in 1992 by the security forces, after Guzman's arrest, shows the wake of Augusta La Torre, better known as "Comrade Norah" and the Shining Path's...

Venezuela's Marxist dictator, Hugo Chavez, has begun confiscating farms and ranches, a violent act worthy of Zimbabwe’s ethinc cleansing, marauding socialist tyrant Robert Mugabe. Like Mugabe, his made his first target a wealthy British aristocrat. But unlike Mugabe, who openly reveled in barbarism, Chavez is using stagecraft calculated to create a melodrama that will excite his supporters, while putting the rest of the world to sleep. And he's doing it to conceal reality Staged with troops, cameras, peasants waving machetes, circling helicopters, Chavez's cow drama aligns “the people” against the 32,000-hectare cattle ranch of Lord Sam Vestey, a British-accented villain...