Aldarir Sentenced for Multiple Counts of Smuggling

 

Ancient Egyptian artifact stolen and sold by Eldarir in 2019.

BROOKLYN, NY: A federal judge sentenced Egyptian doctor Ashraf Omar Eldarir to six months in prison for smuggling nearly 600 Egyptian antiquities through JFK. He used fake provenance to funnel gold funerary amulets, wooden tomb models, an ancient Egyptian polychrome relief, an ancient Roman limestone stele, and an ancient Roman limestone head.

The false provenances included “multiple documents, including what appeared to be decades-old Egyptian blank pages with watermarks, decades-old Egyptian loose stamps, and multiple black-and-white old-looking photographs purporting to depict an ancestor of the defendant displaying several of the artifacts in his office from long ago,” stated court documents, which noted forensic examiners determined the documents were forgeries and the photographs had been photoshopped and aged.

Robbers sent Eldarir videos of the objects from the grave sites "as if it were K-Mart and here’s your pick to choose from," William Campos, the assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said in court.

Read more here: Man packed luggage with hundreds of looted ancient artifacts, feds say

Artists Against AI Generated Art

 

AI images are programmed. We should consider the value of original and truly unique work.

Why are some artists refusing to use AI for creative work?

Many express concerns about copyright infringement. They believe that their work is being used without their consent to train AI models, which then generate derivative works that compete with their own.

Artists argue that the AI technology does not represent true artistic work, and that it devalues their efforts. AI generated images do not entail the natural and lengthy process of art creation. True art is an expression of human experience, emotion, and creativity, something which AI lacks. That is why many view the AI generated images as the opposite of art.

Artists are also concerned that human artists are increasingly being replaced by AI technology.

Molly Crabapple posted an open letter and petition, calling for book and magazine publishers to refuse to use AI art. Crabapple’s letter include signatures from high profile people such as author Naomi Klein and actor Jon Cusack.

Related reding: The Harm and Hypocrisy of AI Art; Independent Artists Are Fighting Back Against AI Image Generators With Innovative Online Protests by Richard Whiddington for Artnet; Colonizing Art | OpenMind Magazine; Philosophers Needed to Navigate the AI Revolution

Philosophers Needed to Navigate the AI Revolution

 

Demis Hassabis, CEO and co-founder of Google DeepMind, has pondered the need for profound philosophical thought to guide humanity through the uncharted waters of advanced AI. His observation highlights a fascinating and potentially critical aspect of the ongoing AI revolution. He believes that the AI revolution requires not just technical prowess but also deep ethical and philosophical reflection.

“I think there is a need for some great philosophers,” Hassabis said. “Where are the great next philosophers? The equivalent of Kant or Wittgenstein, or even Aristotle.”

He went on to explain why he believed such philosophical minds were crucial: “I think we’re going to need that to help navigate society to that next step because I think AGI and artificial superintelligence is going to change humanity and the human condition.”

Read it all here: Will Need Great Philosophers To Navigate The AI Revolution: Google's Demis Hassabis

Failure to Preserve Science Journals

 

Today online research can supplement field and lab research in multiple sciences, but a study suggests that some potentially important findings are no longer available because they have not been preserved.

The work of archiving and preserving science journals is time consuming and there is no uniformly applied process to preserve free downloadable journal articles. If the publisher ceases to exist, the journals may vanish. 

Eighty-four online-only, open-access (OA) journals in the sciences, and nearly 100 more in the social sciences and humanities, have disappeared from the internet over the past 20 years as publishers stopped maintaining them. The average duration of online access appears to have been about 10 years.

“The analysis demonstrates that research integrity and the scholarly record preservation … are at risk across all academic disciplines and geographical regions," says Andrea Marchitelli, managing editor of JLIS.it, the Italian Journal of Library, Archives, and Information Science.

The authors of the study are Mikael Laakso (Hanken School of Economics), Lisa Matthias (Free University of Berlin), and Najko Jahn (University of Göttingen). To determine the list of the 176 vanished journals, they did some digital detective work because clues about them are fragmentary. After the journals go dark their names no longer appear in bibliometric databases.

The authors defined a vanished journal as one that published at least one complete volume as immediate OA, and less than 50% of its content is now available for free online. Some of the content may be accessible as printed copies or in paywalled commercial services.

They used a historical archive of internet content, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, to determine when production ceased and when content disappeared from the internet (within 5 years for three-quarters of the journals). The journals had been based in 50 different countries. Most of the now dark journals published articles only in English.

The study found that only about one-third of the 14,068 journals indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals in 2019 ensure the long-term preservation of their content. Some commercial services offer it, and the Public Knowledge Project Preservation Network, does so for free.

Source: Dozens of Internet Journals Have Vanished; How Open Access Journals are Transforming Science

Two Kinds of Human Dignity

 

I recommend reading this paper by Dr. David Bradshaw, Philosophy professor at the University of Kentucky. "Making Human Rights Orthodox," International Conference on Post-Humanism and Artificial Intelligence, Athens, Greece, November 2024.

Dr. Bradshaw often speaks at Eastern Orthodox conferences and is an expert in early Greek theology. His book Aristotle East and West: Metaphysics and the Division of Christendom is fascinating and challenging (Cambridge U Press, 2004).

Bradshaw writes, "From an Orthodox standpoint, contemporary human rights discourse is problematic in two ways: many rights that are widely advocated are contrary to Orthodox moral teaching, and even those that are acceptable (such as, for example, the right to life) are often justified through faulty reasoning. Hence it is important to articulate a legitimately Orthodox framework for human rights.

 
The approach suggested here is based on a distinction between two kinds of human dignity: ‘mere’ human dignity, consisting in being accorded respect and appropriate treatment by others, and ‘true’ human dignity, consisting of possessing a pure conscience before God. These give rise to two distinct categories of human rights, which I refer to, respectively, as rights of non-abuse and rights of agency."

The Reality of Human Exceptionalism

 

Dr. Alice C. Linsley

Many social issues of the Western world hinge on decisive statements about humans. They touch on human dignity, human diversity, human rights, and human reproduction. We hear from "experts" in many fields, but rarely from anthropologists whose focus is humankind.

The British biologist Richard Dawkins has been outspoken on these issues. In a particularly flamboyant statement, he denigrated the dignity of the unborn human.

"With respect to those meanings of 'human' that are relevant to the morality of abortion, any fetus is less human than an adult pig." - Richard Dawkins' Tweet

Yet Dawkins acknowledges that humans are exceptional. He states: "As Darwin recognized, we humans are the first and only species able to escape the brutal force that created us, natural selection….We alone on earth have evolved to the point where we can…overthrow the tyranny of natural selection.” (Have Humans Outgrown Natural Selection?)

The Hebrew writers of Genesis believed that God created humans fully human from the beginning in a divine act at a moment in the distant past. There is no reason to reject this view since humans appeared suddenly on the earth about 4 million years ago, and though these were anatomically archaic, they were nonetheless, fully human. We have evidence that they walked upright, had human dentition, hunted and butchered, and controlled fire.

The discovery of a complete fourth metatarsal of A. afarensis at Hadar shows the deep, flat base and tarsal facets that "imply that its midfoot had no ape-like midtarsal break. These features show that the A. afarensis foot was functionally like that of modern humans." (Carol Ward, William H. Kimbel, Donald C. Johanson, Feb. 2011)

A. afarensis used polished bone tools, had communal meals, and controlled fire. Some of the earliest evidence of controlled use of fire by humans was found at Swartkrans in South Africa. Other sites that indicate fire use include Chesowanja near Lake Baringo, Koobi Fora and Olorgesailie in Kenya.

In 2011 researchers discovered jaw bones and teeth of four individuals in the Afar region of Ethiopia which date to between 3.3m and 3.5m years old. These archaic humans were alive at the same time as other groups of early humans. Clearly, there were more archaic humans living in Africa 3 million years ago than is generally recognized.

Jeremy DeSilva showed that Australopithecus lacked the large grasping toe typical of tree climbers, and its spine, pelvis, knees, and ankles were made for walking on two legs. DeSilva compared the ankle joint, the tibia and the talus fossils of human ancestors ("hominins") between 4.12 million to 1.53 million years old, he discovered that all of the ankle joints resembled those of modern humans rather than those of apes. Chimpanzees flex their ankles 45 degrees from normal resting position. This makes it possible for apes to climb trees with great ease. While walking, humans flex their ankles a maximum of 20 degrees. The human ankle bones are quite distinct from those of apes. (One Small Step for Man — Bostonia Summer 2010)

Muscle reconstruction provides further evidence that the Australopithecine walked as modern humans do.

From the perspective of anthropology, the deep time record of human activity is evident in the vast number of innovative objects made and used by humans. Here is a short list.

Deniers of Human Exceptionalism

Human exceptionalism proposes, on the basis of data, that humans are unique and superior to other animals. Deniers claim that the belief is dangerous because it can lead to unsustainable practices and environmental degradation. However, humans also undertake many productive measures to preserve their environments.

Deniers assert that belief in human exceptionalism can lead to forgetting how all living creatures are interdependent. However, humans protect and encourage pollinators such as bees and butterflies, and control invasive species. We create protected areas, practice sustainable land management, support conservation efforts, and encourage biodiversity.

Deniers claim that belief in human exceptionalism promotes exploitation of other living creatures. Yet humans are compassionate toward animals and seek to preserve them and their habitats. Humans came up with animal husbandry, veterinary medicine, and fund-raising projects to improve the lives of other creatures.

Humans organize for war, ritually bury their dead, and offer prayers. They venerate their ancestors, create shrines to their heroes, and develop political systems. 

To deny the reality of human exceptionalism is to deny facts. Anthropologists have observed many complex social structures among humans, our ability to laugh at ourselves, to create play, to reason using high logic, to negotiate and resolve conflicts, to deliberate moral and ethical questions, and to adapt fairly quickly to ever-changing conditions. 

Related reading: STEM Education: What Paleoanthropologists Want to Discover; Many Groups of Archaic Humans; Can Molecular Models be aligned with Human Morphology?

Remembering Loren Corey Eiseley

 

"I believe in Christ in all who defend the individual from the iron boot of the expanding collective state." - Loren Corey Eiseley (1907-1977)

Loren Eiseley was an American anthropologist, educator, philosopher, and natural science writer, who taught and published books from the 1950s through the 1970s. He received many honorary degrees and was a fellow of multiple professional societies. He was an award-winning author and former Provost of the University of Pennsylvania.

Eiseley's first book, The Immense Journey, was about the history of humanity, and it appealed to a mass audience. It has sold over a million copies and has been published in at least 16 languages. The Immense Journey established him as a writer with the ability to combine science and humanity in a poetic way.

Dear reader, if today you have but a brief time to read, click on the link to Eiseley's essay The Flow of the River. 
 

Related reading: Loren Eiseley - Wikipedia; The Flow of the River PDF by Loren C. Eiseley