Debate continues to swirl around the theory of evolution Charles Darwin proposed 150 years ago in his groundbreaking book, "On the Origin of Species," despite its universal acceptance among scientists.

Before Darwin's discovery, the world was generally thought to have remained more or less the same since its creation. This belief, based on Biblical interpretations, was contested through fossil studies showing that species change over time.

Darwin's legendary round-the-world 1831-1836 voyage aboard the HMS Beagle generated his most significant observations and discoveries, inspiring his work on natural selection.

Although Darwin first used the term "natural selection" in a paper in 1842, it wasn't until 1859 that he published his controversial theory that all living beings share a common ancestry -- a discovery that remains vital to modern biology.

Author Nick Spencer, director of studies at Theos, a research organisation launched in 2006 with the support of the Archbishop of Canterbury, explained why the debate persists to this day.

"People are encountering evolution not so much as a science but as a philosophy," he told Reuters ahead of a Nov. 24 lecture at Westminster Abbey to mark the anniversary of the exact date on which Darwin's book was first published.

Carlo de Benedetti, Chairman, Gruppo Editoriale L'Espresso/La Repubblica, will deliver the 2009 Reuters Memorial Lecture on ‘Newspapers and Democracy in the Internet era: The Italian Case'.

The Reuters Memorial Lecture commemorates journalists who have lost their lives in pursuit of their profession.

The lecture will be followed by a panel discussion chaired by John Lloyd, with Timothy Garton Ash and Paolo Mancini. Reuters correspondents will be live blogging throughout.

To join the discussion click on the 'make a comment' link at the top of the liveblog panel.

Amid ongoing debates over the hazards of excessive digital exposure through such Web 2.0 social networking platforms as Facebook and Twitter, a new book by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger extols the virtues of forgetfulness.

Since the emergence of digital technology and global networks, forgetting has become an exception, Mayer-Schonberger writes in "Delete".

"Forgetting plays a central role in human decision-making," he argues. "It lets us act in time, cognizant of, but not shackled by, past events."

Mayer-Schonberger shared his theory on how to fight back against the digital panopticon with Reuters before giving a lecture at the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce in London.

Ahead of a U.N. summit in Copenhagen next month, scepticism is growing that an agreement will be reached on a global climate treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol, due to expire in 2012.

The protocol set targets aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions, which are believed to be responsible for the gradual rise in the Earth's average temperature. Many scientists say that reducing carbon dioxide emissions is key to preventing climate change.

But authors Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner argue in their new book SuperFreakonomics that humanity can take an alternative route to try and save the planet.

"If the goal is to stop warming then geo-engineering solutions are worth considering because they are far cheaper, probably much more do-able and easily reversible," Dubner told Reuters before a talk at the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce in London.

Related vlog: How to become a freakonomist

- Phelim Kine is an Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch. The opinions expressed are her own. -

When 15-year-old Wang Xiaomei made the long trip from Gansu province to Beijing last year, she hoped to find justice for her family. Instead, she met with abuse.

First, Wang was abducted by plainclothes Gansu officials, who imprisoned her incommunicado for two months in a “black jail”—an illegal detention facility.

Two days before her September 13, 2008 release, Wang’s captors beat her so badly they knocked out one of her teeth. Wang’s victimizers have never been brought to justice.

Worse still, Wang’s experience—which stands in stark contrast to the Chinese government’s claims of fealty to the rule of law—is not unique. A new Human Rights Watch report released today, “An Alleyway in Hell: China’s Abusive ‘Black Jails',” exposes the routine and severe human rights abuses perpetrated against detainees in these secret facilities.

Our research shows that Wang is just one of estimated thousands of people abducted off the streets of Chinese cities and held incommunicado for weeks or months. Inside these unlawful, secret detention facilities detainees are beaten, sexually abused, deprived of food, sleep and medical care, and subject to theft, extortion and intimidation at the hands of their guards.

And, as Wang’s case shows, children aren’t spared the dangers and indignities of black jail detention. These facilities exist outside of China’s official prison system, and are often located in state-owned hotels, nursing homes and psychiatric hospitals.

The former black jail detainees we interviewed were petitioners--people from mainly rural areas who come to Beijing and other cities in search of legal redress for violations including illegal land seizures and police torture. The petitioning system, which exists in parallel to formal judicial structures, is entirely legal, and explicitly permits people to take their grievances to the highest levels of government.

So why are petitioners being treated this way? Black jails emerged in 2003 after the Chinese government abolished laws permitting the arbitrary detention of any “undesirables.” But that progress was undercut by the introduction at the local level of guidelines that limit local officials’ prospects for promotions or raises if petitioners from their areas carried on their efforts to find justice in larger cities.

What might have been intended as an incentive to make local officials deal with local grievances became an incentive for those officials to keep petitioners off the streets and invest considerable resources in achieving that goal. Plainclothes thugs commonly known as retrievers, or jiefang renyuan, locate and abduct petitioners in Beijing and other cities for bounties as high as $250 per person. Operators of black jail facilities reap daily cash payments from local governments of up to $29 per detainee, helping to perpetuate black jail abuses.

Rather than crack down on these facilities, the central Chinese government denies that they even exist. In an April 2009 Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs press conference, a MOFA official responded to a foreign correspondent’s query about black jails by insisting, “Things like this do not exist in China.”

In June 2009, the Chinese government asserted in the Outcome Report of the United Nations’ Human Rights Commission’s Universal Periodic Review of China’s human rights record that, “There are no black jails in the country.”

Such denials make a mockery of the commitment in the first-ever National Human Rights Action Plan that, “The Chinese government unswervingly pushes forward the cause of human rights in China.” The Chinese government’s credibility would be considerably enhanced by acknowledging that black jails do indeed exist, shutting them down, liberating detainees, and bringing the perpetrators to justice.

External actors also have a role to play. Many governments and international organizations fund Chinese legal reform projects, and they too should demand that the Chinese government put an end to these abuses and that their victims be fairly compensated.

No less a civil rights and legal aid luminary than U.S. President Barack Obama, who will make his first trip as President to China on November 16-18, has a golden opportunity to raise the cases of black jail detainees and explain that an independent judicial system in China is of significant consequence to U.S.-China relations.

He should also repeat to his Chinese hosts–and the Chinese people—his September 2009 message to the United Nations General Assembly: “True leadership will not be measured by the ability to muzzle dissent, or to intimidate and harass political opponents at home.”

-Jane Foley is research director at Forex.com. The opinions expressed are her own.-

November meetings of leaders from the Group of 20 industrialized nations may not have had exchange rates on the agenda, but the notes prepared by the International Monetary Fund included some meaty foreign exchange references.

The first is the view that although the dollar has moved closer to medium-term equilibrium it “still remains on the strong side”.  The second is the (widely held) view that the dollar “is now serving as the funding currency for carry trades” which has contributed to upward pressure on the euro.

The third was the acknowledgement that the Chinese renminbi has depreciated in real effective terms and remains significantly undervalued from a medium-term perspective.  To deal with the latter the IMF prescribed the usual recipe; namely that “exchange rate appreciation would help limit capital flows” and “facilitate a shift towards domestic consumption that is needed in many emerging economies, notably those with large external surpluses”.

None of the points put forward by the IMF on foreign exchange are ground breaking.  However, the fact that the IMF judged it appropriate to outline these issues ahead of the G20 meetings is suggestive of the economic and thus political relevance of these issues.  China’s exchange rate peg is clearly at the forefront of these issues.

Also significant is the IMF’s mention of the upward pressure on the euro, which could be seen as acknowledging that the euro (along with the yen) is bearing the brunt of the dollar’s downward adjustment.  By recognising that the dollar is “still on the strong side”, the IMF may be warning that the upward pressure on the euro may have further to run.

Now that the euro/dollar is back at 1.500, the market will again begin to wonder whether at some point the authorities may act to stem the appreciation of the euro/dollar.  Intervention in euro/dollar cannot be completely ruled out but it remains a remote possibility because it would avoid the real issue.  The dollar’s decline is being driven by inflows into higher yielding markets which is unlikely to be turned around by intervention in euro/dollar as long as the market is forecasting low Fed rates and as long as risk appetite holds.  The rise in the euro vs the dollar is merely a symptom of these flows but the appreciation of the effective euro (and that of the yen) is being compounded by the fact that as the euro rises vs the dollar it also rises vs the renminbi.   At present, the effective euro exchange rate is creeping back to its December 2008 high which represents an all time high.   Rather than seek to rebalance euro/dollar, officials should be increasing pressure on China to address its policy regarding its exchange rate.

It is not just the Europeans and the Japanese that should be worried about the impact of non-flexible exchange rate policies.  The World Bank last week warned that asset price bubbles in parts of Asia are being driven by a rapid increase in equity and house prices notably in China, Hong Kong and Singapore.

The World Bank advised that policy should be tightened by “removing some of the support for liquidity in domestic and foreign currencies”.  Calls for the breaking of some exchange rate pegs within Asia are becoming more commonplace and China’s size will mean that its exchange rate policy will garner most attention.

The issue of exchange rate flexibility in parts of Asia is promising to be one of the most dominant foreign exchange topics of 2010 and President Obama’s visit to Beijing this week could kick it back into the headlines.
ResearchEMEA@forex.com

What do you do when you are trained as an economist, but find economics too complex?

Become a freakonomist, of course.

Steven D. Levitt, co-author of  the freshly published  SuperFreakonomics, decided to "take the tools of economics and apply them to the kind of questions that no self-respecting economist would ever want to be related to -- like: does the name that you give your children affect their life outcomes; what are the underlying economics of prostitution; or, is your estate agent ripping you off?"

Levitt, who teaches economics at the University of Chicago, co-wrote SuperFreakonomics and an earlier book titled Freakonomics with New York journalist Stephen J. Dubner.

Before a talk at the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce in London, Levitt explained to Reuters how he became a freakonomist.

Related vlog: A freakonomic view of climate change

When the Berlin Wall fell 20 years ago, the momentous event marked the triumph of the market economy over planned economic structures, says British economist John Kay.

He explains his views on why the capitalist system reigns supreme.

The fall of the Berlin Wall, on November 9, 1989, was one of history’s truly epochal moments. During what became a revolutionary wave sweeping across the former Eastern Bloc countries, the announcement by the then-East German Government that its citizens could visit West Germany set in train a series of events that led, ultimately, to the demise of the Soviet Union itself.

Twenty years on, what is most striking to me are the massive, enduring ramifications of the events of November 1989. Only several decades ago, the Cold War meant that the borders of the Eastern Bloc were largely inviolate; extremist religious groups and ethnic tensions were suppressed, there was no internet (at least as we know it today) and travel between East and West was difficult. The two great Glaciers of the Cold War produced a frozen hinterland characterised by immobility.

Today’s world is a vastly different place. When one of the great Glaciers - the former Soviet Union – melted it helped unleash a potential torrent of security problems. We now live in an era characterised by huge mobility and instability, in which issues such as mass migration, international crime and international terrorism have a much higher prominence.

The end of the Cold War, together with subsequent conflicts across Africa, the Balkans and the Middle East, for instance, has led to many millions of people migrating the globe in hope or fear. In the West, this has given rise to pressure on jobs, healthcare, education, housing and cultural identity, causing local populations to feel threatened.

While international migration has generally been culturally enriching and beneficial, it has nonetheless also increased the range of threats to our societies. For instance, the 48 radical Islamicists implicated in terror plots in the United States between 1993 and 2001, including the 9/11 hijackers, all used legitimate immigration devices (e.g. "green cards", student/tourism/business visas, and amnesty and asylum) to get into the country.

Getting to grips with this specific threat is a major challenge and the reason why, as UK Home Secretary, I placed so much emphasis on the need to overhaul our immigration system. Key elements of the changes I championed include a new points-based system -- which represents the biggest reform of UK immigration procedures for more than half a century; electronic border controls (all UK entry visas, for instance, are now based on finger prints); and the National Identity Scheme which features compulsory fingerprint biometric identity cards for foreign nationals.

It is globalisation that lies at the heart of our transformational post-Cold War World. This inexorable process has extended the opportunities of world-wide interchange. Driven by technological advances in transport, communications, and electronic networks, globalisation has delivered massive opportunities in terms of mobility, movement and exchange of people, ideas, values, resources, commodities and finance.

But this same globalisation process and associated technology has also brought major new threats, or intensified existing ones, rendering everyone increasingly inter-dependent and vulnerable. The threat we face is seamless, running across the boundaries of defence, foreign affairs, domestic and social life. For instance, it has left nations and peoples ever more vulnerable to phenomena ranging from international crime and terrorism through to cyber-attack, health pandemics, energy-politics, resource shortage and financial crises.

The net result is that there are far more sources of insecurity than during the Cold War. The uncertainty this generates means that crises (defined as crucial turning points in events rather than as catastrophes) are more recurrent. Moreover, this bias towards instability is exacerbated by the fact that the nature of the potential crises we face is constantly evolving. In the context of international migration, for instance, terrorists and other international criminals are constantly trying to find new ways to evade our security safeguards.

Given the complexity of the threats we face, it is essential as a nation that we continually upgrade our capacity to deal with them by identifying, exposing and remedying our deficiencies. If we are to be able to keep up, and potentially be one step ahead of our adversaries, we will increasingly need to pool our ingenuity to innovate and deliver solutions.

This is a relatively uncontroversial ambition, shared by many. But I believe it requires nothing less than new thinking, new urgency and a new approach to studying tomorrow’s security problems today.

That’s partly why we are establishing the Institute for Security and Resilience Studies at University College, London. The new Centre will address projects of vital importance to national and international security arising from globalisation in the post-Cold War World. The goal is to assess and embed resilience as well as analysing threats; and to extend this analysis into action in outlining policy options to shape our preparation, response and recovery to crises.

This insistence on “embedding” resilience throughout organisational structures and culture is essential given the nature of contemporary society. Where there is, for instance, now a global availability of information through the internet, satellite and mobile communications, resilience to threats must be embedded in a decentralised way (rather than top-down). To the degree that resilience can ever be said to have depended on an elite management at the top of organisations, this is no longer the case -- hence the need to bring together practitioners from the public, private and third sectors with academics in order to combine theory and practice in targeted projects.

The goal must be nothing less that ensuring that government, business and society can not only cope with, but flourish, in the increasingly uncertain times in which we live. The fall of that wall symbolised the emergence of a world offering both unparalleled opportunities and unprecedented insecurities. The challenge of maximising the first and countering the latter is a legacy demanding an ingenuity and endurance from the next and subsequent generations to match that of their predecessors.

Amid the turmoil of the 2008 financial crisis a myriad of events unfolded that the general public knew nothing about, writes New York Times reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin in a new book titled "Too Big to Fail."

Wall Street fell from the dizzying heights of good fortune to calamity in a matter of months. To a large degree it's still to early to tell whether financiers and politicians involved made the right choices.

"At its core 'Too Big to Fail' is a chronicle of failure -- a failure that brought the world to its knees and raised questions about the very nature of capitalism," writes Sorkin in his behind-the-scenes account.

He spoke with Reuters before giving a lecture at the London School of Economics on Thursday.