This article has been republished with written permission from The Financial Times Ltd.

Wealthy investors are offering a $10m prize to the first scientific team that can create a genetic code from simple chemicals — reproducing the unknown process that led billions of years ago to DNA as the vehicle for transmitting information in life on Earth.

The Evolution 2.0 prize is an initiative by Perry Marshall, an online marketing entrepreneur based in Chicago. It will be judged by prominent scientists, including George Church, genetics professor at Harvard university, and Denis Noble, the Oxford university biologist who was the first to model the human heart on a computer.

“The biggest problems in science today are: how life got going in the first place and what is the origin of the genetic code,” said Professor Noble. “We want to know whether the way information is encoded in DNA is the result of chance or whether there are good chemical reasons why the code should be the way it is.” Read more »

At the Royal Society in Great Britain 31 May 2019, Perry Marshall and investor Kevin Ham announced the $10 Million Evolution 2.0 Prize.

The meeting was hosted by Oxford Professor Denis Noble FRS CBE; and Oxford Professor Paul Flather, President of the Forum for Philosophy at the London School of Economics.

Denis organized the revolutionary “New Trends in Evolutionary Biology” conference, also at the Royal Society, in 2016.

Where did life come from? Where did the genetic code come from? The Evolution 2.0 Prize incentivizes the first person who can discover how code can emerge from chemistry. Such a discovery will bridge the gap between physics and biology.

Origin of Information (“Abiogenesis”) is the crucial question in the Origin Of Life. It’s also central to evolutionary change. It is the most elemental scientific problem that can be precisely defined. A solution may be as revolutionary as Einstein’s theory of relativity or the development of the transistor.

• Prize entries are being accepted at www.herox.com/evolution2.0.
• Voices From Oxford official prize announcement page

Read more »

Denis Noble, one of the judges for the Evolution 2.0 Prize, discusses in this interview why we can’t just put lipstick on a pig – why the public needs to be aware that evolutionary theory has undergone a revolution, and how this affects not only religious and philosophical discussions but policies and actions in medicine economics and politics.

Learn More About The Largest Origin of Life Science Prize In History: https://www.naturalcode.org

We doubled the Evolution 2.0 Prize from $5 Million to $10 Million.

I announced this at the Royal Society in Great Britain on Friday, May 31, 2019.

The Financial Times (the UK equivalent of the Wall Street Journal) ran the story Sunday. See the FT article at www.evo2.org/ft

***Have you ever rubbed eyes and re-read an email to make sure you weren’t hallucinating??***

Read more »

A blog reader named Nelson Hernandez said:

There isn’t code in DNA. Those are just letters we give chemical interactions to be able to talk about them. There isn’t a code in DNA. That’s like saying there is a code in the rain/water cycle. Nonsense.

Nelson,

There’s a guy who often comments on this site, his name is Tom Godfrey. He is a young earth creationist. He believes the universe is 6000 years old and only “looks billions of years old.” He says that science cannot be used to determine history, only the Bible.

Nobody but young earth creationists ever says this. Because the YEC worldview forbids people from thinking otherwise.

You believe that DNA only “looks like a code”. You insist code is only a convenient way humans use to describe it, but it’s not really code. My experience is, only atheists say this. Because the atheist worldview forbids people thinking otherwise.

What’s the difference between a YEC who thinks the age of the earth is an illusion and an atheist who thinks the genetic code is an illusion?

Have not both camps invented their own version of science in order to avoid what would otherwise be painfully obvious?

Just to be clear, I’m not asserting that there’s no possible naturalistic explanation for the genetic code. I’ve got a $5 million prize for anyone who can figure it out. http://www.naturalcode.org.

And we don’t even have to argue about whether it’s a code or not. All you need is something that “looks like a code” and you’ll win the money.

Frank Visser discovered Ken Wilber’s work in 1982 and contacted him in 1995 by fax, after which they became friends. Frank has written the first popular academic book on Wilber: “Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion” (SUNY 2003).In this conversation, we discuss Frank’s departure from Ken Wilber’s insistence that life itself and evolution are manifestations of the divine. We explore the question of how theology informs specific evolutionary theories. Does invoking God further science? Frank and Perry take a look at the nuances of Darwinism versus Design.

Read more »

Michael Behe’s “Darwin Devolves” asks: Has Darwin solved the design problem in biology? Behe says absolutely not, and backs his position with detailed examples. Furthermore, nobody has really solved the famous problem of “irreducible complexity” that Behe described in “Darwin’s Black Box.” But Perry Marshall insists Behe has still omitted vital details and landmark experiments. Bill Cole works closely with Behe, so Perry and Bill discuss: Will Behe’s approach be effective in addressing the shortcomings of mainstream science?

Podcast Transcript:

Evolution 2.0 – Interview with Paul Braoudakis

About the terminology in this interview:

“Evolution 1.0” is Neo-Darwinism, which asserted that evolution is random and purposeless. Neo-Darwinism is obsolete.

“Evolution 2.0” is our 21st century understanding of evolution, which says that cells evolve purposefully in response to signals from the environment, in ways far beyond man-made technology. It is just as cooperative as it is competitive.

“Evolution Alpha” means the same thing as Evolution 2.0.

“Evolution Omega” on the other hand is what mankind aspires to become as we expand equality and human rights. This kind of evolution is wholly different from the meritocracy of Evolution Alpha. Here we explore the religious context from which these ideas came.

Paul:  Hello everyone. My name is Paul Braoudakis and I’m a friend of Perry Marshall, sitting here to my right. We’ve known each other for many years. We used to go to church together and now we do some things together on the business front once in a while. I’ve had a front row seat to Perry’s journey, at least part of it, and I thought it would be really interesting to be able to sit down with him and talk about some of the things that have really taken sort of front and center in his life in the last few years.

He’s written a fascinating book called Evolution 2.0. I know that many of you have read it, and he’s written many articles and blog entries and so on based around that book. I thought it would be interesting to pick his brain a little bit on some of the points that have been brought out from that book and from some of these writings.

We’re going to just spend a little bit of time going through in no particular order, just as questions came to me that were kind of probing, I thought, that Perry could offer a very unique point of view to. There’s really no agenda. Perry has not seen the questions in advance. This is not a scripted kind of thing, so what you’re going to be hearing and seeing right now is pretty raw.

In this brand new podcast interview, Daniel White Hodge of Profane Faith, and Perry Marshall of Evolution 2.0 discuss…

• Perry’s brother, Bryan – who went from being a Christian missionary in China to 90% of the way to atheism in just 2 years of asking the TOUGH questions about creationism.
• Perry’s journey from extremely conservative, young earth-creationism Christianity, to almost losing his religion, then back to faith restored and a much more solid revelation.
• The Untold Story of Evolution.
• Discerning between junk science and verifiable facts.
• The true age of the earth.
• What does a CELL know that we DON’T?
• Perry’s $5 Million Dollar science prize to anybody who can find a naturally occurring, NON-designed code.
• Are science and religion REALLY incompatible?
• Who was Adam (in Genesis), REALLY?
• How Creationists underestimate God.
• How Darwinists underestimate nature.
• The Big Bang and God are ALSO compatible?