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 Read more »

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.

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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 Neo-Darwinism is obsolete.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.

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https://open.spotify.com/episode/6uaLE18wZibCM0tCMayLSa

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?

Perry Marshall grew up in a conservative Christian community; he was taught Young Earth Creationism in church. But when a crisis forced him to question everything, he applied Electrical Engineering to the problem.

This revealed a world of discoveries he couldn’t have imagined… and engineering served him well. Cells employ digital code, error correction, information processing and control systems. These parallel and supersede human-engineered systems. One blade of grass is 10,000 years ahead of human technology.

This led him to organize a $5 million technology prize for Origin of Life and Artificial Intelligence, with judges from Harvard, Oxford and MIT. The prize was featured in IEEE Spectrum and is based on the discoveries of Claude Shannon, the legendary EE from Bell Labs who pioneered Information Theory.

Perry’s bestseller Evolution 2.0: Breaking the Deadlock Between Darwin and Design brought fresh eyes to the 150-year old evolution debate. Bill Gates and the founders of Google revolutionized software and the web through their status as outsiders; similarly, Perry harnessed a communication engineer’s outsider’s point of view to reveal a century of unrecognized research and discoveries.

At Penn State, Perry explored new frontiers of science research. He raised new questions that confront us in Artificial Intelligence and Genetic Engineering today.

Where did life come from? What happens if we crack the code?

Find out in this video…

Jon Perry of Stated Clearly and I do a discussion and debate about purpose in nature which philosophers call teleology. This is the real issue that people are arguing about: Is the hand at the end of your arm an accumulation of random accidents? Or is it purposeful? That is the question. Jon has a popular YouTube channel called “Stated Clearly” and when my Evolution 2.0 book came out he had major criticisms of it. However, we were able to set aside our differences and have a very productive conversation in this video.

“We are to press known secondary causes as far as they will go in explanation of facts. We are not to resort to an unknown cause for explanation of phenomena until the power of known causes has been exhausted. If we cease to observe this rule there is an end to all science and of all sound sense.”

-Congregational minister and Geologist George Frederick Wright (1876)

The world’s first gene edited babies have been born into the world. Chinese twins Nana and Lulu had their DNA edited using CRISPR gene editing technology, by geneticist He Jiankui.

Mr. He is a team leader at Southern University of Science and Technology in China. The twins’ DNA has now been altered to protect them from HIV.

This is the first instance of humans being born into the world with edited DNA….

…THAT WE KNOW OF.

I would invite you to consult your life experience on planet earth and ask yourself:

How many designer babies have already been born, and NOT broadcast to the worldwide media?

Mr. He, after all, hired a publicist to help him broadcast the news about this, and notes that another pregnancy is underway with gene-edited babies.

Details about the experiment:

MIT Technology Review

The Atlantic

Everyone has denounced this, including the Chinese government. The genetics community is outraged, anticipating backlash and regulations.

I’m familiar with official ethical statements about gene editing by large bodies such as the National Academy of Sciences. At first glance they seem reasonable.

But what is almost always omitted is any admission that we barely understand the process by which evolutionary systems generated the code in the first place!

The elephant in the room is:

While people talk about humans now improving the genetic code intentionally for the first time in history, they never bother to mention that the best engineers at Microsoft and Google don’t even know how to write code as good as the code that bacteria write all the time!

Bacteria evolve all by themselves. Microsoft Windows does not.

So…. how much are we really going to “fix” nature?

Until we face this question, we’re not being honest with ourselves.

And unanswered questions never go away.

Perry Marshall