I appeared on WTVR’s “Good Morning Virginia” talking about Evolution 2.0:
Blog
Can Anybody Actually Win The Evolution 2.0 Prize?
Science, God, and
Happy Chemical Accidents
There’s a million codes out there. HTML, bar codes, zip codes, Java, English and Chinese.
A million codes. 999,999 are designed by humans.
There’s one code we don’t know the origin of – and that’s DNA. We don’t know of any codes that are not designed. This implies design in DNA.
So far, nobody has solved the design problem in biology. Not David Hume, not Charles Darwin, not Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett or anybody else.
That’s an unsolved science mystery. So I and a group of Private Equity Investors have formed a company, Natural Code LLC, to offer a $10 million dollar technology prize for Origin Of Information.
There are two kinds of evolution:
1) There’s the version that you read about in the bookstore. It’s two-thirds science fiction.
2) Then there’s the version that PhD biologists, cancer researchers and genetic engineers use to do their jobs.
The two are entirely different.
Popular books tell you evolution works like this: Read more »
I got this question from John:
Perry, I am a former Christian turned deist. I could not believe in the god of the Bible because of the Bible’s flaws and because of morality problems with how the Old Testament Yahweh is portrayed but I could not give up my belief that an Intelligence had to have jump-started all this and then put natural laws into place to guide it to where we are today.
I read your thesis and would like to comment on how much I enjoyed it. I think your strength is to take a basically simple message–cell design/replication is intelligently designed–and explain it in simple, no-nonsense, no-frills terms.
I liken what you say to the belief by some atheist biologists arguing that chance could explain billions of English letters floating in a giant bowl of soup and then spelling out the complete works of Shakespeare when it is poured onto a table, given enough time.
Just curious: have you ever been drawn to deism as a better explanation for the origins of life–an Intelligence that has no note of or concern about the unspeakable levels of suffering that goes on down here regardless of how many prayers are sent up to Him?
My Reply:
John,
I can well relate to the Read more »
Don Muncie asks a great question:
How is your fundamental argument different from the classical teleological argument?
Answer:
In Paley’s watch argument, the analogy between a watch and a living organism was unclear. However, the definition of code in biology and its definition in computer science (Claude Shannon) are identical.
Paley tried to force you to a conclusion. I offer Read more »
I have a New Years Resolution for 2018, inspired by a recent blog comment.
Yesterday, a reader of this blog indicated that he was not interested in reading Evolution 2.0. Then he posted six very long blog comments that contained 20, maybe 40 questions.
I responded: “Most of your questions are answered in Read more »
Omar Johnson watched my brother Bryan’s video “From Missionary to Almost-Atheist to Present Day” and posted this great comment:
I found Bryan’s (anti?) testimony both engaging and moving. I also have rejected my fundamentalist upbringing, but I will give the Ken Hams of the world this:
“Inerrant” Bible Christian apologetics only needs to deal with 6,000 years of creation, not 14 billion.
They get to postulate while “fallen” now, the world/universe was once perfect.
The Evolution 2.0 model makes sense to me, even as it also makes me wonder what was behind this information-embedding Creator, who or what encoded the meta-programming that resulted in a God capable of jump-starting and micro-managing evolution with barely a Sistine Chapel finger extension? Off track.
What I wanted to point out is that 14 billion years of the universe evolving, whether jump-started and cleverly managed by unfolding layers of information or not, is a pretty amoral place.
Now we have to somehow come to grips with insanely surreal amounts of dying and death, of individuals, species, whole ecosystems, possibly on other worlds as well as our own.
Way before Eve, and the Fall, the great Novelist was killing off his darlings left and right. I think scientists have at least tentatively identified over ten hominid precursors to Homo Sapiens.
Fundamentalist Christianity posits Original Sin, and looks forward to the Second Coming, Redemption, etc. That’s all that’s on their plate.
It’s nuts, but it’s internally consistent.
MY REPLY:
Omar, you just Read more »
The opening shot of my book Evolution 2.0 is an argument between me and my brother about evolution. Bryan had been a missionary in China, but in four years he went from right-wing Christian seminary grad to almost atheist.
He was dragging me with him. I wasn’t enjoying it, but I knew I had to be intellectually honest.
I found myself retreating to what I know best, which is science. I said, “Bryan, look at the hand at the end of your arm. I’m an engineer, and your hand is a fine, fine piece of engineering. You don’t think your hand is an accumulation of random accidents, do you?”
Bryan was good and ready for that question, and he pushed back with a standard-issue Darwinian answer. His answer didn’t quite Read more »
The other day I was sitting across the table from a retired missionary couple. They were eating their lunch and we were discussing evolution.
They were Young Earth Creationists. I took up the challenge of trying to persuade them that maybe there is some goodness to be found in evolution after all.
The guy said, “I wish someone would invent a different word. Evolution sounds so… secular.”
I said, “Have you ever noticed that evolution is a Read more »
Referred to as “Science’s Unruly Earth Mother”, a “vindicated heretic”and a “scientific rebel”, Lynn Margulis was an American evolutionary theorist, biologist, and science author. She was the primary modern proponent for symbiosis in evolution.
Throughout her career, Margulis’ work aroused intense objection (one grant application elicited the response, “Your research is crap, do not bother to apply again”,) and her formative paper, “On the Origin of Mitosing Cells,” appeared in 1967 – after being rejected by numerous journals.
Her papers are now permanently archived in the Library of Congress, and she is considered to be one of the 20th century’s most important inspirational leaders.
Jim MacAllister was a student and colleague of Lynn Margulis for the last decade of her life and converted her teaching materials and research video library to digital files. Jim is the editor of the Environmental Evolution newsletter and the founder of the field of evolution geography.
In this episode, Jim talks about his relationship with Lynn and her unwavering confidence in the face of rejection and ‘small-mindedness’ in the male-dominated scientific community. The discussion includes:
- The fascinating ability that organisms have to reorganize themselves based on their environment
- Evolution as a multi-mechanistic process (not a straight path!)
- Why bacteria cannot be categorized as a species
- Proposing the ‘new biological game in town’ to the next generation of students
Enjoy:
Originally posted at Ray Noble’s Podcast The Thin End
