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

Academic, author and musician, Ray Noble has been a vocalist in Jazz and Blues groups performing at the Edinburgh Fringe and was lead vocalist in the Oxford based rock band, The HeartBeats. He’s a lead vocalist in The Oxford Trobadors and has appeared on radio and television in the UK and abroad.

Ray is the brother of the Denis Noble – one of the pioneers of Systems Biology who developed the first viable mathematical model of the working heart in 1960. When Ray is not immersing himself in his music, he’s busy challenging conventional thinking on his podcast named The Thin End. I was honored to be invited on his show.

We spent our time discussing random mutation, how organisms maintain their integrity by continuous change and how living things are internally directed. Plus we like poking holes in the theory that the universe is only 5000 years old. Some topics discussed:

• We are only at the foothills of what biology is teaching us
• The biggest untold story in science
• Embracing the mantra: Reality is your friend
• How biological evolution is very similar to technological evolution
• Evolution is a system responding to environmental change

Enjoy:
Originally posted at The Thin End

Reader Paul Jervis, reacting to a news story in American Entrepreneurship about my $5 Million Evolution 2.0 Prize, asked:

“Got your hypothesis peer reviewed yet?”

A peppering of snarky remarks followed.

Giving my cynical subscriber the benefit of the doubt, I replied:

“I was tempted to just ban you from Read more »

J. Scott Turner is a professor, biologist, and physiologist whose tireless work concludes that Modern Darwinism has failed in a big way.

After countless decades, we are at a scientific dead-end still unable to clearly define what LIFE is.

Turner says, that only after Modern Darwinists surrender their materialist and mechanistic biases, and acknowledge the qualities and roles Purpose & Desire play, will the field move forward.

Purpose and desire at present are held only as “mere illusion”.

I could not agree more. The purposefulness of living things is apparent to any six year old. It is manifest at every level at which you study life. So, as in Mao’s China, it takes a great deal of “re-education” for people to un-learn the obvious.

In banishing purpose from the discussion, he says, “Where we have striven to exclude the ghosts from our machines, we have inadvertently constructed back doors that allow the ghosts to creep right back in.”

His book is extremely well written and congenial. Turner is a gentleman through and through, and does not go on a shaming rampage. This book is no rant. Rather, he invites you to really think and decide for yourself.

Join us in this fireside chat as we discuss his work.

Read more at:
//evo2.org/purpose-desire-review/

Simple Programmer (Jon Sonmez) partners up with Denis Noble to discuss about the theory of beliefs and how there is much more to that than what we already know. Biology is not what we think we know and, more and more, the scientific community is starting to see more evidence about it.

Denis Noble (born 16 November 1936) is a British biologist who held the Burdon Sanderson Chair of Cardiovascular Physiology at the University of Oxford from 1984 to 2004 and was appointed Professor Emeritus and co-Director of Computational Physiology. He is one of the pioneers of Systems Biology and developed the first viable mathematical model of the working heart in 1960
(Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_N…)

In this video, Denis will show:

• how math disproves the “selfish gene” (3’54”)
• a “petri-dish” thought experiment that proves that DNA is not “alive” (5’12”)
• something that’s not right with mainstream science today (8’03”)
• why DNA is not, and does not contain, the answer to everything (11’22”)
• selfishness vs cooperativity in organisms (14’01”)
• evolution is real but it doesn’t look anything like what the current science tells us (18’49”)
• how understanding the evolution helps us in economics and management (24’45”)
• how the very fact the Dawkins was able to write his book, disproves what he says in it (26’33”)
• there is purpose in life… and here’s where it comes from… (28’06”)
• the job of science and the job of philosophy, and why they cannot be separated (38’13”)
• how mass media and social media make it harder for true science to happen (42’40”)
• how all theories are wrong, albeit in different ways (51’04”)

Dance To The Tune Of Life: Biological Relativity Book

Blog comment from a reader:

The first living things on Earth, single-celled micro-organisms or microbes lacking a cell nucleus or cell membrane known as prokaryotes, first appeared on Earth almost four billion years ago.

After a hundred thousand years or more of evolution and natural selection, these early forms became more and more complex, eventually developing a rudimentary nucleus, which contained the ‘pattern’ for the creature to pass on. Examples of simple creatures like this would be a protozoa, paramecium, or amoeba.

Life didn’t need a “code” to get started; it simply needed the right conditions. You want more specifics? Read any scientific textbook available on abiogenesis, evolution and natural selection. They’re full of proven, verifiable facts – i.e., that life as we know it has evolved over the past four billion years.

I replied:

I beg to differ.

Read more »

You don’t have to keep your opinions silent if you’re willing to listen to others

The very open-minded Lucas Rockwood graciously invited me onto his Yoga Talk Show to discuss my reasons for investigating the subject that eventually became Evolution 2.0. Listen to the full audio interview here..

EPISODE 271: What Darwin Got Wrong
with Perry Marshall

Prefer to download? Download

Lucas opened the show by saying how he’s learned to Read more »

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