December 26, 2009
The Berlin Wall, in 1986 (photos courtesy Wikipedia)
The Berlin Wall in East Germany fell on November 9, 1989, after 28 years of darkness. When the dominoes of communism began to fall, the speed at which they tumbled was amazing.
Today, traditional Darwinism is in the same place in 2010 as communism was in 1986. It’s wheezing like a dying animal. Flailing wildly. Draining limited resources defending itself against attackers. It’s barely able to feed its own people, let alone advance useful scientific theories of its own.
Please understand: I am an advocate of biological evolution. I don’t believe that God beamed complete Zebras from heaven down to the savanna, Star-Trek style. I hypothesize they came from an earlier ancestor through a process that we can study and learn from. I cast my vote for Common Descent.
Furthermore, Charles Darwin is to be commended for formulating an early concept of Common Descent. I think the mechanism of evolution is an utterly fascinating scientific process that well deserves our close study. The question of how evolution works is the 2nd biggest question in science. Just behind the origin of life, which is #1.
As we begin to solve the evolution question *for real*, we’ll also crack the code on artificial intelligence. Information technology will leap forward at an unprecedented pace. All we must do is take our cues from biology and coveted secrets of technological advancement await us, literally right under our noses.
But my friend, Darwinism is NOT the only theory of how evolution works! It’s just the loudest one. And it’s fracturing badly. There is no theory in the history of science that has more holes, problems or detractors than Neo-Darwinism. It’s the most troubled theory in all of science.
Here in Chicago there’s an activist group called The Chicago Northshore Darwin’s Bulldogs. I’ve sparred with them on multiple occasions. I often joke that Darwin is the only scientist that needs bulldogs. All the other scientists can fend for themselves just fine, thank you very much.
Darwinism in 2010 is in sad shape. It’s about to shatter. The wall is about to come down.
The best evidence for this comes from a most curious place: The Amazon reviews of Stephen Meyer’s recent book “Signature in the Cell.” This is a superb text, it’s footnoted with incredible thoroughness. It is remarkably readable considering the depth of its subject material.
It’s also quite popular: Today, in all of Amazon it’s ranked #1,110. Remarkable sales for such a technical book.
It analyzes the cell from an information systems perspective, not unlike the approach I use here. It concludes that random processes do not describe the operation of cellular machinery. Meyer shows that a design paradigm is in fact scientific and that it makes successful, testable predictions.
This book is currently the subject of a book review war on Amazon. I write this today, there are 188 reviews. 140 5-star reviews, 16 2-, 3- or 4-star, and 32 1-star. People either love this book or hate it.
You’ll glean much about the current sad state of Darwnism by reading the 1-star reviews.
You’ll find that many of the 1-star reviews are pure vandalism. So far more than 60 have been deleted by Amazon’s editorial staff. Most of the 1-star reviews are bitter slams against the author and tirades about the Intelligent Design movement. Read these reviews and decide for yourself how little content they contain on what the book actually says.
Contrast this to many of the positive reviews which discuss the contents of the book in detail.
When all opponents can do is rail about the politics of ID and prattle on about what a waste of time this book is, you tend to become rather suspicious.
However…. a handful 1-star reviews are a welcome exception to this. They do challenge the actual content. One such review is by K. M. Sternberg and deserves comment.
“There is a phenomenon known as pareidolia, “The tendency to interpret a vague stimulus as something known to the viewer.” Pareidolia is when we see faces in clouds, or “evil” in the tragic path of a tornado. Meyer’s book is an exercise in pareidolia: the classic “machinery” of cellular cilia, the “computer program” of DNA. He’s appealing to our sense that anything complicated needs human-like interviention, but unless you’re going to buy into the idea that we’d fall apart if angels stopped holding us together, the line between “natural” emergence and the need for divine intervention is tragically fuzzy. Meyer’s book isn’t science, it’s wishful thinking. (It’s also hubris; Meyer’s arguing that, if there’s a God, he and his fellows at the DI can tell us what he was thinking. I suggest anyone who thinks that way go re-read the Book of Job, especially Job 38:4-41.)”
Thank you Mr. Sternberg for finally contributing a good 1-star review to this discussion. There is a LOT that we can unpack from your short paragraph.
The pattern in DNA is not a “vague stimulus.” DNA is a literal code with a 4-letter alphabet, not a figurative one. Thus the term “genetic code” is a proper scientific term. Books and papers discussing linguistics and universal grammars in DNA are plentiful.
This was my epiphany 5 years ago when I began studying evolution. I had written an Ethernet book and spent 10 years in computer networking. I suddenly discovered that everything I knew about 1’s and 0’s, and all of Claude Shannon’s work, applied to the pattern in DNA. Which is why there are scientific journals such as The Journal of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology published by World Scientific.
If Mr. Sternberg was right, this silly journal could not exist. All self-respecting biologists would instruct those ignorant engineers to mind their own business and stop meddling in DNA.
Mr. Sternberg, please write to the journal and inform them that their journal exists purely because of wishful thinking, ignorance and “pareidolia.” Please inform them that DNA only has the appearance of processing and storing information. Let them know that all that DNA “code” is really just a product of their over-stimulated binary imaginations. Tell them that they might as well be telling us that clouds look like sheep.
Mr. Sternberg, I invite you to come to my blog and post the reply you receive from them.
Hubert Yockey addressed this exact question when he said, “Information, transcription, translation, code, redundancy, synonymous, messenger, editing, and proofreading are all appropriate terms in biology. They take their meaning from information theory (Shannon, 1948) and are not synonyms, metaphors, or analogies.” This is from his book “Information Theory, Evolution and the Origin of Life” (Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Yockey is the #1 living authority on information theory in biology. He is not a creationist, he’s an evolutionist. He’s not pushing a religious agenda. Cambridge University Press is not the mouthpiece for some Intelligent Design committee. DNA really is a digital code. It really does contain instructions. It’s not just our imagination.
Stephen Meyer is not suggesting that we’d all fall apart if angels stopped holding us together. That statement shows that Mr. Sternberg is not interested in understanding what Meyer is saying.
And finally, the entire field of theology is predicated on the idea that if there is a God, we CAN know at least something about what He is thinking. Scientists of no less stature than Isaac Newton regarded their scientific work as an act of worship, revealing the mind of God. And yes, while one of the main points about the book of Job is that God does not tell us everything He is thinking, He does tell us some things. That’s why we have the book of Job in the first place.
I know all too well that the typical Darwinian response to information theory is to say, “WHOA, wait a minute, don’t be so quick to apply those computer engineering metaphors to DNA!”
Which is like saying, “Slow down there, boy, don’t you go comparing this to things we actually understand. Let’s keep this DNA thing a mystery. Otherwise we might reach conclusions that are not compatible with atheism.”
Because of materialism and “evolution by random accident,” 30 years of precious time has been squandered. Investigation has been resisted because of the “Junk DNA” theory which is now discredited. If you look closely, you find that at every point, “Evolution by randomness” has vigorously opposed scientific inquiry, even as it pretends to endorse it.
Evolution is not driven by randomness. It’s driven by a fantastically sophisticated Mutation Algorithm. Cells employ a built-in program which engineers re-arrangement of Mobile Genetic Elements (as observed by McClintock and Shapiro). Genes and Chromosomes are re-arranged in a fantastically beautiful process which produces useful adaptations and new species.
The Mutation Algorithm tests design options like blades on a Swiss army knife. DNA has a huge “bag of tricks” and is able to mix and match combinations of eyes, feet and claws, joints, digits, hair, skin and fur colors and patterns, switching out different “blades” as environments change.
It builds animals on a common chassis of head, spine, heart, lungs, stomach and limbs. It ferociously defends this core chassis from being corrupted by random mutations, while switching out different variables in the head, spine, heart etc.
Darwinism is not scientific. Why? because it appeals to randomness instead of presuming underlying order. Explanation by accident is not science. It’s anti-science.
But SCIENTIFIC theories of evolution postulate that an intentional program directs the development of living things. Towards a goal of occupying every imaginable ecological niche. Of filling the earth with life and beauty.
Today, I make a bold prediction.
The “Berlin Wall” of Darwinism will crack in 2013. (I estimate we’ve got about 3 more years to go before this can 
realistically happen.)
The event will be triggered by some “Deep Throat” scientist who has grown sick and tired of the shell games and politics and charades. He is perhaps retired and no longer fears having his career trashed. He will step forward and speak the truth.
He will publish emails and committee notes and recordings of secret meetings. He’ll tell of organized efforts to rig scientific data. Campaigns to malign skilled researchers, to prevent papers from being published, to halt important research from being seen. He’ll report missions to trash the careers of people who publish work that peers into the design process.
He’ll name university presidents, science journal editors, research teams and grant committees. All with an agenda of suppressing legitimate scientific data.
There have been smaller skirmishes of this kind already. But in times past, the retribution from the Old Guard was so swift, so decisive, that one dared not oppose it. This one will trigger a symphony of reports of censorship from across academia. Reports so loud they cannot be ignored.
This revelation will initially be shunned by the mainstream press. A snarl of protest will arise from the Old Guard. But newspapers are dying and most people don’t trust the media anyway. By 2013 the press will be so emaciated, there will be nothing left but a dry husk. The blogosphere will go wild and an entire branch of the formerly trusted scientific community will be discredited.
This will be a major step in evolving the news media beyond its current, calcified form. Most newspapers will become extinct.
Once the dust settles, a new channel will be open for disseminating scientific research that is allowed to assume purpose and teleology in living things. There will be a “Cambrian Explosion” of new research in the genome, in Artificial Intelligence, and in the development of information storage and communication systems.
This gravesite recognizes the lives lost by those attempting to cross the Berlin Wall. Spraypainted on the wall are the words, "The wall will fall. Beliefs become reality."
The next decade holds wonderful new possibilities.
In the late ’90s I worked closely with a German communication software company near Frankfurt. I traveled there and spent many hours having conversations and beers with the owner and the employees. They told me stories of the aftermath of the Berlin Wall coming down. And hardships of integrating workers from East Germany into the Western economy and work ethic.
This West German business owner explained to me that East German workers over the age of 40 were nearly useless. They had spent so long in the docile, uninspired, toxic environment of communism that they were unable to cultivate new habits.
On the other hand, my German friend said, the 20-somethings were eager to learn, to re-tool, and made great workers.
I predict we will see a similar challenge to biology. It’s going to take a long time to heal the profession of its materialistic bias. And, I mince no words, its intellectual laziness. I am still dumbfounded that a theory like “Junk DNA” could have ever been allowed to circulate. It speaks of a woefully anti-scientific intellectual prison. The men who advanced that theory should be stripped of their credentials and ejected from the academy.
The Old Guard may never change. Fortunately, most researchers in the Human Genome Project, genetic engineering and bio-medicine do not actually act as though they believe biology is purposeless and random. They may even say it is, but in actual practice they assume biology wants to do X, they want it to do Y. They figure out what they need to change to get the result they want.
West Germans curiously peer at East German border guards through a hole in the wall
Isn’t it amazing how practical people get when they need to accomplish something productive and get a paycheck?
My friend, not everyone in biology agrees with the Darwinian Dogma. And you don’t need to either, in order to fully embrace science.
Biology is as biology does. It IS purposeful because it acts purposeful. DNA IS a code because it acts like a code.
Countless scientific careers have died in efforts to breach the Darwinian Wall. But this wall will not stand forever.
In June 1987, president Regan had these words for the leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev:
“We welcome change and openness; for we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace. There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace. General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”
May the truth be made known.
Perry Marshall
Download The First 3 Chapters of Evolution 2.0 For Free, Here – https://evo2.org/evolution/Where Did Life And The Genetic Code Come From? Can The Answer Build Superior AI? The #1 Mystery In Science Now Has A $10 Million Prize. Learn More About It, Here – https://www.herox.com/evolution2.0
Dear Perry Marshall,
I have been arguing that DNA / genome are self programmable. How do you react?
Sekhar.
DMRSekhar,
Yes I believe DNA are self programming. See See James A. Shapiro, “A 21st Century View of Evolution”: http://shapiro.bsd.uchicago.edu/Shapiro.2005.Gene.pdf
Perry, how may I contact you directly? There are several points that I would like to discuss with you, but this site is very confusing to me. I agree with a lot of what you are saying, and I would just like to share my theories as well with you to see what you think of them.
Blessings to you,
Alex Leon
Sorry, this is the best I can do as my time is very limited. If you want to have a conversation, this is the place to have it.
Well, I guess first would be this article me and my husband wrote (we worked on it together) a little while ago after dealing with some very negitive Atheists. I’ll just paste it below…
~~~~~~~~~
Mathmatical Proof of the Existence of God
First off, the existence of our world without the existence of a “God” is logically impossible. This is due to the following:
The view point that our existence is the result of a bunch of random events is self-defeating. Since the random events are an incomprehensible and obscenely large number of statistical absurdities. An example of what is meant by statistical absurdity is a one in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 chance of occurring by chance alone. This would be a minor example, as many of the variables possess a much smaller chance of occurring than that. The number of these absurdities required to even go from the big bang to the point where our world was even capable of supporting organic life of our type (carbon based) is a number to large for me to realistically express here (If you don’t believe me start looking up astro-physics to get an idea of how many factors are involved in the development of this world and see that the statistical chance of any of those things occurring, by chance, is absurd). And after that point, even more absurd statistical anomalies had to have occurred for humans to evolve from single celled organisms, by chance alone.
The absolute absurdity of this enters the realm of completely impossible when you look up the length of time that has passed since the big bang, 13.5 billion years (the minimum scientists theorize our world as existed) is nowhere near long enough a span of time for more than a few of these anomalies to occur, and even that many is unlikely. The reason for this can be explained by the following example:
Say one single event in the process of going from the “big bang” to the present has a 1 in 600 billion chance of occurring (which would make the likelihood of it occurring to be significantly more likely to happen than most of the other anomalies required for the big bang to result in the present). Then it would take 600 billion times of this happening for this event to occur even once. Seeing as this one event will be a variable in a huge number of events that are next required to occur, if even one event fails in one way that makes the previous success irrelevant, then the conditions for the original event will have to occur again (possibly up to 600 billion times) before the second set of variables that are dependent on the first to have a chance of occurring. If you look at this with logic and reasoning the first dozen of variables required to result in the random creation of earth would have taken billions of billions of years to occur.
Therefore only if some form of super intelligent consciousness (for which God is a good label) were to be influencing these variables would we exist so soon after the big bang. And I do, like most rational people who label themselves as Christian, believe that the big bang, evolution, and the numerous other scientific theories that take place between the very beginning of everything straight through to now (and I do believe it took billions of years) did occur (and the relevant ones are still occurring, such as evolution). I just believe that these events were not caused by blind chance but rather directed by an omnipotent entity I call God.
Honestly, God requires far less faith to believe than random chance, for how we came to be here.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Also, I would like to say that I love your (very correct) stand point on how DNA is a code, and henceforth was created by a mind. Wonderful. I am going to be recomending this site to people I know so they will also have a chance to look over your works.
I also have several other articles I have written that deal with spirituality, God, comparisons of faith, quantum theory in relation to God and our presence here, and other such things. It really is a shame that you don’t have anything like a Facebook account or hotmail, because then I would be able to share directly with you. Anyway, please tell me what you think of the above article we wrote.
It truely is a pleasure meeting someone like you!
Alex Leon
I also believe that abiogenesis and macro-evolution took place. However, the odds of these two phenomenon taking place randomly (by chance) is radically small. This is especially true for abiogenesis. The more I research these topics, the more I come to the conclusion that evolution was the result of *guided mutations* being imposed on various organisms in response to environmental demands.
Living things are machines, and machines are designed. More importantly, genetics is a language, and language (both innate and constructed over time) is an indicator of a mind or minds.
Like yourself, I am also amazed by the overzealous mentality of modern-day atheists. If they were really confident in their atheism, I would expect a more relaxed demeanor, and quite frankly, an indifferent attitude towards the subject of God.
Perry,
You have taken off my yesterday’s post which I made sure it was posted. Today I didn’t find it. OK. If you don’t like my opinions and comments which were repectful as they should be I am not interested in you theories anymore. So PLS don’t send me more of your stuff, alright? I was really tired of reading your always the same replies anyway.
Jose Schabauer
Lima – Peru
I didn’t take away anything, it’s still in the queue. I don’t delete posts unless they’re inappropriate.
I’ve been reading through your ideas and find many of them to be sensible, but this post does nothing for me. This is selling product, not seeking to understand. It’s like the political people who put so much effort into saying “Your side is losing! the polls are falling! you’re going to get whipped!” as if their exuberantly violent predictions were going to change anything, one way or the other. Don’t worry so much about Darwin, like he’s a rival courting the same lover. “It’s like the fall of Russian totalitarianism!” is an absurd thing to say.
Paradigms change. They always have. It’s the only absolute constant in the history of science. In 100 years, we’ll understand things differently than we do now. In 400 years we might have trouble even understanding the structure of our thinking today.
Darwin and his updates have provided an immensely useful structure for thinking about evolution. We have come to a point now indeed where the issue of information science comes into play. There are things which haven’t become self-explanatory as part of other investigations, and the difficulty of making mutation carry the load of adaptation is becoming an obvious problem. There is another aspect of information entanglement in the process of life, that we haven’t been able to put an actual finger on.
So, that is a very interesting question in biology, but the trouble is: what can you do, to advance on understanding it? There are millions if not tens of millions of insanely clever and hardworking people teasing out deeper understandings of biology, but they can only advance the ends of their own tendrils, follow them where they go. The questions that are valuable to them are the ones that lead them a reachable distance ahead.
“Your paradigm is wrong!” is a useless observation. It is trivial: of course the paradigm is wrong. It’s just a paradigm. Something important remains to be observed and explored and understood, but when has that not been the case?
And this is where I come to grief with your approach, because I think what happens is that you arrive at an interesting question, and the vision of a future in which we will understand life perhaps in a drastically different way than we do now. But, you have a lot of preconceptions about what the unknown ought to be, to the point even of calling it God.
All we really know, I think, is that life is adaptable, protean, efficient, and directed. All of that is pretty obvious in the lives of individual organisms, and we have the sense that the same process happens at a higher level, where “life” somehow determines what to do next, how to make a nose go from the front of the head up to the top, with the trachea re-routed right up through the esophagus, on a cetacean, or how to make calluses form on the taluses of camels prior to birth, or what have you.
We know how vigorous and ingenious life is on its own behalf, whenever we get a virus or a wound; we can study its behavior at the cellular and tissue level with astonishment. It doesn’t seem odd, that this tenacious, insanely complex, exploitative force would have control over its structure at the organism level. But … nothing is exactly jumping out, as to how that might work.
Jumping ahead and saying that our latest analogies surely will account for the true nature of things, while relying heavily on faulting the dominant paradigm by rhetorical means, has a spotty track record.
Much of your analysis consists of operations done on analogies. DNA is not computer code, though it may be like it in some interesting and meaningful ways. But it just becomes a more sophisticated version of the blind watchmaker – “If life were like a watch”. But it’s not a watch. It’s nothing like a watch. If DNA were like computer code then probably it’s obsolete, cause that’s the one thing old computer code always is.
You can do whatever you like with analogies. But proving some designing mind based on some analogy to our own minds, a self-aware agent with a motive and a plan, by means of substitution for ourselves in the process by which we produce information … mm. I don’t think it flies.
In summary: I think you’re probably right in thinking that neo-Darwinism doesn’t fully explain the mechanism of the adaptation of life, but I don’t think that the unknown will behave for you in terms of “how it’s just gotta be, when you think about it”.
Darwin meticulously pulled together a huge range of very careful observations and analyses in order to create a way of thinking about life that made sense, that squared with observation and that squared well with genetics and cell biology and population statistics when they were uncovered. There is something wrong with the actual means by which the process happens, but that doesn’t really matter – it’s a problem too far, a puzzle piece whose context hasn’t formed yet.
Darwin’s model gives a working plan that is undoubtably correct in many ways, even if it misses a lot, including some huge insight about information that is still about as unknown to us as DNA was to Darwin. His ideas will be subsumed into better ones when they emerge. But it’s not some daffy contest between competing ideologies, where gloating over the future demise of the fools who got it wrong is an acceptable substitute for expanding understanding.
I wonder how this new discovery of early humans mating with Neanderthals will affect current evolutionary theory. I always expected that Neanderthals were human, and I guess that this proves it.
Hi Perry,
I’ve used my real name as my user name so nobody believes I am hiding behind anything.
To say that Darwinists deny that DNA is a code is very misleading. Richard Dawkins – surely Darwins’ most ardent bulldog – states in River out of Eden (back in the ninities) that biology publications and IT publications are, apart from jargon/terminology, practically identical. Of course DNA is a code. I’ve never read a book by a Darwinist that says otherwise.
I have read, however, that most people who have studied Natural Selection agree that DNA itself has evolved from an earlier, simpler code (RNA for instance).
I suggest you read Stardust by John Gribbon. It’s a small but awe inspiring book about the initial origins of life as we know it.
“Always respect the right of others to disagree with you.”
“Don’t indoctrinate your children, but do teach them how to think for themselves.”
I agree Stu,
From what I can see “ID” has become for of an argument about “Origins of Life” and not evolution. All sorts of biologists will say “YEA… obviously these “whorles” on this plant are not random”!!
My problem with many “ID” proponants is they are simply there for “GOD” and don’t give a flying one about describing the way things work… which is what theory(s) of evolution IS! There are several things I see that Perry keeps bringin up that are NO surprise to anyone studying Biology or evolution:
1.) Huge problems with the idea of random mutation or random evolution. Everyone knows this.
2.) There are neo-lamarckians crawling out from the woodwork at every major university as far as I can tell.
3.) EVO DEVO crowd is all about evolution working through environmental signals during developement and not random mutation.
I dont’ see where Perry’s “new theory” is “new” at all… correct me if I’m wrong.
DAK
I meant of course “back in the nineties” apologies.
Hi Perry
Thanx for the insights and all the emails
I just want to know, the whole 2013 thing, is it educated guess, or do you have some sort of inside info (know the people involved etc.) ?
And if it does happen in 2013, how big will it be? will it be in the news worldwide etc, or just within the scientific community?…and what effects will it have on people, and the way we think?
thanks 😉
It’s an educated guess.. or more like an intuition.
It’ll be in the news. It’ll be like Climategate. Possibly ignored by parts of the media but one fire in the blogosphere. There’s already strong indications that this is going to take place. Read “Altenberg 16” by Mazur.
Perry, are you aware of any comprehensive list of evidence that supports Darwinian theory, and what kind of support each find/specimen/discovery/etc. gives it?
I am struck by how consistent reports of “new evidence for evolution” are in presenting “evidence” that is CONSISTENT with Darwinism but in no way provides support to Darwinism to the exclusion of other theories.
I am also struck by how consistently Darwinists refer to “overwhelming evidence” supporting Darwinism while not mentioning a single example of this supposed “evidence.”
If the evidence is so clear and overwhelming, where can I read about it?
Any pointers?
I’m gonna swing both ways on this one.
1) If you read a book like “The Greatest Show on Earth” by Dawkins or “Why Evolution is True” by Jerry Coyne, they both give you excellent evidence for evolution.
2) Neither book provides any semblance of a correct explanation of how the evolutionary variations actually originate. See http://evo2.org/evolution-untold-story/ for the untold story. The article and the videos explain one of the mechanisms that drives evolution. I advocate a theory that’s roughly 1/3 the same as Darwinism.
Stay tuned for more installments BTW.
I don’t think atheists have a corner on quoting the Bible out of context. Fundamentalists, Catholics, Protestants, Jews, everybody quotes the Bible to substantiate what they have decided to believe. Then you can switch to the Koran and other books of belief and find the same activity there, etc., etc..When the Bible was written it was not always based in deep wisdom. Just ‘cuz it’s in the Bible doesn’t make it an absolute. It comes out of different cultures and biases, It’s been warped and edited for political and economic reasons, been used to justify greed and injustice. It’s nice to think that if you can find a justifying quote in the Bible, that your point is proven. It’s not like that, it’s all about paradox. Perry seems to denigrate fence sitters? Is that correct Perry? Where do you think wisdom comes from? It doesn’t come from firm conclusions. It comes from a position of awareness, experience, openness and non-attachment. It might look a lot like fence-sitting? Really, when it comes to a subject as beyond human comprehension as what we label God, the wisest place to perceive from will look a lot like fence sitting. I’d say there are three positions:
1) Those who have come to a firm, but limited and wrong conclusion.
2) Those who don’t really care one way or the other.
3) Those who are very interested, aware, taking in all the information, but not coming to conclusion, keeping the case open, being open to possibility and being comfortable with paradox. They don’t feel the need to conclude, when you know your information is limited and your conclusion will be limiting.
The time to come to conclusion is when you need to; to act, to proceed, to further other avenues of thought. That’s the time to come to conclusion with the information you have gathered so far. And when you do come to conclusion, you state what your assumptions are. If that is not the position you are in, coming to a premature conclusion, maybe just because it is convenient, or to align with a group you identify with, just closes a case and terminates possibilities.
A true scientist is always open, when he is not, his “study” becomes dogma.
Watching now. I have a question (@ 40:49).
Does not random selection claim that inferior mutations will die out and only
the improved ones will survive? In your advert example, each of the inferior
mutations would not survive, so the original would always stay until the better
mutation occurred. Of course this seems more preposterous than your example, but
I think it is a more accurate demonstration. No?
Thanks.
Dear Perry,
Great post. I had not realized that Darwinism is crumbling. I had stumbled on your website just recently and it has been a great intellectual and scientific discovery for me. I have been following the Climate Change scientific debate for some years, and incredibly, what you have predicted about neo-Darwinism is actually happening to the theory of Anthropogenic Global warming. Politician-funded (billions of dollars/Euros involved) scientists have for many years been telling us that the end of the world is nigh, telling us that we humans are causing global warming and we have to change our lifestyle and practically telling us to stop burning oil and to go live in caves in order for our children and grand children to have a future on this planet. But this theory has been scientifically challenged by many PhD scientists proving that it is false, based on wrong science, bad data and even cherry-picked and cooked data. This resulted in the publishing of emails from the University of East Anglia, CRU (Climate Research Unit), this being, most probably a whistleblower revelation, precipitating what is now known as CLIMATEGATE. So when I read your prediction I just could not believe what I was reading:
The event will be triggered by some “Deep Throat” scientist who has grown sick and tired of the shell games and politics and charades. He is perhaps retired and no longer fears having his career trashed. He will step forward and speak the truth.
He will publish emails and committee notes and recordings of secret meetings. He’ll tell of organized efforts to rig scientific data. Campaigns to malign skilled researchers, to prevent papers from being published, to halt important research from being seen. He’ll report missions to trash the careers of people who publish work that peers into the design process.
This is what is happening now in climatology. Scientists have lost jobs, been ridiculed, banned from publishing climate related scientific reports, stonewalled, while scientists who had jobs at climate-related units where transferred or lost jobs when they showed the least skepticism on AGW.
Perry, what you are predicting to happen to Darwinism is actually happening now to another area of science, climatology, only it will take a while for a total collapse for the fact that politicians have invested a vast amount,billions, of (our) money in this theory and their political reputation, while many main-stream media moguls and their journalists had invested their reputation, having hyped the issue for a long number of years. So the theory will take a while for it to collapse completely, but scientifically it’s already dead.
Albert
I suspect that the climate change dogma, like Darwinism, is 1/3 or maybe 1/2 true. But that there is a whole ‘nother set of data that nobody is talking about, for some politically motivated reason.
My friend, this is how bubble form, grow, and pop. After you’ve been around the block a few times, you start to see the patterns.
Hi Albert!
While I agree with Perry on many (probably most) of his major thrusts, I should point out that IMHO a LOT of what he brings up ( in Darwinism) is not really anything that is earth shattering, despite the (IMHO) hyperbole in his e-mails and web site. For example:
1.) “Darwinism” has a wide range of uses today, and much of it has little to do with Darwins origional ideas. In main stream media for example Ann Coulter spews about “not believing in Darwinism” but cant seem to enunciate what the hell she is taking about. I should not compare Perry to Ann, as he actually understands this stuff, BUT he (IMHO) certainly takes liberties in claiming a lot of his “problems” with “Darwinism” is a big deal.
2.) Continuing with #1: For example “ramdom mutation” is widely known in biology as having major problems in fitting into observed and theoretical evolution. Biologists readily acknowledge that life is not random on MANY levels… take any “cell bio” course for example.
3.) Continuing on: “Darwinism” is just a name… currently (IMO) it is known as “the modern synthesis” which is simply a sort of “generally accepted” notion of evolution today. This “modern synthesis” is always open to change, as that is the nature of “theories” in science. Theories are MADE to be updated. NONE of this calls into question “EVOLUTION” at it’s core… nor Darwins contribution, which many seem to think each little “problem” actually does. Forexample, from the ID (Intelligent design) websites, ID is STILL evolution… despite that fact… bloggers all over the “blogeshpere” seem to think it does. Nor does it call in to question Darwin’s basic contributions.
4.) Continued from #3: IN FACT “modern synthesis” is currently under assult from a “branch” of evolutionary biology known as “EVO DEVO” in some VERY interesting ways which include random mutation. There are “neo Lamarckians” crawling out of the woodwork at all sorts of major universities as well.
Anyway, IMHO, none of this seems to be “earth shattering” to anyone who is really studying the stuff. Of course that does NOT mean it’s not a problem in the way information sifts down into textbooks and all that (especially since many highschools use outdated ones to save money, and teachers went to school decades ago on average), but that is really a different issue to what is being put forward here (I think).
DAK
Perry,
This is Christine, from Spain. This does not refer specifically to this thread but to God in general–I just didn’t know where to post it.
I’d like to thank you for both your sites. Some time ago I read C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity, and it changed my life. It was like a sort of epiphany for me. And then recently I came accross you… as if to continue what Lewis had started. You’re so elegantly bright!
I think this will amuse you… Regardin elegance, a 19th century Spanish philosopher, Jose Ortega y Gasset, wrote in one of his essays how elegance stems from the latin term eligere (to choose; we still have the verb elegir in Spanish, which means just that). Thus it is the act of choosing. The present participle is elegans, which in turn brings us the adjective eligent, and further enteligent, from which intelligent derives. Then elegance is understodd as the art of choosing our actions and ideas well. I’ve always been very fond of this aception.
Know that I’ve added you to my list of admired human beings, together with J.S Bach and others. I believe God speaks through you just as He composed through him!
My thanks also to all of you who contribute to the intelligent debates taking place here.
God bless
Chris
Chris,
Thanks for your kind remarks. In biology I see elegance everywhere. Elegance is a supreme value in art and design. I think Apple Computer embodies this principle to an extreme and it’s why people love their products. Blessings to you.
Re: furthering DAK’s post, I believe that Darwin would welcome a solid, science based refutation of his theory. He wasn’t starting a religion or an ism, he was a scientist and that’s how the scientific method works, you do your best work and write an article about it. Others check it out, if they can’t disprove it with verifiable scientific results, maybe it’s right. That is until somebody comes up with a good case that it isn’t. There’s been cases where a scientist has put forth a hypothesis and later disproved it himself.
Darwin wasn’t a Darwinian, he was a scientist, nor was Jesus a Christian, he was a Jew. It’s later followers who create these rigid bodies of belief and impose them on others and start wars over them. I doubt that Jesus would take part in that. Nor would Darwin classify himself as Darwinian. If Darwin were around today, he would have “evolved” his theory, based on current solid evidence.
Reply to jimmorris last post concerning Darwin/Darwinism
You are correct in some aspects concerning Darwin as a scientist and not
having an “ism”. Debatable on how welcome any scientist is on being challenged
by others knowing the human nature of egos regardless of beliefs.
However, Charles Darwin had been a devoted Christian
at one point in his life. But when he lost his wife and his child to
unrelated deaths, he turned bitter and rejected God. Most us want to
interject here “rightfully so”, but keep in mind – if you have the ability
to create something, you have the ability to destroy something as well.
And it is God’s right and providence to end our lives when he chooses –
however this does make us angry and He gave us the ability to be angry
and choose. I can’t help but think that Darwin chose to go to war with
God with his writings and it created a bias in his work that leads down
the path that “there is no God”. The small amount of reading of Darwin’s
work that I have actually read seems to support this but I admit I have
not read his entire works.
But Perry is spot-on with his idea of DNA/code/communication theory speaking
as an systems engineer myself. The idea of creation and interpretation of
Genesis (switched perspective from space (or universe view) to earth surface
on day three (I think) is an idea that has been out there for a while as
most of his other thought thread have been as well. There are many creationists
who believe in an old earth/old universe etc; it has been a frustration of
mine that the “new earth” one’s get the focus of the media with their “whack”
ideas of how things happened. Most don’t fit a realistic model that is
backed up by more than one scientific principle and once you start applying
different scientific disciplines to their model – they start to fall like
a house of cards – just like the random mutation of DNA does as well.
I share a very high percentage of beliefs that Perry does and could only
quibble on very few small topics that are not essentail and it has been
enlightening to see how the DNA-code idea stands up over discussions.
I have a very intimate knowledge of creation of the universe from theory
to scientific proof. I started out wanting to go on to be a cosmologists
and after my first BS degree, I decided a BSEE was enough joy in school that
I had had enough. My astronomy courses were during the Carl Sagan era who
was another “highly visible” scientists that steered away from God even though
it was becoming widely accepted that the “big bang” was the most logical
answer that fit most of what was known.
There is a theme that run’s through these threads concerning acceptance by
atheists. The idea of DNA/code challenges their belief structure – we all know
this. But here are two reasons why:
1. If there is a God, we humans (meaning “me” or “I” are not in control).
We don’t like this and we are designed to rebel against this BUT it is
the plan that our love and God’s love overcome this. (without love all
is meaningless – I’m paraphrasing a verse – sorry terrible at quoting
but good at understanding – someone else can name the verse and quote
it verbatim if there is any doubt I missing the point. (I’m pretty sure
I’m not). So if God is in control – why do bad things happen? I like to
think of this on these terms – “you have to have bad days to appreciate
the good days”. Meaning, if there were no sin in the world then there
would be no reason to seek God’s love or we would automatically already
experience it fully with no effort. We would not have choice! We are
given a simple choice, if we choose to know God through his Son – He
chooses to know us. It’s pretty simple.
2. Christians when speaking to non-believers including atheists, bring a
message of “death and hell”. However, this is not the message that
needs to be at the forefront but it is the “critical” part that seems
to get through. The message at the front should be God wants us to
know and love Him.
Species do not evolve from other species. Never have and never will. They only “adapt” within their own “kind,” exactly as the Bible says. Evolution is technically a misnomer, the correct term to be used should be adaptation. That is exactly why “there is no evidence” to support the evolution lie.
Regarding the DNA code, atheists should read Werner Gitt’s ” In the beginning was information”. To quote:
“A coding system always entails a nonmaterial intelligent process. A physical matter cannot produce an information code. All experiences show that every piece of creative information represents some mental effort and can be traced to a personal idea-giver who exercised his own free will, and who is endowed with an intelligent mind.”
Gitt’s book is excellent and no atheist has successfully countered his argument as far as i’ve ever seen.
The book is interesting,I’m in chapter 2 now. I almost put the book down after page 27 because it implies the laws of nature can’t be proven. We do define laws with mathematical formulas, therefore they are repeatable and by definition valid. I got the mistaken impression initially he is saying laws that have mathematical support and are universally repeatable aren’t valid. He does use the word”valid”. That is most likely a better word because “truth and reality” lead people into a world of probabilty and culminate in philosophy, that is personal more’s. Numbers don’t lie, nor natural laws…nuclear force and gravity. Without gravity nothing would exist. Not believeing in gravity is ludicrous as well as the nuclear force.”What goes up must come down”, depending on gravity. Airplanes can’t stay aloft forever nor satelites. Flip a light switch and we have lighting. Even quorum sensing satisfies inra-species communication, the unique properties of silicon in the micro-chip. These not only are observable events but repeatable.
I’m looking forward to reading the book.
Everyone may have discovered what I just did, about information and the beginning associated with a post from someone else about the Hebrew verb, “bara”.
The Bible gives us what is, not what was before anything existed. It is a record of recorded information.
Here’s a link to leading thinkers on the subject of evolution and Christianity. Multiple lectures on the subject in the archives. Ongoing, daily, now. Don’t know how long they will be “up”?
http://evolutionarychristianity.com/blog/
Perry,
thanks for another fine article in defence of real, honest biology. Darwinism is a dead, unburied corpse that stinks & infects science. It also corrupts as the variety of political/philosophical/ideological offshoots it inspired.
My personal take is that creation is actually the hidden mystery that underlies what we call 4-dimensional ‘reality’. Eg., we ordinarily see time as a kind of numbered progression. Since Einstein, we know it isn’t like that. As with gravity, time is not seen in itself. It is the invisble dimension we live in, as fish swim in water. We only observe its effects. The effects of ‘time’ are continuous creation & destruction (entropy). We DO perceive entropy/death/decay, but NOT creation. We call that ‘time’. Far better minds than mine have puzzled why time is not reversible. I suspect it is becoz most science minds are closed to the very possibilty of creation as a hidden, directional force. Similarly, bemused Darwinians must deny that evolution has any direction.
If I had Einstein’s brain, I might figure it out!