News:

Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for justice: for they shall be filled. Mine eye also shall see my desire on mine enemies, and mine ears shall hear my desire of the wicked that rise up against me. The glory of the Lord shall endure for ever: the Lord shall rejoice in his works. He looketh on the earth, and it trembleth: he toucheth the hills, and they smoke. I will sing unto the Lord as long as I live: I will sing praise to my God while I have my being. My meditation of him shall be sweet: I will be glad in the Lord. Let sinners be consumed out of the earth, and let the wicked be no more. Bless thou the Lord, O my soul. Praise ye the Lord.

Author Topic: Darwin  (Read 1039 times)

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AGelbert

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📢 "Academics are KNOWN to be COWARDS." James Tour ✨ 👍
« Reply #45 on: December 29, 2022, 05:02:10 pm »
James Tour ✨: Top 👨‍🔬 Scientist on ☝🏻 God and the Origin of Life


Jews for Jesus 28.9K subscribers 9,040 views  Jun 24, 2022

We invite you to join us for Conversations with Jewish Believers in Jesus, hosted by Jeff Morgan. This is the full interview where Jeff talks with Jewish scientist James Tour .
« Last Edit: December 29, 2022, 05:31:42 pm by AGelbert »
So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. Matthew 7:12

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Dr. Tour EXPOSES the False Science Behind Origin of Life Research
« Reply #46 on: January 04, 2023, 08:11:09 pm »
Dr. Tour EXPOSES the False Science Behind 🙊🙉🙈 Origin of Life Research


197,397 views  Oct 4, 2022  RICE UNIVERSITY
#abiogenesis #originoflife #evolution

00:00 Cold Open
00:25 Introduction
02:20 Dr. Tour's Presentation
55:53 Q&A

Departing from scientific consensus, Dr. Tour challenges the findings of origin of life studies and the surrounding media hype. This talk was presented by @RatioChristiOrg at @riceuniversity.

Don't miss our new and upcoming episodes on Addressing Abiogenesis, Season 2:


Episode 1:

Episode 2:

Episode 3:

Episode 4:

Episode 5:

Episode 6 premieres next Monday! Subscribe to the channel so you’ll be notified with the link!

Don't forget to like, subscribe, and share!

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« Last Edit: January 05, 2023, 05:12:12 pm by AGelbert »
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Dr. Tour UNMASKS Double-Standards & Inaccurate Commentary - Steve Benner, Part 01


Dr. Tour UNMASKS Double-Standards & Inaccurate Commentary - Steve Benner, Part 01

Dr. James Tour 52K subscribers 1,777 views  Premiered January 9, 2023  #evolution #originoflife #abiogenesis
THIS is Episode 6 - Double-Standards, Lie Detectors, and Inaccurate Commentary - Dr. Steve Benner, Part 01

In case you missed them:
Ep 1:
Ep 2:
Ep 3:
Ep 4:
Ep 5:

Episode 7 premieres next Monday, January 16th! SUBSCRIBE so you'll be notified!
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Check out all our episodes:
Addressing Abiogenesis, Season 2
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLI...

Addressing Abiogenesis, Season 1
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLI...

VIDEO INDEX
00:00 Memoirs of a Synthetic Chemist
03:04 On Autocatalysis & Insufficient Backgrounds
05:16 Fairytale Island — No Problems, No Cry
06:15 Synthetic Chemist "Embarrassing Blunders"
06:28 Synthesizing Double Standards
07:21 Chemistry Theory vs Reality
07:47 Benner's World of G-D Problems
09:35 Extra, Extra! Autocatalysis!
11:43 The Lie Detector
14:25 God of the Gaps? No.
16:06 RE: Religion: What Jim Said
16:51 What Was Steve Watching?
18:07 RE: Atmospheres: What Jim Said
19:26 Putting Words In Jim's Mouth
20:40 Jim Wants What?
24:44 RE: Sutherland et al
26:14 RE: Richert: What Jim Said
27:17 TL;DR — Steve's Comments, Misdirected
27:55 Next Time: Steve Benner, Part 02

#abiogenesis #originoflife #evolution

If you would like to support us in creating more content across our different media platforms, we would greatly appreciate any support you can give. Visit https://jesusandscience.org/#Support to learn more.

God bless. ~
https://jesusandscience.org
Dr Tour's Personal Website - http://jmtour.com
Twitter - http://twitter.com/drjamestour
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LinkedIn - http://linkedin.com/in/drjamestour
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WeChat - @drjamestour

Newspaper Disclaimer:
The newspaper image used in this video ("Newspaper") is a satirical creation, comprising individual and artificial articles and titles, some taken from or inspired by real events, but the stories, articles, and titles are entirely works of fiction. The Newspaper is a source of parody, satire, and humor and is for entertainment only. All content contained within the Newspaper are works of fiction and constitute fake news. Any truth or actual facts contained therein are purely incidental or coincidental and are not intended to be, or be construed as, facts.

The Newspaper may or may not use real names, always in substantially fictitious ways. Any resemblance to actual facts or to reality is purely coincidental, except for references to famous persons and/or public figures, in which case such stories may be based on real people, but the story, or stories, surrounding or about these people or figures are entirely fictional and/or are intended as satire, entertainment, and/or teaching/criticism. The Newspaper’s content is written as satire, entertainment, and/or teaching/criticism and not to disparage any persons, or institutions, and no malice is intended, nor should any be construed from the satirically based content. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental or is intended purely as satire, parody or spoof of such persons and is not intended to communicate any true or factual information about that person.

The Newspaper is intended for a mature, sophisticated, and discerning audience and is not intended for persons under 18 years of age.
« Last Edit: January 10, 2023, 02:15:01 pm by AGelbert »
So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. Matthew 7:12

AGelbert

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January 16, 2023, 4:53 PM By John G. West

Martin Luther King’s 📢 Powerful Critique of 🦍 Scientific Racism, Scientific Materialism

Editor’s note: This commentary was originally published on January 18, 2019.

SNIPPET:

With regard to scientific racism, King 🕊️ lamented that “Science was commandeered to prove the biological inferiority of the Negro” (p. 37) and he spoke of how 🦍 segregationists “turn to some 🦍 pseudo-scientific writing and argue that the Negro’s brain is smaller than the white man’s brain.” (p. 38) King 🕊️ argued that the real findings of science didn’t support such claims: “They do not know, or they refuse to know, that the idea of an inferior or superior race has been refuted by the best evidence of the science of anthropology… although there may be inferior and superior individuals within all races, there is no superior or inferior race.”

With regard to scientific materialism, King 🕊️ was searing:
Quote
To believe that human personality is the result of the fortuitous interplay of atoms and electrons is as absurd as to believe that a monkey by hitting typewriter keys at random will eventually produce a Shakespearean play. Sheer magic! It is much more sensible to say with Sir James Jeans, the physicist, that “the universe seems to be nearer to a great thought than to a great machine,” or with Arthur Balfour, the philosopher, that “we now know too much about matter to be materialists.” Materialism is a weak flame that is blown out by the breath of mature thinking. (p. 70)

King 🕊️ added in another chapter that “This universe is not a tragic expression of meaningless chaos but a marvelous display of orderly ☝🏻 cosmos ✨.” (p. 128)

Full article:
https://evolutionnews.org/2022/01/martin-luther-kings-powerful-critique-of-scientific-racism-scientific-materialism-5/
« Last Edit: January 16, 2023, 07:09:46 pm by AGelbert »
So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. Matthew 7:12

AGelbert

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Benner's D-Ribose is prebiotically irrelevant.
« Reply #49 on: January 17, 2023, 04:49:26 pm »
January 16, 2023

🌟 This video includes an intentional mistranslation of a story told by Juan Joya Borja, a Spanish comedian and actor known as "El Risitas" ("The Giggles"   in Spanish), as satire. Joya's hilarious story describes an incident when he worked as a kitchen porter, and he left some paella pans (paelleras) at night in the ocean to soak and clean them, and in the morning when he returned to retrieve the pans, they had washed out to sea with the tide. He frequently interrupts the story with his trademark laugh. This story has become a popular meme on the Internet, entertaining millions with intentional mistranslations paired with Joya’s laugh. Thank you "El Risitas" for blessing the Internet with this story and your contagious laugh. May you rest in peace. For more on Risitas and this meme, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Risitas

Dr. Tour MINES Data on Origin of Life Claims - Steve Benner, Part 02


Dr. James Tour 53.7K subscribers

5,963 views  Premiered 19 hours ago  #abiogenesis #originoflife #evolution
THIS is episode 7 - Digging Through The Data on Origin of Life Claims - Dr. Steve Benner, Part 02

Episode 8 premieres next Monday, January 23th! SUBSCRIBE so you'll be notified!
After witnessing Dr. Steve Benner's misrepresentation of Dr. Tour and his statements on origin of life (OOL), in this episode, we now turn to Benner's chemistry. Looking beyond mere titles and abstracts, we dig into Benner's data, exploring how it suffers from excessive human involvement, despite Benner himself criticizing the notion. After reminding us of the Cannizzaro dilemma and how time presents a problem for synthetic degradation, Dr. Tour exposes how Benner's D-Ribose was just a needle in a haystack of other compounds, rendering it prebiotically irrelevant due to it being completely useless for further reactions. Nevertheless, Benner continues, claiming a "hands off" approach, but using "hands on" from other chemists, who provide the alleged missing human involvement and relay synthesis along the way, let alone, chemists whose papers reveal they purchased chemicals as by-products from living sources, rending those paths prebiotically irrelevant as well. Dr. Tour also exposes OOL's problem of picking and choosing molecules only when it strikes one's fancy, for example, magnesium chloride and all the amino acids, while abrogating DAP's OOL relevance to boot. Things are not so pure as they seem (and as the chemistry requires), and chemists who extrapolate their claims should simply know better.

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« Last Edit: January 17, 2023, 04:52:10 pm by AGelbert »
So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. Matthew 7:12

AGelbert

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January 12, 2023, 12:25 PM

Quote
Darwin’s disciples can bemoan the connection all they want, but the materialistic chance-driven world ushered in by their Down House hero had devastating human consequences. “In the twentieth century,” Johnson concludes, “it is likely that over 100 million people were killed or starved to death as a result of totalitarian regimes infected with varieties of social Darwinism” (p. 136).

Editor’s note: The wonderful historian and journalist Paul Johnson died today at age 94. His 2012 biography Darwin: Portrait of a Genius 🙄 provoked discussion and disagreement at Evolution News when it was published. We offer science historian Michael Flannery’s 👍 review below.

« Last Edit: January 18, 2023, 05:41:02 pm by AGelbert »
So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. Matthew 7:12

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Dr. Tour ✨ SHINES LIGHT on Scientific Paradoxes on Origin of Life - Steve Benner, Part 03



Dr. James Tour 56.5K subscribers

7,034 views  Premiered 21 hours ago  #evolution #originoflife #abiogenesis

SUBSCRIBE and tap the notification bell - premiering with Episode 8 on January 24 - Dr. Tour is back! In an amazing second season on abiogenesis (origin of life), Dr. Tour enlightens us yet again. This time, not only does Dr. Tour thwart a YouTuber’s misguided understanding of chemistry, but he scrutinizes the details of chemists selected by the YouTuber for engagement.

« Last Edit: January 25, 2023, 08:25:56 pm by AGelbert »
So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. Matthew 7:12

AGelbert

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Is creation or evolution stupid? - facts & truth
« Reply #52 on: January 26, 2023, 11:41:13 pm »
Is creation or evolution stupid? - facts & truth by Dr Kent Hovind 🕊️


Our Only Hope 224K subscribers 119,379 views  Feb 5, 2017

Does the scientific evidence support evolutionism or does ALL the evidence really support creation while there is NO evidence whatsoever for the theory of evolution?

Is the earth billions of years old?

How about Dinosaurs, the flood, mutations, the geologic column, trilobites, stars, carbon dating, dating by the fossil record and more?

Richard Dawkins, a famous atheist and evolutionist said, "It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked)"

Well let's take a look at the real scientific evidence and see about that.

“But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear:” 1Peter 3:15
« Last Edit: January 26, 2023, 11:55:40 pm by AGelbert »
So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. Matthew 7:12

AGelbert

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By Design: Behe, Lennox, and Meyer on the Evidence for a Creator
« Reply #53 on: February 08, 2023, 01:02:06 am »
By Design: Behe, Lennox, and Meyer on the Evidence for a ☝🏻 Creator



Hoover Institution 780K subscribers 4.9K

225,679 views  Feb 1, 2023  FIESOLE
Recorded on October 15, 2022, in Fiesole, Italy.

Michael Behe, John Lennox, and Steven Meyer are three of the leading voices in science and academia on the case for an intelligent designer of the universe and everything in it (including us). In this wide-ranging conversation, they point out the flaws in Darwin’s theory and the increasing amount of evidence uncovered by a rigorous application of the scientific method that points to an intentional design and creation of the physical world.



« Last Edit: February 08, 2023, 01:10:47 am by AGelbert »
So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. Matthew 7:12

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The Abrupt Origins of Treeshrews (Scandentia) and Colugos (Dermoptera)

February 3, 2023, 6:22 AM by 👨‍🔬 Günter Bechly 👍

                                          

SNIPPETS:

Treeshrews and colugos not only look like chimeras of different beasts, but indeed both proved to be notoriously difficult to place in the system of animals. ... ...

Is there anything the experts can agree upon beyond trivial facts like those beasts being extinct small mammals? They all look at the same fossil evidenceand constantly come to totally different conclusions. 🤷‍♂️ Even as a paleontologist I have to admit that calling this a real scientific discipline seems like an insult to hard sciences like physics or chemistry or molecular biology. To an outsider it must rather resemble a kind of Rorschach test with fossils instead of ink blotches, and all that matters seems to be guesswork, speculation, and opinion. 🤦‍♂️

Long story short: Irrespective of any of the numerous uncertainties, treeshrews and colugos definitely appeared abruptly in the Paleogene. The fossil record shows nothing even remotely resembling a gradual origin of these orders in the Cretaceous that was predicted by Darwinian molecular clock studies. This is just another instance of the countless empirical failures of the theory, more or less ignored by mainstream evolutionary biology.

Full article:
https://evolutionnews.org/2023/02/fossil-friday-the-abrupt-origins-of-treeshrews-scandentia-and-colugos-dermoptera/
« Last Edit: February 08, 2023, 07:33:06 pm by AGelbert »
So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. Matthew 7:12

AGelbert

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Re: Darwin
« Reply #55 on: February 15, 2023, 05:00:06 pm »
On Origin of Life, New Long Story Skewers Materialist Doctrine

February 14, 2023, 10:07 AM By David Klinghoffer

SNIPPET:


Materialist theories of abiogenesis (life from nonlife) are dictated not by science but by a philosophical doctrine. The doctrine holds that in biological origins, no mind or purpose can have played a role. Any interpretation of the evidence must conform to the doctrine. From this imperative, origin-of-life researchers derive their theories of chemical evolution — an “RNA World,” or now an “RNA-Peptide World” — which are the targets of the new Long Story offering.

Life depends on replication and that ability must have come about through unguided means. But to confirm this, OOL research relies on “cheating” and “stealing” (watch the video to see why I use those words). As Long Story puts it,
Quote
The truth is whenever you see a paper or a popular article about the origin of life you can pretty well bet that they’re cheating in a number of different ways and that the headlines bear no relationship to reality. Importantly, these aren’t problems merely because we don’t yet know how these various processes work. The very concept of the self-replicating molecule that “chemically evolves” into life contradicts many very well-understood laws and processes of chemistry.

Challenge to Origin of Life: Replication



read more:
https://evolutionnews.org/2023/02/on-origin-of-life-new-long-story-skewers-materialist-doctrine/
« Last Edit: February 15, 2023, 05:34:33 pm by AGelbert »
So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. Matthew 7:12

AGelbert

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The Cruel Legacy of Social Darwinism in Nigeria
« Reply #56 on: February 22, 2023, 03:17:25 pm »


February 21, 2023, 6:42 AM Editor’s note: The following article by the late Dr. Olufemi Oluniyi is adapted from his preface to his recently released book, Darwin Comes to Africa: Social Darwinism and British Imperialism in Northern Nigeria (Discovery Institute Press, 2023).

The Cruel Legacy of Social Darwinism in Nigeria

Olufemi Oluniyi

Photo: A tiger moth, by wanderingnome, via Flickr (cropped).

Social Darwinism is a rickety notion, rich in assumptions but destitute of facts. It reminds me of a Mandinka proverb widely recognized in Africa which says, “An empty bag cannot stand.” It is, however, resourceful. Social Darwinism rests like a tiger moth on Darwinism, its mother theory; when challenged with facts, it flits to a slightly different position and poses anew, where its camouflaging coloration allows it to survive a bit longer.

However, Social Darwinism is not merely as tricky and insubstantial as a tiger moth. It also is as dangerous as a tiger. As shall be shown in these pages, a large portion of Northern Nigeria’s suffering can be laid directly at the feet of this tiger and its parent. This book is an invitation to readers, and to African scholars particularly, to look around them and determine to what extent Social Darwinism has mauled their respective societies and nations.

What Precisely Is This Dangerous Creature?

Though it goes by many camouflaging names, Social Darwinism is the pseudo-scientific ideology which posits that the biological principles of Darwin’s scientific theory of random mutation and natural selection bear analogy to human society.

One startling iteration of Social Darwinism occurred under the guise of tactical warfare in the 1920s, when a Russian scientist sought to produce a race of super-soldiers for Stalin’s army by impregnating women from French Guinea with the sperm of a dead chimpanzee — black African women, mind you, who were presumed to be less highly evolved and thus closer to chimpanzees than were white European women. The Russian scientist was not a lone gunman, so to speak. Colonial authorities approved the plan, and the Russian found support amongst both French and American scientists.

Horrifying though this experiment is in terms of religion and morality, it makes ethical sense under Social Darwinism. If humans are naught but evolutionarily advanced animals, and if we breed and crossbreed animals to suit our purposes, why should we not breed humans in the same manner?

Darwin’s theory of evolution further posited the natural world as a place where the fittest survive and the less fit decline and die; if this is indeed the case, thought Darwin’s contemporaries (and indeed many of our own), then who are we to battle nature herself? Why should we not let the less-fit die? Indeed, why should we not hasten their demise if it will profit us — the survivors, the fittest — economically, geographically, or politically? Why should the Briton not manipulate, oppress, and exploit the Nigerian? After all, the fact that he can do so surely proves that he is right to do so — he is fulfilling his very destiny, as decreed by Nature herself.

True, such predatory impulses are as old as man himself. This book, however, explores the 19th-century attempt to repackage those age-old myths, prejudices, racism, and general selfishness in a pseudo-scientific wrapper.

Examining the Wrapper

That pseudo-scientific wrapper has allowed myriad evils to flourish up to the present day. Without doubt, Darwin’s scientific theory of evolution and its social ramifications, though unproven and indeed increasingly discredited, hold pernicious sway in classrooms and boardrooms, in the halls of politics, medicine, and trade.

Though the objective of Social Darwinism was and still is the denigration, subjugation, exploitation, and dehumanization of targeted peoples, these evils generally are cloaked in the benevolent language of guiding an inferior race or protecting a superior one by weeding out supposedly inferior stock. At various times and in various places people so targeted have been the mentally or physically disabled, the elderly, the ill, the homosexual, the unborn; those whose ethnicity, nationality, or appearance has posed a real or perceived barrier to the fulfilment of another group’s desires; and those whose poverty or criminality has been blamed, Darwinist-fashion, upon inferior genetics. The problems of Social Darwinism are various and are pervasive worldwide, and all people wronged by Darwin and his followers deserve to have their stories told and the false narratives wielded against them deconstructed. My focus in these pages, however, will be on my people and my country.

Four Thousand Miles Away

Here is how the idea of a 19th-century scientist traveled four thousand miles to grievously wound Northern Nigeria: Charles Darwin emerged at a time when Europe and Great Britain were hungry for an excuse to exploit Africa. Darwin’s theories provided a morally palatable (though as we shall see, entirely wrong and illogical) excuse. Further, in addition to justifying self-serving colonization, Darwin’s theories shaped the way British administrators managed Northern Nigeria and the various people groups therein.

The false narrative of Social Darwinism as promoted by British colonizers caused great and unjust harm to Nigeria, and to this day many aspects of the pernicious narrative are widely and harmfully believed to be true. However, the critical link between the increasingly insatiable appetite for Africa’s resources, on the one hand, and Charles Darwin’s growing visibility, on the other hand, has been ignored, as if willfully, in the conventional Social Darwinist historiography. I will present ample evidence for my claims in Part One of this book, drawing on official documents, public statements, well-attested historical events, and so forth.

This book does not deny that there are differences in material culture, literacy, and technological attainments between Europe and Black Africa; rather, it firmly rejects the sleight of hand according to which these external differences indicate a difference in the basic building blocks of the European and of the African (understood to mean black-skinned Africans), and that this supposed inherent difference causes cultural differences and warrants “Europeans are superior to Africans” propaganda. These matters I shall discuss in Part Two of this book.

My purpose is not merely to point the finger of blame, nor is it only to restore a view of the black African as equal in all ways to the white European. It is also to show that Social Darwinism rests on a faulty foundation, so that perhaps the day may come when the House of Darwin and all his unruly, self-serving children harm no longer.

https://evolutionnews.org/2023/02/the-cruel-legacy-of-social-darwinism-in-nigeria/
« Last Edit: February 22, 2023, 03:43:03 pm by AGelbert »
So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. Matthew 7:12

AGelbert

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Natural Selection: The Evolution of a Mirage
« Reply #57 on: March 15, 2023, 05:52:21 pm »
AGelbert NOTE: Except the picture of a finch, all graphics and font emphasis in size and color are by yours truly.


March 7, 2023, 6:26 AM By Neil Thomas
Neil Thomas is a Reader Emeritus in the University of Durham, England and a longtime member of the British Rationalist Association. He studied Classical Studies and European Languages at the universities of Oxford, Munich and Cardiff before taking up his post in the German section of the School of European Languages and Literatures at Durham University in 1976. There his teaching involved a broad spectrum of specialisms including Germanic philology, medieval literature, the literature and philosophy of the Enlightenment and modern German history and literature. He also taught modules on the propagandist use of the German language used both by the Nazis and by the functionaries of the old German Democratic Republic. He published over 40 articles in a number of refereed journals and a half dozen single-authored books, the last of which were Reading the Nibelungenlied (1995), Diu Crone and the Medieval Arthurian Cycle (2002) and Wirnt von Gravenberg's 'Wigalois'. Intertextuality and Interpretation (2005). He also edited a number of volumes including Myth and its Legacy in European Literature (1996) and German Studies at the Millennium (1999). He was the British Brach President of the International Arthurian Society (2002-5) and remains a member of a number of learned societies.

Natural Selection: The Evolution of a Mirage

Finch

American scientific educator John A. Moore has pointed out that one of the most ironic episodes in intellectual history occurred when Darwin drew on the very database of knowledge accumulated by natural theologians to support his evolutionary ideas:
Quote
The beautiful adaptations [of Nature] could not be denied, all that was required was to switch the explanatory hypothesis from divine will to natural causes.1
The purely material hypothesis began to resonate better with a secularizing age, as David Handke observed:
Quote
One reason for this is the 😈 manner in which Natural Selection slipped seamlessly into the place of the Creator as the acceptable new face of the creative Designer.2

Needless to say, not all minds in democratic societies could be changed by would-be intellectual fiats issued by Darwin or by anybody else.3 Darwin’s theory that life on Earth could have evolved unplanned and undirected, due to some wondrously benign concatenation of mutational flukes followed by the supposedly “selective” ministrations of Mother Nature, has never ceased to appear improbable to many persons not 😈 bent on conjuring up a materialist explanation for all things (at whatever cost to logic and probability). Even Darwin himself developed doubts over time as he came to ask himself: could natural selection really have exerted the vast transformative powers he had claimed for it? This late failure of nerve might well account for his later flirtation with a form of “supplementary” Lamarckism and even go some way to explain the famous peroration of Origin to the effect that evolution had come about by dint of “laws impressed upon matter by the Creator.”

The latter statement can scarcely be glossed as anything other than what is now termed theistic Darwinism since it is plainly discrepant with exclusively natural processes. Darwin’s shifting ideas made it easy for those of his peers with more traditional (Anglican) opinions to infer that ultimately everything owed its existence to a power transcending the natural order.4 It may even be possible to speculate that Darwin’s two-decade-long procrastination over publication of Origin owed something to his difficulties in convincing himself of some ideas which, on the advice of colleagues and critics, he was driven to modify quite considerably over his five later revisions of Origin.

Darwin at the Literal Level

Summarized at the literal level, the Origin of Species aspires to supply us with a fresh, 👨‍🔬 materialist myth to explain the development of earth’s numerous species. That 🔬 messaging is, however, undermined by interference from an apparently ineradicable subtext arising from Darwin’s deeper intuitions and spiritual promptings. This factor bids us revisit the precise ontological and definitional status of “natural selection” — that ubiquitous metaphor which, in the verdict both of Alfred Russel Wallace and many other of Darwin’s expert peers, had led Darwin so seriously astray.

Conceptual interferences arising from strained metaphors, distant analogies, and widely dispersed narrative patterns with deep roots in people’s imaginations have long been discussed across the whole range of human cultures.5 Even in the context of scientific reporting Misia Landau has detected some surprising interferences from folklore and myth,6 warning that scientists should be aware of the capacity of preexistent narrative structures to exert a subconscious influence on the way they present supposedly objective data. In a similar vein, Andrew Reynolds more recently drew attention to the large role played by analogical reasoning in Darwin’s thinking — a factor which did not always contribute to clarity of thought:
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This analogical reasoning was in turn reliant on several key metaphors. One was the Tree of Life to represent the thesis of the community of descent or shared ancestry of all species. The other concerned his hypothesized mechanism for species transmutation, which he called natural selection, a choice of terminology based on an analogy with the process of artificial selection practised by humans in the production of domesticated plants and animals.7

An Important Tool

The fact is that metaphorical and analogical thinking is an important tool for human beings to verbalize their conceptions of reality, so it is not surprising that Darwin and neo-Darwinians have been drawn to it. However, it is not an intrinsically analytical or even descriptive way of approaching the world, something recognized as early as 1666 by Samuel Parker, an eminent member of the Royal Society, who described metaphors in the following terms:
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Wanton and luxuriant phantasies climbing up into the Bed of Reason, [that] do not only defile it by unchast and illegitimate Embraces, but instead of real conceptions and notices of things impregnate the mind with nothing but Ayeries and Subventaneous [= borne on the wind] Phantasmes.8
Parker clearly saw metaphorical thinking as leading to false and illusory analogies, opposing “real conceptions” to unnatural (“unchast and illegitimate”) associations of ideas arising from unfocused and unbridled imaginations. The numerous objections of colleagues who pointed out to Darwin that there was simply no comparison between what animal breeders did purposefully and by the use of human ingenuity and how mindless Nature herself acted clearly had a long pedigree.

Nevertheless, Darwin initially persisted in claiming a close analogy between the artificial breeding methods of such persons as pigeon-fanciers and the claimed “selection” performed by Nature herself . He was explicit about this claim, stating that he favored the term “natural selection” in order to mark its relation 🙄 to man’s power of selection. Perhaps drawing auxiliary strength from ancient ideas of an active and directive Nature — this being a logic 😉 which we have now lost but a conception which achieved its late flowering by the middle of the 19th century9 — Darwin deposed that Nature, with limitless millennia at her disposal, could do a more comprehensive job of bringing about major physiological changes (and eventually new species) than could human breeders, an idea to which he gave lyrical expression in a famous passage in his Origin of Species:
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It may metaphorically be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation. Even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life. We see nothing of these slow changes in progress, until the hand of time has marked the long lapse of ages, and then so imperfect is our view into long past geological ages, that we only see that the forms of life are now different from what they formerly were.10

It should be noted in the above that the word “metaphorically” was not present in the first edition of 1859. Darwin later added the expression defensively to protect himself from sundry colleagues’ criticisms that he was advancing a covertly theistic conception of the evolutionary process. Not without reason was Darwin’s metaphor of natural selection recently decoded as “an anthropomorphic but superhuman agency, ‘daily and hourly scrutinizing’ all variation, and making intelligent and benevolent decisions like a Paleyan Designer.”11 Or as Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini more pointedly observed, Darwin strove to exorcize all “ghosts in the machine” such as God, selfish genes, or a World Spirit, yet “Mother Nature and other pseudo-agents got away scot free.”12

The Climb-Down

Hence although the Origin purports to offer humankind a fresh, materialist myth to explain the development of earth’s numerous species, that project is subverted by interference from a subtext springing from Darwin’s well-documented cognitive dissonance concerning material and spiritual domains.13 Such an interference explains his boundless faith in what he stated were the
  directive powers of a process which others could see only as being unfathomable and wholly unpredictable (such having been the original meaning of natural selection coined by breeders whose sense was so radically altered by Darwin). For Darwin the powers of natural selection transcended human intelligence to such a degree that he came exceedingly close to imputing to it the capacity for intelligent design. It was only belatedly that he succumbed to colleagues’ numerous objections, conceding in a letter to Charles Lyell,
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Talking of “Natural Selection,” if I had to commence de novo, I would have used natural preservation.14
This was an emendation with enormous consequences. One can understand why Darwin was minded to hold out as long as possible and why he eventually capitulated only under protest. For the letter to Lyell involved a truly fatal concession which, had it been analyzed dispassionately at the time, could (and arguably should) have halted the onward march of Darwinism there and then in the Fall of 1860. As a host of recent studies make clear, the term to which Darwin eventually acquiesced, natural preservation, can by definition only be passive rather than actively productive in the formation of new body parts (let alone whole new species). The Darwinian theory of an advance from organic simplicity to complexity — from microbes to man — must inevitably fall after such a major semantic retreat.


Wanted: A Theory of the Generative

As Steve Laufmann and Howard Glicksman and others have recently pointed out, neo-Darwinism simply has no theory of the generative and therefore no innovative capacity: nothing in Darwin’s theory can account for nontrivial innovations15 and Darwin’s rowing back on that point was fatal to any macromutational claims. As Professor Nick Lane has recently explained,
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It is generally assumed that once simple life has emerged, it gradually evolves into more complex forms, given the right conditions. But that’s not what happens on Earth (…) If simple cells had evolved slowly into more complex ones over billions of years, all kinds of intermediate forms would have existed and some still should. But there are none (…) This means that there is no inevitable trajectory from simple to complex life. Never-ending natural selection, operating on infinite populations of bacteria over millions of years, may never give rise to complexity. Bacteria simply do not have the right architecture.16

So how did speciation occur then? Competent scientists are thrown back on the placeholder terms “fate” or “chance,” such being all too plainly a cover for complete ignorance.17 Fodor and Piatelli-Palmarini are more refreshingly candid:
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“So if Darwin got it wrong, what do you guys think is the mechanism of evolution?” Short answer: we don’t know what the mechanism of evolution is. Nor did Darwin and nor (as far as we can tell) does anybody else.18
The bottom line today appears to be that
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Speciation still remains one of the biggest mysteries in evolutionary biology and the unexamined view of natural selection leading to large-scale innovations is not true.19

No Longer Beyond Question

Such new findings mean that aspects of the Darwinian narrative once accepted as veridical and beyond question can no longer provide the solid pillars of scientific consensus we had once assumed them to constitute. Which does not mean that some 🐒 über-Darwinians will not attempt to cling to old 🙊🙉🙈 certainties. “Evolutionary psychologistSteve Stewart-Williams reaffirmed the notion that micromutation can result in macromutation given a superabundance of time:
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If natural selection can produce small-scale change in the short term, why could it not produce large-scale change in the long term? Unless a compelling example can be found, a sensible default assumption would be that it could and does. And let’s not forget all the indirect evidence (the fossil record, etc.) suggests that species do indeed evolve from other species.20

Both the 😈 “sensible default assumption” to which Stewart-Williams refers and the corroborative fossil evidence are without basis in fact.21 Even the considerably less doctrinaire John A. Moore, despite his attempts to play honest broker between evolutionism and other competing theories, can come up with some eminently contestable verdicts when comparing the relative merits of the two sides:
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Whereas the natural theologians began with the answer — divine creation — and then used the data they had gathered from nature to support the answer they had already decided was true, Darwin began with the data of adaptation and followed them wherever they led.22
That statement is surely incorrect on two counts. As to the point about natural theology, Moore places the cart before the horse since for natural theologians the commitment to a belief in God represents the inference to the best explanation provided by Nature itself (not the other way round) . As to Darwin following the data in the direction the data prompted, this too is very wide of the mark (pace Darwin’s virtue-signaling protestations to be working on “Baconian principles”). From the start Darwin hoped that the natural selection postulate would revive the flailing evolutionary project initiated by his grandfather, 👿 Erasmus Darwin, by 📚 supplying it with some semblance of empirical, properly quantifiable support. He experienced his Eureka moment on reading demographer Thomas Malthus on populations because, hallowed as it was by notions of social-science testability, it was seized upon as a confirmation of the grandpaternal program 🤦‍♂️. Natural selection became a veritable deus ex machina to provide a (claimed) mechanism or vera causa to 😈 justify the idea of evolution developed by Erasmus alongside sundry 18th-century French “transmutationists.”

The Forging of a Secular Myth

Had not Charles come to the rescue, there are grounds for supposing that the grandfather’s ideas might have withered on the vine for lack of support and so fallen into neglect in later 19th-century Europe. That which Erasmus termed the transmutation of species was a subject which had already exercised a group of 18th-century French thinkers to whom history refers collectively as “les philosophes.” This group had toyed with the idea of animal types, over vast tracts of time, being liable to experience change in their physical morphology. Julien Offray de la Mettrie, in his L’Homme Machine (1747), argued that all animal forms had emerged from previous forms, so that the earthworm might be expected to transmute in time to become a considerably larger and more complex animal. Often such speculations became airy (even Charles complained that Erasmus’s speculations were without empirical foundation) and could even tend towards the physiologically 🐵 illiterate. Such was the case when Denis Diderot, mooting in his D’Alembert’s Dream (1769) the possibility of a creature evolving through habitual functioning into another form of life altogether, toyed with the bizarre idea that those humans not required to perform manual labor might eventually become just heads . Not surprisingly, such fantasies were destined to become mal vu, even in France.

In the midst of what others not unreasonably saw as the eccentric musings of a small, self-referential côterie, it became clear that what was required was the identification of a causal underpinning or mechanism which might prove the somewhat counterintuitive phenomenon of physiological evolution alleged by the group. Since that theory had been greeted with considerable skepticism by the generality of people, it was vital to be able to point to the supposed
“scientific” credentials of natural selection
. Only in that way would it be possible to rescue the idea of evolution from the scorn and ultimately the oblivion to which it was heading before 1859. Hence for Darwin the postulate of natural selection had to be true if he were to keep faith with and support the great evolutionary project initiated by his brilliant grandfather, 😒 👿 Erasmus. It was anything but the case of his dispassionately following the evidence ✨ in the direction 👨‍🔬 it ☝🏻 led him. Rather, the analogical thinking that that had encouraged Darwin to map the biological domain onto that of sociology led to an intellectual mirage masking his theory’s dearth of 👨‍🔬🔬 data-based foundations.

Only time will tell whether the idea of evolution itself, which natural selection was meant to support, will endure now that so many scientists are “coming out” to express doubts about natural selection as traditionally glossed. As Michael Ruse recently pointed out, natural selection cannot actually select and is better understood as a score-recording statistic than as a “true cause”:
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Natural selection is simply keeping score, as does the Dow Jones [Industrial] Average. The Dow Jones does not make things (cause things to) happen. It is just statistics about what did happen.23

Natural selection reveals itself as not just a metaphor but a mixed one: Nature being dumb but nevertheless capable of discrimination. It is a poetic concept rather than a scientific one, appealing more to emotional and aesthetic sensibilities than to reason. Denuded of the “cover” provided by natural selection as the motive factor to explain evolution, the broader subject of evolution itself once again becomes as enigmatic to us as it was to our Victorian forbears. Now as in 1858 evolution remains the “mystery of mysteries.”
https://evolutionnews.org/2023/03/natural-selection-the-evolution-of-a-mirage/



Notes

1. John A. Moore, From Genesis to Genetics: The Case of Evolution and Creationism (Berkeley: California UP, 2002), pp. 55-6.

2. “Teleology: the explanation that bedevils biology,” in Explanations: Styles of Explanation in Science, ed. John Cornwell (Oxford: OUP, 2004), pp. 143-155, citation p. 147.

3. See James Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies: A Study of the Protestant Struggle to Come to Terms with Darwin in Great Britain and America 1870-1900 (Cambridge: CUP, 1981).

4. As Sandor Gliboff noted of Darwin’s somewhat protean conceptions, “Darwin’s theory has appeared in many variations (…) Even Darwin’s closest early supporters, such as Wallace, Hooker, Lyell or Gray, differed so much in their interpretations and applications of it that it has been impossible from the outset to identify a single version”; see H. G. Bronn, Ernst Haeckel and the Origins of German Darwinism: A Study in Translation and Transformation (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2008), p. 202.

5. See Maud Bodkin, Archetypal Patterns in Poetry [1927] (New York: Vintage, 1958).

6. Misia Landau, Narratives of Human Evolution (Yale: Yale UP, 1993).

7. Andrew S. Reynolds, Metaphors in the Life Sciences (Cambridge: CUP, 2022), p. 89.

8. Cited by Reynolds, Metaphors in the Life Sciences (as above), p. 2.

9. On the longevity of the semi-deified Natura concept see Barbara Newman, God and the Goddesses: Visions, Poetry and Belief in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania UP, 2003). Newman pointed out that the 19th century was the last great age of Nature’s literary “career” where she was given a strong lease on life by many of the poets whom Darwin himself read, such as Wordsworth and Tennyson. There was even a quasi-Spinozan tendency among some of the Romantics, Wordsworth especially, to “merge Nature with Nature’s God” (pp. 52, 137).

10. Origin of Species, Gillian Beer, ed. (Oxford: OUP, 2008), p. 66.

11. Sander Gliboff, H. G. Bronn, Ernst Haeckel and the Origins of German Darwinism: A Study in Translation and Transformation (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2008), p. 136. The same point had already been made a century earlier by Bishop Wilberforce and by the leading light of the Oxford Movement of the 1840s, Edward Bouverie Pusey, as the chronicler of English thought, Basil Willey, once made clear: “This same metaphysical unawareness led him also, almost without noticing it, to replace the absent God with a latent personification of Nature, or even of ‘Natural Selection’ itself. True, he catches himself out from time to time, and warns us that he is only speaking metaphorically when he talks of Natural Selection ‘observing minutely,’ ‘with unerring tact discovering each improvement for further perfecting,’ and so forth. But he returns so habitually to that way of speaking, that we feel Pusey to be right in accusing Darwin of having introduced, into the theological vacuum he had created, a power acting according to design (Darwin and Butler: Two Versions of Evolution [London: Chatto and Windus, 1960], p. 30).

12. What Darwin Got Wrong (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), p. 163.

13. Of which one of the best accounts remains Neal C. Gillespie’s Charles Darwin and the Problem of Creation (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1979).

14. Letter to Charles Lyell, September 1860. https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-2935.xml

15. Steve Laufmann and Howard Glicksman, Your Designed Body (Seattle: Discovery, 2022), p. 370.

16. Nick Lane, “Lucky to Be There,” in Michael Brooks, ed., Chance: The Science and Secrets of Luck, Randomness and Probability (London: Profile/New Scientist, 2015), pp. 22-33, citations pp. 28, 32.

17. “Surprisingly, natural selection may have little role to play in one of the key steps of evolution — the origin of new species. Instead it would appear that speciation is merely an accident of fate” (Bob Holmes, “The accident of species,” in Michael Brooks, Chance (as above), pp. 33-42, here p. 33.

18. What Darwin Got Wrong (as in note 12), p. xiv.

19. Bob Holmes, “The Accident of Species” in Michael Brooks, ed., Chance (as above), pp. 34-5.

20. Stewart-Williams, Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life (Cambridge: CUP, 2010), p. 34.

21. The contention leaves out of account the insuperable difficulty of the species barrier. Furthermore, had the fossil evidence been supportive of Darwin there would have been no justification for Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge to advance their influential punctuated equilibrium theory a half century ago.

22. From Genesis to Genetics (as in note 1), p. 56.

23. Michael Ruse, Understanding Natural Selection (Cambridge: CUP, 2023), p. 133. For a fully technical discussion of the “statisticalist” point of view see Charles Pence, The Causal Structure of Natural Selection (Cambridge: CUP, 2021), especially pp. 8-11.
https://evolutionnews.org/2023/03/natural-selection-the-evolution-of-a-mirage/
« Last Edit: March 20, 2023, 12:09:27 am by AGelbert »
So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. Matthew 7:12

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« Last Edit: March 15, 2023, 08:58:21 pm by AGelbert »
So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. Matthew 7:12

AGelbert

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New Peer-Reviewed Paper Challenges Neo-Darwinism
« Reply #59 on: March 23, 2023, 06:58:25 pm »
March 15, 2023, 12:03 PM

New Peer-Reviewed Paper Challenges Neo-Darwinism

SNIPPETS:

"It is our perspective that the burden is too great for survival of the fittest to select evolutionary changes that accomplish all evolutionary novelty. Thus, evolution lacks a sufficient mechanism for multifactorial selections because a process that looks forward, is nonrandom, deterministic, or occurs by an unknown biological process, is required. The position of mainstream biologists regarding this aspect of evolution is that nature is always non-purposeful and, therefore, the proposed selection (process, force, tendency), could not possibly be natural (scientific). However, our perspective is that this is a supposition of necessity rather than an established principle. Logic demands that it be open to investigation. This first requires an openness to ideas and science must be open to new ideas. " ... ...

"Realistic probability calculations based on probabilities associated with microevolution are presented. However, macroevolution (required for all speciation events and the complexifications appearing in the Cambrian explosion) are shown to be probabilistically highly implausible (on the order of 10-50 ) when based on selection by survival of the fittest. We conclude that macroevolution via survival of the fittest is not salvageable by arguments for random genetic drift and other proposed mechanisms." ... ...

“We are critical, as previously explained, of the position that macroevolution is sufficiently explained by the processes useful for microevolution — in particular that mutations and survival of the fittest are adequate to the task,” and argue that “Microevolution does not explain speciation — only smaller changes.

Read more: 👨‍🔬🔬🧐
« Last Edit: March 23, 2023, 07:19:27 pm by AGelbert »
So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. Matthew 7:12