History, Evolution, and the Darwin Debate
Darwin, the dead scientist,’ failed to impress
By Dave Obee, Times ColonistFebruary 9, 2010
Oh, how times have changed. Not that long ago, Charles Darwin just couldn’t get any respect. This week, his work will be remembered around the world. We will even celebrate Darwin Day here in Victoria.
The inflation bomb and Charles Darwin
Part of the endless damage done by Darwinism is the way it confuses economic reasoning/
Darwin’s theory is false, and does not show the mechanism of evolution
Interview With Granville Sewell
Q. The Darwin debate is usually fought in terms set by biology, chemistry and paleontology. What’s special or unique about a mathematician’s view on intelligent design that might make his opinion of equal or greater interest compared to a biologist’s?
A. I wouldn’t argue that a mathematician’s view is of greater interest, but I do think we have something to contribute, and that is the broader view that seems to be missed by many biologists, perhaps because they are too close to the details. And although I am not a biologist, I have been reading and writing on topics related to evolution and design for some 30 years now, so I am pretty familiar with the main issues. In any case, my book is not only about biological evolution, it also deals with the Big Bang, the fine-tuning of the laws of physics, quantum mechanics, and even design in mathematics.
Evolution Impacts Environment: Fundamental Shift in How Biologists Perceive Relationship Between Evolution and Ecology
Small Insect With a Big Heart: ‘Giving’ Aphids Endangered by Their Selflessness
ScienceDaily (Feb. 8, 2010) — One of the founding principles of Darwin’s theory is that biological evolution has been shaped by the survival of the fittest. Things, however, are not always that simple as researchers from Royal Holloway, University of London have discovered while analysing the social behaviour of aphids.
Like Escape Artists, Rotifers Elude Enemies by Drying Up and — Poof! — They Are Gone With the Wind
ScienceDaily (Feb. 8, 2010) — They haven’t had sex in some 30 million years, but some very small invertebrates named bdelloid rotifers are still shocking biologists — they should have gone extinct long ago. Cornell researchers have discovered the secret to their evolutionary longevity: these rotifers are microscopic escape artists. When facing pathogens, they dry up and are promptly gone with the wind.
More Doubts About Primordial Soup
You were probably taught in high school biology class that life arose from a primordial soup–the twentieth century’s rendition of Darwin’s “warm little pond.” Most textbooks show pictorial-type drawings of the early earth as a dynamic environment, full of activity. Sunlight is beaming through the clouds with its all important energy-bearing ultra violet rays; rain is pouring down as lightning strikes bring more needed energy to the surface; volcanic activity creates hot spots with yet more energy and a few stray comets might be seen bringing their organic chemicals to seed the life-giving processes. The evolution machine is revving up its engines. Another figure might have illustrated an experimental arrangement mimicking those early-earth conditions. A primordial soup of various organic compounds brewed as sparks were set off in a gaseous mixture above steaming water. There’s only one problem: it doesn’t work.
Bees Recognize Human Faces Using Feature Configuration
ScienceDaily (Feb. 8, 2010) — Going about their day-to-day business, bees have no need to be able to recognise human faces. Yet in 2005, when Adrian Dyer from Monash University trained the fascinating insects to associate pictures of human faces with tasty sugar snacks, they seemed to be able to do just that. But Martin Giurfa from the Université de Toulouse, France, suspected that that the bees weren’t learning to recognise people.
Evolution: Fighting the Wrong Battle
Posted: 08 Feb 2010 09:26 AM PST
The debate over evolution is often portrayed as the battle between science and religion, or faith vs. reason. This clever ploy paints evolutionists as warriors for logic and sanity whose sole opponent is blind belief in a higher power. No one could doubt evolution for any other reason, evolutionists insinuate or flat-out proclaim. But the real battle for evolution, the one its proponents studiously avoid, is the evidence itself. Anytime someone points out a flaw in the evidence for evolution, diehard evolutionists respond with a non-answer—usually an angry personal attack on the person pointing out the flaw. This is an evasion tactic, and one evolutionists have practiced for quite some time. To take the heat off the evidence, and the need to defend evolutionary theories, evolutionists simply avoid the discussion altogether.
They are fighting the wrong battle—on purpose.
Evolution – the Extended Synthesis
Edited by Massimo Pigliucci and Gerd B. Müller
We already commented on this today: this is apparently the book promised by the Altenberg 16 conference (almost two years ago!) and, while it looks interesting, I have very little faith that these so-called dissenters from Darwinism are going to really do anything more than jawbone a compliant (and intimidated) public into just enough verbiage to make it look like something has changed.
What a disappointment, after covering this story for two years. I should note that the effort to do so has shown me a few things, among them the priestly snobbery of the scientific assholes who think it their right and duty to enforce reductionist scientism on humanity. I fear the Altenberg 16 are in the same class (try communicating with such people, almost impossible. You must be part of the in-group to even exchange an email with such types. That’s a sign they are afraid of dissenters, and of the wish to talk remotely to a public made to submit)
Don’t let it happen that another ‘Paradigm’ gets enforced on the subject of evolution (and that certainly includes the Intelligent Design junk )
Call the bluff of these ’scientists’: they have no real understanding of what evolution is, let alone how it works.
The reason for my frustration is the realization that those trained in science and part of the science establishment will never be able to break out of their mindset.
Consider the issue of the fact/value distinction. All the king’s horses and all the king’s scientists are unable to produce a theory of evolution that does justice to this distinction. So we will get another false set of mechanical explanations which fail to grapple with the deep mystery of evolution and the way that it generates the immensity field of life.
Further, none of the real problems with the evolution discourse will reach public discourse, issues such as Social Darwinism, ideology and theory, economic propaganda disguised as evolution, etc, etc,…
I always point to the eonic effect as a snapshot of what the real problem is and what is required for a true theory of evolution, beyond the primitive junk that passes for evolutionary theory.
Check it out: it is not another theory, but a look at the endresult of evolution turning into human history. It shows us what a real theory must do, and that is beyond the capacity of current science.
And, as noted, science now in motion can’t address the simplest task, the fact/value distinction. That this prevents any theory at all is quite forgotten.
Don’t fall for the science snowjob on evolution. This pack of wannabes holds a weak deuce behind the science bluff. Evolution is a complex mystery, and not even properly observed.
The idea of an Extended Synthesis suggests the establishment is going to substitute FACTOR X for natural selection (self-organization is one candidate), and call that a paradigm shift. It is just a change of terminology, in the same way that ‘intelligent design’ is a change of terminology. Note how you can often simply substitute the terms into the same paragraphs. Self-organization, intelligent design, to replace natural selection in the bullshitters routines called evolutionary theory.
Such a statement is a little unfair. After all, self-organization is a valid idea attempting to move beyond random chance to provide a ‘force of evolution’. So we can remain open here even as we stand back entirely suspicious, since the real fundamentals are always being extracted out of explanation in the name of science.
Anyway, this book will be worth reading. But let’s not let another con job get put over on us.
Darwinism was a con job, please. That’s all it was.
Mysterious Drumbeat: just observing evolution over a short range is an immense project. Darwinism is based on not looking at the actual situations of evolution.
The idea of an ‘extended synthesis’ is going to be POISON II, as Darwinism was POISON I, unless scientists stand back and renounce cheap theoretical ambitions based on reductionism.
The real complexity of evolution, albeit here the historical/human brand, is an order of magnitude more complex than the smart-stupid cadre of scientists, ambitious to control culture with a religion of science, can ever hope to grasp.
We need to operate defensively so that these science thugs are effectively disarmed from fake theories used as ideology.
This book sounds interesting, but with all due respect we don’t need an extended synthesis. The whole idea smacks of a tricky compromise to make the establishment look good even as they try to fix their disastrous legacy.
The Altenberg 16 will surely be the same set of schmucks we have seen in abundance defending Darwinism.
The Altenberg 16 is a book by Suzan Mazur.
The book cited here may be the promised book re: the conference of the Altenberg 16:
Enezio E. de Almeida Filho said,
February 8, 2010 at 6:06 am ·
MIT will publish it in 2010:http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=12173
from the link source:
Evolution – the Extended Synthesis
Edited by Massimo Pigliucci and Gerd B. MüllerIn the six decades since the publication of Julian Huxley’s Evolution: The Modern Synthesis, spectacular empirical advances in the biological sciences have been accompanied by equally significant developments within the core theoretical framework of the discipline. As a result, evolutionary theory today includes concepts and even entire new fields that were not part of the foundational structure of the Modern Synthesis. In this volume, sixteen leading evolutionary biologists and philosophers of science survey the conceptual changes that have emerged since Huxley’s landmark publication, not only in such traditional domains of evolutionary biology as quantitative genetics and paleontology but also in such new fields of research as genomics and EvoDevo.
Most of the contributors to Evolution—The Extended Synthesis accept many of the tenets of the classical framework but want to relax some of its assumptions and introduce significant conceptual augmentations of the basic Modern Synthesis structure—just as the architects of the Modern Synthesis themselves expanded and modulated previous versions of Darwinism. This continuing revision of a theoretical edifice the foundations of which were laid in the middle of the nineteenth century—the reexamination of old ideas, proposals of new ones, and the synthesis of the most suitable—shows us how science works, and how scientists have painstakingly built a solid set of explanations for what Darwin called the “grandeur” of life.
Contributors: John Beatty, Werner Callebaut, Jeremy Draghi, Chrisantha Fernando, Sergey Gavrilets, John C. Gerhart, Eva Jablonka, David Jablonski, Marc W. Kirschner, Marion J. Lamb, Alan C. Love, Gerd B. Müller, Stuart A. Newman, John Odling-Smee, Massimo Pigliucci, Michael Purugganan, Eörs Szathmáry, Günter P. Wagner, David Sloan Wilson, Gregory A. Wray
About the Editors
Massimo Pigliucci is Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York.
Gerd B. Müller is Professor of Theoretical Biology at the University of Vienna and Chairman of the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research. He is a coeditor of Origination of Organismal Form (MIT Press, 2003) and Modeling Biology (MIT Press, 2007).
Blind Watchmaker?
Clive Hayden
I wonder if Richard Dawkins actually knows any watchmaker. No actual horologist would take his notion of the Blind Watchmaker seriously in accounting for complexity, even as an analogy.
A blind watchmaker is still a potential designer of no mean capacity!
A conversation with Richard Dawkins
Roger Bingham – thesciencenetwork
from dawkins site
http://thesciencenetwork.org/programs/the-science-studio/richard-dawkins-1
Evolution on the march
New DNA findings show that human genetic mutations are more recent, more rapid than once thought.
By Faye Flam
Conventional wisdom holds that if you could bring back someone from 40,000 years ago, he or she would blend perfectly well with today’s population.
After all, the fossils show that our ancestors were “anatomically modern” by 100,000 years ago, and by 40,000 B.C., they were creating complex tools and art.
It was easy to assume our species hadn’t evolved much since then.
Now molecular biology is overturning that assumption.
Charles Darwin was a genius (I think)
Darwin, once he got the point from plagiarizing Wallace, started filling in the blanks for a lot of easy secondary deductions.
Oh, no. Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini have written a book and opinion piece in which they try to claim that natural selection is a dying concept, and what do they use to justify that outrageous claim? Evo devo!
I am delighted!
I must be getting through to someone. I have said for years that Darwinists concealed the counterevidence to Darwinian NS in the evo-devo findings. Perhaps Fodor and PP’s book will set the record straight.
The ID group will no doubt pilfer this critique and make it their own, blended with ID confusions.
Did Bacteria Developed Into More Complex Cells Much Earlier in Evolution Than Thought?
ScienceDaily (Feb. 8, 2010) — Monash University biochemists have found a critical piece in the evolutionary puzzle that explains how life on Earth evolved millions of centuries ago.
Comment on Never Trust The Darwin Establishment
Jim Buck said,
February 7, 2010 at 5:02 pm ·
Prior to the industrial revolution, scarcity of resources was the limiting factor on Christian charity. The vast wealth created by the satanic mills of industrial England, had the potential to remove all constraints on love–that was the real spectre haunting Europe (communism was love’s profane shadow). Little wonder then, that a new God, preferrably bearded, was sought: a God whose tools of creation were death and starvation, not breath and light. The wealthy English had already sat and watched millions of Irish starve; and by the end of the 19th Century the body count was vastly increased, in India and in China.
The liberal-capitalist elite still needs its Victorian bearded God. So I think obsequies for Darwin are more than a tad premature. In Lacanian terms: Darwin is the ‘Nom du père’ and survival of the fittest is the ‘law of the father’. The nomenclature of the Darwinian paradigm function as master-signifiers which hold mass psychosis at bay. The danger is that the caterpillar’s marching feet will become the butterfly’s double-axe.
This has been my fear, that the ideology behind Darwinism is too important for certain powerful social factions to die away easily. Look at the Dawkins (based on Hamilton’s extreme brand of the subject) and the way he rescued the Ideology just as it was threatened with a paradigm shift.
We will see.
The problem the Establishment has is the increasing awareness there is a problem.
Two links on What Darwin Got Wrong, What Darwin got wrong, what will Fodor & P/P get wrong? (to maintain the evolution monopoly)
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More on What Darwin Got Wrong: the danger of theories
It has taken so long for the academic establishment to produce a book critiquing Darwin that you would do well to mistrust the critique and ask, why now?, and be wary of what is promoted as the next paradigm. I am not sure just what has driven Fodor et al to this: among other things this blog over five years has blasted Darwinists. I predicted long ago that the Internet would facilitate a paradigm shift but the ID gang took over ‘critique’ for their own propaganda and made it look like all critics were religious. That has slowed the paradigm shift down.
Second, real critics can’t have anything to do with the establishment, like me, but that makes life difficult. Noone will listen unless you are an ASSHOLE with a PHD or some club credentials.
Clearly Fodor and P/P have the ASSHOLE credentials, but we can be sure they will pull their punches at some point.
It was always known that Darwin’s theory wouldn’t work. Developmentalists always wondered how Darwin got away with such an oversimplification. Even Huxley tended to that view, the main defender of Darwin!
Just what good will the Fodor/PP book do?
Keep in mind that Darwin’s theory of natural selection was clearly criticized by Soren Lovtrup in his Darwinism: Refutation of a Myth in the seventies, in Denton’s Evolution: A Theory In Crisis in the eighties, and in Robert Wesson’s Beyond Natural Selection in the nineties.
So it is not as if there wasn’t some inkling that something was awry long ago. It is all a propaganda game, but now the point is arriving at which the establishment will look foolish or corrupt if they don’t expose Darwin themselves, with no acknowledgement that anyone outside their clique had anything to say.
The question is simple: expose Darwinian selectionism and don’t let any gang of science types hype the issue all over again. That is already under way with the Altenberg 16 group and various promoters of self-organization theoreis. Stuart Kauffman already has several books on self-org theories.
All interesting stuff but it won’t do what’s needed.
There is no theory out there that is hype free that can answer to a theory of evolution in closed form.
We see the evidence of evolution, and can explain certain aspects. But a general theory of evolution will not prove likely. So don’t be fooled again.
NEVER trust the Darwin establishment. They will will try to produce another fake theory like Darwin’s.
The fastest way to see the real complexity of evolution (human especially) is to look at the eonic effect. That will cure you of the instant theory syndrome.
The solution is to track evolutionary sequences in time and try to close in as much as you can, without foisting theories on the evidence.
Try that with the eonic effect and you will begin to get a sense of what evolution is really like. That’s all you can do.
Jim Buck said,
February 7, 2010 at 3:49 am ·
I posted this on whyevolutionistrue:“Occam” chastises Mary Midgley for supposed poorness of scholarship, simply because she references the English edition of Monad’s book! A reasonable person would see that it is reasonable to do that, in an English language newspaper. But if Occam is interested in prosecuting someone who actually did confuse dates, with malign intent, he needs to read this:
http://www.darwin-conspiracy.co.uk/
The link is to Roy Davies’ The Darwin Conspiracy, on Darwin’s plagiarism from Wallace. BTW, the book is online: see the page and link on the sidebar here.
What Darwin Got Wrong by Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli Palmarini
Darwin is under fire again, but Mary Midgley feels that his ideas have been misrepresented
Darwin was a shifty-eyed faker, and he often danced around his critics with clever changes in his claims, even becoming a neo-Lamarckian at times.
This book What Darwin Got Wrong is hopefully the coup de grace for the great Synthesis, or at least some acknowledgement from the academic world that there is a problem with Darwin’s theory.
What should take its place?? NOTHING! Please, no more evolution paradigms from those who brought us the Darwin propaganda machine. None of these people can be trusted.
A real perspective on evolution would be too complex for these idiots, whose ‘keep it simple’ strategy is designed to be dumbed down to succeed with a dumb public.
This book is, of course, fighting stuff, sure to be contested by those at whom it is aimed. On the face of things, however, it strikes an outsider as an overdue and valuable onslaught on neo-Darwinist simplicities. (The one thing I would complain of is the title, which is perhaps too personal. This isn’t just a point about Darwin; it’s a point about the nature of life.) As the authors note, the traditional story has been defended by extending it – by widening the notion of natural selection to include some of these internal processes. But they think – surely rightly – that this device merely adds epicycles which kill the doctrine by diluting it. The long process of repeated trials and errors which has always been claimed as a central feature of natural selection cannot be incorporated in this way.
If we now ask what will take its place, their answer is that this question does not arise. There is not – and does not have to be – any single, central mechanism of evolution. There are many such mechanisms, which all need to be investigated on their own terms. If one finds this kind of position reasonable, the interesting next question is, what has made it so hard to accept? What has kept this kind of dogmatic “Darwinism” – largely independent of its founder – afloat for so long, given that much of the material given here is by no means new?
The explanation for this might be the seductive myth that underlies it. That myth had its roots in Victorian social Darwinism but today it flows largely from two books – Jacques Monod’s Chance and Necessity (1971) and Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene (1976). Both these books, of course, contain lots of good and necessary biological facts. But what made them bestsellers was chiefly the sensational underlying picture of human life supplied by their rhetoric and especially their metaphors. This drama showed heroic, isolated individuals contending, like space warriors, alone against an alien and meaningless cosmos. It established the books as a kind of bible of individualism, most congenial to the Reaganite and Thatcherite ethos of the 80s. Monod first showed humans in Existentialist style as aliens – “gypsies” in a foreign world – and, by expanding the role of chance in evolution, concluded that our life was essentially a “casino”. Dawkins added personal drama by describing a population of genes which – quite unlike the real ones inside us – operate as totally independent agents and can do as they please. It is no great surprise that these images caught on, nor that they can now persist whether or not the doctrines linked to them turn out to be scientific.
Mary Midgley’s Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature is published by Routledge.