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Skip to comments.Darwin's Doubt
Posted on 07/16/2013 11:44:20 AM PDT by Heartlander
Darwins Doubt, the brand new New York Times bestseller by Cambridge-trained Ph.D., Stephen Meyer, is creating a major scientific controversy. Darwinists dont like it.
Meyer writes about the complex history of new life forms in an easy to understand narrative style. He takes the reader on a journey from Darwin to today while trying to discover the best explanation for how the first groups of animals arose. He shows, quite persuasively, that Darwinian mechanisms dont have the power to do the job.
Using the same investigative forensic approach Darwin used over 150 years ago, Meyer investigates the central doubt Darwin had about his own theory. Namely, that the fossil record did not contain the rainbow of intermediate forms that his theory of gradual evolutionary change required. However, Darwin predicted that future discoveries would confirm his theory.
Meyer points out that they havent. Weve thoroughly searched the fossil record since Darwin and confirmed what Darwin originally saw himself: the discontinuous, abrupt appearance of the first forms of complex animal life. In fact, paleontologists now think that roughly 20 of the 28 animal phyla (representing distinct animal body plans) found in the fossil record appear abruptly without ancestors in a dramatic geological event called the Cambrian Explosion.
And additional discoveries since Darwin have made it even worse for his theory. Darwin didnt know about DNA or the digital information it contains that makes life possible. He couldnt have appreciated, therefore, that building new forms of animal life would require millions of new characters of precisely sequenced codethat the Cambrian explosion was a massive explosion of new information.
For modern neo-Darwinism to survive, there must be an unguided natural mechanism that can create the genetic information and then add to it massively, accurately and within the time allowed by the fossil record. Is there such a mechanism?
The answer to that question is the key to Meyers theory and entire book. Meyer shows that the standard neo-Darwinian mechanism of mutation and natural selection mechanism lacks the creative power to produce the information necessary to produce new forms of animal life. He also reviews the various post-Darwinian speculations that evolutionary biologists themselves are now proposing to replace the crumbling Darwinian edifice. None survive scrutiny. Not only is there no known natural mechanism that can create the new information required for new life forms, there is no known natural mechanism that can create the genetic code for the first life either (which was the subject of Meyers previous book Signature in the Cell).
When Meyer suggests that an intelligent designer is the best explanation for the evidence at hand, critics accuse him of being anti-scientific and endangering sexual freedom everywhere (OK, they dont explicitly state that last part). They also claim that Meyer commits the God of the gaps fallacy.
But he does not. As Meyer points out, hes not interpreting the evidence based on what we dont know, but what we do know. The geologically sudden appearance of fully formed animals and millions of lines of genetic information point to intelligence. That is, we dont just lack a materialistic explanation for the origin of information. We have positive evidence from our uniform and repeated experience that another kind of causenamely, intelligence or mindis capable of producing digital information. Thus, he argues that the explosion of information in the Cambrian period provides evidence of this kind of cause acting in the history of animal life. (Much like any sentence written by one of Meyers critics is positive evidence for an intelligent being).
This inference from the data is no different than the inference archaeologists made when they discovered the Rosetta Stone. It wasnt a gap in their knowledge about natural forces that led them to that conclusion, but the positive knowledge that inscriptions require intelligent inscribers.
Of course, any critic could refute Meyers entire thesis by demonstrating how natural forces or mechanisms can generate the genetic information necessary to build the first life and then massive new amounts of genetic information necessary for new forms of animal life. But they cant and hardly try without assuming what they are trying to prove (see Chapter 11). Instead, critics attempt to smear Meyer by claiming hes doing pseudo science or not doing science at all.
Well, if Meyer isnt, doing science, then neither was Darwin (or any Darwinist today). Meyer is using the same forensic or historical scientific method that Darwin himself used. Thats all that can be used. Since these are historical questions, a scientist cant go into the lab to repeat and observe the origin and history of life. Scientists must evaluate the clues left behind and then make an inference to the best explanation. Does our repeated experience tell us that natural mechanisms have the power to create the effects in question or is intelligence required?
Meyer writes, Neo-Darwinism and the theory of intelligent design are not two different kinds of inquiry, as some critics have asserted. They are two different answersformulated using a similar logic and method of reasoningto the same question: What caused biological forms and the appearance of design in the history of life?
The reason Darwinists and Meyer arrive at different answers is not because theres a difference in their scientific methods, but because Meyer and other Intelligent Design proponents dont limit themselves to materialistic causes. They are open to intelligent causes as well (just like archaeologists and crime scene investigators are).
So this is not a debate about evidence. Everyone is looking at the same evidence. This is a debate about how to interpret the evidence, and that involves philosophical commitments about what causes will be considered possible before looking at the evidence. If you philosophically rule out intelligent causes beforehandas the Darwinists doyou will never arrive at the truth if an intelligent being actually is responsible.
Since all evidence needs to be interpreted, science doesnt actually say anythingscientists do. So if certain self-appointed priests of science say that a particular theory is outside the bounds of their own scientific dogma, that doesnt mean that the theory is false. The issue is truthnot whether something fits a materialistic definition of science.
Im sure Darwinists will continue to throw primordial slime at Meyer and his colleagues. But that wont make a dent in his observation that whenever we see information like that required to produce the Cambrian Explosion, intelligence is always the cause. In fact, I predict that when open-minded people read Darwins Doubt, theyll see that Dr. Meyer makes a very intelligently designed case that intelligent design is actually true. Its just too bad that many Darwinists arent open to that truththey arent even open minded enough to doubt Darwin as much as Darwin himself was.
If Quantum Mechanics was around in Darwin's time and if he had studied it, he would know evolution not to be gradual and that every once in a while a rare combination of mutations would lead to the quantum leap.
In quantum mechanics, an electron in your body has the possiblility (extremely unlikely possibility) of making the quantum leap and suddenly appearing on the moon.
And for the creationist, quantum mechanics is as near a proven fact as you can get, it is close to 2+2 =4. (Actually in a quantum universe 2+2 only comes vanishingly close to equalling 4 due to quantum fluctations.)
In fact, all semiconductor technology depends on quantum mechanics being true.
Even the well-respected scientific journal Nature had an article earlier this year that states that in the face of recent discoveries in molecular and cell biology, we do NOT understand the basic mechanisms of evolution!!!!
Oh, Boy . . . here we go.
Personal attack is a confession of intellectual poverty.
If there are six days so far, the instance of an organism arising from a random mutation then going through a full life cycle in order to generate offspring --in our reference frame of billions of years-- would be how long on the six day chart from God's perspective? Wow, now THAT is intelligent design, to make those momentary adjustments via random mutations!
Need to read later.
You're using the popular trope 'quantum leap' to mean a sudden and dramatic change; that's not the meaning of the term in QM. A quantum leap is usually the smallest possible change in the state of a particle.
Isn't a quantum difference very tiny?
Darwin's original theory is about slow continuous change. Quantum theory is about discontinuity.
quantum fluctuations are tiny from our point of view.
of course from the point of view from an electron quantum fluctuations are giagantic.
from an organism viewpoint, a genetic mutation is tiny
from the viewpoint of a chromosome, a genetic mutation is huge.
Thanks for the ping!
I like Schroeder. Hes interesting, and has as good a theory as any. So far as I know. Admittedly, I dont know much.
The Darwinian Mullahs dont like him, which is an additional recommendation, as far as Im concerned.
With respect to the issue of Intelligent Design, I also very much appreciate the writings of our Founding Fathers. Case in point:
In a letter to John Adams, dated April 11, 1823, Thomas Jefferson endorses the idea of a beginning and of design.
The argument which they [the philosopher disciples of Ocellus, Timaeus, Spinosa, Diderot and D'Holbach] rest on as triumphant and unanswerable is, that in every hypothesis of cosmogony, you must admit an eternal pre-existence of something; and according to the rule of sound philosophy, you are never to employ two principles to solve a difficulty when one will suffice. They say then, that it is more simple to believe at once in the eternal pre-existence of the world, as it is now going on, and may forever go on by the principle of reproduction which we see and witness, than to believe in the eternal pre-existence of an ulterior cause, or Creator of the world, a Being whom we see not and know not, of whose form, substance and mode, or place of existence, or of action, no sense informs us, no power of the mind enables us to delineate or comprehend.
(Jefferson succinctly sums up an argument that was ongoing into my twenties)
On the contrary, I hold, (without appeal to revelation) that when we take a view of the universe, in its parts, general or particular, it is impossible for the human mind not to perceive and feel a conviction of design, consummate skill, and indefinite power in every atom of its composition. . The movements of the heavenly bodies, so exactly held in their course by the balance of centrifugal and centripetal forces; the structure of our earth itself, with its distribution of lands, waters and atmosphere; animal and vegetable bodies, examined in all their minutest particles; insects, mere atoms of life, yet as perfectly organized as man or mammoth; the mineral substances, their generation and uses; it is impossible, I say, for the human mind not to believe, that there is in all this, design, cause and effect, up to an ultimate cause, a Fabricator of all things from matter and motion, their Preserver and Regulator while permitted to exist in their present forms, and their regeneration into new and other forms.
(Amazingly, by some 140 years Jefferson anticipates the detection of the radiation background proving In the beginning.)
We see, too, evident proofs of the necessity of a superintending power, to maintain the universe in its course and order. Stars, well known, have disappeared, new ones have come into view; comets, in their incalculable courses, may run foul of suns and planets, and require renovation under other laws; certain races of animals are become extinct; and were there no restoring power, all existences might extinguish successively, one by one, until all should be reduced to a shapeless chaos.
So irresistible are these evidences of an intelligent and powerful Agent, that, of the infinite numbers of men who have existed through all time, they have believed, in the proportion of a million at least to unit, in the hypothesis of an eternal pre-existence of a Creator, rather than in that of a self-existent universe. Surely this unanimous sentiment renders this more probable, than that of the few in the other hypothesis.
Thanks for writing.
Someday, when my son and grandkids go through my library deciding who wants what, they will find all the Jefferson materials have a nice crisp two dollar bill as a place marker just inside the front flap. ... I have loved books since my childhood. Both of my grandkids have somehow acquired the same love of books and have always read far beyond their school grade level. Thank you for the ping to the thoughts from Tom.
-From: How "Sudden" Was the Cambrian Explosion?
It seems to me that Neo-Darwinist theory has increasingly come under attack these days, from both inside and outside the scientific communities largely because it does not explain what it purports to explain: the emergence of life (not to mention consciousness, mind) from lifeless, inorganic matter. It also cannot explain the emergence of the vast amount of new information it takes to account for the kind of emergent biological speciation that we observe in the historical record: A low information-source cannot spontaneously transition to a high-information source, all by itself. (IIRC, this is called Kahre's Law.) It should be clear to all objective observers that matter and/or protomatter have drastically less "algorithmic content" (i.e., information) than highly complex biological organisms. So from whence did this astronomically large increase of information that characterizes life and consciousness (mind) "come from?"
People who refuse to address such questions, preferring to swaddle themselves in their precious materialist dogma, are simply following in the footsteps of Karl Marx. After all, all inconvenient questions regarding Marx's "system" are absolutely forbidden as a matter or principle.
And then there's the famous saying of Mao Zedong: Tell a lie a hundred times, and people will think it true.
Thank God, there are still honest scientists out there....
Thanks. Heartlander, for this thought-provoking article!
Doubtful, dear friend and brother in Christ. Ever since the Great Exodus of 2006, there are very few articulate Neo-Darwinists still hanging around FR to "dialogue" with.
More's the pity: We lost some great collaborators with serious scientific credentials back then. But they all left, en masse, in a great huff because "creationists are superstitious morons" and thus not worth their time of day to talk to.
Since then, I've been wondering who the "superstitious morons" actually are. The one thing these dear departed all seemed to agree on is what looks to me like a superstitious, mythical belief in the power of matter to single-handedly bootstrap itself into life and mind, through the alleged power of random variation and natural selection.
It's said that science as we know it today began in alchemy, in magical practices. So, what's so different today, if matter itself transmutes just like "base metals into gold," assuming the proper "magical action" has been invoked?
That is, the supposition here is that the inorganic "evolves" into the organic quite "naturally" by means of the "magical operations" of random mutation and natural selection, against the background of purely materialist presuppositions hooking up with "natural laws." (From whence were they introduced? That is, where did "natural laws," or the (more reductive) laws of physics come from, that a magician can manipulate to get his desired result?)
Oh well.... Let the dreamers dream, I suppose. It seems one cannot wake them up. They simply prefer to stay asleep.
Thanks for the ping, dear brother!
betty: they all left, en masse, in a great huff because "creationists are superstitious morons" and thus not worth their time of day to talk to.
Spirited: Truth is a very bitter pill for proud Darwinists and fellow travelers who in rejecting our Lord, the Divine Source of life and mind and relentlessly ridiculing us as superstitious morons only to belatedly discover that their own position can neither account for conscious life nor soul/spirit.
For over one-hundred years alchemists (materialists) have been combining lifeless chemicals in the vain hope that life would finally emerge. But it hasn't and many materialists are quietly looking to "aliens" from deep-space as the bearers of life who seeded our planet long ago and have been overseeing our evolution ever since. Others are quietly crossing over from physical materialism to mystical materialism (pantheism).
Would you explain what you are saying a little more clearly? Are you saying that material 'pops' into existence every once-in a while? Are you saying that the quantum event comes from nothing or does a quantum event arise from a quantum vacuum with a rich sea of fluctuting electrical activity? And when this quantum event which you reference "pops" into existence, into what space did it pop into at the moment of creation? All of science says just prior to creation space did not exist, nor matter, nor energy. Would you explain the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theory which has disposed of the cosmological argument of a quantum event accounting for the creation of the universe? Thank you.
My point is, we are not likely to be at the definitive level of comprehending the Universe in which quantum mechanical calculations work well as a predictor. Our current conceptualization of time is not so complete that we can claim to have reached the last rung of a long ladder of knowledge.
Question for you: if humankind discover a profound aspect of the Universe regarding the nature of living things as opposed to non-living things that they did not heretofore know about or even predict, will the aspect be any less a Creation of God Who is Author of the Universe?
Oh well.... Let the dreamers dream, I suppose. It seems one cannot wake them up. They simply prefer to stay asleep.
Takes faith to believe in a God you've never seen, actually nobody you know has ever seen..
Takes faith to believe in Darwin's tale of mystical beliefs too..
They don't call their believe religion but it is anyway..
They bought Darwins Tale as thoroughly as any christian bought their tale..
Having faith is a virtue I think....
Darwinism is as religious as Buddism, Hinduism, the Tao, or any version of Christianity.. or even the psuedo religion of Islam.. which is basically a scam..
Talking to a Darwinist is as fruitful as talking to a Jehovas Witness.. they both have bought their versions of things completely.. and adjusted everything to it..
I dont think they ARE asleep... thy are awake.. but have bought the narrative of a tale as completely as anyone in any religion..
You gotta believe something.. Darwin is an option..
They believe that is true as completely as any christian believes in Jesus..
Could be "being human" is all about proving what you are willing to accept as reality..
Accusing Darwinist's of having faith makes for some interesting conversation..
I would only add that faith in Christ is a relationship, beyond just faith, it is faithing, an action word of relationship to a very real being. I personally believe Darwin enumerated an interesting concept of how God does some things. That was no small feat by him. But the human desire to reach some definitive knowledge tempts men to go too far in their speculations, to make assertions before all the data is in. It is to be human, I suppose. I have to catch myself all the time in that regard.
Granted, the number and quality of our opposition has slipped a bit ever since many of our Science friends discovered that not all of us could be drawn off into futile arguments over scientific minutiae, but instead stood our ground, insisting that great philosophic and religious principles are not cast on such minutiae.
. . . they all left, en masse, in a great huff because creationists are superstitious morons and thus not worth their time of day . . .
Any port in a storm . . . any excuse in a pinch. A great huff beats admitting that command of facts do not lead to achieving great insights irrelevant to those facts.
So they retreat to insults and denigration (like Liberals).
Same as hitting a hornet's nest with a rock.
It is to be human, I suppose. I have to catch myself all the time in that regard.
True.. we all want to know something...
But when you "know" something "faith" is not required..
WHY? because you know "IT" faith is not required..
Jesus seems to be on vacation and left the "Holy SPirit" in charge of this planet..
Otherwise how and why could he planning on "coming back".?.
Cause if he's already here he need not come back..
Unless the new testament is a flawed account and a human look at reality..
Nothing wrong with that, the apostles were by all means human... who could blame them?..
My fav verse of NT lore is... I Cor 2;9
What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him
Now thats is quite a mouthful there..
Smacks to me of reality.. things a human could not even "imagine"..
Yes; even the science fiction folks.. Darwinist's or anybody "into" physics..
-OR- EVEN a "Christian"...
Maybe some did. Maybe some left because they got tired of being called atheists or told their faith was insufficient because they accepted the theory of evolution. Others because they didn't like being called followers of Marx and Mao. Still others because no matter how many times they explained that the theory of evolution does not depend on an explanation of the origin of life, people still demanded they come up with one. And then there are the overt statements that people who accept evolutionary theory don't belong on Free Republic.
It's not exactly a conducive environment for scientific discussion.
Yes, I remember some of those who left saying that, over and over again. Maybe this is the real source of the disagreement between the so-called "Crevos" and the "orthodox" Darwinists.
For my part, any theory of evolution that cannot explain the origin of life (not to mention mind, consciousness) cannot explain what happens once it has "emerged," from presumably lifeless matter. Darwin never heard of DNA; but more recent scientists have. And they realize that DNA is information-intensive. So where does matter get its information from, so that it knows how to "evolve" DNA?
To put it crudely, how does "dumb matter" become "smart matter," such to give rise to the emergence in time of increasingly complex biological organisms? "Random mutation plus natural selection plus sufficient time" hardly seems to cut it. In any case, it is a supposition that cannot be demonstrated by scientific means. It is a groundless assertion which also happens to be anhistorical: The fossil record we have the history does not support the assertion. Which is what worried Darwin himself.
As a result, Darwin's theory has "evolved" into Neo-Darwinism, whose practitioners seem grudgingly aware that it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to explain the quandary of life and mind on the basis of "matter in its motions" according to natural law. (Where did the natural law come from?)
Actually, the fly in the ointment is a physical cosmology premised in monist materialism. This is the worldview of the regnant scientific method.
Trying to shed some light on these issues, let me point out the argument of Thomas Nagel, University Professor in the Department of Philosophy and the School of Law at New York University, in his recent book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinisan Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly Wrong:
[The] failure to account for something so integral to nature as mind ... is a major problem, threatening to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology.As the book jacket points out, "Nagel's skepticism is not based on religious belief [Nagel is a self-professed atheist] or on a belief in any definite alternative.... [H]e does suggest that if the materialist account is wrong, then principles of a different kind may also be at work in the history of nature, principles of the growth of order that are in their logical form teleological rather than mechanistic."
Since minds are features of biological systems that have developed through evolution, the standard materialist version of evolutionary biology is fundamentally incomplete. And the cosmological history that led to the origin of life and the coming into existence of the conditions for evolution cannot be a merely materialist history, either. An adequate conception of nature would have to explain the appearance in the universe of materially irreducible conscious minds, as such.... In spite of the great achievements of the physical sciences, reductive materialism is a world view ripe for displacement.
In sum,
The existence of consciousness is both one of the most familiar and one of the most astounding things about the world. No conception of the natural order that does not reveal it as something to be expected can aspire even to the outline of completeness. And if physical science, whatever it may have to say about the origin of life [e.g., the "natural process" of Abiogenesis, a/k/a biopoiesis], leaves us necessarily in the dark about consciousness, that shows that it cannot provide the basic form of intelligibility for this world. There must be a very different way in which things as they are make sense, and that includes the physical world, since the problem cannot be quarantined in the mind.In dialoguing with Darwinists, these were the issues that I always tried to raise, not whether my correspondent was an atheist or a Marxist or a Maoist, or fit to be a member of FR.
As an atheist, Nagel is seeking purely naturalistic answers to such questions. One proposal he offers is to say that matter itself "reduces" to an entity that bears within itself the "seeds" of a later emergence of life and mind, as teased out over the time of the world under the influence of natural law. (I'm putting this crudely to make the point clear.) This view comes pretty close to a philosophical theory called panpsychism. But then, he grudgingly admits that "proving the theory" would be just as difficult (if not impossible) as proving the theory of reductionist materialism as THE explanation of the natural world and of the living organisms bearing consciousness that constitute it.
Nagel's final paragraph makes me feel very sad for him:
It is perfectly possible that the truth is beyond our reach, in virtue of our intrinsic cognitive limitations, and not merely beyond our grasp in humanity's present stage of intellectual development. [I have often wondered about this myself.] But I believe we cannot know this, and that it makes sense to go on seeking a systematic understanding of how we and other living things fit into the world. In this process, the ability to generate and reject false hypotheses plays an essential role. I have argued patiently against the prevailing form of naturalism, a reductive materialism that purports to capture life and mind through its Neo-Darwinian extension. But ... I find this view antecedently unbelievable a heroic triumph of ideological theory over common sense. The empirical evidence can be interpreted to accommodate different comprehensive theories, but in this case the cost in conceptual and probabilistic contortions is prohibitive. I would be willing to bet that the present right-thinking consensus will come to seem laughable in a generation or two though of course it may be replaced by a new consensus that is just as invalid. The human will to believe is inexhaustible. [itals added.]In conclusion, it seems to me Nagel is an honest man or at least as honest as a man who rejects God out-of-hand can be.
Just some thoughts, FWTW.
Thanks for writing, Ha Ha Thats Very Logical! (Haven't seen you in a while....)
I'm itching to chime in, but I'll wait until HHTVL responds since he/she was the pingee.
Suddenly, under our powerful, imaginary microscope, we see Ferdie the fungus, furtively floating like a phantom! He is a tiny free-floating fungus spore. He is hanging suspended in the air. We don't know where he came from, for there are no other fungi in the whole world as yet [remember! He had to come from SOMEWHERE, for there had to be a very FIRST fungus!], but there he is. What is he, we wonder? Looking closely, we think he may resemble the spores (which do not yet exist) from a mushroom. But there are no mushrooms, yet. Fungi is the Latin word for "mushroom." Next time you go to an Italian restaurant, you might notice some of Ferdie's offspring offered with your food. You see, it makes scientists sound much more intelligent to use Latin, and Greek, than English. Besides, "mushroom" is a bit confusing. What does it mean? A room filled with mush? Or a room where one eats corn meal mush? So they use Latin, or Greek.
We find that there are many, many kinds of fungi, which are slime-like, algae-like, watery, like mildew, blue and green molds, powdery mildews, spherical fungi, cup and club fungi, and many others.
Little did phantom Ferdie the free-floating fungus know that he would "evolve" from an original free-floating fungus into a whole new world of incredible organisms that help break down and decay dead organic matter (and therefore could not have survived unless there was dead organic matter about before they "evolved"). Little did Ferdie realize that some of his less desirable offspring would become parasitic fungi, which can blight crops and trees, and become a disastrous disease, costing countless dollars to agriculture! Had he known this, he might well have drifted in the air until, running out of whatever it was he was feeding upon, he starved to death, or, failing to find a comfortable mate (we're coming to this) simply fell on a hard piece of granite and died.
But forgetting for the moment all his future difficulties, let's get back to Ferdie, our furtive, free-loading, free-floating, phantom fungus of the forest. (Can't you just hear the little animals saying, "Oh no! There is a fungus among us"?).
Somehow, though he has no brain, Ferdie knows he must find an alga and link up with it (or her, perhaps?), or he cannot survive. A chance puff of wind carries his microscopic little body directly into the clutches of the only alga to ever have evolved, which just "happens" to be in the immediate vicinity. Think of it! A tiny, microscopic algathe ONLY ONE IN THE UNIVERSEhad to "evolve" SEPARATELY, in order to link up with Ferdie!
But the alga could not have survived separately! Notwithstanding this impossible difficulty; notwithstanding the possibility that the little alga COULD have popped into existence 8 or 9,000 miles away, perhaps in the Atlas Mountains in Africa, THERE SHE WAS!
Thankfully, they both evolved together, suddenly, and within a few feet or yards of each other! Wow! Isn't evolution wonderful? The incredible planning of evolution; the design of evolution; the carefully thought-out, intricately developed creative ability of "evolution" is mind-boggling, indeed, isn't it? Of course, when one worships "nature," always called "mother" instead of "father," and endows blind chance with all this power and design, one does not need to worry about any God or His laws which regulate all lifemuch less worry about the punishments for sin.
But back to our fanciful story--er--our scientific investigation of Ferdie's fanciful flight to find his future friend and fellow-survivor, Alice, the alga!
Immediately, the little alga we shall call "Alice," clutches the phantom fungus Ferdie to her green, ugly body, and the two begin (blush!) happily surviving together.
What luck! think of the billions of years it must have taken for Ferdie to evolve in the first placeto become the very first fungus spore! Then think of the difficulty for Alice the alga to have evolved separately, and to have done so not just within a few million years, or even ten years, but on the same afternoon the thermals in the forest bore little Ferdie to her bosom! Instantly, the two became twitterpated.
One would think the opposite. One would assume Alice would say, "Ugh! An ugly spore, and he's looking at me!" Then, she would attempt to slowly creep away. One would think Ferdie would say, "Ugh! An ugly piece of green, slimy, something or other. No way she's getting her clutches on me!" and stay airborne for another few hours, looking for some other alga to help him survive. But there weren't any other algae about! They hadn't evolved yet.
But no, evolution requires that it was love at first sighter, clutch.
Soon, tiny, coral-like growths called "isidia" begin growing around the rim of the "fruiting body" which is what Phantom Ferdie the fungus and Alice the alga have formed. Each little bud which breaks off is a complete lichen, composed of both fungus and alga, and capable of reproduction after their own kind. Wow! What a major miracle Ferdie and Alice have wrought. Neither could have come into existence without the other. But, suddenly, there they were! And their very first attempt was successful! They produced little Alfred, and little Ferdie, Junior. Except they had to name them Alfreda and Alferda, because each were created possessing both sexes! What a problem for evolution! No wonder they would like students who read their text books to dismiss lichens as "poor trash" and "anomalies," and go on to something more interesting, like how dolphins and whales used to be four-footed quadrupeds who could climb trees. (Really! this is what evolutionists say!).
You see, a lichen is composed of a fungus and an alga. Each of these microscopic, living organisms live in close association with each other. The special kind of lichen fungi never live alone, like other fungi do. They can only live in close association with lichens. The alga and the fungus contribute to the welfare of each other by storing water, sending "roots" down into the porous holes in rocks, or into tree bark, producing food through photosynthesis, and by "feeding" upon the decaying organic material.
Oops! Another terrible problem for evolutionists! Lichen fungi, like Ferdie, have no means of photosynthesis and would quickly die unless they were linked with an alga. Good old Ferdie. He found Alice just in time, or there would not be a single lichen about!
Talk about "Alice in wonderland!" Alice the algathe very first, one of her kind, never before, suddenly "evolved" (suddenly? This is anathema to evolution!), in just the right place, at just the right time, to find, not her prince charming, such as another alga, but this time an ugly, misshapen, "spore" floating around in the breeze! But notwithstanding these insurmountable difficulties, IT HAPPENED! (Well, not really, but for evolution to be true, something like this HAD to happen!).
Alice does all the work. The cells in her body manufactures food for both of them, since Ferdie is incapable of it. But Ferdie does his part too, for he provides the incredibly complex structure which binds both of them together, and serves as a storage tank for water and fat, so that Ferdie and Alice can survive together during the dry season.
Of course, the very first time Ferdie found Alice (neither of whom could have previously existedso they didn't existso there wasn't any possibility of lichens "evolving," so lichens don't exist, today. But they do, so...), neither of them knew anything about any approaching "dry season." Furthermore, they had never had time to reason out and plan for the sneaky maneuver to "infiltrate" the frozen tundra to the North. After all, just how many trillions of generations of lichens did there have to be to drop little "buds" and "fruiting bodies" beside themselves, or to be carried by a chance gust of wind from a temperate zone forest to the Brooks Range or across the Atlantic, down the length of the Mediterranean, across the Mideast, and into Nepal and the Himalayas?
So, when the very first dry season came along, foolish phantom, formerly-free-floating Ferdie, now "married" to ugly Alice, not knowing he should have stored all that water and fat, was happily munching on the food Alice gave him. Along came the dry, hot summer, and they dried up and died. So there are no lichens around today. But there are. Therefore, the very first time either came into existence, they had to somehow "know" (without having any brains) how to store up against the dry season together.
Look closely at Ferdie and Alice, as they exist, we assume happily, together. There is an "apothecium," or "fruiting body" on the surface of the lichen. Without invading their privacy, or delving too deeply into just HOW this is done, suffice it to say Ferdie and Alice are producing tiny, microscopic spores as a result of their chance encounter. They are so light in weight that they hang suspended above the fruiting body in the air; borne aloft by the tiniest changes in temperature, which causes hot air to rise from the forest floor.
How did they get into the air? Well, somehow, Ferdie and Alice "evolved" this cup-shaped "fruiting body," which forcibly ejects the spores into the air. What luck! What good fortune! All about them are deer and elk, forcibly ejecting various substances onto the ground. Why didn't Ferdie and Alice simply drop their spores beneath them? Perchance they did, for the first few millions or billions of years. But as they did, the spores, incapable of putting down roots, simply died. But there couldn't have been any spores, because Ferdie and Alice had already died, millions of years earlier! But, somehow, the very first time a fungus and an alga came together in marital bliss, they joyfully ejected their little spores into the air.
Chance gusts of wind carry them about. Some are carried here and there on the fur of animals (where did they come from?) or birds' feet (same question).
The trouble is, we encounter a myriad different types, sizes, shapes and colors of lichens as we look at the forest floor. Some of them have rows and rows of fruiting bodies. Others have large, saucer-shaped fruiting bodies which ooze slime, instead of eject spores (Alice the alga should counsider herself fortunatewhat if she had evolved into a piece of slime, and met "Slippery Simon, the sticky, slick, slithering slime"?). They are black, grey, brown, rust, yellow, orange, ochre, green, bluish, red, and white, and every shade in between.
Then, as the spores are carried about, or as they drop off, or ooze out, they must encounter some algae cells of precisely the correct kind, or they cannot reproduce.
Therefore, evolutionists would tell us, they must have "evolved" at the same timetogether. But evolution requires billions and billions of years. Ejecting spores into the air takes place in only a few seconds! Oozing slime is to no avail, unless the slime, with its spores, comes into contact with the exact kind of algae needed to reproduce. Since the algae of this kind cannot reproduce without the slime from the correct kind of lichen, and the lichen slime cannot reproduce without encountering the correct kind of algae, which came first, Slippery Simon the slime, or Ferdie the Phantom Fungus and Alice the Alga?
What if the algae "evolved" in Siberia, but the lichen which oozes slime "evolved" in Montana? Problem! Neither could have survived. So they don't exist today. But they do. Therefore, they had to come into existence, in myriad numbers, all over the world at the same precise moment in time!
Lichenologists are not sure how some of them reproduce at all. Some reproduce tiny pieces of lichen, while others produce spores which must unite with algae. Says one authority, "The role that spores play in the propagation of lichens is completely unknown, for no one has ever followed the development of a lichen thallus from a germinated fungal spore...We must admit that the most significant aspect of lichens, their reproduction, is still a mystery" (LICHEN HANDBOOK, A Guide To The Lichens Of Eastern North America, by Mason Hale).
It is at least as much a mystery how anyone who studies lichens can avoid throwing up his hands in despair and admitting, "You know, I think there might be a Creator God who did all this, after all!"
Ferdie and Alice were not only sneakily capable of "infiltrating" the frozen North, but were capable of reproducing, not only after their own kind, but dozens of incredibly complex, intricate lichens and fungimultiple trillions and quintillions of offspring, and not a clue as to how they could have evolved, when neither could have survived without the other!
Furthermore, they are found from thousands of feet above sea level to three hundred feet beneath the surface of the ocean; the deepest kind of plant life known to exist! How? Why do this? Was it necessary to survive? Did they "migrate" to the depths of the oceans, and to the heights of the Rocky Mountains?
Even a slug can travel faster than a lichen, clinging to a rock. Isn't it all incredible? Evolutionists are like wide-eyed children, sitting in front of a Disney cartoon, assuming all they see is true; that deer talk, and ducks wear only a jacket, but no trousers! They are like fascinated day-dreamers, conjuring up the weirdest fiction, and attempting to pass it on as fact.
Truly, only the fool hath said in his heart, "There is no God!"
Symbiosis is proof of a law in motion; an immutable, immovable absolute which governs many creatures in our environment, including man. Life is only possible because other life forms exist. You and I could not live without eating living plants and various kinds of fish and animal flesh. We could not digest our food, and it could not be carried into our bloodstream to feed our heart, liver, lungs and brain, without our miraculous bloodstream, with its dizzying array of blood cells and chemical compounds which make life possible.
Symbiosis is a PROOF OF GOD! It is absolute proof that life was CREATED AT ONCE; that it had an instantaneous BEGINNING! Whether clown fish and deadly sea anemones which live in symbiotic harmony, or Ferdie and Alice, happily producing spores, all symbiotic life forms prove the existence of an all-wise, all-powerful Creator God!
All about you is LIFE. Microscopic life, and living things which support life! You and I could not live without foods which come from the ground. Those foods could not grow without the bacteria which cause decay, producing rich soil. All life forms complement each other. Nothing lives or dies to itself. A tree falls in the forest, to decompose, and produce fertile soil for its offspring nearby. Your own body is host to many, many forms of life, including little yeast spores, which float about in the air.
If you could, at this moment, take a tiny piece of clean, clear glass, and touch it to your nose, then place it under a powerful microscope, you could identify these little yeast spores, clinging to the oils on your skin. And, who knows? Maybe one of Ferdie and Alice's little offspring would be smiling up at you, hoping you would drop them off on the nearest decaying log! -End-
And no matter how often they were told that they could not use Science as a shield protecting them from a critical response to their religious, educational and philosophical declarations, they still claim immunity. Isnt going to happen, Pilgrim.
Everyone knows the drill. No one is allowed to make societal assertions under the color of discussing Science, and get away with it. Go to DC (either the city or the website) if you want to argue cultural trends and not have to tolerate dispute.
Thanks, boop for your remarks. Spot on.
I've been to DC the website. That is, before it was closed to non-members. I actually went there several times, even daily, over the course of many weeks. And not once did I ever notice any discussion of science going on there. Not once! Rather, it seemed the site was exclusively dedicated to heaping scorn on people who did not subscribe to the "whole cloth" of orthodox Darwinian dogma.
In short, the main method in evidence there was the ad hominum attack. Certain things said about myself and my dearest sister in Christ Alamo-Girl were scandalous, and I will not repeat them here. (Evidently they didn't like our book.)
I concluded that Darwin Central is nothing more than a "social club" for like-minded co-religionists (to crib from a saying of Eric Voegelin). I'll only add that the use of ad hominum attack is a diversionary tactic designed to conceal the paucity of actual understanding of the issues in dispute, or of any good-faith willingness to engage them at all.
Thanks for your "spot-on" insights, dear YHAOS, and your kind words of support!
For my part, any theory of evolution that cannot explain the origin of life (not to mention mind, consciousness) cannot explain what happens once it has "emerged," from presumably lifeless matter.
I don't see why. To me, that's like saying any theory of disease that cannot explain viruses, cannot explain why vaccination works. Or that any theory of planetary motion that can't explain star formation, can't explain why the planets move the way they do. The question of how something comes into being is separable from the question of how it behaves afterwards. To me.
Trying to shed some light on these issues, let me point out the argument of Thomas Nagel...
I recognize that the theory of evolution is troubling to many philosophers. But looking at the excerpt of Nagel's book available on Amazon, I see that it contains statements like "it is prima facie highly implausible" and "an assumption that things are so remarkable that they have to be explained as non-accidental." In other words, he has trouble believing it. But that difficulty is not an argument against the theory of evolution. Even the idea that the growth of order is teleological is not an argument against evolution. Evolution is a mechanism; the theory of evolution is a way of explaining what we observe. What supplants it--from a scientific standpoint--is a better explanation, with evidence. If researchers who share Nagel's incredulity come up with a better explanation, with evidence--well, great. More power to them.
Unlike (perhaps) some of the other people you've spoken with, I have no problem with the idea that there are things we have yet to discover, forces we don't know how to perceive or measure, that may have been involved in the development of mind and consciousness. But an insistence that we abandon a theory that explains so much--the ToE--because there might be more to it than that seems to me ridiculously shortsighted.
In dialoguing with Darwinists, these were the issues that I always tried to raise, not whether my correspondent was an atheist or a Marxist or a Maoist, or fit to be a member of FR.
And yet above, you wrote "People who refuse to address such questions, preferring to swaddle themselves in their precious materialist dogma, are simply following in the footsteps of Karl Marx." You may argue that that's not the same as calling them a Marxist, but I hope you can see that it's at least a sign of sloppiness with terminology.
(Haven't seen you in a while....)
Nor I you. I don't know if that's because we haven't landed in the same thread or just haven't been around much. I know I was traveling for a little while and working a lot before and after to pay for the trip.
But what if the universe is not itself a "mechanism?" Thus not explicable in such terms? If that is the case, any explanation consistent with the premise of a mechanistic universe will "almost certainly" be false.
Metaphysical naturalism in its present form requires the universe to be "a mechanism."
But even "mechanisms" must have designers; and the ones we know of operate according to a rule (e.g., an algorithm, or a program maybe) which the mechanism did not itself create. The other interesting thing about mechanisms is that they are intended to accomplish a purpose it is here that teleology intrudes of which they need not be aware; indeed, of which they are not capable of becoming aware. They just execute their program. If they're any good (i.e., if the designer is skillful), they do so reliably. But in NO sense can we claim that a mechanism is conscious, while all living organisms are, at least in some degree.
As for my earlier statement about Marx's "forbidding of questions," this was a statement about Marx, not a statement that I think a given correspondent is a Marxist. (That would be an ad hominum attack.)
Marx did indeed forbid any question that might cast doubt on any aspect of his "system." To challenge his dogma was "streng verboten." You have to buy the dogma "whole cloth." Those who dare to ask questions about "the system" deserve to be "punished" as enemies....
Forgive me if I see associations between this historical fact and the behavior of some not all enthusiasts of Darwinian evolutionary theory.
As for me, I do believe that the universe is an evolutionary development. But I don't just assume that it's a giant machine. Thus, I do not agree with materialists of dogmatic Darwinian persuasion, for to the extent that Darwin accepts a materialist worldview (which I believe he did) I doubt that Darwin got the problem right.
You wrote in reply (to a statement of mine appearing in italics at the top of your post), "I don't see why. To me, that's like saying any theory of disease that cannot explain viruses, cannot explain why vaccination works."
I disagree. You can't make a vaccine without understanding what a virus is and how it works. A virus is not a machine; it is "alive" (or quasi-alive) in some sense. If you don't understand what a virus is, then associating it with disease is unlikely; and thus the development of a vaccine to kill it so to cure the disease is also unlikely.
I think that many naturalists (i.e., those who tend to metaphysical naturalist persuasion) think that the best way to deal with "wholes" in nature is to isolate and study the "parts" of which they are constituted. The expectation is that if you sum up all the parts, you will have the complete "picture" of the whole. But this certainly doesn't work in biology: If you reduce a living system to its parts, you kill it: As the poet said, "We murder to dissect."
The biggest "whole" of them all in human experience is the universe itself. Planetary motion and star formation are "parts" of that whole. We do not even know how many other "parts" there are. But even if we did, the Universe seems not to be a simple sum of its constituent parts. For the parts only become functional and meaningful when they are brought into dynamic relation with one another; that is, are clearly ordered by something else which is (as Nagel suggests) teleological (purposive, goal-directed), not mechanistic, in its basic operation.
IMHO, this is spectacularly evident in biological systems to the dispassionate analyst/observer.
It's good to see you again, HHTVL. Thank you for sharing your thoughts!
I too used to pursue DC on occasion and scandalous is not a strong enough word to describe some of the things they said about you two and other creationists.
And I too noticed very little discussion on scientific topics. Mostly it was a FR creationist bashing site.
Which simply confirms what we all know to be true. Politics is the endgame of DC, not Science.
. . . the main method in evidence there was the ad hominum attack. Certain things said about myself and my dearest sister in Christ Alamo-Girl were scandalous, and I will not repeat them here.
All in lowest tradition of political calumny. Entirely in keeping the low form of huckstering weve come to expect from DC (again, both the website and the city)
. . . the use of ad hominum attack is a diversionary tactic designed to conceal the paucity of actual understanding of the issues in dispute, or of any good-faith willingness to engage them at all.
I dont know that its paucity, or if its the knowledge the issues you mention cannot be adequately addressed with the limited resources DC brings to the table. I dont know that it matters. Either way, it is a confession of intellectual poverty.
Thanks for writing. Always enlightening.
I think you must mean "is not itself only a 'mechanism'." Because the universe is certainly a mechanism in many of its aspects. If there were no "if we do this, it'll do that" machinelike predictability, we wouldn't be able to land a spaceship on Mars or use the computers we're typing on right now.
But even "mechanisms" must have designers; and the ones we know of operate according to a rule (e.g., an algorithm, or a program maybe) which the mechanism did not itself create.
I would regard that as an unproven assertion. The mechanism that puts Mars right where we predicted it would be--did its algorithm necessarily have an outside designer?
Forgive me if I see associations between this historical fact and the behavior of some not all enthusiasts of Darwinian evolutionary theory.
Fair enough. The same is true, of course, of many of those who are anti-evolution for religious reasons.
As for me, I do believe that the universe is an evolutionary development. But I don't just assume that it's a giant machine. Thus, I do not agree with materialists of dogmatic Darwinian persuasion,...
I think we've been here before. It's confusing, because it often sounds (to me, anyway) like you're framing your statements as a critique of evolution. And certainly many of the other posters who applaud your statements reject evolution. But if you're okay with evolution but think there must be something more than purely mechanistic, materialist evolution, I'm not sure we have much of a disagreement.
You can't make a vaccine without understanding what a virus is and how it works.
Ah, but you can. People were getting vaccinated against smallpox hundreds of years before anyone had any idea viruses existed, much less how they worked. It was the result of another "if we do this, it does that" observation: if we give people a mild dose of smallpox (or cow pox), they don't get sick when exposed to a larger dose later. No understanding required.
Nice to see you, too. And now I must head to the post office before it closes.
I would say "YES." Because an algorithm is a mathematical entity. And mathematics is a universal language. Universals are never the products of mechanistic behavior mechanics is a result of, not the cause of, universals.
Universals include not only mathematics and by extension logic; but also the natural (e.g., physico/chemical) laws, and I daresay the moral law as well. All mechanics pertains to finite, physical entities. It has no operational scope beyond them.
The beauty here is that the mind of man has the capacity to engage universal ideas. Which tells me right there that man is not a machine.
Actually getting to Mars, however, did require man to conceive of algorithms that would operate towards the achievement of that purpose. If the algorithms achieved their purpose, it must be because the mathematical "truth" they purport to represent actually corresponds with the way the world really is, independent of human wishes and desires.
Which is NOT to denigrate that human beings wished and desired to get to Mars. If they didn't, "we" wouldn't have gone there. This is only to say that human wishes and desires were not the principal or sufficient cause of their success in so doing.
In sum, the algorithmic specification of the world at large is not a human design. Rather, the truth of Reality as discernible by humans depends on the correspondence of natural phenomena to universal specifications which pre-exist and post-exist the human mind. The truth of the world is not a human design but the truthfulness of human investigations of Reality absolutely depends on recognition by humans of what David Bohm called the "implicate order" of all that exists which is not a human creation.
I just think the term "mechanism" as a description of a universe that gives all indication of somehow being "alive" in toto is unfortunate and grossly misleading. I would rate it as a prime example of Whitehead's famous Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness.
IOW, just because something "looks like" a machine doesn't actually make it one.
You wrote: "... if you're okay with evolution but think there must be something more than purely mechanistic, materialist evolution, I'm not sure we have much of a disagreement."
Oh my, I'm very, very glad for that!
You also wrote: "...if we give people a mild dose of smallpox (or cow pox), they don't get sick when exposed to a larger dose later. No understanding required."
Aristotle's famous claim is that "all men desire to know." Lately I've begun to suspect that this maxim is not universally true. But for those men who do want to know the "why" of things, understanding is required. And that's how we learned about viruses.
Science's role in such matters is indispensable but not completely sufficient. There is more to the world than what can be directly observed, weighed, and measured. Certainly, no universal falls into the category of things that are amenable to such methods of investigation.
Thank you truly, dear HHTVL, for your outstandingly thought-provocative essay/post!
Well it certainly looked like that to me!
Meanwhile, I really, really do want to have substantive discussions regarding scientific issues. I gather that DC is not the place to go for that.
Thank you for your observations, dear sister in Christ!
Sometimes it seems to me that the politicalization of science is the curse of our age. But then, everything is "political" these days.
How on earth did this happen?
Thanks, dear, for your moral support!
This is actually a pretty good conversation... on several issues..
A) Is man a mechanism in carnal form?.. to function in the 3rd dimension..
B) Is man a spirit in a carnal space suit.?. to function in a 3D reality..
It seems you can buy Tale(A) or Tale(B) or even some sort of mix of them both.. This is the disconnect between the two forces.. with stragglers in between.. Somebody is a dreamer..
The dreamer could believe man is basically flesh and thats all he is..
Or the dreamer could believe man is basically spirit and thats all he is..
That man is both flesh and spirit conflates both.. but ignores man does not know what "life(death) really is" OR spirit either.. Good convo I would say.. There is room to speculate on both.. because it is all speculation..
The spectre of physical or spiritual "dimensions" on this subject takes the convo to another level.. Not that any resolution is due or even possible..
If man is a mechanical life-form then we are "drones".. or "breeders"..
If man is a spiritual life-form then we are "entitys".. or "forces"..
or a conflated confused mix... Damned good entertainment I would say..
I guess I would agree that evolution required a designer every bit as much as the orbit of Mars did. But to me, that means "not much."
I just think the term "mechanism" as a description of a universe that gives all indication of somehow being "alive" in toto is unfortunate and grossly misleading.
Well, I only used the term to refer to one manifestation of the universe. We've somehow found ourselves talking about whether it's applicable to the whole thing. I meant it the same way one might say the heart and circulatory system is a mechanism: it's observable and studiable pretty much on its own, regardless of whether the larger system of which it's a part can properly be called a mechanism or not.
There is more to the world than what can be directly observed, weighed, and measured.
It occurred to me earlier that for you, evolution is an insufficient explanation, so you think there must be something more. While for me, evolution is a sufficient explanation (for what it tries to explain), but there might be something more. I suppose you've run into some who say evolution is a sufficient explanation, so there must not be anything more, but that kind of hubris doesn't appeal to me.
Regarding a hypothetical designer, would it be all right with you if we confine ourselves to biological evolution here since the title of this thread is "Darwin's Doubt?" I'd just like to take a look at this hypothesis, which Thomas Nagel explores so well in his book. For Nagel, an atheist, the "designer" cannot be an intelligent agent. He prefers to acknowledge that there is "bias" in nature for the world we see all around us, especially including biological organisms, is extremely unlikely to be the outcome of pure chance which may be of two kinds: intentional bias (theism) or non-intentional bias (the "biasing" introduced into nature by the sheer existence of physical laws).
Given the extraordinary "fine tuning" of the universe which makes biological life possible, or extremely likely to occur, the idea of "bias" becomes useful, especially in light of the fact that there is no principle in pure chance that could lead to the fine tuning.
This is the main hypothesis seemingly endorsed by a majority of evolutionary biologists today, though a minority still cling to the "pure chance" argument. Iris Fry calls the latter the Almost a Miracle Camp, which includes such distinguished scientists as Francis Crick, Ernst Mayr, and Jaques Monod (Crick and Monod are both Nobel Laureates). These men appear to be content with the idea that life arose by pure chance even if the probability of this having happened is extremely remote. (So I prefer to call them "The Bitter Enders.")
Leaving those folks aside, in Mind and Cosmos, Nagel writes:
The evolution of mind is part of a single long process of evolutionary descent. It is the latest stage in the evolution of physical organisms, some of whom are now governed largely by thought. If we are skeptical about an intentional (theistic) explanation of the existence of reason, and can't make sense of a causal reductionist one, it is natural to speculate that some tendencies in this direction have been at work all along. If physics alone or even a non-materialist monism can't account for the later stages of our evolutional history, we shouldn't assume it can account for the earlier stages. Indeed, when we go back far enough, to the origin of life of self-replicating systems capable of supporting evolution by natural selection those actually engaged in research in the subject recognize that they are very far from even formulating a viable explanatory hypothesis of the traditional materialist kind. Yet they assume there must be such an explanation, since life cannot have arisen purely by chance....At this point in the book, Nagel cites Roger White, a colleague and professor of philosophy at M.I.T. I found the quotes of White so interesting, I went looking for the relevant paper and found it: Does Origins of Life Research Rest on a Mistake?
...But the hypothesis of intentional design [SI see below] is ruled out as unscientific. So it seems natural to conclude that the only way left for life not to be a matter of chance is for it somehow to be made likely by physical law.
Some useful notation at this point:
C = pure chanceHere's White:
S = physical outcome as the effect of bias
BI = intentional bias (i.e., intelligent designer, i.e., God)
BN = nonpurposive bias introduced by the principles of physics and chemistry.
[T]he line of reasoning ... is something like the following. That molecular replicating systems appear to be designed by an agent is sufficient to convince us that they didnt arise by chance. But in scientific reasoning, non-intentional explanations are to be preferred, if possible (some would say at all costs), to intentional ones hence the motivation to find a non-intentional explanation of life.Thus we have three possibilities: chance, creationism, and directionless physical law. Earlier in the paper, White had observed:
It should be clear however, that even granting the appropriateness of a preference for non-intentional explanations, this line of reasoning is confused. In general, if BI raises the likelihood of S, then S confirms BI to at least some degree, and may thereby disconfirm C. But it does not follow that S confirms BN one iota. S confirms BN only if BN raises the likelihood of S. If the reason we doubt the Chance Hypothesis is that we suspect that life is due in part to intelligent agency, this by itself gives us no reason to expect there to be a non-intentional explanation for life. If on reflection we do not find the hypothesis of intentional biasing acceptable, then we are left with no reason at all to doubt that life arose by chance.
What makes certain molecular configurations stand out from the multitude of possibilities seems to be that they are capable of developing into something which strikes us as rather marvelous, namely a world of living creatures. But there is no conceivable reason that blind forces of nature or physical attributes should be biased toward the marvelous.It appears that White is not averse to the BI (intelligent design) hypothesis. But Nagel has reservations, which basically boil down to: Intent implies purpose. Whose purpose? is his question.
Nagel is aware that of the three hypotheses, only one BI is teleological in character. That is, it implies goal direction.
Now teleology has been banished from science since the 17th century. Nagel wants to restore it but as a naturalistic teleology in which teleological laws would assign higher probability to steps on paths in state space that have a higher "velocity" toward certain outcomes. "They would be the laws of self-organization of matter, essentially or of whatever is more basic than matter....some laws of nature [yet to be discovered] would apply directly to the relation between the present and the future, rather than specifying instantaneous functions that hold at all time [Newton's laws]. A naturalistic teleology would mean that organizational and developmental principles of this kind are an irreducible part of the natural order, and not the result of intentional or purposive influence by anyone. I am not confident that this Aristotelian idea of teleology without intention makes sense, but I do not at the moment see why it doesn't."
Well, I find this all tremendously interesting, even though I believe Aristotle may be rolling in his grave right now....
You'll recall Aristotle's four causes: Formal, material, efficient, and final. Final is the teleological one, in that it fulfills whatever is intended by the formal, by means of the material and efficient causes. The final cause expresses the purpose or goal of an intelligent agent. Nagel wants to dispense with the agent.
Why? I'll let Nagel explain himself:
A creationist explanation of the existence of life is the biological analogue of dualism in the philosophy of mind. It pushes teleology outside the natural order, into the intentions of the creator working with completely directionless materials whose properties nevertheless underlie both the mental and the physical....I find Nagel's hypothesis fascinating; but I do not agree with it, because (of course) I am a "theist," a fan of both dualism in the philosophy of mind and the classical Aristotelian causal categories. But other than that, I think Nagel's book Mind and Cosmos is ingenious and valuable.
My preference for an immanent, natural explanation is congruent with my atheism. But even a theist who believes God is ultimately responsible for the appearance of conscious life could maintain that this happens as part of the natural order that is created by God, but that it doesn't require further divine intervention. A theist not committed to dualism in the philosophy of mind could suppose that the natural possibility of conscious organisms resides already in the character of the elements out of which those organisms are composed, perhaps supplemented by laws of psychophysical emergence. To make the possibility of conscious life a consequence of the natural order created by God while ascribing its actuality to subsequent divine intervention would then seem an arbitrary complication. Some form of teleological naturalism should for these reasons seem no less credible than an interventionist explanation, even to those who believe that God is ultimately responsible for everything.
The only questions that he seems not to want to answer are: (1) Where do the laws of nature, of physics, of chemistry come from? (2) Why is there anything at all, why not nothing?
In closing, just let me mention that the great Sir Isaac Newton believed that, not only did God create the universe, but that God "intervened" in it from time to time. While he evidently rejected what we call "special creation" (as do I), he believed that, as a mechanical system, the universe would be subject to an accumulation of distorting "errors," and that God would have to step in from time to time to set things aright again.
Newton called God "the Lord of Life with His creatures."
That's how I think about Him, too.
God's Name is I AM.
* * * * * * *
Thank you so much for writing, HHTVL! Sorry to run on so long.... I refer you to the sources presented here, thinking you might find them enjoyable and useful.
LOL, dear brother 'pipe!!! We have more fun than cats!!!
Oooooopps! Sorry if I "over-inferred," dear brother! Guess I was just projecting a concern that is deeply, deeply troubling to me....
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text:
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· Discover the origin of the voice that controls the people of Understone
· Features a moral decision that will lead to two drastically different outcomes in Understone
"Shooting Range": After defeating Saker during your quest to become King or Queen, the remaining Mercenaries have turned their camp into a tourist attraction. The main attraction being the replayable shooting range mode
· Beat the high scores to win three prizes that can be used while playing the minigame: the Marksman 500 (gifted to players for downloading the the pack), Money Shot (prize) and Black Dragon (prize)
"The Wheel of Misfortune": After Reaver vacated his home, he set up a venture for budding heroes to replay the thrilling arena-based challenges within his new dwellings
· Beat the high scores to win three new weapons that can be used while playing in the minigame: The Full Monty (gifted to player upon downloading pack), Dirty Harriet (prize) and Dead Ned's Revolver (prize)
Also available for purchase on Nov. 23 are the Exclusive Hair Pack (160 Microsoft Points) with corn rows, afro and asymmetrical bob styles and the 5 Star Dog Potion (80 Microsoft Points) that gives your canine companion the full 5-star ability for digging, diving and tracking down hidden chests right from the start.
Fans in search of more creative and immediate ways to customize their heroes are in luck! Available starting Nov. 9 exclusively on Xbox LIVE Marketplace, you'll be able to tailor your righteous or wicked ruler with the Reaver Industries Hero Outfit (160 Microsoft Points) and a colorful Dye Pack (80 Microsoft Points) that includes black, cream, hot pink and turquoise that will make your hero the talk of Albion.
# # #
To download the new trailer, visit http://edelmanadmin.psni.com/public/Fable%20III/. All video content rated "M" for Mature by the ESRB must be under an appropriate age gate.
"Fable III" is an action-adventure title available now at retailers worldwide, exclusively on Xbox 360. "Fable III" is rated "M" for Mature by the ESRB and available in a Standard Edition ($59.99 U.S. ERP) and Limited Collector's Edition ($79.99 U.S. ERP). For more information, visit xbox.com/fable3. For additional details, visit Lionhead at lionhead.com/fable3 and facebook.com/fable3. For general assets, visit http://edelmanadmin.psni.com/public/Fable%20III/.
For more information, press only:
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subset: commoncrawl


text:
Yolanda Lopez
|Yolanda M. López
|San Diego State University,
University of California, San Diego (UCSD)
|Bay Area Chicano Art Movement
Yolanda M. López (born 1942) is an American painter, printmaker, educator and film producer located in San Francisco, California. She is known for her work that focuses on the experience of Mexican American women and often challenges ethnic stereotypes associated with them.
Yolanda López is a third-generation Chicana.[1] López and her two younger siblings were raised by her mother and her maternal grandparents in San Diego, California.[2]
After graduating from high school in Logan Heights, she moved to San Francisco and became involved in the student movement that shut down San Francisco State University in a 1968 strike called the "Third World Strike". She also became active in the arts.[1] During this time period, López became aware of her position within the community as she is quoted saying, "I did not become aware of our own history until 1968 when there was a call for a strike at San Francisco State, a strike for ethnic studies. I heard the men and women that led that Third World Strike speak and I understood at that point what my position was being part of this long legacy of being part of the oppressed people, just like Black people."[1]
During the 1970s, López returned to San Diego. She enrolled at San Diego State University in 1971, graduating in 1975 with a B.A. in painting and drawing. She enrolled at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), receiving with a Master of Fine Arts in 1979.
Artist René Yañez married Yolanda M. Lopez in the late 1970s, they lived together in San Francisco's Mission district and they had a child, artist Río Yañez (born 1980).[1] They eventually divorced a few years later but Yolanda moved in to the apartment next door and they maintained a professional relationship.[1]
López obtained international celebrity for her Virgen de Guadalupe series of drawings, prints, collage, assemblage, and paintings. The series, which depicted "ordinary" Mexican women (including her grandmother and López herself) with Guadalupan attributes (usually the mandorla), attracted praise for "sanctifying" average Mexican women, who were depicted performing domestic and other labor. Critics, particularly devotees of the Virgin, objected to the series, which they viewed as a sacrilegious debasement of a holy image.
Woman's Work is Never Done is another set of prints. One of the series prints collection, one of which, "The Nanny", attempted to study some problems faced by immigrant women of Hispanic descent in the United States.
Her famous political poster titled Who's the Illegal Alien, Pilgrim? features an angry young man in an Aztec headdress and traditional jewelry holding a crumpled-up paper titled "Immigration Plans." This 1978 poster was created during a period of political debate in the U.S. which resulted in the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments of 1978, which limited immigration from a single country to 20,000 people per year with a total cap of 290,000.[3] With this poster, she claims that the modern descendants of the Aztecs and their neighbors have a fundamental right to immigrate freely to the United States of America and Canada because Spain claimed much of the western portion of North America as its colonial territory.
López has also curated exhibitions, including "Cactus Hearts/Barb Wired Dreams", which featured works of art concerning immigration to the United States. The exhibition debuted at the Galería de la Raza and subsequently toured nationwide as part of an exhibition called "La Frontera/The Border: Art About the Mexico/United States Border Experience".
López has produced two films, Images of Mexicans in the Media and When you Think of Mexico, which challenge the way the mass media depicts Mexicans and other Latin Americans.
She has also taught art in studios and universities, including UCSD and the University of California, Berkeley. She also mentored high school youth who painted a mural in San Diego's Chicano Park.
According to López, "It is important for us to be visually literate; it is a survival skill. The media is what passes for culture in contemporary U.S. society, and it is extremely powerful. It is crucial that we systematically explore the cultural mis-definition of Mexicans and Latin Americans that is presented in the media."
See also[edit]
- ^ a b c d e "Shaping San Francisco". Shaping SF. 2014. Retrieved 2015-04-21.
- ^ Ruiz, Vicki L. (1998). From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth Century America. New York City: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-513099-5.
- ^ "Immigration Statistics: A Story of Neglect". books.nap.edu. 1985. p. 20. Retrieved 2015-04-22.
External links[edit]
- Davalos, Karen Mary (2008). Yolanda López. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press. ISBN 9780895511102.
- Yolanda Lopez - Guide to the Yolanda M. López Papers, 1961–1998 at the California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives
- 1942 births
- American printmakers
- Living people
- American muralists
- American artists of Mexican descent
- Artists from San Diego, California
- American women painters
- Hispanic and Latino American women in the arts
- American women printmakers
- Artists from the San Francisco Bay Area
- Women muralists
- 20th-century American painters
- 20th-century women artists
- 21st-century American painters
- 21st-century women artists


text:
Dear Tom and Ray:
My wife and I are in the market for a new Toyota. My wife insists on getting a manual transmission over an automatic. She believes that automatics are more prone to breakage. What's the deal? Are automatic transmissions more or less reliable? Would we be fools to get an automatic? Please clear up the mystery for us. My wife will listen to you. - Hal
RAY: It's purely a matter of preference these days, Hal. There's no real economic advantage either way. It just depends on whether you like shifting or whether you'd rather have your right hand free to change the radio stations.
TOM: In terms of costs, it's really a wash. An automatic costs more to buy - often an extra $800 or $1,000. But it doesn't break any more often than a manual transmission and will usually last the life of the car if driven responsibly. And with today's five-speed automatics, lock-up torque converters and overdrive, they get just about the same gas mileage as cars with manual transmissions.
RAY: Manual transmissions cost less when you buy the car, but they require clutch replacements from time to time at the cost of many hundreds of dollars. How often? It depends on the driver. I have customers who get 125,000 miles out of a clutch.
TOM: And I have a teen-age son who gets about 125 miles out of a clutch.
RAY: So, in terms of overall costs and reliability, it's a wash, Hal. So it's simply a question of whether you want your wife wants to be shifty or shiftless.
Dear Tom and Ray:
I really need help getting mechanics to take me seriously. I drive a '92 Honda Accord EX that runs hot. It overheats. In spite of having the thermostat replaced and the radiator back-flushed, the engine fan still turns on almost immediately after I park. The warmer the ambient temperature, the more aggressively the fan kicks in. It doesn't seem to turn on at all when the air temperature is under 35 F. Mechanics won't take me seriously. They all say this is perfectly normal, and the fan is doing its job, helping the engine cool down. "Yeah," I say. "Then tell me why the car is overheating." They say they don't know. They ask if the temperature gauge is above normal (it's not). But I can feel heat radiating up from the floor beneath the driver's seat like when the heater is on. What's going on? - Jim
RAY: Well, I'll tell you what's NOT going on, Jim. Your car is not overheating. The mechanics are right that the fan is doing exactly what it's supposed to do. When you turn off the ignition, the engine actually gets hotter - briefly - before it gets cooler. That's because the cooling system shuts off along with the ignition, and the ambient heat accumulates in the closed engine compartment.
TOM: So a sensor reads the coolant temperature, and if it's above 200 degrees or so, it turns on the electric cooling fan until the temperature comes down to an acceptable level. That's not only normal, it's necessary. So your fan is working fine.
RAY: And since the dashboard gauge reads normal, there's no real reason to believe that the car is running hot. The heat you're feeling is probably from the catalytic converter that's under the driver's seat.
TOM: When this car was new, you had a piece of metal called the heat shield that sat between the top of the catalytic converter and the floor of the car. My guess is that it's rusted off and has been missing since about 1998. Without the heat shield, some of the heat from that 800-degree converter is bound to penetrate through the floor and provide an unwanted bun warmer - especially in hot weather.
RAY: So instead of asking about overheating, ask a mechanic to check the heat shield - especially the piece on top of your converter. And if it's missing, ask him to replace it. And if you want to be taken seriously, Jim, do what my brother eventually d id: Stop going into the repair shops in that silly Mary Poppins outfit.
Dear Tom and Ray:
I'm in a quandary. My girlfriend and I are breaking up. A year and a half ago, I refinanced her car in my name so she could get a better interest rate on the loan. (She has lousy credit, and we were going to live together happily ever after.) Now, I'm stuck with the car and I want to sell it. The problem is it's a '97 Ford Aspire, and according to the blue book value, it's worth about $6,000. But I still owe the bank more than $7,000. This reflects the bank's adjusted finance charge for early pay-off of the loan. Do you have any suggestions that don't involve something that could constitute insurance fraud or arson? - Thomas
RAY: Well, you don't leave us much room to maneuver here, Thomas. No insurance fraud or arson. What's left?
TOM: I think you're stuck, Thomas. I think you're going to have to sell the car and eat the loss. You just have to chalk it up to a very expensive lesson in love.
RAY: The only piece that might be negotiable is the bank's additional finance charge. If you made an appointment with someone sufficiently high up at the bank and explained that you might have to default on the loan, they might be willing to negotiate with you. My guess is they'd rather have their principal back than have to chase you for it through a collection agency. It's up to them, but they might agree to lower that early payoff charge under the circumstances.
TOM: But other than that, we don't have any brilliant suggestions to offer you. Maybe some of our readers have some ideas? If you do, write to us and we'll pass them along to Thomas. But please, we will not accept suggestions from people who are currently incarcerated (at least from those incarcerated for insurance fraud or arson, anyway).
Used cars can be a great bargain, and reliable, too! Find out why by ordering Tom and Ray's pamphlet "How to Buy a Great Used Car: Things Detroit and Tokyo Don't Want You to Know." Send $3 and a stamped (55 cents), self-addressed, No. 10 envelope to Used Car, P.O. Box 536475, Orlando, FL 32853-6475.
Help safeguard your investment by ordering Tom and Ray's pamphlet "Ten Ways You May Be Ruining Your Car Without Even Knowing It!" Send $3 and a stamped (55 cents), self-addressed, No. 10 envelope to Ruin, P.O. Box 536475, Orlando, FL 32853-6475.
Got a question about cars? Write to Click and Clack in care of this newspaper, or e-mail them by visiting the Car Talk section of cars.com on the World Wide Web.
Amarillo Globe-News © 2016. All Rights Reserved. Terms of Service | Privacy Policy / About Our Ads


text:
Video Industry News Video Company News Technology Industry News Technology Company News Novelty Industry News Novelty Company News Gay Industry News Gay Company News Legal Industry News All Company News
Released: Jul 06th, 2010
Running Time: 120 Min.
Director: Uncredited
Company: Devil's Film
DVD Extras: Cumshot Recap, Music-Free Option, Still Gallery(ies), Trailer(s), Widescreen
Cast: Lee Bang, Biggz, Dick James, Katie Kayne, Shane Diesel, Desire Kummin, Wesley Pipes, Sierra Skye, Amelia Rose
Genre: Interracial, Young Girl
After mom divorced her pencil dicked husband, she immediately went out searching for a good man with a really big black cock. Everything worked out perfect for her... and her daughter!! It seems the daughter and stepdad are fucking like crazy when mom's not home. The daughter skipped the pencil dicked guys and went straight for the huge black dick instead. Guess she learned from mom's mistakes!


text:
Editors' Note: The Download Now link will download a small installer file to your desktop. Remain online and double-click the installer to proceed with the actual download.
Quick Specs
Total Downloads:30,188
Date Added:Aug. 24, 2011
File Size:203.2KB
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Product ranking:#41 in Web Browsers
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