Darwinism

I’m writing to tell people about a paper of mine that was published in Synthese last month, titled:  “Self-organisation in dynamical systems: a limiting result”.  While the paper doesn’t address intelligent design as such, it indirectly establishes strict limits to what such evolutionary mechanisms as natural selection can accomplish.  In particular, it shows that physical laws, operating on an initially random arrangement of matter, cannot produce complex objects with any reasonable chance in any reasonable time.

The published version may be downloaded (payment or subscription needed) from Springer at:

         http://www.springerlink.com/content/74316rt8373k560x/

Alternatively, a pre-published version is freely available at:

         http://faculty.arts.ubc.ca/rjohns/spontaneous_4.pdf

The argument is based on a number of original mathematical theorems that are proved in the paper.  A less technical presentation of the argument is however given below.

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I’m debating Michael Shermer at Washburn University in Topeka Kansas tonight at 7:00pm CST. The topic of the debate is on ID and its scientific status. The debate is being streamed here (scroll down): http://www.challengewashburn.com

Cornell Geneticist John Sanford argued that Darwinism is wrong because the rate of genetic deterioration is so high that natural selection could not arrest it. If natural selection cannot arrest genetic deterioration, how then could it be the mechanism for evolutionary improvement? Sanford predicted through his research that human genome is deteriorating. This was a daring scientific prediction, and now Michael Lynch of the elite National Academy published on the topic for his inaugural paper. The NAS has now made the paper available to the public free of charge. Read it, and weep, literally: Rate, Molecular Spectrum, and Consequences of Human Mutation Unfortunately, it has become increasingly clear that most of the mutation load is associated with mutations with very Read More ›

Richard Dawkins takes Ray Comfort out of context: Dawkins says he doesn’t debate Creationists, yet he debates what Creationists say quite often. Should Dawkins avoid debating Creationists when they are the subject of his lectures and speaking engagements?

Here and here, historian of Nazi Germany Richard Weikart responds to yet another whitewash of Darwinism’s role in helping to create a particularly malignant type of racism, this time by Darwinist Michael Ruse:

Last November at a conference on Darwinism I conversed with a graduate student in philosophy who embraced Ruse’s position on the evolution of ethics, which is not all that unusual among evolutionists. He told me he believed that morality is a biologically innate response shaped by evolutionary processes. It has no independent, objective, or universal existence. I pressed this graduate student, asking him how far he was willing to take his ethical relativism. Upon his affirmation that he subscribed to it completely, I asked him if he thought Hitler was morally evil. After explaining that he personally found Hitler’s views repugnant, he admitted that he had no basis for condemning Hitler and finally he conceded, “Hitler was OK.”

I doubt Ruse would be comfortable saying that Hitler was OK, because Ruse’s (and Darwin’s) political views are miles apart from Hitler’s. However, Ruse’s worldview (and Darwin’s own) does not, as far as I can see, provide any objective basis for opposing or condemning Hitler (or Stalin or Mao).

Weikart is repeatedly accused of saying things he does not say, principally, one suspects because the things he does say and can demonstrate are so damning that the only alternatives are acknowledgement or obfuscation.

Here’s an interview I did with Weikart on how he got interested in Darwin and Hitler anyway (not how you might think).

Also just up at Access Research Network: Read More ›

This is a multi-part post in response to Merlin’s paper, “Evolutionary Chance Mutation: A Defense of the Modern Synthesis’ Consensus View”. See introduction and table of contents.

Merlin spends a large part of the paper trying to establish what does and does not constitute a directed mutation. Merlin, I think, fails in her attempt to properly differentiate Darwinian and Lamarckian mutations because she has not taken into account the main purpose of Darwinism as described in Part II of this essay. To recap, the entire point of Darwinism was to frame biology as to extricate itself from final causes. Therefore, any mode of genetic adaptation which fails to do so is non-Darwinian.

Explaining Away Apparent Purposefulness

Merlin, it seems, is somewhat aware of this, as she tries to explain away any apparent purposefulness within mutational mechanisms. She says,
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The debate is happening today, Sept. 7th, at the Fixed Point Foundation.

Our next debate features famed atheist Christopher Hitchens, author of God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, and Dr. David Berlinski, author of The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions.  The question being debated: What are the implications of a purely secular society?  It promises to be a formidable clash of titans.  In addition to being highly entertaining and witty, these two men have a serious message they want to communicate.

The Does Religion Poison Everything? Debate begins at 7 p.m., September 7.

The luncheon, reception, and debate all take place at the Sheraton Birmingham Hotel:

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John West of the Discovery Institute Reports: But when a gunman inspired by Darwinism takes hostages at the offices of the Discovery Channel, reporters seem curiously uninterested in fully disclosing the criminal’s own self-described motivations. Most of yesterday’s media reports about hostage-taker James Lee dutifully reported Lee’s eco-extremism and his pathological hatred for humanity. But they also suppressed any mention of Lee’s explicit appeals to Darwin and Malthus as the intellectual foundations for his views. At least, I could find no references to Lee’s Darwinian motivations in the accounts I read by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, ABC, CNN, and MSNBC. Major Media Spike Discovery

Alarmed at a science paper that questions Darwin, Steve Newton advises us at the Huffington Post that Darwin was not wrong when he argued that competition was the driving force of evolution. The article suggested that large-scale changes in ecology played a bigger role. Of course, they did. … When an ice sheet covered much of Canada for thousands of years, it would not have mattered whether the preglacial creatures (mammoth, mastodon, ground sloth, saber-tooth cat, horse, camel, etc.) competed or not. When the ice melted, they were just gone. Bison, beavers, wolves, maples, and such were the big noise. How? Why? We don’t know yet. One thing that sure isn’t helping is Darwinism. For a lot more No! It Read More ›

“That scientific gentleman with the bald, egg-like head and the bare, bird-like neck had no real right to the airs of science that he assumed. He had not discovered anything new in biology; but what biological creature could he have discovered more singular than himself? Thus, and thus only, the whole place had properly to be regarded; it had to be considered not so much as a workshop for artists, but as a frail but finished work of art. A man who stepped into its social atmosphere felt as if he had stepped into a written comedy.”

~G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who was Thursday

I am endlessly intrigued by Evolutionary Psychology. I found this evolutionary psychology journal, and it’s just too good not to share. Here are a few articles, and a quote from their respective abstract:

1. Parent-Offspring Conflict over Mating: The Case of Mating Age

Parents and offspring have asymmetrical preferences with respect to mate choice. So far, several areas of disagreement have been identified, including beauty, family background, and sexual strategies. This article proposes that mating age constitutes another area of conflict, as parents desire their children to initiate mating at a different age than the offspring desire it for themselves. More specifically, the hypothesis is tested that individuals prefer for their offspring to start having sexual relationships at a later age than they prefer for themselves to do so.

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A friend advises that Darwinist Douglas Futuyma’s recent book, A New Biology for the 21st Century informs us, Now more than ever, biology has the potential to contribute practical solutions to many of the major challenges confronting the United States and the world. A New Biology for the 21st Century recommends that a “New Biology” approach–one that depends on greater integration within biology, and closer collaboration with physical, computational, and earth scientists, mathematicians and engineers—be used to find solutions to four key societal needs: sustainable food production, ecosystem restoration, optimized biofuel production, and improvement in human health. The approach calls for a coordinated effort to leverage resources across the federal, private, and academic sectors to help meet challenges and improve Read More ›

Here’s an article on the supposed evolution of live birth: … even the live-bearers have not got rid of the shell entirely. Baby skinks that are born live come out encased in a membrane – all that is left of the eggshell. With a bit of help from their mothers, most of them break out of the membrane within 36 hours. How did live birth evolve? One group of the egg-laying skinks retain their eggs inside their bodies for longer than the others, and it seems that the live-bearers evolved from these “intermediate” skinks. Reptiles are more likely to develop live birth if they live in cold climates, where it is a good idea to protect their offspring in their Read More ›

From some correspondence with a friend: Darwin was a racist, pure and simple. Why can’t people just accept that fact, and get PAST it? I have become increasingly suspicious of efforts to excuse Darwin’s racism by saying that the old boy was also anti-slavery. Lots of racists are anti-slavery. That was true thousands of years ago, by the way. Slavery is a bad social institution because it disrupts the ties that hold a normal society together. For example, a man can have two sons, one by his wife and one by a slave girl he rapes. He can lavish the best on the first son and sell the second down river to some horrible fate – without thinking he is Read More ›