Preparing the public for the slow demise of Darwinian evolution theory

_{Denyse O'Leary

November 18, 2020

Culture, Darwinism, science education}

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Mike Behe’s new A Mousetrap for Darwin: Michael J. Behe Answers His Critics is available today. David Klinghoffer writes:

As biochemist Michael Behe explains in the Introduction to his new book, out today — A Mousetrap for Darwin: Michael J. Behe Answers His Critics — the public is being prepared very slowly for the demise of Darwinian evolutionary theory. It wasn’t planned that way, but it is how things are playing out…
“Since the turn of the millennium a raft of distinguished biologists have written books critically evaluating evolutionary theory. None of them think that Darwin’s mechanism is the main driver of life. It may surprise people who get their information about the state of science from gee-whiz puff pieces in the mainstream media, but, although strong partisans still hold out, the eclipse of Darwinism in the scientific community is well-advanced. A few years ago the journal Nature published an exchange between two groups of scientists, one defending Darwin and the other saying it’s time to move on. It’s nice to have defenders, but when an idea has been around for 150 years — wished well by all right-thinking people, investigated to death by the scientific community — and a piece appears in the world’s leading science journal saying it’s time to move on, then it’s time to move on.
“The question of course is, move on to what? Those books by scientists dissing Darwin offer their own clever ideas, but so far the scientific community isn’t buying any of them. All the new ideas — self-organization, facilitated variation, symbiosis, complexity theory, and more — are quickly concluded to be nonstarters, to have the same problems as Darwin’s theory, or both. In the absence of an acceptable replacement — and because of its usefulness as a defensive talking point in fending off skepticism from the public — intellectual inertia maintains Darwinism as textbook orthodoxy. [from the book] “
David Klinghoffer, “Darwin Is on the Roof — New Book from Michael Behe, Available Now” at Evolution News and Science Today

That’s our sense too. What about New Scientist’s thirteen reasons for moving past Darwin and the doubts about speciation? Whatever else maybe said of these folk, they are not currently suffering from Darwinbrain.

We need to distinguish between rubbish dropkicked from one edition to the next of a public school textbook and what alert minds are really thinking.

And they’re really thinking that it’s time to move on.

Comments

The only alternative to darwinian evolution is Special Creation (Intelligent Design), so of course they do not want to give it up regardless if darwinism is nonsense. Sir Arthur Keith the anthropologist admitted that "Evolution is unproved and unprovable. We believe it because the only alternative is special creation, and that is unthinkable." @Bornagain77 The speciation of animals from a common ancestor within each specific kind (feline, canine etc) is definitely not "evolution", it is exactly the opposite, it is devolution, it is a top-down process which is what is observed, not an impossible bottom-up process . All of the original ancestors on Noah's Ark had all of the genetical information required to produce the various species of their kind, but since then there has been a tremendous amount of loss of information through natural selection based on the environment and other conditions that each species found themselves, and there was not a single bit of new information gained, so it is devolution, the same is happening with humans in some way, we are heading to extinction with the loss of information and the genetic entropy, which is why Jesus Christ and the Resurrection is necessary.Kirikagure_{January 27, 2021
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As to:
Behe, “But one suspects that if we do find God in the stars we are likely to find Him in a lot of other places in nature too, such as in life.”
In regards to finding 'God in the stars', and subsequently finding evidence for God in life, one of the strongest evidences for finding 'God in the stars' is the fine-tuning of the universe,
The Fine-Tuning of the Universe - Dr. Craig - animated video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EE76nwimuT0&list=PL3gdeV4Rk9EfL-NyraEGXXwSjDNeMaRoX&index=4
The fine tuning of the stellar nucleosynthesis of carbon in stars, (since carbon is the 'building block of life'), provides very strong evidence that the universe was designed specifically with life in mind. As Fred Hoyle himself stated, "A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect has “monkeyed” with the physics as well as the chemistry and biology, and there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature.”
“From 1953 onward, Willy Fowler and I have always been intrigued by the remarkable relation of the 7.65 MeV energy level in the nucleus of 12 C to the 7.12 MeV level in 16 O. If you wanted to produce carbon and oxygen in roughly equal quantities by stellar nucleosynthesis, these are the two levels you would have to fix, and your fixing would have to be just where these levels are actually found to be. Another put-up job? ... I am inclined to think so. A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect has “monkeyed” with the physics as well as the chemistry and biology, and there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature.” - Sir Fred Hoyle, Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics, 20 (1982): 16.
In fact, Hoyle because of this evidence for fine-tuning, converted from being a staunch atheist, to being a Deist, debatably even becoming a Theist. Along that line of thought, and as to subsequently finding evidence for 'God in life', the following finding of extreme biological fine-tuning is, as far as Darwinian presuppositions are concerned, "unexpected",,, to quote Dr. William Bialek, who is professor of physics at Princeton University, "In each instance, biophysicists have calculated, the system couldn’t get faster, more sensitive or more efficient without first relocating to an alternate universe with alternate physical constants."
William Bialek: More Perfect Than We Imagined - March 23, 2013 Excerpt: photoreceptor cells that carpet the retinal tissue of the eye and respond to light, are not just good or great or phabulous at their job. They are not merely exceptionally impressive by the standards of biology, with whatever slop and wiggle room the animate category implies. Photoreceptors operate at the outermost boundary allowed by the laws of physics, which means they are as good as they can be, period. Each one is designed to detect and respond to single photons of light — the smallest possible packages in which light comes wrapped. “Light is quantized, and you can’t count half a photon,” said William Bialek, a professor of physics and integrative genomics at Princeton University. “This is as far as it goes.” … Scientists have identified and mathematically anatomized an array of cases where optimization has left its fastidious mark, among them;,, the precision response in a fruit fly embryo to contouring molecules that help distinguish tail from head;,,, In each instance, biophysicists have calculated, the system couldn’t get faster, more sensitive or more efficient without first relocating to an alternate universe with alternate physical constants. http://darwins-god.blogspot.com/2013/03/william-bialek-more-perfect-than-we.html
bornagain77_{November 20, 2020
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Got the book and already impressed by its great quality, recommend it. His one-liners are very adaptable to the thousands of mustas an just-so’s Excerpt: “Miller [catholic, biologist, theist] tries to justify treating physics differently from biology. “Let’s keep in mind that evolution is a biological theory, not a cosmic one,” he writes. “The success or failure of the anthropic principle may be relevant to whether or not we can find God in the stars, but it does not tell us whether or not we can find him in the evolution of species.” Behe, “But one suspects that if we do find God in the stars we are likely to find Him in a lot of other places in nature too, such as in life.”Belfast_{November 19, 2020
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Surveys have consistently shown for many decades that the majority of people believe in some form of creation, not some form of evolution.
Why can't it be both creation and evolution? Why must it be either/or? Even young earth creationists believe tht modern species descended, by descent with modification, from the animals that were on Noah's Ark. They are, in a very real sense, Darwinists. They believe in both Creation AND "some form of evolution."Mung_{November 19, 2020
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I agree. If anything, it's Darwinists academics who are preparing themselves and their faithful for an "evolving" hypothesis. However, the term "evolution" won't change, just the technical details. Notice the similarity: "But that wasn't true socialism." "But that wasn't the complete theory of evolution." After all, one still sees Haeckel's embryos in textbooks.
Although best known for the famous statement "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny", he also coined many words commonly used by biologists today, such as phylum, phylogeny, and ecology. On the other hand, Haeckel also stated that "politics is applied biology", a quote used by Nazi propagandists.
So, here's how Darwinism will meet it's gracious, forgiving epitaph:
Comparing different embryonic stages of different animals is a tool that can be used to infer relationships between species, and thus biological evolution. This has been a source of quite some controversy, both now and in the past. Ernst Haeckel pioneered in this field. By comparing different embryonic stages of different vertebrate species, he formulated the recapitulation theory. This theory states that an animal's embryonic development follows exactly the same sequence as the sequence of its evolutionary ancestors. Haeckel's work and the ensuing controversy linked the fields of developmental biology and comparative anatomy into comparative embryology. From a more modern perspective, Haeckel's drawings were the beginnings of the field of evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo). - Wikipedia
So gentle, so kind -- to rubbish. -QQuerius_{November 19, 2020
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I don't think they're preparing the public. Surveys have consistently shown for many decades that the majority of people believe in some form of creation, not some form of evolution. True in both Russia and US. What's more, the "scientists" who are doing this revision don't give a damn about public opinion because they don't see us as human. So who are they preparing? Maybe just preparing themselves. It takes a lot of self-talking to break a bad habit after you realize it's harmful.polistra_{November 19, 2020
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It was over long ago for People With a Brain.mike1962_{November 19, 2020
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As much as I wish for the demise of Darwinism, slow or otherwise, those who cling to him will continue to cling as they fill the heads of young with their ideas over facts. It is long past time to put Darwin on trial and charge him directly for the 100s of millions who have died due to his work. The first book has been instrumental in thugocracies brutalizing their own people in the name of survival of the fittest. His second book led to the eugenicists, which included the likes of Margaret Sanger and Hitler.BobRyan_{November 19, 2020
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