In a recent book, Science and Art Are Based on the Same Principles and Values (2020), Lima-de-Faria worries that “a wave of obscurantism is spreading over Western countries affecting both science and art in a deadly way.” Mazur writes,
I first became aware of A. Lima-de-Faria’s work through his 1988 landmark book: Evolution Without Selection.
Lima-de-Faria lives on top of a Swedish fjord and in his latest book describes himself as “a lonely wolf howling against an immense sky.” But it is because after a long, distinguished life in science, and at age 99, he sees the enormity of a crushing of humanity without sufficient public outcry. He thinks the dumbing down of our civilization by technology and its cut & paste digital world has now reached a critical point. However, he argues that we can “stave off” this deadly wave if we urgently look to the principles that have historically enabled human ingenuity.
Suzan Mazur, “Antonio Lima-de-Faria: “Stave Off” Deadly Obscurantism” at Mind Matters News
He was an early non-Darwinian evolutionist (1988 is pretty early). In Evolution Without Selection, he argues,
It is well established that evolution has occurred, but the mechanism responsible for it is unknown. A distinction must be clearly made between the phenomenon of evolution and its mechanism. Few phenomena in biology are so well established as evolution, but few are so poorly understood. Nearly every discipline of biology has helped in vindicating the occurrence of evolution. But the demonstration of the occurrence of evolution is not tantamount to the demonstration that its mechanism is based on selection. A radically different approach to the phenomenon of evolution was introduced by Lima-de-Faria, A in 1988. This is republished here with a new preface. The central thesis of this work is that: “Biological form and biological function are the products of the mould of form and function already present in quarks and leptons, or any other of the elementary particles”. This conclusion was based on a vast body of information available at four levels of organization: (1) Elementary particles. (2) Chemical elements. (3) Minerals. (4) Living organisms. The data assembled supported the notion that nothing fundamentally new occurred when the biological level emerged during the evolution of matter. Three evolutions had taken place before the cell arrived.
Lima-de-Faria might have some things to discuss with Michael Denton. This sounds so very structuralist.
And, sure enough, something Mazur has written about Lima-de-Faria before, “Osaka Group Structuralist, 97, Publishes New Book (2008)”, makes clear that he is a structuralist.
That 2008 book was Periodic Tables Unifying Living Organisms at the Molecular Level: The Predictive Power of the Law of Periodicity
About the obscurantismhe worries about: It is surely headed for a head-on collision soon with the “Trust the Science” mantra. When science is represented by a dozen contradictory voices yelling and threatening (cf government policy re COVID-19), it’s no longer a question of trust. It’s how to deal with a crazy colossus.
Mazur is herself the author of a number of books on controversies in evolution, including Royal Society: Public Evolution Summit which recounts the events and discusses the figures behind the 2016 attempt to evaluate realistically what Darwinism is and isn’t doing for biology.
See also: At Oscillations: Suzan Mazur wonders what’s got into Eugene Koonin and Dieter Braun. Readers may recall Eugene Koonin as not particularly a Darwinian. As of 2018, Dieter Braun was more ambivalent. But Mazur notes that something has changed. Is it some light they have seen or has someone warned them to be more submissive?
Mazur’s article is obscurantist. A garble of stuff about various scientists who did bad stuff or good stuff or something. She thinks Lima de Faria should have included Tesla, “who electrified the world”. Nope. Tesla was one of many experimenters who understood that AC is better than DC for some purposes. That’s all. He wasn’t the superhero that his modern cultists believe.
Lima-de-Faria’s 1988 book “Evolution without Selection: Form and Function by Autoevolution” has a picture of various snowflakes on the cover of it.
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51ZRTbMIhdL.jpg
I’m guessing that Lima-de-Faria chose snowflakes for the cover of his book since it clearly represents the overall thesis of his book, i.e. “Biological form and biological function are the products of the mould of form and function already present in quarks and leptons, or any other of the elementary particles”.
Yet, although snowflakes are ‘miraculous’ in their own right,
although snowflakes are ‘miraculous’ in their own right,,,, “emerging” forms and/or patterns, such as we see with Snowflakes, still does not explain life. To explain life we need the input of information from a conscious mind
Perry Marshall, who is behind the 10 million dollar prize being offered for the first person who can prove that you can get a code ‘naturally’ without a mind,,,
As Perry Marshall explains,
Thus Lima-de-Faria, like Darwinists in general, is missing something rather important in his thesis that “Biological form and biological function are the products of the mould of form and function already present in quarks and leptons, or any other of the elementary particles”. Namely, Lima-de-Faria is missing the central importance that information plays in explaining life, and is also missing the fact that, in our repeated experience, information always, and only, comes from an intelligent mind.
Moreover, even if we granted the existence of the information on DNA, ‘biological form’ still cannot be reduced to the linear sequences of information on DNA.
Contrary to popular belief, DNA simply is not a ‘blueprint’ for the cell, nor is it a ‘blueprint’ for multicellular biological organisms in general.
As the following article states, “DNA cannot be seen as the ‘blueprint’ for life,”,,, “It is at best an overlapping and potentially scrambled list of ingredients that is used differently by different cells at different times.”
Biological form is simply not reducible to DNA or to any other material particulars that Darwinists may wish to invoke.
The failure of the reductive materialism of Darwinian evolution to be able to explain the basic form of any particular organism occurs at a very low level. Much lower than DNA itself.
In the following article entitled ‘Quantum physics problem proved unsolvable: Gödel and Turing enter quantum physics’, which studied the derivation of macroscopic properties from a complete microscopic description, the researchers remark that even a perfect and complete description of the microscopic properties of a material is not enough to predict its macroscopic behaviour.,,, The researchers further commented that their findings challenge the reductionists’ point of view, as the insurmountable difficulty lies precisely in the derivation of macroscopic properties from a microscopic description.”
Moreover, at about the 41:00 minute mark of the following video, Dr. Jonathan Wells, (who specializes in embryology), using a branch of mathematics called category theory, demonstrates that, during embryological development, ‘positional information’ must somehow be coming into the developing embryo, ‘from the outside’, by some ‘non-material’ method, in order to explain the transdifferentiation of cells into their multiple different states during embryological development.
The information content in DNA, and even the entire information content of single cell, is simply not enough information to explain why any particular organism may take the basic biological form that it does.
As Doug Axe explained, “there are a quadrillion neural connections in the human brain, that’s vastly more neural connections in the human brain than there are bits (of information) in the human genome. So,,, there’s got to be something else going on that makes us what we are.”
The amount of information coming into a developing embryo is gargantuan, vastly outstripping the information contained within DNA. As the following article states, ‘the information to build a human infant, atom by atom, would take up the equivalent of enough thumb drives to fill the Titanic, multiplied by 2,000.”
As should be obvious, that is orders of magnitude more information than is contained on DNA or even contained within a single cell.
Thus in conclusion, Lima-de-Faria, with his thesis that “Biological form and biological function are the products of the mould of form and function already present in quarks and leptons, or any other of the elementary particles” is missing a rather large elephant in the living room. First, he is missing the necessity of information to explain the origin of life in the first place. And secondly, he is missing the fact that information must be imparted into developing embryos in order to explain why any organism may take the particular biological form that it does.
Verse and music:
Supplemental note:
Of related note: Dr. Tour has his ongoing lecture series on abiogenesis in a playlist format now:
Also of note here is a corrected link to my pervious post which has the corrected quote from Dr. Brian Miller,
corrected quote:
From Lima’s Evolution without Selection:
Couldn’t we just as easily say that the Large Hadron Collider’s “[physical] form and function are the products of the mould of form and function already present in quarks and leptons, or any other of the elementary particles”?
Shall we then conclude that “design” had nothing to do with the LHC? While promoting a kind of physical determinism, obliterating ‘selection’, he nonetheless doesn’t resolve the question of where this “evolution of [biological] matter” comes from. I believe this is a big flaw in his way of thinking.
>” But the demonstration of the occurrence of evolution is not tantamount to the demonstration that its mechanism is based on selection.”
Once again, a non-ID person is stating that you don’t have to know the mechanism (the “how) in order to know that something happened and not the alternatives. If it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for us. In other words, we can ascertain that the universe and life are designed without knowing the “how”. This won’t settle that matter with skeptics, and they will again someday make their tired argument that we have to know the “how”. We’ll just pull out this quote and remind them…again and again.