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Is a recent YouTube vid a symptom of end-stage Darwinism?

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Via the Institute of Art and Ideas, Massimo Pigliucci, Zanna Clay, Tim Lewens address the question, “Is evolution wrong?

Is the theory of natural selection a Victorian relic, about to be replaced by a new science of cultural evolution? Or does the promised paradigm shift provide no real challenge to Darwin’s theory?

In the comments to a UD story, a reader offers some excerpts from this program:

Four evolutionists. Totally confused, contradictory, double-speak.

Zanna Clay: “Nobody in evolutionary research is arguing that we should abandon Darwin. We just need to expand our appreciation of other effects that weren’t explained by the Modern Synthesis.”

Interviewer: “empathy in animals, for example, there must be a gene for that”.

ZC: “But nobody is saying that. I don’t know any scientist who would say that.”

Pigliucci: “Oh, I do. I won’t mention names – Richard Dawkins”.

ZC: “Well, I disagree with those kinds of scientists. I mean, it’s not what most people in the field are debating”.

Interviewer: “It’s the ghost of Richard Dawkins”.

ZC: Yes, it’s a bit of a PR crisis.

Interviewer: It is a PR crisis.

ZC: Anyone seriously studying these processes theories knows that like it’s it it like – theories of evolution would never dismiss the role environment and development play in shaping these behaviors.

It’s not a PR crisis. It’s a collision with reality.

Hat tip: Philip Cunningham and commenter Silver Asiatic.

See also: The Salem Hypothesis Is True, And That’s Great For ID

and

Consciousness: Philosopher Massimo Pigliucci Skates Around The Main Problems (He’s in the vid and was also one of the The Altenberg 16, who began to question Darwinism (though he seems now to want to try to rescue it)

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Comments
'Is it Time to DROP darwinism?' 'For centuries we have accepted Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, but in his book COSMOSAPIENS, John Hands questions our understanding of how humans evolved'. 'At a landmark international conference recently [7-9 November] organised by the Royal Society and the British Academy, several speakers called for a revision of the theory of biological evolution that has been largely unquestioned in the UK and the USA for around 70 years'. 'This paradigm - a combination of Darwinism, population genetics, and what Francis Crick called the central dogma of evolutionary biology - is known as NeoDarwinism, or the Modern Synthesis. Popularised by Richard Dawkins in his bestselling 1976 book The Selfish Gene, it is a statistical model validated not by observation or experiment, but by simplistic games models borrowed from 1940s economics'. https://www.sciencefocus.com/nature/is-it-time-to-drop-darwinism/amp/Truthfreedom
January 14, 2020
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This paper explains how biological life originated and evolved: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S105579031830561XPavelU
December 30, 2019
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One hypothesis suggests that after God started creating life, satan decided he was clever and could do the same. Given his penchant for destroying what God creates, took some bits of living cells and created viruses to attack them. Then God, bringing good from evil, changed some viruses into phages to attack the bacteria that cause diseases. OK, just a thought - entirely non-scientific, but hey, hypotheses begin as vague and novel thoughts...Fasteddious
December 27, 2019
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Martin_r
Moreover, each virus is unique – has a different ‘evolutionary’ origin. To explain the origin of all viruses is like to explain the origin of life thousands of time over and over….
Interesting. Evolutionists cannot explain the origin of viruses as a development from cellular life so they'll claim that their origin is not covered by evolutionary theory and they just push the problem over to the origin of life researchers. So every virus is evidence of abiogenesis. But somehow nobody can produce it in a lab and there is no observable evidence of non-life elements creating a living virus. I guess OOL researchers just push viruses back to evolutionists and expect them to show how viruses emerged from cells. They expect convergent evolution to fix it, as always?
Evolutionary theory can’t explain the existence of the most abundant organism on Earth
They're upset because there's no fossil evidence. As if they don't have enough data-points or material to do lab-studies with among the global population of viruses.Silver Asiatic
December 27, 2019
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BA77
Although empirical evidence has directly contradicted Darwinian claims over and over again, and has thus unambiguously shown that ‘evolution IS wrong”, never-the-less, Darwinist themselves dance around the falsifying evidence and simply refuse to ever honestly address the question “Is evolution wrong?”
Thanks for highlighting this item - and I was delighted to see my comments headlined. Thanks! I found this video to be so informative. A clear window into the confused ideas of evolutionists. The evolution expert claims that no scientists argue for gradualism and genetic determinism. The other so-called expert corrects her: Um, Richard Dawkins? The most famous evolutionist in the world. Never heard of him? Oh yeah. Him and his millions of followers in biology, academics and the general public. Well, ok. But still, nobody besides that actually believes Darwin's theory "like that". We believe Darwin's theory in a different way. I remember years ago when evolutionists claimed to me that evolutionary theory was fixed, certain, precise -- just pure science. What a joke. They still claim it, while they can't even agree on the most fundamental aspects. Now we get a panel of the more brave experts who actually consider the question of whether evolutionary theory is wrong or not. They end up showing the world (anyone who wants to look at the facts) that there isn't any evolutionary theory. It's a jumble of speculations that can fit any observations. They also reveal their own dishonesty - which is probably a more important fact to consider. They'll lie about anything and everything to protect their story.Silver Asiatic
December 27, 2019
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the most absurd fact about evolutionary theory is, that this theory can't explain the existence of the most abundant organism on Earth - the viruses. Viruses outnumber bacteria 10 fold. Yet, evolutionary theory can't explain where the viruses come from. Let me repeat that: There is NO SCIENTIFIC THEORY (just some hypothesis) to explain the origin of viruses.... The idea of common ancestor does not work with viruses, because viruses are a fully different 'system'. Viruses are not made of cells. That is the fact and that is the problem with common ancestor. Moreover, each virus is unique - has a different 'evolutionary' origin. To explain the origin of all viruses is like to explain the origin of life thousands of time over and over.... Some quotes from Virology.ws: "Viruses are polyphyletic In a phylogenetic tree, the characteristics of members of taxa are inherited from previous ancestors. Viruses cannot be included in the tree of life because they do not share characteristics with cells, and no single gene is shared by all viruses or viral lineages. While cellular life has a single, common origin, viruses are polyphyletic – they have many evolutionary origins." "There are no ancestral viral lineages No single gene has been identified that is shared by all viruses. There are common protein motifs in viral capsids, but these have likely come about through convergent evolution or horizontal gene transfer." "Viruses don’t have a structure derived from a common ancestor Cells obtain membranes from other cells during cell division. According to this concept of ‘membrane heredity’, today’s cells have inherited membranes from the first cells that evolved, and provides evidence that cells are derived from a common ancestor. Viruses have no such inherited structure." ... so once again: Evolutionary theory can't explain the existence of the most abundant organism on Earth :)))))martin_r
December 27, 2019
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As to the title of the video "Is evolution wrong?" and as to this comment from the video “Nobody in evolutionary research is arguing that we should abandon Darwin. We just need to expand our appreciation of other effects that weren’t explained by the Modern Synthesis.” And therein lies the primary problem with the claim from Darwinists that Darwinian evolution qualifies as a empirical science. Although empirical evidence has directly contradicted Darwinian claims over and over again, and has thus unambiguously shown that 'evolution IS wrong", never-the-less, Darwinist themselves dance around the falsifying evidence and simply refuse to ever honestly address the question "Is evolution wrong?" In honestly trying to answer the question posed by the title of the video "Is evolution wrong?", well first and foremost, evolution lacks a basis in science to even be, as Wolfgang Pauli would have put it,. "Not even wrong"
Pauli’s ideas on mind and matter in the context of contemporary science – Harald Atmanspacher Excerpt: “In discussions with biologists I met large difficulties when they apply the concept of ‘natural selection’ in a rather wide field, without being able to estimate the probability of the occurrence in a empirically given time of just those events, which have been important for the biological evolution. Treating the empirical time scale of the evolution theoretically as infinity they have then an easy game, apparently to avoid the concept of purposesiveness. While they pretend to stay in this way completely ‘scientific’ and ‘rational,’ they become actually very irrational, particularly because they use the word ‘chance’, not any longer combined with estimations of a mathematically defined probability, in its application to very rare single events more or less synonymous with the old word ‘miracle.’” Wolfgang Pauli (pp. 27-28) https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/234f/4989e039089fed5ac47c7d1a19b656c602e2.pdf
Karl Popper stated that “In so far as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable; and in so far as it is not falsifiable, it does not speak about reality.”
“In so far as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable; and in so far as it is not falsifiable, it does not speak about reality.” Karl Popper – The Two Fundamental Problems of the Theory of Knowledge (2014 edition), Routledge
And as Denis Noble, President of International Union of Physiological Sciences, stated, “it is then incumbent on modern neo-Darwinists to specify what would now falsify the theory. If nothing can do this then it is not a scientific theory.”
Central tenets of neo-Darwinism broken. Response to ‘Neo-Darwinism is just fine’ – 2015 Excerpt: “If, as the commentator seems to imply, we make neo-Darwinism so flexible as an idea that it can accept even those findings that the originators intended to be excluded by the theory it is then incumbent on modern neo-Darwinists to specify what would now falsify the theory. If nothing can do this then it is not a scientific theory.” – Denis Noble https://jeb.biologists.org/content/218/16/2659
Stanford Professor Paul Ehrlich stated that the Theory of Evolution ‘cannot be refuted by any possible observations’ and is thus “outside empirical science.”
“Our theory of evolution has become, as Popper described, one which cannot be refuted by any possible observations. Every conceivable observation can be fitted into it. It is thus “outside empirical science” but not necessarily false. No one can think of ways in which to test it. Ideas, either without basis or based on a few laboratory experiments carried out in extremely simplified systems have attained currency far beyond their validity. They have become part of an evolutionary dogma accepted by most of us as part of our training. The cure seems to us not to be a discarding of the modern synthesis of evolutionary theory, but more skepticism about many of its tenets.” Ehrlich, Paul and L.C. Birch (1967), “Evolutionary History and Population Biology,” Nature, 214:349-352, April 22, p. 352
Moreover, it is not that Darwinism has not already been falsified time and time again. It is that Darwinists themselves simple refuse to ever accept any falsification of their theory. Here are a few falsifications of Darwinian evolution that Darwinists simply refuse to ever accept as falsifications of their theory:
Darwin’s theory holds mutations to the genome to be random. The vast majority of mutations to the genome are not random but are now found to be ‘directed’. Darwin’s theory holds that Natural Selection is the ‘designer substitute’ that produces the ‘appearance’ and/or illusion of design. Natural Selection, especially for multicellular organisms, is found to grossly inadequate as the ‘designer substitute. Darwin’s theory holds that mutations to DNA will eventually change the basic biological form of any given species into a new form of a brand new species. Yet, biological form is found to be irreducible to mutations to DNA, nor is biological form reducible to any other material particulars in biology one may wish to invoke. Darwin’s theory holds there to be an extremely beneficial and flexible mutation rate for DNA which was ultimately responsible for all the diversity and complexity of life we see on earth. The mutation rate to DNA is overwhelmingly detrimental. Detrimental to such a point that it is seriously questioned whether there are any truly beneficial, information building, mutations whatsoever. Charles Darwin himself held that the gradual unfolding of life would (someday) be self-evident in the fossil record. Yet, from the Cambrian Explosion onward, the fossil record is consistently characterized by the sudden appearance of a group/kind in the fossil record(disparity), then rapid diversity within the group/kind, and then long term stability and even deterioration of variety within the overall group/kind, and within the specific species of the kind, over long periods of time. Of the few dozen or so fossils claimed as transitional, not one is uncontested as a true example of transition between major animal forms out of millions of collected fossils. Moreover, Fossils are found in the “wrong place” all the time (either too early, or too late). Darwin’s theory, due to the randomness postulate, holds that patterns will not repeat themselves in supposedly widely divergent species. Yet thousands of instances of what is ironically called ‘convergent evolution’, on both the morphological and genetic level, falsifies the Darwinian belief that patterns will not repeat themselves in widely divergent species. Charles Darwin himself stated that “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.” Yet as Doug Axe pointed out, “Basically every gene and every new protein fold, there is nothing of significance that we can show that can be had in that gradualistic way. It’s all a mirage. None of it happens that way.” Charles Darwin himself stated that “If it could be proved that any part of the structure of any one species had been formed for the exclusive good of another species, it would annihilate my theory, for such could not have been produced through natural selection.” Yet as Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig pointed out, “in thousands of plant species often entirely new organs have been formed for the exclusive good of more than 132,930 other species, these ‘ugly facts’ have annihilated Darwin’s theory as well as modern versions of it.” Charles Darwin himself stated that, ““The impossibility of conceiving that this grand and wondrous universe, with our conscious selves, arose through chance, seems to me the chief argument for the existence of God. Yet ‘our conscious selves’ are certainly not explainable by ‘chance’ (nor is consciousness explainable by any possible reductive materialistic explanation in general), i.e. ‘the hard problem of consciousness’. Besides the mathematics of probability consistently showing that Darwinian evolution is impossible, the mathematics of population genetics itself has now shown Darwinian evolution to be impossible. Moreover, ‘immaterial’ mathematics itself, which undergirds all of science, engineering and technology, is held by most mathematicians to exist in some timeless, unchanging, immaterial, Platonic realm. Yet, the reductive materialism that Darwinian theory is based upon denies the existence of the immaterial realm that mathematics exists in. i.e. Darwinian evolution actually denies the objective reality of the one thing, i.e. mathematics, that it most needs in order to be considered scientific in the first place! Donald Hoffman has, via population genetics, shown that if Darwin’s materialistic theory were true then all our observations of reality would be illusory. Yet the scientific method itself is based on reliable observation. Moreover, Quantum Mechanics itself has now shown that conscious observation must come before material reality, i.e. falsification of ‘realism’ proves that our conscious observations are reliable!. The reductive materialism that undergirds Darwinian thought holds that immaterial information is merely ’emergent’ from a material basis. Yet immaterial Information, via experimental realization of the “Maxwell’s Demon” thought experiment, is now found to be its own distinctive physical entity that, although it can interact in a ‘top down’ manner with matter and energy, is separate from matter and energy. Darwinists hold that Darwin’s theory is true. Yet ‘Truth’ itself is an abstract property of an immaterial mind that is irreducible to the reductive materialistic explanations of Darwinian evolution. i.e. Assuming reductive materialism and/or Naturalism as the starting philosophical position of science actually precludes ‘the truth’ from ever being reached by science! Darwinists, due to their underlying naturalistic philosophy, insist that teleology (i.e. goal directed purpose) does not exist. Yet it is impossible for Biologists to do biological research without constantly invoking words that directly imply teleology. i.e. The very words that Biologists themselves use when they are doing their research falsifies Darwinian evolution.
Verse:
1 Thessalonians 5:21 Test all things; hold fast what is good.
Besides Darwinists refusing to adhere to the criteria of falsification for their supposed scientific theory, by any other reasonable measure that one may wish to judge whether Darwinian evolution even qualifies as a science or not, as is shown in the following video, Darwinian evolution fails to meet those criteria as well:
“There are five standard tests for a scientific hypothesis. Has anyone observed the phenomenon — in this case, Evolution — as it occurred and recorded it? Could other scientists replicate it? Could any of them come up with a set of facts that, if true, would contradict the theory (Karl Popper’s “falsifiability” tests)? Could scientists make predictions based on it? Did it illuminate hitherto unknown or baffling areas of science? In the case of Evolution… well… no… no… no… no… and no.” – Tom Wolfe – The Kingdom of Speech – page 17 Darwinian Evolution Fails the Five Standard Tests of a Scientific Hypothesis – video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7f_fyoPybw
Simply put, Darwinian evolution simply fails to qualify as a rigorous and testable science by any reasonable measure one may wish to invoke and is therefore more properly classified as a pseudoscience, even as a religion for atheists, rather than ever being classified as a real and testable science. In short, as Pauli would have put it, evolution is 'not even wrong'bornagain77
December 26, 2019
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