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Comparing Darwin to a real math and physics genius

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Darwin wrote of himself:

I attempted mathematics [at Cambridge University ], and even went during the summer of 1828 with a private tutor (a very dull man) to Barmouth, but I got on very slowly. The work was repugnant to me, chiefly from my not being able to see any meaning in the early steps of algebra. This impatience was foolish, and in after years I have deeply regretted that I did not proceed far enough at least to understand something of the great leading principles of mathematics; for men thus endowed seem to have an extra sense. But I do not believe that I should ever have succeeded beyond a very low grade.

Autobiography (p. 58 of the 1958 Norton edition)


[thanks to an un-named friend for uncovering the above quote]

I do not wish to overly demean someone for not being mathematically gifted (after all Darwin is not to be blamed for the genes he inherited), but the fact remains Darwin and math don’t mix. Darwin viewed math to be repugnant, and his lack of mathematical insight permeates his illogical ideas about the evolution of life.

In contrast to Darwin, there was the ID proponent and creationist James Clerk Maxwell who was a math and physics genius. Einstein viewed Maxwell as one of the three greatest scientists in history (the ID proponents Newton and Faraday being the other two). Had there been no Einstein, we might be saying instead the name Maxwell to signify genius. It was through those divine Maxwell’s Equations of electro dynamics that Einstein formulated his famous theory of relativity, and it was through Maxwell’s Equations that the modern world is what it is today.

James Clerk Maxwell

From a physics textbook by Halliday and Resnick:

As for Maxwell’s equations, the physicist Ludwig Boltzmann (quoting a line from Goethe) wrote: “Was it a God who wrote these lines …?” In more recent times J.R. Pierce, in a book chapter entitled “Maxwell’s Wonderful Equations,” wrote: “To anyone who is motivated by anything beyond the most narrowly practical it is worthwhile to understand Maxwell’s equations simply for the good of his soul.” The scope of these equations has been well summarized by the remark that Maxwell’s equations account for the facts that a compass needle points north, That light bends when it enters water, and that your car starts when you turn the ignition key. These equations are the basis for the operation of all such electromagnetic and optical devices as electric motors, telescopes, cyclotrons, eyeglasses, television transmitters and receivers, telephones, electromagnets, radar, and microwave ovens.

By contrast, Darwin’s non-equations have done nothing for the world of science and modern technology. Let the world of science commemorate things like Maxwell’s Year more than Darwin Day.

From a long view of the history of mankind — seen from, say, ten thousand years from now, there can be little doubt that the most significant event of the 19th century will be judged as Maxwell’s discovery of the laws of electrodynamics.

Richard Feynman
Nobel Lareate in Physics

Amen brother Feynman, Amen.

Comments
"There is, however, a cost in denying it – but that’s not a matter of science but politics." Yeah, makes sense... Because politics and truth don't necessarily intersect... But still... For my own sake, if I consider myself an intelligent person, how can I be so ignorant of the (scientific) facts ?... I believe this should be beyond politics... Or am I just a dreamer ?Sladjo
March 9, 2007
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How come that after so many decades of advances in microbiology, IT, information theory, engineering, we still have this ToE rubbish in researching labs, universities, textbooks, in newspapers, on television and internet ?…Is there any logical and viable explanation on this ?… There is no cost to accepting it. Accepting -- or not accepting -- the theory makes little difference in anyone's actual work. So one says he accepts it, then goes on and happily does his work. There is, however, a cost in denying it-- but that's not a matter of science but politics.tribune7
March 9, 2007
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OK, Darwin was a mediocre student, a bad scientist... But how can you explain that almost all scientific community accepted his non-sense ?... For me this is a mystery maybe greater than the OOL... How come that bright, intelligent people from scientific community embraced his ToE 150 years ago, took it seriously, and then translated it in the textbooks, forcing pupils for more than 50 years to teach it as a scientific fact ?... How come that after so many decades of advances in microbiology, IT, information theory, engineering, we still have this ToE rubbish in researching labs, universities, textbooks, in newspapers, on television and internet ?... Is there any logical and viable explanation on this ?...Sladjo
March 9, 2007
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We have reached the utmost limit of our thinking faculties when we have admitted that because matter cannot be eternal and self-existent it must have been created. There is a limit to our minds. It is impossible to address the question "Who made God?" just as it is impossible to address the question "What came before the 'Big Bang?'" I'm content to stand on my faith. The materialist claims he has no need of faith then grasps, as a child holds a teddy bear, one inconceivably greater than mine. To deny something one grips is the epitome of delusion.tribune7
March 9, 2007
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Consider the great scientists of the 19th Century and you were likely to find a great man of God (i.e. Faraday, Maxwell, Pasteur, Kelvin). Further, these scientists were making unexpected insights that were largely the result of individual effort. Now, consider the scientists of recent years -- most of whom seem hostile to God. There are still brilliant people, and great discoveries continue to be made but how many are truly unexpected? Even finding DNA was a horserace between competing teams. (Woese is the closest I can think of off the top of my head to the old school although he seems a bit hostile to God, certainly to ID.) What seems to remain unchanged, however, is that the celebrity scientist is someone generally hostile to God. Darwin was the biggest science celeb of his day just as Dawkins and the late Carl Sagan are/were of contemporary times. Maybe the lesson is that those who control popular media are generally hostile to God.tribune7
March 9, 2007
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scordova (quoting de Beer):
The boy [Darwin] developed very slowly: he was given, when small, to inventing gratuitous fibs and to daydreaming.
And so began a pattern... Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle:
[A]s the traveller stays but a short time in each place, his descriptions must generally consist of mere sketches, instead of detailed observations. Hence arises, as I have found to my cost, a constant tendency to fill up the wide gaps of knowledge, by inaccurate and superficial hypotheses.
j
March 9, 2007
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That is the very core of Darwinian failure. Lack of mathematical model. And each one who knows math and IT and physics, knows that evolution theory is not and will not be able to produce such mathematical apparatus, unless the very laws of the universe will be changed.Shazard
March 9, 2007
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And more importantly of course, in the last 150 years there has been mathematical treatment of the Theory of Evolution at all too........Trent
March 8, 2007
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I believe, with the Westminster Divines and their predecessors ad Infinitum, that "Man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him for ever". --Maxwell
See: James Clerk Maxwell and the Christian Proposition And Molecules
No theory of evolution can be formed to account for the similarity of molecules, for evolution necessarily implies continuous change, and the molecule is incapable of growth or decay, or generation or destruction.
The term molecule was really closer to the notion of "immutable" atom. We know today Maxwell was not exactly right, but his daring idea of atomic theory was radical at the time and eventually vindicated. That's right Maxwell, in addition to pioneering electrodynamics was a pioneer of atomic theory!!!! Darwin had no good notion of matter. Maxwell proposed that certain properties of matter were not subject to evolutionary change. This was fundamental to atomic theory. In the modern day we understand the discrete components of matter are not molecules, nor even atoms, but sub-atomic units. Maxwell was far closer to the truth in his conception of matter than Darwin. The discrete components of matter were not subject to gradualistic evolution.
Thus we have been led, along a strictly scientific path, very near to the point at which Science must stop. Not that Science is debarred from studying the internal mechanism of a molecule which she cannot take to pieces, any more than from investigating an organism which she cannot put together. But in tracing back the history of matter Science is arrested when she assures herself, on the one hand, that the molecule has been made, and on the other that it has not been made by any of the processes we call natural. Science is incompetent to reason upon the creation of matter itself out of nothing. We have reached the utmost limit of our thinking faculties when we have admitted that because matter cannot be eternal and self-existent it must have been created. It is only when we contemplate, not matter in itself, but the form in which it actually exists, that our mind finds something on which it can lay hold. That matter, as such, should have certain fundamental properties--that it should exist in space and be capable of motion, that its motion should be persistent, and so on, are truths which may, for anything we know, be of the kind which metaphysicians call necessary. We may use our knowledge of such truths for purposes of deduction but we have no data for speculating as to their origin. .... But though in the course of ages catastrophes have occurred and may yet occur in the heavens, though ancient systems may be dissolved and new systems may be dissolved and new systems evolved out of their ruins, the molecules out of which these systems are built--the foundation stones of the material universe--remain unbroken and unworn. They continue this day as they were created, perfect in number and measure and weight, and from the ineffaceable characters impressed on them we may learn that those aspirations after accuracy in measurement, truth in statement, and justice in action, which we reckon among our noblest attributes as men, are ours because they are essential constituents of the image of Him Who in the beginning created, not only the heaven and the earth, but the materials of which heaven and earth consist.
Maxwell was not exactly correct, but close. Had he used the phrase "sub atomic particle" rather than the word molecule, he would be very close to modern conceptions. Maxwell was so close to the truth and his ideas of atomic theory so daring, that had he not discovered electrodynamics, he would still be famous based on his pioneering work on atomic theory. It's charming to see that in his his historic presentation of atomic theory, he felt free to speak of God as the Designer of the physical universe and atoms and to take a swipe at evolutionary theory.scordova
March 8, 2007
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Thanks, Sal. Interesting post and good food for thought. One of the things that struck me when I read Origin was that Darwin provided essentially no numerical, quantifiable calculations or analyses -- virtually no math to speak of. In fairness, he readily acknowledged that his book was in the form of "one long [rhetorical] argument." But one must not confuse general musings and hypotheses with rigorous numerical analysis. One cannot avoid the latter and expect the former to be taken seriously.Eric Anderson
March 8, 2007
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Sal, My ancestry is to a large degree Scottish, and since Scots are mostly known for whiskey and stinginess, I'm pleased that Maxwell was both a great scientist and a good Presbyterian.GilDodgen
March 8, 2007
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Gil, Feynman had his faults, but thankfully the man that uphold in contrast to Darwin is Maxwell who was a very devout and faithful Presbyterian. Salscordova
March 8, 2007
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Sal, Richard Feynman may have been a genius, but I lost all respect for him after reading the following in James Gleick's biography, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (page 287):
...he [Feynman] had pursued women with a single-mindedness that violated most of the public, if not the private, scruples associated with the sexual ballet. He dated undergraduates, paid prostitutes in whorehouses, taught himself (as he saw it) how to beat bar girls at their own game, and slept with the young wives of several of his friends among the physics graduate students. He told colleagues that he had worked out a kind of all's-fair approach to sexual morality and argued that he was using women as they sought to use him. Love seemed mostly a myth -- a species of self-delusion, or rationalization, or a gambit employed by women in search of husbands.
GilDodgen
March 8, 2007
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Shrewsbury School could find nothing but dull mediocrity in Charles Darwin. Huxley's eulogy
Here is what Darwin was good at according to Sir Gavin de Beer:
Sir Gavin de Beer: The boy [Darwin] developed very slowly: he was given, when small, to inventing gratuitous fibs and to daydreaming
scordova
March 8, 2007
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You don't really need to know math if you're going to be a preacher.tribune7
March 8, 2007
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Sal, let’s not forget antibiotic resistance. Sure glad we have Darwin’s theory to offer us sooooo much help and guidance with that, you know, with very specific predictions and stuff like that…
Agreed. And speaking of anti-biotic resistance, the Nobel Laureates involved in research of penicilin and streptomyocin were anti-Darwinian and/or Design friendly Fleming:
...destiny may play a large part in discovery. It was destiny which contaminated my culture plate in 1928 - it was destiny which led Chain and Florey in 1938 to investigate penicillin instead of the many other antibiotics which had then been described and it was destiny that timed their work to come to fruition in war-time when penicillin was most needed. It may be that while we think we are masters of the situation we are merely pawns being moved about on the board of life by some superior power. Fleming Nobel Laureate, discoverer of penicillin
Chain:
The Darwin-Wallace theory of evoltution... is based on such flimsy assumptions....it can hardly be called a theory....I would rather believe in fairies than such wild speculations Ernst Chain Nobel Laureate for research in purifying penicillin
Waksman:
The concept of the 'struggle for existence' has been applied to microbial interrelationships in nature in a manner comparable to the effects assigned by Darwin to higher forms of life. It has also been suggested that the ability of a microbe to produce an antibiotic substance enables it to survive in competition for space and for nutrients with other microbes. Such assumptions appear to be totally unjustified on the basis of existing knowledge...All the discussion of a 'struggle for existence,' in which antibiotics are supposed to play a part, is mereley a figment of the imagination, and an appeal to the melodramatic rather than the factual." Selman Waksman, Nobel Laureate pioneer of anti biotic research and streptomycin
[HT: Jonathan Wells book, Politically Incorrect Guide]scordova
March 8, 2007
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Sal, <pre-packaged answer>let's not forget antibiotic resistance</pre-packaged answer>. Sure glad we have Darwin's theory to offer us sooooo much help and guidance with that, you know, with very specific predictions and stuff like that... (smile) Fact: Organisms change. What genius.Atom
March 8, 2007
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