Do Darwinians believe in magic?

_{Denyse O'Leary

April 26, 2020

Culture, Darwinism, Intelligent Design, Natural selection}

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It begins to sound like that after a while:

At almost every step in Darwin’s theory of evolution someone has to pull a rabbit out of a black box. Darwin’s theory of evolution might as well be called Merlin’s theory of evolution. It is long on fantastic narrative and magic tricks and short on empirical evidence. So far no substantial and enduring evidence of one species evolving into another species has ever been produced.
But Darwin’s theory pleased many men. It freed them from guilt and fear of a God they preferred to ignore and reject.
Many others, however, found Darwin’s theory implausible. They just couldn’t accept Darwin’s fantastic creation narrative of fish flopping on a sandy beach until the fittest developed suitable lungs and became reptiles or of lizards falling out of trees until the fittest developed wings and became birds. They just couldn’t see how unguided mutations resulted in lungs or wings instead of dead fish and lizards. It did not mesh with common sense and a basic understanding of probability. Still others recognized that the theological implications of Darwinism were incompatible with revealed religion and any solid anchor of right and wrong.
Mike Scruggs, “Darwin’s Magic Evolutionary Ideology ” at The Times Examiner

Whatever one might think of Scrugg’s religious theories, he is right to focus on the essentially magical character of Darwinism. For one thing, it is immune to probability issues. When brand new complex systems are found in living organisms, no matter how many of them or how complex and interlocking they are, well, we are told, that just shows the awesome power of natural selection acting on random mutation.

When life forms of great and probably irreducible complexity appear at over half a billion years ago, that just shows the awesome power of natural selection acting on random mutation.

The Darwinian may as well have said, that just shows the awesome power of magic.

It’s a point of view anchored in an enforced ideology (powerful Darwinists can wreck the careers of critics), not in a strong sense of reality. Nor in any need for a strong sense of reality.

Hat tip: Philip Cunningham

Comments

Talk about the pot calling the kettle black...chuckdarwin_{April 27, 2020
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Moreover, the mathematical problems for Darwinian evolution have only gotten far worse for Darwinists since the Wistar symposium in 1966.
Yockey and a Calculator Versus Evolutionists - Cornelius Hunter PhD - September 25, 2015 Excerpt: In a 1977 paper published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology, Hubert Yockey used information theory to evaluate the likelihood of the evolution of a relatively simple protein.,,, Yockey found that the probability of evolution finding the cytochrome c protein sequence is about one in 10^64. That is a one followed by 64 zeros—an astronomically large number. He concluded in the peer-reviewed paper that the belief that proteins appeared spontaneously “is based on faith.” Indeed, Yockey’s early findings are in line with, though a bit more conservative than, later findings. A 1990 study of a small, simple protein found that 10^63 attempts would be required for evolution to find the protein. A 2004 study found that 10^64 to 10^77 attempts are required, and a 2006 study concluded that 10^70 attempts would be required. These requirements dwarf the resources evolution has at its disposal. Even evolutionists have had to admit that evolution could only have a maximum of 10^43 such experiments. It is important to understand how tiny this number is compared to 10^70. 10^43 is not more than half of 10^70. It is not even close to half. 10^43 is an astronomically tiny sliver of 10^70. Furthermore, the estimate of 10^43 is, itself, entirely unrealistic. For instance, it assumes the entire history of the Earth is available, rather than the limited time window that evolution actually would have had.,,, http://darwins-god.blogspot.com/2015/09/yockey-and-calculator-versus.html Origin: Probability of a Single Protein Forming by Chance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1_KEVaCyaA Mathematical Basis for Probability Calculations Used in (the film) Origin Excerpt: Putting the probabilities together means adding the exponents. The probability of getting a properly folded chain of one-handed amino acids, joined by peptide bonds, is one chance in 10^74+45+45, or one in 10^164 (Meyer, p. 212). This means that, on average, you would need to construct 10^164 chains of amino acids 150 units long to expect to find one that is useful. http://www.originthefilm.com/mathematics.php Right of Reply: Our Response to Jerry Coyne - September 29, 2019 by Günter Bechly, Brian Miller and David Berlinski Excerpt: Indeed, Harvard mathematical biologist Martin Nowak has shown that random searches in sequence space that start from known functional sequences are no more likely to enter regions in sequence space with new protein folds than searches that start from random sequences. The reason for this is clear: random searches are overwhelmingly more likely to go off into a non-folding, non-functional abyss than they are to find a novel protein fold. Why? Because such novel folds are so extraordinarily rare in sequence space. Moreover, as Meyer explained in Darwin’s Doubt, as mutations accumulate in functional sequences, they will inevitably destroy function long before they stumble across a new protein fold. Again, this follows from the extreme rarity (as well as the isolation) of protein folds in sequence space. Recent work by Weizmann Institute protein scientist Dan Tawfik has reinforced this conclusion. Tawfik’s work shows that as mutations to functional protein sequences accumulate, the folds of those proteins become progressively more thermodynamically and structurally unstable. Typically, 15 or fewer mutations will completely destroy the stability of known protein folds of average size. Yet, generating (or finding) a new protein fold requires far more amino acid sequence changes than that. Finally, calculations based on Tawfik’s work confirm and extend the applicability of Axe’s original measure of the rarity of protein folds. These calculations confirm that the measure of rarity that Axe determined for the protein he studied is actually representative of the rarity for large classes of other globular proteins. Not surprisingly, Dan Tawfik has described the origination of a truly novel protein or fold as “something like close to a miracle.” Tawfik is on Coyne’s side: He is mainstream. https://quillette.com/2019/09/29/right-of-reply-our-response-to-jerry-coyne/
Thus, in conclusion, Darwinists certainly do believe in magic. And their magician is 'chance'. Moreover, since 'chance' does not even exist as a known cause for anything, but 'chance' is actually 'our ignorance' of a known cause, then Darwinists actually believe in magic minus any magician to perform their magic. A magic show without any magician to perform the magic is certainly one hell of a magic show for Darwinists to believe in. Verses:
Acts 17:23-25 For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: to an unknown god. So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship—and this is what I am going to proclaim to you. “The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else.
bornagain77_{April 27, 2020
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As to,
"Do Darwinians Believe In Magic?" ,,,"At almost every step in Darwin’s theory of evolution someone has to pull a rabbit out of a black box. Darwin’s theory of evolution might as well be called Merlin’s theory of evolution. It is long on fantastic narrative and magic tricks and short on empirical evidence."
And indeed, Darwinists do believe in the "magic". And their magician is "chance".
"Pure chance, absolutely free but blind, (is) at the very root of the stupendous edifice of evolution: this central concept of modern biology is no longer one among many other possible or even conceivable hypotheses. It is today the sole conceivable hypothesis," - Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity
Small problem for Darwinists in their appeal to 'pure chance' as their magician, chance is not the cause of anything.
What Is Chance? - Nicholas Nurston Excerpt: "The vague word 'chance' is used as a substitute for a more precise word such as 'cause'. “To personify ‘chance’ as if we were talking about a causal agent,” notes biophysicist Donald M. MacKay, “is to make an illegitimate switch from a scientific to a quasi-religious mythological concept.” Similarly, Robert C. Sproul points out: “By calling the unknown cause ‘chance’ for so long, people begin to forget that a substitution was made. . . . The assumption that ‘chance equals an unknown cause’ has come to mean for many that ‘chance equals cause.’” Others who reasoned in this fashion, Nobel laureate Jacques Monod, for one, used this chance equals cause line of reasoning. "Pure chance, absolutely free but blind, (is) at the root of the stupendous edifice of evolution,"... https://books.google.com/books?id=bQ5OAAAAQBAJ&pg=PT25&lpg=PT25
In fact, instead of 'chance' being a known cause for anything, when Darwinists say that something happened by 'chance' they are, in fact, appealing to our ignorance of a known cause instead of appealing to any known cause. Charles Darwin himself admitted that his appeal to 'chance' is to "acknowledge plainly our ignorance of the cause ",
“I have hitherto sometimes spoken as if the variations—so common and multiform in organic beings under domestication, and in a lesser degree in those in a state of nature—had been due to chance. This, of course, is a wholly incorrect expression, but it serves to acknowledge plainly our ignorance of the cause of each particular variation.” Charles Darwin – Origin – Chapter V http://darwin-online.org.uk/Variorum/1860/1860-131-c-1859.html
As Dr. Egnor recently pointed out, there simply can be no definition for 'chance' unless it is defined against a backdrop of purposeful, i.e. teleogical, events. As Egnor succinctly put it, "Chance presupposes design."
Evolution Presupposes Intelligent Design: Case of the Coronavirus – Michael Egnor – April 7, 2020 Excerpt: Aristotle saw this in his definition of chance in nature — chance is the accidental conjunction of purposeful events. Without purpose there can be no chance. His example is instructive: he considered a farmer who ploughs his field and by chance discovers a treasure buried by someone else. The treasure is discovered by chance, but everything else — the farmer’s ownership of the field, his decision to plough it, the accumulation and burial of the treasure by the other man — is purposeful, and in fact the only reason the accident of discovery happened is because it is embedded in a world of purpose. Chance can’t happen — the word has no meaning — in an entirely accidental world. Chance presupposes design. https://evolutionnews.org/2020/04/evolution-presupposes-design-the-case-of-covid-19/
I never heard of Aristotle’s definition of chance before, but I realized that Aristotle, (and Egnor) are right. It simply would be impossible to tell if something happened by chance in a cell, (or in the universe), unless, as Stephen Talbott observes in the following article, it happened against the backdrop of the Intelligently Designed ‘highly regulated, coordinated, integrated, and intensely meaningful biological processes’ of the cell.
Evolution and the Illusion of Randomness – Talbott – Fall 2011 Excerpt: The situation calls to mind a widely circulated cartoon by Sidney Harris, which shows two scientists in front of a blackboard on which a body of theory has been traced out with the usual tangle of symbols, arrows, equations, and so on. But there’s a gap in the reasoning at one point, filled by the words, “Then a miracle occurs.” And the one scientist is saying to the other, “I think you should be more explicit here in step two.” In the case of evolution, I picture Dennett and Dawkins filling the blackboard with their vivid descriptions of living, highly regulated, coordinated, integrated, and intensely meaningful biological processes, and then inserting a small, mysterious gap in the middle, along with the words, “Here something random occurs.” This “something random” looks every bit as wishful as the appeal to a miracle. It is the central miracle in a gospel of meaninglessness, a “Randomness of the gaps,” demanding an extraordinarily blind faith. At the very least, we have a right to ask, “Can you be a little more explicit here?” http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/evolution-and-the-illusion-of-randomness
For 'chance' to have any rigid scientific definition at all it must first be mathematically defined against the backdrop of a purposely designed context and/or purposely designed universe, in which that 'chance' event can be said to occur in a mathematically defined probabilistic manner, After all, randomly choosing a card from a deck, by "chance", necessarily presupposes a intelligently designed deck of cards to choose from! Not to mention presupposing somebody to choose the card from that intelligently designed deck. Darwinists, since they refuse to acknowledge any backdrop of purposeful design in life, or in the universe, simply have no way to provide a rigid mathematical definition for 'chance' so as to make their application of 'chance' scientific. As Wolfgang Pauli noted, "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."
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
Moreover, when scientists try to rigidly define 'chance' in the context of a mathematically defined probability, Darwinists run into insurmountable problems for their theory. In 1966, MIT mathematicians and engineers met with eminent biologists (Darwinists) at the Wistar Institute to discuss problems with evolutionary theory. The meeting angered many of the eminent biologists, (Darwinists). and it angered them for good reason:
HISTORY OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY - WISTAR DESTROYS EVOLUTION Excerpt: A number of mathematicians, familiar with the biological problems, spoke at that 1966 Wistar Institute,, For example, Murray Eden showed that it would be impossible for even a single ordered pair of genes to be produced by DNA mutations in the bacteria, E. coli,—with 5 billion years in which to produce it! His estimate was based on 5 trillion tons of the bacteria covering the planet to a depth of nearly an inch during that 5 billion years. He then explained that the genes of E. coli contain over a trillion (10^12) bits of data. That is the number 10 followed by 12 zeros. *Eden then showed the mathematical impossibility of protein forming by chance. http://www.pathlights.com/ce_encyclopedia/Encyclopedia/20hist12.htm
Paul Nelson describes what happened at the Wistar symposium, "Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution."
50 Years of Scientific Challenges to Evolution: Remembering The Wistar Symposium – Paul Nelson - video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQy12X_Sm2k
In the paper entitled, “Inadequacies of Neo-Darwinian Evolution as a Scientific Theory”. Murray Eden of MIT stated that “It is our contention that if ‘random’ is given a serious and crucial interpretation from a probabilistic point of view, the randomness postulate is highly implausible and that an adequate scientific theory of evolution must await the discovery and elucidation of new natural laws—physical, physico-chemical, and biological.”
“It is our contention that if ‘random’ is given a serious and crucial interpretation from a probabilistic point of view, the randomness postulate is highly implausible and that an adequate scientific theory of evolution must await the discovery and elucidation of new natural laws—physical, physico-chemical, and biological.” Murray Eden, “Inadequacies of Neo-Darwinian Evolution as a Scientific Theory,” Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution, editors Paul S. Moorhead and Martin M. Kaplan, June 1967, p. 109.
Basically, Murray Eden and company were saying that Darwinian evolution does not even qualify as a scientific theory in the first place. I can see where 'eminent biologists', (Darwinists), would be a little perturbed with the realization that, in so far as they cling to Darwinian theory, they are not even to be considered scientists in any meaningful sense. since they don't even have a theory that can be considered scientific.bornagain77_{April 27, 2020
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from the article: " ... fish flopping on a sandy beach until the fittest developed suitable lungs and became reptiles or of lizards falling out of trees until the fittest developed wings and became birds. " not to mention, that Darwinian biologists are death-serious about the claim, that lungs and wings evolved not once, but, that that magic happened many times independently in evolutionary unrelated lineages/species ... Yes!!! Darwinian biologists claim, that lungs evolved many times independently !!!! https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15547792 Yes!!! Darwinian biologists claim, that wings also evolved many times independently in unrelated species (e.g. insects, birds, dinosaurs, mammals) Think of a thing, and i can assure you, that it evolved many times in various species. For more magic/miracles check out my blog at: www.stuffhappens.infomartin_r_{April 27, 2020
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i like this guy (Mike Scruggs) let me quote him once again, this is so well said: "At almost every step in Darwin’s theory of evolution someone has to pull a rabbit out of a black box. Darwin’s theory of evolution might as well be called Merlin’s theory of evolution. It is long on fantastic narrative and magic tricks and short on empirical evidence. So far no substantial and enduring evidence of one species evolving into another species has ever been produced. " Those of you who already know me, know, that i have used basically the same words in my previous posts... e.g. "Do biologists believe in miracles? " or "Most miracles happen in biology" - i am using this sentence very often at my StuffHappens.info blog. I can only agree with Mike Scruggs, moreover, you don't have to be a Nobel price laureate to see that 21st-century-biologists really do believe in miracles/magic. And these biologists are very smart and well educated people... so what to expect from an everyday, uneducated lay Darwinian atheist (e.g. Seversky) ?martin_r_{April 27, 2020
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When brand new complex systems are found in living organisms, no matter how many of them or how complex and interlocking they are, well, we are told, that just shows the awesome power of natural selection acting on random mutation.
And then leading practitioners of the Darwinian arts can make statements like this while being seemingly impervious to the irony:
The error is taking what is possible and making people think that this is what’s common or probable.
Barry Arrington_{April 26, 2020
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