It is often said that all truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident. Yesterday with the publishing of a new paper out of Israel, and two centuries later, Lamarck’s pre Darwinian theory of evolution, sometimes referred to as the inheritance of acquired characteristics, prophetically completed the cycle. Read more
9 Replies to “It’s Official: Lamarckism has Now Joined the Narrative, July 1, 2015 !”
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Of related note, the ‘Lamarckians’ still have an gargantuan unbridged gap to cross in that they, like the neo-Darwinians, do not have any real time empirical evidence that proteins can be created ‘naturally’ but have to rely on sequence comparisons. Here is James Shapiro commenting on the problem:
Thus, like neo-Darwinists, Lamarckians must rely on sequence data to try to make their case. The problem being, of course, that the conclusion of evolution is assumed to as being true from the outset when evolutionists compare sequences, i.e. the fallacy of ‘assuming your conclusion’ into your premise.
Shapiro did refer to ‘domain shuffling’ to try to give ‘natural genetic engineering’ a leg up on neo-Darwinian explanations. Yet domain shuffling is found to be far harder than Shapiro had originally led people to believe:
While “Lamarckism” today is usually simply meant to mean the idea of inherited characteristics, in Darwin’s time the term implied far more than that.
Darwin disagreed with Lamarckism on the idea of an innate tendency of progression, spontaneous generation, recapitulation, etc, the only thing he agreed on was the idea use and disuse, which was an idea accepted by many non-Lamarckists, and did not originate with Lamarck.
Hunter is right that Darwin did ridicule Lamarck and Lamarckism – but he never ridiculed the idea of acquired characteristics.
Hunter is fascinated by the recent change in attitude regarding acquired characteristics among evolutionists. I’m equally fascinated in seeing the change in attitude from ID proponents regarding acquired characteristics, and in particular Darwin’s remarkable change from warmly embracing the idea to suddenly “hating” the idea in the past few years. 🙂
It wasn’t long ago that Creationists and ID proponents regularly mocked Darwin for his enthusiastic support of inherited characteristics.
Here’s an article from the Discovery Institute – from just 2 years ago! – arguing that if not for Darwin that Lamarckism “would likely have died a quicker and more merciful death.”
The article also praises Wallace for his “prescience in rejecting the inheritance of acquired characteristics.”
It’s interesting now that evidence how mounted that (at least to a certain extent), in some circumstances, that the phenomena occurs, how Darwin is suddenly viewed as “hating” the idea of inherited characteristics.
Here’s a list of examples of Darwin (from a Creationist site) talking about acquired characteristics/use and disuse in Origin:
http://www.creationbc.org/inde.....;Itemid=54
Judge for yourselves how much he “hated” the idea.
And he would later incorporate it into his theory of Pangenesis.
And far from wanting to rid of the idea inheritance of acquired characteristics, when Galton did an experiment that many believed put a death knell to the idea, Darwin still refused to give it up.
Noble lists several presuppositions of neo-Darwinism that have now been falsified,,,
And although, as Dr. Hunter pointed out in his article, Nobel would like to make Darwinism more Lamarckian in its foundational theoretical make-up, I would like to point out one more presupposition that Nobel did not examine in his critique of the modern synthesis.
An unexamined presupposition that falsifies both the neo-Darwinian view, and his preferred Lamarckian view, of reality.
Namely, both the neo-Darwinian and the Lamarckian view of reality are ultimately based on reductive materialism.
That is to say, both the neo-Darwinian and Lamarckian view of reality presuppose that ‘plasticity of form’, and ‘form’ itself, of any organism can ultimately be explained solely by reference to particular arrangements, and/or rearrangements, of material.
That reductive materialistic presupposition simply is not true.
The insurmountable problem of ‘form/shape’ for reductive materialistic explanations has now been demonstrated by a few different methods.
That proteins have ‘non-sequential’ information determining the primary ‘form/shape’ of a protein, (information that resides ‘holistically’, as opposed to discretely, along the entirety of the protein chain), was demonstrated by the following:
Moreover, the profound mystery of how a protein folds so quickly is now found to belong to the world of quantum information, not to the world of classical information. (of note: I personally hold that quantum computation is obviously heavily implicated in protein folding).
As well, it is found that the ‘form/shape’ of DNA itself is determined, in large measure, by quantum information, not by sequential, discrete, classical information:
In the following video, Longitudinal Quantum Information running along the entire length of DNA is discussed at the 19:30 minute mark. At the 24:00 minute mark, Dr Rieper remarks that practically the whole DNA molecule can be viewed as quantum information that has classical information embedded within it.
The following study found both quantum and classical information to be within proteins:
Another method of determining that the ‘form/shape’ of an organism is not reducible to ‘bottom up’ materialistic explanations is by noting that the ‘form/shape’ of many proteins is determined, not by its sequential information, but by the overall context in which the protein is residing:
As well, RNA molecules also lack a correspondence betweem sequence and shape:
In the following article, Dr. Wells comments that, ‘It’s the organism controlling the DNA, not the DNA controlling the organism.’.
Here is an article that strongly supports Dr. Wells’s contention that, ‘It’s the organism controlling the DNA, not the DNA controlling the organism.’.
Another method that clearly demonstrates that form/shape is not reducible to ‘bottom up’ materialistic explanations is by noting that it is the ‘bioelectric code’, not the genetic code, that dictates what the basic ‘form/shape’ of an organism will be during its embryological development:
Here is another fascinating method by which it was clearly demonstrated that form/shape is not reducible to ‘bottom up’ materialistic explanations:
But perhaps the best demonstration that ‘form/shape’ is not reducible to the ‘bottom up’ material explanations is by noting the fact that the ‘form/shape’ of an organism is almost immediately lost upon the death of an organism:
In the following article, Stephen Talbott asks this very important question about the relatively sudden loss of ‘form’ at the death of an organism.
Specifically Talbott asks, “What power holds off that moment — precisely for a lifetime, and not a moment longer?”
Well, where does the biological information, specifically the quantum information, that was keeping the organism alive for ‘precisely a lifetime’, suddenly go upon the death of an organism? Reductive materialists would hold that the biological/quantum information simply ceases to exist upon the death of an organism, (since they hold information to be ’emergent’ from a material basis).
But the fact of the matter is that the quantum information, the information that was/is in fact ‘holding life together’ for precisely a life time, is ‘conserved’, and does not simply disappear from reality:
Besides providing direct empirical falsification of neo-Darwinian claims as to the generation of information, the implication of finding ‘non-local’, beyond space and time, and ‘conserved’ quantum information in molecular biology on a massive scale is fairly, and pleasantly, obvious.
That pleasant implication being the strong validation of the Theist’s contention that we, as distinct ‘persons’, are ‘souls’ that merely live in a material body and that we are not ‘persons’ who are co-terminus with our material bodies:
Verse, Picture, and Music:
Supplemental note: As to the question of where does this ‘conserved’ quantum information go upon death, well there are ‘theories’ in that regards as well. ‘Theories’ that happen to far better supported, evidence-wise, than the present multiverse conjectures of atheists that try to ‘explain away’ the fine-tuning of the universe:
Neo-Darwinism is based on classical physics/information and therefore cannot explain protein fold entanglement as described. Darwinism is linear and sequential – like analog recording. A single point-mutation affects DNA but does not explain the changed relationships that result.
semi OT: Jennifer Doudna (UC Berkeley / HHMI): Genome Engineering with CRISPR-Cas9 – video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SuAxDVBt7kQ
Frank Huguenard: Do you know what CRISPRS are? Look up CRISPR. It’s an acronym without the ‘e’. C-R-I-S-P-R. ,,, Check this out. This is mind blowing.,,, So they’re looking at Ebola bacteria and they’re just looking at Epigenetics and they’re trying to understand what’s happening outside of the chromosome–the methylation, demethylation, turning genes on and off. And they observed there are these other sequences showing up outside. And they didn’t know anything about it. They just published it and here’s the report. So other people started looking into this. And what they realize is that the E. coli got infected with a virus and the bacteria’s 50 times larger than a virus. The DNA in the E. coli with the kind of sophistication that the NSA would be proud of hacks into genome of the virus; uses the RNA to create a duplicate strand of the virus DNA–a segment of the virus; attaches it to an enzyme and converts it to a protein that then attaches itself hand-and-glove to the right sequence of the virus and slices it in half and kills it.,,
It’s one of the most amazing things in nature. If you look at the sophistication, how does an E. coli bacteria know how to replicate the exact sequence and in the right portion of the DNA of this virus to kill the virus? It’s amazing stuff.
http://www.skeptiko.com/277-fr.....mindbrain/
OT:
Dr. Michael Nahm on Terminal Lucidity and Near-Death Experience – interview
http://www.skeptiko.com/278mic.....-lucidity/
Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for an interview with Dr. Michael Nahm to discuss his reports on patients who experience brief periods of unexplainable lucidity before death:
Alex Tsakiris: The end result of those experiments [on terminal lucidity and near-death experience] is — this really happened.
Prepare for? A tectonic shift?
To quote from “The Beginning of Infinity”….
So, yes. You can call Lamarckism evolution, if you like, and bring it into the fold. But that would hardly represent a tectonic shift worth celebrating. Rather, it merely muddies the water.
What is truly ridiculous is that Neo-Darwinism is assumed as some kind of sacrosanct ‘default’ position that must be disproved. It has never been well-supported by evidence, but largely assumed, (and laughably so) as the process that drove all of biodiversity.