They try to portray all of life as very simple

 

Darwinists’ deception techniques are generally based on not permitting people to think. One of the most effective ways of doing this, they foolishly imagine, is to completely ignore the extraordinary complexity of life and portray is as really very “simple.”

Darwinists say that, "The cell came into being in muddy water.” They try to deceive people with the idea of the cell “forming in muddy water,” despite being at a complete loss to explain how a single protein might have formed by chance and are still striving to fully unravel the mystery of the cell in the most technically advanced laboratories.

Darwinists also claim that fish emerged onto dry land and gradually turned into amphibians, that reptiles suddenly grew wings and began to fly, that bears turned into whales while romping by the shore – which is Darwin’s own claim, and that chimpanzees (or, since Darwinists regard the words chimpanzee or monkey as slightly disparaging, fictitious “ape-like creatures,” as they themselves put it) turned into scientists, professors, and scholars who examine their own brain cells in laboratories. the glorious complexity in life is a huge dead-end for Darwinists. the only way out for them, is to explain everything in terms of chance; to depict life and the complexity within it as actually very “simple.”

To that end, the idea that Darwinists want to condition people with is essentially this: Muddy water + chance + time = Life! According to Darwinists, when coincidences, to which Darwinists attribute a creative power, combine together they can work miracles (surely Allah is beyond that) and turn life forms into one another, no matter how impossible that may actually be. the Darwinist claim is a ludicrous one that seeks to portray everything as very simple.

This is a cunning act of indoctrination performed on people. This indoctrination has such an effect on some people that they are immediately able to believe in utterly nonsensical concepts. They are able to believe that man is a slightly more developed form of chimpanzee, that fish can emerge onto dry land and turn into terrestrial life forms when they so choose, that a cell can really form in muddy water and that dinosaurs managed to grow wings and turn into birds. That is because they have been so thoroughly indoctrinated, almost to the level of brainwashing. This constant indoctrination is worked into them by well-known professors, wielding incomprehensibly strange formulae and peculiar scientific terminology on the covers of world famous magazines.

The fact is that there is nothing “simple” about life at all. Everything set out under this indoctrination is a lie. With all of its infrastructure and organization, a single cell is far more complex than a giant metropolis such as New York City. Despite much wide-ranging laboratory research over the last few years, only a very small part of this extraordinary structure has been clarified. but there is no way in which it can be replicated. Not one of the thousands of proteins in the cell can be artificially manufactured. Living things are literally works of art in terms of their complexity, sensitivity, symmetry, order, detail, equipment and systems. for that reason, the simplistic explanations offered by Darwinism’s adherents are simply intended to deceive.

In relating all of this nonsense, Darwinists are of course well aware that there is nothing simple in life. They are of course well aware that not a single cell can spontaneously emerge from muddy water, let alone a complex, multi-cell organism, and that a fish can never emerge onto dry land and start flying. We must not forget that Darwinists relate these accounts for purposes of casting a psychological spell; a kind of hypnosis. Moreover, the Darwinists who so shamelessly do all this are quite unable to account for how even a single protein came into being. This represents a huge and absolute defeat for Darwinists right from the beginning. One must never forget this fact as one listen to Darwinist fairy tales.

Secret backing is provided for the major press so they will support Darwinism.

Darwinists have been making propaganda through the press for 150 years and have used the press for all of their psychological conditioning techniques. If they didn't control such a major force as the press, it would be impossible for the Darwinist dictatorship to have established a false dominion across the world and for the nonsense of evolution to have found its way into institutions of state, schools and universities.

The first decision for Darwinism to be disseminated by the press, to make such a fantastical idea in some way believable, was taken in a senior masonic lodge made up of atheist freemasons in Darwin’s time. Members of the 33rd Degree Mizraim Freemasonry Supreme Council in Paris announced the need for evolution to be supported by depicting it as science, but had no qualms about ridiculing the theory amongst themselves;

It is with this object in view that we are constantly by means of our press, arousing a blind confidence in these theories. the intellectuals... will puff themselves up with their knowledge and without any logical verification of them will put into effect all the information available from science, which our agentur specialists have cunningly pieced together for the purpose of educating their minds in the direction we want. Do not suppose for a moment that these statements are empty words: think carefully of the successes we arranged for Darwinism...”2

Thus it was that Darwinism spread to the masses of people in the light of this decision taken at a French lodge made up of atheist freemasons. Ever since then it has always been under the atheist Freemasons’ protection. Atheist freemasons, who have established a global dominion and therefore possess a press army capable of shaping the world as they choose, can thus produce whatever reports they wish, raise whichever subjects they choose, and thus manage people as they desire. This cunning policy of management continues to this day.

Successes in eliminating Darwinism make atheist masons very uneasy. at such times they immediately embark on an intensive policy of conditioning, as already described, through the press. the Darwinist press is immediately unleashed and a false fossil is immediately discovered. a Darwinist scientist is trotted out, and tall tales are written about this fossil. That is how the atheist freemasons’ system works.

It is noteworthy as to why reports about Darwinism are supported by certain sections of the press. the press in question produces their reports solely in line with the instructions they receive from atheist freemasons, and not because of any scientific fats, data or information. This needs to be borne in mind in evaluating the false, global dominion of the Darwinist deception.

Darwinist Propaganda Techniques

Harun Yahya (Adnan Oktar)

Darwin and the mathematicians

  EVOLUTION NEWS: IN THE PAST, YOU’VE REMARKED ABOUT MATHEMATICIANS and their opinions of Darwin’s theory of evolution. They were skeptical, you said; very skeptical. John von Neumann was an example. How do you know that about him and about other mathematicians?

David Berlinski (DB): How do I know? Here’s how: I have been close to a number of mathematicians, and friends with others: Daniel Gallin (who died before he could begin his career), M. P. Schützenberger (my great friend), René Thom (a friend as well), Gian-Carlo Rota (another friend), Lipman Bers (who taught me complex analysis and with whom I briefly shared a hospital room, he leaving as I was coming), Paul Halmos (a colleague in California), and Irving Segal (a friend by correspondence, embattled and distraught). Some of these men I admired very much, and all of them I liked.

I had many other friends in the international mathematical community. We exchanged views; I got around.

Among the mathematicians that I knew from very roughly 1970 to 1995, the general attitude toward Darwin’s theory was one of skepticism. These days, I do not get around all that much, and whatever the mathematician’s pulse, I do not have my finger on it. But the reactions of which I speak were hardly surprising. Until recently, mathematicians have been skeptical of any discipline beyond mathematics, and I say until recently because attitudes as well as times have changed.

In talking of the mathematician’s skepticism, I mentioned von Neumann because his name was widely known. I might have mentioned Gian-Carlo Rota. He despised the enveloping air of worship associated with Darwin; he thought biology primitive and dishonest.

How do I know this? I know it because we were close friends, and because he said so. He said so to me.

Gian-Carlo had, in fact, read closely one of my unpublished papers on Darwinian evolution. Written in late 1970, during my stay at IIASA (the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis), my essay later made its way into Black Mischief: Language, Life, Logic & Luck, stripped by then of almost all of its technical details.

A few mathematicians at IIASA had already read what I had written; they had, after all, encouraged me to write it. When we met later in the year, Gian-Carlo offered me his delighted agreement, which he extended in the spirit of it’s about time; he urged me to keep at it; he considered publishing my essay in his journal; but after some back and forth between us, he decided that it would be best were I never to publish another word on the subject.

Gian-Carlo was a man of very refined political sensibilities.

It is a mistake to read back into the recent past the political and emotional structure of discussions now current.

Reading things backwards is vulgar as intellectual history and false to the facts—vulgar because it assigns an aspect of permanence to our own obsessions; and false because it distorts the play of forces playing just a few decades ago.

In the first part of the twentieth century, Darwin v. Dissent had not yet acquired its riveting incarnation as a melodrama of intolerance. No heresy, no heretics is a useful proverb, and using, say, 1950 as a reference point, there were no heretics among the mathematicians because there was yet no heresy. Darwin’s theory was not then considered totemic; and his touch was not widely understood to cure erysipelas. Darwin v. Dissent is of our time and place.

Now von Neumann turned from pure mathematics in the 1940s and the early 1950s. Like so many other mathematicians and physicists, he regarded the theory of evolution as a placeholder, the full and so the real theory waiting somewhere in the wings of time.

When Erwin Schrödinger published What is Life? in 1944, he electrified the mathematicians and the physicists; and he influenced profoundly biologists such as Francis Crick, the latter a form of Rural Electrification, I suppose. Schrödinger’s impact is easy to understand: he gave biologists a set of ideas that they had been unable to give themselves.

“How can the events in space and time,” Schrödinger asked, “which take place within the spatial boundary of living organism be accounted for by physics and chemistry?”

These words were written in 1944.

“The preliminary answer which this little book will endeavor to expound,” Schrödinger went on to say, “… can be summarized as follows: the obvious inability of present-day physics and chemistry to account for such events is no reason at all for doubting that they can be accounted for by those scientists.”

I have placed in italics words that establish Schrödinger’s attitude. I do not know which word to stress more: the obviousness of an inability, or the inability of an obviousness.

So I have stressed them together. They reflect the attitude of mathematicians and physicists toward biology during the 1940s, 1950s, and at least a part of the 1960s.

Having asked for a clue, Schrödinger found one on his own. He predicted the existence of a code script, one governing heredity. Just eight years later, Watson and Crick published the first of their two great papers on the structure of DNA.

Everyone took notice, the biologists because Schrödinger had been prophetic, and the mathematicians and physicists because Schrödinger had been one of their own.

These remarks belong to the considerable category of things that must be kept in mind.

So keep them in mind.

What was it that comprised von Neumann’s skepticism about evolution?

It was an attitude in three aspects. Von Neumann, in the first place, saw what mathematicians had seen since Darwin first published his theory. The theory required life to clamber over some very sobering improbabilities; indeed, it seemed to require miracles. Other mathematicians were making the same point. “The formation within geological time of a human body,” Kurt Gödel remarked in conversation with Hao Wang, “by the laws of physics (or any other laws of similar nature), starting from a random distribution of elementary particles and the field, is as unlikely as the separation by chance of the atmosphere into its components.”

Note the word geological. Gödel, like everyone else, quite understood that Darwin’s theory played out over long stretches of time. He might even have grasped the concept of natural selection, commonly said to be too difficult for all but a handful of initiates. He was skeptical nonetheless. It was precisely to do battle against this kind of skepticism that Richard Dawkins wrote TheBlind Watchmaker. His proximate target may have been the physicist Fred Hoyle, but his general target was a whole climate of opinion current among mathematicians and physicists.

Von Neumann, in the second place, thought Darwin’s theory inadequate. He thought the theory inadequate because the theory did not yet exist. This is as inadequate as it gets. What did exist lacked the fundamentals. It answered no questions. It had no depth. And it was largely anecdotal. This sense of anecdotal has nothing to do with the idea of just-so stories made popular by Lewontin and Gould. Darwin’s theory was anecdotal, von Neumann suggested, because it lacked the rich and productive concepts that only mathematicians could provide the sciences.

Writing in the 1967 Wistar Symposium, Murray Eden offered a fine sense of the way in which mathematicians and physicists thought Darwin’s theory inadequate. “The continuity of evolution does not demonstrate that natural laws are operative, for the laws are not known.”

Murray then added a most useful analogy. “It is,” he wrote referring to Darwin’s theory, “as if some pre-Newtonian cosmologist had proposed a theory of planetary motion which supposed that natural force of unknown origin held the planets to their courses.”

Just so. This is what Darwin’s theory is like; and it was how it appeared to a great many mathematicians and physicists.

And then Murray added a demurral. “The supposition is right enough and the idea of a force between two celestial bodies is a very useful one, but it is hardly a theory.”

Far from being controversial among mathematicians in the 1940s and 1950s, a sense of the inadequacy of Darwin’s theory was widespread.

And there is a third and final component to von Neumann’s skepticism, this one no more than a hint. To say that von Neumann was skeptical of Darwin’s theory is not to say that he was a supporter of intelligent design. Yet there is a curious remark he made to Stan Ulam. I suspect that he made the remark at the end of his life. Von Neumann pointed to a house in the distance and remarked to Ulam how absurd it would be to think that the house just assembled itself. The men were discussing Darwin’s theory. It was not simply a doubt about improbability to which von Neumann gave voice: it was a more general susurrus of discontent. The remark suggests that just possibly von Neumann’s sensibility had undergone a change. Ulam never said anything more to Marco Schützenberger and Marco never said anything more to me.

There remains nonetheless that air of intellectual poignancy. Perhaps von Neumann was aware of his impending death.

So much for what mathematicians thought and think; so much for what von Neumann thought and thank.

I now pass to the point of this exercise. Where did I get my information? Let me tell you. I got my information about von Neumann from the horse’s mouth, the horse one step removed from the horse himself.

Quite obviously I did not know von Neumann personally. He was too old and I too young ever to have met. So what I know of views I know at second hand. I know it from my friends.

Stanislaw Ulam was close to von Neumann—very close; and Ulam was also close to Marco and Gian-Carlo Rota—very close again. They were close enough to share their views. I knew Marco and Gian-Co very well; and they were close friends of mine.

Since Marco and I were writing a book together about evolution, our interest in von Neumann’s views was natural. Natural, but not consuming. It was a part of the chatter, and it would be wrong to suppose that our curiosity was anything more than curiosity. The subject came up. What had von Neumann thought? We discussed it. Von Neumann stories were told, as they always were.

Let me fix the time and place:

The winter of 1979–1980.

Paris.

And again a year later in Los Angeles at the University of Southern California, where I gave a lecture and Gian-Carlo acted as my host and the source for further stories.

When this issue first emerged, I was asked for references. I am not a von Neumann scholar, and I have not consulted any of the sources. What I know of von Neumann’s views, I know from his friends. But what I know is entirely consistent with the development of his own ideas. Von Neumann’s work on self-reproducing automata is an interesting attempt to make good the deficiencies of a theory that he understood had deficiencies and needed remedying, a demonstration of the thesis, left unremarked, unanalyzed, and unstated in Darwin’s theory, that a self-reproducing automaton is logically possible. It fills one hole.

Ulam’s paper “On Some Mathematical Problems Suggested by Problems in Biology” fills another hole. In it he introduced what he called a “biological metric space” into theoretical biology. The date is 1970. The place is the Rockefeller Institute. And the idea, by the way, is pure Marco. Ulam’s paper marks his indifference to the dominant paradigm of Sewell Wright’s population genetics. Gone are both Euclidean metrics and Wright’s very elaborate apparatus of differential equations.

Whether a theory with quite so many holes in its plush is worth mending is another question entirely.

When the issue of von Neumann’s views appeared in the blogosphere, Douglas Theobald, a contributor to Panda’s Thumb, much occupied in discharging his indignation, wrote a little post. Von Neumann had apparently said something: “I still somewhat shudder,” von Neumann wrote in a letter to George Gamow, “at the thought that highly efficient, purposive organizational elements, like the proteins, should originate in a random process.”1

Having shuddered, von Neumann apparently got hold of himself. “Yet many efficient (?) and purposive (??) media, e.g., language or the national economy, also look statistically controlled, when viewed from a suitably limited aspect. On balance, I would therefore say that your argument is quite strong.”2

Theobald suggests that Von Neumann’s shuddering remark, taken out of context, “may be the ultimate source of many of the claims that von Neumann was anti-evo.”3It may well be, but it is not my source, as I have explained in detail.

Still, what lends to this exchange its lurid aspect is that having shuddered, von Neumann might have kept right on shuddering, for if von Neumann was criticizing Gamow’s theories about protein formation, he was right to do so because Gamow’s theories were wrong.

And there is the final, the inimitable, touch. I have never claimed that von Neumann was “anti-evo.”

What an idea. No one is. What I did claim is that like so many others, von Neumann was profoundly skeptical about Darwin’s theory of evolution.

And I have just said why.

Science After Babel

David Berlinski

Logic Storms Darwin's Gates

Few evolutionists would agree, but by my reckoning, there are now two strikes on Darwinism. Whoa! Here comes a Nolan Ryan fastball!

The problem of half organs

In a popular evolutionary explanation, here's how reptiles evolved into birds: They wanted to eat flying insects that were out of reach. So the rep­ tiles began leaping, and flapping their arms to get higher. Over millions of years, their limbs transformed into wings by increments.l In another model, the reptiles were tree-dwellers who leaped. Those who glided well survived and eventually developed wings, but those who glided poorly went ker­ plunk and were wiped out. In these scenarios, the reptiles' scales sprouted feathers over time, and finally, they became birds. 

One problem is that, anatomically, reptilian scales and bird feathers are completely dissimilar. Scales are a tough, thin plate. Feathers are soft and delicate; like hair, they arise from small holes in the skin called follicles; they are held together by a network of little hooks invisible to the naked eye-one eagle feather has over 250,000 of them.

In Vertebrate History: Problems in Evolution, Barbara J. Stahl noted: "It is not difficult to imagine how feathers, once evolved, assumed additional functions, but how they rose initially, presumably from reptilian scales, defies analysis."2

The theory suffers from an illogical premise that pervades Darwinism. According to natural selection, a physical trait is acquired because it enhances survival. Obviously, flight is beneficial, and one can certainly see how flying animals might survive better than those who couldn't, and thus natural selection would preserve them.

The problem is, wings would have no survival value until they reached the point of flight. Birds' wings and feathers are perfectly designed instru­ments. Those with crippled or clipped wings cannot fly, and are bad candi­dates for survival. Likewise, the intermediate creature whose limb was half leg, half wing, would fare poorly-it couldn't fly, nor walk well. Natural selection would eliminate it without a second thought.

The same would hold true for the limbs that Darwinism's fish supposedly developed, or for any body part. Until the organ is operative, it offers no advantage, and natural selection has no reason to favor it. As Stephen Jay Gould asked: "Of what possible use are the imperfect incipient stages of useful structures? What good is half a jaw or half a wing?"3 Evolutionists, including Gould, generally try to explain organs' develop­ ment by hypothesizing that, en route to becoming functional, they must have served some other useful purpose, now unknown to us, and thus sur­vived under natural selection. But this is merely a rationalization based on no evidence. 

A classic example of an organ that could not have evolved is the human eye, whose superlative design was not really appreciated until the invention of cameras and other optical instruments dependent on the same principles.

For sight to occur, light must pass through the pupil, which automatically adjusts, by widening or contracting, to permit a proper amount of light to enter the eye. It then passes through the lens, which focuses the image on the retina, the light-sensitive area in back of the eye. The retina contains more than 120 million photosensitive cells called rods and cones, which translate light into nerve impulses that reach the brain via the optic nerve.

Vision requires that all of these be working. How then did natural selec­tion make them? Did the lens precede the retina? Did the optic nerve come first? By themselves, none of these constitute vision; they possess no inher­ent survival value that would cause natural selection to prefer them. To accept evolution, we must believe that chance mutations simultaneously developed each, until one day, by sheer coincidence, all were complete and harmoniously arranged, and vision occurred. The situation troubled Darwin himself, who noted:

To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjust­ing the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.4

Most evolutionary texts avoid discussing eye evolution. One that tried­ Gavin de Beer's Atlas of Evolution-followed Darwin's own attempted explanation by showing a sequence of eyes of different organisms, starting with the most primitive. But as one observer pointed out, "This mere listing of eyes from various animals, which he neglects (or is unable) to show to be related can carry no conviction for the case for evolution. It would be equally stupid to place a candle, a torch and a searchlight side by side and proceed to advance to a genealogical relationship."5

What about color vision? Michael Pitman wrote:

It is found in several bony fishes, reptiles, birds, bees and primates. Among mammals only primates see in color. Dogs, cats, horses and bulls do not. Fish supposedly evolved the necessary retinal cones to give them color vision, but then lost them. "Re-evolved" by certain unrelated birds and reptiles, they were lost by mammals, but by luck "re-surfaced" in pri­mates. An odd story indeed.6

Science has proven the eye far more complicated than was known in Darwin's time. Any organ, of course, may be reduced to its molecular struc­ ture. In Darwin 's Black Box, biochemist Michael Behe describes vision's microscopic physiology. The following material is full of technical words, but this underscores the complexity:

When light first strikes the retina a photon interacts with a molecule called II-cis-retinal, which rearranges within picoseconds to trans-retinal. (A picosecond is about the time it takes light to travel the breadth of a sin­gle human hair.) The change in the shape of the retinal molecule forces a change in the shape of the protein, rhodopsin, to which the retinal is tightly bound. The protein's metamorphosis alters its behavior. Now called metarhodopsin II, the protein sticks to another protein, called transducin. Before bumping into metarhodopsin II, transducin had tightly bound a small molecule called GDP. But when transducin interacts with metarhodopsin II, the GDP falls off, and a molecule called GTP binds to transducin . . . .

GTP-transducin-metarhodopsin II now binds to a protein called phos­ phodiesterase, located in the inner membrane of the cell. When attached to metarhodopsin II and its entourage, the phosphodiesterase acquires the chemical ability to "cut" a molecule called cGMP . . . . When the amount of cGMP is reduced because of cleavage by the phos­ phodiesterase, the ion channel closes, causing the cellular concentration of positively charged ions to be reduced. This causes an imbalance of charge across the cell membrane that, finally, causes a current to be transmitted down the optic nerve to the brain. The result, when interpreted by the brain, is vision.7

So mutations had to engineer, simultaneously, not only the gross anatom­ical structures of the eye, but its elaborate molecular interactions.

Irreducible complexity

As the complexity of anything increases, the probability of chance creating it decreases. The main point of Behe's book is that biochemistry has proven a number of bodily systems to be irreducibly complex. He says that "design [intelligent creation] is evident when a number of separate, interacting com­ponents are ordered in such a way as to accomplish a function beyond the individual components."8 Gradual change, as Darwin proposed, cannot pro­duce such systems because "any precursor to an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by definition nonfunctional."9

on an enzyme to activate it. So which evolved first-the protein or enzyme? Not the protein; it cannot function without the enzyme to switch it on. But why would the enzyme have come first?-without the protein, it serves no purpose. The system is irreducibly complex.

If a person lacks just one clotting factor, as in hemophilia (a mutational disorder), he risks severe bleeding. Furthermore, after a clot forms, the pro­teins which produced it must be inactivated by other substances-otherwise the rest of the person's blood would start to coagulate. Step-by-step evolu­tion of clotting is inconceivable: in the trial and error stage, organisms would have either bled to death or clotted to death.

Another example Behe gives: the immune system. In infections, it must distinguish the invading bacterial cells from the body's own cells-other­ wise the latter will be attacked (which is the case in "autoimmune" diseases). An antibody identifies the bacterium by attaching to it. In a complex bio­ chemical process, a variety of white blood cells-"killer cells" such as lym­ phocytes and macrophages-are notified of the bacterium's presence. These travel to the site, and, using the identifying antibody, attack the enemy.

Like blood clotting, this system is irreducibly complex. What evolved first? The killer cells? Without the identifying antibody, they wouldn't know where to attack. But why would the identifier develop first, without any­ thing to notify? If the network evolved gradually, disease would kill the individual before it was perfected.

Behe notes the paucity of articles and books on how such biochemical entities evolved. He says that "if you search the scientific literature on evolution, and if you focus your search on the question of how molecular machines-the basis of life-developed, you find an eerie and complete silence. The complexity of life's foundation has paralyzed science's attempt to account for it. . . .10 In his research, he found only two very short, highly speculative papers attempting to explain the immune system's evolution on a molecular level." Biologist James Shapiro of the University of Chicago agrees:

There are no detailed Darwinian accounts for the evolution of any fun­damental biochemical or cellular system, only a variety of wishful specu­lations. It is remarkable that Darwinism is accepted as a satisfactory expla­nation for such a vast subject-evolution-with so little rigorous examination of how well its basic theses work in illuminating specific instances of biological adaptation or diversity. 12

The human body, as a total system, is also irreducibly complex. It is dif­ficult to change one part without influencing others. Take the liver: it man­ufactures bile; detoxifies poisons and wastes; regulates storage and use of glucose, proteins, fats and vitamins; synthesizes blood clotting and immune system factors; and processes breakdown products of old blood cells. Or take the kidneys: they remove wastes through urine production; regulate the body's water content and electrolytes (sodium, calcium, etc.); and support the adrenal glands, which secrete hormones such as adrenaline.

Evolution says every organ developed through chance mutations. But structures like the liver or kidneys cannot change without drastically affect­ing the rest of the body, with which they maintain a delicate balance. We must assume that by lucky happenstance, each time these organs mutated, other body parts also mutated in harmonious cooperation. The noted writer Arthur Koestler commented:

You cannot have a mutation A occurring alone, preserve it by natural selection, and then wait a few thousand or million years until mutation B joins it, and so on, to C and D. Each mutation occurring alone would be wiped out before it could be combined with the others. They are all inter­dependent. The doctrine that their coming together was due to a series of blind coincidences is an affront not only to common sense but to the basic principles of scientific explanation 13

And what of the human brain? W. H. Yokel wrote in a promotional letter for Scientific American in 1979:

The deep new knowledge about the brain, gathered at an accelerated rate in recent years, shows this organ to be marvelously designed and capacitated beyond the wonders with which it was invested by ignorant imagination.

Microelectronics can pack about a million circuits in a cubic foot, whereas the brain has been estimated to pack a million million circuits per cubic foot. Computer switches interact with not more than two other switches at a time, whereas a brain cell may be wired to 1,000 other cells on both its input and output sides . .. . 14

Yokel called the brain "designed." It has about ten billion neurons (nerve cells) with a thousand trillion connections. 15 Each neuron contains around one trillion atoms. The brain can do the work of hundreds of supercomput­ers. Building a computer requires great intelligence. Who believes even a simple one could arise by chance? Indeed, the brain is more than a com­puter-"It is a video camera and library, a computer and communications center, all in one." 16 Yokel added: 

Perhaps the most elusive questions surround the brain functions that make us human-the capacities of memory and learning. Transcending what might be called the hardware of the brain, there comes a software capacity that eludes hypothesis. The number that expresses this capacity in digital information bits exceeds the largest number to which any physical meaning can be attached. 17

How about our thoughts? Did chance evolve them, too? Darwin critic Phillip Johnson asks: 

Are our thoughts "nothing but" the products of chemical reactions in the brain, and did our thinking abilities originate for no reason other than their utility in allowing our DNA to reproduce itself? Even scientific materialists have a hard time believing that. For one thing, materialism applied to the mind undermines the validity of all reasoning, including one's own. If our theories are the products of chemical reactions, how can we know whether our theories are true? Perhaps [evolutionist] Richard Dawkins believes in Darwinism only because he has a certain chemical in his brain, and his belief could be changed by somehow inserting a differ­ ent chemical.18

The animal kingdom also illustrates features too complex for evolution to explain. Time magazine, in an article critical of creationism, described the remarkable bombardier beetle:

Its defense system is extraordinarily intricate, a cross between tear gas and a tommy gun. When the beetle senses danger, it internally mixes enzymes contained in one body chamber with concentrated solutions of some rather harmless compounds, hydrogen peroxide and hydro­ quinones, confined to a second chamber. This generates a noxious spray of caustic benzoquinones, which explode from its body at a boiling 212 F. What is more, the fluid is pumped through twin rear nozzles, which can be  rotated, like a B- l 7's gun turret, to hit a hungry ant or frog with bull's-eye accuracy. 37

Since the chemicals and enzymes are explosive when mixed in a small space, how could chance have evolved this defense system without blowing the beetle to smithereens?

Or how could natural selection produce the monarch butterfly, which transforms from a caterpillar to a butterfly with two compound eyes, each with 6,000 lenses, and a brain that can decipher 72,000 nerve impulses from the eyes?20 Extinct creatures make the problem even more perplexing. Cambrian rocks, dated at over 500 million years, contain fossils of many of the oldest invertebrates known. Among them: the trilobite. It was an arthropod (the broad category of joint-legged animal that includes lobsters and spiders).

According to evolution, Cambrian rocks should contain only "primitive" organisms. The trilobite was anything but. It had a segmented body, legs, gills, antennae, and a complex nervous system. Moreover, 

Blood clotting swings into action when we get a cut. Its multi-step process utilizes  proteins, many with no other function besides clotting. Each protein depends according to Sci­ence News, trilobites had "the most sophisticated eye lenses ever produced by nature."21

Riccardo Levi-Setti of the University of Chicago writes in his book Trilobites:

In fact, this optical doublet is a device so typically associated with human invention that its discovery in trilobites comes as something of a shock. The realization that trilobites developed and used such devices half a billion years ago makes the shock even greater. And a final discovery­ that the refracting interface between the two lens elements in a trilobite's eye was designed in accordance with optical constructions worked out by Descartes and Huygens in the mid-seventeenth century-borders on sheer science fiction . . . . The design of the trilobite's eye lens could well qual­ify for a patent disclosure.22

Like other animals, trilobites lack fossil ancestors showing how they evolved.

TORNADO IN A  JUNKYARD THE RELENTLESS MYTH OF DARWINISM
James Perloff

Michael Behe: how I came to disagree with most contemporary scientists

 But first a necessary digression to explain how I came to disagree with most contemporary scientists on this pivotal subject. Imagine my surprise a while back when I opened an academic journal called Biology & Philosophy and spotted this sentence: “To see the point quite palpably, note that Stalin, or Osama bin Laden, or Michael Behe, or your favorite villain is also . . .”7 The man who included me in that rogues gallery was Alexander Rosenberg, R. Taylor Cole Professor of Philosophy at Duke University—a fellow I’ve never met. His article had precious little to do with me. The line was an offhand remark in the course of arguing that the well-known philosopher Daniel Dennett—a founding member of the New Atheists—was something of a wimp, because in his books he didn’t clearly spell out the utter nihilism that Rosenberg saw as a consequence of Darwin’s theory.

It was a silly remark but, unfortunately, it does accurately reflect the hostility felt by a large chunk of academia toward those of us who publicly argue the case for purpose in nature. (Notice that the overt insult was passed along by the reviewers of the article and the journal editor.) We might see ourselves as just trying to puzzle out those existential questions that kept us awake at night as kids. But folks such as Rosenberg seem to envision peasants with torches and pitchforks marching on their faculty offices. We might just be wondering what the evidence of nature really shows. But “since nihilism is true,”8 too many academics think there’s nothing to think about; therefore contrary views must be dishonest. So before we begin the book I want to try to head off such charges of bad faith. To show that I come by my views honestly, let me very briefly recount the history of my own thinking.

I was born into a large Roman Catholic family and, like all of my brothers and sisters, attended Catholic grade school and high school. Unlike some Christian denominations, the Catholic Church never had much of a problem with evolution. I remember being taught about it in seventh grade by Sister David Marie. The important point, she stressed, is that God created the universe, life, and humanity. How he did that, whether quickly or slowly, employing natural law or not, was up to him, not us, and our best evidence these days shows that evolution is correct. That view was perfectly fine with me. In fact, although I wasn’t aware of it then, it had been the predominant understanding in Catholic circles for a long time. For example, the 1909 Catholic Encyclopedia has a lengthy scholarly article on evolution that makes a number of crucial distinctions, including a distinction “between the [basic] theory of evolution and Darwinism.”9 Plain “evolution” was no big theological deal. But framing it as necessarily nihilistic, as Alexander Rosenberg and many others do, was tantamount to denying Christianity. Even as a boy I had plenty of reasons to believe in God that had nothing to do with evolution.

When I went off to Drexel Institute of Technology (now Drexel University), I decided to major in chemistry, specifically because I wanted to know how the world worked; I wanted to know what made things tick. Since everything is made of chemicals, then chemistry seemed to be the obvious choice. During my college years I had a summer “co-op” job in a biochemistry lab at the Department of Agriculture research facilities near Philadelphia, where I became fascinated with the chemistry of life. Senior year at Drexel I took a course on evolutionary biochemistry to learn how it all came together.

During graduate studies in biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania and postdoctoral work at the National Institutes of Health, I had no qualms about standard evolutionary theory and would occasionally (and smugly) tease friends who did. I remember one day at the NIH chewing over the Big Questions with a fellow Catholic postdoc, Joanne (her brother was a priest), who was in the same lab I was. Talk turned to the origin of life. Although she and I were both happy to think life started by natural laws, we kept bumping up against problems. I pointed out that to get the first cell, you’d first need a membrane. “And proteins,” she added. “And metabolism,” said I. “And a genetic code,” said she. After a short time we both looked wide-eyed at each other and simultaneously shouted, “Naaaahh!” Then we laughed and went back to work, as if it didn’t really matter to our views. I suppose we both thought that, even if we didn’t know how undirected nature could begin life, somebody must know. That’s the impressive power of groupthink.

After three years at my first job as an assistant professor at Queens College in New York City, my new wife, Celeste, our firstborn daughter, Grace, and I moved to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where a new job awaited at Lehigh University. Several very busy years later I paused to read a book that startled me and changed my view of evolution. Evolution: A Theory in Crisis by Michael Denton, a geneticist and medical doctor then teaching in Australia, offered no solution to the riddle of life, but pointed out numerous serious problems for Darwin’s theory at the molecular level that I had never even heard about—even though I was a biochemistry professor whose goal in entering science was to understand how the world worked! At that point, when I thought back, I realized I had never heard any of my teachers critique Darwin’s theory in all of my science studies.

I got mad. Over the following months I spent much time in the science library trying to find papers or books that explained in real detail how random mutation and selection could produce the exceedingly intricate systems routinely studied by biochemistry. I came up completely empty. Although many publications would pay homage to Darwin and a few would spin “Just So” evolutionary tales, none spelled out how his mechanism accounted for complex functional systems. Vague stories had kept me satisfied in the past, but no longer. Now I wanted real answers.

At that point I concluded that I had been led to believe in Darwin’s theory not because of strong evidence for it. Rather, it was for sociological reasons—that simply was the way educated people were expected to think these days. My professors hadn’t been intentionally misleading—that was the framework in which they thought about life too. But from then on I resolved to decide for myself what the evidence showed.

When one starts to treat Darwinism as a hypothesis about the biochemical level of life rather than as an assumption, it takes about ten minutes to conclude it’s radically inadequate. It takes perhaps another ten minutes to realize that the molecular foundation of life was designed, and for effectively the same reason that Anaxagoras, Galen, and Paley reached the same conclusion for visible levels of biology (although, because of progress in science and philosophy, the argument is now necessarily much more detailed and nuanced than their versions): the signature of intelligent activity is the arrangement of disparate parts to fulfill some purpose. The molecular parts of the cell are elegantly arranged to fulfill many subsidiary purposes that must blend together in service of the large overall purpose of forming life. As we’ll see in this book, no unintelligent, undirected process—neither Darwin’s mechanism nor any other—can account for that.

With the aid of the then newfangled internet, over the years I met other academics who had had experiences roughly similar to mine, who had been perfectly willing to accept Darwinian evolution, but at some point realized with shock that the larger theory was an intellectual facade. Like me, most had religious convictions, which freed them from the crippling assumption that—no matter what the evidence showed—unintelligent forces simply must be responsible for the elegance of life. Some of us banded together under the auspices of the Seattle-based think tank Discovery Institute, the better to defend and advance the topic of intelligent design (ID), to which we had become dedicated.

In conversations with them I discovered that, as a biochemist, I had ideas to contribute that the others did not. At the urging of Phillip Johnson, then a professor of law at the University of California–Berkeley, I set about writing a book that in 1996 became Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution. Except for answering extravagant Darwinian claims or attacks on ID,10 I thought I was done with writing at that point. But the rapid progress of science in the subsequent decade allowed further arguments to be made. In 2007 those became The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism, which, as the title suggests, tried to locate the point in life where what can be explained solely by unintelligent forces is reached. (One common confusion of critics is to think that ID argues everything is planned. That’s not the case. Chance is an important, if superficial, feature of biology.) Again I thought I was done, but even greater unanticipated progress in biology over the past ten years has spurred me to write this book.

Where We’re Headed

The firm conclusion I’ve drawn over the past decades is this: despite occasional questions and bumps along the road, the greater the progress of science, the more deeply into life design can be seen to extend. In Darwin’s own day, the mid-nineteenth century, scientists wondered whether there was sufficient variety in nature’s creatures to fuel his theory. After DNA and proteins were discovered in the late twentieth century, a pressing question was whether Darwin’s mechanism—natural selection acting on random mutation—could account for even the biochemical level of life and the sophisticated molecular machinery unexpectedly discovered there.

As science rapidly advanced in the early twenty-first century, large studies showed only surprisingly minor changes in genes under severe selective pressure. And as we’ll see in this book, now several decades into the twenty-first century, ever more sophisticated studies demonstrate that, ironically, random mutation and natural selection are in fact fiercely devolutionary. It turns out that mutation easily breaks or degrades genes, which, counterintuitively, can sometimes help an organism to survive, so the damaged genes are hastily spread by natural selection. Strangely, in the space of a century and a half Darwinism has gone from the chief candidate for the explanation of life to a known threat to life’s long-term integrity.

Here’s how we’ll proceed. The two chapters of Part I introduce major problems facing any theory attempting to account for life. In Chapter 1 I’ll emphasize a philosophical difficulty—the question of how we know what we claim to know. The second chapter of Part I throws down the gauntlet. It describes biological systems of astonishing elegance and complexity that demand explanation; many of them were discovered as recently as the new millennium. Part II examines a number of ideas that have been offered as answers, from Darwin’s own theory to the most recent non-Darwinian accounts of evolution such as neutral theory and natural genetic engineering. We’ll see why, although they may account for some features of life, they all are severely limited in scope.

Part III (Chapters 6 through 9) compiles pertinent evidence from numerous studies on a wide range of species by many insightful investigators. These studies have only become available in the past few decades due to rapid advances in laboratory techniques that closely examine the molecular level of life. The studies indicate that not only is the Darwinian mechanism devolutionary; it is also self-limiting—that is, it actively prevents evolutionary changes at the biological classification level of family and above. After Part IV (described below), the Appendix reexamines criticisms by top scientists and others of my earlier arguments for intelligent design from the clarifying perspective of more than twenty years later.

The failure of Darwin’s mechanism as an explanation for the evolution of all but the lowest levels of biological classification reopens the primordial question of what does account for the elegance and complexity of life. My answer appears mainly in Part IV (the final chapter). There I defend the reality of mind—a necessary foundation of science itself—and argue that, for its own sake, science must explicitly acknowledge mind’s existence. Once the reality of mind is affirmed, the explanation for life follows easily. In brief, although chance surely affects superficial aspects of biology, the newest evidence confirms that life is the intended work of a mind and that that work extends much more deeply into life than could previously be seen.

From introduction to Darwin Devolves

By Michael J. Behe

Darwinism as a spiritual poison

Note: The article in no way undermines validity of Kevin MacDonald's work.

On the level of worldview Dawinism is a spiritual poison, it is animalisation of the man, and it replaced morality received from divine power with that of animal, blindly insisting on survival, and so it is in total contradiction with Dhamma, where the highest goal is the cessation of being in space and time.

Today a naturalistic approach to knowledge is being applied to virtually every field. Some say we’re entering an age of “universal Darwinism,” where it is no longer just a scientific theory but a comprehensive worldview.

It has become commonplace to say that America is embroiled in a “culture war” over conflicting moral standards. But we must remember that morality is always derivative, stemming from an underlying worldview. The culture war reflects an underlying cognitive war over worldviews—and at the core of each worldview is an account of origins. ↓

The pragmatists were among the first, however, to face squarely the implications of naturalistic evolution. If evolutionary forces produced the mind, they said, then all beliefs and convictions are nothing but mental survival strategies, to be judged in terms of their practical success in human conduct. William James liked to say that truth is the “cash value” of an idea: if it pays off, then we call it true.

Pragmatism Today 

This Darwinian logic continues to shape American thought more than we might imagine. Take religion. William James was raised in a household with an intense interest in religion. (In the Second Great Awakening his father converted to Christianity, then later converted to Swedenborgianism). As a result, James applied his philosophy of pragmatism to religion: we decide whether God exists depending on whether that belief has positive consequences in our experience. “An idea is ‘true’ so long as to believe it is profitable to our lives,” James once said. Thus, “If theological ideas should do this, if the notion of God, in particular, should prove to do it, how could pragmatism possibly deny God’s existence?”3 (...) As Lutheran theologian John Warwick Montgomery puts it, “Truths do not always ‘work,’ and beliefs that ‘work’ are by no means always true.”4

If James’s religious pragmatism has become virtually the American approach to spirituality today, then Dewey’s pragmatism has become the preferred approach to education. Virtually across the curriculum—from math class to moral education—teachers are trained to be nondirective “facilitators,” presenting students with problems and allowing them to work out their own pragmatic strategies for solving them. Of course, good teachers have always taught students to think for themselves. But today’s nondirective methodologies go far beyond that. They springboard from a Darwinian epistemology that denies the very existence of any objective or transcendent truth.*

NANCY PEARCEY How Darwinism Dumbs Us Down. Evolution and Postmodernism

* Revilo Oliver: By denying the concept of truth, Pragmatism necessarily denies the possibility of moral values. With the abolition of right and wrong, man can consult only his appetites and his calculations of expediency. The only test of an action is whether "it works". Logically a Pragmatist must condemn himself for a foolish weakness if he refuses, for example, to grind up his grandmother and sell her for hamburger in circumstances in which it is certain that he could get away with it and either realize a profit or have fun in the process. (...)

There are less spectacular, though not less baneful, applications of the doctrine to daily life. When the practicing Pragmatist expounds an argument, his words are merely the cover for his purposes. They are the flag hoisted by the pirate while stalking or approaching his victim. Where there is no truth there can be no rational debate, and the function of speech is to befuddle the gullible. And when the disinterested pursuit of truth is recognized as the Quixotic pursuit of an illusion, colleges must become hunting grounds for petty scoundrels. From: America's Decline 

Jonas Alexis:

... according to Darwinism’s fundamental principle, whatever is, is right in the animal kingdom. As Crook again puts it, “Struggle and competition, violence, bloodshed, and cruelty were the filtering mechanisms, crude, chancy, wasteful, by which species change and natural progress occurred.”[92]

In other words, according to the Darwinian mechanism, there cannot be “progress” without violence, bloodshed, and struggle. If Darwin is right, then “violence is a constant human potential, war is not aberrant and may even be commended as a biological necessity.”[93] So Darwinists, including Crook, have to do a lot of mental gymnastics in order to avoid Darwin’s fundamental principle. (...) Wilson is commonly known as the father of sociobiology. Yet listen to what Wilson has to say on ethics or morality:

“Ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to co-operate. It is without external grounding. Ethics is produced by evolution but not justified by it, because, like Macbeth’s dagger, it serves as a powerful purpose without existing in substance.”[96]

For Wilson and other staunch Darwinists, morality is just a product of sociobiological evolution which has been ingrained in us and which has no serious objectivity. As Ruse again puts it, “Morality is just a matter of emotions, like liking ice cream and sex and hating toothache and marking student papers.”[97] If you think that Ruse is just joking, then think again. He elaborates on these in his work The Darwinian Paradigm:

“Morality is a biological adaptation no less than are hands and feet and teeth . . . . Considered as a rationally justifiable set of claims about an objective something, ethics is illusory. I appreciate that when somebody says ‘Love their neighbor as thyself,’ they think they are referring above and beyond themselves . . . . Nevertheless such reference is true without foundation. Morality is just an aid to survival and reproduction . . . and any deeper meaning is illusory . . .”[98]

As we have argued in the past, Darwin saw almost the same thing. He argued in the Descent of Man that “If, for instance, to take an extreme case, men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters, and no one would think of interfering.”[99]

The Edinburgh Review quickly saw the logical conclusion of Darwin’s point here. It declared then that if Darwin is right, then:

“most earnest-minded men will be compelled to give up these motives by which they have attempted to live noble and virtuous lives, as founded on a mistake; our moral sense will turn out to be a mere developed instinct…If these views are true, a revolution in thought is imminent, which will shake society to its very foundations by destroying the sanctity of the conscience…”[100]

Science writer Robert Wright agrees that Darwin’s Descent of Man “has indeed sapped the moral strength of Western civilization” and replaced it with something else.

“Sympathy, empathy, compassion, conscience, guilt, remorse, even the very sense of justice, the sense of doers of good deserve reward and doers of bad deserve punishment—all these can now be viewed as vestiges of organic history on a particular planet. What’s more, we can’t take solace, as Darwin did, in the mistaken belief that these things evolved for the greater good—the ‘good of the group.’ Our ethereal intuitions about what’s right and what’s wrong are weapons designed for daily, hand-to-hand combat among individuals. It isn’t only moral feelings that now fall under suspicion, but all of the moral discourse.”[101]

https://www.veteranstoday.com/2023/04/02/david-duke-meets-jared-taylor-and-michael-hart/

Human exceptionalism and its enemies

  AS FAR AS WE KNOW, THE CLAIM THAT HUMANS ARE unexceptional—and arrogant for thinking otherwise—was first made by Darwin. He asked in a notebook over twenty years beforeThe Originwas published: “Why is thought[,] being a secretion of brain, more wonderful than gravity[,] a property of matter? It is our arrogance, it [is] our admiration of ourselves.”1

And in the same notebook: “Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work, worthy [of] the interposition of a deity. More humble & I believe truer to consider him created from animals.”2

He speculated that grinning began with baboons baring their “great canine teeth,” and that “Laughing [was] modified barking, smiling modified laughing.” Barking itself may have started out as a way of signaling the “discovery of prey.” Darwin allowed that “crying is a puzzler.”3He never changed his opinion. InThe Descent of Man(1871) he said that his object was “to shew that there is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties.”4What about language? “With respect to animals,” he said, “I have already endeavoured to show that they have this power, at least in a rude and incipient degree.”5

Darwin repeatedly adopted this strategy of minimizing the difference between the mental powers of humans and animals. In another variation on this theme, he claimed that some humans are mere “savages” or “barbarians.” The Fuegians at the tip of South America, for example, “rank amongst the lowest barbarians.”6They and other such are little removed from the “higher animals.” Any remaining gap could then easily be bridged by Darwin’s all-purpose mechanism, natural selection.

 For his followers, the alleged ordinariness of human beings was little more than a deduction from common descent. His supporter Thomas Huxley wrote in 1863:

Is man a peculiar organism? Does he originate in a wholly different way from a dog, bird, frog, or fish? And does he thereby justify those who assert that he has no place in nature, and no real relationship with the lower world of animal life? Or does he develop from a similar embryo, and undergo the same slow and gradual progressive modifications?

The answer is not for an instant doubtful, and has not been doubtful for the last thirty years. The mode of man’s origin and the earlier stages of his development are undoubtedly identical with those of the animals standing directly below him in the scale; without the slightest doubt, he stands in this respect nearer the ape than the ape does to the dog.7It didn’t seem to occur to Huxley that even though human development in the womb may resemble that of other animals, the end-product is quite different.

Darwin’s accusation of “arrogance” was changed to a charge of “vanity” by Huxley, for whom ridicule was the preferred weapon: “It is not I who seek to base Man’s dignity upon his great toe, or insinuate that we are lost if an Ape has a hippocampus minor.”

On the contrary [Huxley added], I have done my best to sweep away this vanity. I have endeavored to show that no absolute structural line of demarcation, wider than that between the animals which immediately succeed us in the scale, can be drawn between the animal world and ourselves.8To be sure, inThe Uniqueness of Man(1951), Thomas Huxley’s grandson Julian did acknowledge uniquely human features, among them language, conceptual thought, and the transmission of knowledge by writing. But the theme of “arrogance” took hold, and has been regularly repeated since. Here is Stephen Jay Gould inEver Since Darwin(1977):

 Chimps and gorillas have long been the battleground of our search for uniqueness; for if we could establish an unambiguous distinction—of kind rather than of degree—between ourselves and our closest relatives, we might gain the justification long-sought for our cosmic arrogance. The battle shifted long ago from a simple debate about evolution: educated people now accept the evolutionary continuity between humans and apes.

But we are so tied to our philosophical and religious heritage that we still seek a criterion for strict division between our abilities and those of chimpanzees. For as the Psalmist sang: ‘what is man, that thou art mindful of him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and has crowned him with glory and honor.’9The accusation of arrogance is self-defeating on its face. Only humans are capable of arrogance or of seeing themselves as superior to other animals. Animals cannot rise to that level of abstraction. Do cats or dogs think themselves superior to humans? (Well, dogs don’t, but I’m not so sure about cats.) The criticism of arrogance itself rests on human exceptionalism. Meanwhile Gould, who lost his own faith—as Darwin did his—saw himself as someone who had lost nothing but his arrogance.

The University of Washington biologist and liberal activist David P. Barash introduced a variation on the same theme. In theNew York Timeshe denied the uniqueness of human moral values:Before Darwin, one could believe that human beings were distinct from other life-forms, chips off the old divine block. No more. The most potent take-home message of evolution is the not-so-simple fact that, even though species are identifiable (just as individuals generally are), there is an underlying linkage among them—literally and phylogenetically, via traceable historical connectedness.10

He added that “no literally supernatural trait has ever been found in Homo sapiens; we are perfectly good animals, natural as can be and indistinguishable from the rest of the living world at the level of structure.”

 But at the level of structure, what would a good materialist like Barash expect to find? Seraphic wings? Looking for supernatural traits at the natural level is as illogical as hunting for the mind in brain cells.

Human Exceptionalism versus Darwinism

SENTIMENT FOR human exceptionalism is inversely related to Darwinism. If we regard humans as exceptional, we are likely to reject Darwin’s theory. In his bookCreated from Animals(1990), James Rachels (1941–2003) claimed that after Darwin, “we can no longer think of ourselves as occupying a special place in creation—instead, we must realize that we are products of the same evolutionary forces, working blindly and without purpose, that shaped the rest of the animal kingdom.”11An animal rights activist, Rachels was also a supporter of “active” euthanasia.

Here’s a conventional-wisdom update fromNew Scientist:

For much of our existence on Earth, we humans thought of ourselves as a pretty big deal. Then along came science and taught us how utterly insignificant we are. We aren’t the center of the universe. We aren’t special. We are just a species of ape living on a smallish planet orbiting an unremarkable star in one galaxy among billions in a universe that had been around for 13.8 billion years without us.12But wait; there was a correction. “Maybe we were too hasty to write ourselves off,” the editorial continued:

There is a sense in which we are still the center of the universe. Science also teaches us that the laws of physics are ridiculously, almost unbelievably ‘fine-tuned’ for you and me. Take the electromagnetic force. It has a value that is perfectly set for getting stars to bind protons and neutrons to create carbon—the building block of life as we know it. Or the strong nuclear force, which binds the insides of protons and neutrons. If it were even a tiny bit stronger, the whole world would be made of hydrogen; if it were weaker, there would be no hydrogen at all. In either case, life as we know it wouldn’t be possible.13A more elaborate version of that revisionist argument was made by Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards inThe Privileged Planet(2004).

 The ancient (and modern) claim that humans display a unique intelligence has been met with a search for it elsewhere: within the solar system or outside it; in our machines, in the form of artificial intelligence; or in other animals—most commonly chimpanzees.

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence, artificial intelligence, or chimp-talk thus constitutes a three-pronged search for what humans possess by the age of four. They are looking for something that evolutionists are convinced should be there, so they keep on looking. The un-stated goal is to justify Darwinism by denying human uniqueness.

Chimp Talk

THE ASPECT of human uniqueness that Darwin might have examined more closely is language. We can talk to one another; animals can’t. We can put words on paper and others can read them. Darwin did discuss “articulate language” inThe Descent of Man, and he allowed that it is “peculiar to man”—but with his own reservations. Humans, “like the lower animals,” make inarticulate cries “to express their meaning, aided by gestures,” he said.14Darwin used such observations to convince himself that the gap between animals and humans is not so great after all.

He also noted “the tendency in our nearest allies, the monkeys, to imitate what they hear.” And “monkeys certainly understand much that is said to them by man.” (Not really, of course.) So it’s possible that “some unusually wise ape-like animal should have thought of imitating the growl of a beast of prey, so as to indicate to his fellow monkeys the nature of the expected danger.” This “would have been a first step in the formation of a language.”15And at that point Darwin seemed to imagine that his problem was all but solved.Earnest attempts to get chimpanzees—not monkeys—to communicate did not begin for about another 100 years. In the 1970s and later we heard about Lana, Moja, Kanzi, Washoe, Panbanisha, and maybe a dozen other chimpanzees. The most celebrated was Nim Chimpsky, a pun on Noam Chomsky. MIT’s Chomsky had earlier poured cold water on the project, saying that the ability to use language is an innately and uniquely human development. Nonetheless, Gould became so convinced by the chimp reports that he thought the only honest alternative to human exceptionalism was to admit

 strict continuity in kind between ourselves and chimpanzees. And what do we lose thereby? Only an antiquated concept of soul to gain a more humble, even exalting vision of our oneness with nature… We are more nearly akin to the chimpanzee than even Huxley dared to think.16

Language was “the last bastion for potential differences in kind,” Gould wrote. True, “early experiments on teaching chimps to talk were notably unsuccessful.” But there was a simple explanation. “The vocal cords of chimpanzees are constructed in such a way that large repertories of articulated sounds cannot be produced.”17But as the linguist Noel Rude, an expert on Native American languages, has pointed out, parrots can accurately reproduce words with only a beak.18Next, Gould promoted sign language. When “Lana” of the Yerkes laboratory began to ask for the names of objects she had not previously seen, “can we any longer deny to chimps the capacity to conceptualize and to abstract?” Gould asked. “This is no mere Pavlovian conditioning.”19

Baby chimps began making recognizable signs, and their progress “is no slower than that of a human child,” Gould said. In short, we have seen “a striking demonstration of how we have underestimated our closest biological relatives.”20Likewise, primatologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, formerly with the Iowa Primate Learning Sanctuary, promoted a gradation of linguistic skills, from primates to humans.

But animal language research fell into disrepute when “talking” chimps like Washoe and Nim Chimpsky were exposed as unintentional frauds. Scientists found strong evidence that the chimps had simply learned to please their teachers by contorting their hands in various ways. The trainers, straining to find examples of linguistic communication, thought they saw words, “like children seeing pictures in the clouds.”21

 Mark Seidenberg, a graduate student at Columbia during the Nim project, doubted whether chimp signing and human language were ever related. Animal rights activist Peter Singer cited results using the most generous possible interpretations. In deciding what Washoe or Koko meant when they signed “banana,” for example, researchers relied on what is called “rich interpretation.” They assumed that the ape possesses whatever knowledge a child possesses in using the same word. The real challenge—to determine whether ape and child do possess the same knowledge—was sidestepped. Seidenberg and others with no personal investment in particular outcomes challenged Singer’s account. Eventually much of the research funding was withdrawn because the science was not credible.

“In my mind, this kind of research is more analogous to the bears in the Moscow circus who are trained to ride unicycles,” said Dr. Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist at MIT (later Harvard) who has studied language acquisition in children. “You can train animals to do all kinds of amazing things.” He doubted that the chimps learned anything more than how to press the right buttons in order to get humans “to cough up M & M’s, bananas and other tidbits of food.”22

Linguists have also noted how quickly children (but not chimps) can go from cobbling together two-word utterances to spinning out complex sentences with phrases embedded within phrases. Children can easily put together sentences that they never heard before and will never use again.

In the journalScience, Nim Chimpsky’s trainer Dr. Herbert Terrace, a Columbia University psychologist, asked: “Can an ape create a sentence?” He “reluctantly” concluded that the answer was no. There was no evidence that chimps had acquired a generative grammar—the ability to string words together into sentences of arbitrary length and complexity. Like Pinker, Terrace said that Kanzi, another trained chimp, was simply “going through a bag of tricks in order to get things.”23

 Terrace rejected comparisons to human children. “If a child did exactly what the best chimpanzee did, the child would be thought of as disturbed.”24Helene Guldberg, editor of theSpiked Review of Books,wrote that, despite the dedication of a number of primatologists, “the cognitive and linguistic abilities of the great apes have never surpassed those of a two-year-old child.”25

From Chimps to the Stars

FIRST, I’LL briefly mention the mundane explanation for the ongoing search for intelligent life at the extraterrestrial level: funding. NASA keeps looking for extraterrestrial intelligence because it will greatly increase the agency’s popularity on Capitol Hill. Congress is far more likely to fund sorties to outposts of life than to barren rocks. Expeditions to planets outside the solar system are not remotely plausible, but maybe distant civilizations can be detected using short-wave radio receptors.

But the Copernican Principle, sometimes called the Mediocrity Principle, claiming that there was nothing special about the Earth, soon gave way to the Fermi Paradox. In 1950, at Los Alamos, the nuclear physicists Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller, and others were discussing the latest ideas about the universe: it was much larger and older than had earlier been thought; it contained billions of stars evolving over billions of years, probably accompanied by more planets than stars; and the physical laws that apply here also applied out there.

So, “where is everybody?” Fermi famously asked. It became known as the Fermi Paradox.

Enter Frank Drake, a Cornell astronomer who responded in 1959. Using radio telescopes, scientists could listen for signals from aliens. Drake cobbled together the Drake Equation, hoping to estimate how many intelligent, communicating civilizations there are in our galaxy. The novelist Michael Crichton rightly complained that the equation was vacuous because it included no data. Cosmologists and evolutionists plugged in their own numbers anyway, and in their math, the probability of life—possibly intelligent, communicating life turned out to be a near certainty. All you needed was enough habitable platforms—planets—to work with. They are now finding some of those planets. But no extraterrestrial life—let alone intelligence—has yet been discovered.

 Darwin speculated that life may have first appeared in a “warm little pond.”26No experiment has been able to generate life from non-life, and today life on Earth is the only life that we know. But Darwinians have theorized that given enough warm little ponds, life surely must have appeared somewhere else in the universe.

From Exceptionalism to Misanthropy

IN THE late twentieth century, a new element entered into our philosophy—disapproval of the human race. Misanthropy became fashionable, as it still is today. Gould jeered at our “need to see ourselves as separate and superior.”27“Exceptionalism” was now admitted, but in a different form: Human beings were exceptionally bad. For one thing, we were too numerous for our own or anything else’s good. And we did harmful things, exploding nuclear weapons and so on.In The Panda’s Thumb, reflecting on the extinction of the dodo, Gould wrote that “we who revel in nature’s diversity and feel instructed by every animal tend to brand Homo sapiens as the greatest catastrophe since the Cretaceous extinction.”28Environmentalists today see humans as doing harm and little else. Meanwhile, they worry that nothing could be more exceptional than being alone in the Cosmos. So they keep looking for life somewhere else.

Religious Implications of Extraterrestrial Life

GOULD ONCE argued that “a positive result [finding extraterrestrial intelligence] would be the most cataclysmic event in our entire intellectual history.”29But why cataclysmic? He didn’t say. Maybe what he meant was that it would be cataclysmic not to find it.

The physicist Lawrence Krauss—like Gould an atheist—said that the discovery of extraterrestrial life would be “jolting” to “orthodox Christians.” Earlier, the “revelation that the Earth is not the center of the solar system” had delivered a similar jolt, he believed.30(Actually, it didn’t.)

 Here is the columnist Charles Krauthammer on the same topic:

As the romance of manned space exploration has waned, the drive today is to find our living, thinking counterparts in the universe. For all the excitement, however, the search betrays a profound melancholy—a lonely species in a merciless universe anxiously awaits an answering voice amid utter silence. That silence is maddening. Not just because it compounds our feeling of cosmic isolation. But because it makes no sense. As we inevitably find more and more exo-planets where intelligent life can exist, why have we found no evidence—no signals, no radio waves—that intelligent life does exist?”31Maddening? Jolting? Cataclysmic? Maybe they sense that Darwin’s philosophy is at stake.

What lies beyond the solar system? Probably we’ll never know, unless extraterrestrials transmit that sequence of prime numbers that Carl Sagan and others hoped to see transmitted. Until then, a good case can be made for the uniqueness of life on Earth. And that would entail the uniqueness of intelligent, human life. The thought that life on Earth might in fact be unique is unpopular with materialists, because it raises the discomforting possibility that God was responsible for the origin of life and everything else.

The Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg said inThe First Three Minutesthat humans are “just a more or less farcical outcome of a chain of accidents reaching back to the first three minutes…”32He has also argued that if—if—“calculations showed” that the odds of a planet having the right gravity, temperature, and chemical composition were very small and “the earth on which we live were the only planet in the universe” then a “benevolent designer” might indeed “make sense.” For it would be difficult “without supposing divine intervention to understand our great good fortune in having come into being.”33 But, Weinberg added, we now know that “a good fraction of stars have planets.” So, “we need not be surprised that chance events governed by impersonal natural laws have produced intelligent life on at least one of the planets.”34Let’s just say that Weinberg was eager to avoid finding in favor of a Designer. He simply assumed that the probabilities support the case he wanted to make—that life arose accidentally and has no meaning. He has also called religion “an insult to human dignity.”35

Carl Sagan, one of the leading promoters of extraterrestrial intelligence, “believed in superior beings in space, creatures so intelligent, so powerful, as to resemble gods.”36Sagan had proposed that a new civilization is formed just in our galaxy every ten years. If so, Sagan concluded, “there are a million technical civilizations in the [Milky Way] galaxy.”37Surprisingly, Richard Dawkins has shown similar inclinations. He was quoted in theNew York Timesas saying, “It’s highly plausible that in the universe there are God-like creatures.” He was careful to stipulate that “these Gods came into being by an explicable scientific progression of incremental evolution.”38

But even if we do assume the existence of a “Goldilocks” planet—one that has the right size, temperature, and atmosphere to encourage the appearance of life—we still have no idea how likely it is that life will appear spontaneously, because we don’t know how to create life ourselves. Nor do we have any idea how likely it is that such life will evolve to the point where it can build radio telescopes.

Sagan’s faith in the widespread emergence of civilizations arose “because he believed uncritically in Progress,” said his biographer Keay Davidson.39It was the Enlightenment that had inculcated this faith. Darwin also embraced it. So did Huxley, Herbert Spencer, and a hundred other thinkers. But even as our modern-day misanthropy has been embraced, our assumption of progress has been discarded. And that puts our modern philosophy directly at odds with the evolutionist faith. I will take a closer look at this conflict in Chapter 21. Meanwhile, in the next chapter I shall examine the attempts to locate artificial intelligence within computers.

DARWIN’S HOUSE OF CARDS

A JOURNALIST’S ODYSSEY THROUGH THE DARWIN DEBATES

by

Tom Bethell