Tag: evolution

My future debate opponent on the topic of evolution, JF Gariepy, addressed one of my recent Darkstreams on evolution last night:

I haven’t watched it, nor will I prior to our debate, because I am presently reading his book, The Revolutionary Phenotype, and I’m much more interested in getting to the core of his assumptions than I am in learning whatever rhetoric is being utilized to analyze what was a very limited and superficial explication of my criticism of TENS.

The book is definitely interesting, but it has given me enough insight into his style of argument that I’m confident I will at least be able to present a case that he will find non-trivial even though we are engaging on intellectual ground that is considerably favorable to him given his academic background and interests.

JF Gariepy of The Public Space and author of The Revolutionary Phenotype mentioned in a recent stream that he would like to debate me on the topic of the theory of evolution by natural selection. I have told him that I am willing to do so after I read his book, and he graciously sent me a copy.

I understand that his interest was piqued by two of my recent Darkstreams:

• The descent of the theory of evolution by natural selection
• The education of the evolutionist

This isn’t going to happen immediately, since I have to read the book first and I’m not exactly lacking for occupation at the moment. But it will happen, sooner or later, and it should be an interesting opportunity for people on both sides of the question to be exposed to some new ideas and perspectives. Perhaps, as with the free trade debate, we’ll even get a new book out of it.

Notice that the evolutionary skeptic’s position has consistently proven to be more reliably scientifically post-predictive than the mainstream evolutionist position:

The observation that Galapagos finch species possessed different beak shapes to obtain different foods was central to the theory of evolution by natural selection, and it has been assumed that this form-function relationship holds true across all species of bird.

However, a new study published in the journal Evolution suggests the beaks of birds are not as adapted to the food types they feed on as it is generally believed.

An international team of scientists from the United Kingdom, Spain and the US used computational and mathematical techniques to better understand the connection between beak shapes and functions in living birds.

By measuring beak shape in a wide range of modern bird species from museum collections and looking at information about how the beak is used by different species to eat different foods, the team were able to assess the link between beak shape and feeding behaviour.

Professor Emily Rayfield, from the University of Bristol’s School of Earth Sciences, and senior author of the study, said: “This is, to our knowledge, the first approach to test a long-standing principle in biology: that the beak shape and function of birds is tightly linked to their feeding ecologies.”

Guillermo Navalón, lead author of the study and a final year Ph.D. student at Bristol’s School of Earth Sciences, added: “The connection between beak shapes and feeding ecology in birds was much weaker and more complex than we expected and that while there is definitely a relationship there, many species with similarly shaped beaks forage in entirely different ways and on entirely different kinds of food.

“This is something that has been shown in other animal groups, but in birds this relationship was always assumed to be stronger.”

I’m not even remotely surprised by this, although I am certainly amused given the central importance of bird beaks to the history of TENS. The more that biological science advances, particularly on the genetic front, the weaker, the less necessary, and the more obviously false the theory of evolution by natural selection is consistently proving to be.

The late Larry Auster was also an evolutionary skeptic. He wrote this back in 2010.

The Darwinian theory of evolution is a fraud—and it’s not Lawrence Auster who says that, it’s the Darwinian scientists who say it

Many times I have pointed out that the critics of the Darwinian theory of evolution do not need to prove that the theory fails to explain the origin of species by random mutation and natural selection, because the theory’s advocates frequently admit the same. Yet in a massive exercise of Orwellian doublethink, even while scientists repeatedly confess, if sotto voce, that the theory does not explain what it purports to explain (yes, it explains micro-changes within a life form, but not the evolution of new life forms), they and the whole world simultaneously keep declaring that the Darwinian theory has the status of proven fact, as true as the theory of gravity, and that anyone who doubts this is a faith-crazed moron barely worthy of the adjective “human.”

However, here’s an admission from the evolutionary establishment that really takes the cake. In their 2005 book, The Plausibility of Life: Resolving Darwin’s Dilemma (dilemma? dilemma? Darwin has a dilemma?), evolutionary scientists Marc Kirschner and John Gerhart come right out and declare that up to this point, evolutionary science has not shown how Darwinian evolution produces new organs, new species, new life forms. The fly leaf of the book says:

In the 150 years since Darwin, the field of evolutionary biology has left a glaring gap in understanding how animals developed their astounding variety and complexity. The answer has been that small genetic mutations accumulate over time to produce wondrous innovations such as eyes and wings. Drawing on cutting-edge research across the spectrum of modern biology, Marc Kirschner and John Gerhart demonstrate how this stock answer is woefully inadequate. [LA replies: Meaning, the Darwinian theory of evolution by random genetic mutations and natural selection is woefully inadequate.] Rather they offer an original solution to the long-standing puzzle of how small random genetic change can be converted into complex useful innovations.

So, an entirely original theory is needed to explain how random mutations can accumulate into functional new biological forms. Meaning that the explanations offered up to this point have been wrong. Meaning that everything we’ve been told about how evolutionary theory has the status of proven fact has been false.

Yet (remember, we’re living in an Orwellian world) Kirschner and Gerhart’s astounding admission has not entered into the general public consciousness. One reason it hasn’t can be seen in Paul R. Gross’s review of the book in the New York Sun in 2005. Gross spent the first half of the review pounding his chest about how perfect and complete and absolutely unquestionable the Darwinian theory is, until, in the second half of the review, he quietly admitted that some eentsy teentsy issues still remain to be demonstrated, like, you know, how new species evolved. Yet so assured was Gross’s propaganda in the first half of the article, that his dramatic admission in the second half made no impact. Only a careful reader would notice it. And most people do not read carefully.

Fred is tormenting the true believers with observable facts again:

Science is supposed to be objective study of nature, impelled by a willingness to follow the evidence impartially wherever it leads. For the most part it works this way. In the case of emotionally charged topics, it does not. For example, racial intelligence, cognitive differences between the sexes, and weaknesses in Darwinian evolution. Scientists who do perfectly good research in these fields, but arrive at forbidden conclusions, will be hounded out of their fields, fired from academic and research positions, blackballed from employment, and have their careers destroyed.

A prime example is Richard Sternberg, a Ph.D. in biology (Molecular Evolution) from Florida International University and a Ph.D. in Systems Science (Theoretical Biology) from Binghamton University. He is not a lightweight. From 2001-2007 he was staff scientist at the National Center for Biotechnology Information; 2001-2007 a Research Associate at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.

Hell broke loose when he authorized in 2004 the publication, in the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, an organ of the Smithsonian Institution, of a peer-reviewed article, The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher taxonomic Categories by Stephen Meyer. It dealt with the possibility of intelligent design as an explanation of aspects of Darwinism not explainable by the conventional theory. This is a serious no-no among the guardians of conventional Darwinism, the political correctness of science.

At the Smithsonian, he was demoted, denied access to specimens he needed in his work, transferred to work under a hostile supervisor, and lost his office space. In the ensuring storm of hatred, two separate federal investigations concluded that he had been made the target of malicious treatment.

Predictably, the establishment dismisses Meyer’s idea ass “pseudoscience”:

Wikipedia: The Sternberg peer review controversy concerns the conflict arising from the publication of an article supporting the pseudo-scientific concept of intelligent design in a scientific journal, and the subsequent questions of whether proper editorial procedures had been followed and whether it was properly peer reviewed.

Pseudoscience? Does not Darwinism itself qualify as pseudoscience? It is firmly based on no evidence. For most readers this assertion will seem as delusional as saying that the sun revolves around the earth. This is because we have been indoctrinated since birth in the Darwinian myth.

Like Fred, I am an evolutionary skeptic, not because of intelligent design or most of the issues that Fred raises, but because I have never observed any evolutionist able to demonstrate an adequate ability to address, let alone successfully answer, the direct questions about evolution posed to them. Instead, they always – always – attempt to turn the discussion to the Book of Genesis, the age of the Earth, Christianity, the public school system, or some other topic totally unrelated to the one at hand instead.

That is why I am still a skeptic concerning the secularism’s epic myth, despite having read every book ever published by Richard Dawkins, despite having read Wilson, and Gould, and Shermer, and Hauser, and a number of other well-regarded evolutionary popularizers.  At this point, it might be more accurate to say I am an evolutionary skeptic because I have read those books and been astounded by the panoply of obvious logical flaws, evasions, and handwaving that I have encountered in them.

I was pleased to recently run across one of my favorite quotes, from the Pharyngula days of yore:

Keynesian economics, like evolutionary biology, has an outstanding record of success, and has become the foundation for a vast amount of productive work in its field. 

You will note that the self-correcting process of scientistry bears almost no resemblance to the ideal concept of science that is romanticized by the Bill Nye Fake Science brigade:

Where I looked out our van’s window at a landscape of skeletal cows and chartreuse rice paddies, Keller saw a prehistoric crime scene. She was searching for fresh evidence that would help prove her hypothesis about what killed the dinosaurs—and invalidate the asteroid-impact theory that many of us learned in school as uncontested fact. According to this well-established fire-and-brimstone scenario, the dinosaurs were exterminated when a six-mile-wide asteroid, larger than Mount Everest is tall, slammed into our planet with the force of 10 billion atomic bombs. The impact unleashed giant fireballs, crushing tsunamis, continent-shaking earthquakes, and suffocating darkness that transformed the Earth into what one poetic scientist described as “an Old Testament version of hell.”

Before the asteroid hypothesis took hold, researchers had proposed other, similarly bizarre explanations for the dinosaurs’ demise: gluttony, protracted food poisoning, terminal chastity, acute stupidity, even Paleo-weltschmerz—death by boredom. These theories fell by the wayside when, in 1980, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Luis Alvarez and three colleagues from UC Berkeley announced a discovery in the journal Science. They had found iridium—a hard, silver-gray element that lurks in the bowels of planets, including ours—deposited all over the world at approximately the same time that, according to the fossil record, creatures were dying en masse. Mystery solved: An asteroid had crashed into the Earth, spewing iridium and pulverized rock dust around the globe and wiping out most life forms.

Their hypothesis quickly gained traction, as visions of killer space rocks sparked even the dullest imaginations. nasa initiated Project Spacewatch to track—and possibly bomb—any asteroid that might dare to approach. Carl Sagan warned world leaders that hydrogen bombs could trigger a catastrophic “nuclear winter” like the one caused by the asteroid’s dust cloud. Science reporters cheered having a story that united dinosaurs and extraterrestrials and Cold War fever dreams—it needed only “some sex and the involvement of the Royal Family and the whole world would be paying attention,” one journalist wrote. News articles described scientists rallying around Alvarez’s theory in record time, especially after the so-called impacter camp delivered, in 1991, the geologic equivalent of DNA evidence: the “Crater of Doom,” a 111-mile-wide cavity near the Mexican town of Chicxulub, on the Yucatán Peninsula. Researchers identified it as the spot where the fatal asteroid had punched the Earth. Textbooks and natural-history museums raced to add updates identifying the asteroid as the killer.

The impact theory provided an elegant solution to a prehistoric puzzle, and its steady march from hypothesis to fact offered a heartwarming story about the integrity of the scientific method. “This is nearly as close to a certainty as one can get in science,” a planetary-science professor told Time magazine in an article on the crater’s discovery. In the years since, impacters say they have come even closer to total certainty. “I would argue that the hypothesis has reached the level of the evolution hypothesis,” says Sean Gulick, a research professor at the University of Texas at Austin who studies the Chicxulub crater. “We have it nailed down, the case is closed,” Buck Sharpton, a geologist and scientist emeritus at the Lunar and Planetary Institute, has said.

But Keller doesn’t buy any of it. “It’s like a fairy tale: ‘Big rock from sky hits the dinosaurs, and boom they go.’ And it has all the aspects of a really nice story,” she said. “It’s just not true.”

While the majority of her peers embraced the Chicxulub asteroid as the cause of the extinction, Keller remained a maligned and, until recently, lonely voice contesting it. She argues that the mass extinction was caused not by a wrong-place-wrong-time asteroid collision but by a series of colossal volcanic eruptions in a part of western India known as the Deccan Traps—a theory that was first proposed in 1978 and then abandoned by all but a small number of scientists. Her research, undertaken with specialists around the world and featured in leading scientific journals, has forced other scientists to take a second look at their data. “Gerta uncovered many things through the years that just don’t sit with the nice, simple impact story that Alvarez put together,” Andrew Kerr, a geochemist at Cardiff University, told me. “She’s made people think about a previously near-uniformly accepted model.”

Keller’s resistance has put her at the core of one of the most rancorous and longest-running controversies in science. “It’s like the Thirty Years’ War,” says Kirk Johnson, the director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. Impacters’ case-closed confidence belies decades of vicious infighting, with the two sides trading accusations of slander, sabotage, threats, discrimination, spurious data, and attempts to torpedo careers.

“I would argue that the hypothesis has reached the level of the evolution hypothesis.”

Exactly. And if the scientific community is this upset over the gradual demolition of the Dinosaur-Killing Asteroid Theory, imagine how they’re going to react when the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection eventually meets its inevitable conclusive demise.

Fred Reed is among the growing number of evolution skeptics and he answers responses to his recent column on the subject:

Recently I wrote a column about the theory of Intelligent Design, which holds that that life, both in its origins and its changes over time, are the result of design instead of chance. Several hundred comments and emails arrived, more than I could read. This was not surprising as there seems to be considerable public interest in the question, while a virulent political correctness prevents discussion in most forums. In particular the major media prevent mention of Intelligent Design except in derogatory terms.

Interesting to me at any rate was that the tone of response was much more civil and thoughtful than it was say, a decade ago.

A fair few respondents quoted the Bible. I wondered why the Bible and not the Koran or Bhagavad Gita. The Bible seems to me the chaotic literature of a barbaric tribe and characterized by morally unpleasant stories. Why it is thought to have any relevance to abiogenesis is not clear to me.

Some readers, quoting Carl Sagan, said approximately, “Fred, an extraordinary claim requires extraordinary evidence to support it.” I don’t disagree. The claim that ocean water will in time produce Manhattan seems to me sufficiently extraordinary to require extraordinary evidence. So far, there is none. Evolutionists have not shown that sea water can produce any life at all, much less the New York Philharmonic.

Other readers insist that Intelligent Design is not scientific. If not, so what? The question should be not whether it is scientific but whether it is true. What an ideological group calling themselves scientists believe is not a valid test of truth. When I was in the eighth grade, I watched Crusader Rabbit on television. This is not science, yet it is true.

If science deals with the reproducible, then paleontology is not science, as neither is the chance creation of life, which has not proved reproducible. If science must make predictions, then physiology is not science, being entirely descriptive. If science is the study of the quantifiable, then evolution isn’t. What is the unit of selective pressure?

Fred has landed on precisely the aspect of evolutionary theory that made me into a strong TE(p)NSBMGDaGF skeptic. What many people who have not thought seriously about the issue don’t realize is that biologists are literally so stupid, and so innumerate, and so illogical, that they don’t understand the problems that quantification creates for their many unfounded assumptions.

You may recall that I confused a number of evolution advocates by asking them a very simple question: what is the average rate of evolutionary mutation. The problem was not that they could not provide a precise answer, although the fact that they couldn’t even work out a possible range as well as I could was troubling. The problem was that they did not understand that the question was a) entirely legitimate, b) the answer to it can theoretically be worked out, and worst of all, c) there ABSOLUTELY MUST be a precise answer to it.

What their confusion indicated to me, and what I later confirmed by analyzing undergraduate, graduate, and PhD programs, is that biologists are still essentially butterfly collectors. They are the least intelligent of the STEM field graduates and most of them have no ability whatsoever to even begin to grasp the relevant issues involved, let alone successfully address them.

For example, it is particularly amusing to note that I have encountered people who sneer at the idea of intelligent design while simultaneously admitting to being philosophically open to the idea that the world is some sort of digital simulation. I can’t even bring myself to point out to them that if the world is a digital simulation, this strongly implies that the intelligent design crowd was correct all along.

Apparently my hypothesis that atheism is a mild form of autism was correct, but didn’t go anywhere nearly far enough. Scientists are determining that atheists are mutants who are literally unfit in a variety of ways.

Until the Industrial Revolution, we were under harsh conditions of Darwinian Selection, meaning that about 40{434e4795edb8718426f2262f16bc350bda72304c69f2c22d1de5754882bdf177} of children died before they reached adulthood. These children would have been those who had mutant genes, leading to poor immune systems and death from childhood diseases. But they would also have had mutant genes affecting the mind. This is because the brain, home to 84{434e4795edb8718426f2262f16bc350bda72304c69f2c22d1de5754882bdf177} of the genome, is extraordinarily sensitive to mutation, so mental and physical mutation robustly correlate. If these children had grown up, they might have had autism, schizophrenia, depression… but they had poor immune systems, so they never had the chance.

Under these conditions, prevalent until the nineteenth century, we were individually selected for but we were also “group selected” for. Ethnic groups are simply a genetic extended family and some groups fared better against the environment and enemy groups than others did, due to the kind of partly genetic psychological adaptations they developed.

Among these, the authors argue, was a very specific kind of religiosity which developed in all complex societies: the collective worship of gods concerned with morality. Belief in these kinds of gods was selected for, they maintain, because once we developed cities we had to deal with strangers—people who weren’t part of our extended family. By conceiving of a god who demanded moral behaviour towards other believers, people were compelled to cooperate with these strangers, meaning that large, highly cooperative groups could develop.

Computer models have proven that the more internally cooperative group—which is also hostile to infidel outsiders—wins the battle of group selection [The Evolutionary Dominance of Ethnocentric Cooperation. Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation by Max Hartshorn, June 2013]. This very specific kind of religiousness was selected for and, indeed, it correlates with positive and negative ethnocentrism even today.

The authors demonstrate that this kind of religiousness has clearly been selected for in itself. It is about 40{434e4795edb8718426f2262f16bc350bda72304c69f2c22d1de5754882bdf177} genetic according to twin studies, it is associated with strongly elevated fertility, it can be traced to activity in specific regions of the brain, and it is associated with elevated health: all the key markers that something has been selected for.

And it is from here that the authors make the leap that has made SJW blood boil. Drawing on research by Michael Woodley of Menie and his team (see here and here)they argue that conditions of Darwinian selection have now massively weakened, leading to a huge rise in people with damaging mutations. This is evidenced in increasing rates of autism, schizophrenia, homosexuality, sex-dysmorphia, left-handedness, asymmetrical bodies and much else. These are all indicators of mutant genes.

Woodley suggests that weakened Darwinian selection would have led to the spread of “spiteful mutations” of the mind, which would help to destroy the increasingly physically and mentally sick group, even influencing the non-carriers to behave against their genetic interests, as carriers would help undermine the structures through which members learnt adaptive behaviour.

This is exactly what happened in the infamous Mouse Utopia experiment in the late 1960s, where a colony of mice was placed in conditions of zero Darwinian selection and eventually died out. [Death squared: The explosive growth and demise of a mouse population. Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, January 1973(PDF)].

So Dutton and his team argue that, this being the case, deviation from this very specific form of religiousness—the collective worship of moral gods in which almost everyone engaged in 1800—should be associated with these markers of mutation. In other words, both atheists and those interested in spirituality with no moral gods (such as the paranormal) should be disproportionately mutants.

And this is precisely what they show. Poor physical and mental health are both significantly genetic and imply high mutational load. Dutton and his team demonstrate that this specific form of religiousness, when controlling for key factors such as SES, predicts much better objective mental and physical health, recovery from illness, and longevity than atheism.

It’s generally believed that religiousness makes you healthier because it makes you worry less and elevates your mood, but they turn this view on its head, showing that religious worshippers are more likely to carry gene forms associated with being low in anxiety. Schizophrenia, they show, is associated with extreme and anti-social religiosity, rather than collective worship. Similarly, belief in the paranormal is predicted by schizophrenia, and this is a marker of genetic mutation.

Next, they test autism, another widely accepted marker of mutation, as evidenced by the fact that it’s more common among the children of older men, whose fathers are prone to mutant sperm. Autism predicts atheism.

The good news is that once times get difficult again, atheism will again recede in both quantities and virulence. The bad news is that we are going to have to try to treat people born with what I suggest we call “Dawkins Syndrome” with a little more sympathy, since they probably can’t help their lack of belief or behavior much more than those born with Downe’s Syndrome.

How fortunate that those born with Dawkins Syndrome are so highly rational and inclined to put perfect faith in science. Surely they will accept these new scientific discoveries about their condition with grace and aplomb.