46 Replies to “Life on Earth”

  1. Darwin’s theory is “inconsistent with the fossil record”?
    Darwin didn’t make any predictions about the fossil record. His theory, pared of the persiflage, comes down to a version of Gall’s Law:
    “A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.”

  2. Oh, not this again.
    Evolutionary biologists no more profess “Darwinism” than physicists do Niels Bohr’s solar system model of the atom. Successfully knocking down straw men does not a soldier make.

  3. When will Home Sapiens successfully evolve into Homo Sovieticus — the New Soviet Man? It was supposed to have been done by 1980.

  5. Kate, you are right. There are some pretty good letters. At least two had to try to make the topic a racist or firearms issue.
    It seems a number of the writers had sympathy for Professor Nagel and opposed the science is settled community’s inquisitional attacks.
    Now the debate will rage again here and some will slam others for their beliefs.

  6. Our modern academia is so intellectually fragile that they can not and must not utter those sin filled words;”I do not know”.
    The personal cowardice of these self proclaimed “deep Thinkers” is amusing.
    Look to the state of public discussion, PC says it all.
    I support freedom of speech, except for any speech that threatens my tiny self image and personal delusions.
    Actually grading students, based on their mimicry skills as opposed to their cognitive skills.
    Laugh at me and you fail the course.
    Pathetic little worms.

  8. The fossils are interpreted using the theory, the theory is ‘proven’ by the interpretation of the fossils. Just like the climate scam.
    Nothing new under the sun…

  9. In the end, Darwin’s theory of evolution remains a theory since the premise of inter-species evolution has never been proven.
    All attempts to fool the public with a discovery of the ‘missing link’ have been debunked.
    The only thing that matters, in the long run, is that we are here and individually we must choose between good and evil.

  10. I dont recall anyone claiming that the science was settled. They are simply parroting the most reasonable explanation to date.
    Scoffers have no facts or data to support their suppositions. Fortunately for them, everyone can run off at the mouth with their own thoughts about evolution.
    No science is ever settled. The challenge is to come up with a better explanation. It’s as simple as that.

  11. There are alternatives to neo-Darwinism; however,most scientists don’t want to mention them because they involve the realm of the supernatural. Since modern science is thoroughly committed to a materialist world-view, invoking the supernatural is not allowed. In the end, people see what their world-view allows them to see. Scientists are just as prone to the herd mentality as any other class of humans.

  12. These debates are somewhat pointless. Those who still adhere to 19th century positivism (the vast majority of “intellectuals” today, including mutts like Dawkins, Dennet, and most university profs) are apparently constitutionally incapable of grasping the profound epistemological problems their world view presents. Positivism was torn to shreds 80 years ago, yet it still forms the foundation of postmodern bien pensants “thinking”. Furthermore most of these people have no real idea what scientific knowledge actually is (i.e., that there are absolute, sharp limits to what science can possibly address, pace Godel).
    For those who “get it”, there’s not much one can say to change the minds of the bovine materialists.

  13. Oh this old chestnut; I thought people had gotten over this.
    Evolution does not preclude God. Some might even think that the process is so darn miraculous that it is pretty good evidence of an all knowing creator. It does preclude a literal interpretation of the Bible, but then so does astronomy and geology and archaeology.
    I do agree with the criticism of the herd-like inquisition mentality of the priesthood against the heretics. But this is a human trait, as revealed by thousands of years of history and human behavior.
    We simply must guard against dogma, and that means remaining skeptically open minded when we are formulating theories in an almost complete absence of information. And computer models and theories are not information.

  14. This is just an argument about punctuated evolution – or whether it happens at a constant rate or in spurts
    I personally am a spurter đŸ™‚

  15. I disagree about logical positivists infecting our academia. If only …. we have the dregs of the romantic movement infecting academia with their noble savages, tabla razas and perfectibility of man … er humans.

  16. Darwin’s Theory was at odds with the Cambrian Explosion
    Cambrian extinctions, anyone? There were 4, I think. Leaving lots of niches open, causing an explosion of speciation?

  17. Check out “Darwin’s Black Box” by Micheal Behe.
    Darwin, in his wildest dreams, couldn’t have imagined how incredibly complex one single cell is.

  19. I don’t think there are to many people that dispute that evolution happens. We have seen how it happens. It doesn’t help explain where life came from in the first place, which is how it is sold to the public these days.
    Creation and evolution are two different things. The theory of evolution does not explain where life came from in he first place. The theory that life sprang from the primordial goo all by itself does violate the generally accepted 2nd law of thermodynamics.
    So the THEORY of evolution as most of the ill educated masses understand it, violates the 2nd LAW of thermodynamis.

  20. Ras Erasmus said: “Since modern science is thoroughly committed to a materialist world-view, invoking the supernatural is not allowed.”
    I would say instead that invoking the supernatural is not -useful- in a scientific inquiry. Saying the words “intelligent design” shuts off every other avenue of investigation into (ferinstance) why squids have eyes and how they may have gotten that way. You may never find out, but just trying may open new discovery in seemingly unrelated areas.
    If you can -prove- it was intelligent design, as with human designed BT corn for example, then that’s fine. But if its just an argument to close debate on the subject, it isn’t likely to generate further discoveries, is it?
    “Because God said” is not much of an argument, because it doesn’t tell you anything useful. If one believes that the universe had a creator it still isn’t useful, because its a tautology. Granted that there is a Creator, how did he manage this bit?
    Now, none of this excuses the likes of Dawkins et al who really don’t have much of an argument either. You can tell they don’t because they inevitably descend into sophistry, mockery and lawyering when challenged. If they had better they’d certainly trot it out.
    Two sides of the same coin. It says “SHUT UP!!!” on both sides.
    I live in the question, because I’m not smart enough to have it all figured out. Everyone else seems quite sure of themselves, but every day some new thing comes along I’ve never seen before…

  21. Phantom, I thought it was design by committee.
    As Gods substitute any policy committee bureaucrats and proceed to the lunacy of life.

  23. I live in the question, because I’m not smart enough to have it all figured out.
    Now that’s irony, somehow life assembles itself into the highest form, but can’t figure out how it did it.

  24. Theories that include multiple universes and additional dimensions are routinely debated in Physics, while over in Biology the mere suggestion of intelligent design is belittled as the “supernatural”.
    I’m not a creationist, but I do find the contradiction amusing.

  26. Kate said: “…while over in Biology the mere suggestion of intelligent design is belittled as the “supernatural”.”
    Well, if you’re sequencing the genome of some bug and you find it spells “Property Of Dupont Inc.” on sequence 1 of chromosome 1, then you’ve probably got a strong argument for intelligent design. ~:)
    Warthogs are a strong case for “design by committee”.

  27. Darwin, in his wildest dreams, couldn’t have imagined how incredibly complex one single cell is.
    Francis Crick could, so he came up with his theory to explain the origin of life — directed panspermia — seed material was brought to earth by ‘space travel technology’. That still doesn’t explain how life originated in the planet that the UFO came from.

  28. God created evolution.
    Done.
    (Although I appreciate the arguments posed in those letters, the vast majority of dogmatists are very boring)

  29. Yeah well I adhere to the “I dunno…I jus dunno” clique….and seriously doubt any body else does…faith is a funny(queer) thing.
    It is oh so easy to debunk any and all theories….
    eg…..While it is plausable that life on earth came from elsewhere…how the hell did it evolve wherever it came from…
    Evolution is perhaps the most plausible….a series of happy accidents…and survival of the fitest….an unlikely event but possible….and once life was achieved, then was robust enough to spread like a disease by various means….
    I’m not terribly religious but I reject the image of *** standing on 1 toe waving a magic wand….it’s insulting….
    Consciousness???….now there is a head scratcher….I am reasonably certain that dogs dream….that’s a start….

  30. Intelligent Design is and always has been an attempt to make non-science look sciencey. There’s no scientific aka reality-based alternative to Evolution. As it stands, the debate is over how evolution occurs ex punctuated equilibrium versus gradualism.

  31. Interestingly, the Hebrew word translated ‘rib’ means the curve. Brings to my mind the double helix.
    Of course, women do have more curves than men…

  32. The science is far from settled, but the empirical evidence overwhelming fits the Darwinist theories; meanwhile there is no evidence to support the magical claims of ancient man and his religious mumbo jumbo that are blindly accepted on faith by those who are either ignorant or afraid of living without the assurance of some omnipotent sky being.
    That does not mean that there are not plenty of holes in the explanations for how we came to be what we are now, and perhaps given the sparsity of evidence to be examined we may never get a definitive answer to all these questions, but that does not mean the current theory is invalid. “Believing” in evolution is just an acceptance of the theory on the basis of the preponderance of evidence available. If you could provide evidence that null hypothesis is true then I would be willing to hear it. So, evolution, while not fully explaining all aspects of our existence, offers the most logical explanation which is aligned with the facts available – that is what science is all about.
    Climate science on the other hand is not comparable. There has been plenty of valid objections to the MODELS that the followers of the IPCC propose, and the empirical evidence does not support their models. In a normal science context their theory has failed, but they refuse to accept this, so their belief in their models is a religion as opposed to science.

  33. Darwin himself used the word Creator many times in his comments to ‘The Origin of Species’ up until the sixth edition which was the last one printed in his lifetime. Subsequent editions had his notes removed.
    Does anyone believe that something as complex as a DNA molecule just happened to arrange itself inside a cell wall which is built according to instructions in the DNA itself?

  34. Indeed. In fields such as circuit design, evolutionary algorithms have proved useful, and I see nothing strange in a God who uses them to develop new species. In fact He would be rather slow if he did not. Why should an intelligent entity design, say, 250,000 different species of beetle when one prototype beetle (well, two) would do everything that is needful? In any event it is not “evolution” which is hard, but speciation and reproductive isolation.
    In any event it is foolish to expect truth in the pages of a newspaper.

  36. Does anyone believe that something as complex as a DNA molecule just happened to arrange itself inside a cell wall which is built according to instructions in the DNA itself?
    The current hypothesis is that RNA evolved first to encode proteins and DNA later evolved as a long term information storage mechanism.

  37. “The science is far from settled, but the empirical evidence overwhelming fits the Darwinist theories; meanwhile there is no evidence to support the magical claims of ancient man and his religious mumbo jumbo that are blindly accepted on faith by those who are either ignorant or afraid of living without the assurance of some omnipotent sky being.”
    This is why people will cling to the “religious mumbo-jumbo” as you seem to have it all figured out.
    THAT is why the Theory of Evolution debate cannot be a civil one. Though is a theory, it is treated as a religious edict by its believers who cry blasphemy when they hear someone question it. If the allegedly fearful you’ve alluded to are too ignorant to study the theory, what does it make those who buy the theory without question and with great mockery for everyone else?

  38. Excellent point Al.
    And if anyone took time to study the precision of electrolyte exchange within the cell wall allowing the electrical impulse the conduct thru the entire heart (millions of cells) in one beat they would recognise the perfect design.
    One of the proponents of the theory of evolutions claims ‘disorder to order’. That is not happening in our world.
    You are right Kate. That was a good discussion at NP.

  39. Jesus walked through the wall (John 20:26). So, was He not there, or the wall not there?
    I think dimensions are the right track.

  40. Years ago ,one of the elders that I spoke to often said; ” It is not important where you came from,you are here now”.
    ” But ,How do I know where I am going if I don’t where I’ve been?”
    He replied ” many,many years ago the planet was visited by people from another galaxy. They made a stop to replenish their stores and to empty their waste. That is where we started . Don’t worry about what is above you,focus on a way out.

  41. One of the proponents of the theory of evolutions claims ‘disorder to order’. That is not happening in our world.
    Um. Yes it is. Information that encodes successful systems is reproduced. That’s how that beating electrolytic heart came to be.

  42. Having just received my copy of Nagel’s book from Amazon, I’m a bit disappointed that he never mentioned emergent phenomena once in the first 20 or so pages of the book that I’ve read.
    To his credit, he admits he’s not a scientist and thus doesn’t have an intuitive feeling of how science works. The scientific method, as presented in the popular literature, represents an idealization of how science should work. This idealized version of the scientific method has about as much identity with the real process of science as Boris Valeho’s fantasy women to to real women. I’d love to meet a woman that looks like some of the women on his calendars but they’re an idealization of the female form.
    Science operates on two levels; the logical level that the rational mind believes represents the totality of science and the irrational, emotional level that guides the logical mind. Being nonverbal, the irrational is rarely acknowledge by the rationalizing mind which believes it alone has accomplished scientific discoveries.
    For various reasons, when I first got into science, my irrational mind was ascendant and I remember clearly when I first synthesized a chemical compound that had never before existed in crystalline form on the planet earth, that I had a sudden premonition about what it’s melting point would be. I just put a mark on the thermometer as I slowly raised the temperature of the bath where the sample was in a capillary tube attached to the thermometer and, just as my irrational mind had predicted, the compound melted at the temperature I somehow knew it would. This could be dismissed as coincidence except at that time in my life all sorts of paranormal phenomena seemed to be the norm. I was fascinated with Jung’s theory of synchronicity at the time and, to this day, seem to have more than my expected share of luck.
    This experience of science doesn’t fit at all with the logical methodical scientific method and I’ve learned that my wetware now is a finely tuned diagnostic machine which gives me answers to clinical problems which, depending on how preposterous the diagnosis would be to my colleagues, requires the assistance of my logical brain to create the necessary rationalization to make my diagnosis/treatment acceptable within the current medical dogma.
    Purely logical people create nothing – it’s the interplay between irrationality and logic that creates progress in science and the time that I was in basic research was a time where enough people were using psychedelics that the mystical was the norm. Now, however, we have switched to the other extreme where emotional aspects of discovery are denigrated and, especially in the area of human genetics, the reductionist view is dominant.
    In this sense Nagel’s book is a good test of how wedded people are to their theories. The virulent rejection by people who I thought were reasonable was a surprise and this reflects a worrisome ossification of the scientific establishment. The genetic reductionist view is analogous to studying in minute detail the molecular structure of a modern CPU chip and purporting to predict the function of that chip based on minutae of the molecular structure.
    In fact, such a study would be a total waste of time if one wanted to, say, predict the emergence of the internet from the particular arrangement of silicon molecules that make up a Pentium chip. Unless one discovers that really one is dealing with a system which can run programs that only create temporary alterations in charge in the storage devices of the chip, one can expend endless effort and get nowhere. In this sense, a program is the “soul” of a computer.
    Emergent phenomena are the key to understanding complexity. Reductionism posits a “bipolar gene” as the cause of bipolar disorder. It may be true that a significant proportion of bipolars have that gene, but then many bipolars also are prone to diabetes and 80% of them have migraines. Suggesting that migraines cause bipolar disorder would be roundly criticized, as it should be, but the breathless announcements by the miners of the human genome of new “disease genes” are reported without question by the MSM.
    The internet is an emergent phenomenon of computers interacting with humans. It’s existence cannot, a-priori, be predicted by looking at the particular arrangement of atoms that make up the computer or a human. There are seemingly endless examples of emergent phenomena in complex systems and, in the case of climate science, these are ignored by the climate modelers who persist in trying the analogous operation to predicting the internet from the electrical interactions of collections of atoms.
    Nagel appears to have constructed a wide variety of reductionistic straw men and knocked them down. I’ll finish reading the book, but if he doesn’t mention emergent phenomena in the remaining 90 pages, the book is fatally flawed. It’s primary purpose, then, will have been as a serious indictment of the current system of bureaucratic science that is seriously due for a serious shakeup. I’ve pondered whether adding LSD to university water supplies would provide the needed perturbation to blast the bureaucratic scientists out of the intellectual corner they’ve painted themselves into. Clearly they don’t like someone like Nagel pointing out the modern god of science has no clothes.
    Study of the human mind has been one of my lifelong interests and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s impossible for the mind to understand itself. The mind has clearly evolved in response to hundreds of millions of years of interaction with objective reality to create better brains which modeled external reality better than their extinct ancestors. Humans are at the peak of this evolutionary process as we are the first time-binding animal. Corals build reefs in the ocean and we build equivalent structures based on the knowledge acquired throughout the course of human history. Modelling an exact replica of a computer on itself is a mathematical impossibility. I firmly believe that quantum phenomena are involved in cognitive processes and Penrose, in The Emperors New Mind posited that quantum computation takes place in the microtubules of neurons. This may, in some future time, be viewed as humerously as Descartes placing the seat of the soul in the pineal gland. Nevertheless, quantum phenomena play exceedingly significant roles when one gets down to the level of protein molecules. The protein folding problem indicates that the self-assembly of a protein based on just random perturbations by nearby water molecules should be impossible during the life of the universe. Yet it occurs in milliseconds and a quantum solution to the protein folding problem explains why we have working enzymes and structural proteins.
    Nevertheless, there are phenomena not explained by conventional reductionist science operating in the brain. Various experiences over the course of my life have convinced me that the existence of a human soul is valid and whether this represents a connection between all instantiations of an individual in the multiverse or some space-time warping by the brains quantum computational processes remain to be determined. (I personally believe in the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics and David Deautch’s books are a good lay introduction to the subject).
    If the critics of Nagel’s book had simply pointed out that he had ignored emergent phenomena in complex systems then I’d have confidence that science, as practiced today, was on the right path. The vicious reaction by what are supposed to be rational people suggest that Nagel has put his finger squarely on some of the major weaknesses of big government funded science and, if that’s all he does, the book will have been a success.
    Sorry for the length of this post, but this particular issue is one that has been of particular interest to me for decades now.

  43. This was a fascinating exposition for the lay mind. Now I am even more determined to read Nagel’s book.

  44. Loki:
    Obviously this thread has struck a chord with you.
    Please explain your perception of the difference between irrationality and imagination.

  45. NeoLuddite, “irrationality” comprises such items as premonitions of events, magical thinking, precognitive dreams, and synchronistic events. I’m sure there are more things that fit the “irrational” category, but the above list comprises a good chunk of them. Imagination, OTOH, is confined to ones head and I find it comes about when one loosens associations and lets things come together. Imagination is a directed enterprise, and one clearly knows that it’s in ones head.
    The “irrational” events noted above require one to believe in a reality which encompasses such events and I alternate from times when I believe in synchronicity to times that I dismiss my synchronistic events as mere chance. Nevertheless, there was a time in my life where I felt I had tapped into a hidden communication channel in the universe and there were real world benefits. I’ve had a number of precognitive dreams which were scary in their predictive value and the metaphors used in the dreams only became apparent when events had occurred. I record all my dreams so can determine whether they represent a future reality or the R hemisphere’s rearrangement of subconsciously perceived data.
    As an example of the latter, I woke up to hear a patient of mine was admitted to hospital with an exacerbation of Crohn’s and viewed her abdominal CT while half asleep and just zoomed in on her terminal ileum to see what it looked like. I then fell asleep in a chair and had a dream where I was trying to convince one of the local surgeons to take out this patients spleen. This was very odd because I almost always dream of strangers and strange places and WTF would I want her spleen removed? I looked at the CT again, and there was a mass between the spleen and stomach that I had missed in my being focused on the terminal ileum and, as it turned out, the surgeon I had asked to remove this womans spleen in my dream did the surgery to remove a benign stomach tumor. This was clearly an example of the whole of the CT being registered by my brain and the subconscious using the the metaphor of a splenectomy to alert me that there was something I missed in the initial view of the CT. The fact that I had dreamt of talking to the surgeon who actually performed the surgery might have been coincidence or precognitive and thus irrational.
    Rationality denies the occult and denies religion. Not being religious, my irrationality takes other forms and is still a very important part of my life but I have utilized the very capable activity of my left hemisphere to create believable sounding rationalizations of what are irrationally derived ideas and predictions.
    Thus, very often when I see a patient who I’ve never seen before, I often get a very strong feeling of what their diagnosis will turn out to be. This is before they’ve said a word or sat down. I then seek to disprove my irrational diagnosis by means of a detailed physical exam and lab tests. If I can’t disprove it, then I’ve proven it right but tend not to write of how I came up with the diagnosis or why I chose drug X to use which would seem to be exactly they wrong drug to use in this situation except it was part of the intuitive flash on first meeting the patient.
    Having lived in Vancouver I’ve also seen the delusional moonbat side of irrationality where people come in believing in homeopathy and other medical quackery. They are totally resistant to using the scientific method to check out their claims and live in a reality tunnel that has little intersection with objective reality. That’s the problem with irrationality alone — one needs a very logical, ruthlessly destructive portion of the mind to attempt to shred any inspirational idea and, those ideas that survive the test are real.
    So, objective reality is much much stranger than we think and we have a portion of the mind that deals with it. This isn’t surprising considering we’ve had hundreds of millions of years of evolution to develop such “irrational” talents. What I currently suspect is happening in the area of precognition are links to ones other selves in the multiverse providing information about personal potential events; a bit problematic as information isn’t supposed to flow from one portion of the multiverse to another.
    The purely logical who ignore such information are as helpless in objective reality as are the moonbats who only rely on their irrational thoughts. It’s the proper melding of these two aspects of how one deals with objective reality that is the key to succeeding in what is a very hostile environment. Still working on trying to get that right balance in my life.

  46. “Our modern academia is so intellectually fragile that they can not and must not utter those sin filled words;’I do not know’.”
    John, well done, you beat me to the punch.
    As I read through this item and those letters all I could think of was “The Experts” segment in the Red Green Show where Red’s nephew Harold would say by way of an intro, “It’s time once again to talk about those three little words that men find so hard to say: ‘I don’t know’.”

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