Part 9: DESIGNING INTELLIGENCE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Part 9: Designing Intelligence

 

 

SO… UH…WHAT IS INTELLIGENCE?

 

Picking up where we left off in episode 6, apparently, and according to University of Chicago microbiology professor, Dr. James A. Shapiro, intelligent design is not new to modern science.

 

It’s just that Intelligence is a very tough nut to crack as far as science is concerned.

 

And as I’ve stated before: as far as the Materialists, Neo-Darwinists and Scientific Atheists are concerned, there is no consciousness — in the real sense of the word — because until we can see it, measure it, and test it, it does not exist. By the same token, there is no soul, and the mind is nothing but a physical phenomenon, the byproduct of brain activity.

 

In fact, you might remember that in episode five I talked about Richard Dawkins’s address at the first Reason Rally, which was held on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. on March 24, 2012,  and during which professor Dawkins made the following declaration, “How is it conceivable that the laws of physics should conspire together without guidance, without direction, without any intelligence, to bring us into the world? Now we do have intelligence.”

 

Alright, just for contrast, I will share with you highlights from an article penned by the aforementioned James Shapiro, titled “In the Details… what?” published in the September 16, 1996 issue of National Review, and in which he conducted—in my estimation—a thorough, fair and balanced critique of Michael J. Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution.

 

Shapiro asks, “Is this book a serious critique of orthodox evolutionary theory? Or is it a misguided attempt to bring religion back into biology? Unfortunately, the answer to both questions is yes.”

 

And before pointing out what he viewed as Darwin’s Black box’s shortcomings, Shapiro, in no uncertain terms reminds us that: “until the last century (well into the era of “Modern Science”), most serious thinkers considered it self-evident that the remarkable capacities of living organisms, so superior to mechanical devices, must have an intelligent basis. Historically, then, the real issue is not the recent ‘discovery’ of intelligent design in biology but rather why orthodox science currently denies what seemed obvious for so long.”

 

For the record, as an evolutionary biologist, Shapiro never once promotes the idea that intelligence equals mind, or, for that matter, a creator. Instead, and ultimately, he is purely concerned with intelligence as a yet-to-be-understood, self-organizing force that is part and parcel of the natural evolutionary process.

 

Alright, so that shows that at least one noted evolutionary biologist doesn’t merely chalk intelligence up to chemical reactions in the brain; thus, suggesting we not treat intelligence as some sort of mystical, magical force that is beyond the reach of science.

 

But please hold that thought, while I share with you some more statements from that article regarding Darwinism I never imagined an Evolutionary Biologist would ever make:

 

First, and as regards Behe quoting Darwin himself when he challenged us to the impossible task of proving a negative by writing, “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down,” Shapiro writes, “Surely then, contemporary Darwinists have answers to rebut critics like Professor Behe. In fact, there are no detailed Darwinian accounts for the evolution of any fundamental biochemical or cellular system, only a variety of wishful speculation.”

 

Perhaps that is why James Shapiro writes, “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 and diversity.”

 

And so, Shapiro is, at least in this article, definitely an Evolutionist, just not of the Darwinian persuasion.

 

And he doesn’t let Behe off the hook, either.

 

In his view, Professor Behe, whose patient explanations revealed a conscientious teacher, had nevertheless blundered by suggesting that intelligent design may lie outside the domain of scientific investigation.

 

Then Dr. Shapiro expressed something that struck a chord with me because in the story of The Planet Fomalzaab by Doctor Dahesh, which I will tell you more about a little later, we learn that intelligent, directed Evolution had occurred at least once in the history of humanity.

 

Shapiro writes, “The Subtitle of the book (The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution) suggests that it attacks the idea of evolution, not just Darwinian theories of change. Even the scientific approach is questioned. In the third section of Darwin’s Black Box, in a partially justified attack on groupthink in the scientific community, Professor Behe chides colleagues for asserting that scientists must strive for explanations exclusively in terms of natural phenomena.”

 

So, according to Shapiro, Behe’s mistake is his appeal to explanations beyond the realm of nature, being that, in his opinion, the pertinent scientific questions have not all been asked.

 

And, of course, being that Behe feels intelligence is somehow beyond the realm of nature, one can only infer that he’s bringing religion back into the evolutionary debate.

 

And here, Shapiro makes a very insightful remark; he writes, “There is an ironic convergence with the neo-Darwinists who also want to exclude the possibility of intelligent action as part of the natural evolutionary process. Yet, where does intelligence come from?” He then asks, “Is human intelligence natural or supernatural? And what about animal intelligence in finding food, embryonic intelligence in overcoming mistakes and disruptions to produce healthy organisms, cellular intelligence to correct errors and imbalances in millions of coordinated biochemical reactions, and biochemical intelligence exhibited by systems like the blood-clotting cascade?”

 

In essence, Shapiro feels that Darwin’s Black Box undermines itself by abandoning the effort to treat the question of intelligent design within science’s own ongoing evolution.

 

Fair enough! Empirically-speaking, then, is there some way to detect real, not merely apparent design in nature?

 

 

 

THE EXPLANATORY FILTER

 

Whenever tasked with designing anything, may it be a house, a city, an integrated circuit, a car, even a pair of scissors, the designer—or a team thereof—has to consider two principal concepts: form and function, and not necessarily in that order. Sometimes, for example when designing a pair of scissors, form follows function. Sometimes it’s the other way around: a simple paperweight can just be… an overpriced cube. But when it comes to more complex uses, the best designs are those where the line between form and function has been blurred.

 

There’s good and there’s bad design. Placing a tub in the middle of a living room is typically considered bad design, unless… it’s a sculpture?

 

So is placing it in the kitchen, unless one is faced with insurmountable limitations, such as: the kitchen is the only room where indoor plumbing is available, and the residence still has an outhouse, and there is no budget.

 

And when it comes to bad design, the eye has always been used in an argument to either reduce the Designer’s abilities, or to say, “See? there is no intelligent design here, because, who in their right mind would have inverted the placement of crucial components?” Again, we’ll get to this business of the “badly designed” vertebrate eye later in the episode.

 

So, save room for dessert!

 

In the meantime, and at the risk of sounding as though I’m beating a dead horse, this is not about arguing that the designer is perfect or flawless. Rather, that there is enough evidence to suggest there is some sort of intelligent agency at work, which, and for all we know (and of course, that’s not what Daheshism teaches), can — perhaps — learn from its mistakes, and refine its algorithms? Again, I’m just playing devil’s advocate here.

 

And to be fair, we can’t simply reject macroevolution on philosophical grounds. We need to demonstrate that the mechanism of “Natural Selection acting on Random Mutation,” is wanting. I mean, and aside from the fact it is more statistically-plausible for a Boltzmann brain to form in the void of space, in a post heat-death universe (as discussed in episode 8) than for a biological brain to come about as the result of evolution following the Big Bang—and assuming the first life somehow emerges—consider that every living thing is an emergent phenomenon, made of individual microscopic machines, none of which bears any resemblance to the whole. So, could such a degree of apparent ingenuity be achieved, without some sort of intelligent guidance? To that we’re told, “sure, but it has to be done in incremental steps.”

 

Well, that being the case, and for one thing, you’d be assuming that blind, mindless nature is working towards a goal by setting individual, complex components aside for later use. I mean, never mind that you’d also be assuming that time is no object, and that life, somehow, defied the second law of thermodynamics, that is, entropy, which I’ve covered in episode 8.

 

On that front, you might get the urge to protest and say, “Hey, what about Ice? Doesn’t the fact water freezes to form ice prove that order can arise spontaneously? So how can you claim that the spontaneous formation of life violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics?”

 

Well, keep in mind that (and here I am paraphrasing Dr. Brian Miller, who holds a bachelor of science in physics from MIT, and a Ph.D. in physics from Duke university), while water freezing definitely represents a decrease in entropy and (very important) a decrease in energy, life is a state of both low entropy and high — not low — energy!

 

According to Brian Miller: “For simple chemicals on the early Earth to become a cell, they both have to go to low Entropy — a very, very improbable state — and they have to absorb energy from the environment to increase what’s called their free energy.”

 

(By the way, it turns out that the term “Free energy” has multiple definitions in science. Typically, however, it is defined as: the quantity of energy available within a system that is equivalent to that system’s capacity to do work.)

 

Anyway, apparently that’s a “physical impossibility that never happens in the universe, except if it has help,” according to Dr. Miller.

 

Therefore, while water freezing represents a local (please hold that thought) decrease in entropy, it necessarily represents a decrease in energy as well. Why local? Well, remember that though we may succeed in decreasing the entropy of a local system, (say, cleaning up a room, or making the bed) we are always contributing to the increase of entropy of the universe that holds said system through sweating, creasing the clothes we’re wearing, and releasing body heat!

 

Anyway, water freezing means low entropy and low energy. Whereas, and again to quote Dr. Miller, “The formation of a cell represents both a dramatic decrease in entropy and an equally dramatic increase in energy.”

 

And as we’ve learned in past episodes, even the simplest of cells on Earth is extremely mind-boggling, in terms of being a self-replicating factory teaming with nanotechnology consisting of specialized miniature molecular machines that assemble, disassemble, transport, and perform a host of other tasks, using—in essence—the equivalent of computer-aided design and manufacturing where DNA — which is, and to quote Bill Gates, “Just like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software ever created” — acts as part of a complex information processing network, culminating in a translation and assembly system to construct the proteins; and let’s not forget the metabolic and transport systems that supply the necessary parts for the successful completion of these processes. Add to that sundry regulatory, quiet, efficient, reusable, systems, so that the elaborate process of cell division ensures faithful replication of the genome into daughter cells. And that’s just one cell division!

 

Anyway, and so far, have I just been talking a good game, or is there a plausible way to detect, real, not merely apparent design?

 

For example, just because biological systems and networks, including proteins and molecular motors are complex, that does not necessarily make them designed.

 

What, if anything, would help us detect the fingerprint of a  designer?

 

Imagine we’re looking at something...anything.

 

Using mathematician William Dembski’s Explanatory Filter, the first question should be, “is it contingent?”  In other words, can it have more than one way of being assembled? Now, you might remember that, in a scientific context, necessity implies that something has to happen, and that it can only happen one way. So if we let go of the glass vase, it will necessarily fall to the ground.

 

Contingency, on the other hand, speaks to the possibility of potential patterns of glass shards strewn on the floor, from which, of course, only one pattern would emerge.

 

Contingency is what keeps insurance companies in business. And come to think of it, fortune tellers; I mean, could you imagine if the tea leaves always displayed the same pattern?

 

And as regards contingency, there’s a nuance here, whose importance will come to the fore in a later episode, particularly when we revisit one of physics’s anathema—depending on whom you speak to—called the Anthropic Principle. Until then, let me just quickly reiterate that the Anthropic Principle has taken on an unintended teleological connotation, which was not what Australian physicist Brandon Carter meant to happen when he first introduced the term in print, in 1974, and consequently opened the debate about the Multiverse—or the Landscape as it was later named. Also, with or without a teleological connotation, thus, whether or not it allegedly betrays the Copernican Principle, which states that humans do not occupy a privileged position in the Universe, the Anthropic Principle pertains to this business of the apparent fine-tuning of the constants of the universe, which has puzzled physicists due — not only to their extreme improbability(as I explained in Part 1)—but also because, so far, neither the maths nor the physics says there ought to be any reason for many properties of the universe to appear fine-tuned to allegedly permit the arrival of living systems. According to what Dr. Stephen Myer wrote in his 2021 book, Return of The God Hypothesis: “Philosophers of science call such fine-tuning features ‘contingent’ properties, since they could conceivably have been different without violating either the fundamental laws of physics or any necessary principle of logic or mathematics.”

 

So to recap, the flip-side of necessity is contingency, which implies a range of possibilities, to which mathematicians and scientists assign probabilities.

 

Therefore, it can involve every conceivable degree of probability, including the notion of pure chance, where (in theory at least) not even the laws of nature play a part, which would of course be preposterous, because even when throwing a pair of dice one must take into account the interaction with gravity and altitude which affect air density, which in turn affects drag. Add to that the rotation of each die, and the physical characteristics of the landing surface. However, remember what we learned in episode 6 about Statistical Mechanics and this notion of “almost surely,” that is a non-zero value, or the notion of “not quite impossible.” Again, statistically-speaking, monkeys filling the entire observable universe might be able to produce something to write home about, if you afforded them a timespan equal to hundreds of thousands of orders of magnitude longer than the age of the universe.

 

Anyway, as we’ll learn in moments, identifying the presence of contingency, or a lack thereof, is key to identifying the presence of design.

 

Incidentally, more often than not, in plain speak the word chance is used in lieu of contingency. Remember, however, that chance covers a near-infinite range of possibilities. Is there a chance I’ll turn into a rainbow-colored unicorn at midnight?

 

Sure, there’s always that tiny chance I might!

 

And aside from the complex differential equations that don’t actually predict anything, Neo-Darwinism basically boils down to mind games employing rhetoric, metaphors, and a liberal use of modal verbs! You know, like “could, may, might”… very scientific!

 

Speaking of mind games: During that The Firing Line debate I told you about in episode 7, Kenneth Miller puts up a graph and says to David Berlinski, “Once again, to someone who advocates intelligent design…”

 

“I don't,” calmly retorts Dr. Berlinski.

 

Miller (pointing at the graph and doubling down on beating the straw man): “To someone who advocates intelligent design, does the sequence of these organisms in the fossil record simply mean, that the intelligent designer was incompetent -- he kept making things and they went extinct. Or that he was restless -- I'll try this, I'll try that, I'll try the other thing. Or does it mean, that in fact these organisms are related by descent with modification?”

 

Berlinski replies: “I have no idea. It's not a question I'm prepared to answer one way or another. I don't see why I'm obliged to answer that. I'm coming here under the large tent of objurgation. I find scientific flaws with the Darwinian theory; I don't have a replacement.”

 

Now, and this bears repeating: to a scientist and devout catholic such as Dr. Miller, Intelligent Design, which, instead of making an a priori assumption that one exists, makes an inference to a designer— and not necessarily a perfect Creator whose creations can only be flawless—is anathema because it arguably sounds as though it were the poster child for the logical argument from evil.

 

Remember theodicy?

 

I covered that in episode 6, by the way.

 

To recap: Theodicy is the theological construct that troubles many a reincarnation-denying catholic, as they attempt to reconcile the idea of an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent deity with the manifestation of evil in the world.

 

Also as I reported in episode 6, belief in reincarnation was widespread among the early Christians, until it was declared a heresy by the Catholic Church; that is, punishable by death!

 

You might also remember my telling you, in episode 6, about Giordano Bruno who among other things championed the cosmological position known as Cosmic Pluralism, and would eventually be tried for heresy by the Roman Inquisition for denying many core Catholic doctrines, such as the divinity of Jesus Christ and the virgin birth. And again, what really would get him burnt at the stake in 1600 was that he promoted the belief in reincarnation — or more precisely, the transmigration of souls.

 

In his book titled Giordano Bruno, his life, thought, and martyrdom, published in 1914, William Boulting recounts part of what Bruno told the judges, when asked about Transmigration; he said, "I have held and hold souls to be immortal and that they are substantiae subsistentiae, that is intellective souls”

 

Here, Boulting interjects that Giordano Bruno uses a scholastic term which means: “any special sort of existence taken on by substance.” Boulting adds that Giordano Bruno’s statement is vague owing to the fact he had not said whether he understood substance in its earlier or in its later meaning.  According to Boulting: “the phrase might cover the immortality of one single substance which is found differentiated, or it might be taken as an acceptance of the immortality of individual souls.”

 

And so in reference to what happens to souls after we die, Giordano Bruno tells the inquisitors:

 

“Speaking as a Catholic, they do not pass from body to body, but go to Paradise, Purgatory or Hell. But I have reasoned deeply, and, speaking as a philosopher, since the soul is not found without body and yet is not body, it may be in one body or in another, and pass from body to body.”

 

Now, from a Daheshist perspective, every planet and star—including our own sun— is populated with life. Even the moon, which to us appears as a barren rock, is rocking a more advanced civilization than ours, which is imperceptible to our senses.

Also, Planet Earth contains parallel worlds we can’t even see. Well, sometimes, some people do. For example, I’ve heard my elder Brother Chucri explain that a whole mountain—or city even— that wasn’t there before (and I mean up in the air) can suddenly up and materialize, causing an airplane to crash into it. From what I understood, when that happens, that means that everyone on that plane was scheduled to depart this plane of existence.

 

It’s not random, nor cruel. It was just their time.

 

Incidentally, do you know how, sometimes, you think you’ve lost your keys, or you’ve misplaced a sock only to find it was right in front of you all along? Would you believe me if I told that perhaps to delay you on purpose—for your own good—the sock had in fact disappeared? That, basically, it had gone out of phase with what we perceive as our own “reality.” That is, and in Star Trek speak, it had become cloaked. No, not by Klingons; rather, by celestial hands looking out for you.

 

And yes, I know I said that even inanimate objects have a degree of sentience. But, even socks have to obey the laws of physics… well, at least up to the point you put them in the washing machine or dryer. In any case, all things being equal, what we can’t see is the myriad of invisible actors tasked with intervening when needed. Anyway, next you think you’re going nuts because you can’t see the glasses you just put on the table in front of you, relax. Find your center. Go with the flow… Realize that there’s probably a good reason this is happening. In no time, they’ll eventually reappear.

 

You’re welcome!

 

Anyway, and back to the first question in the explanatory filter flow chart:

 

If the answer to, “Is this something we’re looking at contingent?” is categorically, “No, it is not contingent,” we can therefore conclude that it is the result of some natural law, and therefore implies necessity. For example, when the temperature dips, water necessarily freezes.

But, what about snowflakes? While they are the result of complex and variable atmospheric conditions, are they, however, and as per Dr. Dembski’s explanatory filter, designed?

 

The Daheshist worldview aside, no, they are not. That’s because while they are certainly the direct result of natural law, and they are contingent, being that they come in a seemingly endless variety of shapes and sizes, and they are certainly complex, that complexity is not specified complexity.

 

Basically, and speaking as an architect who is all too familiar with having to write specifications manuals that complement the construction documents, that is, the blueprints, which tell the builder what goes where, but not (with some exceptions) how to install it, or what—where applicable—the manufacturer’s instructions are, detecting specification, or specified complexity is all about recognizing those features that have to be what they are in order to perform a function. Of course, even a highly abstract piece of art is contingent, complex, and specified. Well, if it uses anything that is clearly manufactured, or even if it’s built using tree branches, if it is put together in such a manner as to defy gravity, that qualifies as “design."

 

Now, let’s compare a reinforced concrete beam to a celery rib or leafstalk. Celery, a vascular plant, has tubular pathways for transporting nutrients called the Xylem and Phloem , which are not only vital for survival, they provide structural support. In other words, they permit a certain amount of bending, just as rebars do. Rebars are the steel rods with ridges in a reinforced concrete structure, which, and as in the case of reinforced concrete beams and slabs, are placed—typically—at the bottom if the load on the beam is pointing downward, thus allowing the beam or slab to bend. (The reason I say “typically” is because there are certain structural configurations requiring the rebars be placed at the top.)

 

And so imagine you apply a load onto a beam or slab and cause it to camber, or bow downward, or in structural engineering terms, to deflect. The moment that happens, and even though you can’t really see it, though you’ll definitely feel its affect should the beam experience catastrophic failure, the top part of the beam converges to the center of the beam, due to compression, as if in a column, whereas the bottom part of the beam is stretched from the center out due to tension. Again, that’s assuming you are applying a point load in the center of the beam. Well, without the rebars, which permit the concrete to withstand tension, the beam would snap. Similarly, without the Xylem and Phloem, the celery stalk would snap much easier. Essentially, celery has tension cables built in, which also double as a “plumbing” system.

Therefore, I will argue that celery exhibits specified complexity!

 

So, let’s go through Dembski’s explanatory filter step-by-step:

 

If whatever you’re looking at cannot be contingent, then it is necessary. Therefore, not the result of design.

 

If it is contingent, you then need to decide if it is complex or not.

 

If it is not complex, then it’s the result of chance. So, strike Design.

 

Now, if it is complex, then you should ask yourself if specification is involved.

 

If there isn’t any feature that gives any hint that any part of it is there for a function, or purpose, then, and once again, you’re looking at something that happened by chance. Like, for example, cloud animals. Again, I am not speaking from the Daheshist perspective that says everything has a reason for being. I’m just following the rules of the game.

 

So, for example, imagine we’re walking in the forest and we see a bunch of tree branches strewn on the ground.

 

We know that there is not one and only way these branches could have ended up together.

Therefore, in this case we are clearly faced with contingency.

 

Now, if the branches are spread out, not even touching one another, therefore exhibiting a lack of complexity, then you can chalk it up to chance. Yes, I know, the branches could be a cryptogram, but let’s not overthink think!

 

And notice I didn’t say pure chance, because gravity, more than likely, played a part in them ending up on the forest floor, add to that the wind, and the fact each falling branch hit and bounced off something else it its way down, hence some degree of chance, working with necessity, was involved.

 

But here, we would favor chance over necessity because it would be highly unlikely that these tree branches could have—each— fallen exactly the same way, or according to the pattern, and ultimately landed in the exact same spot.

 

However, if the branches do exhibit complexity, in other words, we can discern an organization with interconnected parts, then the plot thickens, and we move on to the next question:

 

Can we detect specification?

 

Once again, are there features that have to be what they are in order for the branches to perform a function?

 

So, for example, does it appear as though the branches were put assembled into some sort of shelter?

 

If the answer is yes, bingo, we’ve just detected evidence of design.

 

In his 2004 book titled, The Design Revolution: Asking the Toughest Questions About Intelligent Design, author William Dembski, who holds two Ph.D.s, one in Mathematics, and the other in Philosophy, writes:

 

“Intelligence leaves behind a characteristic trademark or signature— what I call specified complexity. An event exhibits specified complexity if it is contingent and therefore not necessary; if it is complex and therefore not readily repeatable by chance; and if it is specified in the sense of exhibiting an independently given pattern. Note that a merely improbable event is not sufficient to eliminate chance: flip a coin long enough and you'll witness a highly complex or improbable event. Even so, you'll have no reason not to attribute it to chance.”

 

Next, Dembski points out an important caveat by reminding us that, “The important thing about specifications is that they be objectively given and not just imposed on events after the fact. For instance, if an archer fires arrows into a wall and then we paint bull's-eyes around them, we impose a pattern after the fact. On the other hand, if the targets are set up in advance ('specified') and then the archer hits them accurately, we know it was by design.”

 

So: rare and complex, plus specification equals design, equals evidence of intelligence.

 

Consequently, specification typically implies some sort of connection to an independently derived pattern, such as written instructions to complement a set of construction documents, a software program in (once again) CAD/CAM, or the 4-letter digital code in DNA, which ultimately directs the assembly of the protein chains out of a 20-letter amino- acid alphabet.

 

Now, with everything I know about Computer-Aided Design and Computer-Aided Manufacturing, which is probably good enough for government work, namely, the ramifications of misplacing one letter in my code, and with everything I know about writing and applying specifications, if I don’t come to the conclusion that demonstrably specified complexity in protein manufacturing indicates that the threshold to accept Intelligent Design as a serious research area has been met, then I most certainly have an a priori commitment to materialism. That being the case, then evolution, which I view as the result of necessity and chance, has to be blind and undirected because the alternative would certainly vex my a-priori, philosophical stance. Incidentally, remember my telling you in episode 5 about Richard C. Lewontin, and his 1997 The New York Review of Books manifesto, in which he famously wrote: “We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism”?

 

Well, would it surprise you to learn that the crack he made about, “unsubstantiated just-so stories” harkens back to when he accused neo-Darwinists of telling just-so stories when trying to show how natural selection explained such novelties as long-necked giraffes, according to the April 8, 1985, Newsweek article, "Science Contra Darwin," by evolutionist Sharon Begley?

 

 

 

THE CLASH OF THE ISMS

 

The year 2009 marked the Bicentennial of Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his “On the Origin of Species.” And so, to mark the year-long celebration planned by Darwinists worldwide, German paleontologist Dr. Günter Bechly, one of the curators of the Stuttgart State Museum of Natural History, would spearhead the creation of one of the largest Darwin celebrations in Germany—if not the largest. And so he would design an exhibition that not only would celebrate and honor Darwin’s theory, but would make it clear to the public that there is no debating Darwin. Because, you know… science!

 

One display Günter Bechly put together featured a balance scale, where in one pan he had stacked all the books against evolution written by “creationists and intelligent design proponents,” and in the other pan—that is, the other side of the scale— he deferentially showcased Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, which tipped the scale in favor of Neo-Darwinism.

 

And if that were not enough, and in order to send a clear message where the Museum stood on Intelligent Design, which he refuted, Bechly decided to include a display about the bacterial flagellum, the poster child of Darwinian Evolution’s power to self-assemble complex, biological structures out of a whole bunch of molecules that, not only must carry out their unintended function—because, remember, intention implies a mind at work—they must be able to bond with others in order to form a sophisticated, extremely tiny rotary engine featuring numerous components—such as a rotor and stator—which are attached to certain bacteria and function as a propeller, just like an outboard motor.

 

In so doing, Bechly meant to deride the notion of irreducible complexity, which Dr. Michael Behe had coined and made a case for in his aforementioned 1996 book, Darwin’s Black Box, and which basically says that each one of the flagellum’s parts had be operational before the assembly can properly function as, once again, a propeller. In other words, possessing only one part of the flagellum, setting it aside until the other parts are made available through natural selection acting on random mutation is not a plausible hypothesis. Why? Because, for one, for that to happen, blind, mindless nature will have to preserve the incomplete, severely compromised “prototype,” and set it aside until the rest of the parts— somehow—after beating unimaginable odds, bump into one another other and successfully self-assemble in order to be—somehow—added to finally form a whole… except that blind, mindless nature does not know what it is aiming for in the first place.

 

And to quickly illustrate how implausible the foregone conclusion that chemistry can self-assemble into living biology is (and incidentally, scientists are still not dead set on what constitutes life) please consider that, to-date, and outside of tinkering—masterfully might I add—with what nature has given us, that is DNA and genes, we have not been able to create one biological cell from scratch, nor see any part of it assemble randomly using the most advanced modern labs operating under the strictest of sanitary conditions to avoid contamination, let alone hope to ever see one fire up spontaneously under the kind of inhospitable conditions that early life on Earth is believed to have been subject to.

 

And as stated in episode 6 when I talked about the Miller-Urey experiment, there’s even a debate where that’s concerned.

 

In any case, Dr. Bechly, in an ironic twist of fate, would eventually make—as he put it—“one big mistake”; he would read the books he had prejudicially dismissed, which included Michael Behe’s book, Darwin’s Black Black Box. Consequently, and to his surprise, he would find that the arguments in those books were a far cry from what he had heard from colleagues—or when watching YouTube videos—and that they had merit.

 

And so, Dr. Bechly would soon realize that the proposed neo-Darwinian explanation for the origin of the flagellum couldn’t’ve worked. In other words, the suggestion that Natural Selection could have gradually built a flagellum by co-opting parts from other systems didn’t make sense.

 

Now, I’d like to point out that the operative word here is “gradually.”

 

Such a common, unassuming word, like… baloney.

 

And yet, gradualism, which is the hypothesis that evolution proceeds chiefly by the accumulation of gradual changes (in contrast to punctuationism, which calls for punctuated equilibrium, which is coming up a little later) is the foundation upon which the two principal pillars of Darwinism rest. That is why I believe this calls for another one of my legendary detours for the sake of providing the broader context, after which we’ll pick up the conversation about Dr. Bechly where we left off.

 

Now, as I said, there are are two principal pillars in Darwinism:

 

The first one being our old friend, Natural Selection Acting on Random Variation or Mutation, which pertains to the mechanism of Darwinism through which all living forms emerged as a result of necessity—representing the fundamental physical laws of nature—interacting with contingency—which involves probability distributions. Since we’ve already covered that one at length, we’ll move on to the next pillar, which ultimately pertains to the study of evolutionary relationships among biological entities.

 

 

 

BEHIND THE CURTAIN OF UNIVERSAL COMMON DESCENT

 

Darwin’s On the Origin of Species featured only one illustration showing a branching pattern  resulting from a process of descent with modification. And so in Darwin’s tree of life, Universal Common Descent asserts that all forms of life ultimately and necessarily descended from one single ancestor, a long, long time ago.

 

And even though ancestor-descendant relationships cannot be empirically recovered from fossils, the modern biological literature is replete with evolutionary trees—called phylogenetic trees—that purport such relationships.

 

Incidentally, Phylogenetics is the study of evolutionary relationships among biological entities. More on the nomenclature later.

 

No, thank you!

 

In the meantime, these textbooks tell stories of how earlier organisms evolved into later ones, without any guidance. There are even lesson plans and classroom activities developed by science education groups, such as the one developed by John Baker and Dr. Judith Philip in 2013, and which was published in issue 27 of Science in School.org, titled "Phylogenetics of man-made objects: simulating evolution in the classroom,"  in which students attempt to construct phylogenetic trees using a wide range of man-made objects such as hairpins, staples, split rivets, hooks and bolts, to name a few, to create “artificial phylogeny based on morphology.”

 

The first guiding principle is: “Organisms that resemble each other in many ways are probably more closely related than are organisms that resemble each other only slightly. That is, the greater the similarity in structure (the more features in common), the closer the probable relationship between two forms.”

 

The authors explain that their activities provides a “more hand-on introduction to evolutionary studies, in which the students gather all the necessary data themselves before considering the underlying principles.” That is, DNA and protein studies that can be used to “produce a family tree by looking at the differences between homologous sequences: sequences that are thought to have evolved from a common ancestor.”

 

Alright, now the bad news:

 

According to Dr. Jonathan Wells, a post doctoral biologist who holds 2 Ph.D.s, one from Yale University and the other from University of California at Berkeley, and author of Icons of Evolution and Zombie Science: “Obviously, nothing about these forms requires or implies common ancestry. And in fact, we all know that the metal fasteners, pasta, and cookies were products of intelligent design. So what we have is merely an exercise in choosing what features to compare and deciding on degrees of relationship. But ‘relationship’ is ambiguous. In one sense it can refer to genealogy, as in ‘Charles Darwin was more closely related to Erasmus Darwin (his grandfather) than either was to Geronimo.’ In another sense it can refer to similarity, as in ‘iron is more closely related to aluminum than either is to a daffodil.’ ”

 

Dr. Wells explains that in the case of fossil species, relationships are unknowable in the genealogical sense, so phylogenetic trees are constructed using relationships based on similarities, which is all well and good except that “many evolutionists then equivocate, suggesting that they have demonstrated relationships in the genealogical sense.”

 

However, if we look behind the curtain, we encounter a different narrative. For example, in BioScience Volume 64, Issue 8, publication date August 2014 British biologist Ronald A. Jenner expresses something that clearly challenges the status quo in his paper titled “Macroevolution of animal body plans: Is there science after the tree?”

 

Before I share with you what he wrote in his abstract, let’s have a Linnaean taxonomy refresher from part 8, Romancing the Absurd, which I will supplement with terminology and information relevant to this discussion.

 

First, taxonomy, whose root word is taxon, plural taxa, is defined by Merriam-Webster as: the “orderly classification of plants and animals according to their presumed natural relationships.”

 

Next, humans, same as fruit flies, belong to the animal Kingdom. Therefore, the Kingdom is the highest level of the hierarchy. One step below is the Phylum, plural Phyla, and in the case of us Humans, we belong in the Chordate phylum. Then, one step lower we have the Mammal Class, then the primates Order, then the Hominids Family, then the Homo Genus, plural Genera, and finally, the Sapiens Species.

 

Also, in the last episode, I indicated that we are still debating over the concept of species according to geneticist, evolutionary biologist, and author Jody Hey.

 

Now, there’s also Cladistics, which is a system of biological taxonomy that defines taxa uniquely by shared characteristics not found in ancestral groups and uses inferred evolutionary relationships to arrange taxa in a branching hierarchy such that all members of a given taxon have the same ancestors.

 

In other words, “Darwin’s tree of life or bust!”

 

Anyway, the reason I’m bringing this up is because cladistics refers to something called “crown groups.” A crown group is a living monophyletic group, or clade, which Merriam-Webster defines as: “a group of biological taxa (such as species) that includes all descendants of one common ancestor.”

 

Now, with that out of the way, and I thank you for indulging me, I’ll share with you what what Ronald Jenner, Research Leader in the Department of Life Sciences at the London Natural History Museum, wrote:

 

“A renewed emphasis on the gaps in organization that exist between the crown-group body plans of higher-level animal taxa is a hallmark of the emerging consensus in metazoan phylogenetics.”

 

Incidentally, and as a side note: a Metazoan is any animal of the Metazoa group (singular Metazoon) that is multicellular, whose body is composed of cells differentiated into tissues and organs and usually a digestive cavity lined with specialized cells. They are believed to have evolved from the Protists—that is the Protozoa, which are unicellular—approximately 700 million years ago.

 

Ok, now you know, and back to our abstract where Jenner goes on to say:

 

“Bridging these gaps is the greatest hurdle that stands in the way of translating our knowledge of phylogeny into a renewed understanding of the macroevolution of animal body plans. Unless a good fossil record is available, there is little hope that we will be able to bridge many of these gaps empirically. We have, therefore, little choice but to resort to our more-or-less informed imagination to produce the historical narratives that are the ultimate goal of our studies of animal evolution. Only by fully engaging with the challenges of devising testable scenarios will we be able to tell where along the spectrum of science and fiction our understanding of animal body plan evolution will finally come to rest.”

 

Now, while we’re on the topic of the tree of life, it is worthwhile to note what some experts have said about it.

 

For example, at one point during the February 12, 2011 science forum held at Arizona Sate University’s Grammage Auditorium, titled, “The Great Debate — What is Life?” which was videotaped and is available on YouTube, the panel addressed the titular question, of “How do you define life?”

 

Roger Bingham of the Science Network addressing NASA scientist, Chris McKay, says: “Chris, the question I asked you before, why don’t you have to define it if you’re going to some other planet to look for it, how do you know what you’re looking for?”

 

Chris McKay: “I don’t think we need to define it in order to be able to find it. I think, as Lee said, we can recognize it by the molecules it leaves behind. We don’t need a definition, and I don’t think a definition will be forthcoming. And you might take the view, that we’ll only get a good definition when we have more than one example on which to study. So I think the whole debate about the definition is a mistake. Let’s just go out and look for it.”

 

Following that, Lawrence Krauss addresses American biotechnologist, biochemist, geneticist, and businessman, Craig Venter. Known for leading one of the first draft sequences of the human genome, and assembling the first team to transfect a cell with a synthetic chromosome, Venter would make Time magazine's 2007 and 2008 Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world, thus making him the go-to guy if you have a question about genomics!

 

And so Krauss asks Venter if the minimal configuration to make life was known.

 

Venter: “You mean the minimal gene set?”

 

Krauss: “The minimal gene set."

 

Venter: “We’re whittling down on it. But there won’t be a minimal gene set; there will be multiple ones because I’m not so sanguine as some of my colleagues here, that there’s only one life form on this planet. We have a lot of different types of metabolism, different organisms. I wouldn’t call you the same life form as the one we have that lives in pH 12 base that would dissolve your skin if we dropped you in it.”

 

Paul Davies, a theoretical physicist, cosmologist, astrobiologist, and best-selling author says:

 

 “Well, I’ve got the same genetic code, we’ll have a common ancestor.”

 

Craig Venter quickly responds: “Well, you don’t have the same genetic code. In fact, the Mycoplasmas use a different code that would not work in your cells. There are a lot of variations on the theme.”

 

Davies: But you’re not saying it [Mycoplasma] belongs to a different tree from me, are you?

 

Venter: “Well, I think the tree of life is an artifact of some early scientific studies that aren’t really holding up. So, the tree…… It may be a bush of life. So there isn’t a tree of life. In fact, from our deep sequencing of organisms in the ocean, out of, now we have 60 million different unique gene sets, we found 12 that look like a very, very deep branching, perhaps a fourth domain of life that obviously is extremely rare, that it only shows up out of those few sequences. But it’s still DNA-based.”

 

That’s when a bemused Richard Dawkins, who was clearly jostled by the bombshell Craig Venter had just dropped, says, “I am intrigued at Craig saying that the tree of life is a fiction. I mean, the DNA code of all the creatures that have ever been looked at is all but identical…  um… Surely, that means that they’re related, doesn’t it?"

(The Audience lets out a nervous laugh; Craig Venter laughs along, but he does not reply.)

 

Now, let me share with you what Dr. Eugene Koonin, who heads NIH’s Evolutionary Genomics Research Group had written in a 2010 Nature Education article titled, “The Two Empires and Three Domains of Life in the Postgenomic Age”:

 

“How do scientists study and classify life-forms? How can we understand the complex evolutionary connections between living organisms? Comparative genomics, which involves analysis of the nucleotide sequences of genomes, shows that the known life-forms comprise two major divisions: the cellular and the viral empires."

 

Therefore, and if you have your Linnaean taxonomy list handy, you might want to add to it that, way above the level of Kingdom, we have the “Two Empires;” the cellular and viral.

 

Now, the cellular empire where we belong, consists of three domains. And before I continue, remember what I just said a minute ago: that there might be a forth domain, according to Craig Venter. However—and until further, official notice—we still live in a three-domain world, consisting of Bacteria, Archaea, and Eukarya.

 

First, eukarya, unlike bacteria and archaea, have a nucleus. In fact, you might hear biologists refer to eukaryotes and prokaryotes. Eukaryotes have nuclei, prokaryotes don’t.

 

Next, and we’re still parsing the cellular domains:

 

Bacteria live in soil, water, organic matter, plants, and animals. They can beneficial, parasitic, or downright pathogenic, which is why it’s a saving grace that we have penicillin!

 

Now, Archaea, which—like bacteria are prokaryotic microorganisms—can be found, among others, in our digestive tract… and therefore produce methane, and they can also be found in harsh environments.

 

Lastly, we have the Eukarya: organisms whose cells have nuclei enclosures.

 

The other empire comprises the viruses, which are submicroscopic, infectious agents that replicate inside our living cells.

 

Now, back to Dr. Koonin’s article, he writes:

 

“What are the evolutionary relationships between the two empires and the three domains? Comparative genomics sheds light on this key question by showing that the previous conception of the Tree of Life should be replaced by a complex network of treelike and netlike routes of evolution to depict the history of life. Even under this new perspective on evolution, the two empires and the three cellular domains remain distinct.”

 

In his paragraph titled, “Networks of Genome Evolution Replace the Tree of Life,” Koonin writes that: “Evolutionary biologists used the sequences of multiple genomes of diverse life-forms to construct and compare thousands of phylogenetic trees for individual genes.”

 

Then we learn that, when comparing these phylogenetic trees, they unexpectedly discovered that “genes generally have distinct evolutionary histories, and the trees built for different genes show different branching orders (topologies).”

 

 And apparently, the diversity of gene tree topologies is “particularly pronounced among prokaryotes.”

 

And so, Dr. Koonin writes, “This crucial finding indicates that genome evolution in prokaryotes is not a treelike process but is best represented by a complex network that combines treelike fragments corresponding to coherent evolution of multiple genes with numerous horizontal connections.”

 

Again, and to paraphrase Dr. Craig Venter: there is not a tree of life, but rather a bush! And from the sound of it, bushes of life; plenty of them, as a matter of fact! I mean, it’s hard enough to get one original life form to spawn a supposed tree of life. Can you imagine how long we’d have to wait for many first lives to come to the scene, and blossom into all these “bushes” of life, through what Dr. David Berlinski describes as a random search or a stochastic shuffle?

 

Anyway, and in his summary paragraph, Dr. Koonin writes, “Despite all the recent advances of evolutionary genomics, we still have to answer the most fundamental questions: How did cells evolve in the first place, what caused the fundamental differences between the two prokaryotic domains (Archaea and Bacteria), and what triggered the emergence of the complex organization of the eukaryotic cell?”

 

 

 

SO, COMMON ANCESTOR OR COMMON DESIGNER? WELCOME TO HOMOLOGY!

 

Species that look pretty different on the outside because—as the official story goes—they are adapted, through natural selection acting on random mutation, to function in different environments, and happen to share a unique physical feature, such as a complex bone structure or a body plan, may have all inherited this feature from a common ancestor.

 

And so, physical features shared due to (alleged) evolutionary history are said to be homologous. For example, take the forelimbs of humans, whales, birds, and dogs. Though decidedly different on the outside, if we look at their respective bone structure, we find similarity across these species, which suggests that it would’ve been unlikely for such similar structures to have evolved independently in humans, whales, birds, and dogs; thus, without the accidental benefit of a common ancestor.

 

Now, notice I said Common Ancestor, and not Universal Common Ancestor, that is, that original life form whence all life forms evolved.

 

Therefore, some physical similarities are not homologous, but analogous: that is, they evolved independently in different organisms. For example, The wings of a butterfly and the wings of a bird are analogous but not homologous, in the same way vehicle controls and horse bridles are analogous but not homologous. The same as, I suppose, a modern car’s braking system and Fred Flintstone’s feet.

 

Anyway, Merriam-Webster’s dictionary defines Homology as a: “correspondence or similarity in form or function between parts (such as the wing of a bat and the human arm) of different species resulting from modification of a trait possessed by a common ancestor.”

 

Therefore, Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, just in case you missed the circular nature of the definition, is affirming that similarities in species constitute evidence for the Darwinian Theory of Evolution. Now, you’re probably wondering, “Well, if it’s not a common ancestor, what else could it be?” Excellent question! How about a common…designer? But of course, that is not permitted! And so Merriam-Webster’s dictionary clearly favors Darwin’s idea of descent with modification by attributing the “correspondence or similarity” between the “wing of a bat and the human arm,” to the Darwinian Mechanism of Evolution.

 

But what kind of developmental mechanism fuels homology?

 

According to Dr. Jonathan Wells, one hypothesis says that the mechanism is genetic; that is, structures are homologous because they are specified by similar genes.

 

Sounds perfectly logical! However, the evidence does not support this hypothesis; and according to Wells, biologists have known it for decades. He says, “Apparently, the more molecules that have been studied, the more inconsistencies have turned up in the tree of life. So, the molecules don’t fit each other; in many cases, they don’t fit the anatomies. You get different trees depending on what you look at.”

 

 

 

PRESENTING: ORFan GENES!

 

(Incidentally, ORFan is spelled, uppercase O, R, F, then lower case an. Once again, scientists and their knack for branding!)

 

Anyway, and to paraphrase Dr. Stephen Meyer, some genes and the information-rich sequences they contain cannot be explained regardless of the  scenarios that attempt to explain the origin of two similar genes by reference to descent with modification (via mutation) from common ancestral genes.

 

In his book, Darwin’s Doubt, The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design, published in 2014, Dr. Meyer writes: “Yet genomic studies are now turning up hundreds of thousands of genes in many diverse organisms that exhibit no significant similarity in sequence to any other known gene. These “taxonomically restricted genes” or “ORFans” (for “open reading frames of unknown origin”) now dot the phylogenetic landscape. ORFans have turned up in every major group of organisms, including plants and animals as well as both eukaryotic and prokaryotic one-celled organisms. In some organisms, as much as one-half of the entire genome comprises ORFan genes.”

 

In fact, in his 1971 book, Homology: An Unsolved Problem, British embryologist Gavin de Beer wrote, “Characters controlled by identical genes are not necessarily homologous” and “homologous structures need not be controlled by identical genes.”

 

Incidentally, and as a case-in-point, and as I’ve indicated in episode 7, in 1985 when UC Berkeley's Vincent Sarich, a pioneer of the field of molecular evolution analyzed blood proteins, he saw a close relationship between hippopotamuses and whales. In the meantime, while the jury is still out on this issue, homology is defined to mean similarity due to common ancestry.

 

In other words, we’re stuck with that definition!

 

For example, in his 1982 book The Growth of Biological Thought, Harvard evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr wrote, “Attributes of two organisms are homologous when they are derived from an equivalent characteristic of the common ancestor.”

 

In 1999, Berkeley evolutionary biologist David Wake wrote the following in Homoplasy, homology and the problem of “sameness” in biology: “common ancestry is all there is to homology.”

 

In his 2017 book, Zombie Science, Doctor Wells explains that: “Defining homology in terms of common ancestry, however, leads to a serious problem: Once homology is defined in terms of common ancestry it can no longer be used as evidence for common ancestry. To use it as evidence would be to reason in a circle: How do we know that feature B descended from feature A? Because B is homologous to A. How do we know that B is homologous to A? Because B descended from A.”

 

In his 2014 book titled Homology, Genes, and Evolutionary Innovation, Yale biologist Günter Wagner writes, “every biologist will agree that homology is a confused and confusing subject.”

 

In an effort to reduce the confusion, Wagner begins with the assumption that “homology is a hypothesis of descent from a common ancestor,” and he echoes de Beer’s point that homologies “cannot be explained by the identity of the set of genes that directs their development.”

 

But, given that—technically-speaking—it is not the morphological features that are passed from one generation to the next, rather the genes are, Wagner attributed homologies to (wait for it!) developmental gene regulatory networks that “underlie the evolution of developmental pathways and, thus, the evolution of morphological structures.”

 

Thus, and to paraphrase Jonathan Well, paradoxically, homology has a genetic basis after all.

 

But, sit tight, we’re not done yet!

 

As it turned out, Wagner’s starting assumption would also lead him to another paradoxical conclusion: Homology apparently no longer meant similarity.

 

As I mentioned earlier, corresponding DNA sequences can be very different in two species believed to share a recent common ancestor. In other words, if homology is defined in terms of common ancestry, then the descendant sequences are homologous even though they are dissimilar. The same thing can happen with morphological features. “The identity of a morphological character is not tied to similarity,” Wagner writes, but rather “to historical continuity of descent.”

 

 Yet without employing similarities, how can evolutionary biologists construct phylogenetic trees? And without phylogenetic trees, how can they infer continuity of descent?

 

Wagner’s book was a sincere attempt to straighten out the confusion surrounding homology. But once homology is defined in terms of common ancestry, it seems like the confusion is unavoidable.

 

So, to summarize the problem: Common Ancestry has become the universally established explanation for homology without empirical evidence or a testable, falsifiable hypothesis or theory to back it up!

 

In 1985, Philosopher of biology Ronald Brady wrote the following: “By making our explanation [common ancestry] into the definition of the condition to be explained [homology], we express not scientific hypothesis but belief. We are so convinced that our explanation is true that we no longer see any need to distinguish it from the situation we were trying to explain. Dogmatic endeavors of this kind must eventually leave the realm of science.”

 

And so, as it stands, we have not yet settled the matter of whether homology is due to a common “architect,” one who had specific designs in mind, hence archetypes; or natural selection acting on random mutation, starting from a common progenitor; therefore, strictly involving descent with modification. And please note that, so far, and aside from the likes of Carl Sagan championing Crick and Orgel’s Directed Panspermia, Darwinists are unclear about the arrival of the first life on Earth; well, maybe except for one unlikely group of scientists.

 

 

STRANGE BEDFELLOWS

 

Come to find out, there are evolutionary Biologists who do believe in a Divine Creator while being ardent apologists for the Darwinian mechanism.

 

Of course, and despite Charles Darwin having conceived his theory as a pushback of the God hypothesis that was prevalent in his day, Theistic Evolution apologists object to using the Darwinian evolution as an inference to atheism, while embracing its mechanism.

 

Parallel to that, they also object to using the book of Genesis as a scientific text. Therefore: no Adam, no Eve, and no Garden of Eden… no Noah’s Ark, and so on.

 

So, as far as they are concerned, Darwin’s theory of evolution doesn’t begin to take effect until the first ancestral cell—or first life emerging from non-living chemicals—enters the picture.

 

Consequently, and under the Theistic Evolution scenario, and where our own planet Earth is concerned, the conditions were just right—by divine mandate—for the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection acting on random mutation to begin altering the information embedded within the DNA of the first vouchsafed ancestral cell, which was left to its own devices and which contained the original DNA, thus giving rise to all the immense variety we see in the fauna and flora, including the introduction of completely new animal body forms. In a nutshell, they posit that God created the first cell, and left it to evolve according to Darwinian rules; that is, only guided by necessity and chance.

 

By contrast, Intelligent Design, which has been “excommunicated” despite its scientific, theology-free approach, makes an inference to an intelligence. Therefore, it does not start out by assuming there is a super or perfect intelligence at work, and then try to manipulate the evidence—or ignore the alternatives—in order to support the conclusion, a practice commonly known as  Confirmation Bias.

 

And, as stated before, if the argument against Intelligent Design is that it can potentially lead one to, perhaps, maybe, eventually, embrace theism, let’s not forget that Darwinism, and theistic evolution notwithstanding, is unapologetically atheistic, which wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for all the bad science upon which it is founded, and strapped with! I can’t stress that enough. As I implied in Part 3, the Dynamics of Life, it is a person’s God-given right to be an atheist and believe,  as scientific atheists do, that there is no mind or spirit, and that it’s all an illusion courtesy of our brains. But it would be a shame if such a belief should be based on, again, pseudoscience!

 

So, to recap, Theistic Evolution welcomes Darwinian evolution as a scientific theory with open arms, and sees no reason why God could not implemented a natural evolutionary process, which ultimately led to the forming of the human species.

 

Again… not by design, because that would invalidate the Darwinian argument!

 

Now, you’re probably going: “Wait, what? How does that even work?”

 

Well, let’s find out!

 

In his 2006 book, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief,  Dr. Francis S. Collins, whom I spoke about in episode 5, and who led the Human Genome Project, lays out the following 6 premises of theistic evolution:

 

“1) The universe came into being out of nothingness, approximately 14 billion years ago.

2) Despite massive improbabilities, the properties of the universe appear to have been precisely tuned for life.

3) While the precise mechanism of the origin of life on earth remains unknown, once life arose, the process of evolution and natural selection permitted the development of biological diversity and complexity over very long periods of time.

4) Once evolution was underway, no special supernatural intervention was required.

5) Humans are part of this process, sharing a common ancestor with the great apes.

6) But humans are also unique in ways that defy evolutionary explanation and point to our spiritual nature. This includes the existence of the Moral Law (The knowledge of right and wrong) and the search for God that characterizes all human cultures throughout history.”

 

Therefore, according to the foregoing exposition which attempts to dovetail theology with materialism:

 

God, the prime mover (that is, the first, uncaused cause) created a universe in which the constants of nature had been fine-tuned as a lead-in to introducing the first instance of life that would—courtesy of necessity and chance—undergo a slow, gradual, progressive, adaptive, and never-ending evolutionary radiation that is devoid of gaps, jumps, and leaps.

 

Alright, firstly and spoiler alert: there are gaps, jumps, and leaps; But more on that later.

 

Secondly, let’s put Theistic Evolution through its paces, shall we?

 

During an episode of The Big Conversation, season 4, episode 1, which is available on YouTube, Richard Dawkins, who demonstrably holds Francis Collins in high esteem, says to the latter that if he, Dawkins, were God and wanted to create life—even human life—he would not use such a wasteful, long, drawn-out process; that is, evolution. Instead, he would just go for it.

 

Dawkins, then adds, “I mean, why would you choose Natural Selection, which has the possibly unfortunate property that it could have come about without you?” In other words, and to paraphrase Dawkins, why would God choose the very mechanism that actually makes him superfluous? (Of course, Dawkins believes —firmly—that the Darwinian mechanism has creative power, which I contend it doesn’t; but, let’s not belabor the point… well, not just yet anyway.)

 

As an interesting digression, Dawkins remarks that if this were a matter of God being an experimenter, who, at one point, wondered what would happen if he set up a “primeval, self-replicating molecule, and then leave it to see what happens,” therefore we would be talking about “an interesting experiment,” then, he would sympathize with the notion of “God the experimenter.”

 

But then Dawkins gets back on track and reiterates that if God wanted to make complex life, he wouldn’t choose such an astonishingly, “wasteful, profligate, cruel actually, way.”

 

In response, Collins remarks that Dawkins’s questions are appropriate and that he had wrestled with some of them himself, and proceeds to advance further arguments in the hope of persuading Dawkins, who, despite his respect and affinity for Collins remains unconvinced, digging his heels in, and (calmly, mind you) asserting that, if one clearly understands that “the evolutionary process starts with simplicity and builds up to complexity, and elegance, and beauty, and strong illusion of Design… then, to smuggle Design in again, at the beginning, is to betray the entire enterprise which you’ve spent so long working out and building up.”

 

And once again, Dawkins reiterates that the Darwinian explanation does away with the need for a designer. He says, “We now understand we don’t need a designer to explain complexity; it really can come about … that’s really a beautiful idea… the idea that  complexity and the illusion of design can happen according to the unguided laws of physics.”

 

In response, Collins, who by now looks and sounds like he’s clearly formed a mutual admiration society with Dawkins—whose favorite pastime is disparaging theists—agrees that complexity can come about on it own. (By the way, when we say “complexity,” we’re really talking about “specified complexity.”)

 

Anyway, and back to Collins, he poses the gazillion dollar question: where did the laws of physics come from?

 

To that, a now-ebullient Dawkins says, “Let’s get to that. I think that’s very profound.” Then he adds if somebody were to convince him that God is needed, it would be there, and not in his own field of biology. And from there the conversation turned to a discussion about the fine-tuning of the physical constants of nature, such as the speed of light, the gravitational constant, and the strong and the weak nuclear forces and so on, with Dawkins confirming that most physicists agree that if we had changed any of those constants by the slightest amount, the universe wouldn’t have come into existence.

 

Well… not this universe, anyway.

 

And so Collins and Dawkins broached the topic of the multiverse scenario, which as discussed before, and at least in the minds of many, including those who are on the fence about it, explains away the need for a fine-tuner… even though, really, the multiverse requires prior fine-tuning; but I digress.

 

Alright! Now, my two cents:

 

First, putting the Daheshist perspective aside, which says that everything we experience is the result of our thoughts and actions in this life cycle as well as all the others in which we were, and most likely still are involved in, courtesy of our spiritual fluids, which are interdimensional: how exactly is Theistic Evolution better than Darwinian Evolution, or Intelligent Design, for that matter? And in the case of Intelligent Design, we’re merely talking about an inference to a designer. Whereas, Theistic Evolution, which is purportedly a “scientific” model, starts off from the standpoint that God is not a fiction, and then evolves, or should I say devolves into a mechanism that is intrinsically materialistic, one that rejects intelligent design on the grounds that there can be no supernatural intervention whatsoever, because of course, that would be pseudoscience; and who, in they right might would want that?

 

Never mind, of course, that Theistic Evolution asserts that God only got involved at the very beginning, then enacted a strict, hands-off policy. And, to top it all off, Theistic Evolution rejects Intelligent Design on philosophical grounds because for any devout theist, the idea of a Divine Creator being downgraded to the role of a mere “designer,” one who may not be particularly “perfect” (perhaps even incompetent), is blasphemous.

 

Mind you, I’m not saying it wouldn’t be. Only that the alternative offered by Theistic Evolution is not particularly better!

 

Look, I get the so-called scientific argument. Take for example this business of the successive character of the fossil record, to paraphrase Kenneth Miller who also espouses theistic evolution and posits that Darwinian evolution offered a perfect explanation for natural history, in which new forms appear while others go extinct. At face value, the argument against an intelligent designer seems pretty much cut-and-dried and straightforward: if the designer were so smart, how come we’ve got all these episodes of great dying?

 

Of course, Miller was either beating the straw man, or he genuinely missed the point of the Intelligent Design argument, which is: “It looks as though there’s an intelligence at work.” That’s it! No one’s saying that the designer in Intelligent Design—incidentally a term that refutes Richard Dawkins’s Apparent Design moniker—is a genius.

 

So, if you’re going to attack Intelligent Design on philosophical grounds masquerading as science—hence, you’re trying your hand at the art of sleight of hand—could you at least try to not undermine your case; potentially giving the field of philosophy of science a bad name; oh, and insulting our intelligence?

 

OK… granted, God—who can only be omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent, as, incidentally, Daheshists believe—could not possibly have had anything to do with all these successive extinctions because, again, that would imply that God is not perfect.

 

But in Daheshism, as discussed in prior episodes, every thing that exists is responsible for its predicament, and Reincarnation is God’s greatest gift to us fallen angels as it were. Why? Because it allows us to purify and exalt our spiritual fluids, with the ultimate goal to become one with God. And that is how we are made in “the image of God.” And it’s not that God looks like us, or vice versa. Again, in Daheshism, God Almighty is not an anthropomorphic entity. Sure, if it helps, feel free to think of God as the whole of existence; of the universe… all of it!

 

Anyway, in Daheshism, the term “the image of God” pertains to our Spiritual Fluids, which are the fundamental building blocks of the material, interconnected, interwoven multidimensional universe that is ultimately emanating from God.

 

And it’s all well and good to claim that God created the universe, the physical laws, and the first biological cell (I gather), then left it to compete and suffer…practically.

 

I mean, under the Theistic Evolution model, God might as well have said, “Good luck, and … Oh, a couple of things: some of you might be born rich, others poor; some healthy, others riddled with physical ailments. And, please don’t take it personally; it’s just the luck of the draw, especially if it always feel as though there is no justice in the world, and that bad, horrible even, things keep happening to good people. Just make sure you follow the Moral Law I put in place, and which those who will abuse you will not follow, and which will probably not help you, thoughts and prayers notwithstanding.”

 

Really?

 

The way I see it, the god of Theistic Evolution is a self-centered math and science geek whose only concern is his precious experiments!

 

In fact, in his discussion with Dawkins, Francis Collins said that what he really appreciates about the Theistic evolution model is: “it says God is really interested in order. God is not so excited about the idea of  snap the fingers, and here we all are.”

 

According to Collins, “God wanted a universe that was going to follow those elegant mathematical laws,” which, according to him, is “one of those signposts of an intelligence behind the universe.”

 

OK, first, does Collins have a direct line to God? How does he know what God wanted, which flies in the face of what had been written in the Book of Genesis? On that front, please make sure you listen to Episode 5, “A Question of Meaning,” in which I discuss the Daheshist version of Genesis.

 

Anyway…

 

Second, and to loosely echo the sentiment Doctor Dahesh had expressed to me, which I relayed in episode 3, “The Dynamics of Life,” did Collins have the Almighty over for tea?

 

That aside, what are we… chopped liver?

 

Basically, the god of theistic evolution does not lift one finger to help humanity, nor is compelled to do so—if I understood Francis Collins’s 6 aforementioned premises. So… on the one hand, a God who doesn’t help, who lets bad things happen to good people, and on the other, a designer who’s perhaps trying to help, but is unable; or just doesn’t feel like it… those creative types, boy let me tell you! And, for extra credit, throw in a God that is perhaps malevolent, and set all this up just to see us suffer, and ta-da! you have the aforementioned logical argument from evil that the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus put forward well over 2,000 years ago!

 

Plus, and please don’t adjust your sets,  I actually agree with Dawkins who once again reiterates that Collins’s argument is weak, being that the whole idea of “smuggling design in again, at the beginning, is to betray the entire enterprise.”

 

Again, while I don’t agree with Dawkins’s assertions pertaining to the blind, undirected aspect of the Darwinian evolution mechanism, nevertheless, I do think his argument has an internal consistency. I mean, and save for the origin of the first living and self-replicating cell, if I were compelled to show we do not need to invoke a divine power, or intelligence, to account for the development of all the different forms of life that descended from that first self-replicating initial progenitor, the Darwinian mechanism would be ideal, though highly improbable given that (once again, and as discussed in episode 6) the process requires an unlimited, read infinite, amount of time despite what we’re told; and a bottomless supply of raw materials to go with it.

 

To my mind, theistic evolution does not address the argument from evil. And, once again I have to agree with Richard Dawkins… Oh, would you stop pinching yourself, already? Yeah, leave it to Theistic Evolution to get me to agree with Richard Dawkins!

 

Anyway, it’s illogical, superfluous, and expendable.

 

But what am I getting all work up about?

 

Come on! It’s not as though the Pope has endorsed Theistic Evolution... has he?

 

 

 

YEAH, WELL… IS THE POPE  CATHOLIC?

 

On Tuesday, September 16, 2008, and according to Reuters Vatican Reporter Philip Pullella, the-then Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi, the Vatican’s culture minister, announced that the Theory of Evolution was compatible with the Bible, but that the Vatican planned no posthumous apology to Charles Darwin for the cold reception it gave him 150 years ago. And in a speech given in Paris a week prior, he spoke out against biblical literalism.

 

Historically, Christian churches were hostile to Darwin because his theory conflicted with the literal biblical account of creation. But eventually, in 1950, Pope Pius XII would describe evolution as a valid scientific approach to the development of humans, and Pope John Paul would later reiterate that in 1996.

 

Incidentally and as a reminder, in episode 6 I laid out the differences between belief in Creation and Creationism: Creationism being the belief in the literal account of creation as told in the book of Genesis—which, again, I had covered in episode 5.

 

And I might as well reiterate that—thanks to prominent neo-Darwinists—Intelligent Design is unfairly conflated with Creationism. But as the adage, many attribute to Winston Churchill, goes: “History is Written by the Victors.”

 

Not imply the battle is over. But, truth be told, the Darwinian lobby is very powerful.

 

So, a word to the wise:

 

Mention Intelligent Design once in your classroom, and chances are you’ll be blacklisted, and you’ll never teach biology again regardless of how credentialed you are. More than likely, you’d be committing professional suicide.

 

Now, high-profile scientists like Physicist Lawrence Krauss who, among others, titled his September 8, 2015, The New Yorker article: “All Scientists Should be Militant Atheists”; and Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, who claims that Darwin “made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist”; will have us believe that theirs is a noble cause aimed at preserving the wall of separation between Church and Sate.

 

Now, ordinarily I would have had a lump in my throat were it not for the shameless hypocrisy and double standard of subjecting students to a theory that (again according to Dawkins)inevitably leads to atheism. That, and the fact, it is, at its core, nothing more than smoke and mirrors. So, big deal, Darwin extrapolated Macroevolution from Microevolution, and challenged us to prove that he is wrong without offering a falsifiable way to prove that he is right!

 

 But is this concerted effort to scapegoat Intelligent Design really about the first amendment? Let’s see…

 

In the December 2011, 18–page paper titled, “Rejecting Darwin and Support for Science Funding,” published in Social Science Quarterly, Vol. 92, No. 5, Special Issue on Science and the New Biology, Patricia K. Freeman and David J. Houston, examined the variables relating to support for science in the United States to determine whether a rejection of Darwinian evolution is related to support for government funding of science. The authors concluded the following:

 

“Beliefs regarding human evolution have a unique effect on attitudes regarding government support for scientific research that do not merely channel religion and/or politics. Debate today over evolutionary theory revolves around what constitutes good science. Those who reject Darwinian evolution may do so because of the messages critical of scientists and the scientific method. A possible consequence of this controversy is lower support for science.”

 

Alright, so one can definitely see how quelling Intelligent Design is driven by sheer altruism, read money!

 

Anyway, it’s official, The Catholic Church now teaches “theistic evolution,” while (and to the delight of Darwinists) Intelligent Design is persona non grata.

 

After all, they would have us believe that the Designer in the Intelligent Design Theory is at best incompetent. To them, no Intelligent Designer worth their salt would — for example — design an organ such as the vertebrate eye, which (aside from the fact it is the only part of the central nervous system visible through an ophthalmoscope), is arguably a piece of inexplicable insanity that is often used by evolutionary biologists, such as Richard Dawkins, to argue for the evidence of a blind trial-and-error evolutionary process.

 

Therefore, within the human eye, this blind trial-and-error evolutionary process has purportedly left vestiges of what can only be described as design mistakes; that or the “designer” was not so intelligent after all because any decent engineer designing an apparatus similar to our eyes would, right off the bat, naturally assume that the photocells would have to point toward the light.

 

In fact, you wouldn’t be able to give away a camera designed in such a fashion that the photographic film or electronic detectors pointed away from the lens!

 

And particularly in the case of digital cameras, who in their right mind would purposely point the photocells away from the light, and with their wires departing on the side facing the light, thus making it even harder for the photons to be able to reach their target!

 

Yet, this is exactly the case in all vertebrate retinas: each photocell is—for lack of a better description—wired backwards, with its wires sticking out on the side facing the light.

 

Talk about putting the cart before the horse!

 

And for all intents and purposes, this clunky set up was widely believed to be “poor design,” given that the wiring has to travel over the surface of the retina before exiting through the hole we call the blind spot, and hook up with the optic nerve.

 

Fair enough, and so to summarize the problem at hand: light, which is made up of photons, does not have unhindered access to the photocells. Instead, it has to pass through a tightly packed forest of connecting wires, suffering information loss in the process. And so, the way the eye is set up should offend any good designer, and so this supposedly bad design is probably a leftover from evolution, or the designer does sloppy work.

 

Except that, and as Behe writes in his 2019 book, Darwin Devolves: “Recent experimental work shows that the whole negative argument is misbegotten—the supposed flaw is actually a clever feature.”

 

Huh… Is it, now?

 

THE EYES HAVE IT

 

On May 1, 2007, The Register published an article by Lucy Sherriff called “Living Optical Fibres Found in the Eye: Moving light past all those synapses,” which was based on the research entitled, “Müller cells are Living Optical Fibers in the Vertebrate Retina,” and which was published in the April 30, 2007 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

 

Sherriff writes, “It is an old question: how does light make its way through the retinal layers to finally strike the light-sensitive cells at the back of the eye?”

 

And, that’s a very valid question: a person with normal eyesight should not be able to see anything at all, or at the very least, see a horribly distorted image, given that light has to make its way through the retinal layer.

 

Well, apparently a group of researchers at the Paul Flechsig Institute of Brain Research had demonstrated that light is collected and funneled through long cells, called Müller cells, which work almost exactly like a fiber-optic plate, which is described as a “Zero-Length Window” that optical engineers can use to transmit an image without using a lens.

 

Furthermore, and while normal fiber-optic plates have simple bundles of optical fibers that collect and transmit the light, Lucie Sherriff reports that the researchers have discovered that the vertebrate eye has gone one step further and created a funnel-shaped cell that allows more light to be collected at the surface of the eye, meaning that despite the tightly packed neurons and synapses and what have you, the Müller cells can capture and transmit as much light as possible. And even more fascinating is that Andreas Reinchenbach, who worked on the research said, "Nature is so clever," though I am sure he didn’t mean to imply that Nature had a mind.

 

And so, the claim perpetuated by the Darwinists that optic nerves obstruct the light has long been falsified by laboratory research.

 

Apparently what makes Nature so “clever” as regards the vertebrate eye is concerned, is the location of the choroid — that highly vascular layer of the eye. In fact, per unit weight, the choroid is the tissue with the highest blood flow in the body.

 

But what makes the location of the choroid particularly interesting from a design point of view is that it cannot be on the side of the retina that is facing the light, on account of how opaque it is.

 

And so, it is necessarily situated between the sclera and the retinal pigment epithelium, which is exactly where a clever designer, having the benefit of the Müller cells, and considering all the parameters at play, would place it! One such parameter is that we need to get rid of excess heat. Oh, guess what? Not only does the choroid supply blood and necessary nutrients, it also acts as a cooling system by extracting excess heat.

 

But let’s say we don’t want to wait until nature almost gets it right, and we indulge in a thought experiment in which we roll up our sleeves and alter the design in such a fashion that the nerves end up snaking behind the photoreceptors, which would be now pointing directly at the light; and we ditch the Müller cells altogether. But why stop there? Let’s also dispense with the choroid and its cooling effect, because with the photoreceptors having been moved up directly facing the light, the choroid has become redundant. That, and the small matter of sandwiching it between the photoreceptors and the nerves is not an option. So, we rough it, and hope our design corrections do the trick. It’s not a perfect solution, mind you; but, at least it looks more intelligent!

 

The result?

 

With the choroid out the way, the extremely sensitive photoreceptors, (cones for daytime, rods for nighttime), are now blood-starved and would take a very long time to regenerate. You’d have to wear dark sunglasses all the time, and it might be months before you could drive again after being photographed with a flash at the DMV! Therefore, while ditching the Müller cells and placing the nerves behind the photoreceptors might seem the more logical and elegant design solution, it is  impractical—silly even. That, and the fact you still have the problem of the system overheating on account of your having removed the choroid; that is, your cooling system!

 

So, considering all the tradeoffs at play, and speaking as an Architect, I fail to see how the vertebrate eye could have been put together differently.

 

Anyway, this myth—among others—that the eye is not so intelligently designed, goes directly to why the Vatican welcomed Darwinism in 2008, while rejecting Intelligent Design three years prior, on Friday, November 18, 2005, and calling for its exclusion from science curricula. Which is odd, considering that in the homily delivered at his installation, during the Mass for the Inauguration of the Pontificate, which took place on Sunday, 24 April, 2005, so roughly seven months earlier, Pope Benedict XVI said, “We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary.”

 

Now, clearly, and I’ve said before, not all Catholics, agree with Darwinism. So, something must have happened between the 24th of April 2005 and November 18th of that same year, when, apparently, The Reverend George Coyne, the-then Jesuit director of the Vatican Observatory said that placing Intelligent Design Theory alongside Evolution in school programs is “wrong.” That it isn’t science though it pretends to be, and “If you want to teach it in schools, intelligent design should be taught when religion and cultural history is taught, not science.”

 

Furthermore, and on January 31, 2006, during his talk entitled, “Science Does Not Need God. Or Does It? A Catholic Scientist Looks at Evolution,” at Palm Beach Atlantic University in West Palm Beach, Florida, Father Coyne said, “the Intelligent Design (ID) movement, while evoking a God of power and might, a designer God, actually belittles God”

 

 

And right out of the gate, he criticized Roman Catholic Church cardinal and archbishop of Vienna Christoph Schönborn’s essay, titled, “Finding Design in Nature,” (which appeared in The New York Times, July 27, 2005 issue), in which the latter affirmed that neo-Darwinian evolution is not compatible with Catholic doctrine saying, “To my estimation, the cardinal is in error on at least five fundamental issues, among others (and by the way, I’ll only list two of the issues that Coyne raised, and which according to him are as follows): “the scientific theory of evolution, as all scientific theories, is completely neutral with respect to religious thinking; neo-Darwinian evolution is not in the words of the cardinal: ‘an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection.’ ”

 

Now, if you’ve listened to Episodes 6 and 7, you already know what I think of  Reverend Coyne’s assertions pertaining to evolution being neutral with respect to religion, and not being the product of chance!

 

That aside and for context, this is what Cardinal Schönborn wrote at the beginning of his New York Times Op-Ed:

“EVER since 1996, when Pope John Paul II said that evolution (a term he did not define) was ‘more than just a hypothesis,’ defenders of neo-Darwinian dogma have often invoked the supposed acceptance -- or at least acquiescence -- of the Roman Catholic Church when they defend their theory as somehow compatible with Christian faith.

“But this is not true. The Catholic Church, while leaving to science many details about the history of life on earth, proclaims that by the light of reason the human intellect can readily and clearly discern purpose and design in the natural world, including the world of living things.

 

“Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense -- an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection -- is not. Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science.”

 

And this is what Cardinal Schönborn ended with:

 

“Now at the beginning of the 21st century, faced with scientific claims like neo-Darwinism and the multiverse hypothesis in cosmology invented to avoid the overwhelming evidence for purpose and design found in modern science, the Catholic Church will again defend human reason by proclaiming that the immanent design evident in nature is real. Scientific theories that try to explain away the appearance of design as the result of "chance and necessity" are not scientific at all, but, as John Paul put it, an abdication of human intelligence.”

 

Now, important sidebar: as I’ve said before, in Daheshism, the Multiverse comprises causally interconnected dimensions. So, that’s an important distinction. And, consequently, the mechanism of reincarnation—that is, God’s gift to his creations— is the crucible of that causally-interconnected Multiverse, or if you will, the Multidimensional Universe.

 

In any case, and in terms of the official story, the Vatican welcomes—albeit reluctantly—the Theory of Evolution despite the fact scientific materialists use it as a weapon against theism, all the while rejecting the Theory of Intelligent Design, which all it does is challenge Darwinism by presenting valid scientific arguments, consequently exposing its shortcomings, and making a solid case for an inference to some sort of intelligence based on our everyday experience with it.

 

And, once again from theistic evolution’s perspective: why should we accept that we were left at the mercy of a blind and undirected process?

 

Because otherwise we would have to blame the Creator for all that imperfection and misery in the world. Therefore, the answer to the question, “why do bad things happen to good people,” might as well be, “It is what it is!”

 

The way I see it, the irony here is that despite its name, Theistic Evolution is actually promoting a Deistic worldview.

 

According to Encyclopedia Britannica: “The deist God is not involved in the world in the same personal way. God has made it, so to speak, or set the laws of it—and to that extent he sustains it in being. But God, as the deist sees him, allows the world to continue in its own way, subject to this final and somewhat remote control.”

 

The upshot is that in Deism there is no conflict with science because God is “in the shadows or beyond,” consequently, “The deist proceeds, for most purposes at least, as if there were no God—or only an absent one,” which is why, and here comes the kicker, “deism appealed so much to thinkers in the time of the first triumphs of modern science.”

 

Anyway, don’t be fooled: Theistic Evolution is just repackaged Deism!

 

 

 

PUNCTUATION RULES

 

Alright, so in Universal Common Descent, we have a worldview predicated on the existence of a primordial, biological ancestor, whose advent is currently shrouded in mystery, and whence everything else emanated without guiding hands. And any credible evidence hinting at the involvement of intelligence or consciousness is systematically ignored, squashed,  and everything in-between, to prevent Darwin’s theory from suffering the fate of his famed eponymous  arch in the Galapagos Islands, which collapsed on May 17,  2021, at 11:20 a.m. Galápagos time.

 

And so, Charles Darwin believed that all the wonderfully intricate living organisms evolved from one ancestral biological form of life, gradually. And as mentioned earlier, in his book On the Origin of Species, he challenged us to prove it didn’t happen that way, which is practically impossible to do. Well played, Darwin; well played!

 

In any case, gradualism is taken as gospel, and to question it is tantamount to heresy.

 

And yet, one cannot dive into the realm of Darwinism without encountering the theory known as Punctuated Equilibrium, and I’ll begin with an excerpt from the Punctuated Equilibrium web page featured on the online library that is part of the WGBH NOVA series Evolution: “By gradual, Darwin did not mean ‘perfectly smooth,’ but rather, ‘stepwise,’ with a species evolving and accumulating small variations over long periods of time until a new species was born. He did not assume that the pace of change was constant, however, and recognized that many species retained the same form for long periods.”

 

Fair enough, although… the textbook definition of “stepwise” is “gradual.”

 

In any case, Evolution is not perfectly smooth. Duly noted!

 

But this begs the question of what compelled them to publish such a disclaimer in the first place.

 

Also, assuming one species could evolve into another completely separate species by accumulating small variations over long periods of time in a gradual, stepwise fashion, shouldn’t there be some modicum of smoothness? In other words, if it were possible for the evolution of, say, the whale from a pig-like animal to be documented using time-lapse photography, ultimately yielding a motion reel, the latter had better have plenty of in-betweens for the sake of credibility. Else, it’ll appear jerky, with abrupt transitions.

 

Now, before anybody says, “So there are abrupt transitions or jumps, what’s wrong with that?” and aside from the fact the aforementioned brings us dangerously close to flirting with the idea that some sort of creator might have been involved (and for the record I’m just playing devil’s advocate here), please, consider the number of random, undirected, blind coordinated mutations that have to occur in such a way as to not kill off  the offspring, or doom it to an intolerable existence.

 

In the case of the evolution of the whale, which I’ve covered in episode 7, the belief, based on the fossil record, is that 55 million years ago there was a land-dwelling, grass-eating, cloven-hoofed ancestor that would eventually, through natural selection acting on random mutation, give rise to the cloven-hoofed animals of today, and that later, there was a split, with one lineage leading to whales, and another lineage leading to the modern Hippopotamuses.

 

Also in episode 7, I talked about how complicated a problem it would be just to convert a car into a submarine.

 

Now, take that and imagine what factor to multiply that level of difficulty by when attempting to convert a cloven-hoofed, grass-eating animal to a an ocean-dwelling, krill-eating baleen whale.

 

I mean, it would be hard enough for trained engineers to figure all that out, let alone rely on blind, undirected processes through which thousands upon thousands of — once again — coordinated body alterations would successfully be selected and passed on, from one offspring to the other, until all the transformations would finally lead to anything other than a horrifically-disfigured monstrosity that wouldn’t be able to survive, let alone reproduce.

 

Because, remember, in Darwinism, all these small changes need to be conserved and passed on to the next generation, without any help from intelligence, thank you very much. In other words, and under the Darwinian paradigm, Nature has no clue what it’s aiming for!

 

 

Now, moving along to the next item, I would like to focus a little bit on the matter of the reliability of those proverbial movie-reel in-betweens known as fossils—mother nature’s lithographs—and how they can be interpreted.

Which brings us to this next quote from the aforementioned WGBH’s NOVA Evolution website:

 

“Still, if evolution is gradual, there should be a fossilized record of small, incremental changes on the way to a new species. But in many cases, scientists have been unable to find most of these intermediate forms. Darwin himself was shaken by their absence. His conclusion was that the fossil record lacked these transitional stages because it was so incomplete. That is certainly true in many cases, because the chances of each of those critical changing forms having been preserved as fossils are small.”

 

Alright, so if we don’t see empirical evidence of those intermediate forms, it’s not because the transitional stages never happened; it’s just that fossils are not perfect! And so, we have to take neo-Darwinists at their word when they assure us that blind, unguided Macroevolution is not a fiction, even though we are yet to see actual evidence of it in action.  Again, we’re not talking about the same species undergoing Microevolution, whilst remaining the same species, which, and the case of dogs for example, resulted in the panoply of breeds. Instead, we are talking about Macroevolution; that is, the aggregate of all these small changes ultimately resulting in a creature that is decidedly not a dog!

 

Furthermore, we’re told that we could never see it happening within our lifetime, owing to how long the process takes. And the reason we’re told that is because those gaps between the fossils show that millions of years are needed between each intermediate stage.

 

Fair enough! However, and as discussed in prior episodes, the maths shows that, for example, 10 million years is nothing compared to what would be actually required for all those unguided, coordinated mutations to yield a new species!

 

Incidentally, and as a reminder: in Darwinian Evolution, the word “Intermediate” does not necessarily mean something that precedes something else. As discussed in episode 7, “Children of Poseidon," a fossil that is widely hailed as the “morphological intermediate” between two other fossils, one younger and the other older, might in fact be the youngest of the three!

 

And again, “morphological” speaks to “form and structure,” as opposed to “genetic makeup,” which we could never determine by simply comparing fossils.

 

As a case in point, and speaking of fossils: the Chrysler PT Cruiser, which first rolled out the assembly line in 2001, arguably looks like the morphological intermediate between the 1934 Chrysler Airflow, and the 1988 Chrysler Grand Voyager!

 

Anyway, and back to NOVA’s Evolution website, and in a move to stifle this notion that the fossils are imperfect, we learn that “in 1972, evolutionary scientists Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge proposed another explanation, which they called ‘punctuated equilibrium.’ That is, species are generally stable, changing little for millions of years. This leisurely pace is ‘punctuated’ by a rapid burst of change that results in a new species and that leaves few fossils behind.”

 

And according to the University of California Berkeley’s Evolution web page, “Punctuated equilibrium is an important but often-misinterpreted model of how evolutionary change happens. Punctuated equilibrium does not: Suggest that Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is wrong, or that the central conclusion of evolutionary theory, that life is old and organisms share a common ancestor, no longer holds, or that evolution only happens in rapid bursts.”

Again, duly noted.

 

Still, what is it about Punctuated Equilibrium that elicits so much explaining and disclaiming?

 

Obviously, it’s not a theory that is going to fade away anytime soon, certainly not judging by the amount of information that the UC Berkeley website provides on the subject matter.

 

Plus, the WGBH NOVA website says, “Although the patterns predicted by punctuated equilibrium have been observed in at least some cases, debate continues over how frequently this model of evolutionary change occurs -- is it the norm, or only an exception? Punctuated equilibrium also generates interesting questions for further research. What, for example, are the processes that produce rapid evolution?”

 

Alright…

 

First, I’m not sure what they mean when they claim that “the patterns predicted in punctuated equilibrium have been observed.”

 

“Observed”…

 

Uh… I mean, are they referring to the fossil record? I Sure hope they’re not referring to something like Darwin’s finches. As discussed in episode 6, that was a classic case of Microevolution gratuitously hyped up to imply Macroevolution; ergo, to vindicate Darwin—even though, and despite the belief that evolutionary oscillation between larger and smaller finch beaks has been occurring for eons, the Galapagos finches are still finches!

 

Second, and basically, not all paleontologists agree with Darwin’s assessment of the fossil record’s unreliability.

 

Again, and to summarize Darwin’s dilemma: if the fossil record is reliable, theologians will attribute the gaps to divine intervention; hence the “God of the Gaps” argument.

 

Consequently, because obviously something had to be done, American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science Dr. Stephen Jay Gould—along with paleontologist Niles Eldredge—stepped up to the plate and developed an evolutionary theory called Punctuated Equilibria, which is the polar opposite of Darwin’s idea to the extent it predicts that a lot of evolutionary change takes place in short periods of time tied to speciation events.

 

And so, in 1972 Gould and Eldredge published a landmark paper in which they argued that the fossil record did not reflect the gradualism commonly attributed to Charles Darwin, and that stasis dominates the history of most fossil species.

 

In a nutshell, Punctuated Equilibrium states that, in reality and contrary to Darwin’s bottom-up view, evolution consists of long periods of evolutionary stability—during which which nothing happens—which is then punctuated by rapid changes. Yes I know, “Is it the norm, or only an exception?” Regardless, that puts a big dent in Darwin’s universe. And I’ll tell you why: to a layman such as yours truly, punctuated equilibrium might as well be another way of saying… “creationism” ?

 

You know… a distinction without a difference!

 

But I assure you that neither Gould nor Eldredge was implying anything of the sort.

 

Rather, they worked very hard at coming up with a mechanism that could explain how undirected, material processes, could, without the need to invoke any intelligence, accomplish what might be misconstrued as … creation.

 

In fact, Stephen Jay Gould campaigned against creationism and advocated for the establishment of a demarcation between science and religion, a philosophical worldview know as Non-Overlapping Magisteria, where science and religion each belong in separate domains of questioning.

 

In any case, as far as Gould and Eldredge were concerned, the fossil record did not support the Darwinian idea of gradualism.

 

Furthermore, Niles Eldredge and Ian Tattersall would write the following in their book, The Myths of Human Evolution, by Columbia University Press (January 1, 1982 edition):
“Rather than taking the record literally, we have dismissed the lack of change within species as merely the artifacts of an imperfect record.”

As a response, and in their 24-page-long May 1982 article titled, “A Neo-Darwinian commentary on Macroevolution,” which was published in Evolution, Vol. 36, evolutionary biologists Brian Charlesworth, Russell Lande, and Montgomery Slatkin wrote: “Certain elements of neo-Darwinism have been sharply challenged by advocates of the ‘punctuated equilibria’ theory of evolution.”

 

According to Charlesworth et al., “some of the genetic mechanisms that have been proposed to explain the abrupt appearance and prolonged stasis of many fossil species are conspicuously lacking in empirical support.”

 

Then Stephen Jay Gould, who had clearly thrown down the gauntlet in 1980, is quoted as saying the following about neo-Darwinism, which come to think of it I didn’t see on either UC Berkeley’s or WGBH’s NOVA website: “I have been watching it [neo-Darwinism] slowly unravel as a universal description of evolution… I have been reluctant to admit it… but that theory, as a general proposition, is effectively dead, despite its persistence as a text-book orthodoxy.”

 

And there you have it, two diametrically-opposed materialistic worldviews, each claiming

to hold the key to elucidating what is clearly etched in stone, and which neither of them can see; which is, and if I may interject a Daheshist-inspired perspective:

We are (comparatively-speaking) nothing more than measly 2-dimensional creations, utterly insignificant in the big scheme of things, attempting to get inside our own Creator’s beyond-hyperdimensional mind.

 

Now, for some, I’m certainly preaching to the choir.

 

However, for those still straddling the fence…

 

 

 

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, I GIVE YOU THE CAMBRIAN EXPLOSION!

 

 

 Here, clearly, the mechanism of Natural Selection couldn’t have enough time to work gradually on small, incremental variations!

 

Instead—and this is not hyperbole—we literally have an explosion of new body forms that appear to have sprung from nowhere!

 

Here’s the condensed history: until about 550 million years ago, life on Earth was relatively simple. Then, suddenly, within a short span of time—geologically-speaking—there was a huge explosion of new body plans and types of animals with bizarre forms that have no modern analog, and which defy classification, such as the enigmatic and controversial Nectocaris. For example, and last I checked, paleontologists still couldn’t decide whether Nectocaris more closely resembled an arthropod (an invertebrate animal having an exoskeleton), a chordate (which includes the vertebrates), or a cephalopod (a class of mollusk).

 

 In fact, such is their degree of weirdness, that they are given names like, Hallucigenia!

 

And so the Cambrian fauna features a group of animals exhibiting wide morphological disparity.

 

They’re practically alien-like, with unique body designs or anatomical structures; and sometimes, both!

 

One of the strangest, is called Opabinia, which was equipped with a combination of features that—together—do not appear in any animal we know of.

 

For starters, it had a long proboscis, an elephant-like trunk with a claw at the end. It came equipped with five eyes… five: Two eyes situated right at the front of the head; then one on each side of the head, allowing it to view sideways; and lastly, one eye situated right on top of the head, square in the middle, allowing it to look straight up.

 

Modern tactical gear should be this advanced! Seriously, it’s as though a team of celestial concept artists had a little too much ambrosia, and let loose their creativity!

 

Now, you should know that this abrupt appearance of Cambrian Fauna posed a real problem for Darwin himself—and so, I do recommend you read Dr. Stephen C. Meyer’s 2014 book, Darwin’s Doubt. In any case, in his book, On The Origin of Species, Darwin acknowledged the fact that the Cambrian fossil record was a serious problem for him. He writes:

 

“In the sixth chapter I enumerated the chief objections which might be justly urged against the views maintained in this volume. Most of them have now been discussed. One, namely the distinctness of specific forms, and their not being blended together by innumerable transitional links, is a very obvious difficulty.”

 

And before I get to the punchline, Darwin did recognize that “The abrupt manner in which whole groups of species suddenly appear in certain formations, has been urged by several paleontologists—for instance, by Agassiz, Pictet, and Sedgwick—as a fatal objection to the belief in the transmutation of species. If numerous species, belonging to the same genera or families, have really started into life at once, the fact would be fatal to the theory of evolution through natural selection. For the development by this means of a group of forms, all of which are descended from some one progenitor, must have been an extremely slow process; and the progenitor must have lived long before their modified descendants.”

 

So Darwin clearly establishes the bar that his theory must meet in order to survive.

 

And being the smart fellow that he was, he preemptively addresses the little matter of the lack of evidence that supports his theory by writing, “But we continually overrate the perfection of the geological record, and falsely infer, because certain genera or families have not been found beneath a certain stage, that they did not exist before that stage.”

 

So, basically what he’s saying is that: should his theory—which he had developed in large part based on a gap-laden fossil record—fail to live up to the hype (and vindicate his claim that blind, undirected macroevolution, which he had extrapolated from microevolution, is not a hoax), it’s not his fault… it’s those confounded, incomplete fossils’!

 

And then he makes a statement that one would expect a true scientist to make: he writes, “In all cases positive paleontological evidence may be implicitly trusted; negative evidence is worthless, as experience has so often shown.”

 

Now, try squaring that with what he also wrote in On the Origin of Species; you know, the oldie-but-goodie—I know I’ve said it many times before, but it doesn’t hurt to repeat it—to wit, “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find out no such case.”

 

Therefore, and aside from the equivocal approach to argue his position, leading to the unscientific move of challenging us to prove a negative, this business of gradual, incremental change is primordial.

 

But let’s continue reading what Darwin wrote,

 

“We continually forget how large the world is, compared with the area over which our geological formations have been carefully examined; we forget that groups of species may elsewhere have long existed, and have slowly multiplied, before they invaded the ancient archipelagoes of Europe and the United States. We do not make due allowance for the intervals of time which have elapsed between our consecutive formations… These intervals will have given time for the multiplication of species from some one parent-form; and in the succeeding formation, such groups or species will appear as if suddenly created.”

 

Therefore, and if I may paraphrase what he’s saying: “People, please keep in mind that the mechanism of evolution I want you to believe in, is not the kind of process you can readily observe through time-lapse photography. And although your everyday common sense tells you this had to have happened suddenly, rest assured it has not…”

 

Be that as it may, Darwin hit a wall when confronted with the enigma that is the Cambrian Fossil record.

 

He wrote, “There is another allied difficulty, which is more serious. I allude to the manner in which species belonging to several of the main divisions of the animal kingdom suddenly appears in the lowest known fossiliferous rocks.”

 

Oddly enough, Darwin was stumped.

 

He wrote, “To the question why we do not find rich fossiliferous deposits belonging to these assumed earliest periods prior to the Cambrian system, I can give no satisfactory answer.”

 

 The Cambrian explosion, for lack of a better term, messed up his otherwise continuous branching tree of life. You see, once again, in order to produce truly novel animal forms — not merely smaller, bigger, or what have you of the same type of animal, may it be a sheep or a dog—the Darwinian mechanism would need, according to Dr. Günter Bechly, and in the case of the transition from a pig-like ancestor to a dolphin-like animal, ten times more time that is available in the Fossil record. Simply stated, it just doesn’t add up. Again, I refer you to episode 7, “Children of Poseidon.” Plus, geologists are yet to find the myriad of ghost transitional forms leading to the Cambrian fauna.

 

Now, for those who might argue, “Well, they must be buried deep down below the ocean floor, because of plate tectonics,” here’s where we stand on that issue, which was part of Charles Walcott’s Artifact Hypothesis, an ingenious geological scenario which attempted to explain away the absence of fossilized ancestors of the Cambrian animals:

 

With the advent of offshore drilling technology in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, oil companies began to drill through thousands of feet of marine sedimentary rock. The geologists who analyzed the contents of these drill cores were not able to find anything that would vindicate Walcott’s predicted Precambrian fossils.

 

Furthermore, whatever is down there — according to the science — has to be younger than the Cambrian fossils.

 

Therefore, and as Dr. Stephen Meyer, a former practicing geophysicist himself, explains:

 

 “Modern plate tectonic theory now affirms that oceanic crustal material eventually plunges back into the earth and melts in a process known as subduction.

After surface rocks melt during subduction, they form a new supply of molten magma. Eventually, magma from other locations deep in the earth wells up at mid-oceanic ridges to form new igneous rocks, in a process known as seafloor spreading.”

 

So… what does that mean in terms of Walcott’s Artifact hypothesis?

 

Simply stated, any oceanic sediments deposited atop the oceanic igneous crust—igneous rocks being rocks formed from the solidification of molten rock material—have a limited “life span.” In other words, they cannot last indefinitely—so-to-speak—on the face of the earth. So what happens to them? Well, Eventually, these sedimentary rocks collide with the continental margin—that is, the shallow water area found in proximity to continents—which causes them to plunge deep into the upper mantle, and melt to form magma. Consequently, this cycle strictly limits the maximum age of any marine sediment.

 

And  now, we come to the good part:

 

According to modern estimates, the oldest section of oceanic crust has existed only since the Jurassic (or about 180 million years ago), which is way too young to contain fossil ancestors of the trilobites. In Darwin’s Doubt, Meyer explains that With the mounting plate tectonics evidence, “Paleontologists today do not expect to find any Precambrian ancestors of the trilobites in oceanic sediments, since they realize that there are no Precambrian sediments in the ocean basins.” He adds, “If Precambrian strata are to be found anywhere, continents are the place.”

 

“Oh, well, then clearly these transitional forms were not fossilized due to… to how fragile they were. So, there!” you say?

 

Yeah… n… no.

 

See, consider Sponges, which are nature’s glassworks, according to Stephen Meyer. They are one of the simplest known forms of animal life. Logically, no microscopic sponge embryo should survive the fossilization process. Then again, we would be wrong in our assumption because little precambrian round balls, that turned out to be sponge embryos had been found!

 

In 1999, at a major international conference about the Cambrian Explosion held near Chengjiang, J. Y. Chen, Paul Chien, and three other colleagues presented their findings. And as serendipity would have it, early in his career, Paul Chien had initially perfected a technique for examining the embryos of living sponges under a scanning electron microscope. He would then adapt the lessons learned from examining living sponges to the now-more-ambitious goal to peer into the world of those microscopic fossilized sponge embryo structures using an even more powerful microscope, which—according to Meyer—startled him and amazed other scientists who, at first, questioned the results, suggesting that that the little round balls were not sponge embryos at all, but instead the remains of brown and green algae. But, as Meyer explains, Paul Chien’s expertise came to the fore. And as I said, I highly recommend Stephen Meyer’s Darwin’s Doubt to anyone wishing to learn more about evolution’s “Big Bang” as it were, namely the Cambrian Explosion.

 

So, to recap, those supposed predecessors of the Cambrian creatures are missing and arguably non-existent.

 

As for Darwin’s tree of life, The trunk was supposed to branch into many different species, each species giving rise to many genera, and towards the top of the tree you would find so much diversity that you could distinguish separate phyla.

 

But, as Dr. David Berlinski points out, the fossil record shows the opposite; that is, “Representatives of separate phyla appearing first, followed by lower-level diversification on those basic themes.” In general, “most species enter the evolutionary order fully formed and then depart unchanged.”

 

Therefore, The incremental development of new species is largely not there. Those missing pre-Cambrian organisms have still not turned up.

 

And as I mentioned earlier, and this bears retreating, some researchers have guessed that those missing Precambrian precursors were too small or too soft-bodied to have made good fossils. However, Precambrian fossil deposits have been discovered in which tiny, soft-bodied embryo sponges are preserved—but there were no predecessors to the celebrity organisms of the Cambrian Explosion.

 

And so one faces the age-old dilemma of whether to toe the party line and promote improbable hypotheses as though they were foregone assumptions in order to remain in the fold, or speak truth to power to power and be ostracized.

 

Speaking of which, let’s get back to Dr. Günter Bechly of the Stuttgart State Museum of Natural History and his change of heart, or mind rather, about the bacterial flagellum self-assembling according to Darwinian rules. He said, “It is graphically convincing, but if you know the ontogenesis of the flagellum motor then it is completely ridiculous…”

 

By the way, Ontogeny (hence ontogenesis) is the origination and development of an organism.

 

In any case, and as he put it, the reason this kind of scenario doesn’t make sense in terms of the ontogenesis of the structure— and is ridiculous, according to him—is due to the fact we—apparently— can’t just build the flagellum by simply adding to it some protein elements in order to make it longer outside of the cell wall.

 

In layman’s terms, whatever the Darwinists claim to be a precursor to the fully constructed flagellum motor was more than likely a mutation that led to a reduction; that is, a truncation that happened after-the-fact!

 

Therefore, the flagellum had to have been in existence, somehow, before the reduction in complexity would occur. And if such was the case, what was the source of the original complexity? Again, remember, in Darwinism, things — and that boils down to genetic information — are supposed to evolve from simpler to more complex.

 

But, this was merely the beginning.

 

 

TIPPING THE SCALES

 

As I’ve indicated earlier, Dr. Günter Bechly had never read Michael Behe’s book Darwin’s Black Box, nor any of the books he had stacked, one on top of the other in on the traditional balance scale pans. To Beckly, though they were numerous and heavy, they were light on substance. Therefore, all combined, they apparently weighed far less than Darwin’s masterwork, On the Origin of Species, which  rested in the other pan.

 

 

The image was very effective: Darwin’s book alone carried more weight than all the books on Intelligent Design combined, which Dr. Bechly, a staunch Darwinist, didn’t think were worth reading, until he (once again) committed what he described as being that one mistake of reading the books on Intelligent design he had placed in his Museum display, in order to make a mockery of them.

 

Consequently, Bechly (who didn’t fit the usual stereotype of a Darwin skeptic, given his being a never-been-baptized, never-attended-church agnostic who had joined with the anti-intelligent-Design choir) would, in 2015, disclose his support for Intelligent Design.

In any case, consider that life—to the extent we can define it—is only possible due to molecular machines that haul cargo from one place into another in each cell, using highways or tracks made of other molecules.

 

And yes, there are cables, ropes, and pulleys to maintain the structural integrity of the cell and maintain its shape, and those are made of molecules as well.

As biochemist Dr. Michael Behe wrote in his 1996 book, Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution:

 

“Machines turn cellular switches on and off, sometimes killing the cell or causing it to grow. Solar-powered machines capture the energy of photons and store it in chemicals. Electrical machines allow current to flow through nerves. Manufacturing machines build other molecular machines, as well as themselves.

Cells swim using machines, copy themselves with machinery, ingest food with machinery…Thus the details of life are finely calibrated, and the machinery of life enormously complex. Can all of life be fit into Darwin's theory of evolution? “

 

 

 

OUT OF THIS WORLD

 

In his story called “The Planet Fomalzaab,” which he wrote in New York City on March 29, 1977, and which was published in Strange Tales and Wondrous Legends, volume 1, Doctor Dahesh made it abundantly clear that inhabitants from of a highly advanced alien civilization had visited planet Earth, and remained for a total of six months before returning to their home planet. And according to the story, they left two physical reminders of their sojourn on Earth.

 

One of them was an opulent architectural complex, whose remnants still stand today:

 

Located in the city of Baalbek, in Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley, the ruins of what is universally recognized as a complex of Roman temples, feature jaw-dropping, colossal limestone megaliths weighing as much as one thousand six hundred and fifty tons—according to a December 18, 2014, The New Yorker magazine article called “The Myth of the Megalith.”

 

For what it’s worth, I’ve been to Baalbek, and I’ve seen those megaliths up-close, and… wow!

 

Now, according to what Doctor Dahesh intimated in his essay titled “The Ruins of Baalbek,” penned on July 15, 1944, this begs the question of why the Romans would allegedly undertake such an ambitious and costly project, which rivals—if not dwarfs—anything they might have built anywhere else, including in Rome proper, and erect it on a site located between Mount Lebanon to the west and the Anti-Lebanon mountains to the east— at an elevation of 3,840 ft no less. Thus, making it virtually invisible! I mean, talk about not wanting to broadcast the power and might of the Empire!

 

Who knew the Romans were so discreet!

 

Anyway, in “The Ruins of Baalbek,” Doctor Dahesh would reveal that historians got it wrong, and that neither the Phoenicians, the Romans, nor the Arabs for that matter had anything to do with the construction of Heliopolis, or City of the Sun. Therefore, this not only suggests that Heliopolis predates all of these cultures, but that all the different architectural styles it features, which includes the technological wonder for its time know as the arch, were vouchsafed to us by an advanced alien civilization.

The aliens also left behind offspring: baby boys and girls born from the consensual union between some the extraterrestrial males and the human females.

 

Therefore, thanks to this highly advanced alien civilization, humanity was gifted novel building archetypes that subsequent civilizations would study, learn from, and eventually replicate, as well as a genetic code upgrade.

 

And that is why I’ve often stated I do not, nor can I impugn Evolution. Rather, I have serious issues with Darwinian Evolution. In my heart of hearts I believe that all the monumental work in microbiology and genomics that has been done—from elucidating the structure of DNA to acquiring all the knowledge pertaining to the human genome, and everything in between—would have been none the worse for wear without Darwinism’s extrapolations pertaining to major evolutionary change, or what is known as macroevolution, and the myth that is has the power—as a blind, undirected mechanism—to create new types of body plans, or life.

 

To paraphrase Dr. David Berlinski: before we ask, “Is Darwinian theory correct or not” we have to ask the preliminary question: “is it clear enough so that it could be correct?”

 

Speaking to Ben Stein in the movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, in an in-home on-camera interview, Berlinski adds, “Nothing in the theory is precisely, clearly defined or delineated. It lacks all the rigor one expects from mathematical physics, and mathematical physics lacks all the rigor one expects from mathematics. So we’re talking about a gradual descent down the level of intelligibility until we reach evolutionary biology. We don’t even know what a species is, for heaven’s heaven sakes [sic]!”

 

By the way, consider that any mutation is—technically-speaking—a copying error, that the entropy of the universe is tending towards a maximum, and that unlike viruses or bacteria, we humans do not reproduce at the same rate, which means that, statistically-speaking, “copying errors” carry a much higher risk of penalty. To quote University of Edinburgh Professor of Evolutionary Genetics Dr. Peter Keightley, “A high genomic rate of deleterious mutations can make it difficult to explain how humans, a species with a relatively low reproductive potential, are able to persist.”

 

In other words, technically-speaking, we shouldn’t even be here—that is, “persist”—let alone embark on a non-messy departure from the essence of whatever it is we are supposed to be, especially that — once again — there are no archetypes in Darwinism!

 

I mean the first heart that ever had to pump blood didn’t know what a heart was, nor what blood was, nor that it had to pump it. Seriously, and if I may step out of character for a moment… I can’t even believe we’re actually talking about the possibility of any living creature that doesn’t know it mutated in such a manner as to require a heart; assuming, of course, all the thousands of other coordinated mutations would have laid down all the necessary “plumbing,” including the precise location of the heart it didn’t even know it needed in the first place. Oh, but wait, never mind, that creature just died, because, apparently, all the right switches in its DNA had not been properly selected right after conception! And why would they? Again, the process is blind and undirected… or, is it?

 

And in all fairness to theoretical chemists such as Dr. Peter Schuster, who has developed a mathematical formulation of Darwin’s theory of evolutionary optimization through Variation and Selection, which he had derived in terms of what is called (I kid you not) “Ordinary Differential Equations,” and which can be interpreted as chemical kinetics of evolution: making any sort of prediction, or rather, statistical inference in Evolution, in terms of building mathematical equations that would allow us to make predictions, is a daunting problem—far harder than economics, which is hard-enough given it involves a highly unpredictable variable, that is human emotion!

 

I mean, good luck predicting a baby’s gender without an ultrasound.

 

Yeah I know, the odds are fifty-fifty… but, would you stake your life on it?

 

Yeah, I didn’t think so!

 

Incidentally, let’s say we’re able to artificially control a baby’s gender—what does that have to do with vindicating Darwin? Darwinism is all about blind, undirected, natural selection acting on random mutations. And again, anything we might be custom-designing uses genetic material vouchsafed to us by mother nature.

 

In his 2019 book, Darwin Devolves: the New Science About DNA that Challenges Evolution, Michael J. Behe writes: “Yet the problem is very much worse for the study of evolution, because it concerns processes—many still largely unknown—that occur at the molecular level over thousands or millions of years, involving not only biological factors, but also geological, meteorological, and even celestial ones.”

 

Behe explains, that like economics, much of modern evolutionary biology is also cloaked by a thick pretense of knowledge.

 

In essence, all biologists can do by studying, among others, fossils and genes, is to map the history of life and to tell us what happened.

 

As Behe put it, “The sticking point is not so much what happened, but how. What caused events to unfold as they did? That’s the question Charles Darwin had hoped to answer.”

Therefore, and by comparison, mathematicians and physicists have it easy!

 

In fact, as I was gazing at Peter Schuster’s Ordinary Differential Equations, wide-eyed and entranced like a deer caught in the headlights, my mind wandered and I imagined a team of NASA engineers hitting a roadblock and a frustrated team director blurting out, “Oh, for crying out loud people, this isn’t the chemical kinetics of evolution! it’s just rocket science!”

 

 

 

MARIO HENRI CHAKKOUR, AIA

 

April 20, 2024

 

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