Darwin's Black Box - Michael J. Behe and Intelligent Design

[zak]

Thank you every one to give and share on this great thread, a conductive thread in fact.

One of my favourite subjects was natural sciences:

"In France, the term "natural sciences" generally refers to all scientific disciplines concerned with the study of nature in the ecological or environmental sense of the term. In other words, "the set of life sciences and ecosystem sciences that enabled life to flourish". They include zoology, botany and some earth sciences. Nowadays, this assortment of sciences is taught in primary school classes under the name of "natural sciences". "

And even if I have specialized a little today in the tree, my interest as a childhood love has remained more or less intact.

When I was in the first third of DBB's pages, I had the image of Ark at the Barcelona conference saying something close to "finally we don't need a device, we are ourselves" and pushing a little to paraphrase Ark: "finally we no longer need the Darwinian designer, we are ourselves !!!"
Of course I kept reading the book to fall at the end of the chapter "publish or perish" Behe asks us:

How do you know that?
How do we know what we claim to know_not in a deep philosophical sense, but from a practical point of view, that of everyday life?

...The first way to know something is based, of course, on your personal experience (by automatism I had put before correcting "professional experiences")

...The second way of knowing is based on authority. This implies that, without any specific experience, you rely on an external source of information that you believe is reliable...

Throughout my school program I obeyed and followed the authority of Darwinism, in high school to a friend who was not well in his head, nor his skin I dared to tell him that it was because his ancestors adapted well, and that his parents are strong, that's why he was there.

The fact is that it is not because of "our parents' Darwinism" that we are here, it is because of their genes. If I can put it that way.
Hence the importance of integrating the Cass well in this light:
Knowledge=Protection and Ignorance=EndangerED,
also Protection=Knowledge and EndangerED=Ignorance
And not just for the school program, but for the program itself.

As I read the following from DBB, I remembered oh how many times I asked myself the following question: "Why did I come to this world?

Who is there?
Concluding on the design of a thing or system does not require us to seek to know who the designer is. We can quite establish the design of a system just by looking at it, and, moreover, our conviction about the design can be much stronger than that about the identity of the designer...
We do know, however, that all these things were indeed designed because the scheduling of their independent elements has an end.

Maybe one day soon the Neo darwinists will have a place near the Flat earthers.
But for me I left its heavy, limited and now ultimately useless shadow, I can face myself and adjust to the new sunlight shining and full of new adventures and hopes and other designs that I always had here in me, and the important fact of having "integrated" DBB and being able to go back with i cannot feel other thing but POSSIBILITY to BE FREE.
I know what I have in my hands, even if I do not understand everything again.
Thank you again.

To see not only the limitations of Darwinism, but also its delimitations, it is not but necessarily obliged to dive to the molecular scale.
In the postface of the French edition here is what you can find:

Stanislas Deheane (professor of psychology at the Collège de France) is surprised by the ability to identify written words very quickly: "Yet neither the hypothesis of an intelligent creator[materialism obliges us!], nor that of an evolution by natural selection seem to explain it. There was simply not enough time for Evolution to design specialized reading circuits."
A similar problem arises for arithmetic.
As for language, Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini (Professor of Cognitive Sciences at the University of Arizona) explains: "Chomsky argues convincingly __which I have confirmed in some of my publications_ that the very structure of language presents particularisms that cannot have been shaped by natural selection as a by-product of communication, and which have not been thought [and wanted as such by humans].
In the 1985's, it appeared that the language was too idiosyncratic [particularism of "feeling"] to be the result of natural selection [...] In any case, there is no place in this program for any adaptationist, gradualist, neodarwinian explanation whatsoever."

 

[Laura]

I just want to recommend again to read “Darwinian Fairytales” by David Stove. <snip>

Another thing that becomes totally clear when you read the book is that Darwinian ideas aren’t just any old pathological theory. They are pure psychopathy. There is no other way to put it.

The book really restored my faith and hope in humanity and rooted out quite some toxic Darwinian thinking still going on in my head. I’m sure you won’t regret getting this book!

I've ordered it; it sounds positively delicious.

And yes, the revelation that Darwinisim/Neo-Darwinism is purely and simply "Worship of the material universe" makes it as psychopathic as it can get.

I think that once we all get fully up to speed on this reading, it might be time to see it as an AIM for this group to help counteract Darwinism, to spread the word of Intelligent Design as the obvious, logical, EVIDENTIAL basis for life and thus, the context in which other questions can be answered.

Up to this moment, I have never felt any kind of impulse to really stand up for anything in a big way, but I tell ya, this is inspiring.

 

[genero81]

I think that once we all get fully up to speed on this reading, it might be time to see it as an AIM for this group to help counteract Darwinism, to spread the word of Intelligent Design as the obvious, logical, EVIDENTIAL basis for life and thus, the context in which other questions can be answered.

Up to this moment, I have never felt any kind of impulse to really stand up for anything in a big way, but I tell ya, this is inspiring.

I feel the same. Time to stand up to this bullied propaganda. Enough is enough.

 

[goyacobol]

I wasn't sure where to post this because so many of the threads are now kind of blurring together this is a cross posting from The Mecca Mystery thread.

So, the question is: what does it to to the souls/minds of those who believe complete lies?

Hopefully, all these studies on Islam and the monotheistic religions, DNA, sexual identity and the lies of Darwinian evolution will help Laura write the next book to give guidance for humanity to finally find truth and light where now there is mostly lies and darkness.

Session 8 April 2000:

Q: But then, as far as I can tell, the Hebrew monotheism is also derived from the Aryan, monotheistic, male dominated religion. It then "fathered" Christianity, and that has been the whole patriarchal, kill-em-all and let God sort-em-out war mongering thing under which we have lived for over 2000 years. This is the Western, European mind... it came from the Aryans, from the North; it was the so-called "civilizing" influence in nearly every respect that you can track. The cohesiveness and dominance of this type of thinking was able to civilize, but then civilization involves dominance, killing, war, territory, the Hitler scene, the whole nine yards. All of this is antithetical to all that you promote as far as being desirable. Yet, you have said that you were in contact with the Northern Peoples for millennia. Yes, Cassiopeia is a Northern Constellation, and probably figured in the early myths of these peoples in ways we cannot know, but the whole thing is that they represent all that is STS.

A: But so do you, so then why did we contact you?

Q: Well. I don't buy into that whole monotheistic, dominator, war-mongering, make everybody conform to one way of thinking head trip!

A: So, you think all individuals conformed then, or is it the soul that counts in the final analysis?

Q: Okay, obviously all individuals are different, and some did not conform then, either.

A: And neither do you.

Q: Point taken. I am just having a hard time with this. I wish you would just tell me! Who interacted with these Aryans to give them this male-dominated, monotheistic idea that they then sought to impose on every other human being on the planet - and are STILL trying!

A: Interactions were transdensity.

 

[genero81]

It occurs to me just how important this is at this time because design implies purpose. Life on earth is unmistakably designed with purpose, from gender to the marked intelligence of the human race over other species. Relativistic theories and ideologies are thereby devoid of credibility. We should shout it from the rooftops.

 

[thorbiorn]

David Berlinski frames the problem from another angle: You can, in principle, take a child from a primitive tribe and transplant it to Oxford university. The child could very well turn into a fine mathematician, even though higher math was never part of anything in the child’s heritage even remotely producing a “survival advantage”. This means that the potential for higher math was somehow built-in. But how? How could a brain capable of higher math have evolved in an environment that never ever selected for such a thing, and indeed should have killed it off the minute it got in the way of killing and gutting that tiger? Is there some kind of information that transcends time? Is there some kind of preexisting information or potential? Materialists and their handmaidens, the Darwinists, will never consider such possibilities. They cannot, for whatever reason. They prefer circular reasoning that never ever leaves their limited and stubbornly defended horizon.

While I don't know if David Berlinsky or you are alluding to anyone in particular, why not try to fill in the blanks. One case that might be of interest is the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Aiyangar Ramanujan (22. december 1887 – 26. april 1920)

Ramanujan (literally, "younger brother of Rama", a Hindu deity[12]:12) was born on 22 December 1887 into a Tamil Brahmin Iyengar family in Erode, Madras Presidency (now Tamil Nadu), at the residence of his maternal grandparents.[12]:11 His father, K. Srinivasa Iyengar, originally from Thanjavur district, worked as a clerk in a sari shop.[12]:17–18 His mother, Komalatammal, was a housewife and also sang at a local temple.[13] They lived in a small traditional home on Sarangapani Sannidhi Street in the town of Kumbakonam.[14] [...] In December 1889, Ramanujan contracted smallpox, though he recovered, unlike 4,000 others who would die in a bad year in the Thanjavur district around this time.

Since Ramanujan's father was at work most of the day, his mother took care of the boy as a child. He had a close relationship with her. From her, he learned about tradition and puranas. He learned to sing religious songs, to attend pujas at the temple, and to maintain particular eating habits—all of which are part of Brahmin culture.[12]:20 [...] In 1903, when he was 16, Ramanujan obtained from a friend a library copy of A Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure and Applied Mathematics, G. S. Carr's collection of 5,000 theorems.[12]:39[17] Ramanujan reportedly studied the contents of the book in detail.[18] The book is generally acknowledged as a key element in awakening his genius.[18] The next year, Ramanujan independently developed and investigated the Bernoulli numbers and calculated the Euler–Mascheroni constant up to 15 decimal places.[12]:90 His peers at the time commented that they "rarely understood him" and "stood in respectful awe" of him.[12]:27

He received a scholarship to study at Government Arts College, Kumbakonam,[12]:28[12]:45 but was so intent on mathematics that he could not focus on any other subjects and failed most of them, losing his scholarship in the process.[12]:47 In August 1905, Ramanujan ran away from home, heading towards Visakhapatnam, and stayed in Rajahmundry[19] for about a month.[12]:47–48 He later enrolled at Pachaiyappa's College in Madras. There he passed in mathematics, choosing only to attempt questions that appealed to him and leaving the rest unanswered, but performed poorly in other subjects, such as English, physiology and Sanskrit.[20] Ramanujan failed his Fellow of Arts exam in December 1906 and again a year later. Without a FA degree, he left college and continued to pursue independent research in mathematics, living in extreme poverty and often on the brink of starvation.[12]:55–56

On 14 July 1909, Ramanujan married Janaki (Janakiammal) (21 March 1899 – 13 April 1994),[22] a girl whom his mother had selected for him a year earlier and who was ten years old when they married.[23][24][12]:71 It was not unusual for marriages to be arranged with girls. She came from Rajendram, a village close to Marudur (Karur district) Railway Station. Ramanujan's father did not participate in the marriage ceremony.[25] As was common at that time, Janakiammal continued to stay at her maternal home for three years after marriage till she attained puberty. In 1912, she and Ramanujan's mother joined Ramanujan in Madras.[26]

After the marriage, Ramanujan developed a hydrocele testis.[12]:72 The condition could be treated with a routine surgical operation that would release the blocked fluid in the scrotal sac, but his family did not have the money for the operation. In January 1910, a doctor volunteered to do the surgery at no cost.[27]

After his successful surgery, Ramanujan searched for a job. He stayed at a friend's house while he went from door to door around Madras looking for a clerical position. To make money, he tutored students at Presidency College who were preparing for their F.A. exam.[12]:73

And about his health Hardy is quoted in the French Wiki (Srinivasa Ramanujan — Wikipédia) as saying:

"Hardy is known that the piety of Ramanujan had been romanticized by Westerners and overstated by his biographers indians ; it did, however there that its beliefs and non-religious practices, complaining instead of the regrettable consequences of his strict observance of the vegetarian diet on his health and may be on his work17. "

Now that I have presented glimpses from his background and history of suffering, let's go back to the beginning of the Wiki where some of the results he achieved are mentioned:

During his short life, Ramanujan independently compiled nearly 3,900 results (mostly identities and equations).[4]Many were completely novel; his original and highly unconventional results, such as the Ramanujan prime, the Ramanujan theta function, partition formulae and mock theta functions, have opened entire new areas of work and inspired a vast amount of further research.[5] Nearly all his claims have now been proven correct.[6] The Ramanujan Journal, a peer-reviewed scientific journal, was established to publish work in all areas of mathematics influenced by Ramanujan,[7] and his notebooks—containing summaries of his published and unpublished results—have been analyzed and studied for decades since his death as a source of new mathematical ideas. As late as 2011 and again in 2012, researchers continued to discover that mere comments in his writings about "simple properties" and "similar outputs" for certain findings were themselves profound and subtle number theory results that remained unsuspected until nearly a century after his death.[8][9] He became one of the youngest Fellows of the Royal Society and only the second Indian member, and the first Indian to be elected a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Of his original letters, Hardy stated that a single look was enough to show they could only have been written by a mathematician of the highest calibre, comparing Ramanujan to other mathematical geniuses such as Euler and Jacobi.

And much later:

K. Srinivasa Rao has said,[71] "As for his place in the world of Mathematics, we quote Bruce C. Berndt: 'Paul Erdős has passed on to us Hardy's personal ratings of mathematicians. Suppose that we rate mathematicians on the basis of pure talent on a scale from 0 to 100, Hardy gave himself a score of 25, J. E. Littlewood 30, David Hilbert 80 and Ramanujan 100.'" During a lecture at IIT Madras in May 2011, Berndt stated that over the last 40 years, as nearly all of Ramanujan's theorems have been proven right, there had been greater appreciation of Ramanujan's work and brilliance, and that Ramanujan's work was now pervading many areas of modern mathematics and physics.[63][72]

And how did he describe some of his insights:

Ramanujan has been described as a person of a somewhat shy and quiet disposition, a dignified man with pleasant manners.[57] He lived a simple life at Cambridge.[12]:234,241 Ramanujan's first Indian biographers describe him as a rigorously orthodox Hindu. He credited his acumen to his family goddess, Namagiri Thayar (Goddess Mahalakshmi) of Namakkal. He looked to her for inspiration in his work[12]:36 and said he dreamed of blood drops that symbolised her consort, Narasimha. Afterward he would receive visions of scrolls of complex mathematical content unfolding before his eyes.[12]:281 He often said, "An equation for me has no meaning unless it represents a thought of God."[58]

Hardy cites Ramanujan as remarking that all religions seemed equally true to him.[12]:283 Hardy further argued that Ramanujan's religious belief had been romanticised by Westerners and overstated—in reference to his belief, not practice—by Indian biographers. At the same time, he remarked on Ramanujan's strict vegetarianism.[59]

It is hard to say how Ramanujan got his knowledge, at any rate doing math as Ramanujan did was a very risky, even a poor survival strategy from a Darwinist perspective. Besides Ramanujan and his wife did not have any children either. Still this short lived son of a temple singer and sari shop clerk became a real star in fields of advanced mathematics. Ramanujan must have had an inherent potential that had nothing to do with immediate biological survival of the fittest.

 

[Approaching Infinity]

It’s also just incredible how Darwin’s absolutely ridiculous and frankly totally dumb ideas could have gained so much traction – unless there was a materialist elite just waiting for someone to complete their dark minds and their programming, and/or hyperdimensional entities waiting to complete the programming.

This is actually true, and some of them even admit it. For instance, here's an example from David Ray Griffin's Religion and Scientific Naturalism:

Darwin's theory was evidently embraced so rapidly by so many fellow scientists not because Darwin had convinced them that natural selection was the sole, or at least the primary, factor, which he did not, but simply because his theory, in being fully naturalistic in this materialistic sense, fit into the program of Victorian naturalism by suggesting that the existence of life and even human culture could be understood in completely materialistic terms. For example, just three pages before the most famous line in John Tyndall's "Belfast Address"—"We claim, and we shall wrest from theology, the entire domain of cosmological theory" (FS, 530)—he said: "The strength of the doctrine of evolution consists, not in an experimental demonstration . . . but in its general harmony with scientific thought" (FS, 527). Tyndall's statement, which indicates that the crucial issue is not empirical evidence but materialistic metaphysics, coheres with Gillespie's description of "the basic positivist assumption that when sufficient natural or physical causes were not known they must nonetheless be assumed to exist to the exclusion of other causes" (CD, 115).

 

[Approaching Infinity]

If evolution is about the survival of the fittest, and in general the simplest life forms are the fittest, then why are there complex organisms like mammals at all?? Remember we are always told that cockroaches will survive a nuclear holocaust, but not us. And bacteria, as species, are much more capable of surviving than cockroaches. Some of them live in volcanoes! So how can we explain that higher organisms ever evolved past the point of the simplest forms of life?

It is hard to say how Ramanujan got his knowledge, at any rate doing math as Ramanujan did was a very risky, even a poor survival strategy from a Darwinist perspective. Besides Ramanujan and his wife did not have any children either. Still this short lived son of a temple singer and sari shop clerk became a real star in fields of advanced mathematics. Ramanujan must have had an inherent potential that had nothing to do with immediate biological survival of the fittest.

I've been re-reading a chapter in Griffin's book I mentioned in the post above for the radio show on Saturday and this section popped out to me. As a tiny bit of background, Griffin has just finished describing a 'cosmic bias' that pervades the cosmos through the agency of the divine cosmic mind in order to account for the creation of certain genetic mutations (whether indirectly, by influencing the organism's own self-determination, or directly). He then moves on to how progress, which is denied by Darwinism, can be accounted for in his own philosophical framework:

Evolutionary Progress and the Inner Criterion of Success

This kind of cosmic bias would mean only that not all mutations are random [in every possible sense of the word]. It would not necessarily mean that they are not random [in the sense of simply not being biased towards being adaptive - i.e., they're blind with respect to outcome], because the cosmic aim, by hypothesis, is not toward adaptation to the immediate environment or even toward a value that would be positively correlated with it. Adaptation has to do with the phenotype, which is the only side of an organism the environment can judge. However, the cosmic aim, being for an increase in the capacity for beauty in the sense of intrinsically rewarding experience, is directed toward the inside of each actuality, which is hidden from the agents of natural selection. There need be, in general, no positive correlation between increased intrinsic value and increased survival power.

This distinction between inner and outer criteria of excellence correlates perfectly with the distinction between fitness for survival and our intuitions about higher and lower forms of life: On the one hand, we cannot help but believe that the evolutionary process from bacteria to diverse forms of life existing today, including human life, has involved progress. On the other hand, this progress does not mean an increase in survival power. If we can ask about progress only in terms of this externalist criterion, then those who deny progress are clearly right—dolphins and humans will not outlast bacteria! But the assumption that survival is the only valid criterion is a reflection of the positivist assumption that a "scientific" perspective can deal only with features knowable through our sensory perception, thereby only with external features. This assumption leads to what Whitehead called the "evolutionist fallacy," which is not the truism that the fittest survive, which is obvious, but "the belief that fitness for survival is identical with the best exemplification of the Art of Life" (FR, 4). If the overall goal were survival, there would be no explanation for the rise of life itself:

[L]ife itself is comparatively deficient in survival value. The art of persistence is to be dead. . . . The problem set by the doctrine of evolution is to explain how complex organisms with such deficient survival power ever evolved. (FR, 4, 5)

The explanation offered by this theistic naturalism is that life and then more complex forms of life emerge because the universe lives within an appetitive, form-inducing soul, which whets the appetites of the creatures for life and then more abundant forms of life, a criterion that is at right angles, at it were, to the criteria for survival.

This Whiteheadian criterion for judging evolutionary progress—greater capacity for experience that is intrinsically valuable—is positively correlated with greater capacity to include more feelings and objective data from the environment in one's experience. This standard is similar, therefore, to that employed by Francisco Ayala, "the ability of an organism to obtain and process information about the environment" (CP, 90). Ayala's wording, however, stresses the purely cognitive side of the experience, whereas Whitehead's criterion is primarily aesthetic. The other difference is that Ayala, qua Darwinian scientist, must say that nothing in the evolutionary process makes his criterion of progress "best or more objective than others" (CP, 95). Within Whitehead's philosophy, however, the criterion can be thought to be objective, in that it is believed to be the criterion of the soul of the universe itself, which has inspired the whole evolutionary process. Within this wider naturalism, furthermore, reference to a soul of the universe would not be ruled out of "scientific" discourse any more than reference to any other agents believed really to exist and to exercise explanatory causal influence. [Footnote: We, of course, cannot perform experiments to see whether there really is such a soul of the universe. But we also cannot perform experiments to show that there really are logical, mathematical, and aesthetic principles, or that all events occur within a universal, unbroken causal nexus, or that numerous other ideas that we presuppose are really true.]

In any case, Ayala's distinctions with regard to this criterion for progress are helpful. To say that progress can and does occur, it is not necessary to mean general progress, "which occurs in all historical sequences of a given domain of reality and from the beginning of the sequences until their end." It is sufficient to mean particular progress, "which occurs in one or several but not all historical sequences, or . . . during part but not all of the duration of the sequences" (CP, 80). Also, Ayala points out, it is obvious that uniform progress has not taken place. The question is only whether net progress has occurred (CP, 84). These distinctions are important, because the idea of evolutionary progress is often rejected by pointing out that there is no criterion in terms of which uniform and general progress has occurred. In terms of Whitehead's criterion, which incorporates Ayala's, we can say that net progress has occurred in the evolutionary process as a whole by virtue of having occurred in particular sequences. Darwinism [in the form of rejecting the idea of progress] is thereby rejected.

 

[Approaching Infinity]

Just for reference, here's a list of what I think are all the anti-Darwinism or intelligent design-related books mentioned so far (plus one or two more), in chronological order. There are a few others that are considered classics that aren't listed (e.g. Denton's first, and some by Dembski). I doubt there's much in them that isn't included in some form or another in these ones.

• Darwinian Fairytales: Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity and Other Fables of Evolution by David Stove (1995/2007)
• Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution by Michael J. Behe (1996/2006)
• Religion and Scientific Naturalism: Overcoming the Conflicts by David Ray Griffin (2000)
• Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth? Why Much of What We Teach About Evolution Is Wrong by Jonathan Wells (2002)
• Genetic Entropy by John Sanford (2005/2014)
• Origin of Life: The 5th Option by Bryant M. Shiller (2006)
• The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism by Michael J. Behe (2007)
• The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions by David Berlinski (2009)
• Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design by Stephen Meyer (2010)
• Being as Communion: A Metaphysics of Information by William Dembski (2014)
• Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design by Stephen Meyer (2014)
• Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis by Michael Denton (2016)
• Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed by Douglas Axe (2016)
• Evolution 2.0: Breaking the Deadlock Between Darwin and Design by Perry Marshall (2017)
• Zombie Science: More Icons of Evolution by Jonathan Wells (2017)
• Heretic: One Scientist's Journey from Darwin to Design by Matti Leisola and Jonathan Witt (2018)
• Darwin Devolves: The New Science About DNA That Challenges Evolution by Michael J. Behe (2019)

 

[Deleted member 4320]

The nature of the reality can be observed by daily interaction with it. I want to write a post on the forum. But how? I can discover that I can do it typing in the window at the end of the page. How can I type a word? I can get my fingers and push the letters. How I can form the text? I have words and grammar rules. The world is compound with the billions of the situations when one can have a question about how to do this or that or what is this or that or how something work. These are like the little lessons where can be raised the question and the answer can be given to that.

To be the fittest is the ability to raising the appropriate questions and finding answers to them.

 

[mkrnhr]

The materialist scientific paradigm does great things with the vague notion of randomness. On the one hand, free-will, and by extention consciousness, doesn't exist because everything is pre-determined. One the other hand however, there is random mutations and random everything. Randomness is just a fancy word for ignorance. If I have a coin in one hand, for everyone who doesn't know in which hand the coin is, the position is random.

 

[Windmill knight]

This assumption leads to what Whitehead called the "evolutionist fallacy," which is not the truism that the fittest survive, which is obvious, but "the belief that fitness for survival is identical with the best exemplification of the Art of Life" (FR, 4). If the overall goal were survival, there would be no explanation for the rise of life itself:

[L]ife itself is comparatively deficient in survival value. The art of persistence is to be dead. . . . The problem set by the doctrine of evolution is to explain how complex organisms with such deficient survival power ever evolved. (FR, 4, 5)

The explanation offered by this theistic naturalism is that life and then more complex forms of life emerge because the universe lives within an appetitive, form-inducing soul, which whets the appetites of the creatures for life and then more abundant forms of life, a criterion that is at right angles, at it were, to the criteria for survival.

This Whiteheadian criterion for judging evolutionary progress—greater capacity for experience that is intrinsically valuable—is positively correlated with greater capacity to include more feelings and objective data from the environment in one's experience.

I like that! Well, they explained it more nicely than I did. And reading the above, I realize that there is an implication to this argument. If Darwinism were correct, life would not evolve, since it is best fit for survival at its most basic levels - or there wouldn't be any life at all to begin with because being dead is so much easier than being alive. Yet there is life, and not only that, but it evolves in ways that do not guarantee better survival/fitness. Complex organisms are swimming (evolving) against the Darwinian current, so to speak. Which means that life has a purpose other than simply being alive!

Like thorbiorn, who mentioned the case of the Indian mathematical genius, I was wondering about genius in art - both these qualities seem to have very little if any added capacity for fitness/survival - yet they greatly enrich human life.

I was also thinking about the 'Cambrian explosion':

The Cambrian explosion or Cambrian radiation[1] was an event approximately 541 million years ago in the Cambrian period when most major animal phyla appeared in the fossil record.[2][3] It lasted for about 20[4][5]–25[6][7] million years. It resulted in the divergence of most modern metazoan phyla.[8] The event was accompanied by major diversification of other organisms.[note 1]
Before the Cambrian explosion,[note 2] most organisms were simple, composed of individual cells occasionally organized into colonies. Over the following 70 to 80 million years, the rate of diversification accelerated, and the variety of life began to resemble that of today.[10] Almost all present animal phyla appeared during this period.[11][12]

The seemingly rapid appearance of fossils in the "Primordial Strata" was noted by William Buckland in the 1840s,[13] and in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin discussed the then inexplicable lack of earlier fossils as one of the main difficulties for his theory of descent with slow modification through natural selection.[14] The long-running puzzlement about the appearance of the Cambrian fauna, seemingly abruptly, without precursor, centers on three key points: whether there really was a mass diversification of complex organisms over a relatively short period of time during the early Cambrian; what might have caused such rapid change; and what it would imply about the origin of animal life. Interpretation is difficult due to a limited supply of evidence, based mainly on an incomplete fossil record and chemical signatures remaining in Cambrian rocks.

In other words, they don't have a clue. But so far it looks as if someone, at some point, looked down on the primitive, simple, bacteria-like lifeforms of this planet, which were living in stable ecosystems with no reason to evolve into anything else, and decided to make things interesting. Then life 'exploded' into complexity, even if it meant at the expense of better survival chances!

 

[Approaching Infinity]

In other words, they don't have a clue. But so far it looks as if someone, at some point, looked down on the primitive, simple, bacteria-like lifeforms of this planet, which were living in stable ecosystems with no reason to evolve into anything else, and decided to make things interesting. Then life 'exploded' into complexity, even if it meant at the expense of better survival chances!

Regarding the Cambrian, read Meyer's book from my list above: Darwin's Doubt. That's its main theme. I started a thread about it some years ago here: Darwin's Doubt, by Stephen C. Meyer

As for an explanation for why life seems to be periods of stasis punctuated by sudden bursts of new forms (i.e., injections of information), there's another section in Griffin's chapter that deals with this. We'll be talking about it on the show on Saturday, and when I get the chance, I'll either write up a summary here or paste in the text.

 

[Harmony99]

The more you read about the topic, the more you realize how strange it is that it took a Michael Behe with his in-depth assault on Darwinism on the molecular level to bring home the point that Darwinism is pseudo-science. Just common sense should do the trick - like asking "what are the odds?" and the obvious observation that nothing ever "evolves"/generates order without conscious effort.

"What are the odds?" might also be a good question to ask when it comes to the situation we're in right now: What are the odds for a world coming into existence that is so completely upside-down as ours at this present time? I can't help but think that the Cs are right and there is a subtle manipulation going on for millennia, which was invisible for people in the past, but that becomes obvious from our present experience. There seems to be a non-random force at work trying to bring about spiritual death. Just as with evolution, "chance" doesn't cut it.

Thanks a lot luc for the time invested in this tread. The videos have allowed for a further insight on the invisible PTB suppressing ID from the mainstream.We here on this network are like soldiers preparing for battle with no fear whatsoever of the enemy.
Thanks again Laura for diving this deep. My books are now on my table so i am ready with enough oxygen to dive.

 

[caballero reyes]

Thank you, dugdeep for the clarification, reply 114.

Many times the meaning of a word changes from one region/country to another and this produces lamentable or disastrous results, preventing us from knowing the true history, since when the narration is translated, the writer, either by imprudence or with a defined purpose, changes the meaning of some fact; we already know that this happens very often in matters of religion or politics in general.