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

[Laura]

I apologize for having left the main topic of this thread, I did it because I thought there could be some relationship in the topics covered.

This is a thread about evolution, or the lack thereof; intelligent design. You think that some ancient texts talk about this sort of thing, or that images suggest it. That is still off-topic. Start a thread, introduce your topic, include cited quotes from your sources, include images you are talking about, and people will take a look at it.

 

[Cosmos]

It's funny, I just finished Stove's "Darwinian Fairytales" and I don't think I've ever been so appalled and even disgusted at a "conspiracy" in my life, mainly because it has taken over a cognitive style that purports to seek TRUTH. It's all a pack of lies, from the foundations up.

Well, as for how we can count on anything that darwin and co. pulled up their sleeves; there is a pretty basic scientific principle as far as I know, that if a theory is proven wrong, or at best is shown to not be comparable with the evidence repeatedly, again and again, from all kind of angels, not only biologically speaking but also on the geological, paleontological, archeological, catastrophical, logical arenas etc., that one has to simply throw the theory into a trash bin and create a more fitting theory instead that actually accounts for the evidence.

So in this sense I do think there is serious grounds for not taking anything darwinism and uniformitarianism imposed on the world for granted as any kind of trueism for further inquiry. Rather a new theory is needed that isn‘t so obviously flawed in so many areas OSIT.

 

[luc]

It's funny, I just finished Stove's "Darwinian Fairytales" and I don't think I've ever been so appalled and even disgusted at a "conspiracy" in my life, mainly because it has taken over a cognitive style that purports to seek TRUTH. It's all a pack of lies, from the foundations up.

Yes, and what I hate about that is that it entices you with this "you won't gonna like it, but let's look what's REALLY going on beneath the surface!" promise. And then you think you are finally getting to the real truth, even though you don't like it, which simulates a feeling that this must be it, and even that you have "earned" it by giving up views that are dear to you. And then you end up buying a whole pathological package, complete with an abhorrent view of the world and humanity that defies common sense and experience. I know from my own history of wrestling with these things at some points in my life how I completely started doubting my own view of the world, common sense etc. It's freaking gas-lighting!

The only thing that is left, when you finish Stove, is an invisible structure of Intelligent Design that Stove never verbally advocates or even suggests to advocate, but his failure to go in any other direction pretty much leaves that as the default. Heck, when he was writing, Behe's book had not been published so he was actually not aware, as far as I can see, of those utterly compelling, deep level, foundational, data that leave ID as the only explanation.

That's what I was thinking too - Stove gave Darwinism some lip-service because he didn't know better. There was no Behe around, and at that time, I guess nobody except some specialists knew anything about what's going on in molecular biology. Perhaps there was another reason as well: I digged a bit into Stove's background out of curiosity, and he kind of was a troubled man who had no high hopes for humanity. And no wonder given his uncanny BS detector and brilliance. His beloved department was also maliciously destroyed by Marxists, feminists and postmodernists, and he saw the flaws in anything so clearly - including religion. Maybe his only hope for humanity was that rationality, the human capacity for sound reasoning, will prevail. Not knowing better, perhaps he still saw in evolutionary theory an example for the triumph of reason, and he held on to that. Don't know, but one thing is clear: once he set his mind on Darwinism, actually thought it through, it completely lay in shambles before him, and he even defended design arguments at the end of the book.

As for evolution, I increasingly tend to think that the ID guys are probably spot-on in many ways. The information simply has to come from somewhere. Perhaps there is some mechanistic process involved, or some regulatory network or whatever that does the job, but still: there must be an information input.

Here's an intersting tidbit from Stephen Meyer, showing how the genetic structure cannot be explained or reduced to mechanical chemical reactions (around 54:52):

 

[whitecoast]

Or maybe the neo-Darwinists would say that there were a bunch of bears around the world that were different colors, ranging from black to white and other colors in between, and when the ice age came, the white bears were the ones that did best in the snow? But why would there be a white bear to begin with in a non white colored landscape before an ice age, surely it would have died out soon enough being very visible to prey? Or maybe the Arctic caps were always here, going back millions of years, and polar bears just evolved there and 'random selection' hit on the color white fairly early on?

Even in populations of regular bears there are a variety of colors and shades of hair. On the British Columbia coast there are a subspecies of black bears called Kermode Bears which have white hair (nicknamed Spirit Bears) because their white makes it harder for salmon to see them when they go fishing in the rivers. As for the adaptations of polar bears to their environment, I think it would select for the lighter shades of bears, to the point that white(r) bears would quickly dominate the tundra environment and where the darker bears would likely remain in the taiga and boreal lands where they are better camouflaged, since the white bears would monopolize resources much more efficiently. Bears may in fact to quite wary of venturing into the tundra if they notice they simply can't sneak up and ambush like they can in the taiga.

Taking my Neodarwinism shades off for a sec here, I was wondering too about how the 2D genetic body interacts with the 5D soul pool of a population. Perhaps during the life-review session the bear soul pool notices that these arctic environments are poor places for dark fur, and so designs life lesson plans that somehow involve experiencing life as an animal with white fur? Perhaps that leads to an incarnation of a bear with a "random mutation" or some other kind of genetic rearrangement resulting in white fur, making it effective in surviving the arctic environment. If this bear leads to the existence of whole populations that become more genetically isolated from the brown bears (being in different environments and fulfilling different niches), perhaps this leads to a 2D and 5D speciation event, where the 2 bears are reproductively isolated and their soul pool forks into two, where each can focus more on managing the environmental challenges of its respective species.

That's one theory of biological design that's more self-directed on a species-wide basis, and contrasts I think with the idea that we are purely just mechanical products of another intelligence that has its own aim and agenda. It was also said that the STO genetic engineers could only change an organism if it wanted that change, and if it didn't interfere with the lesson plan. In such an instance I think a bear wishing it could be less visible to the seals it wants to hunt in the arctic would qualify for that kind of upgrade. I'm leaning more towards the former than the latter explanation, but I don't know how to design an experiment to tell which actually occurred.

I wonder about this with regard to the dinosaurs, which the C's say were destroyed because they were just an evolutionary dead-end. If we are designed from head to toe by some higher time-traveling intelligence that wanted specifically intelligent beings like us, I would think that they would have been able to see the enormous detour that the 170 million year long age of the dinosaurs was. Since it required cosmic intervention to change things up on earth, would the dinosaur soul/gene pools have just plodded along ever so satisfied with themselves? Was it because they were refusing to learn certain lessons (maybe intelligence related) that nature had to intervene?

 

[Joe]

Even in populations of regular bears there are a variety of colors and shades of hair. On the British Columbia coast there are a subspecies of black bears called Kermode Bears which have white hair (nicknamed Spirit Bears) because their white makes it harder for salmon to see them when they go fishing in the rivers. As for the adaptations of polar bears to their environment, I think it would select for the lighter shades of bears, to the point that white(r) bears would quickly dominate the tundra environment and where the darker bears would likely remain in the taiga and boreal lands where they are better camouflaged, since the white bears would monopolize resources much more efficiently. Bears may in fact to quite wary of venturing into the tundra if they notice they simply can't sneak up and ambush like they can in the taiga.

Kermode bears are almost entirely black except for between 100 and 500 individuals that are white, or rather off white (with some tan color). The white individuals might be an adaptation given their improved fishing ability, but why are they still a minority? Too early in the evolutionary time frame? Can't find any info on how long they have been known to be around, but I doubt anyone knows that for sure.

Also, how would dark color bears be "wary" of snowy landscapes? And do you really think they "notice" something like their ability or lack thereof to sneak up on prey? That suggests that they observe their environment, engage in fairly high level thinking about it and take action based on that thinking. If any dark color bears wandered into the Arctic circle, they wouldn't think "oops, I'm a bit dark for here, better get out", they either die out from lack of food or, randomly wander off and, if lucky, end up in a more suitable environment.

So there's still no explanation as to how polar bears came to be so suited to their Arctic home.

 

[BlackCartouche]

Discounting OPs and psychos there could be around 4 billion more or less souled individuals on the planet.
If you think in terms of 1:10'000 that would leave a pool of 400,000 with a potential for being "harvested", given that they can achieve the appropriate polarization.

Since material-centric habits and respective life-styles cannot remain intact the way things are developing, that could mean that only a small proportion of Westerners will be among those with a potential to be harvested...

Those that are not harvested or graduate become fertilizer, or as Gurdjieff calls "merde" or "shit souls" to put back into Earth's grid.
This particular aspect of soul-process could be ideologically sound within a Darwinist belief structure. If the process of lesser souls as fertilizer be conceptually isolated and become the ONLY such soul processing method for any and ALL "souls", then it could be the best chance to persuade Darwinists to come around to accepting the possibility of what might be gotten away with applying the term "soul" to "awareness evolution".
The reason I think it could be a persuasive argument is because the defining concept of "merde", souls ultimately as fertilizer, would, in the minds of Darwinists, absolve any notion of working on Higher Self - which is really at the core of what Darwinists want, or rather NOT want.

The whole regurgitating process of "merde" souls is still so mechanical in nature, and keeps to some semblance of atheistic mortality.
Also, the wording Gurdjieff uses for such 'souls' has just the right ring of contempt associating something of "the spiritual" to appeal to a Darwinist too, I think.

 

[whitecoast]

Kermode bears are almost entirely black except for between 100 and 500 individuals that are white, or rather off white (with some tan color). The white individuals might be an adaptation given their improved fishing ability, but why are they still a minority? Too early in the evolutionary time frame? Can't find any info on how long they have been known to be around, but I doubt anyone knows that for sure.

The range of the black bears overlaps in a number of places with that of grizzly bears, which tend to monopolize access to salmon stocks. So the white color isn’t super beneficial unless there are both salmon bearing streams and an absence of grizzly bears, such as the islands of the Pacific Northwest. Areas failing that criteria are where the white variation is more selectively neutral, and so is far less likely to “fix” like it would somewhere where the white is universally beneficial, such as the arctic.

Also, how would dark color bears be "wary" of snowy landscapes? And do you really think they "notice" something like their ability or lack thereof to sneak up on prey? That suggests that they observe their environment, engage in fairly high level thinking about it and take action based on that thinking. If any dark color bears wandered into the Arctic circle, they wouldn't think "oops, I'm a bit dark for here, better get out", they either die out from lack of food or, randomly wander off and, if lucky, end up in a more suitable environment.

Maybe my metaphors were getting too anthropomorphic. I’d say wariness just on the grounds that it’s quite a different environment from their normal one. And the environmental feedback wouldn’t come from abstractly theorizing about fur color; they could simply notice they’re still hungry after having no success hunting in a habitat that is already unusual to them, and so quit if they had the luxury of turning back (and they’re not being forced to hunt farther north because of population pressures in the south). If a whiter variant did the same, they would likely be more successful and so stick around up there.

 

[BlackCartouche]

Or maybe the neo-Darwinists would say that there were a bunch of bears around the world that were different colors, ranging from black to white and other colors in between, and when the ice age came, the white bears were the ones that did best in the snow? But why would there be a white bear to begin with in a non white colored landscape before an ice age, surely it would have died out soon enough being very visible to prey? Or maybe the Arctic caps were always here, going back millions of years, and polar bears just evolved there and 'random selection' hit on the color white fairly early on?

I don't think white bears or brown bears are simply variations in a population that "selected out" because of the environment; I think they were put there because they suited the environment.

Even in populations of regular bears there are a variety of colors and shades of hair. On the British Columbia coast there are a subspecies of black bears called Kermode Bears which have white hair (nicknamed Spirit Bears) because their white makes it harder for salmon to see them when they go fishing in the rivers. As for the adaptations of polar bears to their environment, I think it would select for the lighter shades of bears, to the point that white(r) bears would quickly dominate the tundra environment and where the darker bears would likely remain in the taiga and boreal lands where they are better camouflaged, since the white bears would monopolize resources much more efficiently. Bears may in fact to quite wary of venturing into the tundra if they notice they simply can't sneak up and ambush like they can in the taiga.

Quite a few animals in the arctic, both predators and prey, change coat color from white in winter to brown/grey/black during the snow-less summer months. Its interesting both the polar bear and black bear have long overlapped each others habitat regions, yet neither adapted to change coat to fit the respective seasons.

One of the most northerly snowiest land animals is the muskox. They're black/brown coated all year round. However, there is the incredibly rare white muskox. The 'white' muskox is so rare that it is the talk of the arctic peoples.

Here's all I could find of the white muskox: https://web.archive.org/web/20110717011938/http://www.thelon.com/geese.htm

It is a little-known fact that in the Canadian Far North on the Arctic mainland there dwells rare white (blonde) muskoxen. The existence of the white musk-oxen is legendary among the coastal Inuit, dating in stories far back into their history. Yet little written acknowledgment exists - even though this unusual biological phenomena has been reported time and again over the past decades by

bush pilots and biologists who had occasion to visit the very remote Arctic region of the Queen Maud Gulf Sanctuary.

Having first spotted 18 of these very rare animals together in an all-white herd in 1987, in the summer of 1996 'Tundra Tom' took two photographers - Brian Jones of Canada and the late Wolf Franzen from Germany - deep into this remote Arctic coastal area.

https://web.archive.org/web/20110717011938/http://www.thelon.com/downloads/White_Muskox.pdf

Using air recon and GPS positioning techniques they made photographic history when they located, landed & stalked a blonde musk ox! This proud animal was mixed in with a herd of 24 normal (black) musk-oxen. The off-white bull turned out to be the herd leader!

A Darwinist could argue this is the fits-and-spurts of evolution's trial and error playing out before us.

Notice the website is in the wayback machine. There appears to be nothing of the white muskox since. What of the white muskox today?

 

[Jacques]

Just a heads up that Perry Marshall recommended the following book in his latest newsletter. He gave it an absolutely glowing review, which begins:

Some months ago a package arrived containing a very large book, “COSMOSAPIENS” by John Hands. It was from the publisher. I had no idea why someone decided to send it to me.​

​

The book itself seemed over-ambitious - a 700 page tome purporting to canvass the entire subject of life on earth - where it’s coming from and where it’s going.​

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Sounds almost outrageous to suggest you could compress all that into one book.​

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I couldn’t help but notice that it also devoted about 100 pages to the question of evolution.​

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Well, I took the book with me on the trip and eventually John Hands won me over. I was very impressed.​

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http://amzn.to/2aRLHag​

​

This is the sort of book that only comes out once every 10 or 20 years, and there are very, very few people who can write a book such as this.​

​

I am reading that book now and here what he has to say about Behe:

Irreducible complexity
Michael Behe, Professor of Biochemistry at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, says he believes all lifeforms on Earth have evolved from a common ancestor, although the Darwinian hypothesis does not explain the differences between species. However, individual components of the first cell, and the elaborate and interconnected biochemical pathways of their production, are irreducibly complex: if they are missing just one of their parts they cannot function. They could not have evolved by an [Ultra]Darwinian mechanism because that depends upon natural selection from a variety of mutants at each step in the pathway, and each step must be viable. The evidence he cites includes the systems that target proteins to specific sites within the cell and the bacterial flagellum.† This latter, for example, consists of a dozen or more proteins; no intermediate stage is viable as a functioning unit.

He says he was forced to conclude that the first form of life, the common ancestor cell, could only have resulted from intelligent design. To reconcile this with biological evolution he suggests that this first cell contained all the DNA necessary for subsequent evolution. He does not identify the designer, but says that orthodox science has rejected this conclusion because of its possible theological implications.

Orthodox evolutionists were quick to condemn Behe’s 1996 book, Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution. In his review in Nature University of Chicago evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne finds a clue to Behe’s reasoning by identifying him as a Roman Catholic. Most scientists, however, don’t dismiss Newton’s work on mechanics because he believed in alchemy or Kepler’s work on astronomy because he believed in astrology. A more substantial criticism is that Behe fails to take sufficient account of mechanisms other than sequential steps for the production of cell components, like the co-option of components evolved for other purposes, duplicated genes, and early multifunctional enzymes.

In the case of the bacterial flagellum, for example, microbiologist Mark Pallen and evolutionary biologist Nicholas Matzke point out that there is not just one bacterial flagellum but thousands, perhaps millions, of different flagella today; hence “either there were thousands or even millions of individual creation events…or…all the highly diverse contemporary flagellar systems have evolved from a common ancestor”. Evidence for the evolution of bacterial flagella includes the existence of vestigial flagella, intermediate forms of flagella, and the pattern of similarities among flagella protein sequences: almost all of the core flagellar proteins have known homologies with non-flagellum proteins, suggesting that flagella evolved from combinations of existing cellular components.

Both Coyne and Brown University biologist Kenneth Miller note that Behe concedes that some components of the first cell could have evolved by an [Ultra]Darwinian mechanism but requires that all biochemical features would have to be explained by natural effects before intelligent design is disproved. Because of the difficulties in obtaining evidence, it is impossible to prove that all are not. Hence, they argue that Behe’s claim is not falsifiable and therefore not scientific.

Science’s inability to explain
Behe’s claim is a particular example arising from a more general problem, the inability of science to explain certain phenomena. This was articulated by Fred Hoyle, a confirmed atheist. It was atheism that motivated Hoyle to search for an alternative to the Big Bang theory, but when he came to consider how life emerged on Earth he famously compared the random emergence of even the simplest cell to the likelihood that “a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein”.

By the time he gave the Royal Institution’s Omni Lecture in 1982 he had concluded :

If one proceeds directly and straightforwardly in this matter, without being deflected by a fear of incurring the wrath of scientific opinion, one arrives at the conclusion that biomaterials with their amazing measure of order must be the outcome of intelligent design….[P]roblems of order, such as the sequences of amino acids in the chains [that constitute cell proteins]…are precisely the problems that become easy once a directed intelligence enters the picture.​

I’m not aware that Hoyle converted to any religion, but his later writings suggest he considered that some superior intelligence governing the universe is inferred by phenomena science cannot explain. And herein lies the problem. Just because science cannot explain a phenomenon now, it does not follow that science will never be able to explain the phenomenon. Equally, it does not follow that science will be able to explain the phenomenon in the future, as some materialists like Richard Dawkins assert.

Since evidence can neither prove nor disprove intelligent design as the origin of life on Earth, the test of reasonableness is best applied by examining consistency with other evidence, which in this case is the pattern of human understanding of natural phenomena. Historically, most humans have invoked a supernatural cause for natural phenomena they do not understand at the time. Thus the Greeks of the warring city states of around the tenth to the fifth centuries BCE did not understand what caused lightning and thunder, and so they attributed these powerful and awe-inspiring occurrences to the most powerful god in a pantheon of superhumans who reflected the hierarchy of their own society.

As science developed in a Western society that was predominantly Christian, its empirical reasoning filled gaps in our understanding of natural phenomena and progressively removed the need for supernatural explanations. Thus the Earth was no longer something God had created as the centre of the universe and the Sun was no longer something God had created to illuminate the Earth between periods of darkness.

The realm of the gaps—and hence the realm of the transcendent creator God—continued to diminish as science’s explanatory power increased, and God was continually pushed back towards being the ultimate, rather than the direct, cause of natural phenomena. (I am using here the mainstream Christian concept of God because science from the sixteenth century developed mainly in the Christian West. Other religions and cultures have different views of God or gods, and some hold that a creative Cosmic Spirit is both immanent and transcendent, rather than immanent for only 33 years in one person of a transcendent Trinitarian God.)

While there is no guarantee that this pattern will continue, the most reasonable approach to understanding the emergence of life on Earth is that, while keeping an open mind, we should seek a natural explanation rather than invoke a supernatural cause like God or intelligent design.

 

[Jones]

I think neo-Darwinists would argue something along those lines. They give the example of some moths which lived in a forest; most were light colored and a few were darker. But one day they built a coal plant nearby and the smoke turned the barks of the trees darker, so then the darker ones became the predominant moths. (Or maybe they were all light, but one happy day a couple mutated into a darker color and had offspring - not sure how the argument goes exactly.)

I think I remember this moth story - the observations of the moths were made during the industrial revolution. Prior to smoke producing industry, it was noticed that the white moths were camouflaged against the white washed walls of houses and were not picked off by birds. But as the air in the environment got dirtier, and the whitewashed walls darker, the white moths stood out against the background more and the darker moths had the better camouflage and so were less likely to be picked off by birds.

I initially bought into this as evidence for evolution, but now the idea that the ability for the moth species to change colour in relation to it's environment being based on characteristics already present in the moth species makes a whole lot more sense.

 

[Chu]

Speaking of polar bears, their hair isn't even white but hollow. So it's not even a matter of losing melanin to adapt. Go figure...

The True Color of Polar Bear Fur Explained | Videos

When most people think of polar bears, they typically envision a white bear residing in the Arctic region of the world. Despite popular belief, however, po | Videos

www.labroots.com

Apparently Darwin himself tried to explain Polar bears (not the hair, but the subspecies), and the arguments are like everything else when it comes to "evolution": useless, full of filling in the blanks needed, and illogical.

Darwin’s Polar Bear

Musings upon the whys and wherefores of polar bears, particularly in relation to their forest-dwelling cousins, played an important but often overlooked role in the development of evolutionary theory. Michael Engelhard explores.

publicdomainreview.org

 

[Chu]

I don't think white bears or brown bears are simply variations in a population that "selected out" because of the environment; I think they were put there because they suited the environment. I don't think that Black, White, Brown, or Yellow people were originally "variations" that selected themselves because of more or less sunlight, I think they were engineered and planted. Yes, they can mix up and hybridize because their types were all engineered from the same basic materials and plan, and there was some genetic drift due to some variations in the genotype, but not a whole lot. Just imagine how different dog breeds are "created" by selective breeding. And if you stop "controlling" the breeding, they all revert back to some basic type. People can do this to themselves in various ways; and they do.

There is some response to the environment, mainly epigenetic, but that in no way creates new genes. There may have been some "mutations" or changes, thanks to virii, but overall, it looks like the genome is highly, HIGHLY resistant to change and mutation. Those experiments with trillions of iterations of bacteria tell a LOT. "Random mutations" break things. That's pretty much it. And if, by some change, one of them does help survival, it only does so at a cost because something is broken.

Indeed! At one point Behe suggests that Darwinism can still explain microevolution even if it's ridiculous for macroevolution. I'm not done with his book yet, but I just don't see how even that could be true. His own compelling arguments are saying that nothing happens by chance. Even the slight changes would have to be engineered, I think. A different color, a different beak, etc. requires A LOT of changes due to irreducible complexity. So, just because one is more "suitable to a specific environment" or is better equipped to hide from its prey, that's not a sign of evolution. It could simply have been put there with a specific intent.

Genetic Entropy to me just destroyed even the slightest possibility that a mutation is capable of creating anything, much less lead to evolution, when all it shows is destruction and loss of information, NOT more complexity. And with Behe's explanations, well, that's settled even more!

When thinking of ID, I find it interesting that as vast and complex as creation is, there are also no "new ingredients" (something other than proteins, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, etc.) being created, which would, IMO, be a sign of actual "evolution". The main genetics, the main components of life, are the same. It's like the Intelligent Designer(s) have a certain amount of "raw materials" to work with. Combining them, reshuffling them, etc, they create new things, still apt to live in this realm. The level of engineering and complexity required surpasses everything that man can produce, and even conceive of. I tend to think of ID as a "cook": you can make thousands of cakes and pastries with the same ingredients, modifying the process, the temperature, the quantities, etc. But you have to have the essentials, and have a clue about what binds with what, what cannot be combined, etc. There is no mutation in that, just a different recipe! I know it's too simplistic, but... Humans do it in many areas, not just cooking. They work with the raw materials they have to create new products, but they don't go inventing new compounds. And when something goes wrong, and the cake isn't edible or the machine doesn't work, they start from scratch again (extinctions?), with the same raw ingredients.

 

[Laura]

​

I am reading that book now and here what he has to say about Behe:

I've got it too and have been taking a look at it; not much impressed by it at all. His info on religions is really pathetic. This quote in the extract you posted above just clinches it for me.

Cosmo-Sapiens quote:
"I’m not aware that Hoyle converted to any religion, but his later writings suggest he considered that some superior intelligence governing the universe is inferred by phenomena science cannot explain."

I keep saying that how a person uses the words "Imply" and "infer" can tell you a lot... and here he uses it wrongly.

 

[Jacques]

After reading the recommendation of Perry Marshall, I must admit that I had high expectation:

This is the sort of book that only comes out once every 10 or 20 years, and there are very, very few people who can write a book such as this.

And I agree with that too:

not much impressed by it at all. His info on religions is really pathetic. This quote in the extract you posted above just clinches it for me.

 

[Laura]

Yes, and what I hate about that is that it entices you with this "you won't gonna like it, but let's look what's REALLY going on beneath the surface!" promise. And then you think you are finally getting to the real truth, even though you don't like it, which simulates a feeling that this must be it, and even that you have "earned" it by giving up views that are dear to you. And then you end up buying a whole pathological package, complete with an abhorrent view of the world and humanity that defies common sense and experience. I know from my own history of wrestling with these things at some points in my life how I completely started doubting my own view of the world, common sense etc. It's freaking gas-lighting!

That's it. And I've been thinking about this and how, for the past 50 or more years, I've been battling my way through all kinds of stuff, doubting my own mind, doubting my experiences and those of others, struggling to make the pieces fit together within the Darwinian framework, and on and on and freaking ON. And none of it was necessary.

I guess that one of the chief things I'm feeling right now is just really, REALLY ANGRY at all the LIES.

I'm also feeling rather stupid because Stove went through all that and just used common sense and rational thinking to debunk the whole thing; he didn't even have Behe and the gang. Maybe that's why what he writes is so impressive: it's just logical, clear thinking, analysis of the Darwinian thinking and world view, and concluding, base on pretty fundamental methods of clear thinking, that it's all bunkum.

At the end of the book he writes:

Gwen Raverat was a daughter of Charles Darwin's son, George. She wrote a wonderful book entitled "Pierod Piece (1952) about her childhood and her numerous Darwin relatives. Late in that book she remarks that the Darwins in general "were quite unable to understand the minds of the poor, the wicked, or the religious."

This is most profoundly true. And it is true not only of Darwins, or of Darwinians of the blood royal such as Galton, but of All Darwinians of what might be called "the pure strain" of intellectual descent from Darwin: for example, Fisher, Darlington, E.O. Wilson, and Richard Dawkins. And it means, of course, a rather large gap in their understanding of human life; since the poor, the wicked, and the religious, must make up, on any estimate, at least three-quarters of all human beings.

But true as Gwen Reverat's remark is, and far as it goes, it does not go nearly far enough. For there are many and large lasses of people who are neither poor nor wicked nor religious, but who are still a closed book to the characteristically Darwinian cast of mind.

Well, putting it that way, I guess y'all know what that led to. My brain, always running some kind of background search and compare thing, thought of how similar that description was to the terms used by Lobaczewski to describe schizoid psychopaths!!!

Yup, you knew it was coming, didn't you?

But there it is; it really is a valid comparison and it sent shivers down my spine when I was re-reading it. It really is a horror.

A schizoid’s ponerological activity should be evaluated in two aspects. On the small scale, such people cause their families trouble, easily turn into tools of intrigue in the hands of clever individuals, and generally do a poor job of raising the younger generation. Their tendency to see human reality in the doctrinaire and simplistic manner they consider “proper”, transforms their frequently good intentions into bad results. However, their ponerogenic role can take on macro-social proportions if their attitude toward human reality and their tendency to invent great doctrines are put to paper and duplicated in large editions.

And:

Schizoid characters aim to impose their own conceptual world upon other people or social groups, using relatively controlled pathological egotism and the exceptional tenacity derived from their persistent nature. They are thus eventually able to overpower another individual’s personality, which causes the latter’s behavior to turn desperately illogical. They may also exert a similar influence upon the group of people they have joined. They are psychological loners who feel better in some human organization, wherein they become zealots for some ideology, religious bigots, materialists, or adherents of an ideology with satanic features. If their activities consist of direct contact on a small social scale, their acquaintances easily perceive them to be eccentric, which limits their ponerogenic role. However, if they manage to hide their own personality behind the written word, their influence may poison the minds of society in a wide scale and for a long time.

And:

The nineteenth century, especially its latter half, appears to have been a time of exceptional activity on the part of schizoidal individuals, often but not always of Jewish descent. After all we have to remember that 97 % of all Jews do not manifest this anomaly, and that it also appears among all European nations, albeit to a markedly lesser extent. Our inheritance from this period includes world-images, scientific traditions, and legal concepts flavored with the shoddy ingredients of a schizoidal apprehension of reality.

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In spite of the fact that the writings of schizoidal authors contain the above described deficiency, or even an openly formulated schizoidal declaration which constitutes sufficient warning to specialists, the average reader accepts them not as a view of reality warped by this anomaly, but rather as an idea to which he should assume an attitude based on his convictions and his reason. That is the first mistake. The oversimplified pattern, devoid of psychological color and based on easily available data, exerts an intense influence upon individuals who are insufficiently critical, frequently frustrated as result of downward social adjustment, culturally neglected, or characterized by some psychological deficiencies. Others are provoked to criticism based on their healthy common sense, also they fail to grasp this essential cause of the error.

Societal interpretation of such activities is broken down into the main trifurcations, engendering divisiveness and conflict. The first branch is the path of aversion, based on rejection of the contents of the work due to personal motivations, differing convictions, or moral revulsion. This already contains the component of a moralizing interpretation of pathological phenomena.

We can distinguish two distinctly different apperception types among those persons who accept the contents of such works: the critically-corrective and the pathological. People whose feel for psychological reality is normal tend to incorporate chiefly the more valuable elements of the work. They trivialize the obvious errors and complement the schizoid deficiencies by means of their own richer world view. This gives rise to a more sensible, measured, and thus creative interpretation, but is not free from the influence of the error frequently adduced above.

Pathological acceptance is manifested by individuals with diversiform deviations, whether inherited or acquired, as well as by many people bearing personality malformations or who have been injured by social injustice. That explains why this scope is wider than the circle drawn by direct action of pathological factors. This apperception often brutalizes the authors’ concepts and leads to acceptance of forceful methods and revolutionary means.

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In the ponerogenic process of the pathocratic phenomenon, characteropathic individuals adopt ideologies created by doctrinaire, often schizoidal people, recast them into an active propaganda form, and disseminate it with pathological egotism and paranoid intolerance for any philosophies which may differ from their own. They also inspire further transformation of this ideology into its pathological counterpart. Something which had a doctrinaire character and circulated in numerically limited groups is now activated at societal level, thanks to their spellbinding possibilities.