So I finally finished all 37 pages of this. You guys make me read so much... (Never mind the 23 books I downloaded because of this.) As punishment, I'll make you read at least 37 paragraphs of mine. (Don't worry, it's not really mandatory.)
Seriously, though, this was a good ride. I've only read about 2.2 books by Behe so far, but I have to get some things out before I can read on.
Let me first establish a few randomly assembled and naturally selected code words:
DW - Darwishfullthinkingism
DWs - Darwishfullthinkers
RM - Random Mutation
NS - Natural Selection*
IC - Irreducible Complexity
ID - Intelligent Design
(* I suppose you can meditate on how this NS relates to the other NS, National Socialism, if you want. I thought about it for a few minutes, and it's crazy, I tell you. It's almost like the Nazis did it on purpose. Kinda freaky for something that I only thought of accidentally after typing that "NS".)
So let's tear this thing apart.
The whole idea that sophisticated and complex order arises out of randomness is utter stupidity. (Even without the limitation of NS.) There is absolutely nothing in our world that shows anything like that. Garbage in, garbage out. Randomness in, no order coming out, sir. Even the idea that this would happen
once is far-fetched. DW relies on this happening
all the time. This alone should give people the first clue that this theory is dubious at best. And once you look at it closer, as Behe says: "it takes about ten minutes to conclude it's radically inadequate."
He says "radically inadequate" because he's a really nice guy. I'd say something a bit different, but let's go with this.
To make matters worse, this randomness has a fixed set of material to work with, and thus really cannot create anything new. It can only modify, recombine, duplicate, switch, and mainly destroy. This, of course, reflects the whole STS reality. "Let's keep randomly smashing things until we get what we want! It hasn't worked so far, but if we keep trying, surely any time now..." US foreign policy, anyone?
But I guess this theory would work well for organic portals. They can't create anything new either, and they're sort of dead inside.
A soulless theory for soulless people?
In a universe where everything revolves around consciousness, it's no wonder that a theory that's built on the denial of consciousness, meaning, and purpose won't be able to explain much. Interestingly, though, this voodoo mumbo jumbo actually maintains one purpose: reproduction. But in a dead, mindless universe,
where does this even come from? If anything in the code can randomly change, why is the drive for reproduction always there? And how? What makes sure that this drive never
randomly stops? What created this drive? Has anybody explained that? (It only occurred to me now, so idk. Seems like an important question, though, so if anyone knows what the DWs think of that, let me know.)
At any rate, if you ignore consciousness, you get nowhere. Limits in, limits out. If you fail to input a large chunk of reality, you can't get an output that reflects what you see around you.
So we have a bunch of blind "watchmakers" running around, claiming they can make watches, even though they haven't produced a single one so far. But because they can tie their shoe laces blindfolded, they are somehow convinced that by the same process they can make a watch. Or anything, really. Just give it time. There's nothing persistent randomness cannot achieve!
It's kind of funny how Darwinists deny any intelligence behind anything. In one sense I agree with them - they
are pretty stupid.
And then there's the religious dogmatism - claims without evidence, stubborn insistence on having the truth despite evidence to the contrary, confusion of assumptions and facts, and rabid intolerance to opposition. Then they of course accuse ID of same.
Often you can see in their arguments just how limited their mind is. They really don't think things through. My favourite is the one where ID can't be true because how could an intelligent designer create something imperfect? Here they're mixing design and perfection, as if they're somehow related. Humans have designed millions of things, and almost(?) all of them are
broken imperfect. Take your computer, or the web browser you're reading this in. Perfect, right? No bugs, always does what you expect it to, never does anything strange, never crashed once, right? Well, if your browser has ever crashed, the nice folk from the DW department would have you know that your browser definitely was not designed, but rather its source code was randomly assembled one character at a time. And it improved with every character!
Anyway, here is my summary of what I got from this whole thing, how I feel about it, and some ideas about where I think we can go from here:
The accuracy of "Darwinism explains how life on this planet evolved" is, for all intents and purposes, 0%. It's plain wishful thinking. So currently I would classify Darwinism as "retarded pile of garbage" or thereabouts.
It's somewhat mind-boggling that any scientist still takes it seriously, but only until you realise, as luc put it:
"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."
If something fits the agenda of the ruling elite, it will gain traction, no matter how retarded it is. We can see that with many things, like GM food, vaccines, or anything Hitlery Clinton says. So if you look at the big picture, no big surprise.
But this crap is being taught in schools as fact, and that is of course pretty bad. If your education is built on garbage, what can the result possibly be? But again, this is nothing new. Our educational system is full of such things. (They lost me in elementary school when they tried to tell me that the pyramids in Egypt were built by hordes of slaves who pulled the huge stone blocks with ropes on wooden logs. On sand.)
Unlike the more or less ignorable issue of how the pyramids were built, this particular nonsense has some far reaching and dire implications. We have noticed it in writings of even "innocent" people who have been programmed to replace "ABC exists" or "ABC has" with "ABC has evolved" with zero evidence for any such evolution. This evolution is merely assumed, but without any thinking taken as fact. If something false infests just about every area of our lives, we have a serious problem.
Moreover, Darwinism goes hand in hand with materialism, which is another black hole of rotten faecal matter, and so people, even those who would not claim to be materialists, are nonetheless infected with materialist thinking, revolving around lies. Thus you have even smart and well-intentioned people spouting a lot of nonsense. It's like a plague programmed to the core of people's thinking.
So...
Darwinism has to go. (Strap on your shields and raise your banners!)
Obviously, this is not going to be easy. If you just shout "Darwinism is wrong" really loudly, you'll get to hear a lot of people shouting back various insults and not much else, so this will require a better strategy.
Since the books that have been recommended here did a really great job for us and are well written, one of the easier things that can be done is pointing people to those books as much as possible. Anyone capable of changing their mind in the light of facts should not have any trouble understanding Behe's arguments.
Other than that, while there are plenty of arguments against Darwinism, some seem a lot more efficient than others. So I'm wondering about how to best show people in a simple way that Darwinism just cannot deliver what it promises. Personally I feel like pointing to ID is going nowhere fast, as people have knee jerk reactions to that and simply skip the part where they were supposed to look at the science. I think the science is the key, because the pro-Darwinists believe in science. (Or at least claim to. At any rate, mentioning science doesn't send them into blind rage like mentioning ID.) And as far as I can tell, science
does prove that Darwinism can't really do much of anything.
IMO, proving DW is wrong by pointing to ID is unlikely to work, but if you first just prove DW is wrong (with science), those who accept that fact may be ready to accept (or at least open to) ID.
So for any random conversation irl or on the web, where Darwinism may come up, it would be good to have an idea of what arguments to bring up when and why. I'd like to summarise the most important arguments in a few points, keep them only as complicated as absolutely necessary, and start with that.
This may be overlooked, but a lot of people might actually not know how EXACTLY Darwinism is supposed to work. I didn't. I vaguely knew that things are supposed to evolve slowly, but I didn't know the precise mechanism and its limitations.
The fact that Darwinism can only proceed by RANDOM mutations, one at a time, and EVERY SINGLE ONE of them has to increase the chances of survival in order to be picked by NS is in itself such a strong limitation that the smarter ones might already start having an inkling that this kind of process is rather unlikely to create a human out of a virus, no matter how much time you give it. And all you're doing here is explaining Darwinism itself. No "crazy" ideas. So before you go into how ID makes sense, maybe check whether the person you're talking to even understands what DW is.
- Molecular biology is infinitely more complex than you're probably imagining. (Unless you're a biologist or really smart. Which most people aren't.)
This is another thing where you don't need any crazy theories but rather just to state some facts about biology. Most people probably don't have a clue, or don't remember from school, how complex a cell is, much less about things like the flagellum, how exactly blood clotting works, and much more. And it's not only about assembling the parts; all the processes are complex too and require precise timing. How do you create precise timing randomly?
Pointing out the incredible complexity of biology, together with the limitations of RM+NS, could go a long way in shaking people's faith in Darwinism, before you even get into any theory. You're just making it clear to people what it really is that Darwinism needs to overcome in order to "work".
- Odds are astronomically against RM + NS.
Low probability is not proof of anything, as it can in principle be compensated for by time and population size, but there are limits to that, and this is at least something a layman can understand, and the odds are really absolutely, devastatingly, crushingly hopeless.
I think DWs used that Boeing example somewhere in a weird way to "disprove" ID. I use it differently.
Imagine you take apart a Boeing plane to the last part and spread the parts out over a football field. Now a tornado runs through it. The chances that RM+NS could produce any complex biological organism are similar to the chances of that tornado to assemble the plane correctly. DWs say given enough chances, it's perfectly possible. But you have to assemble all parts correctly, lay all the cables through all the right openings, tighten every screw and zip tie... with a tornado. Anyone who doesn't have an orange in place of the left brain hemisphere will acknowledge that this is just never happening. And for Darwinism to work, this kind of thing would have to happen pretty often.
Or imagine those monkeys randomly typing things. The keyboard has 26 letters, 10 numbers, and a bunch of other keys. Let's go with just 50 keys, even though there are more.
Now, say you have the word "Darwinism", and the DWs claim the word was assembled by RM+NS (typing monkeys + an editor), one character at a time.
"Darwinism" only has 9 letters. Most biological systems are much more complicated than that.
What most people don't quite get is how probability really works, so this is a good example to explain that.
The chances that the monkey will type "D" (Let's ignore the lowercase/uppercase distinction.) are 1 in 50 because there are 50 keys and the monkey hits a random one.
The chances the monkey will type "Da" are 1 in 50*50, so 1 in 2500. Each of the 2 letters has a 1 in 50 chance.
To type "Dar", the chances are 1 in 50*50*50: 1 in 125,000.
"Darw": 1 in 6,250,000
"Darwi": 1 in 312,500,000
"Darwin": 1 in 15,625,000,000
"Darwini": 1 in 781,250,000,000
"Darwinis": 1 in 39,062,500,000,000
"Darwinism": 1 in 1,953,125,000,000,000
THAT is the chance a typing monkey would type
one measly word. That's the chance of randomly assembling something of only 9 parts in the right sequence, with 50 different available parts.
Biology is much more complex than that, and remember that if you beat these odds, you've created ONE thing. Now look at all the life around you.
What are the odds?
(Also think about the moron who thought the monkeys could type Shakespeare's books. Maybe a Darwinist?)
But it gets
MUCH worse! This was only RM! Now you have to add the editor (NS), who checks after each letter whether it makes sense and has improved, which means that "Da" has to be "better" than "D" (higher chance of survival), "Dar" has to be "better" than "Da", "Darw" has to be functionally better than "Dar", all the way to the end. In this case the "word" has to have some kind of meaning, more useful than the previous one (otherwise it just gets scraped, and you're starting from the beginning). Well, look at those words, and tell me how many of them were "useful"? The only one that meant something was "Darwin". So only steps 6 and 9 (the last one) actually complied with NS. So we have 7 missing steps out of 9. How can DW solve this problem? It. Fucking. Can't.
- Random shuffling, deleting, and repeating of a code can not produce anything new, just variations of the same.
Take a picture of a cat, cut it into pieces, and try to move them around until you get a picture of a giraffe. Good luck with that.
(Also you should be doing that blindfolded.)
(Also every time you move something, the result has to be better than the previous step.)
But at least you're allowed to copy the cat's neck 26 times, so that should help.
This is kind of the smoking gun, the
completely insurmountable obstacle for DW.
The puzzling part is that even though it's so simple, the DWs always manage to "misunderstand" (possibly on purpose) the definition, and so they "disprove" it with a randomly mutated explanation for something else.
So maybe this doesn't work so great when you don't have real-time feedback from the person you're talking to (forum, emails, articles, etc.).
But in a real-time conversation, this is perhaps the best argument to show DW just can't deliver. As long as you can explain IC correctly and the person doesn't have brain damage, they shouldn't have much trouble understanding this. Still, I would start with running through the points above first.
As for the "well maybe the intermediate stages could have been used for something else", you can go back to the monkey-typing example above and try to figure out how all those useless words could have been "useful for something else".
("'Darw'... hmm... hmm... uhhh..... I could use it as a name for my dog??" Evolution in progress. Somebody's dog was an intermediate stage of Darwinism. Thank God it all worked out in the end! I mean, thank Random Mutation.)
- Vast majority of mutations degrade the code.
This has actually two parts.
1. Vast majority of mutations in general are not beneficial at all. (No use for survival.)
2. Of the ones that are "beneficial" (improve survival), the vast majority degrade the code irreparably. (Damages/removes code that was useful for something.)
The fact that you survive doesn't mean you've evolved or improved. A good example is the sickle cell mutation. It saves you from malaria, but by definition makes your organism weaker (you have damaged red blood cells), and if you get the gene from both parents, you die from sickle cell disease. So if you live in a non-malaria region, like Europe, it's 100% bad. And there's no going back. That's not evolution, but that's about all Darwinism has ever provably done.
You can also imagine it like this: say there's a deadly parasite that kills you by setting up camp under your finger nails. Your child has this amazing mutation where (s)he doesn't have hands, so the parasite is powerless because it can't hold onto anything else. So people are dying around, but your child survives. But... uh... no hands. This, my friends, is Darwiniam "evolution".
- Decades of experience with malaria and HIV show that there's really very little Darwinist processes can do.
The interesting point here is that these two little creeps have gone, in the few decades we've observed them, through as much evolution as humans would have in their whole history. (Because lots of them & short generation span.) And what do they have to show for it? Fuck all. Did they grow anything new? No. Did they change in any observable way? No. They're just resistant to a few of our drugs. Which is about as awesome as humans learning to wear sunglasses to protect their eyes from the sun.
And it's not just these two. Science has only ever confirmed small adaptive mutations in anything anywhere. It has never discovered
ANYTHING complex evolving by RM+NS. The idea that this is possible is only
ASSUMED, proved by absolutely nothing.
- Humans evolved from a virus?
I'm not sure what the original ancestor of everything is supposed to be exactly, but afaik it's a one cell organism, virus or otherwise. (Never mind that DW has really nothing to say about where it came from in the first place.) And we're all supposed to have evolved from that.
Now, take a look at a virus...
Does it look like it has all the necessary information for assembling a human?
...
There's of course much more, but these are some of the main points that can be used to explain to people why what they believe makes no sense.
Feel free to point out mistakes or add more.
Also share what else we can do to eradicate this plague.
Thanks for reading.
www.sott.net
) but I started to take notes to help me grasp it all, and as I went along, I felt more and more determined and inspired to really, really understand all the material. Behe has a wonderful style of writing, his examples are clear and even comical at times, as has been said he is a great teacher who really knows how to communicate the information in an understandable way. I think this guy is a true hero!
